The Breaking of the Storm, Vol. II.

by Friedrich Spielhagen

CHAPTER VIII.

Ottomar had been fully occupied in making up for lost time. He went from one to the other, here whispering a compliment, there accompanying a shake of the hand with a jest, this evening more than ever overflowing with life and spirits and good-humour, the accomplished favourite of the Graces, and king of society. So said Baroness Kniebreche to Carla, who had just appeared in the drawing-room, with her brother and sister-in-law, and was immediately taken possession of by the old lady, one of whose "mignons" she was. "Look, my dear Carla! he is just speaking to Helene Leisewitz--how happy the poor thing is! It is not often that she is so singled out. Mon Dieu! he is positively paying attentions to her. Do look!" Carla was in despair. She could see nothing without her eye-glass, but did not like to make use of it while with the Baroness whose pince-nez, with glasses as big as thalers, were fixed to her almost sightless eyes. Besides the old lady screamed so loud that she might be heard half across the room, and she expected to be answered equally loudly, being quite deaf of the right ear and almost deaf of the left.

"Ah! at last he has fluttered off to Emilie Fischbach--à la bonne heure! She has been making eyes at him for ever so long, charming little creature! She really grows more charming every day. And how she chatters and wriggles. A little too much simplicity, but she will improve. You will have another rival next season, my dear Carla. What, going already! No, no, my dear, not so fast; I have not spoken to you for ages. You owe me a world of confidences. Do you think that an old woman like me is to go about in society as ignorant as a new-born baby, while the whole world is au courant? Out with it! When is the betrothal to be? Not speak so loud? Why I am hardly speaking above a whisper--this ear, please! It is not yet settled! Don't be angry with me, my dear Carla; but what in the world are you thinking about? Do you imagine an Ottomar von Werben is always to be had?"

"Do you want me, Baroness?" said Ottomar, who had heard his name.

"I want you to sit down by me here, on my left side, you faithless butterfly!"

"Is there such a thing as a faithful butterfly, Baroness?"

"Now none of your jokes; I am a serious, practical old woman, and want you both--why what has become of Carla?" Carla had seized the opportunity, and, rising with an expression of delighted astonishment on her animated countenance, had hastened towards Count Golm, whom, by a hasty glance through her eye-glass, she had perceived at the other side of the room engaged in conversation with Countess Fischbach, and who now turned towards her. She was determined to punish Ottomar for the neglect with which he had in the most open manner treated her. Ottomar looked after her with gloomy eyes, and his glance did not clear while the old Baroness took him to task, as she expressed it. "Yes, yes, my dear Ottomar, it is only the truth; and from whom should you hear it if not from an old woman, who knows the world thoroughly and has known you ever since you were born? I have seen other affairs come to nothing that looked quite as promising as yours. Everything has its limits, even the patience of society. If this patience is tried too long, society says nothing will come of it; and when society has said so for a certain length of time nothing does come of it, simply because it has said so. People do everything as society decides; are betrothed, marry, separate, fall in love, fall out of it again, fall in love a second and a third time, fight duels, shoot their friends, shoot themselves--society is always right."

"And supposing society should be right in our case?" The old lady let her pince-nez fall in horror: "Mais vous êtes fou, monsieur, positivement fou!" She seized her large black fan, and fanned herself violently and noisily; replaced her pince-nez, cast a sharp glance at Ottomar, who stared moodily before him, and said, while she motioned to him to put his ear near her mouth--

