Part 129

He heard a dog bark, a wagon rattle, a bell strike; he heard people talking, murmuring, crying; he heard the scraping of feet. But it all sounded to him like noises that were reaching his ears through the walls of a prison. He went on his way; his gait was unsteady.

As he reached the Church of Our Lady, Daniel turned to the right toward the Market Place, and saw the Goose Man standing before him.

“Go home,” the Goose Man seemed to say with a sad voice. “Go home!”

“Who are you? what do you wish of me?” A voice within him asked. But then it seemed that the figure had become invisible, and that it could not be seen again until it was far off in the distance, where it was being shone upon by a bright light.

People were running across Ægydius Place; some of them were crying “Fire!” Daniel turned the corner; he could see his house. Flames were leaping up behind his window. He pressed his hands to his temples, and, with eyes wide open and filled with terror, he forced his way through the crowd up to his house. “For God’s sake, for Heaven’s sake!” he cried, “save my trunk!”

Many looked at him. A figure appeared at the window; many arms were pointed at it. “The woman! Look, look, the woman!” came a cry from the crowd. And then again: “She has set the house on fire! She has swung the torch and started the fire!”

Daniel rushed into his house. Firemen overtook him. There he saw in the hall, lighted by the lanterns being carried back and forth so swiftly, and placed in the corner with no more care or consideration than was possible under such circumstances, the dead body of old Jordan. His body, and close beside it, as if in supernatural mockery of all things human, the doll, the Swiss maid with the machine in her stomach. Sighing and sobbing, he fell down; his forehead touched the dead hand of the old man.

As if in a dream he heard the hissing of the hoses, the commands, the hurried running back and forth of the firemen. Then he felt as if a shadow, a figure from the lower world, suddenly rose before him. A clenched fist, he thought, opened and hurled shreds of paper into his face. When he looked up he could see nothing but the firemen rushing around him. The shadow, the figure, had pushed its way in among them, and in the confusion no one had paid any attention to it.

With an absent-minded gesture, Daniel reached out and picked up the paper that was lying nearest him. It had fallen on the face of the doll. He unfolded it and saw, written in his own hand, the music to the “Harzreise im Winter.” Under the notes were the words:

But aside, who is it? His path in the bushes is lost, Behind him rustle The thickets together, The grass rises again, The desert conceals him.

The melody and rhythm that interpreted the words were of a grandiose gloominess, like a song of shades pursued in the night, across the sea. Daniel recalled the hour he had written this music; he recalled the expression on Gertrude’s face the time he played it for her. Eleanore was there, too, wearing a white dress, with a myrtle wreath in her hair. The tones dissolved the web of infinite time. “But aside, who is it?” came forth like a great, deep dirge. In the question there was something prophetically great. He covered his face and wept; he felt as if his heart would break.

The dead man and the doll were lying there, motionless, lifeless.

In half an hour the fire was under control. The two attic rooms had been burned out completely. Further than this no damage had been done.

Philippina had vanished without a trace. Since no one had seen her leave the house, the first theory was that she had been burned to death. But investigation proved this assumption to be incorrect. The police looked for her everywhere, but in vain; she was not to be found. A few people who had known her rather intimately insisted that she had been burned up so completely that there was nothing left of her but a little pile of black ashes.

However this may be, and whatever the truth may be, Philippina never again entered the house. No one ever again saw or heard a thing of her.

BUT ASIDE, WHO IS IT?

Late in the evening Benda came. He had been tolerably well informed of everything that had taken place. In the hall he met Agnes. Though generally quite monosyllabic, Agnes was now inclined to be extremely communicative, but she could merely confirm what he had already heard.

She went up to the top floor with him, and he stood there for a long while looking at the burnt rooms. There were two firemen on guard duty. “All of his music has been burnt up,” said Agnes. Benda thought he would hardly be able to talk with his old friend again after this tragedy. But he at once felt ashamed of his timidity, and went down to see him.

It was again quiet throughout the entire house.

Daniel had lighted a candle in the living room. Finding it too dark with only one candle, he lighted another.

He paced back and forth. The room seemed too small for him: he opened the door leading into Dorothea’s room, and walked back and forth through it too. On entering the dark room, his lips would move; he would murmur something. When he returned to the lighted room, he would stand for a second or two and stare at the candles.

His features seemed to show traces of human suffering such as no man had borne before; it could hardly have been greater. He did not seem to notice Benda when he came in.

“Everything gone? Everything destroyed?” asked Benda, after he had watched Daniel walk back and forth for nearly a quarter of an hour.

“One grave after the other,” murmured Daniel, in a voice that no longer seemed to be his own. He raised his head as if surprised at the sound of what he himself had said. He felt that a stranger had come into the room without letting himself be heard.

“And the last work, the great work of which you told me, the fruit of so many years, has it also been destroyed?” asked Benda.

“Everything,” replied Daniel distractedly, “everything I have created in the way of music from the time I first had reason to believe in myself. The sonatas, the songs, the quartette, the psalm, the ‘Harzreise,’ ‘Wanderers Sturmlied,’ and the symphony, everything down to the last page and the last note.”

Yes, there was a stranger there; you could hear him laughing quietly to himself. “Why do you laugh?” asked Daniel sternly, and adjusted his glasses.

Benda, terrified, said: “I did not laugh.”