The habituÉs 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 GrÜndlich, 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-À-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 DÖderlein 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 Étude, 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 Ægydius 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. RiviÈre, 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. RiviÈre. 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. RiviÈre 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. RiviÈre 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 rÔle, 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 DÖrmaul-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 Æsthetic 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 FrÄulein 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 RÜbsam 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. RiviÈre at the cafÉ 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 Étoile,” 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 BlÄtter 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. RiviÈre 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. RiviÈre 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. RiviÈre 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. RiviÈre 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. RiviÈre, 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 Ægydius 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 FrÄulein 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, “BrÜderlein.[1]...” She spoke the word in a tone of longing fervour and half-humorous appealing.

[1] “Little brother.”