"Now listen patiently, like a good child, for you are children, both of you; you who sit here looking like an ensign who has had twenty marks too few at his examination for lieutenant; and Carla who is flirting over there with Count Golm, on purpose to provoke you. Don't play with fire. You might burn your fingers badly. If the affair comes to nothing it will be the greatest scandal of the season. And now go and make your peace with Carla, and tell her from me that I have known the Counts Golm for three generations, and that the present one--well, I had rather tell her myself." She rapped Ottomar on the knuckles with her fan. Ottomar rose quickly and moved a few paces towards Carla, in the full conviction that his approach was all that was necessary to appease her, as she had watched the whole progress of his conversation with the old lady, and now turned her eye-glass on him. But Carla let him come a few steps nearer and then turned completely round towards the Count, with the defiant movement of an actress who wishes to give the audience an opportunity of admiring the back of her dress. Ottomar started back and turned on his heel, murmuring between his teeth: "A formal provocation! Thank heaven!" But when he now again mixed with the company, laughing and jesting even more gaily than before, in his heart was dark night. What the Baroness had murmured in his ear he had said to himself over and over again as he hastened home through the Thiergarten, and the mighty trees over his head could as little overpower with their sighings and groanings the warning voice within him, as the hum and rustle of the company could now overpower the harsh voice of the toothless old lady. Was she only the mouth-piece of society? So, exactly so, would and must society speak, perhaps did speak already, though he could not hear. Let it! What did society know of the tall, slender figure which he had but now held in his arms, of the throbbing heart that had rested on his breast, of the wealth of kisses that still burned on his lips? If the four charming girls with whom he was talking could combine all their charms into one, they would still not make a Ferdinanda. And as for Carla, he had never admired her as much as the rest of the world did, and now he thought her positively ugly, with her coquettish airs, her eternal laugh and her everlasting eye-glass. Let her marry the Count; let them say and do what they would! And what could they do? A duel with Wallbach? Well, it would be the fourth within four years, and if he were killed, so much the better! There would be an end to the whole affair; he need no longer trouble his head with his debts, or his heart about the women! Debts, women--he would have done with them all!

"Oh, Herr von Werben! how intensely amusing you are this evening!"

"I feel intensely amusing, I assure you."

"I don't wonder, under the circumstances."

"Of course not!"

"Then do us a favour."

"A thousand."

"Do bring us your brother officer from the reserve; what is his name?"

"Schmidt!"

"Really?"

"Really!"

"How funny!"

"Why?"

"How cross you look! It is not our fault. Emilie Fischbach says he is quite delightful! We want to know the delightful Herr Schmidt. Do please bring Herr Schmidt here!"

"Oh, do!" exclaimed the other young ladies, "bring Herr Schmidt here!"

"I fly." The titter of the girls, which was not ill-meant, sounded after him like an intentional scoff. His cheeks burnt with anger and shame; that name--it was hers also.

"One word, Werben." Clemda touched him on the shoulder.

"What do you want?"

"I have had a letter from Brussels, from the Duke, and also one from Antonia. The Duke is now free. Our wedding is to be in four weeks. Antonia is very anxious that your betrothed should be one of her bridesmaids. You must of course take me under your wing; I dare not write and tell her that you are not yet betrothed. You are not angry with me for the hint?"

"Why should I be?"

"Because you look so serious over it. Where are you off to in such a hurry?"

"The ladies want me to take Lieutenant Schmidt to them."

"Ah! not a bad fellow--in his way!" Clemda had let the last words slip out carelessly after the others--as one might open a chink of a door one had just shut, in order to let the dog in, thought Ottomar.

"And what I wanted to say besides, Ottomar--of course, as host, one has certain duties, but then certain duties are owed to the host also; and entre nous, I consider Golm's flirtation as rather a want of consideration towards you, as he must know your situation with regard to Fräulein Wallbach as well as anybody."

"He is quite a stranger in our circle."

"Then you should explain matters to him; and Golm----"

"My dear Werben! can you spare me a moment?"

"At your orders, Colonel!"

"Ah!" said Clemda, retiring with a bow before his commanding officer.

"Only a moment," repeated Colonel von Bohl, drawing Ottomar a little on one side; "I have just been speaking to Wallbach; he was very pressing, but, with the best will in the world, I cannot give you leave before the spring. Clemda will want a long leave; Rossow must be away at least three months, as his wound threatens to break out again. I cannot spare all my best officers at once. His Excellency must understand that."

