XI

Driven by the torment of her soul, Eleanore had gone to Martha Ruebsam's only to hear that her father had been there three hours earlier. From the confused and embarrassed conduct of her friend she learned that her father had made a request of Judge Ruebsam, and a fruitless one at that.

Then she stood for a while on one of the leading streets, and stared in bewilderment at the throngs of people surging by. It was all so cruelly real.

She thought of whom she might go to next. A wave of purple flashed across her face as she thought of Eberhard. Involuntarily she made a passionate, deprecating gesture, as if she were saying: No, no, not to him! The first ray of this hope was also the last. Her conscience struck her; but she was helpless. Here was a feeling impervious to reason; armed ten times over against encouragement. Anyhow, he was not at home. She thought of this with a sigh of relief.

Would Daniel go to the Baroness? No; that could not be thought of for a minute.

She could no longer endure the city nor the people in it. She walked through the park out into the country. She could not stand the sight of the sky or the distant views; she turned around. She came back to The Fuell, entered the Carovius house, and rang Frau Benda's bell. She knew the old lady was away, and yet, as if quite beside herself, she rang four times. If Benda would only come; if the good friend were only sitting in his room and could come to the door.

But there was not a stir. From the first floor the sounds of a piano floated out the window; it was being played in full chords. Down in the court Caesar was howling.

She started back home with beating heart. At the front gate she saw Philippina.

"I have heard all about your misfortune," said Philippina in her shrill voice. "Nobody can help you but me."

"You? You can help?" stammered Eleanore. The whole square began to move, it seemed, before her.

"Word of honour—I can. I must simply have a talk with Daniel first. Let's lose no time. Is he upstairs?"

"I think he is. If not, I will get him."

"Let's go up, then."

They went up the stairs.

XII

Jason Philip had been invited to a sociable evening in the Shufflers' Club. He was now enjoying his siesta after his banquet by reading an editorial in the Kurier. One of Bismarck's addresses had been so humorously commented on that every now and then Jason Philip emitted a malevolent snarl of applause.

He had brought a lemon along home with him; it was lying on a plate before him, sliced and covered with sugar. From time to time he would reach over, take a piece and stick it in his mouth. He smacked his tongue with the display of much ceremony of his kind, and licked his lips after swallowing a piece. His two sons gaped at his hand with greedy eyes and likewise licked their lips.

Willibald was groaning over an algebraic equation. In his pale, pimpled face were traces of incapability and bad humour. Markus, owing to his physical defect, was not allowed to study by artificial light. He helped his mother shell the peas, and in order to make her angry at Philippina, kept making mean remarks about her staying out so long.

Just as the last piece of the lemon disappeared behind Jason Philip's moustache, the door bell rang.

"There is a man out there," said Markus, who had gone to the door and was now standing on the threshold, stupidly staring with his one remaining eye.

Jason Philip stretched his neck. Then he got up. He had recognised Daniel standing in the half-lighted hall.

"I have something to say to you," said Daniel, as he entered the room. His eyes gazed on the walls and at the few cheap, ugly, banal objects that hung on them: a newspaper-holder with embroidered ribbons; a corner table on which stood a beer mug representing the fat body of a monk; an old chromic print showing a volunteer taking leave of his big family as he starts for the front. These things appealed to Daniel somewhat as an irrational dream. Then, taking a deep breath, he fixed his eyes on Jason Philip. In his mind's eye he looked back over many years; he saw himself standing at the fountain in Eschenbach. Round about him glistened the stones and cross beams of the houses. Jason Philip was hurrying by at a timid distance. There was bitterness in his face: he seemed to be fleeing from the world, the sun, men, and music.

"I have something to say to you," he repeated.

Theresa felt that the worst of her forebodings were about to be fulfilled. With trembling knees she arose. She did not dare turn her eyes toward the place in the room where Daniel was standing. She did not see, she merely sensed Jason Philip as he beckoned to her and his sons to leave the room. She took Markus by the hand and Willibald by the coat-sleeve, and marched out between the two.

"What's the news?" asked Jason Philip, as he crossed his arms and looked at the pile of beans on the table. "You have a—what shall I say?—a very impulsive way about you. It is a way that reminds me of the fact that we have a law in this country against disturbing the peace of a private family. Your stocks must have gone to the very top of the market recently. Well, tell me, what do you want?"

He cleared his throat, and beat a tattoo on the elbows of his crossed arms with his fingers.

Daniel felt that his peace was leaving him; his own arm seemed to him like a shot-gun; it itched. But thus far he could not say a thing. The question he had in mind to put to Jason Philip was of such tremendous import that he could not suppress his fear that he might make a mistake or become too hasty.

"Where is the money my father gave you?" came the words at last, rolling from his lips in a tone of muffled sullenness.

The colour left Jason Philip's face; his arms fell down by his side.

"The money? Where it's gone to? That your father—?" He stuttered in confusion. He wanted to gain time; he wanted to think over very carefully what he should say and what he could conceal. He cast one glance at Daniel, and saw that it was not possible to expect mercy from him. He was afraid of Daniel's bold, lean, sinewy face.

He nearly burst with anger at the thought that this young man, for whom he, Jason Philip, was once the highest authority, should have the unmitigated audacity to call him to account. In this whole situation he pictured himself as the immaculate man of honour that he wished he was and thought he was in the eyes of his fellow citizens. At the same time he was nearly stifled with fear lest he lose the money which he had long since accustomed himself to regard as his own, with which he had worked and speculated, and which by this time was as much a part of his very being as his own house, his business, his projects. He buried his hands in his pockets and snorted. His cowardly dread of the consequences of fraud forced him into a half confession of fraud, but in his words lay the feverish pettifogging of the frenzied financier who fights for Mammon even unto raging and despair.

"The money is here; of course it is. Where did you think it was? My books will show exactly how much of it has found its way over to Eschenbach in the shape of interest and loans. My books are open to inspection; the accounts have been kept right up to this very day. I have made considerable progress in life. A man who has lived as I have lived does not need to fear a living soul. Do you imagine for a minute that Jason Philip Schimmelweis can be frightened by a little thing like this? No, no, it will take more of a man than you to do that. Who are you anyhow? What office do you hold? What authority have you? With what right do you come rushing into the four walls of my home? Do you perhaps imagine that your artistic skill invests you with special privileges? I don't give a tinker's damn for your art. The whole rubbish is hardly worth spitting on. Music? Idiocy. Who needs it? Any man with the least vestige of self-respect never has anything to do with music except on holidays and when the day's work is done. No, no, you can't impress me with your music. You're not quite sane! And if you think that you are going to get any money out of me, you are making the mistake of your life. It is to laugh. If a man wants money from me, he has to come to me at least with a decent hair-cut and show me at least a little respect. He can't come running up like a kid on the street who says: 'Mumma, gif me a shent; I want to buy some tandy.' No, no, son, you can't get anything out of me that way."

The smile that appeared on Daniel's face filled Jason Philip with mortal terror. He stopped his talk with incriminating suddenness. He decided to hold in and to promise Daniel a small payment. He hoped that by handing over a few hundred marks he could assure himself the desired peace of mind.

But Daniel never felt so certain of himself in his life. He thought of the hardships he had had to endure, and his heart seemed as if it were on fire. At the same time he was ashamed of this man and disgusted with him.

He said quietly and firmly: "I must have three thousand seven hundred marks by ten o'clock to-morrow morning. It is a question of saving an honourable and upright family from ruin. If this sum is handed over to me promptly, I will waive all rights to the balance that is due me, in writing. The receipt will be filled out ready for delivery in my house. If the money is not in my hands by the stipulated time, we will meet each other in another place and in the presence of people who will impress you."

He turned to go.

Jason Philip's mouth opened wide, and he pressed his fist to the hole made thereby. "Three thousand seven hundred marks?" he roared. "The man is crazy. Completely crazy is the man. Man, man, you're crazy," he cried in order to get Daniel to stop. "Are you crazy, man? Do you want to ruin me? Don't you hear, you damned man?"

Daniel looked at Jason Philip with a shudder. The door to the adjoining room sprang open, and Theresa rushed in. Her face was ashen pale; there were just two little round red spots on her cheek bones. "You are going to get that money, Daniel," she howled hysterically, "or I am going to jump into the Pegnitz, I'll jump into the Pegnitz and drown myself."

"Woman, you ..." he gnashed his teeth, and seized her by the shoulder.

She sank down on a chair, and, seizing her hair, continued: "He is everywhere, and wherever he is, our dear Gottfried, he is looking at me. He stands before the clothes press, at the cupboard, by my bedside, nods, exhorts, raises his finger, finds no peace in his grave, and does not let me sleep; he has not let me sleep all these years."

"Now listen, you had better think of your children," snapped Jason Philip.

Theresa let her hands fall in her lap, and looked down at the floor: "All that nice money, that nice money," she cried. Then again, this time with a face distorted beyond easy recognition and at the top of her voice: "But you'll get it, Daniel; I'll see to it that you get it: I'll bring it to you myself." Then again, in a gentle voice of acute lamentation: "All that nice money."

Daniel was almost convulsed. It seemed to him as if he had never rightly understood the word money before, as if the meaning of money had never been made clear to him until he heard Theresa say it.

