Part 23

The director was an old stager who referred to the public about as a disrespectful footman refers to his lord. At Daniel’s suggestions for improving the repertory, he generally shrugged his shoulders. The operas in which he had the greatest confidence as drawing cards were “The Beggar Student,” “Fra Diavolo,” “L’Africaine,” and “Robert le Diable.” The singers and the orchestra were not much better than those of the lamented Dörmaul-Wurzelmann troupe. The possibility of arousing them to intensified effort or filling them with a semblance of intelligent enthusiasm for art was even less. Privileges based on length of service and the familiar traditions of indolence made æsthetic innovations unthinkable.

Wherever careworn Philistines and slothful materialists occupy the seats from which art should raise her voice, advancement, progress born of sacrificial application, is out of the question: the most it is reasonable to expect is a bourgeois fulfilment of inescapable duties. In such, cases the flower droops; the dream vanishes; the free-born spirit has the choice of fighting day in and day out against the collective demons of pettiness and mediocrity, or of going down in admitted defeat.

“Stuff the people can easily digest, my dear boy, that is the idea,” said the director.

“What are you so excited about? Don’t you know these people haven’t a musical muscle in their whole soul?” said Lebrecht.

“For nine consecutive years I have been singing F sharp at this opera house, and now here comes a _musicien_ from the backwoods and demands all of a sudden that I sing F!” This was the commentary of Fräulein Varini, the prima donna whose outstanding bosom had long been a source of human merriment to pit, stall, and gallery.

“Ah, he is a greasy grind determined to arrive,” said the first violinist.

“He’s a spit-fire,” said the lad who beat the big drum, when Daniel threatened to box his ears for a false intonation.

The Baroness had secured a publisher in Leipzig for his cycle of sixteen songs; the compositions were to be brought out at her expense. That did not have the right effect: it was not something, Daniel felt, that he had fought for and won; it was not a case where merit had made rejection impossible. He had the feeling that he was selling his soul and was being paid to do it. Moreover, and worst of all, he had to express his gratitude for this act. The Baroness loved to have somebody thank her for what she had done. She never once suspected that what Daniel wanted was not benefactors, but people who were stirred to the depths of their souls by his creations. The rich cannot sense the feelings of the poor; the higher classes remain out of contact with the lower.

His excitability saved him. In his magnificent solicitude for the mission that is at once the token and the curse of those who are really called, he shut himself off from a world from which the one thing he wanted was bread; bread and nothing else.

After the publication of the songs a review appeared in the _Phœnix_ which had a remarkably realistic ring to the ear of the layman. As a matter of fact it was merely an underhanded attempt at assassination. The thing was signed with a big, isolated “W.” Wurzelmann, the little slave, had shot from his ambush.

Other musical journals copied this review. A half dozen people bought the songs; then they were forgotten.

It was no use to hope. The trouble was, he needed bread, just bread.

V

It was often difficult for him to find the peace and quiet necessary for effective work. May brought cold weather; they had to make a fire; the stove smoked; the potter came in and removed the tiles; the room looked like an inferno.

Gertrude was pounding sugar: “Don’t be angry at me, Daniel; I must pound the sugar to-day.” And she pounded away until the hammer penetrated the paralysed brain of the listener by force of circumstances.

The hinges of the door screeched. “You ought to oil them, Gertrude.” Gertrude looked high and low for the oil can, and when she finally found it, she had no feather to use in smearing the oil on. She went over to the chancellor’s, and borrowed one from her maid. While she was gone, the milk boiled over and filled the house with a disagreeable stench.

The door bell rang. It was the cobbler; he had come to get the money for the patent leather shoes. The wives of Herr Kirschner and Herr Rübsam had both said that Daniel must not think of appearing at the coming recital at the Baroness’s without patent leather shoes.

“I haven’t the money, Gertrude; have you got that much?”

Gertrude went through her chests, and scraped up five marks which she gave the cobbler as a first instalment. The man went away growling; Daniel hid from him.

Gertrude was sitting in the living room making clothes for her baby-to-come. There was a happy expression on her face. Daniel knew that it was a display of maternal joy and expectation, but since he could not share this joy, since indeed he felt a sense of fear at the appearance of the child, her happiness embittered him.

Between the fuchsias in the window stood a robin red-breast; the impish bird had its head turned to one side, and was peeping into the room: “Come out,” it chirped, “come out.” And Daniel went.

He had an engagement with M. Rivière at the café by the market place. Since he no longer saw anything of Eleanore, he wanted to find out how her plans for going to Paris were getting along.

