Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/317

 twigs, and on this little label as if it was a riddle that had to be solved, but that defied solution. And really I had a feeling of not being able to grasp the whole thing; I did not understand that this plant still stood here and had the same unpronounceable name, understood still less that I myself was here and, least of all, that Minna was not here, or that I couldn't go to "Seilergasse" and embrace her. I realised nothing at all.

When at last I turned round, I saw some children a few yards away putting their heads together, laughing and running away. Evidently they thought that I was mad. And who knows? From children one hears the truth!

On my way back I passed the beautiful Renaissance Villa, which Minna and I jokingly had called ours. A new riddle! In those days it had been a matter of course that we two should build a home together, but it was a wild and ridiculous dream that we should ever be able to do it on such a grand scale. And now there was more possibility of my being able to buy this building than of taking Minna to the most modest home. Incomprehensible! Was this perhaps already a madness, that I had a feeling of not being able to understand anything, where I suppose in reality there was nothing to understand, where everything for a cool brain was clear as daylight, had to be so, and for me it could not be. Madness! Sonnenstein! And why not? "If I am lodged there," I thought, "it will always be an advantage that no Napoleon will come to drive one out."

At sunset a signal shot sounded, which announces that the Elbe rises unusually. The next morning, when I still lay in a half-slumber, I was alarmed by a second shot, by which the danger of flood is foretold. I got up at once. As I was staying at the Bellevue Hotel, I was quite close to the river. Since last evening, the porter said, people had been