One morning Gertrude returned from the market, carrying a heavy basket
full of things she had bought. As she came in the front door she heard
Daniel playing. She noticed at once that he was not improvising; that he
was playing a set piece, the tones of which were quite unfamiliar to
her.
As she came up the steps, the basket no longer seemed like a burden.
She went quietly into the living room and listened. Something drew her
closer and closer to the piano. Daniel had not noticed that she had
entered the room and sat down. He was wholly lost in what he was doing;
he never took his rapt and wondering eyes from the music before him.
It was his draft of the "Harzreise im Winter." For a year and a half,
since the time he had composed it in Ansbach, he had never again thought
of it; it had lain untouched. Suddenly the fire of creation had flamed
up in him; he could once more bind the incoherent, and make what had
been merely implied or indicated take definite shape.
He would play a movement again and again, trying to connect it with what
went before or came after; he would take his pencil and write in a few
notes here or there; then he would try it again, and smile to himself in
a strange, confused, and yet enchanted way, when he saw that the motif
was complete, perfect. Gertrude was drawn still closer to him. In her
awe-struck admiration she crouched on the floor beside him. She would
have liked to creep into the piano, and give her soul the opportunity it
sought to express itself in the tones that came from the strings. When
Daniel had finished, she pressed her head to his hips, and reached her
hot hands up to him.
Daniel was terrified; for he recalled instantaneously another occasion
on which another woman had done precisely the same thing. His eye
involuntarily fell on the mask of Zingarella. He was not conscious of
the connection; there was no visible bridge between the two incidents;
Gertrude's face was too unlike that of its momentary prototype. But with
a feeling of awe he detected a mysterious liaison between then and now:
he imagined he could hear a voice calling to him from the distant shores
of yonder world.
He laid his hand on Gertrude's hair. She interpreted the gesture as a
visible sign that his promise had been fulfilled; that this work
belonged to her; that he had created it for her, had taken it from her
heart, and was returning it to the heart from whence it came.
X
Zierfuss, the music dealer, had sent out invitations to a concert.
Daniel did not feel like going. Gertrude asked Eleanore if she would
not go with her. Daniel called for them after the concert.
Eleanore told him on the way home that she had received a letter for him
that afternoon bearing a London stamp.
"From Benda?" asked Daniel quickly.
"It is Benda's handwriting," replied Eleanore. "I was going to bring it
to you when Gertrude called for me. Wait out in the front of the house,
and I'll go in and get it."
"Take dinner with us this evening, Eleanore," said Gertrude, looking
rather uncertainly at Daniel.
"If it is agreeable to Daniel...."
"No nonsense, Eleanore, of course it is agreeable to me," said Daniel.
A quarter of an hour later Daniel was sitting by the lamp reading
Benda's letter.
The first thing his friend told him was that he was to join a scientific
expedition to the Congo, and that his party would follow almost exactly
the same route that had been taken by the Stanley Expedition when it set
out to look for Emin Pascha.
Benda wrote: "This letter then, my dear friend, is written to say
good-bye for a number of years, perhaps forever. I feel as if I had been
born anew. I have eyes again; and the ideas that fill my brain are no
longer condemned to be stifled in the morass of imprisoned colleagues,
loyal and inimical. To labour in nature's laboratory will make me forget
the wrongs I have suffered, the injustice that has been done me. Hunger
and thirst, disease and danger will of course have to be endured; they
are the effects of those crimes of civilisation that spare the body
while they poison the mind and soul."
Further on Benda wrote: "I am bound to my home by only two people, my
mother and you. When I think of you, a feeling of pride comes over me;
every hour we spent together is indelibly stamped on my heart. But there
is one delicate point: it is a point of conscience. Call it, so far as I
am concerned, a chip; call it anything you please. The fact is I have
had a Don Quixotic run in, and I have got to defend myself."
Daniel shook his head and read on. Benda knew nothing of his marriage.
He did not even seem to know that Daniel and Gertrude had been engaged.
Or if he had known it he had forgotten it. Daniel could hardly believe
his own eyes when he came to the following passage: "My greatest anxiety
always lay in the fear that you would pass Eleanore by. I was too
cowardly to tell you how I felt on this point, and I have reproached
myself ever since for my cowardice. Now that I am leaving I tell you how
I feel about this matter, though not exactly with the sensation of
performing a belated task."
For Heaven's sake, thought Daniel, what is he trying to do to me?
"I have often thought about it in quiet hours; it gave me the same
feeling of satisfaction that I have in a chemical experiment, when the
reactions of the various elements take place as they should: what
Eleanore says is your word; what you feel is Eleanore's law."
He is seeing ghosts, cried Daniel, he is tangling up the threads of my
life. What does he mean? Why does he do it?
"Don't neglect what I am telling you! Don't crush that wonderful flower!
The girl is a rare specimen; the rarest I know. You need your whole
heart with all its powers of love and kindness to appreciate her. But if
my words reach you too late, please tear this letter into shreds, and
get the whole idea out of your mind as soon and completely as possible."
"Come, let's eat," said Gertrude, as she entered the room with a dish of
pickled herring.
Eleanore was sitting on the sofa looking at Daniel quizzically. He was
lost in thought.
Daniel looked up, and studied the two women as if they were the figures
of a hallucination: the one in dark red, the other in dark blue; minor
and major keys. The two stood side by side, and yet so far removed from
each other: they were the two poles of his world.