VI
Felix Imhof and the painter Weikhardt met at the exhibition of the “secessionists” in Munich. For a while they strolled through the rooms, and looked at the paintings; then they went out on the terrace, and sat down at a table that commanded a view of the park.
It was in the early afternoon, and the odours of oil and turpentine from within blended with the fragrance of the sun-warmed plants.
Imhof crossed his long legs, and yawned affectedly. “I’m going to leave this admirable home of art and letters for some months,” he declared. “I’m going to accompany the minister of colonial affairs to South West Africa. I’m anxious to see how things are going there. Those people need looking after. Then, too, it’s a new experience, and there will be hunting.”
Weikhardt was utterly self-absorbed. He was full of his own annoyances, his inner and outer conflicts, and therefore spoke only of himself. “I am to copy a cycle by Luini for the old Countess Matuschka,” he said. “She has several blank walls in her castle in Galicia, and she wants tapestries for them. But the old creature is close as the bark on the tree, and her bargaining is repulsive.”
Imhof also pursued his own thoughts. “I’ve read a lot about Stanhope recently,” he said. “A tremendous fellow, modern through and through, reporter and conquistador at the same time. The blacks called him the ‘cliff-breaker.’ It makes one’s mouth water. Simply tremendous!”
Weikhardt continued: “But I dare say I’ll have to accept the commission. I’ve come to the end of my tether. It’ll be good to see the old Italians again, too. In Milan there’s a Tintoretto that’s adorable. I’m on the track of a secret. I’m doing things that will count. The other day I finished a picture, a simple landscape, and took it to an acquaintance of mine. He has a rather exquisite room, and there we hung it. The walls had grey hangings, and the furnishings were in black and gold. He’s a rich man and wanted to buy the picture. But when I saw how much he liked it, and saw, too, the delicate, melancholy harmony of its colours with the tints of the room, I felt a sudden flash of encouragement. I couldn’t bear to talk money, and I simply gave him the thing. He accepted it quietly enough, but he continued saying: ‘How damned good it is!’”
“It’ll take my thoughts off myself, this little trip to the Southern Hemisphere,” said Imhof. “I’m not exactly favoured of fortune just now. To be frank—everything’s in the deuce of a mess. My best horse went to smash, my favourite dog died, my wife took French leave of me, and my friends avoid me—I don’t know why. My business is progressing backward, and all my speculations end in losses. But, after all, what does it matter? I say to myself: Never say die, old boy! Here’s the great, beautiful world, and all the splendour and variety of life. If you complain, you deserve no better. My sandwich has dropped into the mud. All right; I must get a fresh one. Whoever goes to war must expect wounds. The main thing is to stick to your flag. The main thing is faith—quite simple faith.”
It was still a question which of the two would first turn his attention from himself, and hear his companion’s voice. Weikhardt, whose eyes had grown sombre, spoke again: “O this dumb loneliness in a studio, with one’s hundred failures, and the ghosts of one’s thousand hours of despair! I have a chance to marry, and I’m going to take it, too. The girl has no money, to be sure, but she has a heart. She’s not afraid of my poverty, and comprehends the necessary quixotism of an artist’s life. She comes of a Protestant family of very liberal traditions, but two years ago she became a Catholic. When I first met her I was full of suspicion, and assumed all sorts of reasons for her step except the simple and human ones. It’s very difficult to see the simple and the human things, and still more difficult to do them. Gradually I understood what it means—to believe! and I understood what is to be reverenced in such faith. It is faith itself that is sacred, not that in which the faith is placed. It doesn’t matter what one has faith in—a book, a beast, a man, a star, a god. But it must be pure faith—immovable and unconquerable. Yes, I quite agree with you—we need simple faith.”
So they had found each other through a word. “When do I get my picture, your Descent from the Cross?” Imhof inquired.
