CHAPTER III.
The clear song of the birds awoke him while it was still in the gray of the morning, and not a sound could be heard in the house below.
The tops of the pine-trees, seen through the broad studio-window, recalled to his mind where he was, and how and why he had strayed thither.
In the afternoon he had met the lieutenant, whom he had not seen before for a week, although he had zealously frequented all the places where Schnetz was generally to be found. He knew that Irene had left the city with her uncle. In his dull consternation upon learning this in reply to an indirect inquiry at the hotel, he had not even inquired in which direction they had gone. She had fled from him, that he knew; his mere silent presence sufficed to frighten her away, to make the town in which he lived distasteful to her. Whither had she fled? To Italy, as she had at first planned?--to the east or to the west? What did it matter to him, since he dared not follow her? Nor did he really care to make any inquiries of Schnetz, who undoubtedly knew all about it. And yet he was eager to see the only human being who might possibly give him news of her. And when at last he encountered him in the street, after a day of depression and brooding, on which he had not even seen Jansen and had neglected his work, his heart beat so fast and his face flushed so deeply that it seemed as if his unsuspecting friend could not help reading all his secret thoughts in his eyes. And it really did so happen that the very first words which Schnetz ejaculated, in reply to Felix's inquiry as to how he was, had reference to the fugitives.
Things went wretchedly with him. He had hoped to be rid of his serfdom and slavery to woman, now that his whimsical little princess had gone off with her servile valet of an uncle! Vain idea! The chain which held him now reached as far as Starnberg, and only an hour ago he had felt himself jerked by it in anything but a gentle way. A note from the uncle summoned him to come out in all haste on the following day. Visits had been announced for Sunday from all manner of youthful haute volés, noble cousins and their followers; but the old lion-hunter had previously accepted an invitation to a shooting-match at Seefeld, which it would be quite impossible for him to escape, and his niece, poor child, who, for some reason or other, was daily growing paler and more nervous in the country air, felt herself quite incapable of doing the honors of the little villa without the assistance of a zealous and active cavalier. Consequently, Schnetz was her last hope, and he could assure him of Irene's kindest welcome, and of his own eternal gratitude if he would come and be her knight! "You will readily understand, my dear baron," concluded the grumbling cavalier, slapping his high boots with his riding-whip, "that there are moral impossibilities which prevent the slave from breaking his chain. But to the hundred times I have already cursed this Algerian camp-friendship, I have added to-day the one hundred and first. It is true, I certainly have a certain curiosity to see how this 'kindest welcome' of her proud little highness will seem. You know I have a secret weakness for this gracious little tyrant of mine. But it is asking a great deal of me to expect that I should bear with her whims and humors for a whole day. Pity me, happy man! you who are free from all service, and receive no other orders than those which come from the genius of art."
His speech had been long enough for Felix to think of some appropriate and sufficiently cheerful answer.
"You are terribly mistaken, my dear friend," he said, "if you think I wear no chain. Art, do you say? She is a gracious mistress to him alone who has gotten so far as to be able to rule her while he serves her. But, as for a wretched beginner and blunderer to whom she has not yet given her little finger to kiss, no raftsman or woodsman in the mountains groans under such a load. A thousand times I ask myself whether it was not, after all, a piece of folly for me, at my time of life, to join the scholars who are learning her first A B C; and whether I shall not discover to my horror, after the lapse of many weary years, that all this precious time has been thrown out of the window of Jansen's studio. It is certainly large enough for such a purpose."
"Hm!" growled the tall lieutenant. "You are singing a bad song to an old tune. Nowhere do you come across existences that are failures, more frequently than in a city of art like this. It's so damned seductive to go singing--
'Free, ah, free, is the life we lead,
A life filled full of pleasure--'
and yet, what you say is quite right--he who cannot rule art, him she oppresses; and that to a worse degree than does any duty of life. You, as I know you, don't seem to me quite in your proper place. Both of us ought to have come into the world a few centuries earlier; and then I, as a leader of bandits, after the manner of Castruccio Castracani, and you, as a politician of the old energetic and unscrupulous stamp, might not have cut a bad figure. But now, all we can do is to help ourselves as best we can. Now let me tell you something. You have been over-excited, and have lost your spirits. Come out to the lake with me to-morrow. I will introduce you to her young highness. Perhaps you will fall in love with her and find favor in her eyes, and then our little princess and both of us would be made happy at one stroke."
Felix shook his head with increasing embarrassment. "He was not the man for such company," he said, in a stammering voice; "Schnetz would get little honor by introducing him. He couldn't swear that he wouldn't go out to the lake. He certainly did stand in great need of a change of air. But, unfortunately, he could be of no use to him in entertaining his countesses, baronesses, and young nobles."
With these words they had shaken hands and parted.
