Chapter 17

Certain tones and combinations of tones took on definite shapes in her mind. The bass B of the fourth octave appeared to her as a heavily veiled woman; the middle E resembled a young man who was stretching his arms. In chords, harmonies, and harmonic transformations these figures were set in motion, the motion depending on the character of the composition: a procession of mourning figures between clouds and stars; wild animals spurred on by the huntsmen who were riding them; maidens throwing flowers from the windows of a palace; men and women plunging into an abyss in one mass of despairing humanity; weeping men and laughing women, wrestlers and ball players, dancing couples and grape pickers. The pause appealed to her as a man who climbs naked from a deep subterranean shaft, carrying a burning torch in his hand; the trill seemed like a bird that anxiously flutters about its nest.

All of Daniel’s compositions came close to her heart; all his pictures were highly coloured; his figures seemed to be full of blood. If they remained dead and distant, her sympathy vanished; her face became tired and empty. Without having spoken a word with each other, Daniel would know that he was on the wrong track. But all this bound him to the young woman with hoops of steel; he came to regard her as the creature given him of God to act as his living conscience and infallible if mute judge.

He hated her when her feelings remained unmoved. If he at last came to see, after much introspection, that she was right, then he would have liked to fall down and worship the unknown power that was so inexorable in pointing him the way.

Spindler had a beautiful harp which he had bequeathed to Daniel in his will. It had remained in Ansbach in the possession of the old lady who kept house for him. Daniel had forgotten all about the harp. After his marriage he had it sent to him.

He kept it in the living room; Gertrude was fond of looking at it. It enticed her. One day she sat down and tried to draw tones from its strings. She touched the strings very gently, and was charmed with the melody that came from them. Gradually she learned the secret; she discovered the law. An innate talent made the instrument submissive to her; she was able to express on it all the longings and emotions she had experienced in her dark and lonely hours.

She generally played very softly; she never tried intricate melodies, for the harp was adapted to the expression of simple, dream-like harmonies. The tones were wafted out into the hall and up the stairs; they greeted Daniel as he entered the old house.

When he came into the room, Gertrude was sitting in a corner by the stove, the harp between her knees. She smiled mysteriously to herself; her hands, like strange beings loosed from her body, sought chords and melodies that were his, and which she was trying to translate to her own world of dreams.

VI

Her command of language was more defective now than ever. She was seized with painful astonishment when she noticed that in matters of daily intercourse Daniel’s mind was not able to penetrate the veil behind which she lived.

He said to himself: she is too heavy. He was dumbfounded at her conduct, and displeased with it.

“The gloomy house oppresses you,” he said in a tone of ill humour, when she smiled in her helpless way.

“Let us run a race,” he said to her one day as they were taking a walk through the country. An old tree in the distance that had been struck by lightning was to be their objective.

They ran as fast as their feet could carry them. At a distance of about ten metres from the tree, Gertrude collapsed. He carried her over to the meadow.

“How heavy you are,” he said.

“Too heavy for you?” she asked with wide-opened eyes. He shrugged his shoulders.

Then she slipped out of his embrace, sprang to her feet, and ran with remarkable swiftness a distance that was twice as long as the one he had staked off; she did not fall; she did not want to fall; she dared not.

Breathing heavily and pale as a corpse, she waited until he came up. But he had no tenderness for her now; he merely scolded. Arm in arm they walked on. Gertrude felt for his hand; he gave it to her, and she pressed it to her bosom.

Daniel was terrified as he looked into her face, and saw her thoughts written there as if in letters of fire: We belong to each other for time and eternity.

That was her confession of faith.

VII

She lay wide awake until late at night. She heard him go into the kitchen and get a drink of water and then return to his room. He had forbidden her to come to the door and ask whether he was not going to bed soon: she was not to do this, it made no difference how late it was.