The Frenchman told of the progress he was making in his Caspar Hauser research. In his broken German he told of the murder of body and soul that had been committed in the case of the foundling: “He was a mortal man _comme une étoile_,” he said. “The bourgeoisie crushed him. The bourgeoisie is the _racine_ of all evil.”

Daniel never mentioned Eleanore’s name. He tried to satisfy himself by the fact that she kept out of his sight. He bit his lips together, and said: I will. But a stronger power in him said, No, you won’t. And this stronger power became a beggar. It went around saying, Give me, please, give me!

The billiard balls rattled. A gentleman in a red velvet vest had a quarrel with a shabby looking fellow who had been reading _Fliegende Blätter_ for the last two hours; he would begin over and over again at the very beginning, and break out into convulsions of laughter every time he came to his favourite jokes.

Daniel was silent; he insisted somehow on remaining silent. M. Rivière wished, for this reason, to hear something about the “Harzreise.” By way of starting a discussion he remarked quite timidly that _sans musique la vie est insupportable_, “There is something about music that reminds one of insanity,” he remarked. He said there were nights when he would open a volume of Schubert’s or Brahms’s songs, leaf through them, read the notes, and hum the melodies simply in order to escape the despair which the conduct of the people about him was emptying into his heart. “_Moi_, I ought to be, how do you say? stoic; _mais_ I am not. In me there is _trop de musique, et c’est le contraire_.”

Daniel looked at him in astonishment. “Come with me,” he said suddenly, got up, and took him by the arm.

They met Eleanore in the hall. She had been up in the new flat with the whitewasher. Her father was to move in the following day.

“Why was all this done so quickly?” asked Daniel, full of a vague happiness that drew special nourishment from the fact that Eleanore was plainly excited.

“Mere chance,” she said, and carefully avoided looking at him. “A captain who is being transferred here from Ratisbon is moving in our place. It is a pity to leave the good old rooms. The second-hand dealer is going to get a deal of our stuff; there is no room for it up there in those two cubby holes. How is Gertrude? May I go up and see her for a minute or two?”

“Yes, go right up,” said Daniel stiffly; “you can stay and listen if you wish to. I am going to play the Harzreise.”

“If I wish to? I almost have a right to; you promised me this long ago.”

“She thinks after all that I want to catch her,” he thought to himself. “It will be better for me to drop the whole business than to let the idea creep into her stupid skull that my composition is going to make propaganda for our private affairs.” With bowed head he ascended the stairs, M. Rivière and Eleanore following along behind. His ears were pricked to hear anything they might say about Paris; they talked about the weather.

As they entered the room Gertrude had the harp between her knees; but she was not playing. Her hands lay on the strings, her head was resting on the frame. “Why haven’t you lighted a lamp?” asked Daniel angrily.

She was terrified; she looked at him anxiously. The expression on her face made him conscious of many things that he had kept in the background of his thoughts during his everyday life: her unconditional surrender to him; the magnanimity and nobility of her heart, which was as dependent on his as the mercury in the thermometer is dependent on the atmosphere; her speechless resignation regarding a thousand little things in her life! her wellnigh supernatural ability to enter into the spirit and enjoyment of what he was doing, however much his mind might presume to write _De profundis_ across his creations.

It was on this account that he recognised in her face a serious, far-away warning. At once cowardly and reverential, conscious of his guilt and yet feeling innocent, he went up to her and kissed her on the hair. She leaned her head on his breast, thus causing him to feel, though quite unaware of it herself, the whole weight of the burden she was placing on him.

He told her he was going to play. He said: “I have lost my picture again; I want to try to find it in others.”

Gertrude begged him, with a pale face, to be permitted to stay in the living room. She closed the door only partly.

VI

In Goethe’s verses entitled “Harzreise im Winter,” thoughts lie scattered about like erratic strata in the world of geology, and feelings that are as big and terrible as the flames from burning planets. In Daniel’s work the whole of Goethe’s prodigious sorrow and solemnity seemed to have been transformed automatically into music.

When, in the second half, the motif of human voices was taken over, when these voices pealed forth first singly, one by one, from the surging sea of tones, and then gathered with ever-increasing avidity, longing, and candour into the great chorus, one had the feeling that without this liberation they would have been stifled in the darkness.

The effect of the pianissimo moaning of the basses before the soprano set in was overwhelming: it was like the vulture which, resting with easy wing on the dark morning cloud, spies around for booty. So was the song meant to be. The trombone solo was a shout of victory: it imparted new life to the sunken orchestra.

