Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Read Free Book Online Page A

with as little sleep as he could and he always devoted the day to the task in hand, so that each evening something had been done.
    ‘Let us now,’ he said to his friend, ‘turn to what remains to be done, the inventory of the estate, for which sufficient preparatory work must be already to hand, and which will afterwards lead on to the tenancy deeds and other things of that sort. Only let us firmly determine on one thing: to separate everything that is actual business from living. Business demands seriousness and severity, living demands caprice; business requires consistency, living often requires inconsistency, for that is what makes life agreeable and exhilarating. If you are secure in the one, you can be all the more free in the other; whereas if you confound the two, your freedom uproots and destroys your security.’
    Eduard heard in these suggestions a mild reproach. He was not disorderly by nature but he could never manage to arrange his papers according to subject. What also involved other people was not separated from what involved himself alone. He likewise did not adequately divide business from pursuits, entertainment from distractions. But now he found it easy to do so. His friend, a second self, was making the division the single self may not always want to make.
    They installed in the Captain’s wing a registry for current documents, an archive for those no longer current. They collected together all the papers and reports which lay scatteredin containers, rooms, cupboards and boxes. With the greatest of speed the chaos was reduced to a gratifying order and lay captioned in named compartments. What was required was found in a more complete state than could have been hoped for, and in this regard an elderly copying-clerk, with whom Eduard had hitherto always been dissatisfied, proved very serviceable, never leaving his desk the whole day long and even working on into the night.
    ‘I no longer recognize him,’ said Eduard to his friend, ‘he is so industrious and useful.’
    ‘The reason for that,’ the Captain replied, ‘is, we never give him anything new to do before he has finished what he already has to do in his own time; and thus, as you see, he gets through a great deal. If you start pestering him, he dries up completely.’
    The friends spent their days together but they did not neglect Charlotte in the evenings. If there were no visitors, and often there were none, they talked together and read, usually about useful subjects.
    Charlotte, accustomed in any event to improving the hour, felt she could put the good mood her husband was evidently now in to her own advantage. Domestic improvements she had long wanted to make but had been unable to were now put in hand through the Captain. The domestic dispensary, which had consisted of only a few medicines and remedies, was enlarged. Charlotte was industrious and helpful by nature and through discussion and by reading comprehensible textbooks she was enabled to be so more effectively and more often.
    They also thought about emergencies which might arise. Emergencies were really quite commonplace, nonetheless they too often took them by surprise. They bought everything they might need for lifesaving and this was all the more necessary in that, because there were so many lakes, watercourses and waterworks, accidents often occurred. The Captain tookvery detailed care of this department, and Eduard let fall the remark that a case of this sort had in the strangest way made an epoch in his friend’s life. But when the Captain was silent and seemed to be finding the recollection of it unpleasant, Eduard checked himself and Charlotte too, who was in general no less informed about it, paid no attention to what he had said.
    ‘We have done well to make all these arrangements,’ the Captain said one evening, ‘but we still lack what we need most, which is an able man who knows how to use them. I can suggest for this post a field-surgeon I know who can be