Weikhardt did not answer the question. As he talked on, his smooth, handsome, boyish face assumed the aspect of a quarrelsome old man’s. Yet his voice remained gentle and slow, and his bearing phlegmatic. “Humanity to-day has lost its faith,” he continued. “Faith has leaked out like water from a cracked glass. Our age is tyrannised by machinery: it is a mob rule without parallel. Who will save us from machinery and from business? The golden calf has gone mad. The spirit of man kowtows to a warehouse. Our watchword is to be up and doing. We manufacture Christianity, a renaissance, culture, et cetera. If it’s not quite the real thing, yet it will serve. Everything tends toward the external—toward expression, line, arabesque, gesture, mask. Everything is stuck on a hoarding and lit by electric lamps. Everything is the very latest, until something still later begins to function. Thus the soul flees, goodness ceases, the form breaks, and reverence dies. Do you feel no horror at the generation that is growing up? The air is like that before the flood.”
“Create, O artist, and don’t philosophize,” Imhof said gently.
Weikhardt was shamed a little. “It’s true,” he said, “we have no means of knowing the goal of it all. But there are symptoms, typical cases that leave little room for hope. Did you hear the story of the suicide of the German-American Scharnitzer? He was pretty well known among artists. He used to go to the studios himself, and buy whatever took his fancy. He never bargained. Sometimes he would be accompanied by a daughter of eighteen, a girl of angelic beauty. Her name was Sybil, and he used to buy pictures for her. She was especially fond of still-life and flower pieces. The man had been in California and made millions in lumber. Then he returned to the fatherland to give the girl an atmosphere of calm and culture. Sybil was his one thought, his hope, his idol and his world. He had been married but a short time. His wife, it is said, ran away from him. All that a life of feverish activity had left him of deep feeling and of hope for the future was centred in this child. He saw in her one girl in a thousand, a little saint. And so indeed she seemed—extraordinarily dainty, proud and ethereal. One would not have dared to touch her with one’s finger. When the two were together, a delightful sense of harmony radiated from them. The father, especially, seemed happy. His voluntary death caused all the more consternation. No one suspected the motive; it was assumed that he had suffered a moment of madness. But he left behind him a letter to an American friend which explained everything. He had been indisposed one day, and had had to stay in bed. Sybil had invited several girl friends to tea, and the little company was in a room at the other end of their suite. But all the doors between were open, even the last was slightly ajar, so that the murmur of the girls’ voices came to him inarticulately. A sudden curiosity seized him to know what they were saying. He got up, slipped into a dressing gown, went softly through the intervening rooms, and listened at the door. The conversation was about the future of these girls—the possibilities of love, happiness, and marriage. Each gave her ideas. Finally it was Sybil’s turn to speak her thoughts. At first she refused; but they urged her again and again. She said she took no interest in emotions of any sort; she didn’t yearn for love; she wasn’t able to feel even gratitude to any one. What she expected of marriage was simply liberation from a galling yoke. She wanted a man who could give her all that life held—boundless luxury and high social position—and who, moreover, would be abjectly at her feet. That, she said, was her program, and she intended to carry it out too. The other girls fell silent. None answered. But that hour poisoned the father’s soul. This cynicism, uttered by the pure and spiritual voice of the child he adored and thought a miracle of depth and sweetness, the child on whom he had wasted all he was and had, plunged him into an incurable melancholy, and caused him finally to end his life.”
“My dear fellow,” cried Imhof, and waved his arm, “that man wasn’t a lumber merchant, he was a minor poet.”
“It’s possible that he was,” Weikhardt replied, and smiled; “quite possible. What does it alter? I admire a man who cannot survive the destruction of all his ideals. It’s better than to be a cliff-breaker, I assure you. Most people haven’t any ideals to be destroyed. They adapt themselves endlessly, and become vulgar and sterile.” Again his eyes grew sombre, and he added, half to himself: “Sometimes I dream of one who neither rises nor falls, of one who walks on earth whole and unchangeable, unswerving and unadaptable. Perfectly unadaptable. It is of such an one that I dream.”
Imhof jumped up, and smoothed his coat. “Talk, talk!” he rattled, in the disagreeable military tone that he assumed in his moments of pseudo-virility. “Talk won’t improve things.” He passed his arm through Weikhardt’s, and as they left the terrace, which had been gradually filling with other guests, he recited, boldly, unashamed, and in the same tone, the alcaic stanza of Hölderlin:
“Still man will take up arms against all who breathe;
Compelled by pride and dread he consumes himself in conflict, and destroys the lovely
Flower of his peace that is brief of blooming.”