George and Heinrich dismounted from their cycles. The last villas lay
behind them and the broad road with its gradual upward incline led
into the forest. The foliage still hung fairly thickly on the trees,
but every slight puff of wind brought away some leaves which slowly
fluttered down. The shimmer of autumn floated over the yellow-reddish
hills. The road ascended higher past an imposing restaurant garden
approached by a flight of stone steps. Only a few people sat in the
open air, most of them were in the glass verandah, as though they did
not quite trust themselves to the faltering warmth of this late October
day, through which a dangerous and chilly draught kept on penetrating.
George thought of the melancholy memory of the winter evening on which
he and Frau Marianne had paid a visit here, and had had the place to
themselves. He had been bored as he had sat by her side and listened
impatiently to her prattle about yesterday's concert in which Fräulein
Bellini had sung songs; and when he had been obliged to get out of the
carriage in a suburban street on his way back on account of Marianne's
nervousness, he had taken a deep breath of deliverance. A similar
feeling of release, of course, almost invariably came over him whenever
he left a mistress, even after some more or less beautiful hours.
Even when he had left Anna on her doorstep a few days ago, after the
first evening of complete happiness, the first emotion of which he was
conscious was the joy of being alone again. And immediately in its
train, even before the feeling of gratitude and the dim realisation of
a genuine affinity with this gentle creature who enveloped his whole
being with such intimate tenderness had managed to penetrate his soul,
there fluttered through it a wistful dream of voyages over a shimmering
sea, of coasts which approached seductively, of walks along shores
which would vanish again on the next day, of blue distances, freedom
from responsibility and solitude.
The next morning, when the atmosphere of the previous evening, pregnant
as it was with memory and with presage, enveloped him as he woke up,
the journey was of course put off to a later but not so distant though
of course more convenient time. For George knew at this very hour,
though without any touch of horror, that this adventure was predestined
to have an end however sincerely and picturesquely it had begun.
Anna had given herself to him without indicating by a word, a look
or gesture that so far as she was concerned, what was practically a
new chapter in her life was now beginning. And in the same way George
felt quite convinced that the farewell to her, too, would be devoid
of melancholy or of difficulty; a pressure of the hand, a smile and a
quiet "it was very beautiful"; and he felt still easier in his mind
when she came to him at their next meeting with a simple intimate
greeting, quite free from that uneasy tone of nestling sorrow or
accomplished fate which he had heard thrilling in the voice of many
another woman, who had woken up to such a morning, though not for the
first time in her life.
A faintly-defined line of mountains appeared in the distance and then
vanished again as the road mounted through thick-wooded country up to
the heights. Pine-wood and leaf-bearing wood grew peacefully next to
each other, and the foliage of beeches and birch-trees shimmered with
its autumn tints through the quieter tints of the firs. Ramblers could
be seen, some with knapsack, alpine-stock and nailed shoes, as though
equipped for serious mountaineering; now and again cyclists would come
whizzing down the road in a feverish rush. Heinrich told his companion
of a cycle-tour which he had made along the Rhine at the beginning of
September.
"Isn't it strange," said George, "I have knocked about the world a fair
bit, but I do not yet know the district where my ancestors' home was."
"Really?" queried Heinrich, "and you feel no emotion when you hear the
word Rhine spoken?"
George smiled. "After all it is nearly a hundred years since my
great-grandparents left Biebrich."
"Why do you smile, George? It's a much longer time since my ancestors
wandered out of Palestine, and yet many otherwise quite rational people
insist on my heart throbbing with homesickness for that country."
George shook his head irritably. "Why do you always keep bothering
about those people? It will really soon become a positive obsession
with you."
"Oh, you think I mean the Anti-Semites? Not a bit of it. I am not
touchy any more about them, not usually, at any rate. But you just go
and ask our friend Leo what his views are on this question."
"Oh, you mean him, do you? Well, he doesn't take it so literally but
more or less symbolically ... or from the political standpoint," he
added uncertainly.
Heinrich nodded. "Both these ideas are very intimately connected
in brains of that character." He sank into meditation for a while,
thrust his cycle forward with slight impatient spurts and was soon
a few paces in front again. He then began to talk again about his
September tour. He thought of it again with what was almost emotion.
