Autumn had come, and was boisterously asserting his authority; the
weather was dark and gloomy, even in Reinhold's eyes. "The gloomiest
and darkest I ever experienced," he said each morning to himself as the
same spectacle always presented itself when he opened his window: dark,
lowering clouds, trees swaying to and fro, from whose branches
blustering winds were stripping the brown leaves and whirling them
through the moist, foggy atmosphere across the roofs of the workshops,
which looked so drenched and miserable that one would only have
expected tombstones to be made there.
"And yet I have got through darker and gloomier days without losing
heart," philosophised Reinhold further; "it is not the weather out of
doors, it is that whichever way I turn I see people in need and
trouble, as if I were on board a ship that must sink shortly and could
do nothing to save it, but must sit with my hands before me, and look
on idly at the catastrophe."
Reinhold could do nothing; of that he had only too soon convinced
himself ever since that terrible morning when the General had come to
his room, and in the deepest agitation, which even his iron strength
could hardly master, had informed him of the conversation he had just
had with Herr Schmidt, and its miserable results.
"I made every advance to your uncle," said the General, "which was
possible to a man of honour. I offered to him and to your family the
reparation which, at least in the eyes of the world, would put
everything straight, and would secure to the young people the
possibility of that happiness which they have so recklessly pursued. If
they will find it in this way, God only knows, but that is their
affair, and must be theirs. What I feel about it, what hopes I bury
here, what a sacrifice I make of my personal convictions, is a matter
that lies between my God and me. May God guide your uncle's heart, that
he may put his trust in Him, as I do, in the inward conviction that our
own wisdom will not help us here. I have come to you, my dear Schmidt,
to say all this to you, not that I wish that you should try to
influence your uncle; according to my judgment of him, that would be
labour lost; but because I cannot endure the thought of being wrongly
judged by a man whom we all think so highly of, and who, besides, is
connected with me as a brother soldier, even if only for a short time."
Reinhold had, notwithstanding, followed the impulse of his heart, and
attempted the impossible. He had been, for the first time since they
had been together, harshly repulsed by his uncle, and had been forced
to own to himself that neither he nor any other man could persuade the
fiery-tempered old man to retract a decision once made "because he
must." But when Aunt Rikchen, unable to rest from fear of the terrible
_something_ in the air which yet she could not comprehend, found
Ferdinanda an hour later lying senseless on the floor of her studio;
when the unfortunate girl was raving in high fever, and the family
doctor came and went with anxious looks, and soon returned in company
with a colleague, and in the evening the two were joined by a
third physician, who seemed no less helpless before this strange
seizure--then, when Reinhold's first words, "It will kill her!" seemed
likely to be so terribly soon fulfilled, he bethought himself of the
General's fervent prayer that God might guide his uncle's heart, and
sought his uncle, who had not left his room again since the morning,
and asked him whether he would really allow his child to die when it
was in his power to save her.
"I am convinced that you can save her," he cried; "that a word from you
would pierce to her troubled mind through all the horrors of a fevered
fancy, and that she would awake to a new life."
"And what would that word be?" asked Uncle Ernst.
"If your heart does not tell you, you would not understand it if I
spoke it."
"My heart only tells me that it would be a lie," replied Uncle Ernst;
"and as I understand life, no lie will restore it. What life would it
be to which she would awake! Life at the side of a man whose courage
holds out just so long as the darkness in which he has followed his
course of intrigue; who only steps forth from that darkness when a
villain tears off his mask, and he cannot endure his father's eye upon
his miserable face; who would do what he must to-day, driven on by the
reproaches of his conscience and fear of the world's opinion, only to
repent it tomorrow from the same fear, and to hint it to her at first
in a thousand different ways, and say it at last to her face. Is that a
lot for a father to prepare for his child? No, never! Better a thousand
times death, if she must needs die. Every man has his own way of
looking at life, and this is mine; and no general officer, with I know
not what confused ideas of honour and love, and no relation, however
dear he may be to me, who in his good-nature would like to accommodate
what never can be put straight, will ever teach me another. And if God
Himself came and said to me, 'You are wrong,' I should answer, 'I do
right in my own eyes,' and no God can demand more of man."
"But you ought not to have urged Ferdinanda to a decision which cannot
possibly have come from her heart."
"Are not you attempting something of the same kind at this moment?"