But no sooner did Felix find himself alone than his passionate grief and his old yearning came upon him with such force that he threw all his resolutions to the winds, and thought only how he could be near her once more. The evening train did not leave for some hours. It would be impossible to wait for it, or to pass the intervening time in any civilized fashion. He hired a horse and mounted, dressed just as he was, and left the town at a sharp trot, without giving notice at his own house of his intended absence, or even taking leave of Jansen.
His horse was none of the best, and was somewhat tired from having been in use before that day. Consequently he was soon obliged to moderate his speed, and had only accomplished half his journey, when the train whirled by him. But he was not at all sorry to have to take the last part of the way at a walk. The nearer he approached his goal, the more conflicting became his feelings. What object had he in coming here at all? He knew that she avoided him, and that she would unquestionably leave this retreat too, if she should form but the slightest suspicion that he was following her, and seeking an opportunity to meet her again. And in what a light must he himself, his pride, his sense of delicacy, appear to her, unless he carefully avoided even the appearance of trying to intrude himself upon the peace that she had won with such difficulty? If she could do without him, ought he to show how painful it still was for him to do without her?
He reined up his horse so sharply that the animal stood still, trembling. All around him were solitary woods, and the road that ran by the side of the railway was utterly deserted. He sprang off, threw the reins over the horse's neck, and threw himself on his back at the side of road, on the thick, dry moss, which sent out a cloud of fragrant dust into the heated air.
Here he lay; and if his manliness had not forbidden him, he would have liked nothing better than to relieve himself by a flood of burning tears, like a helpless, unhappy child, to whom some one has shown its favorite plaything and then taken it away again. Instead of yielding to such girlish weakness, he strengthened and stilled his rebellious heart with that defiant spirit which is the man's form of this youthful feebleness. He gnashed his teeth, cast threatening glances up at the tree-tops and the blue dome of the sky, and behaved himself generally in a way so boyish, and so unworthy of the great statesman that Schnetz believed he had detected in him, that even his horse, hearing his wild, disconnected words, and the strange gnashing and raving by which they were accompanied, looked up in amazement from his grazing, and turned his head toward his rider with an expression of silent pity. "Is it any fault of mine," he raved to himself, "that a ridiculous accident has brought her to the very spot where I was on the point of beginning a new life? Must I fly before her, like a fool, the moment this absurd fate brings her near me again? The world is surely large enough for us both; and yet now, though she knows why I have pitched my tent in this particular place, she persists in haunting the immediate neighborhood, so that I can't take a step outside the gates without running the risk of meeting her. What am I saying? Why, I do not dare even to go out to the lake! I am to be cut off from light and air, and left to smother in the Munich dust! In other words, I am to condemn myself to perpetual imprisonment for a crime of which I do not even repent. No! I owe something to myself as well. Why shouldn't I show that I have put the whole affair behind me once for all, and go on living as though certain eyes were no longer in the world? Cannot one person ignore another? Shall it last forever, this fear of ghosts? As if one couldn't go around a street corner without meeting a dead and buried love!"--he sprang up suddenly, smoothed his hair, and brushed the dust from his coat--"and though her eyes should look down upon me from every window in Starnberg," he cried, "I will ride through the town and laugh at all these apparitions!"
So he swung himself into the saddle again, and rode over the few remaining miles of his journey at a sharp trot. When at last a blue strip of the lake sparkled through the tree-tops, and the houses of the town came into view, a gray, starlit twilight had already settled down; so that, after all, he could ride through the streets between the rows of lighted windows, without any fear of being recognized.
Nevertheless, it was almost a relief to him when, upon inquiry at all of the three inns, he was told that no room could be had for the night. He thought at once of Rossel's little country house, of which he had often heard his friends speak. As the way was described to him, he could still arrive there in good time, and before his friends had gone to bed. So he contented himself with a hasty drink after his sultry ride through the woods, handed over his animal to a hostler, who promised to take good care of it, and got under way again.
He had not had the heart to inquire for Irene's villa, though he had thought for a moment of doing so--only that he might avoid it all the more surely. But he did not allow her name to pass his lips. Clinching his teeth, he went his way, past the garden fences and walls. The warm night had enticed every living thing out into the open air. Under the vines and in the summer-houses, on garden-benches and on balconies, old and young sat, walked, and stood; and here and there one could hear the clear but subdued sound of girlish laughter, as it suddenly burst forth from whispered conversations or deep silence, like a rocket that starts instantly from a humble fire-work into the dark heaven of night. Some one was playing a cither, to which a man's voice sang a low accompaniment; from another house a full soprano voice sang Schubert's Erl King, to the loud music of a piano; and from yet another was heard a violin concerto, with a clarionet obbligato. All harmonized as well as the different voices of the birds in the woods, for the sounds were softened and melted into one another by the sultry night air. Involuntarily Felix stood still and listened.
