The GOOSE MAN

by Jacob Wassermann

Author of
“THE WORLD’S ILLUSION”

Authorized translation by
ALLEN W. PORTERFIELD

GROSSET & DUNLAP ~ Publishers
by arrangement with
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY

NOTE

The first chapter, “A Mother Seeks Her Son,” and sections I and II of the second chapter, “Foes, Brothers, a Friend, and a Mask,” were translated by Ludwig Lewisohn. The rest of the book has been translated by Allen W. Porterfield. The title, “The Goose Man” (“Das Gänsemännchen”), refers to the famous statue of that name in Nuremberg.

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

THE GOOSE MAN

A MOTHER SEEKS HER SON

I

The landscape shows many shades of green; deep forests, mostly coniferous, extend from the valley of the Rednitz to that of the Tauber. Yet the villages lie in the midst of great circles of cultivated land, for the tillage of man is immemorial here. Around the many weirs the grass grows higher, so high often that you can see only the beaks of the droves of geese, and were it not for their cackle you might take these beaks to be strangely mobile flowers.

The little town of Eschenbach lies quite flat on the plain. In it a fragment of the Middle Ages has survived, but no strangers know it, since hours of travel divide it from any railway. Ansbach is the nearest point in the great system of modern traffic; to get there you must use a stage-coach. And that is as true to-day as it was in the days when Gottfried Nothafft, the weaver, lived there.

The town walls are overgrown with moss and ivy; the old drawbridges still cross the moats and take you through the round, ruined gates into the streets. The houses have bay-windows and far-projecting overhangs, and their interlacing beams look like the criss-cross of muscles on an anatomical chart.

Concerning the poet who was once born here and who sang the song of Parsifal, all living memory has faded. Perhaps the fountains whisper of him by night; perhaps sometimes when the moon is up, his shadow hovers about the church or the town-hall. The men and women know nothing of him any more.

The little house of the weaver, withdrawn by a short distance from the street, stood not far from the inn at the sign of the Ox. Three worn steps took you to its door, and six windows looked out upon the quiet square. It is strange to reflect that the spirit of modern industrialism hewed its destructive path even to this forgotten nook of the world.

In 1849, at the time of Gottfried Nothafft’s marriage—his wife, Marian, was one of the two Höllriegel sisters of Nuremberg—he had still been able to earn a tolerable living. So the couple desired a child, but desired it for years in vain. Often, at the end of the day’s work, when Gottfried sat on the bench in front of his house and smoked his pipe, he would say: “How good it would be if we had a son.” Marian would fall silent and lower her eyes.

As time passed, he stopped saying that, because he would not put the woman to shame. But his expression betrayed his desire all the more clearly.

II

A day came on which his trade seemed to come to a halt. The weavers in all the land complained that they could not keep their old pace. It was as though a creeping paralysis had come upon them. The market prices suddenly dropped, and the character of the goods was changed.

This took place toward the end of the eighteen hundred and fifties, when the new power looms were being introduced from America. No toil profited anything. The cheap product which the machines could furnish destroyed the sale of the hand-made weaves.

At first Gottfried Nothafft refused to be cast down. Thus the wheel of a machine will run on for a space after the power has been cut off. But gradually his courage failed. His hair turned grey in a single winter, and at the age of forty-five he was a broken man.

And just as poverty appeared threatening at their door, and the soul of Marian began to be stained by hatred, the longing of the couple was fulfilled, and the wife became pregnant in the tenth year of their marriage.

The hatred which she nourished was directed against the power loom. In her dreams she saw the machine as a monster with thighs of steel, which screamed out its malignity and devoured the hearts of men. She was embittered by the injustice of a process which gave to impudence and sloth the product that had once come thoughtfully and naturally from the careful hands of men.

One journeyman after another had to be discharged, and one hand-loom after another to be stored in the attic. On many days Marian would slip up the stairs and crouch for hours beside the looms, which had once been set in motion by a determinable and beneficent exertion and were like corpses now.

Gottfried wandered across country, peddling the stock of goods he had on hand. Once on his return he brought with him a piece of machine-made cloth which a merchant of Nördlingen had given him. “Look, Marian, see what sort of stuff it is,” he said, and handed it to her. But Marian drew her hand away, and shuddered as though she had seen the booty of a murderer.

After the birth of her boy she lost these morbid feelings; Gottfried on the other hand seemed to dwindle from month to month. Though he outlasted the years, there was no cheer left in him and he got no comfort even from his growing boy. When he had sold all his own wares, he took those of others, and dragged himself wearily in summer and winter from village to village.

In spite of the scarcity that prevailed in the house, Marian was convinced that Gottfried had put by money, and certain hints which he threw out confirmed her in this hope. It was one of his peculiar views that it was better to leave his wife in the dark regarding the true state of their fortunes. As their circumstances grew worse, he became wholly silent on this point.

III

On the square of the grain merchants in Nuremberg, Jason Philip Schimmelweis, the husband of Marian’s sister, had his bookbinder’s shop.

Schimmelweis was a Westphalian. Hatred against the junkers and the priests had driven him to this Protestant city of the South, where from the beginning he had acquired the respect of people through his ready wit and speech. Theresa Höllriegel had lodged in the house in which he opened his shop, and gained her living as a seamstress. He had thought that she had some money, but it had proved to be too little for his ambitious notions. When he discovered that, he treated Theresa as though she had cheated him.

