Part 46

He made this discovery one day as Eberhard was packing his trunk. “Where are you going, my dear friend?” he crowed in exclamatory dismay. Eberhard replied that he was going to Switzerland. “To Switzerland? What are you going to do there? I am not going to let you go,” said Herr Carovius. Eberhard gave him one cold stare. Herr Carovius tried beseeching, begging, pleading. It was in vain; Eberhard left for Switzerland. He wanted to be alone; he became tired of being alone, and returned; he went off again; he came back again, and had the conversation with Eleanore that robbed him of his last hope. Then he went to Munich, and took up with the spiritists.

Spiritual and mental ennui left him without a vestige of the power of resistance. An inborn tendency to scepticism did not prevent him from yielding to an influence which originally was farther removed from the inclinations of his soul than the vulgar bustle of everyday life. Benumbed as his critical judgment now was, he went prospecting for the fountain of life in a zone where dreams flourish and superficial enchantment predominates.

Herr Carovius hired a spy who never allowed Eberhard to get out of his sight. He reported regularly to his employer on the movements of the unique scion of the Auffenberg line. If Eberhard needed money, he was forced to go to Carovius, who would stand on the platform for an hour waiting for the Baron’s train to come in; and once Eberhard had got out of his carriage, Herr Carovius excited the laughter of the railroad officials by his affectionate care for his protégé. Delighted to see him again, he would talk the sheerest nonsense, and trip around about his young friend in groundless glee.

It seemed after all this that Herr Carovius really loved the Baron; and he did.

He loved him as a gambler loves his cards, or as the fire loves the coals. He idealised him; he dreamt about him; he liked to breathe the air that Eberhard breathed; he saw a chosen being in him; he imputed all manner of heroic deeds to him, and was immeasurably pleased at his aristocratic offishness.

He loved him with hatred, with the joy of annihilation. This hate-love became in time the centre of his thoughts and feelings. In it was expressed everything that separated him from other men and at the same time drew him to them. It controlled him unconditionally, until a second, equally fearful and ridiculous passion became affiliated with it.

Daniel had hesitated for a long while about making use of the letter of introduction from Frau von Erfft. Gertrude then took to begging him to go to the Baroness. “If I go merely to please you, my action will avenge itself on you,” he said.

“If I understood why you hesitate, I would not ask you,” she replied in a tone of evident discomfort.

“I found so much there in Erfft,” said he, “so much human kindness that was new to me; I dislike the idea of seeing some ulterior motive back of it, or of putting one there myself. Do you understand now?” She nodded.

“But must is stronger than may,” he concluded, and went.

The Baroness became quite interested in his case. The position of second Kapellmeister at the City Theatre was vacant, and she tried to have Daniel appointed to it. She was promised that it would be given to him; but the usual intrigues were spun behind her back; and when she urged that the matter be settled immediately and in favour of her candidate, she was fed on dissembling consolation. She was quite surprised to be brought face to face with hostile opposition, which seemed to spring from every side as if by agreement against the young musician. Not a single one of his enemies, however, allowed themselves to be seen, and no one heard from by correspondence. It was the first time that she had come in conflict with the world in a business way; there was something touching in her indignation at the display of cowardly fraud.

Finally, after a long, and for her humiliating, interview with that chief of cosmopolitan brokers, Alexander Dörmaul, Daniel’s engagement for the coming spring was agreed upon.

In the meantime the Baroness took lessons from Daniel. She expressed a desire to familiarise herself with the standard piano compositions, and to be given a really practical introduction to their meaning and the right method of interpreting them.

It was long before she became accustomed to his cold and morose sternness. She had the feeling that he was pulling her out of a nice warm bath into a cold, cutting draught. She longed to return to her twilights, her ecstatic moods, her melancholy reveries.

Once he explained to her in a thoroughly matter-of-fact way the movement of a fugue. She dared to burst out with an exclamation of joy. He shut the piano with a bang, and said: “Adieu, Baroness.” He did not return until she had written him a letter asking him to do so.