Then he lay beside her, his head on his arm, and looked at her with eyes that had lost their earthly, temporal glow. Man, where are your eyes anyway, she would have liked to exclaim. And yet she knew where they were; she knew, too, that it is dangerous to disturb a somnambulist by calling to him.

One night he had found it impossible to do his work. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared into the light of the lamp for an hour or so, hating himself. Gertrude saw how he raged at himself; how he really fed, nourished his lack of confidence in himself. But she could not say anything.

A publisher had returned one of his manuscripts with a courteous but depressing conventional rejection slip. Daniel spoke disparagingly of his talents; he had lost hope in his future; he was bitter at the world; he felt that he was condemned to a life of unceasing obscurity.

The only thing she could do was look at him; merely look at him.

He became tired of having her look at him; a fresh, vigorous remark would have served his purpose much better, he thought.

She measured her work and his not in terms of reward; she did not seek for connection of any kind between privation and hope; nor did she measure Daniel’s love in terms of tender expressions and embraces. She waited for him with much patience. In time her patience irritated him. “A little bit more activity and insistence would not hurt you,” he said one day, and thrust her timid, beseeching hands from him.

He saw himself cared for: He had a home, a person who prepared his meals, washed his clothes, and faithfully attended to his other household needs. He should have been grateful. He was, too, but he could not show it. He was grateful when he was alone, but in Gertrude’s presence his gratitude turned to defiance. If he was away from home, he thought with pleasure of his return; he pictured Gertrude’s joy at seeing him again. But when he was with her, he indulged in silent criticism, and wanted to have everything about her different.

The judge’s wife on the first floor complained that Gertrude did not speak to her. “Be kind to your neighbours,” he remarked with the air of a professional scold. The next Sunday they took a walk, on which they met the judge’s wife. Gertrude spoke to her: “Well, you don’t need to fall on her neck,” he mumbled. She thought for a long while of how she might speak to people without offending them and without annoying Daniel. She was embarrassed; she was afraid of Daniel’s criticism.

On such days she would put too much salt in the soup, everything went wrong, and in her diligent attempt to be punctual she lost much time. She was fearfully worried when he got up from the table and went to his room without saying a word. She would sit perfectly still and listen; she was frightened when he went to the piano to try a motif. When he again entered her room, she looked into his face with the tenseness of a soul in utter anguish. Then it suddenly came about that he would sit down by her side and caress her. He told her all about his life, his home, his father, his mother. If she could only have heard each of his words twice! If she could only have drunk in the expression in his eyes! They were filled with peace; his nervous hands lay in quiet on his knees when he spoke to her in this way on these subjects. His twitching, angular face, weather-beaten by the storms of life, took on an expression of sorrow that was most becoming to it.

When she had a headache or was tired, he expressed his anxiety for her in touching tones. He would go about the house on tiptoes, and close the doors with infinite care. If a dog barked on the street, he rushed to the window and looked out, enraged at the beast. When she retired, he would help her undress, and bring her whatever she needed.

It was also strange that he disliked the idea of leaving her alone. There was something child-like in his restlessness when he was at home and she was out. He pictured her surrounded by grievous dangers; he would have liked to lock her up and hold her a captive, so as to be sure that she was quite safe. This made her all the weaker and more dependent upon him, while he was like a man who presses what he has to his heart, plagued with the thought that by some mischance it might escape, and yet clings to it also lest he be disturbed by the thought of another more precious possession he loved long since and lost a while.

Once he came to Gertrude while she was playing the harp, threw his arms about her, looked into her face with a wild, gloomy expression, and stammered: “I love you, I love you, I do.” It was the first time he had spoken these eternal words. She grew pale, first from joy and then from fear; for there was more of hatred than of love in his voice.

VIII

He felt that association with congenial men would help him over many a dark hour. But when he set out to look for these men, the city became a desert and a waste place.

