II
It was three o’clock in the morning when Felix Imhof left a party in the Leopoldstrasse, where there had been gaming for high stakes. He had won several thousand marks, and the gold coins clinked in the overcoat pocket into which he had carelessly stuffed them.
He had had a good deal to drink, too. His head was a bit heavy. At his first steps into the fresh air he reeled a little.
Nevertheless he was in no mood to go home. So he wandered into a coffee-house that was frequented by artists. He thought he might still find a few people with whom he could chat and argue. The day he had passed was not yet full enough of life for him. He wanted it brimming.
In the room, which was blue with smoke, there were only two men, the painter Weikhardt, who had recently returned from Paris, and another painter, who looked rather ragged and stared dejectedly at the table.
Felix Imhof joined the two. He ordered cognac and served them, but, to his annoyance, the conversation would not get started. He got up and invited Weikhardt to walk with him. With contemptuous joviality he turned to the other: “Well, you old paint-slinger, your lamp seems about burned out!”
The man didn’t stir. Weikhardt shrugged his shoulders, and said softly: “He has no money for bread and no place to sleep.”
Felix Imhof plunged his hand into his pocket, and threw several gold coins on the table. The painter looked up. Then he gathered the gold. “Hundred and sixty marks,” he said calmly. “Pay you back on the first.”
Imhof laughed resoundingly.
When they were in the street, Weikhardt said good-naturedly: “He believes every word of it. If he didn’t absolutely believe it, he wouldn’t have taken the money. There are still eleven days before the first—time for a world of illusions.”
“It may be that he believes it,” Imhof replied, with an unsteady laugh, “it may be. He even believes that he exists, and yet he’s nothing but a melancholy corpse. O you painters, you painters!” he cried out into the silent night. “You have no feeling for life. Paint life! You’re still sitting by a spinning-wheel, instead of at some mighty wheel of steel, propelled by a force of sixteen thousand horse-power. Paint my age for me, my huge delight in being! Smell, taste, see, and grasp that colossus! Make me feel that great rhythm, create my grandiose dreams. Give me life—my life and its great affirmation!”
Weikhardt said drily: “I have heard that talk before—between midnight and dawn. When the cock crows we all calm down again, and every man pulls the cart to which fate has hitched him.”
Imhof stopped, and somewhat theatrically laid his hand on Weikhardt’s shoulder. He gazed at him with his intensely black, bloodshot eyes. “I give you a commission herewith, Weikhardt,” he said. “You have talent. You’re the only one with a mind above your palette. Paint my portrait. I don’t care what it costs—twenty, fifty thousand. Doesn’t matter. Take your own time—two months, or two years. But show me—me—the innermost me. Take this vulture’s nose, this Hapsburg lip, these gorilla arms and spindle shanks, this coat and this chapeau claque, and drag from it all the animating Idea. To hell with the accidents of my phiz, which looks as though an unskilful potter had bungled it in the making. Render my ambition, my restlessness, my inner tempo and colourfulness, my great hunger and the time-spirit that is in me. But you must hurry; for I am self-consumed. In a few years I shall have burned out. My soul is tinder. Render this process with the divine objectivity of art, and I’ll reward you like a Medici. But I must be able to see the flame, the flaring up, the dying down, the quiver of it! I want to see it, even if to make me see it you have to lash the whole tradition since Raphael and Rubens into rags!”
“You are an audacious person,” Weikhardt said, in his dry way. “But have patience with us, and restrain your admiration for your particular century. I do not let the age overwhelm me to the point of folly. I do not share the reverential awe of speed and machinery that has seized upon many young men like a new form of epilepsy. I haven’t any attitude of adoration toward seven-league boots, express trains, dreadnoughts, and inflated impressionism. I seek my gods elsewhere. I don’t believe I’m the painter you’re looking for. Where were you? You’ve been travelling again?”