"I have no authority over you, and your mind is not torn by conflicting
feelings as Ferdinanda's must have been in that unhappy hour."
"So much the better, that one of us at least should know what he wishes
and wills."
That had been Uncle Ernst's last word, and he had said it with a
calmness that to Reinhold was more terrible than the wildest outburst
of passion would have been.
And yet not so terrible as the smile with which the stubborn old man a
few days later received the news that Ferdinanda was, in the doctor's
opinion, out of danger.
Reinhold could not forget that smile; it haunted him even in his
dreams. He had never seen the like on any human face; he could not even
describe it to Justus, to whom he had repeatedly mentioned it, till one
day he stopped with a sudden exclamation at a face that stared at him
from the wall in a remote corner of the studio.
"Good heavens, Anders, what is this!"
"The mask of the Rhondonini Medusa," said Justus, looking up from his
work.
"That was my uncle's smile."
"I dare say it was something like it," said Justus, coming up with his
modelling-tool in his hand, "although I cannot quite reconcile Uncle
Ernst's beard with the Medusa; but one sees sometimes such diabolical
resemblances."
Justus's friendship was invaluable to Reinhold in these dark days; when
he was almost giving way, the artist's perpetually cheerful temper
would keep him up. "I cannot understand you," said Justus; "I certainly
have every possible respect for Uncle Ernst's splendid qualities, and I
take really a sincere interest in Ferdinanda, to say nothing of Aunt
Rikchen, poor soul, who will soon have cried her eyes out; but sympathy
and pity and all that sort of thing, like everything else in the world,
must have its limits, and if anything of the kind affects my own life
and incapacitates me from working--why, then, you see, Reinhold, I say
with Count Egmont: 'This is a foreign drop within my veins!' and--out
with it! Have you written to the President?"
"Three days ago."
"That's right. Heaven knows how sorry I shall be to lose you; but you
have been here too long already. You ought to have a ship's planks
under your feet again, and a northeaster whistling in your ears; that
would soon blow your melancholy and hypochondria and all that well out
of you, and clear your brain and your heart--you may take my word for
it!"
"If only it comes to anything," said Reinhold; "I almost fear, as the
answer is so long in coming, that my report may have roused bad
feelings in the other department as well, as the General prophesied it
would."
"Then we must think of something else," answered Justus; "so smart a
vessel must not be left to rot in the stagnant waters of a port. For
the present you can sit to me occasionally as a model for my
bas-relief; not that I want you yet, but one must gather the roses ere
they fade. I will take your head now at once, life-size, to be sure of
you in any case." Justus set aside all other work, and busied himself
over the designs for his bas-reliefs from morning till night, which
came only too early for the busy worker. Two of them, the "March out"
and the "Battle," were already finished, and the "Ambulance
preparations" had made great progress; but what was to be done about
the "Return"? Heaven only knew! "And the idea was such a splendid one,"
cried Justus. "You had been promoted to be an officer meanwhile, and
were to be standing at attention in the right corner, your eyes left
towards the charming burgomaster's daughter, who, with the wreath in
her hand, also turned her eyes right towards the smart lieutenant,
while the two elders exchanged the most beautiful sentiments about
union, peace, fraternity, and the like. Heaven help us! beautiful
sentiments they have exchanged certainly! Those confounded politics!
for after all they are at the bottom of all this trouble. Why must that
old Berserker go running about upon the barricades in '48! And he calls
himself a Liberal now, and bottles up his anger for four and twenty
years, and so spoils my splendid idea, for the idea was fairly embodied
in those two. Who the devil is to make bas-reliefs from disembodied
ideas! I, for one, can't do it; I gladly renounce the doubtful glory of
being an inventor; my motto is: 'Seek, and you shall find!' I have held
by it, and it has held by me. I have always found just what I wanted
for the moment; it has fairly fallen in my way, I must have been blind
not to see it; and this time it was just as if Abdallah's wonderful
cave had opened before me: 'Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, only the way
between them is narrow ... the camels laden almost beyond their
strength;' and now--just turn a little more to the right, my good
fellow!--'one only, the last, remained to the dervish.' Admirable, my
dear Reinhold, but, excepting you, every one of my splendid models has
left me in the lurch; Uncle Ernst, the General, Ferdinanda--absolutely
impossible! Aunt Rikchen declares that in such a time of trouble she
cannot have anything to do with such nonsense--it would be quite
wicked!--is not that good? Old Grollmann's face, I positively cannot
see through his melancholy wrinkles; our worthy Kreisel, since he has
given up Socialism and taken to speculation, has shrivelled up into a
mere grasshopper; dear Cilli even has only occasionally the sweet smile
with which, gift in hand, she was to grope for the superintendent's
table; and among the new workmen I cannot find a single decent
model. A parcel of stupid, coarse, sullen faces; and all comes from
politics--those confounded politics!"
