“What a sweet temper he will be in at the probe to-morrow!” laughed Karl. “Won’t he give it to the Mädchen right and left!”
“What time is he coming?” proceeded one of the oboists.
“Don’t know; know nothing about it; perhaps he’ll appear in ‘Tannhauser’ to-night. Look out, Friedhelm.”
“Here comes little Luischen,” said Karl, with a winning smile, a straightening of his collar, and a general arming-for-conquest expression, as some of the “ladies of the chorus and ballet,” appeared from the side door. “Isn’t she pretty?” he went on, in an audible aside to me. “I’ve a crow to pluck with her too. Tag, Fräulein!” he added, advancing to the young lady who had so struck him.
He was “struck” on an average once a week, every time with the most beautiful and charming of her sex. The others, with one or two exceptions, also turned. I said good-morning to Linders, who wished, with a noble generosity, to make me a partaker in his cheerful conversation with Fräulein Luise of the first soprans, slipped from his grasp and took my way homeward. Fräulein Luischen was no doubt very pretty, and in her way a companionable person. Unfortunately I never could appreciate that way. With every wish to accommodate myself to the only society with which fortune supplied me, it was but ill that I succeeded.
I, Friedhelm Helfen, was at that time a lonely, soured misanthrope of two-and-twenty. Let the announcement sound as absurd as it may, it is simply and absolutely true, I was literally alone in the world. My last relative had died and left me entirely without any one who could have even a theoretical reason for taking any interest in me. Gradually, during the last few months, I had fallen into evil places of thought and imagination. There had been a time before, as there has been a time since—as it is with me now—when I worshiped my art with all my strength as the most beautiful thing on earth; the art of arts—the most beautiful and perfect development of beauty which mankind has yet succeeded in attaining to, and when the very fact of its being so and of my being gifted with some poor power of expressing and interpreting that beauty was enough for me—gave me a place in the world with which I was satisfied, and made life understandable to me. At that time this belief—my natural and normal state—was clouded over; between me and the goddess of my idolatry had fallen a veil; I wasted my brain tissue in trying to philosophize—cracked my head, and almost my reason over the endless, unanswerable question, Cui bono? that question which may so easily become the destruction of the fool who once allows himself to be drawn into dallying with it. Cui bono? is a mental Delilah who will shear the locks of the most arrogant Samson. And into the arms and to the tender mercies of this Delilah I had given myself. I was in a fair way of being lost forever in her snares, which she sets for the feet of men. To what use all this toil? To what use—music? After by dint of hard twisting my thoughts and coping desperately with problems that I did not understand, having managed to extract a conviction that there was use in music—a use to beautify, gladden, and elevate—I began to ask myself further, “What is it to me whether mankind is elevated or not? made better or worse? higher or lower?”
Only one who has asked himself that question, as I did, in bitter earnest, and fairly faced the answer, can know the horror, the blackness, the emptiness of the abyss into which it gives one a glimpse. Blackness of darkness—no standpoint, no vantage-ground—it is a horror of horrors; it haunted me then day and night, and constituted itself not only my companion but my tyrant.
I was in bad health too. At night, when the joyless day was over, the work done, the play played out, the smell of the foot-lights and gas and the dust of the stage dispersed, a deadly weariness used to overcome me; an utter, tired, miserable apathy; and alone, surrounded by loneliness, I let my morbid thoughts carry me whither they would. It had gone so far that I had even begun to say to myself lately:
“Friedhelm Helfen, you are not wanted. On the other side this life is a nothingness so large that you will be as nothing in it. Launch yourself into it. The story that suicide is wrong and immoral is, like other things, to be taken with reservation. There is no absolute right and wrong. Suicide is sometimes the highest form of right and reason.”
This mood was strong upon me on that particular day, and as I paced along the Schadowstrasse toward the Wehrhahn, where my lodging was, the very stones seemed to cry out, “The world is weary, and you are not wanted in it.”