“I’m always on some road,” Felix Imhof replied. “It’s a crazy sort of life. Let me tell you how I spent the last five days. Monday night I went to Leipzig. Tuesday morning at nine I had a conference with some literary people in regard to the founding of a new review. Splendid fellows—keen critics and intellectual Jacobins, every one of them. Then I went to an exhibition of majolicas. Bought some charming things. At noon I left for Hamburg. On the train I read two manuscripts and a drama, all by a young genius who’ll startle the world. That evening attended a meeting of the directorate of the East African Development Corporation. Festivities till late that night. Slept two hours, then proceeded to Oldenburg to a reunion of the retired officers of my old regiment. Talked, drank, and even danced, though the party was stag. Six o’clock in the morning rushed to Quackenbruck, a shabby little country town on the moors, where the officers had arranged for a little horse race. My beast was beaten by a head. Drove to the station and took a train for Berlin. Attended to business next morning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, interviewed agents, witnessed a curious operation in the clinic, made a flying-trip to Johannisthal, where a new aeroplane was tried out; went to the Deutsches Theater that evening, and saw a marvellous performance of ‘Peer Gynt.’ Drank the night away with the actors. Next morning Dresden. Conference with two American friends. Home to-day. Next week won’t be very different, nor the one after that. I ought to sleep more; that’s the only thing.” He waved his thick bamboo cane in air.
“It is enough to frighten any one,” said Weikhardt, who took more comfort in the contrast between his own phlegm and his companion’s excitement. “How about your wife? What does she say to your life? She was pointed out to me recently. She doesn’t look as if she would let herself be pushed aside.”
Imhof stopped again. He stood there, with his legs far apart and his trunk bent forward, and rested on his cane. “My wife!” he said. “What a sound that has! I have a wife. Ah, yes. I give you my word, my dear man, I should have clean forgotten it to-night, if you hadn’t reminded me. It’s not her fault, to be sure. She’s a born Wahnschaffe; that means something! But somehow.... God knows what it is—the damned rush and hurry, I suppose. You’re quite right. She’s not the sort to be neglected or pushed to the wall. She creates her own spaces, and within these”—he described great circles in the air with his cane—“she dwells, cool to her fingertips, tense as a wire of steel. A magnificent character—energetic, but with a strong sense for decorative effects. She’s to be respected, my dear man.”
Weikhardt had no answer ready for this outburst. Its mixture of boasting and irony, cynicism and ecstatic excitement disarmed and wearied him at once. They had reached a side street, which led to the Englischer Garten, and in which stood the painter’s little house. He wanted to say good-night. But Imhof, who seemed still unwilling to be alone, asked: “Are you working at anything?”
Weikhardt hesitated before answering. That was enough to make Imhof accompany him. The sky grew grey with dawn.
Felix Imhof recited softly to himself:
“Where the knights repose, and streaming
Banners fold at last their gleaming,
Towers rise to the way-farers,
And the wanderers seek a spring;
And the lovely water-bearers
Lift a goblet to the dreaming
Shadow of the fleeing king.”
Weikhardt, who would not yield to Imhof in a knowledge or love of the poet Stefan George, continued the quotation in a caressing voice:
“With a smile serene he watches,
Yet flits on with shyer seeming,
For beneath him fades the height,
And he fears all mortal touches,
And he almost dreads the light.”
They entered the studio. Weikhardt lit the lamp, and let its glow fall upon a picture that was not quite completed. It was a Descent from the Cross.
“Rather old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Weikhardt asked, with a sly smile. He had grown pale.
Imhof looked. He was a connoisseur through and through. No other had his eye. The painters knew it.
The picture, which reminded one of the visionary power as well as of the brushwork of El Greco, was bizarre in composition, intense in movement, and filled with an ecstatic passion. The forms of an old master, through which the painter had expressed himself, were but an appearance. The vision had been flung upon the canvas with a burning splendour. The figures had nothing old-fashioned about them; there was no cliché; they were like clouds, and the clouds like architecture. There were no concrete things. There was a chaos, which drew meaning and order only from the concentrated perceptions of the beholder.
Felix Imhof folded his hands. “To have such power,” he murmured. “Great God, to have the power to project such things!”
Weikhardt lowered his head. He attributed little significance to these words. A few days before he had stood in front of his canvas, and he had imagined that a peasant was standing beside him—an old peasant or any other simple man of the people. And it had seemed to him that this peasant, this humble man, who knew nothing of art, had kneeled down to pray. Not from piety, but because what he saw had in its own character overwhelmed him.
Almost rudely Imhof turned to the painter and said: “The picture is mine. Under all circumstances. Mine. I must have it. Good-night.” With his top hat set at a crazy angle, and his sleepless, dissipated face, he was a vision to frighten one.
At last he went home.
Next day Crammon informed him of his arrival in Munich. He had come because Edgar Lorm was about to give a series of performances there.