“She is sitting in a boat with a man who’s abducted her. The lake is no larger than a pond in a park. She keeps peering into the large black brooding eyes of the man sitting utterly motionless in the boat beside her and thinks: ‘How his eyes gaze into the water. At me he does not look. But the entire huge surface of the water is gazing at me with his eyes!’ The man has a shaggy beard of the sort robbers are in the habit of wearing. He can be gallant like none other. He is capable of taking gallantry to the point of losing his life without blinking an eyelash and most certainly without placing his hand on his heart to boast of his deeds. This man is no boaster. He has a warm, wonderfully masculine voice, but he never uses it to pay a compliment. Never does flattery of any sort cross his proud lips, and he ruins his voice intentionally to make it sound harsh and heartless. But the girl knows he has a boundlessly good heart: Nonetheless she doesn’t dare appeal to his heart with a request. A string resounds across the water in long sound waves. Hedwig thinks she might die in this resounding air. The sky above the water looks exactly like this weightless, water-hued sky currently floating above me: a floating hovering lake high above me, that fits perfectly and the trees in the picture correspond to the region’s tall, swaying trees — there is something manorial, park-like about them. But in the picture everything is cramped and condensed, and now I am strolling through this scene once more, giving no more thought to its correlation with myself and this region: The man now seizes the oar and gives the boat a cavalier thrust. Hedwig senses he might be doing this to offset his own warmth and love — to him, feeling love and tenderness is an affront, and he punishes himself mercilessly for having allowed himself to harbor such affectionate sentiments in his breast. He’s so unnaturally proud; not a man at all, just a cross between a boy and a giant. It doesn’t hurt a man to find himself overwhelmed by sentiment, but it hurts a boy who wants to be more than a man with honest feelings, a boy who wants to be a giant, wants to be only strong and not at times also weak. A boy has chivalric virtues that a man whose thoughts are sensible and mature will always thrust aside, seeing them as superfluous in the festival of love. A boy is less cowardly than a man since he is less mature, for maturity can easily make one dastardly and selfish. You need only observe the hard, cruel lips of a boy: this outspoken defiance and the exemplified insistence on a promise he’s secretly given himself. A boy keeps his word, a man might find it more appropriate to break it. The boy finds beauty in the severity of this word-keeping (as in the Middle Ages) and the man finds beauty in replacing one promise he’s uttered with another, which he promises like a man to keep. He is the promiser, and the boy is the enforcer of the promised word. Curls dance about his youthful forehead, a defiance unto death upon his curved lips. Eyes like daggers. Hedwig trembles. The park’s trees are so soft, they are dissolving in the light blue air. There beneath the trees sits the man she despises. This man who sits beside her, loveless — him she must love, though he promises nothing. He hasn’t yet opened his mouth to make a promise, he’s had the gall to abduct her without, in compensation, whispering even a single sweet nothing in her ear. Whispering is the business of that other one; this man doesn’t know the first thing about it. Even if he did, he wouldn’t do so, or he’d do so on some occasion where others wouldn’t dream of uttering anything at all. But she is giving herself to him, without knowing why. She has nothing to gain from this, has nothing to hope for, as women are so fond of doing, she has only inconsiderate treatment in store for her, the violent moods a master freely inflicts upon his property. But she feels happy when he speaks to her in a curt, heedless voice, as though she were already his. And she is his, after all, and the man knows this. He pays no more heed to what is his already. Her hair has come undone, splendid hair that plunges down her narrow, red cheeks like liquid cloth. ‘Tie it back,’ he commands, and she struggles to obey. She is in raptures as she obeys, and of course he’d see this even with his eyes shut; for then he would hear a moan cross her lips such as only those who are happy can give voice to, those hastily performing a task that is perhaps burdensome to their hands but a joy to their hearts. They get out of the boat and go ashore. The earth is soft and gives way slightly beneath their steps, like a carpet, or like several carpets placed one atop the other. The grass is the sparse yellowed grass from the year before, just like the grass here where I am smoking my pipe. Then suddenly a girl appears on the scene, a quite small, pale, gloomy-eyed girl. She appears to be a princess; for her garments are magnificent and puff out at the sides in a heavy arc from which her breast protrudes like a small burgeoning bud. The garments are a deep red, the hue of dried-out blood. Her face has a transparent pallor, it’s the shade of a wintry evening sky in the mountains. ‘You know me!’ With these words she addresses herself to the dumbfounded man, who stands there paralyzed. ‘You still dare to look upon me? Go, kill yourself. I command you!’ This is how she speaks to him. The man looks as though he means to obey her. How does he look? Well, the way one looks when there is something irrevocable to be done. In such cases a grimace is customary. The face trembles, and one must bite and knead it into submission with the full force of one’s will. It wants to break apart. A piece of nose is about to fall off. At any rate, this is the sort of thing to expect on such occasions. But I don’t wish to go on sharing this madman’s intentions to kill myself; for this must be done with a long knife, and I believe I have only a tobacco pipe, not a knife. I was liking my dream at the beginning, but now I see it’s starting to degenerate, and this doesn’t suit Hedwig at all; for Hedwig is gentle, and when she suffers, she suffers in a more beautiful, silent way. She’d no doubt just laugh at my man there in his shaggy beard if he attempted such insolence. The landscape I sketched out was quite nice all the same, but only because it was mostly borrowed from the countryside that surrounds me. One should never lose the natural ground beneath one’s feet while dreaming, especially about people, for otherwise one soon arrives at the point of making one’s characters utter words like: ‘Go, kill yourself.’ And then one of them will have to wear a facial expression that is ridiculous and well-suited to spoil even the loveliest dream!—”
