Part 39

Several months passed by. Bismarck, then staying at his country place in Sachsenwald and quarrelling with his lot, decided to visit Munich. There was tremendous excitement in Nuremberg when it was learned that he would pass through the city at such and such an hour.

Everybody wanted to see him, young and old, aristocrats and humble folk. Early in the morning the whole city seemed to be on its feet, making its way in dense crowds out through the King’s Gate.

This was a drama in which Jason Philip had to play his part: without him it would be incomplete. “To look into the eyes of a tiger whose claws have been chopped off and whose teeth have been knocked out is a pleasure and a satisfaction that my mother’s son dare not forego,” said he.

His elbows stood him in good stead. When the train pulled into the station, our rebel was standing in the front row, having pushed his way through the seemingly impenetrable mass of humanity.

The train stopped for a few minutes. The Iron Chancellor left his carriage amid deafening hurrahs from the assembled multitude. He shook hands with the Mayor and a few high-ranking army officers.

Jason Philip never budged. It never occurred to him to shout his own hurrah. An acidulous smile played around his mouth, his white beard quivered when he dropped the corners of his lips in satanic glee. It never occurred to him to take off his hat, despite the threatening protests all too audible round about him. “I am consistent, my dear Bismarck, I am incorruptible,” he thought to himself.

And yet—the satisfaction which we have described as satanic seemed somehow or other to be ill founded: it was in such marked contrast to the general enthusiasm. What had possessed this imbecile pack? Why was it raging? It saw the enemy, the hangman, right there before it, immune to the law, dressed in civilian clothes, and yet it was acting as though the Messiah had come to town on an extra train!

Jason Philip had the feeling that Bismarck was looking straight at him. He fancied that the fearfully tall man with the unusually small head and the enormously blue eyes had taken offence at his silence. He feared some one had told him all about his political beliefs.

The scornful smile died away. Jason Philip detected a lukewarm impotency creeping over his body. The sweat of solicitude trickled down across his forehead. Involuntarily he kneed his way closer to the edge of the platform, threw out his chest, jerked his hat from his head, opened his mouth, and cried: “Hurrah!”

He cried hurrah. The Prince turned his face from him, and looked in another direction.

But Jason Philip had cried hurrah.

He sneaked home shaking with shame. He drew his slippers, “For the tired Man—Consolation,” on his feet. They had become quite worn in the course of his tempestuous life. He lay down on the sofa with his face to the wall, his back to the window and against the world.

V

Daniel had been in Berlin for weeks. He had been living a lonely life on the east side of the gigantic city. One of the managers of Philander and Sons came to see him. He returned the call, and in the course of two hours he was surrounded, contrary to his own will, by a veritable swarm of composers, directors, virtuosos, and musical critics.

Some had heard of him; to them he appeared to be a remarkable man. They threw out their nets to catch him, but he slipped through the meshes. Unprepared, however, as he was for their schemes, he could not help being caught in time. He had to give an account of himself, to unveil himself. He found himself under obligations, interested, and so forth, but in the end they could not prevail against him: he simply passed through them.

They laughed at his dialect and his rudeness. What drew them to him was his self-respect; what annoyed them was his secretiveness; what they found odd about him was the fact that, try as they might to associate with him, he would disappear entirely from them for months at a time.

A divorced young woman, a Jewess by the name of Regina Sussmann, fell in love with him. She recognised in Daniel an elemental nature. The more he avoided her the more persistent she became. At times it made him feel good to come once again into intimate association with a woman, to hear her bright voice, her step more delicate, her breathing more ardent than that of men. But he could not trust Regina Sussmann; she seemed to know too much. There was nothing of the plant-like about her, and without that characteristic any woman appealed to him as being unformed and uncultured.

One winter day she came to see him in his barren hall room in Greifswald Street. She sat down at the piano and began to improvise. At first it was all like a haze to him. Suddenly he was struck by her playing. What he heard made a half disagreeable, half painful impression on him. He seemed to be familiar with the piece. She was playing motifs from his quartette, his “Eleanore Quartette” as he had called it. It came out that Regina Sussmann had been present at the concert given in Leipzig three years ago when the quartette was performed.

