Part 3

A lean old man with kid gloves and a top-hat entered the shop. It was growing dark, and he had peered carefully about before entering. He hurried up to Jason Philip, and said in a cracked falsetto: “How about the new publications? Anything very fine?” He rubbed his hands, and stared stupidly from under his thin, reddish lids. It was Count Schlemm-Nottheim, a cousin of the Baron von Auffenberg, the leader of the liberal party.

“I’m entirely at your service, sir,” said Jason Philip, holding himself as rigidly as a sergeant who is being addressed by a captain.

He led the count to a corner of the shop, and opened a heavy oaken chest. This chest contained the pornographic publications forbidden by the state. They were sold quite secretly and only to very reliable persons.

Jason Philip whispered, and the old count turned over the heap of books with avid fingers.

XIII

Marian climbed up the steep, dark stairs, and rang the upstairs bell. She had to tell the maid who she was and even mention her name to the children. The latter laughed at her stiff, rural courtesy. Philippina, who was twelve, acted arrogantly and swung her hips when she walked. All three had their mother’s square head and a cheesy complexion.

The maid brought up the bag. Then Theresa came too and helped her sister unpack. With her acrid, unfeeling voice she asked many questions, but without waiting for an answer told the tale of marriage and births and deaths that had taken place in the city. She avoided Marian’s eyes, because she was silently considering how long her sister’s visit would last and to what expense it would put her.

She did not mention Daniel, and her silence condemned him more completely than her husband’s acrimonious speeches. She held firmly an almost religious doctrine of the complete obedience which children owe their parents, and doubted Marian’s power to punish properly a breach of this sacred law.

When Marian was left alone, she sat down by the window of the little room, and gazed sadly down at the river. Without any curl of waves the yellow water glided by and washed the walls of the houses on the other bank. She had a view of the Museum Bridge and another bridge, and the crowding of people on the bridges disquieted her.

She walked through the streets, and stopped at the head of the Museum Bridge. She thought that every human being who lived in the town must pass by here sooner or later. Her attentive glance searched all faces, and where one escaped, she followed the figure as it melted into the dark. But as it grew later the people were fewer and fewer.

At night she would lie awake, and listen to the dull echo of the feet of the last passerby. Next day from morning to twilight she would wander up and down the streets. What she saw weighed on her heart. The city people seemed to her like dumb animals, tormented and angry. The narrow streets stopped her breath; the hubbub deadened her senses.

But she was never tired of seeking.

On the fifth day she did not come home until ten o’clock. Theresa, who had gone to bed, sent her a plate of lentil soup. While she was avidly eating the soup she heard steps in the hall and a knock at the door. Jason Philip entered. “Come along at once,” was all he said. But she understood. With trembling fingers she threw a shawl across her shoulders, since the October nights were growing cool, and followed him in silence.

They went up hill to Adler Street, turned into it and then into a narrow, dark little alley at the right. A lantern hung above a door and on a green glass pane were inscribed the words: “The Vale of Tears.” A greenish light suffused the stone stairs that led to the cellar, the kegs and the desolate room filled with chairs and benches. A sourish smell of wine arose from the place.

Beside the entrance there was a barred window. Beside it Jason Philip stopped, and beckoned Marian to join him.

At the long tables below them sat a queer crowd. They were young men, but such as one never finds in ordinary houses and only very rarely in the streets. Want seemed to have driven them to huddle here, and the night to have lured them from their hiding places—shipwrecked creatures they seemed who had fled to a cavern on some deserted shore. They had absurdly gay cravats and sad, pallid faces, and the greenish light made them look altogether like corpses. It was long since a barber had touched their hair or a tailor their garb.

A little aside from these sat two old fellows, habitual topers, not in the best circumstances themselves, yet rather astonished at this dreary Stygian crew. For they themselves at least received their weekly wage of a Saturday night, while those others had obviously for years not worked at all.

But in a dusky corner sat one at a piano and struck the keys with a strange might. He had no score before him, but played from memory. The instrument moaned; the strings hummed pitifully; the pedals creaked; but the man who played was so bewitched by his music that he cared little for the inadequacy of its communication. Wild as the tumult of the playing sounded, the shrill and raging chords, the wild clamour of the treble, the driven triplets and seething tremolos of the bass, yet the deep emotion of the player, the ecstasy and world-estranged madness in which he was, lent the scene a melancholy and a solemnity which would have had its effect even without the greenish cellar and the cavernous pallor of the listeners.