Solitude, change of scene, movement: had he not enjoyed a threefold
happiness? "I can scarcely describe to you," he said, "the feeling
of inner freedom which thrilled through me. Do you know those moods
in which all one's memories near or distant lose, as it were, their
oppressive reality? all the people who have meant anything in one's
life, whether it be grief, care or tenderness, seem to sweep by more
like shadows, or, to put it more precisely, like forms which one has
imagined oneself? And the creations of one's own imagination also come
on the scene, of course, and are certainly quite as vivid as the people
whom one remembers as having been real; and then one gets the most
extraordinary complications between the figures of reality and of one's
imagination. I could describe to you a conversation which took place
between my great-uncle who is a rabbi and the Duke Heliodorus, the
character you know who is the centre of my opera plot--a conversation
which was amusing and profound to a degree which, speaking generally,
neither life nor any opera libretto scarcely ever reaches.... Yes,
such journeys are really wonderful, and so one goes on through towns
which one has never seen before, and perhaps will never see again,
past absolutely unknown faces which speedily vanish again for all
eternity.... Then one whizzes again into the street between the rivers
and the vineyards. Such moods really cleanse the soul. A pity that they
are so rarely vouchsafed to one."
George always felt a certain embarrassment whenever Heinrich became
tragic. "Perhaps we might go on a bit," he said, and they jumped on to
their machines.
A narrow bumpy byroad between the forest and fields soon led them to a
bare unimpressive two-storied house, which they recognised to be an inn
by its brown surly signboard. On the green, which was separated from
the house by the street, stood a large number of tables, many covered
with cloths which had once been white, others with cloths which were
embroidered. Ten or twelve young men who were members of a cycling club
sat at some pushed-back tables. Several of them had taken off their
coats, others with an affectation of smartness wore them with their
sleeves hanging down. Designs in magnificent red and green knitting
blazed on the sky-blue sweaters with their yellow edges.
A chorus rang out to the sky with more power than purity: "Der Gott der
Eisen wachsen liess, der wollte keine Knechte."
Heinrich surveyed the company with a quick glance, half shut his eyes
and said to George with clenched teeth and vehement emphasis: "I don't
know if these youths are staunch, true and courageous, which they
certainly think they are; but there is no doubt that they smell of wool
and perspiration, and so I am all for our sitting down at a reasonable
distance from them."
What _does_ he want? thought George. Would he find it more congenial if
a party of Polish Jews were to sit here and sing psalms?
Both pushed their machines to a distant table and sat down. A waiter
appeared in black evening dress sprinkled with the relics of grease and
vegetables, cleared the table energetically with a dirty napkin, took
their orders and went off.
"Isn't it lamentable," said Heinrich, "that in the immediate outskirts
of Vienna nearly all the inns should be in such a state of neglect? It
makes one positively depressed."
George thought that this exaggerated regret was out of place. "Oh well,
in the country," he said, "you have got to take things as you find
them. It is almost part of the whole thing."
Heinrich would not admit the soundness of this point of view. He began
to develop a plan for the erection of seven hotels on the borders of
the Wienerwald, and was calculating that one would need at the outside
three or four millions, when Leo Golowski suddenly appeared. He was in
_mufti_, which, as was frequently the case with him, was not without
a certain element of bizarreness. He wore to-day, in addition to a
light-grey lounge suit, a blue velvet waistcoat and a yellow silk
cravat with a smooth steel tie-ring. Both the others greeted him with
delight and expressed their astonishment.
Leo sat down by them. "I heard you fixing up your excursion yesterday
evening, and when we were discharged from the barracks at nine o'clock
to-day, I at once thought how nice it would be to have a chat for an
hour or so in the open air with a couple of keen and congenial men.
So I went home, threw myself into mufti and started off." He spoke
in his usual tone, which always fascinated George with its charm and
semi-naïveté, though when he thought of it afterwards it always seemed
to possess a certain touch of irony, of insincerity in fact. He had
a knack of conducting serious conversations with a cut-and-dried
definiteness that really impressed George. He had recently had an
opportunity of listening to discussions in the café between Leo and
Heinrich on questions dealing with the theory of art, especially the
relation between the laws of music and mathematics. Leo thought he
was on the track of the fundamental cause of major and minor keys
affecting the human soul in such different ways. George took pleasure
in following the chain of his acute and lucid analysis, even though he
was instinctively on his guard against the audacious attempt to ascribe
all the magic and mystery of sound to the rule of laws, which were as
inexorable as those in accordance with which the earth and the planets
revolved, and must necessarily spring from the same origin as those
eternal principles. It was only when Heinrich tried to carry Leo's
theories still further, and to apply them for instance to the products
of literary style, that George became impatient and immediately felt
himself tacit ally of Leo who invariably smiled gently at Heinrich's
tangled and fantastic expositions.