“Ah, it is lost effort, a waste of time,” he thought, though he did not fail to appreciate the Baroness’s human dignity. The eight hours a month were a complete torture to him. And yet he found that twenty marks an hour was too much; he said so. The suspicion that she was giving him alms made him exceedingly disagreeable.

A servant became familiar with him. Daniel took him by the collar and shook him until he was blue in the face. He was as wiry as a jaguar, and much to be feared when angry. The Baroness had to discharge the servant.

Once the Baroness showed him an antique of glass work made of mountain crystal and beautifully painted. As he was looking at it in intense admiration, he let it fall; it broke into many pieces. He was as humiliated as a whipped school boy; the old Baroness had to use her choicest powers of persuasion to calm him. He then played the whole of Schumann’s “Carneval” for her, a piece of music of which she was passionately fond.

Every forenoon you could see him hastening across the bridge. He always walked rapidly; his coat tails flew. He always had the corners of his mouth drawn up and his lower lip clenched between his teeth. He was always looking at the ground; in the densest crowds he seemed to be alone. He bent the rim of his hat down so that it covered his forehead. His dangling arms resembled the stumpy wings of a penguin.

At times he would stop, stand all alone, and listen, so to speak, into space without seeing. When he did this, street boys would gather about him and grin. Once upon a time a little boy said to his mother: “Tell me, mother, who is that old, old manikin over there?”

This is the picture we must form of him at this time of his life, just before his years of real storm and stress: he is in a hurry; he seems so aloof, sullen, distant, and dry; he is whipped about the narrow circle of his everyday life by fancy and ambition; he is so young and yet so old. This is the light in which we must see him.

The apartment of Daniel and Gertrude had three rooms. Two opened on the street, and one, the bed room, faced a dark, gloomy court.

With very limited means, but with diligence and pleasure, Gertrude had done all in her power to make the apartment as comfortable as possible. Though the ceilings were low and the walls almost always damp, the rooms seemed after all quite home-like and attractive.

In Daniel’s study the piano was the chief object of furniture; it dominated the space. Fuchsias in the window gave a pleasing frame to the general picture of penury. His mother had given him the oil painting of his father. From its place above the sofa the stern countenance of Gottfried Nothafft looked down upon the son. It seemed at times that the face of the father turned toward the mask of Zingarella as if to ask who and what it was. The mask hung on the other side of the room from the oil painting; its unbroken smile was lost in the shadows.

Gertrude had to do all the household work; they could not afford a servant. In the years of Daniel’s absence, however, she had learned to copy notes. Herr Seelenfromm, assistant to the apothecary Pflaum, had taught her. He was a cousin of Frau Rübsam, and she had become acquainted with him through Eleanore. In his leisure hours he composed waltzes and marches, and dedicated them to the princes and princesses of the royal family. He also dedicated one to Gertrude. It was entitled “Feenzauber,” and was a gavotte.

When Daniel learned of her accomplishment, he was so astonished that he threw his hands above his head. The rare being looked up at him intoxicated with joy. “I will help you,” she said, and copied his notes for him.

When they walked along the streets she would close her eyes at times. A melody floated by her which she had never before been able to understand. As she bought her vegetables and tried to drive a bargain with the old market woman, her soul was full of song.

Certain tones and combinations of tones took on definite shapes in her mind. The bass B of the fourth octave appeared to her as a heavily veiled woman; the middle E resembled a young man who was stretching his arms. In chords, harmonies, and harmonic transformations these figures were set in motion, the motion depending on the character of the composition: a procession of mourning figures between clouds and stars; wild animals spurred on by the huntsmen who were riding them; maidens throwing flowers from the windows of a palace; men and women plunging into an abyss in one mass of despairing humanity; weeping men and laughing women, wrestlers and ball players, dancing couples and grape pickers. The pause appealed to her as a man who climbs naked from a deep subterranean shaft, carrying a burning torch in his hand; the trill seemed like a bird that anxiously flutters about its nest.