"To-morrow morning at ten o'clock," he said.

Theresa nodded her head in silence, and raised her hands with outstretched fingers as if to protect herself from Jason Philip. Willibald and Markus had crept under the door. The gate must not have been closed, for just then Philippina came in. She had come over with Daniel, but had remained outside on the street. She could not wait any longer; she was too anxious to see the consequences of her betrayal.

She looked around with affected embarrassment. Was it merely the sight of her that aroused Jason Philip's wrath? Was it the half-cowardly, half-cynical smile that played around her lips? Or was it the cumulative effect of blind anger, long pent up and eager to be discharged, that made Jason Philip act as he did? Or did he have a vague suspicion of what Philippina had done? Suffice it to say, he leapt up to her and struck her in the face with his fist.

She never moved a muscle.

Indignant at the rudeness of his conduct, Daniel stepped between Jason Philip and his daughter. But the venomous scorn in the girl's eyes stifled his sympathy; he turned to the door, and went away in silence.

"All that nice money," murmured Theresa.

XIII

When Daniel told the Jordans that the money would be there the next morning, Jordan looked at him first unbelievingly, and then wept like a child.

Eleanore reached Daniel both her hands without saying a word. Gertrude, who was lying on the sofa, straightened up, smiled gently, and then lay down again. Daniel asked her what was the matter. Eleanore answered for her, saying that she had not felt well since some time in the afternoon. "She must go to bed, she is tired," added Eleanore.

"Well, come then," said Daniel, and helped Gertrude to get up. But her legs were without strength; she could not walk. She looked first at Daniel and then at Eleanore; she was plainly worried about something.

"You won't care, will you, Father, if I go home with them?" asked Eleanore in a tone of flattery.

"No, go, child," said Jordan, "it will do me good to be alone for a few minutes."

Daniel and Eleanore took Gertrude between them. At the second landing in their apartment, Daniel took Gertrude in his arms, and carried her into the bedroom. She did not want him to help her take off her clothes; she sent him out of the room. A cup of warm milk was all she said she wanted.

"There is no milk there," said Eleanore to Daniel, as she entered the living room. He stopped suddenly, and looked at her as if he had awakened from a fleeting dream: "I'll run down to Tetzel Street and get a half a litre," said Eleanore. "I'll leave the hall door open, so that Gertrude will not be frightened when I come in."

She had already hastened out; but all of a sudden she turned around, and said with joyful gratitude, her blue eyes swimming in the tears of a full soul: "You dear man."

His face took on a scowl.

There was a fearful regularity in his walking back and forth. The chains of the hanging lamp shook. The flame sent forth a thin column of smoke; he did not notice it. "How long will she be gone?" he thought in his unconscious, drunken impatience. He felt terribly deserted.

He stepped out into the hall, and listened. There hovered before him in the darkness the face of Philippina. She showed the same scornful immobility that she showed when her father struck her in the face. He stepped to the railing, and sat down on the top step; a fit at once of weakness and aimless defiance came over him. He buried his face in his hands; he could still hear Theresa saying, "All that nice money."

There were shadows everywhere; there was nothing but night and shadows.

Eleanore, light-hearted and light-footed, returned at last. When she saw him, she stopped. He arose, and stretched out his arms as if to take the milk bottle. That is the way she interpreted his gesture, and handed it to him in surprise. He, however, set it down on the landing beside him. The light from the living room shone on it and made it look sparkling white. Then he drew Eleanore to him, threw his arms around her, and kissed her on the mouth.

Merely a creature of man, only a woman, nothing but heart and breath, all longing and forgetting, forgetting for just one moment, finding herself for a moment, knowing her own self for a moment—she pressed close up to him. But her hands were folded between her breast and his, and thus separated their bodies.

Then she broke away from him, wrung her hands, looked up at him, pressed close up to him again, wrung her hands again—it was all done in absolute silence and with an almost terrible grace and loveliness.

Everything was now entirely different from what it had been, or what she had formerly imagined it to be; there were depths to everything now. She lost herself; she ceased to exist for a moment; darkness enveloped her much-disciplined heart; she entered upon a second existence, an existence that had no similarity with the first.

To this existence she was now bound; she had succumbed to it: the law of nature had gone into effect. But the glass case had been shattered; it was in pieces. She stood there unprotected, even exposed, so to speak, to men, no longer immune to their glances, an accessible prey to their touch.

She went into the kitchen, and heated the milk. Daniel returned to the living room. His veins were burning, his heart was hammering. He had no sense of appreciation of the time that had passed. When Eleanore came into the room, he began to tremble.

She came up to him, and spoke to him in passionate sadness: "Have you heard about Gertrude? Don't you know, really? She is with child—your wife."

"I did not know it," whispered Daniel. "Did she tell you?"

"Yes, just now."



TRES FACIUNT COLLEGIUM

I

The habitues of the reserved table at the Crocodile were all reasonably well informed of the events that had recently taken place in the homes of Inspector Jordan and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. Details were mentioned that would make it seem probable that the cracks in the walls and the key-holes of both houses had been entertaining eavesdroppers.

Some refused to believe that Jason Philip had made restitution for the money young Jordan had embezzled. For, said Degen, the baker, Schimmelweis is a hard-fisted fellow, and whoever would try to get money out of him would have to be in the possession of extraordinary shrewdness.

"But he has already paid it," said Gruendlich, the watchmaker. He knew he had; he knew that the wife of the bookseller had gone over to Nothafft's on Tuesday afternoon; that she had a heap of silver in a bag; and that when she came back home she took to bed, and had been ill ever since.

Kitzler, the assistant postmaster, felt there was something wrong here; and if there was not, you would simply have to assume that Nothafft, the musician, was a dangerous citizen, who had somehow managed to place the breast of his uncle vis-a-vis a revolver.

"And you know, Nothafft is to be made Kapellmeister at the City Theatre," remarked the editor Weibezahl, the latest member of the round table. "His appointment is to be made public in a few days."

"What! Kapellmeister! You don't say so! That will make Andreas Doederlein the saddest man in ten states."

Herr Carovius, whose mouth was just then hanging on his beer glass, laughed so heartily that the beer went down his Sunday throat; he was seized with a coughing spell. Herr Korn slapped him on the back.

It was a shame that such a bad actor as Nothafft had to be endured in the midst of people who lived peaceful and law-abiding lives. This lament came from Herr Kleinlein, who had been circuit judge now for some time. He was anxious to know whether all the tales that were circulating concerning Nothafft were true.

Well, he was told, a great many things are said about Nothafft, but it is difficult to get at the truth. They appealed to the apothecary Pflaum, on the ground that his assistant knew the musician and might be able to give them some definite information.

Herr Pflaum took on an air as if he knew a great deal but was under obligations not to tell. Yes, yes, he said rather perfunctorily, he had heard that some one had said that Nothafft was running a pretty questionable domestic establishment; that he had a rather unsavoury past; and that there was some talk about his neglecting his wife.

The deuce you say! Why, they were married only a short while ago. Yes, but there was a rumour to the effect that there was a woman in the case. Who could it be? Ahem! Well-ah, it would be a good idea to be cautious about mentioning names. Good Lord, why cautious? Why not straight out with the information any one chanced to be fortunate enough to have? Is it not a question of protecting one's own wife and daughters?

And so this slanderous babble rattled on. There was something unfathomable in their hatred of the musician. They were just as agreed on this point as they would have been if Daniel had broken open their strong boxes, smashed their windows, and betrayed their honour and dignity to public ridicule.

They did not know what they should do about him. They passed by him as one would pass by a bomb that might or might not explode.

II

When Herr Carovius was alone, he picked up the paper, and read the account of a mine explosion in Silesia. The number of killed satisfied him. The description of the women as they stood at the top of the shaft, wept, wrung their hands, and called out the names of their husbands, filled him with the same agreeable sensation that he experienced when he listened to the melancholy finale of a Chopin nocturne.

But he could not forget the expression on Herr Pflaum's face when he told how Nothafft was neglecting his wife. It had been the expression that comes out, so to speak, from between the curtains of a sleeping room: something was up, make no mistake, something was going on.

For quite a while Herr Carovius had harboured the suspicion that there was something wrong. Twice he had met Daniel and Eleanore walking along the street in the twilight, talking to each other in a very mysterious way. Things were going on behind Herr Carovius's back which he could not afford to overlook.

Since the day Eleanore had disentangled the cord of his nose glasses from the button of his top coat, the picture of the young girl had been indelibly stamped on his mind. He could still see the beautiful curvature of her young bosom as she raised her arm.

A year and a half after this incident, Herr Carovius was going through some old papers. He chanced upon an unfinished letter which Eberhard von Auffenberg had written to Eleanore but had never posted. Eberhard had come to Nuremberg at the time to transact some business connected with the negotiation of a new loan; he had left his hotel, and Herr Carovius had had to wait for him a long while. This time he had spent in looking over the unsealed documents of the incautious young Baron.

