Zweisamkeit.
Loneliness of Two.

Zweisamkeit was the most telling word used by our guest, the Swiss professor, as we stood on the lawn after dinner, while he talked and we listened.

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As I gazed at the dark trees or searched the heavens for the familiar constellations, marking them on my fingers as I found them, Orion's belt, the Pleiades, Taurus and the others, drifts of talk came intermittently to me.

“The world is moving towards chaos. Even in my own land men think only of money. This,” with a wide sweep of his hand towards my sky, “the impudence to use this to write advertisements on.”

His voice droned on while I dreamed. I shook myself in the coolness of the night and thought of suggesting going inside. But the Swiss professor was still talking.

“I am alone; einsamkeit. But the loneliness of one is nothing to the loneliness of two—zweisamkeit.” He turned the German word over on his tongue, flavouring it again. I regretted that I had not learnt German, that so exprssive language.

Talk continued, but I was left clinging to a word, realizing in pity for all unhappy people the loneliness of two.

What two? Not two friends, who have quarrelled, and can ease the hurt with the balm of other friendships. Not two lonely ones, who draw together in their loneliness to front a hostile world, such as those two men of middle years whom I remembered on a long sea voyage, years ago, made common cause against the waves of youth and femininity, and at their journey's end went each his way without having spoken once from the soul. But two who have been lovers and are so no longer; perhaps two who, in middle life, have found the friendship of the years finer than ecstasy—and yet have lost it. Bound still by common interests, convention, marriage lines, the two, divergent in thought and feeling, must face a world which considers them, as a pair, self-sufficient. And in pride they continue to give this impression, and dare not reach out for other friendship to replace that which they have lost, Such can be the “loneliness of two.”

The professor's voice carried on my thought. “But when one is there,” pointing with the left hand, “and one is there,” waving into the darkness with his right, “love letters soon pass again. Is it not so? If not, that is the end!”

The end? Probably. Yet if two, who have once opened their minds to each other, separate, and think, and wonder, there is little doubt that they will want to communicate, to explain just what they meant in that last talk, and to show that they were capable of appreciating the other person's argument, and soon—“love letters will pass again.”

A cold breeze was stirring the trees’ branches and the professor's long hair.

“Come. We will go in,” I said; but my heart still shook with pity at the thought of zweisamkeit.

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