In a gentle, calm voice she said good night.
“I’m glad to be here all the same,” she said the next morning. “How can one go wishing oneself away from a position so tempestuously. As if this were so important! I could almost laugh to think of it, and I’m a bit ashamed to have been so forthcoming yesterday. And yet I’m glad; for you do have to speak your mind sometimes. How patiently you were able to listen to me, Simon! Almost reverentially! And yet this too makes me glad. In the evening one isn’t the same as in the morning, no, one is so utterly different, so dissimilar in the way one expresses oneself and in one’s feelings. Merely having slept soundly for a single night, I’ve heard, can utterly change a person. I can certainly believe it. Having spoken in such a way yesterday appears to me now, on this bright morning, like an anxious, exaggerated, sad dream. What can have been the matter? Should one take things so irritably, so hard? Think no more about it! I must have been tired yesterday — I’m always tired in the evenings — but now I feel so light, so healthy, so fresh, as if new-born. I have such a feeling of suppleness, as if someone were lifting me up and bearing me along the way a person is carried on a litter. Open the window while I’m still lying here in bed. It’s so lovely to lie in bed while the windows are being opened. Where can I have found all the joyousness that envelops me as I lie here. Out of doors, the beautiful landscape appears to me to be dancing, the air is slipping indoors to me. Is it Sunday today? If not, it’s a day that seems made to be a Sunday. Do you see the geraniums? They stand so prettily before the window. What did I want yesterday? Happiness? Don’t I already have happiness? Should one have to go off searching for it at unknown distances among people who surely have no time to be thinking about such things? It’s good when you don’t have time for too many things, quite good in fact, for if we had time enough, we’d surely die of presumptuousness. What a brightness there is in my head. Now there’s not a single thought in my head that isn’t lying there like its mistress — me — feeling glad and light, exactly like me. Would you bring me breakfast in bed, Simon? I’d enjoy having you serve me as if I were a Portuguese noblewoman and you a young Moor who comprehends my every gesture. Of course you’ll bring me what I ask. Why shouldn’t you be attentive? How long have you been here with me? Wait, it was winter when you arrived, snow was falling, I can still remember it quite clearly — how many fair and rainy days have since gone by. Now you’ll be leaving soon; but you mustn’t rob me of the pleasure of having you here with me a few days more. And three days from now I’ll say to you: “Stay another three,” and you won’t be any better able to resist me then than you are now, bringing the breakfast to my bedside. You’re a curiously unresisting and unscrupulous person. Ask anything of you, and you’ll do it. You want everything anyone wants. I think a person might ask all sorts of improper things of you before you’d start to think ill of him. One can’t avoid feeling a certain touch of contempt with regard to you. I do despise you a tiny bit, Simon! But I know it doesn’t matter to you if one speaks to you like this. I consider you, by the way, quite capable of performing a heroic deed at a pinch: You see, I do think quite well of you. With you, people allow themselves all sorts of things. Your behavior liberates our behavior from every sort of restraint. Years ago, I used to box your ears, I was always tattling on you to Mother and having you punished when you’d committed some misdeed, and now I’m asking you: Come give me a kiss, or rather: Let me give you one, a nice cautious kiss on the forehead. There! Compared with last night I’m like a saint this morning. I feel a presentiment of the times that are coming — let them come! But don’t laugh at me. Though if you laughed I’d also be pleased; for laughter is the most fitting sound for an early blue morning. And now please leave the room so I’ll be at liberty to get dressed—”
Simon left her alone.
“I was always in the habit,” Hedwig said to Simon in the course of the day, “of treating you somehow as my subordinate. In their dealings with you, perhaps others do, too — you hardly give an impression of intelligence — what people are more likely to see in you is love, and you know pretty well how that’s received. I don’t think you’ll ever have much success in society the way you are and the way you act, but I’m also confident you’ll never trouble your head about this — that wouldn’t be like you, in my experience. Only those who know you will think you capable of heartfelt sentiment and incisive thought — others not. And that’s the rub, the main point, the underlying cause why you’ll probably be unsuccessful in life: A person must get to know you to find you credible, and this takes time. Success depends on first impressions, which will always fail you, but at least this won’t make you lose your composure. Not many will love you, but the ones who do will promise themselves everything from you, and with their liking for you they’ll be simple, good human beings — your foolishness can take you far. There’s something idiotic about you, something unstable, something… how should I put it, lackadaisically foolish — and that’s what will offend many people: They’ll call you impertinent — and having made many harsh, hastily judgmental enemies, you’ll find they might very well succeed in making you hot under the collar. But this will never frighten you. Some people will always seem unkind to you, and to them you’ll look insolent; there will be frictions, you must be prepared for this! And in larger groups of people where it’s important to show oneself to advantage and to stand out by virtue of one’s eloquence, you’ll always keep silent because it won’t appeal to you to open your mouth when everyone’s already jabbering away. As a result, you’ll be overlooked: And then you’ll start to feel defiant and behave inappropriately. Yet some, on the other hand, those who’ve gotten to know you, will consider it a gift to engage in heartfelt conversation with you; you’re skilled at listening, and in conversation this is perhaps more important than speaking. People will happily entrust their secrets and private affairs to a close-mouthed person like you, and in general you’re a master when it comes to discretion in silence and speech — unconsciously, I mean, it’s not as if you need to go to particular trouble on this account. You speak a bit awkwardly, and your mouth, a little ungainly, first pops open and then remains that way until you start to speak, as if you were expecting the words to come flying up from somewhere or other and land there. In the eyes of most, you’ll cut an uninteresting figure: Girls will find you dreary, women irrelevant, and men utterly untrustworthy and ineffectual. See if you can’t change a little in that department, if you’re able. Pay a bit more attention to yourself and be more vain; for being completely free of vanity is something even you will soon have to realize is an error. For example, Simon, look at your trousers: all ragged at the bottom! To be sure, and I know this perfectly well myself: They’re just trousers, but trousers should be kept in just as good a condition as one’s soul, for when a person wears torn, ragged trousers it displays carelessness, and carelessness is an attribute of the soul. Your soul must be ragged too. The other thing I wanted to say to you — You don’t think I’m saying all these things to you in jest, do you? Now he’s laughing. Don’t you consider me just a little bit more experienced than you are? Not at all! You’re more experienced? But if I say that many more experiences still lie before you, isn’t that demonstrating experience? Surely it is—”