Then it was that he discovered the letter. What words! And oh, the passion! Herr Carovius would never have believed that the reserved misanthrope was capable of such a display of emotion. He felt that Eberhard had disclosed to him the most secret chambers of his heart. He was terrified at the voluptuousness revealed to him by the unveiling of the mystery of his soul. They are human beings after all, those members of the nobility, he exclaimed with a feeling of personal triumph. They throw themselves away; they meet some slippery imp, and fall; they lose control of themselves as soon as they hear a skirt rustle.

But what concerned the Baron in this case concerned also Herr Carovius. A passion that had taken possession of the Baron had to be guarded, studied, and eventually shared by Herr Carovius himself.

Herr Carovius's loneliness had gradually robbed him of his equanimity. Suppressed impulses were stifling his mind with the luxuriant growths of a vivid and vicious imagination. The adventures into which he had voluntarily plunged in order to make sure of his control over Eberhard had almost ruined him. The net he had spread for the helplessly fluttering bird now held him himself entangled in its meshes. The world to him was a body full of wounds on which he was battening his Neronic lusts. But it was at the same time a tapestry, with bright coloured pictures which could be made living and real by a magic formula, and this formula he had not yet been able to discover.

At the insinuations of the apothecary his fancy took on new life: he was not a man in whose soul old emotions died out; his lusts never became extinct. Lying on the sofa, taking his midday siesta, he would picture the figure of Eleanore dancing around him in diminutive form. When he sat at the piano and played an etude, he imagined he saw Daniel standing beside him criticising his technique—and doing it with much show of arrogance. When he went out of evenings, he saw Nothafft displayed on all the signs, while every demi-monde bore Eleanore's features.

It seemed to him in time that Eleanore Jordan was his property; that he had a right to her. His life, he felt, was full of lamentable privations: other people had everything, he had nothing. Others committed crimes; all he could do was to make note of the crimes. And no man could become either satiated or rich from merely taking the criminal incidents of other people's lives into account.

At midnight he put on his sleeping gown, took a seat before the mirror, and read until break of day a novel in which a man fifty years old has a secret and successful love affair with a young woman. As he read this novel he knew that something was going on. And he knew that out there in a certain house on AEgydius Place something was also going on. Make no mistake, something was up.

He saw trysts on unlighted stairways. He saw people coming to mutual understandings by a certain pressure of the hand and adulterous signals. That is the way they did it; that is the way Benda and Marguerite had done it. His old hate was revived. He transferred his hate, but also his hope, to music. Through music he was to build a bridge to Daniel and Eleanore. He wanted to give them the advantage of his insight, his tricks, his experience, simply in order that he might be on hand when they committed the gruesome deed; so that he might not be cut off from them by an impenetrable wall and be tortured in consequence by an incorporeal jealousy; he wanted to be one with them, to feast his eye and reach forth his empty, senescent hand.

"I am," he said to himself, "of the same flesh and blood as that man; in me too there is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I have, to be sure," he said to himself, "despised women, for they are despicable. But let some woman come forward and show me that she is fit for anything more than to increase by two or three the number of idiots with which the world is already overcrowded, and I will do penance, whole and complete, and then offer her my services as a knight."

He no longer slept or ate; nor could he do anything that was in any way rational. In a belated sexual outburst, a second puberty, his imagination became inflamed by a picture which he adorned with all the perfections of both soul and body.

He heard that one of Daniel's works was to be played before invited guests at the home of Baroness von Auffenberg. He wired to Eberhard, and asked him to get him an invitation. The reply was a negative one. In his rage he could have murdered the messenger boy. He then wrote to Daniel, and, boasting of what he had already done for him, begged Daniel to see to it that he was among the guests at the recital. He received a printed card from the Baroness, on which she had expressed the hope that she might be able to greet him on a certain day.

He was in the seventh heaven. He decided to pay Daniel a visit, and to thank him for his kindness.

III

"The only thing to do is to leave the city, to go far, far away from here," thought Eleanore, on that evening that was so different from any other evening of her life.

While she was combing her hair, she was tempted to take the scissors and cut it off just to make herself ugly. In the night she went to the window to look for the stars. If it only had not happened, if it only were a dream, a voice within her cried.

As soon as it turned grey in the morning, she got up. She hastened through the deserted streets, just as she had done yesterday, out to the suburbs. But everything was different. Tree and bush looked down upon her with stern reproachfulness. The mists hung low; but the hazy grey cold of the early morning was like a bath to her. Later the sun broke through; primroses glistened with gold on the meadow. If it could only have been a dream, she thought in silence.

When she came home, her father had already received the news about the money: it had been paid to Diruf; Daniel had taken it to him.

Jordan remained in his room the whole day. And on the following day he kept to himself except while at dinner. He sat at the table with bowed head; he had nothing to say. Eleanore went to his door from time to time to see if she could hear him. There was not a sound; the house sang with solitude.

Jordan had requested the landlord to sublet the house before his lease had expired: he felt that it was too large and expensive for him in the present state of his affairs. The landlord approved of the idea. In the house where Daniel and Gertrude were living there were two vacant rooms in the attic. Gertrude suggested to her father that it would be well for him to take them. Jordan agreed with her.

Eleanore began to think the situation over: if Father moves into those rooms, I can leave him. She learned from Gertrude, who came now to see her father every other day, that Daniel had received the appointment as Kapellmeister at the City Theatre. Eleanore could carry out her plans then with a clear conscience, for her brother-in-law and her sister were getting along quite well at present.

She recalled some conversations she had had with M. Riviere, who had advised her to go to Paris. Since Christmas, when he was invited to be present at the distribution of the presents, he had been coming to Jordan's quite frequently to talk French with Eleanore. This was in accord with her express desire.

One afternoon she went to visit M. Riviere. He was living in the romantic place up by the gardener on Castle Hill. His room had a balcony that was completely overgrown with ivy and elder, while in the background the trees and bushes of the city moat formed an impenetrable maze of green. The spring air floated into the room in waves. As Eleanore made her business known, she fixed her enchanted eyes on a bouquet of lilies of the valley that stood on the table in a bronze vase.

M. Riviere took a handful of them, and gave them to her. They had not been cut; they had been pulled up by the roots. Eleanore laughed happily at the fragrance.

M. Riviere said he was just about to write to his mother in Paris, and as she was so familiar with the city, she could be of great help to Eleanore.

Eleanore stepped out on the balcony. "The world is beautiful," she thought, and smiled at the fruitless efforts of a tiny beetle to climb up a perpendicular leaf. "Perhaps it was after all merely a dream," she thought, and thereby consoled herself.

When she returned, Daniel was at her father's. The two men were sitting in the dark.

Eleanore lighted the lamp. Then she filled a glass with water, and put the lilies of the valley in it.

"Daniel wants to know why you never visit them any more," said Jordan, weak and distraught as he now always was. "I told him you were busy at present with great plans of your own. Well, what does the Frenchman think about it?"

Eleanore answered her father's question in a half audible voice.

"Go wherever you want to go, child," said Jordan. "You have been prepared for an independent life in the world for a long while; there is no doubt about that. God forbid that I should put any hindrances in your way." He got up with difficulty, and turned toward the door of his room. Taking hold of the latch, he stopped, and continued in his brooding way: "It is peculiar that a man can die by inches in a living body; that a man can have the feeling that he's no longer a part of the present; and that he can no longer play his role, keep up with his own people, grasp what is going on about him, or know whether what is to come is good or evil. It is fearful when a man reaches that stage, fearful—fearful!"

He left the room, shaking his head. To Daniel his words sounded like a voice from the grave.

They had been silent for a long while, he and Eleanore. Suddenly he asked gruffly: "Are you serious about going to Paris?"

"Of course I am," she said, "what else can I do?"

He sprang up, and looked angrily into her face: "One has to be ashamed of one's self," he said, "human language becomes repulsive. Don't you have a feeling of horror when you think? Don't you shudder when you reflect on that caricature known as the heart, or the soul, or whatever it may be called?"

"I don't understand you, Daniel," said Eleanore. She would never have considered it possible that he would look with disfavour on her contrition and the decision that had sprung from it. Then it had not after all been the flash of a solitary second? Had she not hoped and expected to hear a self-accusation from him that would make her forget all and forgive herself? Where was she? In what world or age was she living?

"Do you believe that I merely wanted to enjoy a diverting and momentary side-step?" Daniel continued, measuring her with his eyes from head to foot. "Do you believe that it is possible to jest with the most sacred laws of nature? You have had a good schooling, I must say; you do your teachers honour. Go! I don't need you. Go to Paris, and let me degenerate!"

He stepped to the door. Then he turned, and took the lamp, which she had removed from the holder when she lighted it. Holding the lamp in his right hand, he walked close up to her. Her eyes closed involuntarily. "I simply wanted to see whether it was really you," he said with passionate contempt. "Yes, it is you," he said scornfully, "it is you." With that he placed the lamp on the table.

"I don't understand you, Daniel," she said softly. She looked around for some object to rest her eyes on.

"So I see. Good night."

"Daniel!"

But he had already gone. The hall door closed with a bang. The house sang with solitude.

The green threadbare sofa, the old, old smoke stains on the whitewashed ceiling, the five rickety chairs that reminded her of so many decrepit old men, the mirror with the gilded angel of stucco at the top—all these things were so tiring, so irksome, so annoying: they were like underbrush in the forest.

