They walked along in silence until they reached the Town Hall, when Eberhard said: “Won’t you come up and sit awhile with me?” Daniel nodded.
Eberhard lighted the six candles of a chandelier in his diminutive room. Seeing that Daniel was surprised, he said: “There is nothing I hate worse than gas or oil. That is light; gas and oil merely give off illuminated stench.”
For a while there was complete silence in the room; Daniel had stretched out on the sofa.
“Illuminated stench,” he repeated with a smile of satisfaction. “That is not bad; it is the new age in which we are living. I believe they call it fin de siècle. The day when things flourish is gone; everything has to be manufactured now. Men have become Americans, gruesomely sobered by the intoxication of doing a big business; women have lost their nicety of instinct; the cities have become colossal steam engines; everybody, young and old, is on his belly adoring the so-called wonders of science, just as if it really meant anything to humanity that a loafer in Paris can sip his morning coffee and crunch his rolls while reading that the Pope spent a restful night, or that a gun has been invented which will send a bullet through fourteen people one after another, whereas the best record up to the present had been only seven to a shot. Who can create anything, who can draw anything from his soul under such conditions? It is madness, it is immoral discipline.”
“Oh, I don’t know; I think a man can draw something from within his soul,” said the Baron, in whose face a bored, peeved expression gave way to one of suspense. “It is possible, for example, to conjure the invisible spirit into visibility.”
Daniel, who had not yet suspected that the Baron was, in a way, speaking from another country and in a strange tongue, continued: “The whole supply of interest and enthusiasm at the disposal of the nation has been used up. The venerable creations of days gone by still have nominal value; that is, they are still gaped at and praised, but creative, reproductive, and moulding power they no longer have. Otherwise hocus-pocus alone prospers, and he who does forgive it is not forgiven. But life is short; I feel it every day; and if you do not attend to the plant, it soon withers and dies.”
“It is not only hocus-pocus,” replied Eberhard, who was now completely transformed, though he did not grasp the painful indignation of the musician. “You see, I have associated but very little with men. My refuge has been the realm of departed and invisible spirits who take on visible form only when a believing soul makes an unaffected appeal to them. It was my task to de-sensualise and de-materialise myself; then the spirits took on shape and form.”
Daniel straightened up, and saw how pale the Baron had become. It seemed to him that they were both quite close together, and at the same time poles removed from each other. He could not refrain however from taking up the thread of his thought. “Yes, yes,” he exclaimed with the same short, jerky laugh that accompanied the beginning of the conversation, “my little spirits also demand faith, credulity, and whine and cry for form and shape. You have expressed yourself in an admirable way, Baron.”
“And have you given up in final resignation with regard to your spirits?” asked Eberhard, in a serious tone.
“Resignation? To what? Of what? Do you imagine that is necessary in my case? I am the counterpart of Cronos. My children devour me; they devour my living body. I conjure up spirits and endow them with flesh and blood, and in return for what I do they convert me into a shadow. They are rebellious fellows, I tell you, quite without mercy. I am supposed to arouse a citizenry on their behalf that is petrified with indifference. The very thing, or things, that offend and disgust me, I am supposed to take up and carry about on an unencumbered shoulder. I am supposed to be their prostitute and offer them my body at a price. I am supposed to be their retail grocer and haggle in their behalf. There is something inspiring about a struggle, and when the enemy is worthy of one’s steel there is a distinct pleasure in entering the fray. But my little spirits want to be pampered and have a lot of attention paid them. The hate, consequently, that is being dammed up within me is possibly nothing but rage at my fruitless wooing. No, mine is not an honest hate, because I long to get at every ragged beggar who will have nothing to do with my spirits, because my entire life consists in pleading for an audience with people who do not care to listen, and scraping together pennies of love from people who cannot love, because two or three are not enough for me, because I must have thousands and am nothing if I don’t have thousands, and pine away in anguish and distress if I cannot imagine that the whole world is keeping step with my pace and keeping in time with the swing of my baton. I can despise Mushroom Mike who lies down by his wife at night drunk as a fool, and to whom the name of Beethoven is an empty sound; Jason Philip Schimmelweis makes me laugh when he looks me in the face and says, I don’t give a damn for all your art. And yet there is humanity in such people, and so long as this is true I must have them; I must convince them, even if my heart is torn from my breast in the attempt. Would you call this life? This digging-up of corpses from the graves, and breathing the breath of life into them so that they may dance? And doing it with the consciousness that this moment is the only one? I am; I exist; here is the table, there are the wax candles, and over there sits a man; and when I have stopped talking everything is different, everything is as if a year had passed by, and everything is irrevocable. Show me a way to humanity, to men, and then I will believe in God.”