The meal was served and the young men ate with appetite; Heinrich
not less than the others, in spite of the fact that he expressed his
opinion of the inferiority of the cooking in the most disparaging
terms, and was inclined to regard the conduct of the proprietor, not
merely as a sign of his personally low mind, but as characteristic of
the decay of Austria in many other spheres. The conversation turned
on the military position of the country, and Leo gave a satirical
description of his comrades and superiors, with which both the others
were very much amused. Much merriment, especially, was occasioned by a
First-Lieutenant who had introduced himself to the volunteer contingent
with the ominous words: "I shan't give you anything to laugh about, I
am a fiend in human form."
While they were still eating a gentleman came up to the table, clicked
his heels together, put his hand to his cycle cap by way of salutation,
addressed them with a facetious "All hail," added a friendly "Hallo"
for the benefit of Leo, and introduced himself to Heinrich. "My name
is Josef Rosner." He then cheerily began the conversation with these
words: "I suppose you gentlemen are also on a cycling expedition...."
As no one answered him he continued: "One must make the best of the
last fine days, the splendid weather won't last much longer."
"Won't you sit down, Herr Rosner?" asked George politely.
"Much obliged but...." He pointed to his party.... "We have only just
started out, we have still got a lot in front of us; going to ride
down to Tull and then via Stockerau to Vienna. Excuse me, gentlemen."
He took a wooden vesta from the table and lighted his cigarette with
dignity.
"What kind of a club are you in then, old chap?" asked Leo, and George
was surprised at the "old chap," till it occurred to him that they had
both known each other from boyhood.
"This is the Sechshauser Cycle Club," replied Josef. In spite of the
fact that no astonishment was expressed, he added: "Of course you are
surprised, gentlemen, at a real Viennese like myself belonging to this
suburban club, but it is only because a great friend of mine is the
captain there. You see that fat chap there, just slipping into his
coat. That is Jalaudek, the son of the town councillor and member of
Parliament."
"Jalaudek ..." repeated Heinrich with obvious loathing in his voice,
and said nothing more.
"Oh yes," said Leo, "that's the man, you know, who in a recent debate
about the popular education board gave this magnificent definition of
science. Didn't you read it?" He turned to the others.
They did not remember.
"'Science,'" quoted Leo, "'Science is what one Jew copies from
another.'"
All laughed. Even Josef, who, however, immediately started explaining:
"He is really not that sort at all--I know him quite well--only he is
so crude in political life ... simply because the opposing parties
scratch each other's eyes out in our beloved Austria. But in ordinary
life he is a very affable gentleman. The boy is much more Radical."
"Is your club Christian Socialist or National German?" asked Leo
courteously.
"Oh, we don't make any distinction. Only of course as things are going
nowadays...." He stopped with sudden embarrassment.
"Come, come," said Leo encouragingly. "It is perfectly obvious that
your club is not tainted by a single Jew. Why, one notices that a mile
off."
Josef thought it was best form to laugh. He then said: "Excuse me, no
politics in the mountains! Anyway, as we are on this topic you are
labouring under a delusion, gentlemen. For instance, we have a man in
the club who is engaged to a Jewish girl. But they are beckoning to me
already. Goodbye, gentlemen; so long, Leo; goodbye, all." He saluted
again and swaggered off.
The others, smiling in spite of themselves, followed him with their
eyes. Then Leo suddenly turned to George and asked: "And how is his
sister getting on with her singing?"
"What?" said George, startled and blushing slightly.
"Therese has been telling me," went on Leo quietly, "that you and Anna
do music together sometimes. Is her voice all right now?"
"Yes," replied George, hesitating, "I believe so; at any rate I
think it is very pleasant, very melodious, especially in the deeper
registers. It is a pity in my view that it is not big enough for larger
rooms."