As chance would have it, his eyes rested on a little house from which came no sound of song or music, and which was overhung with exquisite roses, while tall hollyhocks nodded over the garden-fence. In the upper story was a room with a balcony, lit by a hanging-lamp. The door stood wide open, but the brightly-lighted apartment beyond seemed to be quite empty. Of a sudden, just as the clarionet was playing a solo, a shadow entered the bright frame made by the balcony door. A slender, womanly figure stood on the threshold for a moment, then stepped out in full view and leaned over the balustrade. Her features could not be clearly distinguished from the street, and the watcher below still hesitated to believe his beating heart. But now the shadow moved, and turned its face toward the bright door, as if some one in the room had called to it. For a minute or two the outline of a clear-cut profile could be seen sharply defined against the background of light. It was she!--his beating heart had known her sooner than his open eyes; and now it beat all the more wildly as the apparition disappeared into the room again as quickly as it had come. So this was the place! Now he knew it--now he could mark the house well, so that he might always carefully avoid it by a wide détour. He trembled all over, and his feet would not at first obey him, when he tried to tear himself away and continue his wandering. In his excitement he missed the road that runs along by the lake, and followed the side-road leading to the Seven Springs. It was only when he reached that spot, and found himself in the midst of a swampy thicket, that he became aware of his mistake. Then, with the stars for his guides, he began to search his way back again. But once more he lost the right track; the sweat rolled down his forehead. With laboring breast he forced his way through the thick underbrush; and, panting like a wounded stag, succeeded in reaching a glade from which he could see the railway, and over beyond it, through the tree-tops, the broad surface of the lake, glittering in the moonlight. A signalman whom he met put him upon his way again. He saw that he had already gone far beyond his goal, and his anxiety lest he should disturb his friend by coming to him at so late an hour, quickened his steps. Thus it was that he reached Edward's in the state in which we have already seen him.
But the strength of his youth pulled him through all his troubles overnight. He awoke in the morning with all his senses refreshed from those bright dreams with which the soul, healing silently as her wont is, had striven to restore her shaken balance. Nor did this bright cheerfulness of the morning desert him when he was fully awake, and was forced to admit that matters stood no better with him to-day than on the day before. A feeling of courage made the blood course warmly through his veins: a secret delight in life, and a quiet confidence which he could not altogether destroy, and which was very different from the boastful courage of the previous day. He opened the window and stood for a long time breathings in the fresh fragrance of the firs. Then he stepped before the easel, on which stood Kohle's cartoon representing the first scene of his legend of Venus, a plan of which, sketched in hasty outlines on a long roll of paper, lay near by. Felix was enough of an artist to appreciate this singular conception, even without an explanation; and, in his present romantic and excited state, it attracted him wonderfully. He seated himself on the wooden stool before the easel, and became absorbed in the contemplation of this first sheet, which was now almost completed. The beautiful goddess, leading her boy by the hand, had stepped half out of the shadow of a wild and overgrown gorge, and was gazing wonderingly toward a city which could be seen perched on a distant height, with Gothic battlements and towers. A river, which wound around the base of the hill, was spanned by a quaint old bridge, over which moved a long train of merchants with heavily-laden wagons, accompanied by a few travelers. A little further in the background was a shepherd-boy, stretched out on the grass by the side of his flock, playing a reed pipe and gazing dreamily up at the fleecy summer clouds. The figures were sharply and almost harshly outlined, but there was a certain dignity in the whole, that aided in heightening the fantastic charm of the conception, and in holding the thoughts of the observer aloof from the realities of every-day life.
Felix was still lost--as if in a second morning dream--in the contemplation of this fairy world, when he heard a cautious step creep up the narrow stairway, and stop at his door. He cried "come in," and could not help laughing when he caught sight of Kohle's honest face peering in with an expression as if he feared to find a man in the last stages of illness. Upon his informing his amazed friend that he was in excellent health, and that the picture of the goddess had probably worked this miracle, the artist's features lighted up, and he began, bright morning as it was, to speak of his work in the same spirit of high-strung enthusiasm in which he had fallen asleep the night before, and to give his explanation of the sketches, which, when unrolled, extended across the whole breadth of the studio. Then the fact that Rossel had given him leave to make use of the walls of the dining-room, and had even offered to assist in the painting, had to be communicated to Felix. Then, at last, he told him about the others; how they had risen long ago, and, without waiting for breakfast, had started off for Starnberg--Rosenbusch on matters connected with their love affairs, and in order to make arrangements for effecting a meeting in the afternoon; while Elfinger, who was passionately fond of fishing, had gone to a trout-brook near the Seven Springs, with whose owner he was acquainted--for he insisted upon contributing his share to the day's dinner. The master of the house himself never made his appearance before nine or ten o'clock. He was in the habit of taking his breakfast, and of smoking and reading, in bed; declaring that even then the day was much too long for him not to shorten it by any legitimate stratagem.
