The Bride of Dreams | Page 9

saw in me the lover long before I began to look on her with
a lover's eyes. I had, indeed, found the unspeakable joy of intimacy
surpassing and atoning for all, but not yet the peculiar higher joy of an
intimacy, with greater disparity, between youth and maid. I thought all
intimacy glorious if it was but very fervent, and even entertained some
vague notion regarding the great joy of an intimacy and cordiality
embracing all, man and woman, young and old. But these moments of
revelation and insight were but very brief and buried forthwith under
commonplaces.
It must have been between the age of ten and twelve, that looking into
the bright eyes of a girl, I first experienced that peculiar and higher
bliss, that boy friendship could not give me. This was an event that so
engrossed me, that I was oblivious of everything else and walked about
like one moving in a dream.
I know not whether it was due to the blood of my fair northern mother,
but never could a southern, dark-eyed and black-haired lass fascinate
and interest me so vehemently and intensely as a blue-eyed blonde.
Especially the English type, the cool, self-possessed, as well as
somewhat haughty and coy blonde maiden, slender and yet strong, with
wavy hair, attracted my attention and interest with an irresistible power.
Have patience, dear reader, it is a delicate and difficult matter, and I
must deliberate well and speak carefully if we would more deeply
penetrate the meaning of these things.

When these feelings overtake us as a child, we think it is the
personality, that it is Alice or Bertha who interests us so intensely, and
that only Alice or only Bertha can inspire such strange and powerful
emotions of bliss and desire. And above all that it is just Alice or just
Bertha whose more intimate acquaintance is so eminently desirable.
But how is it possible that we retain this illusion, and even live and die
in it - pleasant and enviable though it may be - when we know that each
feels this same interest in some other and ofttimes even see it
transferred from one to another?
Being in love is the desire to fathom a most interesting secret,
indispensable to us all. The beloved maiden attracts us, as a ray of light
attracts the wanderer in the dark. Yet we know that every creature of
her kind can shed this radiance about her, and that it is simply our own
accidental receptivity that, among so many thousands, gives to this one
creature in particular her attractive power.
Thus I think I can positively say that it was not herself I sought in my
beloved, but the reflection of one common light that also shines
through other windows as well as through the eyes in which I
discovered it. But though my reason must affirm it, my heart
comprehends little of this. When I think of her whom I loved last,
longest and most devotedly, then she herself, her own personality, is a
certainty to me that I would not willingly relinquish for any higher
certainty, many years though I have spent in anxious pondering on this
subject.
The list of my boy friends is not worth recording. They were puppets
wondrously decked out by my fertile imagination, worshipped as
heroes for a while with all the ritual of German friendship cult - and
later, when in their personal life they showed no resemblance to my
ideal expectations, rudely dismantled and cast aside and hated. I can
still see a photograph of one of them lying in my washbowl with
pierced eyes, curling and charring under the avenging flame of a match.
The last of the series, the young commercial traveller, longest retained
his glory. I saw him only about a week in a watering place, and

subsequently he was able to maintain his position of hero-friend by a
correspondence in which he answered my fervent ingenuousness
stammered in poor German with fluent plagiarism from the classics of
his romantic fatherland. All went well, until after a few years I met him
again and noticed that it was not even a puppet but a skeleton that I had
arrayed in a hero's armor. I was furious at him as though he had
purposely deceived me - but my anger was unmerited. He had in
perfect good faith tried his best to live up to the national traditions of
friendship and to keep burning the smouldering fire of his own humble
ideal of love.
A friend, who would have paid me in my own coin, who requited what
I desired to give him, - as, faithful, as devoted, as passionate, as
self-sacrificing, as attentive and solicitous as it was my nature to
understand and prove