After a painful pause Regina began to ask some questions that cut him to the very heart. She wanted to know what relation, if any, the composition bore to actual life. She was trying to lift the veil from his unknown fate. He thrust her from him. Then he felt sorry for her: he began to speak, with some hesitation, of his symphony. There was something bewitching, enchanting in the woman’s passionate silence and sympathy. He lost himself, forgot himself, disclosed his heart. He built up the work in words before her, pictured the seven movements like seven stairs in the tower of a temple, a glorious promenade in the upper spheres, a tragic storm with tragically cheerful pauses of memory and meditation, all accompanied by laughing genii that adorned and crowned the pillars of the structure of his dreams.

He went to the piano, began playing the melancholy leading motif and the two subsidiary themes, counterpointed them, ran into lofty crescendos, introduced variations, modulated and sang at the same time. The pupils of his eyes became distended until they shone behind his glasses like seas of green fire. Regina Sussmann fell on her knees by the piano. It may be that she was so affected by his playing that she could not act otherwise; and it may be that she wished thereby to give him visible proof of her respect and adoration. All of a sudden the woman became repulsive to him. The unleashed longing of her eyes filled him with disgust. Her kneeling position appealed to him as a gesture of mockery and ridicule: a memory had been desecrated. He sprang to his feet and rushed out of the room, leaving her behind and quite alone. He never said a word; he merely bit his lips in anger and left. When he came back home late that night, he was afraid he might meet her again; but she was not there. Only a letter lay on the table by the lamp.

She wrote that she had understood him; that she understood he had been living in the past as if in an impregnable fortress, surrounded by shadows that were not to be dispelled or disturbed by the presumption of any living human being. She remarked that she had neither intention nor desire to encroach upon his peace of mind, that she was merely concerned for his future, and was wondering how he would fight down his hunger of body and soul.

“Shameless wretch,” cried Daniel, “a spy and a woman!”

She remarked, with almost perverse humility, that she had recognised his greatness, that he was the genius she had been waiting for, and that her one desire was to serve him. That is, she wished to serve him at a distance, seeing that he could not endure her presence. She implored him to grant her this poor privilege, not merely for his own sake, but for the sake of humanity as well.

Daniel threw the letter in the stove. In the night he woke up with a burning desire for delicate contact with an untouched woman. He dreamed of a smile on the face of a seventeen-year-old girl innocently playing around him—and shuddered at himself and the thought of himself.

Shortly after this he went to Dresden, where he had some work to do in the Royal library.

People came to him anxious to place themselves at his service. Many signs told him that Regina Sussmann was making fervent propaganda for him.

One day he received a letter from a musical society in Magdeburg, asking him to give a concert there. He hesitated for a long while, and then agreed to accede to their wish. Outwardly it could not be called an unusually successful evening, but his auditors felt his power. People with the thinnest smattering of music forgot themselves and became infatuated with his arms and his eyes. An uncertain, undetermined happiness which he brought to the hearts of real musicians carried him further along on his career. For two successive winters he directed concerts in the provincial towns of North Germany. He was the first to accustom the people to strictly classical programmes. It is rare that the first in any enterprise of this kind reaps the gratitude of those who pay to hear him. Had he not desisted with such Puritanical severity from feeding the people on popular songs, opera selections, and favourite melodies, his activity would have been much better rewarded. As it was, his name was mentioned with respect, but he passed through the streets unacclaimed.

Regina Sussmann was always on hand when he gave a concert. He knew it, even if he did not see her. At times he caught sight of her sitting in the front row. She never approached him. Articles redolent with adulation appeared in the papers about him: it was manifest that she had been influential in having them written. Once he met her on the steps of a hotel. She stopped and cast her eyes to the ground; she was pale. He passed by her. Again he was filled with longing to come into intimate contact with an untouched woman. Was his heart already hungry, as she had predicted? He bit his lips, and worked throughout the whole night. He felt that he was being fearfully endangered by the prosy insipidity of the age and the world he was living in. But could he not escape the terrors of such without having recourse to a woman? The shadows receded, enveloped in sorrow, Gertrude and Eleanore, wrapped in the embrace of sisters.

“Don’t!” they cried. He saw at once that his provincial concerts were leading him to false goals, enflaming false ambitions, robbing him of his strength. He no longer found it possible to endure the sight of brilliantly lighted halls, and the over-dressed people who came empty and left untransformed. It all seemed to him like a lie. He desisted; he threw it all overboard just as the temptation was strongest, just as the Berlin Philharmonic invited him to give a concert of his own works in its hall.

He had suddenly disappeared. In less than three months his name had become a saga.