Little brother! Little brother!

IV

Three evenings of the week were devoted to opera, the others to drama.

The first Kapellmeister was a middle-aged man whose curly hair made him the idol of all flappers. He was lazy, uncultivated, and his name was Lebrecht.

The director was an old stager who referred to the public about as a disrespectful footman refers to his lord. At Daniel's suggestions for improving the repertory, he generally shrugged his shoulders. The operas in which he had the greatest confidence as drawing cards were "The Beggar Student," "Fra Diavolo," "L'Africaine," and "Robert le Diable." The singers and the orchestra were not much better than those of the lamented Doermaul-Wurzelmann troupe. The possibility of arousing them to intensified effort or filling them with a semblance of intelligent enthusiasm for art was even less. Privileges based on length of service and the familiar traditions of indolence made aesthetic innovations unthinkable.

Wherever careworn Philistines and slothful materialists occupy the seats from which art should raise her voice, advancement, progress born of sacrificial application, is out of the question: the most it is reasonable to expect is a bourgeois fulfilment of inescapable duties. In such, cases the flower droops; the dream vanishes; the free-born spirit has the choice of fighting day in and day out against the collective demons of pettiness and mediocrity, or of going down in admitted defeat.

"Stuff the people can easily digest, my dear boy, that is the idea," said the director.

"What are you so excited about? Don't you know these people haven't a musical muscle in their whole soul?" said Lebrecht.

"For nine consecutive years I have been singing F sharp at this opera house, and now here comes a musicien from the backwoods and demands all of a sudden that I sing F!" This was the commentary of Fraeulein Varini, the prima donna whose outstanding bosom had long been a source of human merriment to pit, stall, and gallery.

"Ah, he is a greasy grind determined to arrive," said the first violinist.

"He's a spit-fire," said the lad who beat the big drum, when Daniel threatened to box his ears for a false intonation.

The Baroness had secured a publisher in Leipzig for his cycle of sixteen songs; the compositions were to be brought out at her expense. That did not have the right effect: it was not something, Daniel felt, that he had fought for and won; it was not a case where merit had made rejection impossible. He had the feeling that he was selling his soul and was being paid to do it. Moreover, and worst of all, he had to express his gratitude for this act. The Baroness loved to have somebody thank her for what she had done. She never once suspected that what Daniel wanted was not benefactors, but people who were stirred to the depths of their souls by his creations. The rich cannot sense the feelings of the poor; the higher classes remain out of contact with the lower.

His excitability saved him. In his magnificent solicitude for the mission that is at once the token and the curse of those who are really called, he shut himself off from a world from which the one thing he wanted was bread; bread and nothing else.

After the publication of the songs a review appeared in the Phoenix which had a remarkably realistic ring to the ear of the layman. As a matter of fact it was merely an underhanded attempt at assassination. The thing was signed with a big, isolated "W." Wurzelmann, the little slave, had shot from his ambush.

Other musical journals copied this review. A half dozen people bought the songs; then they were forgotten.

It was no use to hope. The trouble was, he needed bread, just bread.

V

It was often difficult for him to find the peace and quiet necessary for effective work. May brought cold weather; they had to make a fire; the stove smoked; the potter came in and removed the tiles; the room looked like an inferno.

Gertrude was pounding sugar: "Don't be angry at me, Daniel; I must pound the sugar to-day." And she pounded away until the hammer penetrated the paralysed brain of the listener by force of circumstances.

The hinges of the door screeched. "You ought to oil them, Gertrude." Gertrude looked high and low for the oil can, and when she finally found it, she had no feather to use in smearing the oil on. She went over to the chancellor's, and borrowed one from her maid. While she was gone, the milk boiled over and filled the house with a disagreeable stench.

The door bell rang. It was the cobbler; he had come to get the money for the patent leather shoes. The wives of Herr Kirschner and Herr Ruebsam had both said that Daniel must not think of appearing at the coming recital at the Baroness's without patent leather shoes.

"I haven't the money, Gertrude; have you got that much?"

Gertrude went through her chests, and scraped up five marks which she gave the cobbler as a first instalment. The man went away growling; Daniel hid from him.

Gertrude was sitting in the living room making clothes for her baby-to-come. There was a happy expression on her face. Daniel knew that it was a display of maternal joy and expectation, but since he could not share this joy, since indeed he felt a sense of fear at the appearance of the child, her happiness embittered him.

Between the fuchsias in the window stood a robin red-breast; the impish bird had its head turned to one side, and was peeping into the room: "Come out," it chirped, "come out." And Daniel went.

He had an engagement with M. Riviere at the cafe by the market place. Since he no longer saw anything of Eleanore, he wanted to find out how her plans for going to Paris were getting along.

The Frenchman told of the progress he was making in his Caspar Hauser research. In his broken German he told of the murder of body and soul that had been committed in the case of the foundling: "He was a mortal man comme une etoile," he said. "The bourgeoisie crushed him. The bourgeoisie is the racine of all evil."

Daniel never mentioned Eleanore's name. He tried to satisfy himself by the fact that she kept out of his sight. He bit his lips together, and said: I will. But a stronger power in him said, No, you won't. And this stronger power became a beggar. It went around saying, Give me, please, give me!

The billiard balls rattled. A gentleman in a red velvet vest had a quarrel with a shabby looking fellow who had been reading Fliegende Blaetter for the last two hours; he would begin over and over again at the very beginning, and break out into convulsions of laughter every time he came to his favourite jokes.

Daniel was silent; he insisted somehow on remaining silent. M. Riviere wished, for this reason, to hear something about the "Harzreise." By way of starting a discussion he remarked quite timidly that sans musique la vie est insupportable, "There is something about music that reminds one of insanity," he remarked. He said there were nights when he would open a volume of Schubert's or Brahms's songs, leaf through them, read the notes, and hum the melodies simply in order to escape the despair which the conduct of the people about him was emptying into his heart. "Moi, I ought to be, how do you say? stoic; mais I am not. In me there is trop de musique, et c'est le contraire."

Daniel looked at him in astonishment. "Come with me," he said suddenly, got up, and took him by the arm.

They met Eleanore in the hall. She had been up in the new flat with the whitewasher. Her father was to move in the following day.

"Why was all this done so quickly?" asked Daniel, full of a vague happiness that drew special nourishment from the fact that Eleanore was plainly excited.

"Mere chance," she said, and carefully avoided looking at him. "A captain who is being transferred here from Ratisbon is moving in our place. It is a pity to leave the good old rooms. The second-hand dealer is going to get a deal of our stuff; there is no room for it up there in those two cubby holes. How is Gertrude? May I go up and see her for a minute or two?"

"Yes, go right up," said Daniel stiffly; "you can stay and listen if you wish to. I am going to play the Harzreise."

"If I wish to? I almost have a right to; you promised me this long ago."

"She thinks after all that I want to catch her," he thought to himself. "It will be better for me to drop the whole business than to let the idea creep into her stupid skull that my composition is going to make propaganda for our private affairs." With bowed head he ascended the stairs, M. Riviere and Eleanore following along behind. His ears were pricked to hear anything they might say about Paris; they talked about the weather.

As they entered the room Gertrude had the harp between her knees; but she was not playing. Her hands lay on the strings, her head was resting on the frame. "Why haven't you lighted a lamp?" asked Daniel angrily.

She was terrified; she looked at him anxiously. The expression on her face made him conscious of many things that he had kept in the background of his thoughts during his everyday life: her unconditional surrender to him; the magnanimity and nobility of her heart, which was as dependent on his as the mercury in the thermometer is dependent on the atmosphere; her speechless resignation regarding a thousand little things in her life! her wellnigh supernatural ability to enter into the spirit and enjoyment of what he was doing, however much his mind might presume to write De profundis across his creations.

It was on this account that he recognised in her face a serious, far-away warning. At once cowardly and reverential, conscious of his guilt and yet feeling innocent, he went up to her and kissed her on the hair. She leaned her head on his breast, thus causing him to feel, though quite unaware of it herself, the whole weight of the burden she was placing on him.

He told her he was going to play. He said: "I have lost my picture again; I want to try to find it in others."

Gertrude begged him, with a pale face, to be permitted to stay in the living room. She closed the door only partly.

VI

In Goethe's verses entitled "Harzreise im Winter," thoughts lie scattered about like erratic strata in the world of geology, and feelings that are as big and terrible as the flames from burning planets. In Daniel's work the whole of Goethe's prodigious sorrow and solemnity seemed to have been transformed automatically into music.

When, in the second half, the motif of human voices was taken over, when these voices pealed forth first singly, one by one, from the surging sea of tones, and then gathered with ever-increasing avidity, longing, and candour into the great chorus, one had the feeling that without this liberation they would have been stifled in the darkness.

The effect of the pianissimo moaning of the basses before the soprano set in was overwhelming: it was like the vulture which, resting with easy wing on the dark morning cloud, spies around for booty. So was the song meant to be. The trombone solo was a shout of victory: it imparted new life to the sunken orchestra.

Daniel had infinite trouble in making all this wealth of symbolic art clear through song, word, and gesture at the same time that his music was being played.

