Part 30

Daniel was severely criticised for his discourteous treatment of the people from the City Theatre, every one of whom had come to the funeral. When several of them shook hands with him, he merely nodded, and blinked his eyes behind the round glasses which he had been wearing for some time.

Judge Kleinlein said: “He should be very grateful for the Christian burial, for despite the evidence that was turned in, it was not satisfactorily proved that the woman was in her right mind.”

Eleanore looked into the open grave. She thought: “Guilt is being heaped upon guilt, deep, serious guilt.”

All this was over now. Daniel and Eleanore and Jordan had come back to the house.

II

They felt lonely and deserted. Jordan shut himself up in his room. It was rare now that he took his accustomed evening walks; his coat-sleeves and the ends of his trouser legs had become more and more frayed. He pined away; his hair became snow white, his walk unsteady, his eye dim. But he was never ill, and he never complained of his fate. He never said anything at the table; he was a quiet man.

Eleanore moved back up with her father, and Daniel took his old room next to the dining room. There was all of a sudden so much space; he was surprised that the going of a single person could make such a vast difference.

Eleanore spent the whole day with little Agnes until Philippina came and relieved her. She also did her work close to Agnes.

When she had finished her writing, she had to look after the house. She could not cook, and had no desire to learn how, so she had a woman come in three times a week who prepared the midday meals. Twice a week she would prepare meals for two days, and once a week she would get them ready for three days. She was a modest woman who worked for very little money. The food she cooked merely needed to be heated over, and in the evening they always had sausage and sandwiches anyhow.

It was a practical arrangement, but no one praised Eleanore for it.

At first she spent her nights in Gertrude’s room with the child; she could not stand this, however, longer than three weeks. Either she could not sleep, or she had such terrible dreams.

Then she took to carrying the child up to her room with her and making a little bed for it on the sofa. But the child did not sleep so well there; Eleanore noticed that, as a result of all the excitement and hard work, she was losing strength.

Often in the night when she would take the child to quiet it—and become so tired and uneasy—she would make up her mind to have a talk with Daniel. But the next morning she would find it impossible to bring up the subject. She felt that the voice of Gertrude was admonishing her from beyond the grave and telling her to be patient.

She felt, too, that the time was drawing near when she would succumb to over-exertion; it made her anxious. Just then Philippina came in to help.

III

When Jason Philip heard that Philippina was going to Jordan’s daughters every day, he told her most emphatically and repeatedly that she had to quit it. Philippina paid not the slightest attention to him and did as she pleased.

“I’ll kill you,” cried Jason Philip at the girl.

Philippina shrugged her shoulders and laughed impudently.

Jason Philip saw that a grown person was standing before him; he was afraid of the evil look of his daughter.

It was long before he could make out what was taking her to his enemies. Then he learned that wherever she chanced to be, at home, or with acquaintances, or with strangers, she was spreading evil reports concerning Daniel and his family. This tended to make him a bit more indulgent: he too wanted to feast his ears on scandal from that quarter. At times he would enter into a conversation with Philippina, and when she told him the latest news he was filled with fiendish delight. “The day will come when I will get back at that music-maker, you see if I don’t,” he said.

Theresa was still confined to her bed. During his leisure hours Willibald had to read to her, either from the newspapers or from trashy novels. When she was alone she lay perfectly quiet and stared at the ceiling.

The time finally came when Willibald left school. He went to Fürth, where he was employed as an apprentice by a manufacturer. There was no doubt in any one’s mind but that he would become one of those loyal, temperate, industrious people who are the pride of their parents, and who climb the social ladder at the rate of an annual increase in salary of thirty marks.

The one-eyed Markus entered the paternal bookshop, where he soon familiarised himself with the novels of the world from Dumas and Luise Mühlbach to Ohnet and Zola, and with the popular sciences from Darwin to Mantegazza. His brain was a book catalogue, and his mouth an oracle of the tastes displayed at the last fair. But in reality he not only did not like the books, he regarded all this printed matter as a jolly fine deception practised on people who did not know what to do with their money. Zwanziger, the clerk, had married the widow of a cheese merchant, and was running a shop of his own on the Regensburg Chaussee.

“A rotten business,” said Jason Philip at the end of each month. “The trouble with me,” he invariably added, “is that I have been too much of an idealist. If I had worked as hard for myself as I have for other people, I would be a rich man to-day.”