"Not big enough?" repeated Leo meditatively.
"How would you describe it?"
Leo shrugged his shoulders and looked quietly at George. "It is like
this," he said. "I personally like the voice very much, but even when
Anna had the idea of going on the stage ... to speak quite frankly, I
never thought anything would come of it."
"You probably knew," replied George with deliberate casualness, "that
Fräulein Anna suffers from a peculiar weakness of the vocal chords."
"Yes, of course I knew that, but if she were cut out for an artistic
career, really had it in her, I mean, she would certainly have overcome
that weakness."
"You think so?"
"Yes, I do. That is my decided opinion. That's why I think that
expressions like 'peculiar weakness' or 'her voice is not big enough'
are more or less euphemisms for something more fundamental, more
psychological. It's quite clear that her fate line says nothing about
her being an artist, that's a fact. She was, so to speak, predestined
from the beginning to end her days in respectable domesticity."
Heinrich enthusiastically caught up the theory of the fate line, and
led their thoughts in his own erratic way from the sphere of cleverness
to the sphere of sophistry, and from the sphere of sophistry to the
sphere of the nonsensical.
He then suggested that they should bask for half an hour in the meadow
in the sun. "It will probably not shine so warm again during this year."
The others agreed.
A hundred yards from the inn George and Leo stretched themselves out on
their cloaks. Heinrich sat down on the grass, crossed his arms over his
knees, and looked in front of him. At his feet the sward sloped down to
the forest. Still deeper down rested the villas of Neuwaldegg, buried
in loose foliage. The spire-crosses and dazzling windows of the town
shone out from the bluish-grey clouds, and far away, as though lifted
up by a moving haze, the plain swept away to a gradual darkness.
Pedestrians were walking over the fields towards the inn. Some gave
them a greeting as they passed, and one of them, a slim young man who
led a child by the hand, remarked to Heinrich: "This is a really fine
day, just like May."
Heinrich felt at first his heart go out as it were involuntarily,
as it often did towards casual and unexpected friendliness of this
description. But he immediately pulled himself together, for of course
he realised that the young man was only intoxicated, as it were,
with the mildness of the day and the peace of the landscape; that at
the bottom of his soul he too felt hostile to him, just like all the
others who had strolled past him so harmlessly, and he himself found
difficulty in understanding why the view of these gently sloping hills
and the town merging into twilight should affect him with so sweet a
melancholy, in view of the fact that the men who lived there meant
so little good by him, and meant him even that little but rarely.
The cycling club whizzed along the street which was quite close to
them. The jauntily-worn coats fluttered, the badges gleamed and crude
laughter rang out over the fields.
"Awful people," said Leo casually without changing his place.
Heinrich motioned down below with a vague movement of his head. "And
fellows like that," he said with set teeth, "imagine that they are more
at home here than we are."
"Oh, well," answered Leo quietly, "they aren't so far out in that,
those fellows there."
Heinrich turned scornfully towards him: "Excuse me, Leo, I forgot for a
moment that you yourself wish to count as only here on sufferance."
"I don't wish that for a minute," replied Leo with a smile, "and you
need not misunderstand me so perversely. One really can't bear a grudge
against these people if they regard themselves as the natives and you
and me as the foreigners. After all, it is only the expression of their
healthy instinct for an anthropological fact which is confirmed by
history. Neither Jewish nor Christian sentimentalism can do anything
against that and all the consequences which follow from it." And
turning to George he asked him in a tone which was only too courteous:
"Don't you think so too?"
George reddened and cleared his throat, but had no opportunity of
answering, for Heinrich, on whose forehead two deep furrows now
appeared, immediately began to speak with considerable bitterness.
"My own instinct is at any rate quite as much a rule of conduct for me
as the instinct of Herren Jalaudek Junior and Senior, and that instinct
tells me infallibly that my home is here, just here, and not in some
land which I don't know, the description of which doesn't appeal to
me the least bit and which certain people now want to persuade me is
my fatherland on the strength of the argument that that was the place
from which my ancestors some thousand years ago were scattered into the
world. One might further observe on that point that the ancestors of
the Herren Jalaudek and even of our friend Baron von Wergenthin were
quite as little at home here as mine and yours."
