Part 48

When she had a headache or was tired, he expressed his anxiety for her in touching tones. He would go about the house on tiptoes, and close the doors with infinite care. If a dog barked on the street, he rushed to the window and looked out, enraged at the beast. When she retired, he would help her undress, and bring her whatever she needed.

It was also strange that he disliked the idea of leaving her alone. There was something child-like in his restlessness when he was at home and she was out. He pictured her surrounded by grievous dangers; he would have liked to lock her up and hold her a captive, so as to be sure that she was quite safe. This made her all the weaker and more dependent upon him, while he was like a man who presses what he has to his heart, plagued with the thought that by some mischance it might escape, and yet clings to it also lest he be disturbed by the thought of another more precious possession he loved long since and lost a while.

Once he came to Gertrude while she was playing the harp, threw his arms about her, looked into her face with a wild, gloomy expression, and stammered: “I love you, I love you, I do.” It was the first time he had spoken these eternal words. She grew pale, first from joy and then from fear; for there was more of hatred than of love in his voice.

VIII

He felt that association with congenial men would help him over many a dark hour. But when he set out to look for these men, the city became a desert and a waste place.

Herr Seelenfromm came to his house now and then. Daniel could not endure the timid man who admired him so profoundly, and who, in the bottom of his heart, had an equal amount of respect for Gertrude. The young architect who had been employed at the St. Sebaldus Church while it was being renovated, and who loved music, had won Daniel’s esteem. But he had a repulsive habit of smacking his tongue when he talked. Daniel and he discussed the habit, and parted the worst of enemies. His association with a certain Frenchman by the name of Rivière was of longer duration. Rivière was spending some time in the city, looking up material for a life of Caspar Hauser. He had made his acquaintance at the Baroness von Auffenberg’s, and taken a liking to him because he reminded him of Friedrich Benda.

M. Rivière loved to hear Daniel improvise on the piano. He knew so little German that he merely smiled at Daniel’s caustic remarks; and if he became violently enraged, M. Rivière merely stared at his mouth. He had a wart on his cheek, and wore a straw hat summer and winter. He cooked his own meals, for it was an obsession of his that people wanted to poison him because he was writing a life of Caspar Hauser.

When Herr Seelenfromm and M. Rivière came in of a Sunday evening, Daniel would reach for a volume of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Clemens Brentano, and read from them until he was hoarse. He tried in this way to find peace in a strange world; for he did not wish to weep at the sight of human beings who seemed perfectly at ease.

Gertrude looked at him, and put this question to herself: How is it that a man to whom music is life and the paradise of his heart can allow himself to be so enveloped in sorrow, so beclouded by gloom? She understood the smarting pains in which he composed; she had a vague idea of the labyrinthine complications of his inner fate; these she grasped. But her own soul was filled with joyless compassion; she wished with all her power to plant greater faith and more happiness in his heart.

She meditated on the best means of carrying on her spiritual campaign. It occurred to her that he had had more of both faith and happiness at the time he was going with Eleanore. She saw Eleanore now in a quite different light. She recalled that Eleanore was not merely her sister but the creator of her happiness. Nor was she unmindful of the fact that through the transformation of her being, love and enlightenment had arisen to take the place of her former suspicion and ignorance.

She ascribed to Eleanore all those powers in which she had formerly been lacking: general superiority and stimulating vigour; an ability to play that lent charm to drudgery and made the hard things of life easy; brightness in conversation and delicacy of touch. In her lonely broodings she came to the conclusion that Eleanore was the only one who could help her. She went straightway to her father’s house to find out why Eleanore so rarely came to see her.

“I don’t like to come; Daniel is so unkind to me,” said Eleanore.

Gertrude replied that he was unkind to everybody, including her herself, and that she must not pay any attention to this; for she knew full well that Daniel liked her—and perhaps he himself was offended because she never called.

Eleanore thought it all over, and from then on visited her sister more frequently. But if it did not look as though Daniel did everything in his power to avoid her, this much was certain: he never said a word to her more than human decency required, and was an expert at finding reasons why he had to leave the room when she was there. Eleanore was gainfully conscious of this; it hurt her.

One morning Gertrude returned from the market, carrying a heavy basket full of things she had bought. As she came in the front door she heard Daniel playing. She noticed at once that he was not improvising; that he was playing a set piece, the tones of which were quite unfamiliar to her.

As she came up the steps, the basket no longer seemed like a burden. She went quietly into the living room and listened. Something drew her closer and closer to the piano. Daniel had not noticed that she had entered the room and sat down. He was wholly lost in what he was doing; he never took his rapt and wondering eyes from the music before him.

It was his draft of the “Harzreise im Winter.” For a year and a half, since the time he had composed it in Ansbach, he had never again thought of it; it had lain untouched. Suddenly the fire of creation had flamed up in him; he could once more bind the incoherent, and make what had been merely implied or indicated take definite shape.

He would play a movement again and again, trying to connect it with what went before or came after; he would take his pencil and write in a few notes here or there; then he would try it again, and smile to himself in a strange, confused, and yet enchanted way, when he saw that the motif was complete, perfect. Gertrude was drawn still closer to him. In her awe-struck admiration she crouched on the floor beside him. She would have liked to creep into the piano, and give her soul the opportunity it sought to express itself in the tones that came from the strings. When Daniel had finished, she pressed her head to his hips, and reached her hot hands up to him.

Daniel was terrified; for he recalled instantaneously another occasion on which another woman had done precisely the same thing. His eye involuntarily fell on the mask of Zingarella. He was not conscious of the connection; there was no visible bridge between the two incidents; Gertrude’s face was too unlike that of its momentary prototype. But with a feeling of awe he detected a mysterious liaison between then and now: he imagined he could hear a voice calling to him from the distant shores of yonder world.

He laid his hand on Gertrude’s hair. She interpreted the gesture as a visible sign that his promise had been fulfilled; that this work belonged to her; that he had created it for her, had taken it from her heart, and was returning it to the heart from whence it came.

Zierfuss, the music dealer, had sent out invitations to a concert. Daniel did not feel like going. Gertrude asked Eleanore if she would not go with her. Daniel called for them after the concert.

Eleanore told him on the way home that she had received a letter for him that afternoon bearing a London stamp.

“From Benda?” asked Daniel quickly.

“It is Benda’s handwriting,” replied Eleanore. “I was going to bring it to you when Gertrude called for me. Wait out in the front of the house, and I’ll go in and get it.”

“Take dinner with us this evening, Eleanore,” said Gertrude, looking rather uncertainly at Daniel.

“If it is agreeable to Daniel....”

“No nonsense, Eleanore, of course it is agreeable to me,” said Daniel.

A quarter of an hour later Daniel was sitting by the lamp reading Benda’s letter.