The work abounded in blends and half tones which stamped it as a child of its age, and still more of ages to come, despite the compact rigidity of its architecture. There was no bared sweetness in it; it was as rough as the bark of a tree; it was as rough as anything that is created with the assurance of inner durability.

Its rhythm was uniform, regular; it provided only for crescendos. There was nothing of the seductive, nothing of the waltz-fever in it. It was in no way cheap; it did not flatter slothful ears. It had no languishing motifs; it was all substance and exterior. The melody was concealed like a hard kernel in a thick shell; and not merely concealed: it was divided, and then the divisions were themselves divided. It was condensed, compressed, bound, and at the same time subterranean. It was created to rise from its depths, rejoice, and overwhelm: "But clothe the lonely one in thy clouds of gold! Enshroud with ivy until the roses bloom again, oh Love, the dampened hair of thy poet!"

The work was written a quarter of a century before its time. It was out of touch with the nerves of its contemporary environment. It could not hope to count upon a prophet or an interpreter. It could not be carried further by the benevolence of congenial champions. It bore the marks of mortal neglect. It was like a bird from the tropics left to die on the icy coasts of Greenland.

But for those who are near in heart there is a fluid in the air that intercedes for the higher truth. M. Riviere and Eleanore scarcely breathed during the recital. Eleanore's big eyes were still: they opened and closed slowly. When Daniel finished, he dried his hot brow with his handkerchief, and then his arms fell limp at his sides. He felt as if the brilliancy of Eleanore's eyes had reached the tips of his hair and had electrified it.

"Enshroud with ivy, until the roses bloom again, oh Love, the dampened hair of thy poet!"

"It is impossible to get an idea of it," murmured Daniel; "the piano is like an instrument of torture."

They were struck by peculiar sounds coming from the living room. They went in, and found Gertrude pale as death, her hands folded across her bosom, sitting on the sofa. She was talking to herself, partly as if in a dream, partly as if she were praying. It was impossible to understand what she was saying. She seemed distant, estranged.

Eleanore hastened to her; Daniel looked at her with a scowl. Just then the bell rang, and M. Riviere went out. There was the sound of a man's voice; it was disagreeable. The door was opened and—Herr Carovius entered.

VII

Herr Carovius bowed in all directions. He wore tan shoes with brass buckles, black trousers, a shiny green coat, and a white cravat that could no longer be called clean. He laid his slouch hat on a chair, and said he would like to beg their pardon if he had called at an inopportune hour. He had come, he said, to thank his dear young master for the aforementioned invitation.

"It seems—yes, it seems," he added, with a droll blinking of his eyes, "that I have in all innocence interrupted the performance of a most interesting production. There is a crowd of people gathered out in front of the house, and I could not forego the pleasure of listening. I hope you will not stop playing the sacrificial festival on my account. What was it, maestro? It wasn't the symphony, was it?"

"Yes, it was the symphony," replied Daniel, who was so amazed at the appearance and conduct of the man that he was really courteous.

"It cost me money to be sure—believe it or not. I had to get an afternoon coat that would do for a Count—latest cut, velvet collar, tails that reached down to my calves. Aristocratic, very!" He stared over Gertrude's head into the corner, and tittered for at least a half a minute.

Nobody said a word. Everybody was dumb, astounded.

"Good lord, social obligations," continued Herr Carovius, "but after all you can't afford to be a backwoodsman. Music is supposed to ennoble a man even externally. By the way, there is a rumour afloat that it is a symphony with chorus. How did you happen upon the idea? The laurels of the Ninth will not let you sleep? I would have thought that you didn't give a damn about classical models. Everybody is so taken up now with musical lullabies, wage-la-wei-a, that kind of stuff, you know. But then I suppose that is only a transition stage, as the fox said when he was being skinned."

He took off his nose glasses, polished them very hastily, fumbled for a while with his cord, and then put them on again. Having gained time in this way, he began to expatiate on the decadence of the arts, asked Daniel whether he had ever heard anything about a certain Hugo Wolf who was being much talked about and who was sitting in darkest Austria turning out songs like a Hottentot, made a number of derogatory remarks about a fountain that was being erected in the city, said that a company of dancers had just appeared at the Cultural Club in a repertory of grotesque pantomimes, remarked that as he was coming over he learned that there was an institution in the city that loaned potato sacks, and that there had just been a fearful fire in Constantinople.

Thereupon he looked first at Daniel, then at M. Riviere, took the snarls of the one and the embarrassment of the other to be encouraging signs for the continuation of his gossip, readjusted his glasses, and sneezed. Then he smoothed out the already remarkably smooth hairs he had left on his head, rubbed his hands as if he were beginning to feel quite at home, and tittered when there was any sign of a stoppage in his asinine eloquence.

At times he would cast a stealthy glance at Gertrude, who would draw back somewhat as the arm of a thief who feels he is being watched. Eleanore did not seem to be present so far as he was concerned: he did not see her. Finally she got up. She was tortured by the interruption of what she had just experienced from the music and by his flat, stale, and unprofitable remarks. Then he got up too, looked at his watch as if he were frightened, asked if he might repeat his visit at another time, took leave of Gertrude with a silly old-fashioned bow, from Daniel with a confidential handshake, and from the Frenchman with uncertain courtesy. Eleanore he again entirely overlooked.

Out in the hall he stopped, nodded several times, and said with an almost insane grin, speaking into the empty air before him: "Auf Wiedersehen, fair one! Auf Wiedersehen, fairest of all! Good-bye, my angel! Forget me not!"

In the room Eleanore whispered in a heavy, anxious tone: "What was that? What was that?"

VIII

Philippina Schimmelweis came to help Eleanore with the moving. At first Eleanore was quite surprised; then she became accustomed to having her around and found her most helpful. Jordan took no interest in anything that was going on. The last of all his hope seemed to be shattered by the fact that he was to move.

Philippina gradually fell into the habit of coming every day and working for a few hours either for Eleanore or for Gertrude, so long as the latter had anything to do in the kitchen. They became used to seeing her, and put up with her. She tried to make as little noise as possible; she had the mien of a person who is filling an important but unappreciated office.

She made a study of the house; she knew the rooms by heart. She preferred to come along toward sunset or a little later. One day she told Eleanore she had seen a mysterious-looking person out on the hall steps. Eleanore took a candle and went out, but she could not see any one. Philippina insisted nevertheless that she had seen a man in a green doublet, and that he had made a face at her.

She was particularly attracted by the rooms in the attic. She told the neighbours that there was an owl up there. As a result of this the children of that section began to fear the entire house, while the chancellor's wife, who lived on the ground floor, became so nervous that she gave up her apartment.

There was no outside door or entrance hall of any kind to Jordan's new quarters. You went direct from the stairway into the room where Eleanore worked and slept. Adjoining this was her father's room. People still called him the Inspector, although he no longer had such a position.

He sat in his narrow, cramped room the whole day. One wall was out of plumb. The windows he kept closed. When Eleanore brought him his breakfast or called him to luncheon, which she had cooked in the tiny box of a kitchen and then served in her own little room, he was invariably sitting at the table before a stack of papers, mostly old bills and letters. The arrangement of these he never changed.

Once she entered his room without knocking. He sprang up, closed a drawer as quickly as he could, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and tried to smile in an innocent way. Eleanore's heart almost stopped beating.

He never went out until it was dark, and on his return he could be seen carrying a package under his arm. This he took with him to his room.

At first Eleanore was always uneasy when she had to leave. She requested Philippina to be very careful and see to it that no stranger entered the house. Philippina had a box full of ribbons in Eleanore's cabinet. She set a chair against the door leading into Jordan's room; and when her hands were tired from rummaging around in the ribbons and her eyes weary from looking at all the flashy colours, she pressed her ear to the door to see if she could find out what the old man was doing.

At times she heard him talking. It seemed as if he were talking with some one. His voice had an exhortatory but tender tone in it. Philippina trembled with fear. Once she even pressed the latch; she wanted to open the door as quietly as possible, so that she might peep in and see what was really going on. But to her vexation, the door was bolted on the other side.

For Gertrude she did small jobs and ran little errands: she would go to the baker or the grocer for her. Gertrude became less and less active; it was exceedingly difficult for her to climb the stairs. Philippina took the place of a maid. The only kind of work she refused to do was work that would soil her clothes. Gertrude's shyness irritated her; one day she said in a snappy tone: "You are pretty proud, ain't you? You don't like me, do you?" Gertrude looked at her in amazement, and made no reply; she did not know what to say.

Whenever Philippina heard Daniel coming, she hid herself. But if he chanced to catch sight of her, he merely shrugged his shoulders at the "frame," as he contemptuously called her. It seemed to him that it would be neither wise nor safe to mistreat her. He felt that it was the better part of valour to look with favour on her inexplicable diligence, and let it go at that.

Once he even so completely overcame himself that he gave her his hand; but he drew it back immediately: he felt that he had never touched anything so slimy in his life; he thought he had taken hold of a frog. Philippina acted as if she had not noticed what he had done. But scarcely had he gone into his room, when she turned to Gertrude with a diabolic glimmer in her eyes, and, making full use of her vulgar voice, said: "Whew! Daniel's kind, ain't he? No wonder people can't stand him!"