"You mustn't be angry with me," retorted Leo, "but your standpoint in
these matters is really somewhat limited. You are always thinking about
yourself and the really quite irrelevant circumstance ... excuse my
saying irrelevant circumstance, that you are an author who happens to
write in the German language because he was born in a German country,
and happens to write about Austrian people and Austrian conditions
because he lives in Austria. But the primary question is not about you,
or about me either, or even about the few Jewish officials who do not
get promoted, the few Jewish volunteers who do not get made officers,
the Jewish lecturers who either get their Professorship too late or not
at all--those are sheer secondary inconveniences so to speak; we have
to deal, in considering this question, with quite another class of men
whom you know either imperfectly or not at all. We have to deal with
destinies to which, I assure you, my dear Heinrich, that in spite of
your real duty to do so, I am sure you have not yet given sufficient
thorough thought. I am sure you haven't.... Otherwise you wouldn't
be able to discuss all these matters in the superficial and the ...
egoistic way you are now doing."
He then told them of his experiences at the Bâle Zionist Congress in
which he had taken part in the previous year, and where he had obtained
a deeper insight into the character and psychological condition of the
Jewish people than he had ever done before. With these people, whom he
saw at close quarters for the first time, the yearning for Palestine,
he knew it for a fact, was no artificial pose. A genuine feeling was
at work within them, a feeling that had never become extinguished and
was now flaming up afresh under the stress of necessity. No one could
doubt that who had seen, as he had, the holy scorn shine out in their
looks when a speaker exclaimed that they must give up the hope of
Palestine for the time being and content themselves with settlements in
Africa and the Argentine. Why, he had seen old men, not uneducated men
either, no, learned and wise old men, weeping because they must needs
fear that that land of their fathers, which they themselves would never
be able to tread, even in the event of the realisation of the boldest
Zionist plans, would perhaps never be open to their children and their
children's children.
George listened with surprise, and was even somewhat moved.
But Heinrich, who had been walking up and down the field during Leo's
narrative, exclaimed that he regarded Zionism as the worst affliction
that had ever burst upon the Jews, and that Leo's own words had
convinced him of it more profoundly than any previous argument or
experience.
National feeling and religion, those had always been the words which
had embittered him with their wanton, yes malignant, ambiguity.
Fatherland.... Why, that was nothing more than a fiction, a political
idea floating in the air, changeable, intangible. It was only the home,
not the fatherland which had any real significance ... and so the
feeling of home was synonymous with the right to a home. And so far
as religions were concerned, he liked Christian and Jewish mythology
quite as much as Greek and Indian; but as soon as they began to force
their dogmas upon him, he found them all equally intolerable and
repulsive. And he felt himself akin with no one, no, not with any one
in the whole world: with the weeping Jews in Ble as little as with the
bawling Pan-Germans in the Austrian Parliament; with Jewish usurers
as little as with noble robber-knights; with a Zionist bar-keeper as
little as with a Christian Socialist grocer. And least of all would
the consciousness of a persecution which they had all suffered, and
of a hatred whose burden fell upon them all, make him feel linked
to men from whom he felt himself so far distant in temperament. He
did not mind recognising Zionism as a moral principle and a social
movement, if it could honestly be regarded in that light, but the idea
of the foundation of a Jewish state on a religious and national basis
struck him as a nonsensical defiance of the whole spirit of historical
evolution. "And you too, at the bottom of your heart," he explained,
standing still in front of Leo, "you don't think either that this goal
will ever prove attainable; why, you don't even wish it, although
you fancy yourself in your element trying to get there. What is your
home-country, Palestine? A geographical idea. What does the faith of
your father mean to you? A collection of customs which you have now
ceased to observe and some of which seem as ridiculous and in as bad
taste to you, as they do to me."
