The Tanners

In a gentle, calm voice she said good night.

“I’m glad to be here all the same,” she said the next morning. “How can one go wishing oneself away from a position so tempestuously. As if this were so important! I could almost laugh to think of it, and I’m a bit ashamed to have been so forthcoming yesterday. And yet I’m glad; for you do have to speak your mind sometimes. How patiently you were able to listen to me, Simon! Almost reverentially! And yet this too makes me glad. In the evening one isn’t the same as in the morning, no, one is so utterly different, so dissimilar in the way one expresses oneself and in one’s feelings. Merely having slept soundly for a single night, I’ve heard, can utterly change a person. I can certainly believe it. Having spoken in such a way yesterday appears to me now, on this bright morning, like an anxious, exaggerated, sad dream. What can have been the matter? Should one take things so irritably, so hard? Think no more about it! I must have been tired yesterday — I’m always tired in the evenings — but now I feel so light, so healthy, so fresh, as if new-born. I have such a feeling of suppleness, as if someone were lifting me up and bearing me along the way a person is carried on a litter. Open the window while I’m still lying here in bed. It’s so lovely to lie in bed while the windows are being opened. Where can I have found all the joyousness that envelops me as I lie here. Out of doors, the beautiful landscape appears to me to be dancing, the air is slipping indoors to me. Is it Sunday today? If not, it’s a day that seems made to be a Sunday. Do you see the geraniums? They stand so prettily before the window. What did I want yesterday? Happiness? Don’t I already have happiness? Should one have to go off searching for it at unknown distances among people who surely have no time to be thinking about such things? It’s good when you don’t have time for too many things, quite good in fact, for if we had time enough, we’d surely die of presumptuousness. What a brightness there is in my head. Now there’s not a single thought in my head that isn’t lying there like its mistress — me — feeling glad and light, exactly like me. Would you bring me breakfast in bed, Simon? I’d enjoy having you serve me as if I were a Portuguese noblewoman and you a young Moor who comprehends my every gesture. Of course you’ll bring me what I ask. Why shouldn’t you be attentive? How long have you been here with me? Wait, it was winter when you arrived, snow was falling, I can still remember it quite clearly — how many fair and rainy days have since gone by. Now you’ll be leaving soon; but you mustn’t rob me of the pleasure of having you here with me a few days more. And three days from now I’ll say to you: “Stay another three,” and you won’t be any better able to resist me then than you are now, bringing the breakfast to my bedside. You’re a curiously unresisting and unscrupulous person. Ask anything of you, and you’ll do it. You want everything anyone wants. I think a person might ask all sorts of improper things of you before you’d start to think ill of him. One can’t avoid feeling a certain touch of contempt with regard to you. I do despise you a tiny bit, Simon! But I know it doesn’t matter to you if one speaks to you like this. I consider you, by the way, quite capable of performing a heroic deed at a pinch: You see, I do think quite well of you. With you, people allow themselves all sorts of things. Your behavior liberates our behavior from every sort of restraint. Years ago, I used to box your ears, I was always tattling on you to Mother and having you punished when you’d committed some misdeed, and now I’m asking you: Come give me a kiss, or rather: Let me give you one, a nice cautious kiss on the forehead. There! Compared with last night I’m like a saint this morning. I feel a presentiment of the times that are coming — let them come! But don’t laugh at me. Though if you laughed I’d also be pleased; for laughter is the most fitting sound for an early blue morning. And now please leave the room so I’ll be at liberty to get dressed—”

Simon left her alone.