When she saw that Gertrude knit her brow at this exclamation, she wheeled about on the heels of her clumsy shoes, and screamed as if the devil were after her: "Oi, oi, Gertrude, Gertrude, oi, oi, the meat's burning! The meat's burning."

It was a false alarm. The meat was sizzling quite peacefully in the pan.

IX

Late in the afternoon of a stormy day in June Daniel came home from the last rehearsal of the "Harzreise," tired and out of humour. The rehearsals had been held in a small room in Weyrauth's Garden. He had quarrelled with all the musicians and with all the singers, male and female.

As he reached AEgydius Place a shudder suddenly ran through his body. He was forced to cover his eyes with his hands and stand still for a moment; he thought he would die from longing for a precious virginal possession which he had been so foolish as to trifle away.

He went up the steps, passed by his own apartment, and climbed on up to the apartment of Inspector Jordan and his daughter Eleanore.

His eye fell on the board partition surrounding the stove and the copper cooking utensils that hung on the wall. There sat Eleanore, her arm resting on the window sill, her head on her hand: she was meditating—meditating and gaining new strength as she did so. Her face was turned toward the steep fall of a roof, the century-old frame-work, grey walls, darkened window panes and dilapidated wooden galleries, above which lay stillness and a rectangular patch of sky that was then covered with clouds.

"Good evening," said Daniel, as he stepped out of the darkness into the dimly lighted room. "What are you doing, Eleanore, what are you thinking about?"

Eleanore shuddered: "Ah, is it you, Daniel? You show yourself after a long while? And ask what I am thinking about? What curiosity! Do you want to come into my room?"

"No, no, sit perfectly still," he replied, and prevented her from getting up by touching her on the shoulder. "Is your father at home?"

She nodded. He drew a narrow bench from which he had removed the coffee mill and a strainer up to the serving table, and sat down as far as possible from Eleanore, though even so they were as close together as if they were sitting opposite each other in a cab.

"How are you making out?" she asked with embarrassment, and without the remotest display of warmth.

"You know that I am beating a perforated drum, Eleanore." After a pause he added: "But whatever people may do or fail to do, between us two there must be a clear understanding: Are you going to Paris?"

She dropped her head in silence. "Well, I could go; there is nothing to prevent me," she said, softly and with hesitation. "But you see how it is. I am no longer as I used to be. Formerly I could scarcely picture the happiness I would derive from having some one there in whom I could confide and who would be interested in me. I would not have hesitated for a moment. But now? If I go, what becomes clear from my going? And if I stay here, what will be clear? I have already told you, Daniel, that I don't understand you. How terrible it is to have to say that! What do you want now? How is all this going to come out?"

"Eleanore, do you recall Benda's last letter? You yourself brought it to me, and after that I was a different person. He wrote to me in that letter just as if he had never heard of Gertrude, and said that I should not pass you by. He wrote that we two were destined for each other, and neither for any one else in the world. Of course you recall how I acted after reading the letter. And even before that: Do you remember the day of the wedding when you put the myrtle wreath on? Why, I knew then that I had lost everything, that my real treasure had vanished. And even before that: Do you recall that I found that Fraeulein Sylvia von Erfft had your complexion, your figure, your hair, and your hands? And even before that: When you went walking with Benda in the woods, I walked along behind, and took so much pleasure in watching you walk, but I didn't know it. And when you came into the room there in the Long Row, and caressed the mask and sat down at the piano and leaned your head against the wood, don't you recall how indispensable you were to me, to my soul? The only trouble is, I didn't know it; I didn't know it."

"Well, there is nothing to be done about all that: that is a by-gone story," said Eleanore, holding her breath, while a blush of emotion flitted across her face only to give way to a terrible paleness.

"Do you believe that I am a person to be content with what is past? Every one, Eleanore, owes himself his share of happiness, and he can get it if he simply makes up his mind to it. It is not until he has neglected it, abandoned it, and passed it by, that his fate makes a slave out of him."

"That is just what I do not understand," said Eleanore, and looked into his face with a more cheerful sense of freedom. "It wounds my heart to see you waging a losing battle against self-deception and ugly defiance. We two cannot think of committing a base deed, Daniel. It is impossible, isn't it?"

Daniel, plainly excited, bent over nearer to her: "Do you know where I am standing?" he asked, while the blue veins in his temples swelled and hammered: "Well, I'll tell you. I am standing on a marble slab above an abyss. To the right and left of this abyss are nothing but blood-thirsty wolves. There is no choice left to me except either to leap down into the abyss, or to allow myself to be torn to pieces by the wolves. When such a being as you comes gliding along through the air, a winged creature like you, that can rescue me and pull me up after it, is there any ground for doubt as to what should be done?"

Eleanore folded her arms across her bosom, and half closed her eyes: "Ah no, Daniel," she said in a kindly way, "you are exaggerating, really. You see everything too white and too black: A winged creature, I? Where, pray, are my wings? And wolves? All these silly little people—wolves? Oh no, Daniel. And blood-thirsty? Listen, Daniel, that is going quite too far; don't you think so yourself?"

"Don't crush my feelings, Eleanore!" cried Daniel, in a suppressed tone and with passionate fierceness: "Don't crush my feelings, for they are all I have left. You are not capable of thinking as you have just been talking, you cannot think that low, you are not capable of such languid, ordinary feelings. The over-tone! The over-tone! Think a little! Can't you see them gritting their teeth at me? Can't you hear them howling day and night? Can you possibly say that they are kind or compassionate? Or are they willing to be good and great when one comes? Do you have confidence in a single one of them? Have they not even dragged your good name into the mire? Are any of the things that are sacred to you and to me sacred to them? Can they be moved the one-thousandth part of an inch by your distress or my distress or the distress of any human being? Is not the slime of slander thick upon their tongues? Is not your smile a thorn in their flesh? Do they not envy me the little I have and for which I have flayed myself? Don't they envy me my music, which they do not understand, and which they hate because they do not understand it? Would it not fill them with joy if I had to make my living beating stones on the public highway or cleaning out sewers? Do they find it possible to pardon me for my life and the things that make up my life? And yet you say there are no wolves? That they are not wolves? Tell me that you are afraid of them, that you do not wish to turn them against yourself; but don't tell me that you are committing an evil act when I call you to me, you with your wings, and you come."

His arms were stretched out toward her on the top of the kitchen table; they were trembling to the very tips of his fingers.

"The evil deed, Daniel," whispered Eleanore, "hasn't anything to do with these people; it was committed against the higher law of morals, against our feeling of right usage and established honour...."

"False," he hissed, "false! They have made you believe that. They have preached that to you for centuries and centuries; your mother, your grand-mother, your great-grand-mother, they have all been telling you that. It is false; it is a lie; it is all a lie. It is with this very lie that they support their power and protect their organisation. It is truth on the contrary that fills my heart, fills it with joy, and helps me along. What nature offers, obedience to nature, that is truth. Truth lies in your thoughts, in your feelings, girl, in your choked feelings, in your blood, in the 'yes' you speak in your dreams. Of course I know that they need their lie, for they must be organised, the wolves; they must go in packs, otherwise they are impotent. But I have only my truth, only my truth as I stand on the marble slab above the abyss."

"Your truth, Daniel," said Eleanore, "your truth. But your truth is not my truth."

"No, Eleanore? No? Not yours? What then is the use of my talking with you? And even if everything else were falsehood and error, I am as convinced as I can be that my truth is also your truth."

"You can't stand out against the whole world," said Eleanore in anguish, "you are after all in the world yourself."

"Yes, I will take my stand against the whole world," he said, "that is precisely what I have made up my mind to do. I will pay them back in their own coin. Just as they have all stood against me, just so will I stand against them. I am no compromiser, no treaty-maker, no haggler, no beggar. I live according to my own law. I must, where other people merely should or may, or may not. Whoever does not comprehend that has nothing in common, one way or the other, with me."

She was terrified at the presumptuousness of his words; and yet there was a feeling in her of joy and pride: she felt a desire to be for him, to be with him. If he was fighting against the very power that would in the end overcome him, he was doing it for her sake. She did not feel, therefore, that she had the right to withdraw from him. The thing about it all that gave her a wonderful feeling of relief, and at the same time made her morally flabby and carried her away, was the passion of his will and the undaunted assurance of his feelings.

But their eyes chanced to meet; and in the eyes of each there was the name of Gertrude.

Gertrude stood between them in living form. Everything they had said had proceeded from her and returned to her. That Daniel was not thinking of annulling his marriage, that he could not think of it, Eleanore knew. A child was expected; who could reject the mother under these circumstances? How would it be possible, poor as they were, to expose both mother and child to the inevitable misery that would follow annulment of the marriage? Daniel could not do this, and Eleanore knew it.

But she also knew, for she knew her sister, that separation from Daniel would mean her death. She knew too that Daniel considered his marriage to Gertrude as indissoluble, not only because of his knowledge of her character, but because there was in his life with Gertrude something that is quite independent of passions, views, and decisions, something that binds even in hate and binds even more firmly in despair.