They went on talking for a long time, now vehemently and almost
offensively, then calmly, and in the honest endeavour to convince each
other. Frequently they were surprised to find themselves holding the
same opinion, only again to lose touch with each other the next moment
in a new contradiction. George, stretched on his cloak, listened to
them. His mind soon took the side of Leo, whose words seemed to thrill
with an ardent pity for the unfortunate members of his race, and who
would turn proudly away from people who would not treat him as their
equal. Soon he felt nearer again in spirit to Heinrich, who treated
with anger and scorn the attempt, as wild as it was short-sighted,
to collect from all the corners of the world the members of a race
whose best men had always merged in the culture of the land of their
adoption, or had at any rate contributed to it, and to send them all
together to a foreign land, a land to which no homesickness called
them. And George gradually appreciated how difficult those same picked
men about whom Heinrich had been speaking, the men who were hatching
in their souls the future of humanity, would find it to come to a
decision. How dazed must be their consciousness of their existence,
their value and their rights, tossed to and fro as they were between
defiance and exhaustion, between the fear of appearing importunate and
their bitter resentment at the demand that they must needs yield to an
insolent majority, between the inner consciousness of being at home
in the country where they lived and worked, and their indignation at
finding themselves persecuted and insulted in that very place. He saw
for the first time the designation Jew, which he himself had often used
flippantly, jestingly and contemptuously, in a quite new and at the
same time melancholy light. There dawned within him some idea of this
people's mysterious destiny, which always expressed itself in every one
who sprang from the race, not less in those who tried to escape from
that origin of theirs, as though it were a disgrace, a pain or a fairy
tale that did not concern them at all, than in those who obstinately
pointed back to it as though to a piece of destiny, an honour or an
historical fact based on an immovable foundation.
And as he lost himself in the contemplation of the two speakers,
and looked at their figures, which stood out in relief against
the reddish-violet sky in sharply-drawn, violently-moving lines,
it occurred to him, and not for the first time, that Heinrich who
insisted on being at home here, resembled both in figure and gesture
some fanatical Jewish preacher, while Leo, who wanted to go back to
Palestine with his people, reminded him in feature and in bearing of
the statue of a Greek youth which he had once seen in the Vatican or
the Naples museum. And he understood again quite well, as his eye
followed with pleasure Leo's lively aristocratic gestures, how Anna
could have experienced a mad fancy for her friend's brother years ago
in that summer by the seaside.
Heinrich and Leo were still standing opposite each other on the
grass, while their conversation became lost in a maze of words. Their
sentences rushed violently against each other, wrestled convulsively,
shot past each other and vanished into nothingness, and George noticed
at some moment or other that he was only listening to the sound of the
speeches, without being able to follow their meaning.
A cool breeze came up from the plain, and George got up from the
sward with a slight shiver. The others, who had almost forgotten his
presence, were thus called back again to actualities, and they decided
to leave. Full daylight still shone over the landscape, but the sun was
couched faint and dark on the long strip of an evening cloud.
"Conversations like this," said Heinrich, as he strapped his cloak
on to his cycle, "always leave me with a sense of dissatisfaction,
which even goes as far as a painful feeling in the neighbourhood of
the stomach. Yes really. They just lead absolutely nowhere. And after
all, what do political views matter to men who don't make politics
their career or their business? Do they exert the slightest influence
on the policy and moulding of existence? You, Leo, are just like
myself; neither of us will ever do anything else, can ever do anything
else, than just accomplish that which, in view of our character and
our capacities, we are able to accomplish. You will never migrate to
Palestine all your life long, even if Jewish states were founded and
you were offered a position as prime-minister, or at any rate official
pianist----"
"Oh, you can't know that," interrupted Leo.
"I know it for a certainty," said Heinrich. "That's why I'll admit,
into the bargain, that in spite of my complete indifference to every
single form of religion I would positively never allow myself to be
baptised, even if it were possible--though that is less the case to-day
than ever it was--of escaping once and for all Anti-Semitic bigotry and
villainy by a dodge like that."
"Hum," said Leo, "but supposing the mediæval stake were to be lighted
again."
"In that case," retorted Heinrich, "I hereby solemnly bind myself to
take your advice implicitly."
"Oh," objected George, "those times will certainly not come again."
Both the others were unable to help laughing at George being kind
enough to reassure them in that way about their future, in the name, as
Heinrich observed, of the whole of Christendom.
In the meanwhile they had crossed the field.
George and Heinrich pushed their cycles forward up the bumpy by-road,
while Leo at their side walked on the turf with his cloak fluttering in
the wind. They were all silent for quite a time, as though exhausted.
At the place where the bad path turned off towards the broad high road,
Leo remained stationary and said: "We will have to leave each other
here, I am afraid." He shook hands with George and smiled. "You must
have been pretty well bored to-day," he said.