Thus Justus lamented, and between whiles laughed, over his own
"splendid" idea, while he kneaded and moulded the wet clay incessantly
in his busy hands, whose dexterity seemed miraculous to Reinhold, and
then stepped back a few paces, nodding his half-bald head backwards and
forwards, and shaking it gravely if he did not think he had succeeded,
or whistling softly and contentedly if he was satisfied--which he
generally had reason to be--in any case taking up again outwardly the
work which he had not for a moment ceased mentally to carry on.
"I never know which to be most amazed at," said Reinhold; "your skill
or your industry."
"It is all one," answered Justus; "a lazy artist is a contradiction in
terms, at the best he is only a clever amateur. For what is the
difference between artists and amateurs? That the amateur has the will
and not the power--the will to do what he cannot accomplish; and the
artist can accomplish what he will, and wills nothing but what he can
accomplish. But to this point--to comparatively perfect mastery over
the technicalities of his art and knowledge of its limits--he attains
only through unremitting industry, which is no special virtue in him,
but rather his very self, his very art. Or, to put it differently, his
art is not merely his greatest delight, it is everything to him; he
rises with his work as he went to bed with it, and if possible dreams
of it too in the night. The world vanishes for him in his work, and
it is just, therefore, that he creates a new world in his work. Of
course this makes him one-sided, narrows him in a hundred other
directions--you must have discovered long ago that I am insufferably
stupid and ignorant; but ask the ants, who pursue their way, because it
is the shortest, right across the beaten tracks, or the bee who commits
murder so jovially in the autumn, and roves about in such idyllic
fashion in the spring, or any of the other artistic creatures--the
whole tribe of them is stupid, and narrow-minded, and barbarous, but
they accomplish something. Look at my Antonio; he will never accomplish
anything but hewing a figure out of the marble after a finished model,
and working it up till it is ready to receive the last touches at the
artist's hands, that is to say, being a first-class workman. Why?
Because he has a thousand follies in his head, and in the front rank
his own precious, conceited self. And then a feeling heart! Goethe, who
was a real, true artist, though he did draw and paint some bad things,
had his thoughts about that. The fellow--I don't mean Goethe, but
Antonio--was good for nothing during the first days of Ferdinanda's
illness, so that I had to send him away from his work altogether. What
is Ferdinanda to him? Or, at any rate, what is she to him more than to
me? and I have been able to work splendidly all these last days. And
Ferdinanda herself! such a pity! She was absolutely standing on the
threshold of the sanctuary, and yet she will never enter because she
cannot grasp the stern saying over the door: 'Thou shalt have none
other gods but me.' She has begun to work again, indeed, since
yesterday; but defiance, and despair, and resignation, and all that--it
may be all very fine; but it is not the muse. And neither is love the
muse of art--let people say what they will. All this yearning of heart
to heart, it is all very well, but just let a man try to work with a
yearning heart, and see how soon his art gives way to the yearning! The
artist must be cool to the centre of his heart. I have kept it so till
now, and intend so to continue, and if ever you see the name of Justus
Anders in a register of marriages, you need no longer look for it in
the golden book of art; you would see a line drawn through the space
where it may once have stood in alphabetical order."
Reinhold would not allow this, any more than he would accept Justus's
theory of the necessary one-sidedness of artists. He saw in the artist
rather the complete, perfect man, to whom nothing in humanity was
strange; the more than complete man even, who poured out his exuberant
wealth, which otherwise must have overwhelmed him, in his works, and
thus, beside the real world in which ordinary men dwelt, created for
himself a second ideal world. And if Justus maintained that he had
never loved, it might be true, although for his part he ventured
slightly to doubt the strict truth of his assertion; but even if it
were so, this great finder had merely not yet found the right object,
and as he boasted of always finding the right object at the right
moment, here, too, at the right moment the right object would certainly
present itself.
