But Jason Philip had cried hurrah.
He sneaked home shaking with shame. He drew his slippers, “For the tired Man—Consolation,” on his feet. They had become quite worn in the course of his tempestuous life. He lay down on the sofa with his face to the wall, his back to the window and against the world.
V
Daniel had been in Berlin for weeks. He had been living a lonely life on the east side of the gigantic city. One of the managers of Philander and Sons came to see him. He returned the call, and in the course of two hours he was surrounded, contrary to his own will, by a veritable swarm of composers, directors, virtuosos, and musical critics.
Some had heard of him; to them he appeared to be a remarkable man. They threw out their nets to catch him, but he slipped through the meshes. Unprepared, however, as he was for their schemes, he could not help being caught in time. He had to give an account of himself, to unveil himself. He found himself under obligations, interested, and so forth, but in the end they could not prevail against him: he simply passed through them.
They laughed at his dialect and his rudeness. What drew them to him was his self-respect; what annoyed them was his secretiveness; what they found odd about him was the fact that, try as they might to associate with him, he would disappear entirely from them for months at a time.
A divorced young woman, a Jewess by the name of Regina Sussmann, fell in love with him. She recognised in Daniel an elemental nature. The more he avoided her the more persistent she became. At times it made him feel good to come once again into intimate association with a woman, to hear her bright voice, her step more delicate, her breathing more ardent than that of men. But he could not trust Regina Sussmann; she seemed to know too much. There was nothing of the plant-like about her, and without that characteristic any woman appealed to him as being unformed and uncultured.
One winter day she came to see him in his barren hall room in Greifswald Street. She sat down at the piano and began to improvise. At first it was all like a haze to him. Suddenly he was struck by her playing. What he heard made a half disagreeable, half painful impression on him. He seemed to be familiar with the piece. She was playing motifs from his quartette, his “Eleanore Quartette” as he had called it. It came out that Regina Sussmann had been present at the concert given in Leipzig three years ago when the quartette was performed.
After a painful pause Regina began to ask some questions that cut him to the very heart. She wanted to know what relation, if any, the composition bore to actual life. She was trying to lift the veil from his unknown fate. He thrust her from him. Then he felt sorry for her: he began to speak, with some hesitation, of his symphony. There was something bewitching, enchanting in the woman’s passionate silence and sympathy. He lost himself, forgot himself, disclosed his heart. He built up the work in words before her, pictured the seven movements like seven stairs in the tower of a temple, a glorious promenade in the upper spheres, a tragic storm with tragically cheerful pauses of memory and meditation, all accompanied by laughing genii that adorned and crowned the pillars of the structure of his dreams.