VI

He spent the summer, autumn, and winter of 1893 wandering around. Now he was in a remote Thuringian village, now in some town in the Rhön region, now in the mountains of Saxony, now in a fishing village on the Baltic. Throughout the day he worked on his manuscripts, in the evening he composed. No one except the members of the firm of Philander and Sons knew where he was. He did not dare hide himself from the people who were sending him the cheque at the end of the month.

He gradually became so unaccustomed to talking that it was only with difficulty that he could ask a hotel-keeper about the price of his room. This unrelieved silence chiselled his lips into ghastly sharpness.

He never heard from his mother or his children. He seemed to have forgotten that there were human beings living who thought of him with affection and anxiety.

The only messages he received from the world were letters that were forwarded to him at intervals of from four to five weeks by the musical firm in Mayence. These letters were written by Regina Sussmann, though they were not signed in her name: the signature at the close of each one was “The Swallow.” She addressed Daniel by the familiar _Du_, and not by the more conventional and polite _Sie_.

She told him of her life, wrote of the books she had read, the people she had met, and gave him her views on music. Her communications became in time indispensable to him; he was touched by her fidelity; he was pleased that she did not use her own name. She had a remarkable finesse and power of expression, and however ungenuine and artificial she may have appealed to him in personal association, everything she wrote seemed to him to be natural and convincing. She never expressed a wish that he do something impossible and never uttered a complaint. On the other hand, there was a passion of the intelligence about her that was quite new to him; she was unlike the women he had known. And there was a fervour and certainty in her appreciation of his being before which he bowed as at the sound of a higher voice.

Though he never answered her letters, he looked forward to receiving them, and became impatient if one were overdue. He often thought of the swallow when he would step to the window on a dark night. He thought of her as an all-seeing spirit that hovered in the air. The swallow—that was fraught with meaning—the restless, delicate, swift-flying swallow. And in his mind’s eye he saw the swallow that hovered over Ægydius Place when Eberhard came to take him up to the room with the withered flowers.

He wrote to Philippina: “Decorate my graves. Buy two wreaths, and lay them on the graves.”

“You must mount to the clouds, Daniel, otherwise you are lost,” was one passage in one of the letters from the Swallow. Another, much longer, ran: “As soon as you feel one loneliness creeping over you, you must hasten into another, an unknown one. If your path seems blocked, you must storm the hedges before you. If an arm surrounds you, you must tear yourself loose, even though it cost blood and tears. You must leave men behind and move above them; you dare not become a citizen; you dare not allow yourself to be taken up with things that are dear to you; you must have no companion, neither man nor maid. Time must hover over you cold and quiet. Let your heart be encased in bronze, for music is a flame that breaks through and consumes all there is in the man who created it, except the stuff the gods have forged about their chosen son.”

Why should the picture of this red-haired Jewess, from whom Daniel had fled in terror, not have vanished? There was a Muse such as poets dream of! “Jewess, wonderful Jewess,” thought Daniel, and this word—Jewess—took on for him a meaning, a power, and a prophetic flight all its own.

“The work, Daniel Nothafft, the work,” wrote this second Rahel in another letter, “the rape of Prometheus, when are you going to lay it at the feet of impoverished humanity? The age is like wine that tastes of the earth; your work must be the filter. The age is like an epileptic body convulsed with agonies; your work must be the healing hand that one lays on the diseased brow. When will you finally give, O parsimonious mortal? when ripen, tree? when flood the valley, stream?”

But the tree was in no hurry to cast off the ripened fruit; the stream found that the way to the sea was long and tortuous; it had to break through mountains and wash away the rocks. Oh, those nights of torment when an existing form crashed and fell to the earth in pieces! Oh, those hundreds of laborious nights in which there was no sleep, nothing but the excited raging of many voices! Those grey mornings on which the sun shone on tattered leaves and a distorted face, a face full of suffering that was always old and yet new! And those moonlight nights, when some one moved along singing, not as one sings with joy, but as the heretics who sat on the martyr benches of the Inquisition! Then there were the rainy nights, the stormy nights, the nights when it snowed, and when he chased after the phantom of a melody that was already half his own, and half an incorporeal thing wandering around in boundless space under the stars.