"That is a most unartistic view of the matter, my dear Reinhold!" cried
Justus. "We, who according to your ideas are something of demi-gods,
know better with what groans and creaks these beautiful creations are
brought into life, and that at the best of times, when things go as
smoothly as possible, you cannot boil anything without water. And as
for love, you certainly have more experience in that, and experience,
said Goethe's grey friend at Leipzig, is everything; but very often it
is better to be without that experience."
And Justus hummed the tune of "No fire, no coals, no ashes," as, with
his modelling-tool grasped in both hands, he worked at the forehead of
his clay figure.
"Do not give expression to such profane notions this evening at the
Kreisels'," said Reinhold.
"Why not? It is the simple truth."
"May be so; but it hurts good little Cilli to hear such things,
especially from your mouth."
"Why especially from my mouth?"
"Because she sees in you her ideal."
"In you, I should think."
"Don't talk such nonsense, Justus!"
"Not at all. She fairly raves about you; she talks about nothing but
you. Only yesterday she said to me that she hoped to live to see you as
happy as you deserved to be, on which I ventured to observe that I
considered you as one of the happiest men under the sun,
notwithstanding your temporary want of employment, whereupon she shook
her pretty head and said, 'The best indeed, but happy?' and shook her
head again. Now I only ask you! You not happy!"
And Justus whistled the tune of "Happy only is the soul that loves,"
and exclaimed, "There, now I have got rid of the wrinkles in your
forehead, and now we will stop for today, or we shall make a mess of it
again, as we did yesterday evening."
He sprinkled his figures with water, wrapped Reinhold's half-finished
head in wet cloths, and wiped his hands.
"There, I am ready!"
"Won't you at least shut your desk?" said Reinhold, pointing to a
worm-eaten old piece of furniture, on and in which Justus's letters and
other papers were wont to lie about.
"What for?" said Justus. "No one is likely to touch the rubbish.
Antonio will put it all in order; Antonio is order itself. Antonio!"
The other workmen had already left the studio; only Antonio was still
busying himself in the twilight.
"Put these things a little tidy, Antonio. Come!"
The two young men left the studio.
"Do not you leave too much in Antonio's hands?" asked Reinhold.
"How so?"
"I do not trust that Italian; so little indeed that I have repeatedly
fancied that the fellow must have had a hand in betraying Ferdinanda."
Justus laughed. "Really, my dear Reinhold, I begin to think that Cilli
was right, and that you are an unhappy man! How can a happy man torment
himself with such horrid ideas? I will just run up and make myself
tidy. You go on, I will follow you in five minutes."
Justus was just hastening away, when the door of Ferdinanda's studio
opened, and a lady came out dressed entirely in black, and muffled in a
thick black veil. She hesitated for a moment when she saw the two, and
then with hasty step and bent head passed them on her way to the yard.
The two friends thought at the first moment that it was Ferdinanda
herself; but Ferdinanda was taller, and this was not her figure or
walk.
"But who else could it have been?" asked Reinhold.
"I do not know," said Justus. "Perhaps a model--there are shy models. I
hope at any rate that it was one. It would be the best sign that she
was going to work again, that is to say to come to her senses."
Justus sprang up the steps which led to his apartment. Reinhold
continued on his way. As he turned the corner of the building, the
black figure was just disappearing through the entrance to the house.
Antonio also, who had begun to tidy Justus's desk as soon as the two
friends had left the studio, had observed the lady in black as she
glided past the window. He threw the papers which he held in his hand
into the desk, and was about to rush out, but remembered that he could
not follow her in his working dress, and stopped with much annoyance.
The lady in black had been with Ferdinanda at the same hour yesterday,
but as the studio was full, he had not been able to make his
observations through the door. She was no model--he knew better than
that! But who could it be, if not an emissary from the man he hated?
Perhaps she would come for the third time at a more convenient hour. He
must find out!
He returned to the desk. "Bah!" said he, "what is there to be found
here? accounts, orders--the old story! And what use is it to listen to
their conversation? Always the same empty chatter. I can't think why he
wants to know what the Captain talks about to the maestro!"
He knew that Ferdinanda was no longer in her study, but yet his
gleaming eyes remained fixed on her door as he sat here brooding in the
twilight.
"I will do everything that he commands. He is very wise, very powerful,
and very wealthy; but what good can he do here? Is not she now even
more unhappy than she was before? And if she should ever find out that
it was I--but the signor is right there, one thing always remains to
me--the last, best of all--revenge!"