“Not exactly, Royal Highness; no, the unsuitability to which I alluded before began to show itself in me at an early age. I couldn't get on at school. I left it without passing my ‘final.’ I went up to the university with the full intention of taking it later, but I never did. And when my first volume of poems attracted a good deal of attention, it no longer suited my dignity to do so, if I may say so.”
“Of course not…. But did your parents then agree to your choice of a career?”
“Oh no, Royal Highness! I must say to my parents' credit that they by no means agreed to it. I come of a good stock: my father was Solicitor to the Treasury. He's dead now, but he was Solicitor to the Treasury. He naturally disliked my choice of a career so much that till his death he would never give me a farthing. I lived at daggers drawn with him, although I had the greatest respect for him because of his strictness.”
“Oh, so you've had a hard time of it, Herr Martini, you've had to struggle through. I can well believe that you must have knocked about a good deal!”
“Not so, Royal Highness! No, that would have been horrid, I couldn't have stood it. My health is delicate—I dare not say ‘unfortunately,’ for I am convinced that my talent is inseparably connected with my bodily infirmity. Neither my body nor my talent could have survived hunger and harsh winds, and they have not had to survive them. My mother was weak enough to provide me behind my father's back with the means of life, modest but adequate means. I owe it to her that my talent has been able to develop under fairly favourable conditions.”
“The result has shown, Herr Martini, that they were the right conditions…. Although it is difficult to say now what actually are good conditions. Permit me to suppose that if your mother had shown herself as strict as your father, and you had been alone in the world, and left entirely to your own resources … don't you think that it might have been to a certain extent a good thing for you? That you might have got a peep at things, so to speak, which have escaped you as it is?”
“People like me, Royal Highness, get peeps enough without having actually to know what hunger is; and the idea is fairly generally accepted that it is not actual hunger, but rather hunger for the actual … ha, ha!… which talent requires.”
Herr Martini had been obliged to laugh a little at his play upon words. He now quickly raised one yellow-gloved hand to his mouth with the hedge-like moustache, and improved his laugh into a cough. Klaus Heinrich watched him with a look of princely expectancy.
“If your Royal Highness will allow me…. It is a well-known fact that the want of actuality for such as me is the seed-ground of all talent, the fountain of inspiration, indeed our suggestive genius. Enjoyment of life is forbidden to us, strictly forbidden, we have no illusions as to that—and by enjoyment of life I mean not only happiness, but also sorrow, passion, in short every serious tie with life. The representation of life claims all our forces, especially when those forces are not allotted to us in overabundant measure”—and Herr Martini coughed, drawing his shoulders repeatedly forward as he did so. “Renunciation,” he added, “is our compact with the Muse, in it reposes our strength, our value; and life is our forbidden garden, our great temptation, to which we yield sometimes, but never to our profit.”
The flow of words had again brought tears to Herr Martini's eyes. He tried to blink them away.