He went to the café and discussed politics. He had developed into a perpetual grumbler; he was pleased with nothing, neither the government nor the opposition. To hear him talk you would have thought that the opposing parties had been forced to narrow their platforms down to the differences between the views of Prince Bismarck and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. When Kaiser Wilhelm I died, Jason Philip acted as though his appointment to the chancellorship was imminent. And when in that same memorable year Kaiser Friedrich succumbed to his sufferings, Jason Philip resembled the pilot on whose isolated fearlessness the rescue of the storm-tossed ship of state depends.

The born hero always finds a sphere of activity, a forum from which to express his views. If public life has rejected him, he goes to the café, where he is sure to find a congenial element.

One day Theresa got up from the bed where she had spent fifteen unbroken months, and seemed all of a sudden completely recovered. The physician said it was the strangest case that had ever come under his observation. But Jason Philip said: “It is the triumph of a good constitution.” With that he went to the café, drank beer, made fiery political speeches, and played skat.

But Theresa left her bed not as a woman forty-six years old—that was her age—but as a woman of seventy. She had only a few sparsely distributed grey hairs left on her square head, her face was full of wrinkles, her eye was hard and cold. From that time on, however, she did not seem to age. She did not quarrel any more, attended to her affairs in a straightforward, self-assured way, and observed her increasing impoverishment with unexpected calm.

She lived on herring, potatoes, and coffee; it was the same diet on which Philippina and Markus lived, with the one exception that Markus, as the child nearest her heart, was allowed a piece of sugar for his coffee. Jason Philip was also put on a diet: he never dared open his mouth about it, either.

Philippina stood it for a while in silence; finally she said to her mother: “I can’t stand this chicory brew forever.”

“Then you’ll have to lap up water, you will,” replied Theresa.

“No, I won’t,” said Philippina. “I am going to hire out.”

“Well, hire out. Who cares? It’ll be one mouth less to feed.” “Your daughter is going to hire out,” said Theresa to her husband, when he came home that evening.

Jason Philip had been playing cards that day, and had lost. He was in a terrible humour: “She can go plumb to the Devil so far as I am concerned.” That was his comment.

The next morning Philippina sneaked up to the attic, and drew out her cash from the hole in the chimney: it amounted to nine hundred and forty marks, mostly in gold, which she had exchanged in the course of years for small coins. Through the opening in the wall the June sun fell upon her face, which, never young and bearing the stamp of extended crime, looked like that of a witch.

She put the money in a woollen stocking, rolled it up in a knot, stuffed it down her corset between her breasts, made the sign of the cross, and repeated one of her drivelling formulas. Her clothes, ribbons, and other possessions she had already packed in a basket. This she carried down the stairs, and, without saying good-bye to a soul, left the house.

Her brother Markus was standing with sprawled legs in the sun before the store, whistling. He caught sight of her with his one eye, smiled contemptuously at her, and cried: “Happy journey!”

Philippina turned to him, and said: “You branded lout! You’re going to have a lousy time of it, mark what I tell you!”

In this frame of mind and body she came to Daniel, and said to him: “I want to work for you. You don’t need to pay nothing if you ain’t got it.”

Daniel had been noticing for some time that Eleanore could not stand the exertion required of her by the extra work.

“Will you mind the baby and sleep with it?” Daniel asked. Philippina nodded and looked down.

“If you will take care of the child and act right toward it and me, I shall be awfully grateful to you,” he said, breathing more easily.

Thereupon Philippina threw her hands to her face, and shuddered from head to foot. She was not exactly crying; there was something much worse, much more despairing, in what she was doing than in mere crying. She seemed to be convulsed by some demoniac power; a ghastly dream seemed to have seized her in a moment of higher consciousness. She turned around and trotted into the room where the child was playing with a wooden horse.

She sat down on a foot-stool, and stared at the restless little creature.

Daniel stopped, stood perfectly still, and looked at her in a mood of solicitous reflection.

IV

During a rehearsal of “Traviata,” Daniel flew into a rage at Fräulein Varini: “Listen, pay attention to your intonation, and keep in time. It’s enough to make a man lose his mind! What are you squeaking up at the gallery for? You’re supposed to be singing a song, and not whining for a little bit of cheap applause.”

The lady stepped out to the foot-lights with heaving bosom. Her offended dignity created something like the spread tail of a peacock about her hips: “How dare you?” she exclaimed: “I give you your choice: You can apologise or leave this place. Whatever you do, you are going to become acquainted with the power I have.”

Daniel folded his arms, let his eyes roam over the members of the orchestra, and said: “Good-bye, gentlemen. Since it is the director’s place to choose between me and this lady, there is no doubt whatever but that my term of usefulness in this position is up. And moreover, in an institution where meat is more valuable than music, I feel that I am quite superfluous.”

