Daniel had lighted a candle in the living room. Finding it too dark with only one candle, he lighted another.
He paced back and forth. The room seemed too small for him: he opened the door leading into Dorothea’s room, and walked back and forth through it too. On entering the dark room, his lips would move; he would murmur something. When he returned to the lighted room, he would stand for a second or two and stare at the candles.
His features seemed to show traces of human suffering such as no man had borne before; it could hardly have been greater. He did not seem to notice Benda when he came in.
“Everything gone? Everything destroyed?” asked Benda, after he had watched Daniel walk back and forth for nearly a quarter of an hour.
“One grave after the other,” murmured Daniel, in a voice that no longer seemed to be his own. He raised his head as if surprised at the sound of what he himself had said. He felt that a stranger had come into the room without letting himself be heard.
“And the last work, the great work of which you told me, the fruit of so many years, has it also been destroyed?” asked Benda.
“Everything,” replied Daniel distractedly, “everything I have created in the way of music from the time I first had reason to believe in myself. The sonatas, the songs, the quartette, the psalm, the ‘Harzreise,’ ‘Wanderers Sturmlied,’ and the symphony, everything down to the last page and the last note.”
Yes, there was a stranger there; you could hear him laughing quietly to himself. “Why do you laugh?” asked Daniel sternly, and adjusted his glasses.
Benda, terrified, said: “I did not laugh.”