Part 104

“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.”

To Philippina Frau Hadebusch said: “Dorn—he can write as no one else on this earth. Oh, you ought to see him swing a pen! He limps a little, but what of it? Just think how many people go around on two sound legs, but have their heads all full of rubbish! But Dorn! He’s whole cloth and a yard wide! He’s as soft as prune juice. Why, when a dog barks at him, he gives the beast a lump of sugar. That’s the kind of a man he is.”

In October Benjamin Dorn and Philippina went to the church fair, and naturally took Agnes along. Benjamin Dorn knew what was expected of him. He had Philippina take two rides on the merry-go-round, paid her way into the cabinet of wax figures, and took a chance on the lottery. It was a blank. He then explained to Philippina that it was immoral to have anything to do with lotteries, and bought her a bag of ginger snaps; and that was solid pleasure.

Philippina acted very nicely. She laughed when nothing amusing had taken place, rolled her eyes, spoke with puckered lips, shook her hips when she walked, and never lost a chance to show her learning. As they were coming home on the train, she said she felt she would like to ride in a chaise, but there would have to be two horses and a coachman with a tile hat. Benjamin Dorn replied that that was not an impossible wish, suggesting at the same time in his best brand of juvenile roguishness that there was a certain solemn ceremony that he would not think of celebrating without having a vehicle such as she had described. Philippina giggled, and said: “Oi, oi, you’re all right.” Whereupon Benjamin Dorn, grinning with embarrassment, looked down.

Then they took leave of each other, for Agnes had fallen asleep in Philippina’s arms.

How Philippina actually felt about the attention he was showing her would be extremely difficult to tell, though she acted as if she felt honoured and flattered. Benjamin Dorn was by no means certain of himself. Frau Hadebusch did all she could to bring Philippina around, but every time she made a fresh onslaught Philippina put her off.

But Philippina had never sung as she had been singing recently, nor had she ever been so light and nimble of foot. Every day she put on her Sunday dress and trimmed it with her choicest ribbons. She washed her hands with almond soap, and combed her hair before the mirror. Bangs had gone out of fashion, so she built her hair up into a tower and looked like a Chinese.

She visited Herr Carovius occasionally, and always found him alone, for Dorothea Döderlein had been sent by her father to Munich to perfect herself in her art. In broken words, with blinking eyes, from a grinning mouth and out of a dumb soul, she told Herr Carovius all about her affair with Benjamin Dorn, evidently believing that he was all fire and flame to know how she was getting along and what she had in petto. Herr Carovius had long since grown sick and tired of her, though he did not show her the door. He had reached the point where he heaved a sigh of relief when he heard a human voice, where he began to dread the stillness that ruled supreme within his four walls. No one came to see him, no one spoke to him, and he in turn no longer had the courage to speak to any one. His arrogance of former days had died a difficult death, and now he saw no way of making friends. If he went to the café, there was no one there whom he knew. The brethren of the Vale of Tears had been scattered to the four corners of the earth; a new generation was having its fling; new customs were being introduced, new topics discussed, and he was old.

He found it hard to get along without Dorothea. He counted the days, waiting for her to return. He never opened the piano, because all music, and especially the music he loved, caused a melancholy depression to arise that filled the room with miasma.

The Nero of our day was suffering from Cæsar sadness. The private citizen had sunk to the very bottom of the ditch which he himself had dug with the idea of burying all that was new and joyful, and all winged creatures in it.