"But there is no hurry, Colonel."

"You want to marry, and I am not devoted to newly-married young officers; I grant you willingly, therefore, a year's leave for diplomatic service in St. Petersburg. And then, my dear Werben----" The Colonel cast a glance behind him and said in a lower voice:

"I should not be sorry if you could find some excuse for a short absence,"--the Colonel made a significant gesture; "those matters might be better and easier arranged from St. Petersburg than here--believe me, my dear Werben!"

"But everything is arranged, Colonel; since this morning."

"Everything?" The Colonel looked Ottomar full in the face.

"All but a trifling matter----"

"I should like even that trifling matter to be got over. His Majesty is very particularly sensitive on those matters just now, and with reason. Now, my dear Werben, we have all been young once, and you know my feelings towards you. I speak for your own sake, and may tell you in confidence that Wallbach, if not exactly prepared for any sacrifice--that would be saying too much--is ready to help you as far as he can in making any arrangement. You understand!" The Colonel held out his hand, and turned quickly away to put an end to the interview. He had in the kindest and friendliest manner said his last word, his ultimatum. Ottomar had quite understood. The blood ran hot and cold through his veins; his temples throbbed violently. He stopped a servant who was passing with a tray, tossed down several glasses of wine and then laughed, as one of his brother officers called out to him: "Leave a little for me!"

"Do you find it so hot too?"

"Tolerably! But I believe we are going to dance,"

"After supper; I don't know why it is so late. I will ask my sister."

"She is in that room." Ottomar plunged into the room, into the midst of a circle which had grouped itself round Carla. An extraordinary feeling of perversity came over him. In this little room almost all his most decisive meetings with Carla had taken place; here it was the custom, when the company was smaller, to withdraw in order to talk more at ease; and here were now gathered together all his most intimate friends: a few of his favourite brother officers--Wartenberg, Tettritz--only Schönau was absent--few of Elsa's particular friends, Elsa herself, even old Baroness Kniebreche had made her appearance, as she always did wherever she expected an interesting conversation, and, preventing Carla from rising off the small, blue silk sofa, had sunk into an armchair, in which, leaning forward, with her hand to her left ear, she listened eagerly to Carla's words. The only one of the party who was a stranger, as Ottomar himself had said a few minutes before to Clemda, was Count Golm; and this stranger stood, with one hand on the back of the small sofa, close to Carla, where he himself ought to have been standing, instead of remaining in the doorway, without the possibility of advancing a step farther into the crowded room, and not daring either to withdraw, after Baroness Kniebreche, turning her pince-nez angrily on him, had exclaimed: "There you are at last, when our dear Carla has been enchanting us with her clever talk--yes, yes, my dear Carla, positively enchanting us. Let your brother stand, Elsa; he has richly deserved it. For heaven's sake go on, my dear Carla!" Carla had hastily glanced towards the door through her eye-glass. "I cannot say any more without repeating what I have said already."

"Then repeat it!" exclaimed the Baroness. "One cannot hear often enough that Wagner is the master of all masters who have ever lived or ever will live."

"I did not say that, Baroness," said Carla, laying her hand on the old lady's; "only of those who have lived! It is not for nothing that the master calls his music that of the future; and the future is so called because it is yet to come. But who can venture to predict what will come?"

"Is it not magnificent?" exclaimed the old lady--"positively magnificent?"

"For," continued Carla, "deep as is my admiration for the master, I cannot conceal from myself, though with some trembling--only too natural in face of such incomparable greatness--that the mystical connection between word and sound--the Eleusinian mystery--proclaimed by the master, though only to the initiated, produces a deeper, more heart-felt satisfaction, in which the last remains of that barbarous separation which has hitherto existed between poetry and music entirely and for ever disappear."

"Positively stupendous!" exclaimed the Baroness.

"Magnificent!" growled Lieutenant von Tettritz.

"But Wagner himself allows that," said Von Wartenberg.