Daniel had infinite trouble in making all this wealth of symbolic art clear through song, word, and gesture at the same time that his music was being played.

The work abounded in blends and half tones which stamped it as a child of its age, and still more of ages to come, despite the compact rigidity of its architecture. There was no bared sweetness in it; it was as rough as the bark of a tree; it was as rough as anything that is created with the assurance of inner durability.

Its rhythm was uniform, regular; it provided only for crescendos. There was nothing of the seductive, nothing of the waltz-fever in it. It was in no way cheap; it did not flatter slothful ears. It had no languishing motifs; it was all substance and exterior. The melody was concealed like a hard kernel in a thick shell; and not merely concealed: it was divided, and then the divisions were themselves divided. It was condensed, compressed, bound, and at the same time subterranean. It was created to rise from its depths, rejoice, and overwhelm: “But clothe the lonely one in thy clouds of gold! Enshroud with ivy until the roses bloom again, oh Love, the dampened hair of thy poet!”

The work was written a quarter of a century before its time. It was out of touch with the nerves of its contemporary environment. It could not hope to count upon a prophet or an interpreter. It could not be carried further by the benevolence of congenial champions. It bore the marks of mortal neglect. It was like a bird from the tropics left to die on the icy coasts of Greenland.

But for those who are near in heart there is a fluid in the air that intercedes for the higher truth. M. Rivière and Eleanore scarcely breathed during the recital. Eleanore’s big eyes were still: they opened and closed slowly. When Daniel finished, he dried his hot brow with his handkerchief, and then his arms fell limp at his sides. He felt as if the brilliancy of Eleanore’s eyes had reached the tips of his hair and had electrified it.

“Enshroud with ivy, until the roses bloom again, oh Love, the dampened hair of thy poet!”

“It is impossible to get an idea of it,” murmured Daniel; “the piano is like an instrument of torture.”

They were struck by peculiar sounds coming from the living room. They went in, and found Gertrude pale as death, her hands folded across her bosom, sitting on the sofa. She was talking to herself, partly as if in a dream, partly as if she were praying. It was impossible to understand what she was saying. She seemed distant, estranged.

Eleanore hastened to her; Daniel looked at her with a scowl. Just then the bell rang, and M. Rivière went out. There was the sound of a man’s voice; it was disagreeable. The door was opened and—Herr Carovius entered.

VII

Herr Carovius bowed in all directions. He wore tan shoes with brass buckles, black trousers, a shiny green coat, and a white cravat that could no longer be called clean. He laid his slouch hat on a chair, and said he would like to beg their pardon if he had called at an inopportune hour. He had come, he said, to thank his dear young master for the aforementioned invitation.

“It seems—yes, it seems,” he added, with a droll blinking of his eyes, “that I have in all innocence interrupted the performance of a most interesting production. There is a crowd of people gathered out in front of the house, and I could not forego the pleasure of listening. I hope you will not stop playing the sacrificial festival on my account. What was it, _maestro_? It wasn’t the symphony, was it?”

“Yes, it was the symphony,” replied Daniel, who was so amazed at the appearance and conduct of the man that he was really courteous.

“It cost me money to be sure—believe it or not. I had to get an afternoon coat that would do for a Count—latest cut, velvet collar, tails that reached down to my calves. Aristocratic, very!” He stared over Gertrude’s head into the corner, and tittered for at least a half a minute.

Nobody said a word. Everybody was dumb, astounded.

“Good lord, social obligations,” continued Herr Carovius, “but after all you can’t afford to be a backwoodsman. Music is supposed to ennoble a man even externally. By the way, there is a rumour afloat that it is a symphony with chorus. How did you happen upon the idea? The laurels of the Ninth will not let you sleep? I would have thought that you didn’t give a damn about classical models. Everybody is so taken up now with musical lullabies, _wage-la-wei-a_, that kind of stuff, you know. But then I suppose that is only a transition stage, as the fox said when he was being skinned.”

He took off his nose glasses, polished them very hastily, fumbled for a while with his cord, and then put them on again. Having gained time in this way, he began to expatiate on the decadence of the arts, asked Daniel whether he had ever heard anything about a certain Hugo Wolf who was being much talked about and who was sitting in darkest Austria turning out songs like a Hottentot, made a number of derogatory remarks about a fountain that was being erected in the city, said that a company of dancers had just appeared at the Cultural Club in a repertory of grotesque pantomimes, remarked that as he was coming over he learned that there was an institution in the city that loaned potato sacks, and that there had just been a fearful fire in Constantinople.