Herr Seelenfromm came to his house now and then. Daniel could not endure the timid man who admired him so profoundly, and who, in the bottom of his heart, had an equal amount of respect for Gertrude. The young architect who had been employed at the St. Sebaldus Church while it was being renovated, and who loved music, had won Daniel’s esteem. But he had a repulsive habit of smacking his tongue when he talked. Daniel and he discussed the habit, and parted the worst of enemies. His association with a certain Frenchman by the name of Rivière was of longer duration. Rivière was spending some time in the city, looking up material for a life of Caspar Hauser. He had made his acquaintance at the Baroness von Auffenberg’s, and taken a liking to him because he reminded him of Friedrich Benda.

M. Rivière loved to hear Daniel improvise on the piano. He knew so little German that he merely smiled at Daniel’s caustic remarks; and if he became violently enraged, M. Rivière merely stared at his mouth. He had a wart on his cheek, and wore a straw hat summer and winter. He cooked his own meals, for it was an obsession of his that people wanted to poison him because he was writing a life of Caspar Hauser.

When Herr Seelenfromm and M. Rivière came in of a Sunday evening, Daniel would reach for a volume of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Clemens Brentano, and read from them until he was hoarse. He tried in this way to find peace in a strange world; for he did not wish to weep at the sight of human beings who seemed perfectly at ease.

Gertrude looked at him, and put this question to herself: How is it that a man to whom music is life and the paradise of his heart can allow himself to be so enveloped in sorrow, so beclouded by gloom? She understood the smarting pains in which he composed; she had a vague idea of the labyrinthine complications of his inner fate; these she grasped. But her own soul was filled with joyless compassion; she wished with all her power to plant greater faith and more happiness in his heart.

She meditated on the best means of carrying on her spiritual campaign. It occurred to her that he had had more of both faith and happiness at the time he was going with Eleanore. She saw Eleanore now in a quite different light. She recalled that Eleanore was not merely her sister but the creator of her happiness. Nor was she unmindful of the fact that through the transformation of her being, love and enlightenment had arisen to take the place of her former suspicion and ignorance.

She ascribed to Eleanore all those powers in which she had formerly been lacking: general superiority and stimulating vigour; an ability to play that lent charm to drudgery and made the hard things of life easy; brightness in conversation and delicacy of touch. In her lonely broodings she came to the conclusion that Eleanore was the only one who could help her. She went straightway to her father’s house to find out why Eleanore so rarely came to see her.

“I don’t like to come; Daniel is so unkind to me,” said Eleanore.

Gertrude replied that he was unkind to everybody, including her herself, and that she must not pay any attention to this; for she knew full well that Daniel liked her—and perhaps he himself was offended because she never called.

Eleanore thought it all over, and from then on visited her sister more frequently. But if it did not look as though Daniel did everything in his power to avoid her, this much was certain: he never said a word to her more than human decency required, and was an expert at finding reasons why he had to leave the room when she was there. Eleanore was gainfully conscious of this; it hurt her.

IX

One morning Gertrude returned from the market, carrying a heavy basket full of things she had bought. As she came in the front door she heard Daniel playing. She noticed at once that he was not improvising; that he was playing a set piece, the tones of which were quite unfamiliar to her.

As she came up the steps, the basket no longer seemed like a burden. She went quietly into the living room and listened. Something drew her closer and closer to the piano. Daniel had not noticed that she had entered the room and sat down. He was wholly lost in what he was doing; he never took his rapt and wondering eyes from the music before him.

It was his draft of the “Harzreise im Winter.” For a year and a half, since the time he had composed it in Ansbach, he had never again thought of it; it had lain untouched. Suddenly the fire of creation had flamed up in him; he could once more bind the incoherent, and make what had been merely implied or indicated take definite shape.

He would play a movement again and again, trying to connect it with what went before or came after; he would take his pencil and write in a few notes here or there; then he would try it again, and smile to himself in a strange, confused, and yet enchanted way, when he saw that the motif was complete, perfect. Gertrude was drawn still closer to him. In her awe-struck admiration she crouched on the floor beside him. She would have liked to creep into the piano, and give her soul the opportunity it sought to express itself in the tones that came from the strings. When Daniel had finished, she pressed her head to his hips, and reached her hot hands up to him.

