Author: Gerhart Hauptmann

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 9781230459592

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... VI E was now stumbling on blindly through the darkness, because there was nothing left him to do, if he would still have word of his mother, than to seek the castle of which the fisherman had spoken. A bitter and a fearsome night it was that he had to live through. He was astounded how it could come to pass that a man such as he could go under in such perplexity of distress. When, the thick darkness made it, ever and anon, impossible for him to press on, he more times than once swung from the terror of despair to fits of Berserker wrath that spent themselves with bleeding fists against stones and tree trunks. He did not, be sure, cease to shout Heartache's name over and over again into the rustling wilderness of the woods, whence, ever and again, a mournful echo gave him answer, an echo that only made his helplessness, his fears, his longing, and in the end, his rage, the greater. He seemed, in his own eyes, as one befooled, as one tricked. They had tricked him of the most precious thing the world had held for him, but where to look for the trickster, for the cheat, he could not tell. He went so far as to challenge the air, the night, the trees, the rocks, the waters, and the earth, to give him back bis mother on pain of his everlasting enmity. Toward morning, Parsival became aware that he was wending his way up stream on the banks of a somewhat broad river. The grey dawn, heralding the sun, disclosed a deep valley that, steep and rocky, widened out or narrowed in on either shore of the river bed. The farther he fared the more foreign the landscape became, and had he not been stricken to the soul, he would, at the last, have believed himself in Paradise. Strange plants, strange flowers, trees and grasses encompassed him round about....