"And that speaks in my favour," answered Carla. "When we see how this splendid genius goes further and deeper with every work, how he advances with giant strides from 'Rienzi' and the 'Fliegende Holländer' to 'Tannhäuser' and 'Lohengrin;' from these to the 'Meistersinger;' from the 'Meistersinger' to 'Tristan and Isolde,' which I have only glanced at as yet, and now to what the 'Ring des Nibelungen' is to bring us--can we, dare we say, in opposition to the most modest of men, who looks upon every height that he has reached as only the stepping stone to a greater one, that with the 'Ring' the ring is closed? Impossible! 'Art,' says Goethe, who, if he understood nothing of music, always deserves to be listened to on the universal principles of æsthetics--'Art has never been possessed by one man alone;' and, god-like though he is, we must still look upon the master as a man."

"I must kiss you--I positively must kiss you!" exclaimed the Baroness. "What do you say to it, Count Golm--what do you say to it?"

"I bow my head in admiration and--silence," answered the Count, laying his hand on his heart.

"And you, Ottomar?" exclaimed the Baroness, turning in her chair with almost girlish activity, and fixing her pince-nez like a double-barrelled pistol on him.

"I consider Wagnerism, from beginning to end, to be an abominable humbug!" answered Ottomar defiantly. The company were horror-struck. "Good heavens!" "Unheard of!" "Abominable!" "Positive blasphemy!" was heard on all sides.

"What did he say?" asked the old lady, her hand to her ear, bending towards Carla. Carla shrugged her shoulders. "You really cannot expect me to repeat Herr von Werben's words. Baroness?"

"Which Ottomar did not mean seriously," said Elsa, with an imploring look at her brother, which Ottomar answered by a shrug of the shoulders.

"I thought myself bound," he said, "as the Baroness did me the honour to appeal directly to me, to give my opinion, though it can be of no importance in this 'noble circle.'" He emphasised scornfully the last words.

"Humbug!" exclaimed the old lady, who, while the others were all talking at once, had made Herr von Tettritz repeat the fearful word in her ear. "It is too bad! You must withdraw it!--you must positively withdraw it! Do you hear, Ottomar?"

"Perfectly, Baroness," answered Ottomar; "but I am unfortunately unable to comply with your command."

"It is an insult--a positive insult!" exclaimed the Baroness, waving her enormous fan violently up and down--"to us all, to Carla in particular--on my honour, my dear Carla!" Carla appeared not to hear; she was leaning back on the sofa, and laughing with Count Golm, who, leaning on his elbow, bent low over her. Elsa was greatly disturbed. She knew that her brother did not in the least care about music, and that under any other circumstances he would have put an end to the disagreeable scene with one of the light jests that came so easily to him; and that if he did not do so now--if, as was evident from his gloomy countenance, he was determined to continue it, he could only have one reason for doing so--the wish to bring about a crisis, to break with Carla irrevocably and for ever, in the presence of their friends! She did not wish for the marriage; she had spoken eagerly against it that very day; had opened her anxious heart to her brother. But Carla had not deserved this; she was only behaving today as she always did, and her laughter at this moment was doubtless forced. What could she say or do?

"Will you at least honour me with an answer?" exclaimed the angry old lady, half rising from her chair.

"Let me answer for him, Baroness?" said a voice. Elsa almost exclaimed in joyful astonishment. It was Schönau, who, laying his hand on Ottomar's shoulder, stepped into the doorway. Behind them she saw another bearded countenance, whose large, honest eyes rapidly surveyed the group, and finally rested on her. He could do no good here; but his very presence was a comfort, while Schönau's wits would bring help. Half a dozen voices at once made him acquainted with the crime Ottomar had committed.

"Now, Werben, Werben!" said Schönau, shaking his head at him. "How could you let your rash daring lead you into such danger, even if you were as much at home in logic as you are on horseback? But to confuse cause with effect--to call Bark giddiness because it produces giddiness, singing in the ears, and headache, is really unheard of!"

