Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist by Heinrich von Kleist Read Free Book Online

up her ears, as if she’d heard someone drawing near outside the door, the girl bolted upright; she thoughtfully and dreamily rearranged the cloth that had slipped from over her breasts; and only once she fathomed that it had been a false alarm did she turn back to the stranger with a cheerful look and remind him that if he did not soon make use of the hot water it would get cold. “Heavens,” she said, a bit taken aback, as the stranger peered at her in thoughtful silence, “why are you looking at me in such a strange way?” Fiddling with her pinafore, she tried to hide her growing embarrassment, andlaughed out loud: “Strange Sir, what strikes you amiss at the sight of me?” The stranger, who wiped his brow with his hand, suppressing a sigh as he lifted her off his lap, replied: “A wondrous resemblance between you and a girl I once knew!” Noticing that he had been distracted from his merry mood, she gaily and attentively grabbed him by the hand and asked: “What girl?” Whereupon, reflecting a moment, the young man spoke up: “Her name was Marianne Congreve and she hailed from Strasbourg. I met her there, where her father was a merchant, shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and was fortunate enough to have received a yes to my proposal and her mother’s approval. Dear God, she was the most faithful soul under the sun, and the terrible and stirring circumstances under which I lost her leap to mind when I look at you, so that I cannot keep from crying.” Toni tenderly and intimately pressed her body close to his. “Is she no longer living?” “She died,” replied the stranger, “and it was only at her death that I fathomed that I had lost the epitome of all goodness and virtue. God knows,” he went on, leaning his aching head on her shoulder, “how I could have been so foolish as to criticize the recently established revolutionary tribunal one evening in a public place. I was accused of treason, they came looking for me; in my absence, as I was fortunate enough to have escaped to the outskirts of the city, the raving mob that craved a victim rushed to the house of my bride, and upon her truthful assurance that she did not know my whereabouts, under the pretense that she was in cahoots with me, the embittered hooligans simply dragged her off to the scaffold instead of me. No sooner was I informed of this terrible news than I emerged from my hideout, and shoving my way through the crowd to the place of execution, cried out at the top ofmy lungs: “Here, you inhuman beasts, am I!” But in response to the questions of several revolutionary judges who, alas, did not seem to know me, standing there on the platform in front of the guillotine, she turned away from me with a look indelibly etched into my soul and said: “I don’t know that person!” Whereupon, moments later, at the sound of the drumbeat and the howl of the mob, egged on by the trumped up charges of the bloodthirsty judges, the blade dropped and her head fell from her shoulders. How I was saved I cannot tell; I found myself a quarter of an hour later in the apartment of a friend, where I staggered from one faint to another, and toward evening, was loaded, half-mad, onto a carriage, and dispatched across the Rhine.” At these words, letting go of the girl, the stranger hastened to the window, and as she saw him bury his profoundly troubled face in a handkerchief, stirred by a deep sympathy for his plight, she impulsively rushed over to him, wrapped her arms around his neck and mingled her tears with his.
    What happened next need not be told, since everyone who gets to this point in the tale can guess. Rousing himself afterwards, the stranger had no idea where the impetuous thing he’d done would lead him; in the meantime, however, he fathomed this much, that he had been saved and that he had nothing to fear from the girl in this house. Seeing her