HAD come back again to London, to the humdrum round—office and club, club and office, the same people, the same tasks, the same dinner-parties with bridge to follow, the same golf on the same Sundays. Sometimes I caught myself chuckling over those stolen weeks: I was at least ahead on them. Yes, I had seen the Alps again, an odd fancy, and Pæstum, and Girgenti. I had given myself up to fancies, to old longings, to the wistful things one dreams of, sighing "If." There had come to me a small legacy, and I had spent it. One of my diversions had been to visit Weimar. That again was a long-nursed dream. Goethe repels one, or else he holds. Me he had always fascinated. I could never see the coldness in him, the polished egotism. Hard as a stone new from the lapidary, and as smooth, is one reading. But the man was different; one has but to take the Elegies, or else Eckermann. There was warmth behind the polish, there was a heart, volcanic. And so I had ended my pilgrimage at this great shrine, to me the greatest.
I lingered, and I found a fellow-worshiper. He might have been the cause of this delay. It may be guessed that one has a curiosity and often a weakness when one finds a passion shared or the same complaint. Patients discuss their symptoms; so we discussed Goethe. He was Davidson's mania and mine. Yet here was a man, whole-souled and all-devoted, a veritable watcher by the tomb, while I—I had only taken a holiday, was suffering only a transient acuteness of the thing, and to-morrow would find me deaf to these enthusiasms. Not perhaps stone-deaf, but merely deaf. In London, at the office, at the club, who could afford to dabble openly in Goethe? In stocks, in bonds, in shares, perhaps, but not in Goethe.
And now I was home again, going the same round, my dreams fulfilled. It made something else to think of; and often I caught glimpses of the little city dreaming on, full of old-fashioned people, of pilgrims coming and going as I had come, of sleepy tradespeople and informal hotels, with a grand duke presiding over its destinies—Goethe's grand duke's lineal heir. It was something to know I had seen the poet's tomb; it was something to know I had followed his daily way, crossing the park to his cottage by the Ilm, treading the rooms of his mansion in the town, stooping over manuscript and writing-table, almost as he had stooped. One stood so very close to him, to all the ardors of that crowded life! First of all came the poet; and afterward my mind would settle on Davidson, leech-like, drawing blood from him. He was the true worshiper who had renounced all else for service, I merely the Sunday guest who passes an hour in prayer and then moves on. I sit here, pondering over him, piecing his story together, unraveling it. One moment he is tragic, another ludicrous, ivy clinging to the monument, parasitic or pitiful. He was so small, so white-faced, and so feeble; so passionate with that—the nature of a child!
We had met casually in the restaurant of a hotel. When I was done with the English paper, would I let him have it? he began; and after that we talked. I met his wife, their friends, I saw the city as it was, old-world and somnolent, with a society that moved ceremoniously through a life that was a minuet. All went to slow music here: you took tea at a house, and it was an occasion; you paid a call, and it was ritual. I remembered Heine's impatience with the life, in no way changed. Indeed, I felt it, too; but, then, I argued, it was their nature, their way, and may have been born with their fine pride and their penuriousness, for Weimar is a city of the proud and poor. Leave out its memories, its significance, and you are among a people that has not yielded, that will not budge. No one dares jostle them, or trouble them with the irreverent word; the wit and the parvenu are alike excluded from this tremulous hospitality. But what was Davidson, an Englishman, doing with them? I asked. In the months that have gone by I have found an answer. Whence I hardly know. From him, his wife, her family, from others that spoke of him, or from myself? One pieces things together, and one fails. One tries again and yet again. It may so happen that one arrives.