Each landscape became a pale vision: bush and grass and flower, like spun yarn seen in a fever, the people who passed by, and the clouds fibrillated above the forests were of one and the same constituency. Nothing was tangible; the palate lost its sense of taste, the finger its sense of touch. Bad weather was welcome; it subdued the noises, made men quieter. Cursed be the mill that clappers, the carpenter who drives the nails, the teamster who calls to his jaded pair, the laughter of children, the croaking of frogs, the twittering of birds! An insensate man looks down upon the scene, one who is deaf and dumb, one who would snatch all clothing and decorations from the world, to the end that neither colour nor splendour of any description may divert his eye, one who mounts to heaven at night to steal the eternal fire, and who burrows in the graves of the dead by day—an outcast.

In the beginning of spring, he started on the third movement, an andante with variations. It expressed the gruesome peace that hovered over Eleanore’s slumbering face one night before her death. The springs within him were all suddenly dried up; he could not tell why his hand was paralysed, his fancy immobile.

One evening he returned from a long journey to Arnstein, a little place in Lower Franconia, where he had then pitched his tent. He was living in the house of a seamstress, a poor widow, and as he came into the room he noticed her ten-year-old daughter standing by the open box in which he had kept the mask of Zingarella. Out of a perfectly harmless curiosity the child had removed the lid, and was standing bewitched at the unexpected sight.

When Daniel’s eyes fell on her, she was frightened; her body shook with fear; she tried to run away. “No, no, stay!” cried Daniel. He felt the emaciated body, the timidly quivering figure, and a distant memory sunk its claws deep into his breast. The mouth of the mask seemed to speak; the cheeks and forehead shone with a brilliant whiteness. And as he turned his eyes away there was a little elf dancing over him; and this little elf aroused a guilty unrest in his heart.

VII

Philippina would not permit little Agnes to play with other children.

One day the child went out on to the square, and stood and watched some other children playing a game known as “Tailor, lend me the scissors.” She was much pleased at the sight of them, as they ran from tree to tree and laughed. She would have been only too happy to join them, but no one thought of asking the pale, shy little creature to take part. Philippina, seeing her, rushed out like a fury, and cried in her very meanest voice: “You come back here in the house, or I’ll maul you until your teeth will rattle in your mouth for three days to come!”

Philippina also disliked to have Jordan pay any attention to Agnes. If he did not notice that he was making her angry by talking with the child, she would begin to sing, first gently, and then more and more loudly. If this did not drive the old man away, she would unload some terrific abuse on him, and keep at it until he would get up, sigh, and leave. He did not dare antagonise her, for if he did, she would penalise him by giving him poor food and reduced portions. And he suffered greatly from hunger. He was making only a few pennies a week, and had to save every bit of it, if possible, so as to defray the expenses he was incurring while working on his invention.

He had unbounded faith in his invention; his credulity became stronger and stronger as the months rolled by. He could not be discouraged by seeming failure. He was convinced, on the contrary, that each failure merely brought him so much nearer the desired goal.

He said to Philippina: “Why is it that you object to my playing once in a while with my little grand-daughter? It gives me so much pleasure; it diverts me; it takes my mind off of my troubles.”

“Crazy nonsense,” replied Philippina. “Agnes has had trouble enough with her father. Her grandfather? whew! That beats me!”

Another time the old man said: “Suppose we make an agreement: let me have the child a half-hour each day, and in return for that I’ll run your errands down town.”

Philippina: “I’ll run my own errands. Agnes belongs to me. That settles it.”

And yet Philippina was in an especially good humour about this time. Benjamin Dorn, like Herr Zittel, had left the Prudentia, and obtained a position with the Excelsior. He was taking unusual interest in Philippina. In a dark hour, Philippina had told her friend, Frau Hadebusch, that she had saved a good deal of money, and, equipped with this bit of earthly wisdom, Frau Hadebusch had gone to the Methodist, told him all about it, and put very serious matrimonial ideas in his head.

Benjamin Dorn took infinite pains to gain Philippina’s good graces. He was, to be sure, somewhat dismayed at having her blasphemous system of theology dinned into his ears. He shook his head wearily when she called him a sky-pilot and declared right out that all this sanctimonious stuff was damned rot, and that the main thing was to have a fat wallet. In this philosophy Frau Hadebusch was with her to the last exclamation point. She had told Benjamin Dorn that a doughtier, bonnier, more capable person than Fräulein Schimmelweis was not to be found on this earth, and that the two were as much made for each other as oil and vinegar for a salad. She said: “You simply ought to see the dresses the girl has and how she can fix herself up when she wants to go out. Moreover, she comes of a good family. In short, any man who could get her would be a subject for real congratulations.”