During a rehearsal of "Traviata," Daniel flew into a rage at Fraeulein
Varini: "Listen, pay attention to your intonation, and keep in time.
It's enough to make a man lose his mind! What are you squeaking up at
the gallery for? You're supposed to be singing a song, and not whining
for a little bit of cheap applause."
The lady stepped out to the foot-lights with heaving bosom. Her offended
dignity created something like the spread tail of a peacock about her
hips: "How dare you?" she exclaimed: "I give you your choice: You can
apologise or leave this place. Whatever you do, you are going to become
acquainted with the power I have."
Daniel folded his arms, let his eyes roam over the members of the
orchestra, and said: "Good-bye, gentlemen. Since it is the director's
place to choose between me and this lady, there is no doubt whatever but
that my term of usefulness in this position is up. And moreover, in an
institution where meat is more valuable than music, I feel that I am
quite superfluous."
The other singers had come running out from the wings, and were
standing crowded together on the stage looking down at the orchestra.
When Daniel laid down his baton and walked away, every member of the
orchestra rose as one man to his feet. It was a voluntary and almost
overwhelming expression of speechless admiration. Though they had never
loved this man, though they had regarded him as an evil, alien kill-joy,
who interfered with their easy-going habits as musicians in that town,
they nevertheless respected his energy, admired the nobility of his
intentions, and at least had a vague idea of his genius.
Fraeulein Varini went into hysterics. The director was called in. He
promised Fraeulein Varini immediate redress, and wrote a letter to Daniel
requesting that he offer an apology.
Daniel replied in a brief note that he had no thought of changing his
plans as announced when he left the building. He remarked that it was
quite impossible for him to get along with Fraeulein Varini, that either
he or she would have to quit, and that since she intended to remain he
must consider his resignation as submitted and accepted.
That evening, as he was sitting at the table with Eleanore, he told her,
after a long silence and in very few words, what had happened. Her
response to him was a look of astonishment; that was all.
"Oh, it was the only thing I could do," said Daniel, without looking up
from his plate; "I was so heartily sick of the whole business."
"What are you going to live on, you and your child?" asked Eleanore.
His eye became even darker and harsher: "You know, God who makes the
lilies grow in the fields ... I can't quote that old proverb exactly, my
familiarity with the Bible is nothing to boast of."
That was all they said. The window was open; there was a mysterious
pulsing in the earth; the warm air had a disagreeable taste, somewhat
like that of sweet oil.
When the clock in the tower struck ten, Eleanore got up and said
good-night.
"Good-night!" replied Daniel, with bowed head.
V
That is the way it was now every evening between the two; for during the
day they scarcely saw each other.
Daniel would sit perfectly still for hours at a time and brood.
He could not forget. He could not forget the burning, smoking border of
the dress; nor the shoes that had some street mud on them; nor the face
with the pinched upper lip, the dishevelled hair, the nervously knitted
brow.
Under the linen in the clothes press he had found the silver buckle he
had given her. "Why did she hide it there?" he asked himself. The
condition of her soul when she opened the press and put the buckle in it
became vivid, real; it became blended with his own soul, a part of his
own being.
Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room;
and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a
face without flesh.
"Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?" This was the question that
came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: "I will
be your mother made young again." And that other one, too: "I, too, am a
living creature."
He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had
carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he
would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or
fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits
of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock
them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.
She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each passing
hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or
discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He
recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against
his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable
mystery.
It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was
it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in
the realisation of accumulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought
of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a
reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form
over this earth.
It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel.
And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician.
Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows;
it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from
the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for
yesterday and storms to-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he
has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His
thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and
the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails
to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love;
he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in
the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things,
understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being
deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.
Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said
was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made
eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress,
the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now
the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and
enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once
been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present
by the brightness of visions.
He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side
of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black
frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a
needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could
see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed,
or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden
become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning,
always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening
along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he
remembered--it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the
myrtle wreath on her head--gave the impulse to the stirring _presto_ in
the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" he sketched on awakening
from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect
repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.
But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these
conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When
the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay
nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from
himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping
melody of the twenty-second Psalm arose in his mind, he trembled from
head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was
in the dead of night. The recurring bass figure of the _presto_ sounded
to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal
words: "Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!" And he did hold
his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked
its way through the ice-locked region into which a passionate spell that
was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.
He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation
widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not
challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came
to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never
were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the
remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them
in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a
man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him
as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother
or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.
He came on this account to cherish a feeling of superb disgust for
shrewd dealers who were carried along on the wings of fashion. He took a
dislike to anything that was famous; for fame smelled of and tasted to
him like money. He shuddered at the mere thought of the chaos that
arises from opinions and judgments; the disputes as to the merits of
different schools and tendencies made him ill; he could not stand the
perambulating virtuosos of all zones and nations, the feathers they
manage to make fly, the noise they evoke, the truths they proclaim, the
lies they wade about in and make a splash. He stood aghast at the
mention of a concert hall or a theatre; he flew into a reasoned rage
when he heard a neighbour playing a piano; he despised the false
devotion of the masses, and scorned their impotent, imbecile transports.