But Kohle had not yet finished what he was saying when the stairs once more began to creak, this time under a slower and more ponderous tread. Contrary to his usual habit, Fat Rossel had turned out early, in order to make inquiries concerning Felix's condition. He had not even taken time to complete his toilet, but came in his dressing-gown, his bare feet thrust into his slippers. He was perceptibly relieved when Felix, looking fresh and bright again, advanced to meet him and shook his hand, really touched that his anxious friend should have sacrificed his comfort for his sake.
"There are good fellows still left in this wretched world," he cried; "and I should be a villain indeed to make their lives uncomfortable. It is true, my friends, all within and about me is not just as it should be. But whoever shall see me drawing down the corners of my mouth and making a long face to-day, let him call me a Nazarene and break his maulstick over my back."
Rossel nodded his head thoughtfully at these words, for this sudden change in the young man's mood did not appear quite natural to him; however, he did not say a word, but seated himself on the stool before the easel--having first laid a pillow on it--in order to study Kohle's designs.
"Hm--hm! So--so! Fine--fine!" were the only critical remarks which he uttered for the space of a quarter of an hour. Then, however, he began to go into details, and, as he did so, all the strange traits of his nature came into view.
For, just as his own fancy was inexhaustible in raising buds that never bore fruit, so too, in regard to the works of others, he had gradually lost the faculty of patiently following the slow maturing of a thought in accordance with the inherent laws and quiet workings of Nature. For young people especially he was dangerous, for he first excited them powerfully, and led them in a perfect reel through a world of artistic problems; and then, the moment they went to work in earnest upon a particular task, his keenness and superior knowledge disgusted them with the subject they had taken up, by demonstrating to them a variety of other ways and methods in which the theme might be treated even more happily. Then, if they decided to destroy what they had begun, and begin anew according to one of the ways suggested, they found themselves no better off than before, since the one decisive and final solution always receded farther and farther into unattainable distance. In this way they lost all disposition to strike out boldly and energetically; became hair-splitters and theorists after the style of their master; or, if they did not possess enough mind or money for this, they gave themselves up in their desperation to mere mechanical work, which they pursued in secret, taking good care never to knock again at the door of their former oracle with a question about art.
"There is no one who sees into a picture, or out of it again, as quickly as Rossel," Jansen had once said, and Felix now had an unusually good opportunity of observing the force of this remark, in the manner in which Rossel examined Kohle's designs. For since, in this case, the critic was himself to lend a helping hand, his fancy was even more active than usual in rearranging what had been done, in order that it might, as far as possible, appropriate the picture to itself. How the light effect was to be arranged for every picture, what problems of color would enter into the question, how Giorgione would probably have composed the background, and what effect it would have if, for instance, the whole first scene should be transposed from broad day into evening twilight--all these questions were weighed in the most serious fashion; while all the while the position of the figures, the way in which the space was divided, and the landscape, were so mercilessly changed about, that finally the new conception of the work had scarcely anything in common with the original plan, except the mere subject.
Nor was even this last point to be regarded as definitely settled, but was merely to be looked upon as a basis for further consideration. But, while Kohle's face kept growing longer and more anxious, that of his fellow-laborer beamed with growing satisfaction. Every muscle in it quivered with intellectual life, and his black eyes flashed with genuine enthusiasm from beneath his white forehead. When finally he rose, he extended his arms above his head and cried:
"There is nothing finer than a good work which has been taken hold of at the right end. You shall see, Kohle--the thing will go. I take such pleasure in it that I would begin to-day--at once, if it didn't happen to be Sunday and I had not, before all things, to play the attentive host. However, you will have quite enough to do in making the changes in the cartoon. In the meanwhile I will assist my household dragon in composing a bill of fare--a thing which will take more thought, let me tell you, than even our dame Venus."
As soon as he had gone the two looked at one another, and Felix could not help bursting into a loud laugh, in which poor Kohle joined--at least with a pathetic smile.
"Now you see what comes of being too wise about anything," said he, regarding his sketch with a sigh. "When, in my stupidity, I went straight on following my certa idea, or even my nose, something came of it at all events. But after these criticisms, which were, by-the-way, all excellent and capital and appropriate, I am afraid the whole thing will go to the deuce again! If it were not for the beautiful wall down stairs I would tell him candidly that so ill-mated a span--as ill-matched as an ox and horse--would never drag the plough very far. Better to let the lean horse do the work alone, even though the furrows should not be quite so smooth. Alas, alas, alas! My poor dame Venus!"