The fire alarm drove him out: there was a fire in the suburbs of Schoppershof. The sky was reddened, it was drizzling. It seemed to Daniel that the air was reeking with the premonition of a heart-crushing disaster. Above the Laufer Gate a sheaf of sparks was whirling about.
Just then the melody for which he had waited so long throughout so many nights of restless despair arose before him in a grandiose circle. It seemed as if born for the words of the “Harzreise”: “With the dim burning torch thou lightest for him the ferries at night over bottomless paths, across desolate fields.”
In mournful thirds, receding again and again, the voices sank to earth; just one remained on high, alone, piously dissociated from profane return.
He hummed the melody with trembling lips to himself, until he met the nineteenth-century Socrates with his followers in the Rosenthal. They were still gipsying through the night.
They all talked at once; they were going to the fire. Daniel passed by unrecognised. The shrill voice of the painter Kropotkin pierced the air: “Hail to the flames! Hail to those whose coming we announce!” The laughter of the slough brothers died away in the distance.
Gertrude was standing at the head of the stairs with a candle in her hand; she had been waiting there since twelve o’clock. At eleven she had gone over to her father’s house and rung the bell. Eleanore, frightened, had raised the window, and called down to her that Daniel had left her at nine.
He took the half-inanimate woman into the living room: “You must never wait for me, never,” he said.
He opened the window, pointed to the glowing sky beyond the church, and as she leaned her head, with eyes closed, on his shoulder, he said with a scurrilous distortion of his face: “Behold! The fire! Hail to the flames! Hail to those whose coming we announce!”