Ancestors: A NovelAtherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
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Ancestors: A Novel
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
British -- United States -- Fiction; California -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Love stories; Political fiction
"Of course I lived in a pension. I had no private sitting-room, and he
positively refused to sit in the salon a second time. So we used to take
interminable walks about Munich, lingering in all the quaint old Gothic
corners, along the magnificent stretches of Renaissance; lunching on the
terraces of the restaurants under the shade of the green trees, or in
quaint little back gardens set in the angle of buildings as mediaeval as
Rothenburg; the people looking down at us from the narrow windows or the
little balconies. We spent hours in the Englischergarten, sitting on the
banks of the Isar; often took the train to the beautiful Isarthal and
spent the day in the woods; or sailed on one of the lakes with the
tumbled glittering peaks of the Alps always in sight. We visited
Ludwig's castles together, attended peasants' festivals in the
mountains, lunching in some dilapidated old garden of a Gasthaus. And of
course we went constantly to the opera. It was positive heaven for a
time, and as romantic as the heart of any romantic idiot could wish. I
was so happy I could not even think, even when I was alone. I simply sat
like one in a trance and gazed into space, vague rose-colored dreams
turning the slow wheel of my brain. No one paid any attention to us.
Everybody in the pension was studying something; we avoided the American
church and consulate and even the Baroness L. We were determined to have
our blissful dream unvulgarized by gossip.
"There is no doubt that for a time my young enthusiasm gave him back a
flicker of the romance of his own youth, but of course it couldn't last.
I hardly know when it was I began to realize that the whole base of his
nature was honeycombed with ennui, and that any structure reared upon it
might topple at a moment's notice. I had been steeped to the eyes in the
present. I had no wish to marry. Marriage was prosaic. Life was a fairy
tale, why materialize it? I soon discovered that man's capacity for
living on air is limited, and I had almost yielded to his entreaties to
cross to England where we could marry without tiresome formalities, when
one day--this was perhaps a month after we had met--he was late at a
tryst. I lived a lifetime in five minutes. When he arrived he was so
apologetic and so charming that if I had been an older woman I should
have known that something was wrong. The next day, as it happened, I had
to go to bed with influenza, and wrote him that I might not get out for
a week. He wrote twice a day and sent me flowers. On the fourth morning
I felt so much better that I sent him a note by a _dinstmann_ telling
him that I should lunch on the terrace of the Neue Buerse restaurant. He
was not awaiting me; nor did he come at all. Later I saw him driving
with an astonishingly handsome woman; who looked as if she had been born
without crudities or illusions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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