Part 60

“Daniel wants to know why you never visit them any more,” said Jordan, weak and distraught as he now always was. “I told him you were busy at present with great plans of your own. Well, what does the Frenchman think about it?”

Eleanore answered her father’s question in a half audible voice.

“Go wherever you want to go, child,” said Jordan. “You have been prepared for an independent life in the world for a long while; there is no doubt about that. God forbid that I should put any hindrances in your way.” He got up with difficulty, and turned toward the door of his room. Taking hold of the latch, he stopped, and continued in his brooding way: “It is peculiar that a man can die by inches in a living body; that a man can have the feeling that he’s no longer a part of the present; and that he can no longer play his rôle, keep up with his own people, grasp what is going on about him, or know whether what is to come is good or evil. It is fearful when a man reaches that stage, fearful—fearful!”

He left the room, shaking his head. To Daniel his words sounded like a voice from the grave.

They had been silent for a long while, he and Eleanore. Suddenly he asked gruffly: “Are you serious about going to Paris?”

“Of course I am,” she said, “what else can I do?”

He sprang up, and looked angrily into her face: “One has to be ashamed of one’s self,” he said, “human language becomes repulsive. Don’t you have a feeling of horror when you think? Don’t you shudder when you reflect on that caricature known as the heart, or the soul, or whatever it may be called?”

“I don’t understand you, Daniel,” said Eleanore. She would never have considered it possible that he would look with disfavour on her contrition and the decision that had sprung from it. Then it had not after all been the flash of a solitary second? Had she not hoped and expected to hear a self-accusation from him that would make her forget all and forgive herself? Where was she? In what world or age was she living?

“Do you believe that I merely wanted to enjoy a diverting and momentary side-step?” Daniel continued, measuring her with his eyes from head to foot. “Do you believe that it is possible to jest with the most sacred laws of nature? You have had a good schooling, I must say; you do your teachers honour. Go! I don’t need you. Go to Paris, and let me degenerate!”

He stepped to the door. Then he turned, and took the lamp, which she had removed from the holder when she lighted it. Holding the lamp in his right hand, he walked close up to her. Her eyes closed involuntarily. “I simply wanted to see whether it was really you,” he said with passionate contempt. “Yes, it is you,” he said scornfully, “it is you.” With that he placed the lamp on the table.

“I don’t understand you, Daniel,” she said softly. She looked around for some object to rest her eyes on.

“So I see. Good night.”

“Daniel!”

But he had already gone. The hall door closed with a bang. The house sang with solitude.

The green threadbare sofa, the old, old smoke stains on the whitewashed ceiling, the five rickety chairs that reminded her of so many decrepit old men, the mirror with the gilded angel of stucco at the top—all these things were so tiring, so irksome, so annoying: they were like underbrush in the forest.

Little brother! Little brother!

Three evenings of the week were devoted to opera, the others to drama.

The first Kapellmeister was a middle-aged man whose curly hair made him the idol of all flappers. He was lazy, uncultivated, and his name was Lebrecht.

The director was an old stager who referred to the public about as a disrespectful footman refers to his lord. At Daniel’s suggestions for improving the repertory, he generally shrugged his shoulders. The operas in which he had the greatest confidence as drawing cards were “The Beggar Student,” “Fra Diavolo,” “L’Africaine,” and “Robert le Diable.” The singers and the orchestra were not much better than those of the lamented Dörmaul-Wurzelmann troupe. The possibility of arousing them to intensified effort or filling them with a semblance of intelligent enthusiasm for art was even less. Privileges based on length of service and the familiar traditions of indolence made æsthetic innovations unthinkable.

Wherever careworn Philistines and slothful materialists occupy the seats from which art should raise her voice, advancement, progress born of sacrificial application, is out of the question: the most it is reasonable to expect is a bourgeois fulfilment of inescapable duties. In such, cases the flower droops; the dream vanishes; the free-born spirit has the choice of fighting day in and day out against the collective demons of pettiness and mediocrity, or of going down in admitted defeat.

“Stuff the people can easily digest, my dear boy, that is the idea,” said the director.

“What are you so excited about? Don’t you know these people haven’t a musical muscle in their whole soul?” said Lebrecht.

“For nine consecutive years I have been singing F sharp at this opera house, and now here comes a musicien from the backwoods and demands all of a sudden that I sing F!” This was the commentary of Fräulein Varini, the prima donna whose outstanding bosom had long been a source of human merriment to pit, stall, and gallery.

“Ah, he is a greasy grind determined to arrive,” said the first violinist.

“He’s a spit-fire,” said the lad who beat the big drum, when Daniel threatened to box his ears for a false intonation.

The Baroness had secured a publisher in Leipzig for his cycle of sixteen songs; the compositions were to be brought out at her expense. That did not have the right effect: it was not something, Daniel felt, that he had fought for and won; it was not a case where merit had made rejection impossible. He had the feeling that he was selling his soul and was being paid to do it. Moreover, and worst of all, he had to express his gratitude for this act. The Baroness loved to have somebody thank her for what she had done. She never once suspected that what Daniel wanted was not benefactors, but people who were stirred to the depths of their souls by his creations. The rich cannot sense the feelings of the poor; the higher classes remain out of contact with the lower.

His excitability saved him. In his magnificent solicitude for the mission that is at once the token and the curse of those who are really called, he shut himself off from a world from which the one thing he wanted was bread; bread and nothing else.

After the publication of the songs a review appeared in the Phœnix which had a remarkably realistic ring to the ear of the layman. As a matter of fact it was merely an underhanded attempt at assassination. The thing was signed with a big, isolated “W.” Wurzelmann, the little slave, had shot from his ambush.