The other singers had come running out from the wings, and were standing crowded together on the stage looking down at the orchestra. When Daniel laid down his baton and walked away, every member of the orchestra rose as one man to his feet. It was a voluntary and almost overwhelming expression of speechless admiration. Though they had never loved this man, though they had regarded him as an evil, alien kill-joy, who interfered with their easy-going habits as musicians in that town, they nevertheless respected his energy, admired the nobility of his intentions, and at least had a vague idea of his genius.

Fräulein Varini went into hysterics. The director was called in. He promised Fräulein Varini immediate redress, and wrote a letter to Daniel requesting that he offer an apology.

Daniel replied in a brief note that he had no thought of changing his plans as announced when he left the building. He remarked that it was quite impossible for him to get along with Fräulein Varini, that either he or she would have to quit, and that since she intended to remain he must consider his resignation as submitted and accepted.

That evening, as he was sitting at the table with Eleanore, he told her, after a long silence and in very few words, what had happened. Her response to him was a look of astonishment; that was all.

“Oh, it was the only thing I could do,” said Daniel, without looking up from his plate; “I was so heartily sick of the whole business.”

“What are you going to live on, you and your child?” asked Eleanore.

His eye became even darker and harsher: “You know, God who makes the lilies grow in the fields ... I can’t quote that old proverb exactly, my familiarity with the Bible is nothing to boast of.”

That was all they said. The window was open; there was a mysterious pulsing in the earth; the warm air had a disagreeable taste, somewhat like that of sweet oil.

When the clock in the tower struck ten, Eleanore got up and said good-night.

“Good-night!” replied Daniel, with bowed head.

V

That is the way it was now every evening between the two; for during the day they scarcely saw each other.

Daniel would sit perfectly still for hours at a time and brood.

He could not forget. He could not forget the burning, smoking border of the dress; nor the shoes that had some street mud on them; nor the face with the pinched upper lip, the dishevelled hair, the nervously knitted brow.

Under the linen in the clothes press he had found the silver buckle he had given her. “Why did she hide it there?” he asked himself. The condition of her soul when she opened the press and put the buckle in it became vivid, real; it became blended with his own soul, a part of his own being.

Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room; and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a face without flesh.

“Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?” This was the question that came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: “I will be your mother made young again.” And that other one, too: “I, too, am a living creature.”

He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.

She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each passing hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable mystery.

It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in the realisation of accumulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form over this earth.

It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel. And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician. Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows; it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for yesterday and storms to-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love; he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things, understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.

Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress, the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present by the brightness of visions.

He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed, or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning, always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he remembered—it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the myrtle wreath on her head—gave the impulse to the stirring _presto_ in the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he sketched on awakening from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.

But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping melody of the twenty-second Psalm arose in his mind, he trembled from head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was in the dead of night. The recurring bass figure of the _presto_ sounded to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal words: “Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!” And he did hold his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked its way through the ice-locked region into which a passionate spell that was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.

He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.

He came on this account to cherish a feeling of superb disgust for shrewd dealers who were carried along on the wings of fashion. He took a dislike to anything that was famous; for fame smelled of and tasted to him like money. He shuddered at the mere thought of the chaos that arises from opinions and judgments; the disputes as to the merits of different schools and tendencies made him ill; he could not stand the perambulating virtuosos of all zones and nations, the feathers they manage to make fly, the noise they evoke, the truths they proclaim, the lies they wade about in and make a splash. He stood aghast at the mention of a concert hall or a theatre; he flew into a reasoned rage when he heard a neighbour playing a piano; he despised the false devotion of the masses, and scorned their impotent, imbecile transports.

All their music smelled of and tasted to him like money.

He had bought the biographies of the great masters. From them he familiarised himself with their distress and poverty; he read of the petty attitudes and fatuous mediocrity that stood deaf and dumb in the presence of immortal genius. But one day he chanced to read that Mozart’s body had been buried in a pauper’s grave. He hurled the book from him with an oath that he would never again touch a work of that sort. The mordant smoke of misanthropy blew into the fire of idolisation; he did not wish to see any one; he left the city, and found peace only after he had reached a lonely, unfrequented place in the forest, where he felt he was out of the reach of human feet and safe from the eyes of men.

At night he would walk rapidly through the streets; his head was always bowed. If he became tired, he betook himself to some unknown café where he was sure he would not meet any of his acquaintances. If some one whom he knew met him on the street, he did not speak; if any one spoke to him, he was blatant and bizarre in his replies, and hastened off as rapidly as he could, with some caustic bit of intended wit on his loosened tongue.