Thereupon he looked first at Daniel, then at M. Rivière, took the snarls of the one and the embarrassment of the other to be encouraging signs for the continuation of his gossip, readjusted his glasses, and sneezed. Then he smoothed out the already remarkably smooth hairs he had left on his head, rubbed his hands as if he were beginning to feel quite at home, and tittered when there was any sign of a stoppage in his asinine eloquence.

At times he would cast a stealthy glance at Gertrude, who would draw back somewhat as the arm of a thief who feels he is being watched. Eleanore did not seem to be present so far as he was concerned: he did not see her. Finally she got up. She was tortured by the interruption of what she had just experienced from the music and by his flat, stale, and unprofitable remarks. Then he got up too, looked at his watch as if he were frightened, asked if he might repeat his visit at another time, took leave of Gertrude with a silly old-fashioned bow, from Daniel with a confidential handshake, and from the Frenchman with uncertain courtesy. Eleanore he again entirely overlooked.

Out in the hall he stopped, nodded several times, and said with an almost insane grin, speaking into the empty air before him: “_Auf Wiedersehen_, fair one! _Auf Wiedersehen_, fairest of all! Good-bye, my angel! Forget me not!”

In the room Eleanore whispered in a heavy, anxious tone: “What was that? What was that?”

VIII

Philippina Schimmelweis came to help Eleanore with the moving. At first Eleanore was quite surprised; then she became accustomed to having her around and found her most helpful. Jordan took no interest in anything that was going on. The last of all his hope seemed to be shattered by the fact that he was to move.

Philippina gradually fell into the habit of coming every day and working for a few hours either for Eleanore or for Gertrude, so long as the latter had anything to do in the kitchen. They became used to seeing her, and put up with her. She tried to make as little noise as possible; she had the mien of a person who is filling an important but unappreciated office.

She made a study of the house; she knew the rooms by heart. She preferred to come along toward sunset or a little later. One day she told Eleanore she had seen a mysterious-looking person out on the hall steps. Eleanore took a candle and went out, but she could not see any one. Philippina insisted nevertheless that she had seen a man in a green doublet, and that he had made a face at her.

She was particularly attracted by the rooms in the attic. She told the neighbours that there was an owl up there. As a result of this the children of that section began to fear the entire house, while the chancellor’s wife, who lived on the ground floor, became so nervous that she gave up her apartment.

There was no outside door or entrance hall of any kind to Jordan’s new quarters. You went direct from the stairway into the room where Eleanore worked and slept. Adjoining this was her father’s room. People still called him the Inspector, although he no longer had such a position.

He sat in his narrow, cramped room the whole day. One wall was out of plumb. The windows he kept closed. When Eleanore brought him his breakfast or called him to luncheon, which she had cooked in the tiny box of a kitchen and then served in her own little room, he was invariably sitting at the table before a stack of papers, mostly old bills and letters. The arrangement of these he never changed.

Once she entered his room without knocking. He sprang up, closed a drawer as quickly as he could, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and tried to smile in an innocent way. Eleanore’s heart almost stopped beating.

He never went out until it was dark, and on his return he could be seen carrying a package under his arm. This he took with him to his room.

At first Eleanore was always uneasy when she had to leave. She requested Philippina to be very careful and see to it that no stranger entered the house. Philippina had a box full of ribbons in Eleanore’s cabinet. She set a chair against the door leading into Jordan’s room; and when her hands were tired from rummaging around in the ribbons and her eyes weary from looking at all the flashy colours, she pressed her ear to the door to see if she could find out what the old man was doing.

At times she heard him talking. It seemed as if he were talking with some one. His voice had an exhortatory but tender tone in it. Philippina trembled with fear. Once she even pressed the latch; she wanted to open the door as quietly as possible, so that she might peep in and see what was really going on. But to her vexation, the door was bolted on the other side.

For Gertrude she did small jobs and ran little errands: she would go to the baker or the grocer for her. Gertrude became less and less active; it was exceedingly difficult for her to climb the stairs. Philippina took the place of a maid. The only kind of work she refused to do was work that would soil her clothes. Gertrude’s shyness irritated her; one day she said in a snappy tone: “You are pretty proud, ain’t you? You don’t like me, do you?” Gertrude looked at her in amazement, and made no reply; she did not know what to say.

Whenever Philippina heard Daniel coming, she hid herself. But if he chanced to catch sight of her, he merely shrugged his shoulders at the “frame,” as he contemptuously called her. It seemed to him that it would be neither wise nor safe to mistreat her. He felt that it was the better part of valour to look with favour on her inexplicable diligence, and let it go at that.