Daniel was terrified; for he recalled instantaneously another occasion on which another woman had done precisely the same thing. His eye involuntarily fell on the mask of Zingarella. He was not conscious of the connection; there was no visible bridge between the two incidents; Gertrude’s face was too unlike that of its momentary prototype. But with a feeling of awe he detected a mysterious liaison between then and now: he imagined he could hear a voice calling to him from the distant shores of yonder world.

He laid his hand on Gertrude’s hair. She interpreted the gesture as a visible sign that his promise had been fulfilled; that this work belonged to her; that he had created it for her, had taken it from her heart, and was returning it to the heart from whence it came.

X

Zierfuss, the music dealer, had sent out invitations to a concert. Daniel did not feel like going. Gertrude asked Eleanore if she would not go with her. Daniel called for them after the concert.

Eleanore told him on the way home that she had received a letter for him that afternoon bearing a London stamp.

“From Benda?” asked Daniel quickly.

“It is Benda’s handwriting,” replied Eleanore. “I was going to bring it to you when Gertrude called for me. Wait out in the front of the house, and I’ll go in and get it.”

“Take dinner with us this evening, Eleanore,” said Gertrude, looking rather uncertainly at Daniel.

“If it is agreeable to Daniel....”

“No nonsense, Eleanore, of course it is agreeable to me,” said Daniel.

A quarter of an hour later Daniel was sitting by the lamp reading Benda’s letter.

The first thing his friend told him was that he was to join a scientific expedition to the Congo, and that his party would follow almost exactly the same route that had been taken by the Stanley Expedition when it set out to look for Emin Pascha.

Benda wrote: “This letter then, my dear friend, is written to say good-bye for a number of years, perhaps forever. I feel as if I had been born anew. I have eyes again; and the ideas that fill my brain are no longer condemned to be stifled in the morass of imprisoned colleagues, loyal and inimical. To labour in nature’s laboratory will make me forget the wrongs I have suffered, the injustice that has been done me. Hunger and thirst, disease and danger will of course have to be endured; they are the effects of those crimes of civilisation that spare the body while they poison the mind and soul.”

Further on Benda wrote: “I am bound to my home by only two people, my mother and you. When I think of you, a feeling of pride comes over me; every hour we spent together is indelibly stamped on my heart. But there is one delicate point: it is a point of conscience. Call it, so far as I am concerned, a chip; call it anything you please. The fact is I have had a Don Quixotic run in, and I have got to defend myself.”

Daniel shook his head and read on. Benda knew nothing of his marriage. He did not even seem to know that Daniel and Gertrude had been engaged. Or if he had known it he had forgotten it. Daniel could hardly believe his own eyes when he came to the following passage: “My greatest anxiety always lay in the fear that you would pass Eleanore by. I was too cowardly to tell you how I felt on this point, and I have reproached myself ever since for my cowardice. Now that I am leaving I tell you how I feel about this matter, though not exactly with the sensation of performing a belated task.”

For Heaven’s sake, thought Daniel, what is he trying to do to me?

“I have often thought about it in quiet hours; it gave me the same feeling of satisfaction that I have in a chemical experiment, when the reactions of the various elements take place as they should: what Eleanore says is your word; what you feel is Eleanore’s law.”

He is seeing ghosts, cried Daniel, he is tangling up the threads of my life. What does he mean? Why does he do it?

“Don’t neglect what I am telling you! Don’t crush that wonderful flower! The girl is a rare specimen; the rarest I know. You need your whole heart with all its powers of love and kindness to appreciate her. But if my words reach you too late, please tear this letter into shreds, and get the whole idea out of your mind as soon and completely as possible.”

“Come, let’s eat,” said Gertrude, as she entered the room with a dish of pickled herring.