"You hear him!" exclaimed the old lady triumphantly, having only caught the last words. "Unheard of--positively unheard of! Get up, Tettritz; let Schönau sit down here. Go on, Schönau. Wagner is the greatest musician--eh?"

"And the greatest dramatist also," said Schönau, taking the place willingly left free for him by the Baroness.

"Go on, go on!" exclaimed the Barones, tapping Schönau on the hand with her fan.

"Undoubtedly," continued Schönau, with a smile, "it is the mission of every poet to hold a looking-glass to nature; but with a difference. 'J'ai vu les mœurs de mon temps, et j'ai publié ces lettres,' wrote Rousseau in the preface to his 'Nouvelle Héloise;' that may suffice for the novelist, the poet's half-brother, as Schiller calls him. We must be content if he presents to us good photographs of reality--instantaneous pictures; and more than content if these photographs come out stereoscopically, and appear almost like life--almost. For only the dramatist fulfils, and can fulfil, his mission in earnest, his aim having been from the first, and being still, to leave the impress of his style on the age and on the material world. The first thing necessary for this, however, is Shakespeare's golden rule--'Be not too tame.' And it is just because Wagner is not too tame--because he has the courage, which his enemies call audacity, to allow the salient points in the character of his age to appear, to allow the excrescences to grow out of the material world--it is this which raises him so far above his rivals in the estimation of all who have ears to hear and eyes to see."

"I should like to kiss you!" exclaimed the Baroness. "Go on, my dear Schönau--go on!" Schönau bowed.

"What are, however, the salient points of our age? Ask our philosophers--Schopenhauer, Hartmann----"

"This will please you, Carla!" exclaimed the Baroness.

"They will answer, the deep conviction of the insufficiency, wretchedness, misery--let me say the word--worthlessness of this our earthly life; and combined with this, the conscious-unconscious longing after the Nirvana, the sweet Nothing--the beginning and foundation of things, which appears to our troubled nature as the only deliverance and last haven of refuge from the desolation and error of this life, and to which we should undoubtedly fly were it not for our will--our gigantic, invincible, indestructible will--that cares for nothing more than to live, to enjoy, to drink down the foaming cup of life, of love, to its last bitter drops. Renunciation there, enjoyment here, both to overflowing; because each is aware of the other, each hates the other, like the hostile brothers. And in this constantly renewed contest between irreconcilable contradictions; in this sensation of being torn backwards and forwards in the wildest confusion, the maddest tumult, the most entangled whirl; in this witches' Sabbath, this will-o'-the-wisp dance, and this halo of falling stars of modern humanity, hurrying from hell to heaven, from heaven to hell, raging and vanishing into mist; in this everything, and something more, turned into endless sing-song and eternal clang--the most horrible Past painted into a rosy-red caricature of the Present, while the eyes of a spectral Future stare from the empty sockets--the flute-notes of soft enjoyment, the violin-tones of fading bliss, drowned by the crashing cymbals and the shrill sound of the trumpets--here you have the 'Venusberg' and the 'Penitent,' the 'Wedding-night' and 'Monsalvat,' the chronic sorrows of love and the magic drink from a prescription; here you have, taking it all in all, him whose like has never been seen, and never will be seen--here you have Richard Wagner! And now, Baroness and ladies, allow me to withdraw before the enchanted silence into which I have lulled you breaks into words, which might hurt my modesty, though not that of nature." Schönau kissed Baroness Kniebreche's hand and disappeared, taking Ottomar with him. A few laughed, others cried "Treachery." The Baroness exclaimed:

"I don't know what you mean; he is quite right!" Lieutenant von Tettritz, who, as an enthusiastic Wagnerite, felt himself seriously offended, and was considering whether he ought not to call out Schönau for this insult, tried to explain to her that the Captain had mystified and laughed at her in the most outrageous manner.

"Without my finding it out!" exclaimed the old lady. "You must not say that, my dear child; old Kniebreche knows better than that when she is laughed at, I can assure you."