“Don’t!” they cried. He saw at once that his provincial concerts were leading him to false goals, enflaming false ambitions, robbing him of his strength. He no longer found it possible to endure the sight of brilliantly lighted halls, and the over-dressed people who came empty and left untransformed. It all seemed to him like a lie. He desisted; he threw it all overboard just as the temptation was strongest, just as the Berlin Philharmonic invited him to give a concert of his own works in its hall.
He had suddenly disappeared. In less than three months his name had become a saga.
VI
He spent the summer, autumn, and winter of 1893 wandering around. Now he was in a remote Thuringian village, now in some town in the Rhön region, now in the mountains of Saxony, now in a fishing village on the Baltic. Throughout the day he worked on his manuscripts, in the evening he composed. No one except the members of the firm of Philander and Sons knew where he was. He did not dare hide himself from the people who were sending him the cheque at the end of the month.
He gradually became so unaccustomed to talking that it was only with difficulty that he could ask a hotel-keeper about the price of his room. This unrelieved silence chiselled his lips into ghastly sharpness.
He never heard from his mother or his children. He seemed to have forgotten that there were human beings living who thought of him with affection and anxiety.
The only messages he received from the world were letters that were forwarded to him at intervals of from four to five weeks by the musical firm in Mayence. These letters were written by Regina Sussmann, though they were not signed in her name: the signature at the close of each one was “The Swallow.” She addressed Daniel by the familiar Du, and not by the more conventional and polite Sie.
She told him of her life, wrote of the books she had read, the people she had met, and gave him her views on music. Her communications became in time indispensable to him; he was touched by her fidelity; he was pleased that she did not use her own name. She had a remarkable finesse and power of expression, and however ungenuine and artificial she may have appealed to him in personal association, everything she wrote seemed to him to be natural and convincing. She never expressed a wish that he do something impossible and never uttered a complaint. On the other hand, there was a passion of the intelligence about her that was quite new to him; she was unlike the women he had known. And there was a fervour and certainty in her appreciation of his being before which he bowed as at the sound of a higher voice.
Though he never answered her letters, he looked forward to receiving them, and became impatient if one were overdue. He often thought of the swallow when he would step to the window on a dark night. He thought of her as an all-seeing spirit that hovered in the air. The swallow—that was fraught with meaning—the restless, delicate, swift-flying swallow. And in his mind’s eye he saw the swallow that hovered over Ægydius Place when Eberhard came to take him up to the room with the withered flowers.