Marian had at once recognised the pianist as Daniel. She had to hold fast to the bars of the window and lean her knees against the wainscoting. It was not for nothing that Jason Philip was known as a thorough wag. The comparison to Daniel in the lion’s den was too much for him. He whispered the words to Marian. But since the window was open and the music had first risen and then, at this moment, paused, his words penetrated to the people below, and several heads turned toward him. Marian was thoughtless. She believed that the piece had ended. Faintly and fearfully she cried: “Daniel!”

Daniel leaped up, stared at her, saw Jason Philip’s mocking face, hastened to the door, the steps, and was beside them.

He stood in the doorway, and his lips began to form words. The unhappy boy, she thought, and it seemed to her as though power would be given her to press back to his heart the words she trembled to hear.

It was in vain. The words were uttered. He did not wish to see his mother any more; he was content to live alone and for himself and to be free. He needed no one. He needed only to be free.

Jason Philip hurled a glance of contempt at the blasphemous wretch, and drew Marian away with him. To the very corner of the alley they were accompanied by the excited voices of the people in the Vale of Tears.

Next morning Marian returned to Eschenbach.

FOES, BROTHERS, A FRIEND AND A MASK

I

Daniel had rented a room of the brush-maker Hadebusch and his wife, who lived on Jacob’s Square behind the church.

It was March, and a sudden cold had set in; and Frau Hadebusch had a superstitious fear of coal, which she characterised as Devil’s dung. At the back of the yard was the wood pile, and logs were brought in with which to feed the oven fires. But wood was dear, and had Daniel fed his little iron stove in the garret with such costly food, his monthly bill would have reached a fabulous height. He paid seven marks a month for his room and counted every penny so as not to shorten the period of his liberty by any needless expenditure.

So he sat freezing over his books and scores until the first warmth of spring stole in through the windows. The books he borrowed from the library at the King’s Gate, and paid six pfennigs a volume. Achim von Arnim and Jean Paul were his guides in those days: the one adorned the world of the senses for him, the other that of the soul.

On the police department’s identification blank Daniel had called himself a musician. Frau Hadebusch brought the paper into her living room, which, like all the rooms of the house, seemed built for dwarfs and reeked of limewater and lye. It was at the day’s end, and in the room were assembled Herr Francke and Herr Benjamin Dorn, who lodged on the second floor, and Frau Hadebusch’s son, who was weak-minded and crouched grinning beside the stove.

Herr Francke was a town traveller for a cigar house, and was regarded as a good deal of a Don Juan by the female servants of the neighbourhood. Benjamin Dorn was a clerk in the Prudentia Life Insurance Company, belonged to a Methodist congregation, and was respected by all the respectable on account of his Christian walk and conversation.

These gentlemen examined the document thoroughly and with frowns. Herr Francke gave it as his opinion that a musician who never made music could scarcely be regarded as one.

“He’s probably pawned his bass violin or bugle or whatever he was taught,” he said contemptuously; “perhaps he can only beat a drum. Well, I can do that too if I have one.”

“Yes, you’ve got to have a drum to be a drummer,” Benjamin Dorn remarked. “The question, however, is whether such a calling is in harmony with the principles of Christian modesty.” He laid his finger on his nose, and added: “It is a question which, with all proper humility, all proper humility, you understand, I would answer in the negative.”

“He hasn’t any relatives and no acquaintances at all,” Frau Hadebusch wailed, and her voice sounded like the scraping of carrots on a grater; “and no employment and no prospects and no boots or clothes but what he’s got on. In all my life I haven’t had no such lodger.”

The blank fluttered to the floor, whence the weak-minded Hadebusch Jr. picked it up, rolled it in the shape of a bag, and applied that bag, trumpet-like, to his lips, a procedure which caused the document in question to be gradually soaked through and thus withdrawn from its official uses. Frau Hadebusch was too little concerned over the police regulations to take further thought of her duties as the keeper of a lodging house.

Herr Francke drew from his pocket a pack of greasy cards and began to shuffle them. Frau Hadebusch giggled and it sounded like a witch rustling in the fire. The Methodist conquered his pious scruples, and placed his pfennigs on the table; the town-traveller turned up his sleeves as though he were about to wring a hen’s neck.

Before very long there arose a dissonant controversy, since Herr Francke’s relations with the goddess of fortune were strained and violent. The old brush-maker poked his head in at the door and cursed; the weak-minded boy blew dreamily on his paper trumpet; and the company that had been so peacefully at one separated in violence and rage.

II

Daniel wandered up to the castle, along the walls, over the bridges and planks.

