Part 106

On the third day he was seized with a quite unusual sense of fear and anxiety. He felt that he had made a mistake; that he had lost his way; that something was driving him to another place. He went into the kitchen. Philippina was cooking potato noodles in lard; they smelt good.

“I am going to Eschenbach,” he said, to his own astonishment, for the decision to do so had come with the assertion.

Philippina jerked the pan from the stove; the flames leaped up. “You can go to Hell, so far as I’m concerned,” she said in a furious rage. With the light from the fire flaring up through the open top of the stove and reflected in her face, she looked like a veritable witch.

Daniel gazed at her questioningly. “What is the matter with Agnes?” he asked after a while. “The child seems to try to avoid me.”

“You’ll find out what’s the matter with her,” said Philippina spitefully, and placed the pan on the stove again. “She don’t swallow people whole.”

Daniel left the kitchen.

“He is going over to see his bastard, the damned scoundrel,” murmured Philippina. She crouched down on the kitchen stool, and gazed into space.

The potato noodles burned up.

Daniel entered his mother’s little house in Eschenbach late at night. As soon as he saw her, he knew that some misfortune had taken place.

Eva was gone. She had disappeared one evening four weeks ago. A troupe of rope dancers had given an exhibition in the city, and it was generally suspected that they had abducted the child. The people of Eschenbach were still convinced of their suspicion after the police had rounded up the dancers without finding a trace of the child.

A general alarm had been sent out, and investigations were being made even at the time of Daniel’s arrival. But they were in vain; it was impossible to find the slightest clue. To the authorities, indeed to every one, the case was a hopeless riddle.

They made a thorough search of the forests; the canals were drained; vagabonds were cross-questioned. It was all in vain; Eva had apparently been spirited away in some mysterious fashion. Then the Mayor received an anonymous letter that read as follows: “The child you are looking for is in safe keeping. She was not forced to do what she has done; of her own free will and out of love for her art she went off with the people with whom she is at present. She sends her grandmother the tenderest of greetings, and hopes to see her some time again, after she has attained to what she now has in mind.”

To this Eva had added in a handwriting which Marian Nothafft could be reasonably certain was her own: “This is true. Good-bye, grandmother!”

The people who mourned with Marian the loss of the child were convinced that if Eva had really written these words herself, she had been forced to do it by the kidnappers.

The letter bore the postmark of a city in the Rhenish Palatinate. A telegram brought the reply that a company of jugglers had been there a short while ago, but that they had already gone. It was impossible to say in what direction, but it was most likely that they had gone to France.

Marian was completely broken up. She no longer had any interest in life. She did not even manifest joy or pleasure at seeing Daniel.

Daniel in turn felt that the brightest star had fallen from his heaven. As soon as he had really grasped the full meaning of the tragedy, he went quietly into the attic room, threw himself across the bed of his lost daughter, and wept. “Man, man, are you weeping at last?” a voice seemed to call out to him.

Of evenings he would sit with his mother, and they would both brood over the loss. Once Marian began to speak; she talked of Eva. She had always been made uneasy by the child’s love for mimicry and shows of any kind. Long ago, she said, when Eva was only eight years old, a company of comedians had come to the village, and Eva had taken a passionate interest in them. She would run around the tent in which they played, from early in the morning until late in the evening. She had made the acquaintance of some of them at the time, and one of them took her along to a performance. Whenever the circus came to town, it was impossible to keep her in the house. “At times I thought to myself, there must be gipsy blood in her veins,” said Marian sadly, “but she was such a good and obedient child.”

Another time she told the following story. One Sunday in spring she took a walk with Eva. It had grown late, night had come on, and on the return journey they had to go through the forest. Marian became tired, and sat down on the stump of a tree to rest. The moon was shining, and there was a clearing in the forest where they had stopped. All of a sudden Eva sprang up and began to dance. “It was marvellous the way she danced,” said Marian, at the close of her story. “The girl’s slender, delicate little figure seemed to glide around on the moss in the moonlight of its own accord. It was marvellous, but my heart grew heavy, and I thought to myself at the time, she is not going to be with me much longer.”

Daniel was silent. “Oh, enchanting and enchanted creature!” he thought, “heredity and destiny!”

He remained with his mother for three weeks. Then he began to feel cramped and uneasy. The house and the town both seemed so small to him. He left and went to Vienna, where the custodian of the Imperial Institute had some invaluable manuscripts for him.

Six weeks later he received a letter that had followed him all over south Europe informing him of the death of his mother. The school teacher at Eschenbach had written the letter, saying, among other things, that the aged woman had died during the night, suddenly and peacefully.

A second letter followed, requesting him to state what disposition should be made of his mother’s property. He was asked whether the house was to be put on the market. A neighbour, the green-grocer, had expressed his willingness to look after Daniel’s interests.

Daniel wrote in reply that they should do whatever seemed best. There was a heavy mortgage on the house, and the amount that could reasonably be asked for it was not large.

He retired to a desolate and waste place.

While living in little towns and villages on the Danube, Daniel completed the third movement of the Promethean symphony. When he awoke as if from a delirious fever, it was autumn.

One morning in October he heard a saint playing the organ. It was in the Church of St. Florian near Enns. The great artist had lived in former years in the monastery, and now had the habit of coming back once in a while to hold communion with his God. In his rapture, Daniel felt as if his own crowned brother were at the organ. He sat in a corner and listened, meekly and with overwhelming delight. Then when a man passed by him, a stooped, haggard, odd-looking old fellow with a wrinkled face and dressed in shabby clothes, he was terror-stricken at the reality, the corporeality of genius: he wondered whether he himself were not a ghost.

The Swallow wrote: “There is only one who can redeem us: the musician. The day of founders of religion, builders of states, military heroes, and discoverers is gone. The poets have only words, and our ears have grown tired of words, words, words. They have only pictures and figures, and our eyes are tired beholding. The soul’s last consolation is to be found in music; of this I am certain. If there is any one thing that can make restitution for the lost illusions of religious faith, provide us with wings, transform us, and save us from the abyss to which we are rushing with savage senses, it is music. Where are you, O redeemer? You are wandering about over the earth, the poorest, the most abandoned, the guiltiest of men. When are you going to pay your debts, Daniel Nothafft?”