Eleanore knew all this. She knew that Daniel knew it. And if she drew the only conclusion that could be drawn from his argument and his state of mind, she knew what he demanded of her.

He was demanding that she give herself up to him. Of this there could be not a shred of doubt.

But how? Secretly? Could that produce happiness? With the understanding of Gertrude? Could Gertrude endure such a thought, even if she were as magnanimous as a saint? Where was the way that could be followed? Where was there an angle from which embarrassment, anxiety, and ruin were not ready to leap forth without warning?

She bowed her head, and covered it with her hands. She sat in this position for a long while. Darkness settled down over the roofs of the houses.

Suddenly she got up, reached him her hand, smiled with tears in her eyes, and said with a last attempt to escape the horrible consequences, "Bruederlein[1]...." She spoke the word in a tone of longing fervour and half-humorous appealing.

[Footnote 1: "Little brother."]

He shook his head sadly, but took her hand and held it tenderly between his.

Her face became clouded; it was like a landscape at the coming of night. Her eyes, turned to one side, saw the trees of a great garden, an ugly old woman sitting by a hedge, and two little girls who looked into the setting sun with fear in their hearts.

There was a noise; she and Daniel were startled. In the doorway stood Philippina Schimmelweis. Her eyes glistened like the skin of a reptile that has just crept up from out of the bog.

Daniel went down to his apartment.

X

For nine years the rococo hall in the Auffenberg home had been closed to festive celebrations of every kind. It took a long, tedious exchange of letters between the secretary of the Baron living in Rome and the secretary of the Baroness to get the permission of the former to use the hall.

The indignation at Nothafft's work was general. The members of the social set could hardly contain themselves, while the amateurs and specially invited guests were likewise but little edified. The chief diversion of the evening, in fact, was to see the composer himself conduct. At the sight of the jumping and sprawling fellow, Herr Zoellner, councillor of the consistory, almost burst with laughter.

Old Count Schlemm-Nottheim, who not only had a liking for pornographic literature but was also known to drink a quarter of a litre of Dr. Rosa's balsam of life every afternoon, declared that the ensemble playing of all the instruments represented by the show-booths at the annual fair was an actual musical revelation in comparison with this Dutch concert of rogues' marches. Judge Braun of the Supreme Court gave it as his candid opinion that there was evidently a conspiracy against good taste.

Remarks of this kind were, of course, made behind screens and in the corners. In order not to offend the Baroness, there was a goodly measure of seemingly cordial applause. The guests and artists then assembled around a huge table arranged in the shape of a horseshoe.

Count Schlemm-Nottheim was the table companion of the Baroness; he had her tell him who the various personages from the world of art were. He asked who was the woman of such interesting melancholy sitting next to Major Bellmann. He was told that that was the wife of the composer. His wife? She is not at all bad; life with her would be rather worth while. And who was the woman between old Herold and the Frenchman? A charming little creature: she had eyes like the Lake of Liguria and hands like a princess. That was the sister of the composer's wife. Sister? You don't tell me! A jolly fine family; worth the support of any man.

Toasts were drunk. Herr Ehrenreich, the wholesale merchant, drank to the health of the creator of the "Harzreise"; the Count to the ladies present.

Herr Carovius created a sensation. He sat with the members of the "Liedertafel"; they had sung in the chorus; and they were ashamed of him, for he conducted himself in a most unseemly fashion.

He had somehow managed to get hold of a glove Eleanore had lost, and possibly it was this that made him so convivial. He picked up an almond shell from the serving tray, and threw it at Fraeulein Varini. He let his leery, lascivious eyes roam about over the cut glass and the decorations of the hall, and never once grew tired of praising the wealth and splendour of the house. He acted as though he were quite at home. He raised his wine glass, and declared that he was charmed by the flavour and colour of the costly, precious juice from the grape: he tried to give the impression that he knew the Auffenberg wine cellar from years of intimate association with it.

Then it happened that through a hasty, awkward movement, he upset his plate; a rivulet of rich brown gravy ran down over his white vest. He became silent; he retired within himself. He dipped his napkin in the water, and rubbed and rubbed. The waiters tittered. He buttoned up his coat, and looked like a show window in the dead of night.

The eyes of the waiters were also given the privilege of feasting on another rare social phenomenon. They noticed that Kapellmeister Nothafft was sitting at the table in his stocking feet. His patent leather shoes had hurt him so much that he made short work of it and took them off during the dinner. There they stood without master or servant, one at the right, the other at the left of his disencumbered feet. Whenever the waiters passed by, they would cast one furtive but profitable glance under the table, and bite their lips to keep from bursting out in laughter.

This rude offence to social dignity was not unknown to the other dinner guests. They whispered, smiled, shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. Daniel made no effort to conceal his bootlessness when the guests rose to leave the table; without giving the astonishment of his companions a single thought, he once more drew the patent leather torturers on to his extremities. But he had made a mistake: he had gambled and lost.

The news of the extraordinary event was fully exploited on the following day. It was carried from house to house, accumulated momentous charm in its course, passed from the regions of the high to those of the less high and quite low, and provoked storms of laughter everywhere. No one had anything to say about the symphony; everybody was fully informed concerning the patent leather episode.

XI

On the way home Daniel walked with Eleanore. Gertrude followed at some distance with M. Riviere; she could not walk rapidly.

"How did you find it, Eleanore? Didn't you have the feeling that you were at a feast of corpses?"

"Dear," she murmured; they walked on.

After they had gone along for some time in perfect silence, they came to a narrow gateway. Eleanore suddenly felt that she could no longer endure Daniel's mute questioning. She pulled her silk veil closer to her cheeks, and said: "Give me time! Don't hurry me! Please give me time!"

"If I hadn't given you time, my dear girl, I should not have deserved this moment," he replied.

"I cannot, I cannot," she said, with a sigh of despair. She had only one hope, one ray of hope left, and her whole soul was fixed on that. But she was obliged to act in silence.

Standing in the living room with Gertrude, Daniel's eye fell on the mask of Zingarella; it had been decorated with rose twigs. Under the green young leaves fresh buds shone forth; they hung around the white stucco of the mask like so many little red lanterns. "Who did that?" he asked.

"Eleanore was here in the afternoon; she did it," replied Gertrude.

His burning eyes were riveted on the mask, when Gertrude stepped up to him, threw her arms around him, and in the fulness of her feelings exclaimed: "Daniel, your work was wonderful, wonderful!"

"So? Did you like it? I am glad to hear it," he said, in a tone of dry conventionality.

"The people don't grasp it," she said gently, and then added with a blush: "But I understand it; I understand it, for it belongs to me."

The following day he laid the score of the "Harzreise" together with the words in a big old chest, and locked it. It was like a funeral.

XII

In the dark, winding alleys behind the city wall stand little houses with large numbers and coloured lanterns. They are filled with a sweetish, foul odour, and have been laboriously built up out of dilapidated lumber-rooms. From the cracks in the closed blinds come forth, night after night, the sounds of shrill laughter. Those who enter are received by half-nude monsters, and are made to sit down on monstrous chairs and sofas covered with red plush.

The citizen calls these places dens of vice. Between Friday and Sunday he thinks with lustful horror of the inhabitants with their bloated or emaciated bodies and the sad or intoxicated stare of their eyes.

Herr Carovius wended his way to this quarter of the city. Because it was only a shadow which he embraced in hours when his inflamed imagination, vitiated by all the poisons of the earth, conjured up a human body, he was angry; now he went there, and bought himself a real human body.

After he had been in a half a dozen of these houses, had been jubilantly greeted, and then thrown out to the accompaniment of bawdy abuse, he at last found what he had been looking for: a creature whose cunning had not entirely been lost, who still had the features of a daughter of man, and whose figure and character still had the power to call up a memory, provided one were firmly decided to see what one wished to see and to forget what one wished to forget.

Her name was Lena, charming reminder of a desired reality! He went with her as she left the circle of her companions, and followed her into the wretched hole between winding stairs and attic rooms. He rattled the coins in his pocket, and gave his orders. The nymph had to put on a street dress, set a modest hat on her head, and draw a veil over her rouged face. Thereupon he went up to her, spoke to her courteously, and kissed her hand. He had never in his life acted in so polite and chivalric a fashion in the presence of a woman.

The prostitute was frightened; she ran away. She had to be given instructions; these were given her by the madame of the house; for Herr Carovius was rattling the coins in his pocket. "You will have to be patient and indulgent; we are not prepared for such refined guests here."

He returned. Lena had been told what to do. She soon fell into her role.

"To be frank," he said to Lena, "I am inexperienced in the arts of love. I am too proud to kowtow to the berobed and bodiced idol. A woman is a woman, and a man is a man. They delude themselves and each other, or try to, into believing that each woman is a special person, and each man a man to himself. Idiocy!"

The prostitute grinned.

He walked back and forth; the room was just large enough to allow him to take three steps. He recalled the expression on Eleanore's face during the performance of the symphony; his greedy eyes had rested on her all the while. He became enraged: "You don't imagine that progress can be made by such amateurish efforts?" he said with a roar. "It is all hocus-pocus. There is as a matter of fact no such thing as progress in art, any more than there is progress in the course of the stars. Listen!"