It was his youth that caused him so to love the night that he forgot all men and seemed to himself to be alone on earth. It was his youth that delivered him up to things with such passion that he was able to weave the ghostly flowers of melodies about all that is visible—melodies that were so delicate, so eloquent, and so winged that no pen could ever record them. They vanished and died whenever he sought to capture them.

But it was also his youth that fired his eyes with hatred when he saw the comfort of lit windows, and filled his heart with bitterness against the satisfied, the indifferent, the strangers, the eternal strangers who had no consciousness of him.

He was so small and so great: small in the eyes of the world, great in his own estimation. When the tones burst from him like sparks from an anvil, he was a god. When he stood in the dark court behind the City Theatre waiting for the final chorus of “Fidelio” to penetrate the wall and reach his grateful ears, he was an outcast. Fountains of music rustled all about him. He looked into the eyes of the children and there was melody; he gazed up at the stars and there was harmony. He finally came to the point where there was no limit. His day was a waste place, his brain a parched field in the rain, his thoughts were birds of passage, his dreams a super-life.

He lived on bread and fruit, treating himself only every third day to a warm meal in the inn at the sign of the White Tower. There he would sit and listen at times, unobserved, to the quite remarkable conversation of some young fellows. This awakened in him a longing for intercourse with congenial companions. But when the brethren of the Vale of Tears finally took him into their circle, he was like a Robinson Crusoe or a Selkirk who had been abducted from his island.

III

Benjamin Dorn was a compassionate individual. The desire to save a lost soul filled him with the courage to pay Daniel Nothafft a visit. He hobbled up the creaky steps with his club-foot, and knocked timidly at the door.

“Can I be of service to you, Sir, in a Christian way?” he asked, after he had blown his nose.

Daniel looked at him in amazement.

“You know, I could help you in an unselfish, Christian way, to get a position. There is a great deal of work to be done down at the Prudentia. If I were to recommend you to Herr Zittel it certainly would not be in vain. Herr Zittel is head of the clerical department. I also stand in with Herr Diruf, and he is general agent. I come in contact nearly every day with Inspector Jordan, and Herr Jordan is a man of exceptional culture. His daughter Gertrude attended my Sunday-school class. She has received and still enjoys divine favour. If you were to entrust your case to me, you would be entering upon a righteous, wholesome career. I am always looking out for some one. To tell the truth, and not wishing to appear immodest, I was born that way.”

The man looked like a patchwork of qualmishness, tribulation, and unctuous piety, and his coat collar was badly frayed.

“That’s all right,” replied Daniel; “don’t you see that I am getting along quite well?”

The pious life-insurance agent sighed and brushed a drop from the tip of his nose with the back of his hand. “My dear Sir,” said he, “take to heart the words of Solomon: Pride goeth before a fall, but the humble in spirit obtain honour.”

“Yes, I’ll take that to heart,” said Daniel drily, and bent still lower over the score on which he was working.

Benjamin Dorn sighed again, and limped out of the room. With his thumbs pointing straight to high heaven above, he said to Frau Hadebusch: “You know, Frau Hadebusch, I simply can’t help it. I must lighten my heart in a Christian way. What do you think?”

“Good heavens, what’s he doing? What’s he up to now?” sighed the old lady, as she shoved her broom under her arm.

“As true as I stand here, the table is all covered with papers, and the papers are all covered with some kind of mysterious signs.”

Alarmed at the very thought of having a lodger up in the attic who was practising black magic, Frau Hadebusch sent her husband down to the district policeman. This enlightened official declared that the brush-maker was a gossip. Vexed at this unanticipated description of himself, the brush-maker went straightway to the inn at the sign of the Horse and got drunk, so drunk that Benjamin Dorn had to take him home. It was a beautiful moonlit night.

IV

Not far from Hadebusch’s was a little café known as The Paradise. Everything in it was diminutive, the proprietor, the waitress, the tables, the chairs and the portions. There the brethren from the Vale of Tears assembled to drag the gods down into the dust and destroy the universe in general.

Daniel wended his way thither. He knew the liliputian room and the starved faces. He was personally acquainted with the painter who never painted, the writer who never wrote, the student who never studied, and the inventor who never invented anything. He knew all about the sculptor who squandered such talents as he may have had in tinkering with plaster casts, the actor who had been on a leave of absence for years, and the half dozen mendicant Philistines who came here day after day to have a good time in their own repelling fashion. He knew the young Baron von Auffenberg who had broken with his family for reasons that were clear to no one but himself. He knew Herr Carovius, who invariably played the rôle of the observer, and who sat there in a sort of mysterious fashion, smiling to himself a smile of languishing irony, and stroking his hand over his long hair, which was cut straight across at the back of his neck.

