Part 77

Kropotkin recognised Daniel. He called to him, threw him kisses, had one of the wooden swords given him, and went through the motion of directing an orchestra. The fat boy hurled a handful of pretzels at the spot on the sidewalk where Daniel was standing; a trombone began to bray; the Englishman first stuck his head out of his cabriolet, and then got out and hopped over to Daniel, carrying a pole draped with women’s clothes, including a feather hat and a veil. A new keg of beer was tapped on the Gambrinus wagon, while the people in the houses rushed to the windows and roared.

“You have forgotten the railing,” cried Daniel in a loud voice to the people on the Goose Man wagon.

“What did he say?” they asked, and looked at each other in astonishment. The on-lookers were filled with curious silence: many of them gazed at Daniel, bewildered.

“You forgot the railing,” he repeated, with glistening eyes, “you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, your clown.”

He laughed quietly, and, with opened mouth and shining teeth, quickly withdrew from the innumerable gapers. Having reached a deserted alley, he began to sing with a frenzied expression on his face: “Whom thou dost not desert, oh Genius, him wilt thou raise up with wings of fire. He will wander on as if with feet of flowers across Deucalion’s seas of slime, killing Python, light-footed, famed Pythius Apollo.”

XVI

A few weeks later a real singer came to Daniel. She sang several of the songs he had written. He had thought they were completely forgotten by everybody. Her art was not merely perfect; it was wonderful.

It was a very mysterious visit the singer paid him. One afternoon during a fearful snow storm the bell rang; and when Gertrude opened the door, she saw a woman wearing a heavy black veil standing before her, who said she wished to speak to Kapellmeister Nothafft. Gertrude took her up to Daniel’s room. The stranger told Daniel she had been wishing to make his acquaintance for a long time, and, now on her way to Italy, she had been detained in the city for a few days by the illness of a near friend. This, she said, she regarded as a hint from fate itself. She had come to extend him her greetings, and particularly to thank him for his songs, a copy of which a friend had been good enough to present to her at a time when she was living under the weight of a great sorrow.

She spoke with an accent that had a Northern note in it, but easily and fluently; she gave the impression of a woman who had seen a great deal of the world and had profited by her travels. Daniel asked her with whom he had the pleasure of speaking, but she smiled, and asked permission to conceal her name for the present. She said that it really did not make much difference, and that it might be more agreeable to him later to think that an unknown woman had come to him to express her appreciation than to recall that Fräulein So-and-So had been there: she hoped that her very anonymity would make a more lasting impression on his memory than could be made by a woman of whom he knew only what everybody knows.

The mingling of the jocose and the serious, of the mind and the heart, in the words of the stranger pleased Daniel. Though his replies were curt and cool, it was plain that she was affording him much pleasure: she was reminding him of the fact that his creations had not after all sunk into an echoless abyss. In course of time, the conversation turned again to the songs; she said she would like very much to sing some of them for him. Daniel was pleased. He got the score, sat down at the piano, and the enigmatic woman began to sing. At the very first note Daniel was enraptured; he had never heard such a voice: so soft, so pure, so emotional, so unlike the conventional product of the conservatory. As soon as she had finished the first song, he looked up at her in unaffected embarrassment, and murmured: “Who are you, anyhow? Who are you?”

“No investigations or cross-questioning, please,” replied the singer, and, blushing at the praise Daniel was bestowing on her by his very behaviour, she laughed and said, “The next song, please, that one by Eichendorff!”

Gertrude, who had not wished to remain longer than was necessary because of the unkempt impression she knew she made, had hastened down to the kitchen. And now Eleanore came in, after having knocked at the door with all imaginable timidity. She had heard the strange voice, had rushed out into the hall, and, unable to restrain her curiosity any longer, had come in to see the singer.

Daniel nodded to her with radiant eyes, the stranger greeted her cordially though calmly, and then began to sing the next song; after this she took up the third, and so on until she had sung the complete cycle of six. Old Jordan was standing behind the door; he had his hands pressed to his face and was listening; he was much moved.

“Well, I must be going,” said the strange woman, after she had finished the last song. She shook hands with Daniel, and said: “It has been a beautiful hour.”

“It has been one of the most beautiful hours I have ever experienced,” said Daniel.

“Farewell!”

“Farewell!”

The strange woman went away, leaving behind her not a trace of anything other than the memory of a joy that grew more fabulous as the storm-tossed years rolled by. Daniel never saw her again, and never heard from her again.

XVII

While the woman was singing, Gertrude had been standing down in the hall listening. She knew every note of every song; every melody in the accompaniment seemed to her like an old, familiar picture. She was also aware that an artist by the grace of God had been in the house.

But how strange it was that she should find nothing unusual in the incident. She felt that a living stream in her bosom had dried up, leaving nothing but sand and stones in its bed. This inability to feel, this being dead to all sensations, took the form of excruciating pangs of conscience.

“My God, my God, what has happened to me?” she sighed, and wrung her hands.

That evening she went to the Church of Our Lady, and prayed for a long while. Her prayer did not appease her, however; she came back home more disquieted than ever.

The door of the living room was open: Daniel and Eleanore were sitting by the lamp, reading together from a book. The baby began to move; Eleanore had left the door open so that she might be able to hear the child when it woke up. Gertrude took the child in her arms, quieted it, and returned to the door leading into the living room. Daniel and Eleanore had turned their backs to the door, and were so absorbed in their reading that they were not aware of Gertrude’s presence.

A light suddenly came into Gertrude’s heart: she became conscious of her guilt—the guilt she had been trying in vain to fathom now for so many cruel weeks.

She did not have enough of the power of love; therein lay her guilt. She had assumed an obligation that was quite beyond her power to fulfil: she had entered into marriage without having the requisite strength of heart.

Marriage had seemed to her like the Holy of Holies. Her union with the man she loved seemed to her to be of equal significance with the union with God. But when she saw that this bond had been broken, the world was plunged into an abyss immeasurably remote from God. And it was not her husband who seemed to her to be guilty of infidelity; nor did she look upon her sister as being the guilty one; it was she herself who had been unfaithful and guilty in their eyes. She had not stood the test; she had been tried and found wanting; her strength had not been equal to her presumptions; God had rejected her. This conviction became irrevocably rooted in her heart.

In her union with Daniel music had become something divine; and she saw, now this union had been broken, something in music that was perilous, something that was to be avoided: she understood why she was so unemotional, why her feelings had dried up and vanished.