He bellowed forth the first motif from the "Sonata quasi una fantasia" of Mozart: "Listen to this: Da—dada—da—daddaa! Is it possible to progress beyond that? Don't let them make a fool of you, my angel. Be honest with yourself. He has hypnotised you. He has turned your unsuspecting heart upside down. Look at me! Are you afraid of me? I will do all in my power for you. Give me your hand. Speak to me!"

The prostitute was obliged to stretch out her arms. He sat down beside her with a solemn ceremoniousness. Then he removed the pin from her hat, and laid the hat tenderly to one side. She had to lean her head on his shoulder.

With that he fell into a dreamy meditation.

XIII

Philippina came up to Gertrude in the living room. Daniel was not at home. Philippina was humming the latest street song, the refrain of which ran as follows:

Drah' di, Madel, drah' di, Morgen kommt der Mahdi.

"There it is," said Philippina, and threw a ball of yarn on the table.

Gertrude had yielded to the girl's importunities, and was addressing her now with the familiar "thou" and allowing Philippina to do the same in speaking to her. "We are after all relatives, you know, Gertrude," said Philippina.

Gertrude was afraid of Philippina; but she had thus far found no means of defending herself against her exaggerated eagerness to help her with the housework. And she felt in Philippina's presence what she felt in the presence of no one else—a sense of shame at her own condition.

Philippina, in fact, saw something indecent in Gertrude's pregnancy; when she talked to her she always held her head up and looked into space; her action was quite conspicuous.

"Oh, but ain't people impudent," Philippina began, after she had taken a loutish position on a chair. "The clerk over in the store asked me whether there wasn't something up between Daniel and Eleanore. What d'ye think of that? Fresh, yes? You bet I give him all that was coming to him!"

The needle in Gertrude's fingers stopped moving. It was not the first time that Philippina had made such insinuating remarks. To-day she would come up to Gertrude, and whisper to her that Daniel was upstairs with Eleanore; yesterday she had said in a tone of affected sympathy that Eleanore looked so run down. Then she gave a detailed report of what this person and that person had said; then she turned into a champion of good morals and gentle manners, and remarked that you ought not offend people.

Her every third word was "people." She said she knew what a faultless character Eleanore had and how Daniel loved his wife, but people! And after all you couldn't scratch everybody's eyes out who annoyed you with dubious questions; if you did, there would soon be very few eyes left.

Philippina's bangs had acquired an unusual length; they covered her whole forehead down to her eyelashes. The glances she cast at Gertrude had on this account something especially malevolent about them. "She is not so certain of herself and her family after all," thought Philippina, and made a lewd gesture with her legs as she sprawled on the chair.

"You know, I think Daniel ought to be more cautious," she said with her rasping voice. "This being together all alone for hours at a time ain't going to do no good; no good at all, I say. And the two are always running after each other; if it's not her, it's him. If you happen to take 'em by surprise, they jump like criminals. It's been going on this way for six weeks, day after day. Do you think that's right? You don't need to put up with it, Gertrude," she said in conclusion, making a sad attempt to look coquettish. Then she cast her eyes to the floor, and looked as innocent as a child.

Gertrude's heart grew cold. Her confidence in Daniel was unfaltering, but the venomous remarks made to her left her without peace of mind or body; she could not think clearly. The very fact that such things were being said about Daniel and Eleanore, and that words failed her to stop them because from the very beginning she had borne it all with the self-assurance that naturally springs from contempt for gossip, only tended to make her grief all the more bitter.

How hollow any objection on her part would have sounded! How fatuous and ineffective a rebuke from her would have been! Could she muzzle these wicked, slanderous tongues by referring to the peculiarities of Daniel's nature? Could he be expected to go to Philippina and give an account of himself? A contemptuous smile came to her face when she pondered on such possibilities.

And yet, why was she heart-sore? Was it because she was at last beginning to realise that she was unloved?

Involuntarily her eyes fell on the mask; it was still covered with the withered rose twigs. She got up and removed them. Her hand trembled as if she were committing some evil act.

"Go home, Philippina, I don't need you any more," she said.

"Oi, it is late, ain't it? I must be going," cried Philippina. "Don't worry, Gertrude," she said by way of consolation. "And don't complain of me to your husband; he'll git ugly if you do. If you say anything bad about me, there's going to be trouble here, I say. I am a perfect fool; people git out of my way, they do. I've got a wicked mouth, I have; there's no stopping it. Well, good night."

She rubbed her hands down over her skirt, as if she were trying to smooth out the wrinkles; there was an element of comic caution in what she did.

Out on the street she began to hum again:

Drah' di, Madel, drah' di, Morgen kommt der Mahdi.

XIV

When Daniel came home, it was late; but he sat down by the lamp in his room and began to read Jean Paul's "Titan." In the course of time his thoughts liberated themselves from the book and went their own way. He got up, walked over to the piano, raised the lid, and struck a chord; he listened with closed eyes: it seemed that some one was calling him. It was a sultry night; the stillness was painful.

Again he struck the chord: bells from the lower world. They rang up through the green, grey mists, each distinct and delicate. Each tone sent forth its accompanying group like sparks from a skyrocket. Those related by the ties of harmony joined; those that were alien fell back and down. And up in the distant, inaccessible heights there rang out with deceiving clarity, like the last vision of earthly perfection, the melody of love, the melody of Eleanore.

Yet, some one was calling him; but from where? His wife? The distant, gloomy, waiting one? He closed the piano; the echo of the noise made thereby rebounded from the church wall through his window.

He put out the lamp, went into his bedroom, and undressed by the light of the moon. The border of the curtain was embroidered with heavy Vitruvian scrolls, the shadows of which were reflected on the floor; they made jagged, goalless paths. All these lines consisted after all of only one line.

As he lay in bed his heart began to hammer. Suddenly he knew, without looking, that Gertrude was not asleep; that she was lying there staring at the ceiling just as he was. "Gertrude!" he called.

From the slight rustling of the pillow he concluded that she turned her face to him.

"Don't you hear me?"

"Yes, Daniel."

"You must give me some advice; you must help me: help me and your sister, otherwise I cannot say what may happen."

He stopped and listened, but there was not a stir: the stillness was absolute.

"It is at times possible to remain silent out of consideration for others," he continued, "but if the silence is maintained too long, deception follows, and falsehood does not fail. But of what use is candour if it thrusts a knife into the heart of another merely in order to prepare an unblocked path for him who is candid? What good does it do to confess if the other does not understand? Two are already bleeding to death; shall the third meet with the same fate merely in order to say that the matter was talked over? The truth is, too many words have already been spoken, gruesome, shameless words, at the sound of which the innocent night of the senses vanishes. And must one bleed to death when it becomes clearer and clearer that those are not eternal laws against which war is being waged? How can I, dwarf that I am, attack eternal laws? No, it is the frail, mutable customs of human society—? Are you listening, Gertrude?"

A "yes" that sounded like a note from a bird on a distant hill greeted his ears: it was the answer to his question.

"I have reached the point where silence is no longer thinkable: there is no going any farther without you. I will neither exaggerate nor have recourse to conventional phrases: I will not speak of passion nor say that it could not be helped. It is just barely possible that everything can be helped; that a man could always have done differently if he had begun soon enough. But who can ever tell what the future may bring? And passion? There are many varieties of passion. It is the term that every swain, washed and unwashed, uses in referring to his lusts. I had never felt a passion for which a woman was guilty. But now one has seized me with hide and hair. I had imagined that I could get out of it and not bring you into it; impossible! I am burning up with this passion, Gertrude, my whole being has been changed by it; and if help is not given me, I will be ruined."

For a time there was a death-like stillness in the room; then he continued.

"But where is help to come from? It is strange; never until this thing happened did I know what holds us two together, you and me. Threads are being spun back and forth between us which no hand may touch without withering, as it is written in the Bible. There is a secret, a sacred secret, and if I offended it I would feel as though I had strangled the unborn child in your womb; and not only the child in your womb, but all the unborn children in my own breast. There is in the life of each man a woman in whom his own mother becomes young again, and to whom he is bound by an unseen, indestructible, umbilical cord. Face to face with this woman, his love, great or small, even his hate, his indifference, becomes a phantom, just as everything that we give out becomes a phantom compared with what is given to us. And there is another woman who is my own creation, the fruit of my dreams; she is my picture; I have created her from my own blood; she lay in me just as the seed lay in the bud. And she must be mine once she has been unveiled and made known to me, or I will perish of loneliness and maddened longing."

The extravagant man pressed his face to the pillow and groaned: "She must be mine, or I will never get up from this bed. But if my way to her passes over you, Gertrude, I would have to cry out with Faust: 'Oh, had I never been born!'"

Gertrude never uttered a sound. Minute after minute passed by. Daniel, growing calmer, listened to see if he could not hear some sound in the room. He heard nothing. The silence of his wife began to fill him with anxiety; he rose up in bed. The moon had gone down; it was pitch dark. He felt around for some matches, and lighted a candle. Holding it in his hand, he bent over Gertrude. She was as pale as death; she was looking at the ceiling with wide-opened eyes.