Daniel's money was about at an end. The new sources on which he had
hoped to be able to draw were nowhere to be discovered. He defiantly
closed the doors against care; and when fear showed its gloomy face, he
shut up shop, and went out to drown his sorrows with the brethren of the
Vale of Tears.
Schwalbe, the sculptor, had made the acquaintance of Zingarella, then
engaged in singing lascivious couplets at the Academy, and invited the
fellows to join him.
The Academy was a theatre of the lowest description. Smoking was, of
course, permitted. When they arrived the performance was over. People
were still sitting at many of the tables. Reeking as the auditorium was
with the stench of stale beer, it left the impression of a dark, dank
cavern.
With an indifference that seemed to argue that Zingarella made no
distinction between chairs and people, she took her seat between the
sculptor and the writer. She laughed, and yet it was not laughter; she
spoke, and her words were empty; she stretched out her hands, and the
gesture was lifeless. She fixed her eyes on no one; she merely gazed
about. She had a habit of shaking her bracelet in a way that aroused
sympathy. And after making a lewd remark she would turn her head to one
side, and thereby stagger even the most hardened frequenter of this
sort of places. Her complexion had been ruined by rouge, but underneath
the skin there was something that glimmered like water under thin ice.
The former winsomeness of her lips was still traceable in the sorrowed
curves of her now ravaged mouth.
At times her restless eyes, seeking whom they might entangle, were fixed
on Daniel, then sitting quite alone at the lower end of the table. In
order to avoid the unpleasant sensation associated with the thought of
going up to such a distinguished-looking person and making herself known
to him, she would have been grateful had some one picked her up and
thrown her bodily at his feet. There was an element of strangeness about
him. Zingarella saw that he had had nothing to do with women of her
kind. This tortured her; she gnashed her teeth.
Daniel did not sense her hatred. As he looked into her face, marked with
a life of transgression and already claimed by fate, he built up in his
own soul a picture of inimitable chastity. He tried to see the playmate
of a god. The curtain decorated with the distorted face of a harlequin,
the acrobat and the dog trainer at the adjacent table, who were
quarrelling over their money, the four half-grown gamblers directly
behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench
with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer
who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and
incessantly on perpetual motion--to all of this he paid not the
slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in
the bottom of the sea. He got up and left.
But as he saw the snow-covered streets before him and was unable to
decide whether he should go home or not, Zingarella stepped up to him.
"Come, be quick, before they see that we are together," she whispered.
And thus they walked along like two fugitives, whose information
concerning each other stops short with the certainty that both are poor
and wretched and are making their way through a snow storm.
"What is your name?" asked Daniel.
"My name is Anna Siebert."
The clock in the St. Lorenz Church struck three. The one up in the tower
of St. Sebaldus corroborated this reckoning by also striking three and
in much deeper tones.
They came to an old house, and after floundering through a long, dark,
ill-smelling passage way, entered a room in the basement. Anna Siebert
lighted a lamp that had a red chimney. Gaudy garments of the soubrette
hung on the wall. A big, grey cat lay on the table cover and purred.
Anna Siebert took the cat in her arms and caressed it. Its name was
Zephyr. It accompanied her wherever she went.
Daniel threw himself on a chair and looked at the lamp. Zingarella,
standing before the mirror, stroked the cat. Gazing distractedly into
space, she remarked that the manager had discharged her because the
public was no longer satisfied with her work.
"Is this what you call the public?" asked Daniel, who never once took
his eyes from the lamp, just as Anna Siebert kept hers rigidly fixed on
the desolate distances of the mirror. "These fathers of families who
side-step every now and then, these counter-jumpers, the mere looks of
whom is enough to snatch your clothing from your body, this human filth
at the sight of which God must conceal His face in shame--this is what
you call the public?"
"Well, however that may be," Anna Siebert continued in a colourless
voice, "the manager rushed into my dressing room, threw the contract at
my feet, and said I had swindled him. How on earth could I have swindled
him? I am no prima donna and my agent had told him so. You can't expect
a Patti on twenty marks a week. In Elberfeld I got twenty-five, and a
year ago in Zuerich I even drew sixty. Now he comes to me and says he
doesn't need to pay me anything. What am I to live off of? And you've
got to live, haven't you, Zephyr," said Anna as she picked up the cat,
pressed its warm fur to her cheek, and repeated, "You've got to live."
She let her arms fall to her sides, the cat sprang on the floor, hunched
up its back, wagged its tail, and purred. She then went up to Daniel,
fell on her knees, and laid her head on his side. "I have reached the
end," she murmured in a scarcely audible voice, "I am at the end of all
things."
The snow beat against the window panes. With an expression on his face
as though his own thoughts were murdering each other, Daniel looked into
the corner from which Zephyr's yellowish eyes were shining. The muscles
of his face twitched like a fish on being taken from the hook.
And as he cowered in this fashion, the poor girl pressed against his
body, his shoulders lowered, past visions again arose from the depths of
the sea. First he heard a ravishing arpeggio in A-flat major and above
it, a majestic theme, commanding quiet, as it were, in sixteenth triads.
The two blended, in _forte_, with a powerful chord of sevens. There was
a struggling, a separating, a wandering on, and out of the subdued
pianissimo there arose and floated in space a gentle voice in E-flat
minor. O voice from the sea, O humanity on earth! The eighth note,
unpitiable as ever in its elemental power, cut into the bass with the
strength that moves and burrows as it advances, until it was caught up
by the redeemed voice in E-flat major. And now everything suddenly
became real. What had formerly been clouds and dreams, longing and
wishing, at last took shape and form and stood before him. Indeed he
himself became true, real, and conscious of his existence in a world of
actualities.
On his way home he covered his face with his hands, for the windows of
the houses gaped at him like the hollow eyes of a demi-monde.