All their music smelled of and tasted to him like money.
He had bought the biographies of the great masters. From them he
familiarised himself with their distress and poverty; he read of the
petty attitudes and fatuous mediocrity that stood deaf and dumb in the
presence of immortal genius. But one day he chanced to read that
Mozart's body had been buried in a pauper's grave. He hurled the book
from him with an oath that he would never again touch a work of that
sort. The mordant smoke of misanthropy blew into the fire of
idolisation; he did not wish to see any one; he left the city, and
found peace only after he had reached a lonely, unfrequented place in
the forest, where he felt he was out of the reach of human feet and safe
from the eyes of men.
At night he would walk rapidly through the streets; his head was always
bowed. If he became tired, he betook himself to some unknown cafe where
he was sure he would not meet any of his acquaintances. If some one whom
he knew met him on the street, he did not speak; if any one spoke to
him, he was blatant and bizarre in his replies, and hastened off as
rapidly as he could, with some caustic bit of intended wit on his
loosened tongue.
To enter the room where Philippina and the child were required much
effort; at first he was able to do it only with pronounced aversion.
Later he came somehow to be touched by the form and actions of the
child: he would come in a few times each day for a minute or two only,
take it up in his arms, have it poke its tiny hands into his face or
even jerk at his nose glasses; he listened with undivided interest to
its baby talk. Philippina would stand in the corner in the meanwhile,
with her eyes on the floor and her mouth closed. He became painfully
aware of his obligations to her because of her inexplicable fidelity to
him, and knew that he would never be able to reward her for her unique
and faithful assistance. He was grieved at the same time to see the
child so motherless, so utterly without the attention that ennobles. The
child's bright eyes, its outstretched arms hurt him: he feared the
feelings slumbering even then in its breast, and was driven away by the
thought of what might happen in the future.
One morning in August he arose with the sun, went to the kitchen and got
his own breakfast, took his walking stick, and left the house. He wanted
to go to Eschenbach on foot.
He walked the entire day, making only very short stops for rest. At noon
the heat became intense; he asked a peasant, who chanced to drive up in
his hay wagon, if he might ride a little. He had no definite end in
view, no plan. Something drew him on; what it was he did not know.
When he finally reached the little town it was late at night; the moon
was shining. There was not a soul on the street. The windows of his
mother's house were all dark. He climbed up the steps, and sat down as
close to the front door as was physically possible. He imagined he could
hear his mother and the child she had in her care breathing.
It seemed so strange to him that his mother knew nothing of his
presence. If she had known he was there, she would have unlocked the
door and looked at him in astonishment. And if he had not felt like
talking, he would have been obliged to lay his head in her lap and weep.
Nothing else was possible; he could not speak. And yet the fear lest he
talk, lest he be forced to tell everything, took such firm hold on him
that he decided to start back home without letting his mother know that
he had been there and without having seen either her or the child. The
peculiar restlessness that had driven him away from his home and
impelled him to go on this unusual journey was silenced as soon as he
sat in the shadow of his mother's little house.
But he was so tired that he soon fell asleep. He dreamed that the child
and the old lady were standing before him, that the former had a great
bunch of grapes in her hand and the latter a shovel and was shovelling
up the earth, her face revealing a soul of sorrows. Eva seemed to him to
be much more beautiful than she had been a year ago; he felt drawn to
the child by an uncontrollable power and a painful love that stood in a
most unusual relation to what his mother was doing. The longer his
mother shovelled in the earth the heavier his heart became, but he could
not say anything; he felt as if a glorious song were pouring forth from
his soul, a song such as he had never heard in his life. Enraptured by
its beauty, he woke up. At first he thought he could still hear it, but
it was only the splashing of the water in the Wolfram fountain.
The moon was high in the heavens. Daniel went over to the fountain just
as the night watchman came along, blew his trumpet and sang: "Listen,
all men, I wish to tell that it has struck two from the town-hall bell."
The watchman noticed the lonely man standing by the fountain, was
startled at first, but then continued on his rounds, repeating from time
to time the words of his official song.
Often as a child Daniel had read the inscription on the base of the
Wolfram figure. Now he read the words, irradiated by the light of the
moon, and they had a totally different meaning:
Water gives to the trees their life,
And makes with fertile vigour rife
All creatures of the world.
By water all our eyes are purled;
It washes clean man's very soul
And makes it like an angel, whole.
Simple words, but Daniel read them in the light of a full experience,
dipped his hands in the basin, and rubbed them over his eyes drunk with
sleep; then casting one more glance at his mother's house, he turned in
the direction of the road leading away from the town.
Out in the fields it was too damp for him to lie down to rest. Near an
isolated farm house he found a hay rick, went up to it, and lay down.