Eleanore was sitting on the sofa looking at Daniel quizzically. He was lost in thought.

Daniel looked up, and studied the two women as if they were the figures of a hallucination: the one in dark red, the other in dark blue; minor and major keys. The two stood side by side, and yet so far removed from each other: they were the two poles of his world.

XI

“What has Benda got to say?” asked Gertrude hesitatingly.

“Just think, he is going to Africa,” replied Daniel, with a voice as if he were lying. “Curious, isn’t it? I suppose he is on the ocean by this time.”

With an expression on his face that clearly betrayed the fact that he was afraid the sisters might somehow divine or suspect the parts of the letter he wished to keep to himself, he read as much of it as he dared to them.

“Why don’t you read on?” asked Eleanore, when he paused.

She bent over the table, filled with a burning curiosity to know the whole contents of the letter, and while so doing her hair became entangled in the metal bric-a-brac of the hanging lamp. Gertrude got up and liberated her.

Daniel had laid his hand over the letter, and was looking at Eleanore threateningly. His eye and that of the captured girl chanced to meet; she struggled between a feeling of amusement and one of annoyance. It gave Daniel an uncomfortable feeling to have her eyes so close to his.

“Don’t you know that that is not polite?” he asked. “We have some secrets, probably, Benda and I.”

“I merely thought that Benda had sent me his greetings,” replied Eleanore, and blushed with embarrassment.

Daniel then held the letter above the chimney of the lamp, waited until it had caught fire, and then threw it on the floor, where it burned up.

“It is late, and father is already waiting,” said Eleanore, after they had eaten in great haste.

“I will take you home,” declared Daniel. Surprised by such unusual gallantry, Eleanore looked at him with amazement. He at once became moody; she was still more surprised. “I can go home alone, Daniel,” she said in a tone of noticeable seriousness, “you do not need to put yourself out for me.”

“Put myself out? What do you mean? Are you one of those people who can’t keep a tune, and step on the pedal when their sentiment runs short?”

Eleanore had nothing to say.

“Put your great coat on, Daniel,” said Gertrude in the hall, “it is cold and windy out.”

She wanted to help him on with it, but he threw it in the clothes press; he was irritated.

He walked along at Eleanore’s side through the deserted streets.

She had already put the key in the front door, when she turned around, looked up in a most unhappy way, and said: “Daniel, what in the world is the matter with you? When I look at you, a feeling of anguish and distress comes over me. What have I done that you should act so disagreeably toward me?”

“Oh, forget it, think about something else, don’t mention the subject any more,” said Daniel, in a rough, rude voice. But the glance she fixed on him was so stern and unpitying, so testing and so un-girl-like, so strong and so bold, that he felt his heart grow softer. “Let us take a little walk,” he said.

For a long time they paced back and forth in perfect silence. Then she asked him what he was working on now. He made cautious, non-committal replies, and then suddenly he was overwhelmed with a flood of words. He remarked that he felt at times as if he were struggling with goblins in the dark. What gushed forth from the deepest depths of his soul, he said, was somehow or other too noisy and blatant, and died in his hands while he was trying to create an appropriate form for it. He said he had no success with anything unless it was something disembodied, incorporeal, the melody of which had thus far found an echo in no human breast. Therefore he seemed to be groping around, without anchorage, after sprites from the land of nowhere. And the more domineering the order was to which he subjected his mind and his fancy, the more lost and hopeless his earthly self seemed to be as it drifted in the chaos of the everyday world. He remarked that heaven was in his dreams, hell in his association with men. And how dead everything about him seemed to be! It was all like a cemetery; it was a cemetery. His doughtiest life was gradually transformed into a shadow and lacerated into a monstrosity. But that he was aggrieved at men he felt full well; for they lived more innocent lives than he, and they were more useful.

“But you have some one to hold to,” said Eleanore, realising that she was skating on thin ice, “you have Gertrude.”