He knew, ah, he knew by heart, the grease spots on the walls that had been rubbed in by the heads of the habitués, the indelible splotches on the tables, the hartshorn buttons on the proprietor’s vest, and the smoke-coloured curtains draped about the tiny windows. The loud, boisterous talking, the daily repetition of the same hackneyed remarks, the anarchistic swashbuckling of the painter whom his comrades had dubbed Kropotkin—all of these were familiar stories to him. He knew the philosophic cynicism of the student who felt that he was the Socrates of the nineteenth century, and who looked back on twenty-five wasted semesters as on so many battles fought and won.

The most interesting personage was Herr Carovius. He was a well-read man. That he knew a great deal about music was plain from many of his chance remarks. He was a brother-in-law of Andreas Döderlein, though he seemed to take anything but pride in the relationship. If any one mentioned Döderlein’s name in his presence, he screwed up his face, and began to shuffle about uneasily on his chair. He was an unfathomable, impenetrable personality. Even if his years—he was forty-five—had not won for him a measure of esteem, the malicious and mordant scorn he heaped on his fellow-men would have done so. People said he had a good deal of money. If this was brought to his attention, he employed the most ghastly oaths in asserting his poverty. But since he had neither calling nor profession and spent his days in unqualified idleness, it was apparent that his assertions on this point were wholly unfounded, and this despite the virility of his unconventional language.

“Say, tell me, who is that lanky quack there?” asked Herr Carovius, pointing to Daniel and looking at Schwalbe the sculptor. He had known Daniel for a long while, but every now and then it gave him a peculiar kind of pleasure to play the rôle of the newcomer.

The sculptor looked at him indignantly.

“That is a man who still has faith in himself,” he remarked rather morosely. “He is a man who has bathed in the dragon blood of illusions, and has become as invulnerable as Young Siegfried. He is convinced that the people who sleep in the houses around this part of town dream of his future greatness, and have already placed an order with the green-grocer for his laurel wreath. He has not the faintest idea that the only thing that is sacred to them is their midday meal, that they are ready to drink their beer at the first stroke of the gong, and to yawn when the light appears on Mount Sinai. He is completely taken up with himself; he is sufficient unto himself; and he gathers honey. The bee will have its honey, and if it is unable to get it from the flowers, it buzzes about the dung heap. As is evidently the case here. _Prosit_ Nothafft,” he said in conclusion, and lifted his glass to Daniel.

Herr Carovius smiled in his usual languishing fashion. “Nothafft,” he bleated, “Nothafft, Nothafft, that is a fine name, but not exactly one that is predestined to a niche in Walhalla. It strikes me as being rather more appropriate for the sign of a tailor. Good Lord! The bones the young people gnaw at to-day were covered with meat in my time.”

And then, clasping his glasses a bit firmer onto his nose, he riveted his blinking, squinting eyes on the door. Eberhard von Auffenberg, elegant, slender, and disgruntled, entered to find life where others were throwing it away.

It was far into the night when the brethren went home. As they passed along through the streets they bellowed their nocturnal serenades at the windows of the otherwise peaceful houses.

As the hilarious laughter and vocal rowdyism reached Daniel’s ear, he detected from out of the hubbub a gentle voice in E-flat minor, accompanied by the inexorable eighth-notes sung with impressive vigour. Then the voice died away in a solemn E-flat major chord, and everything was as if sunk in the bottom of the sea.

V

Toward the end of the summer, Philippina, Jason Philip’s daughter, shot out the eye of her seven-year-old brother with a so-called bean-shooter.

The children were playing in the yard. Willibald, the older boy, wanted the shooter. Philippina, who had not the slightest sense of humour, snatched it from his hands, placed the stone on the elastic band and let it fly with all her might. Little Marcus ran in front of it. It was all over in a jiffy. A heart-rending scream caused the frightened mother to leave the shop and run out into the yard. She found the child lying on the ground convulsed with pain. While Theresa carried the boy into the house, Jason Philip ran for the doctor. But it was too late; the eye was lost.

Philippina hid. After considerable search her father found her under the cellar steps. He beat her so mercilessly that the neighbours had to come up and take him away.

Little Marcus was Theresa’s favourite child. She could not get over the accident. The obsession that had slumbered in her soul for years now became more persistent than ever: she began to brood over guilt in general and this case in particular.

At times she would get up in the night, light a candle, and walk about the house in her stocking feet. She would look behind the stove and under the table, and then crouch down with her ear against the maid’s door. She would examine the mouse-trap and if a mouse had been caught in it, she could not, try as she might, completely detach her own unrest from the mental disturbance of the little beast.