He held his trade in contempt, and was ambitious of greater things. He felt that he was called to be a bookseller; but he had no capital wherewith to realise this plan. So he sat morosely in his subterranean shop, pasted and folded and quarrelled with his lot, and in his hours of leisure read the writings of socialists and freethinkers.

It was the Autumn in which the war against France was raging. On that very morning had come the news of the battle of Sedan. All the church bells were ringing.

To the surprise of Jason Philip, Gottfried Nothafft stepped into his shop. His long, patriarchal beard and tall stature gave something venerable to his appearance, even though his face looked tired and his eyes were dull.

“God bless you, brother,” he said and held out his hand. “The fatherland has better luck than its citizens.”

Schimmelweis, who did not like the visits of kinsmen, returned the salutation with careful coolness. His features did not brighten until he heard that his brother-in-law was stopping at the Red Cock Inn. He asked what errand had brought Gottfried to the city.

“I must have a talk with you,” Nothafft replied.

They entered a room behind the shop and sat down. Jason Philip’s eyes harboured even now a definitely negative answer to any proposal that might cost him money or trouble. But he was to be agreeably disappointed.

“I want to tell you, brother,” Gottfried Nothafft said, “that I have put by three thousand taler during the nineteen years of my married life. And since I have the feeling that I am not long for this world, I have come to ask you to take charge of the money for Marian and the boy. It has been troublesome enough not to touch it in these evil times that have come. Marian knows nothing of it, and I don’t want her to know. She is a weak woman, and women do not understand money nor the worth and dignity it has when it has been earned so bitterly hard. In some hour of difficulty she would begin to use it, and presently it would be gone. But I want to ease Daniel’s entry into life, when his years of training and apprenticeship are over. He is twelve now. In another twelve years he will be, God willing, a man. You can help Marian with the interest, and all I ask of you is to be silent and to act a father’s part toward the boy when I shall be no more.”

Jason Philip Schimmelweis arose. He was moved and wrung Gottfried Nothafft’s hand. “You may rely upon me,” he said, “as you would on the Bank of England.”

“I thought that would be your answer, brother, and that is why I came.”

He put down on the table three thousand taler in bank notes of the realm, and Jason Philip wrote out a receipt. Then he urged him to stay that night at his house. But Gottfried Nothafft said that he must return home to his wife and child, and that a single night in the noisy city had been enough for him.

When they returned to the shop, they found Theresa sitting there. In her lap she held Philippina, her first-born, who was three years old. The child had a large head and homely features. Gottfried hardly stopped to answer his sister-in-law’s questions. Later Theresa asked her husband what Gottfried’s business had been. Jason Philip answered brusquely: “Nothing a woman would understand.”

Three days later Gottfried sent back the receipt. On the back of it he had written: “The paper is of no use; it might even betray my secret. I have your word and your hand. That is enough. With thanks for your friendship and your services, I am your faithful kinsman, Gottfried Nothafft.”

IV

Before peace had been made with France, Gottfried lay down to die. He was buried in the little churchyard by the wall, and a cross was set upon his grave.

Jason Philip and Theresa had come to the funeral, and stayed for three days. An examination of her inheritance showed, to Marian’s consternation, that there were not twenty taler in the house, and what she saw ahead of her was a life of wretchedness and want. Jason Philip’s counsel and his plan were a genuine consolation to her, and his declaration that he would stand by her to the best of his ability eased her heart.

It was determined that she was to open a little shop, and Jason advanced her one hundred taler. All the while he had the air of a made man. He held his head high, and his fat little cheeks glowed with health. He was fond of drumming with his fingers on the window pane and of whistling. The tune he whistled was the Marseillaise, but that tune was not known in Eschenbach.

Daniel observed carefully his uncle’s lips, and whistled the tune after him. Jason Philip laughed so that his little belly quivered. Then he remembered that it was a house of mourning, and said: “What a boy!”

But really he did not like the boy. “Our excellent Gottfried does not seem to have trained him carefully,” he remarked once, when Daniel showed some childish recalcitrance. “The boy needs a strong hand.”

Daniel heard these words, and looked scornfully into his uncle’s face.

Sunday afternoon, when the coffee had been served, the Schimmelweis couple was ready to leave. But Daniel was not to be found. The wife of the inn-keeper called out across the road that she had seen him follow the organist to church. Marian ran to the church to fetch him. After a while she returned, and said to Jason Philip, who was waiting: “He’s crouching in the organ loft, and I can’t get him to move.”

“Can’t get him to move?” Jason Philip started up, and his little red cheeks gleamed with rage. “What does that mean? How can you tolerate that?” And he himself proceeded to the church to get the disobedient child.

As he was mounting the organ-loft he met the organist, who laughed and said: “I suppose you’re looking for Daniel? He’s still staring at the organ, as though my bit of playing had bewitched him.”

“I’ll drive the witch-craft out of him,” Jason Philip snarled.

Daniel was crouching on the floor behind the organ, and did not stir at his uncle’s call. He was so absorbed that the expression of his eyes made his uncle wonder whether the boy was really sane. He grasped Daniel’s shoulder, and spoke in a tone of violent command: “Come home with me this minute!”

Daniel looked up, awoke from his dream, and became aware of the indignant hiss of that alien voice. He tore himself away, and declared insolently that he would stay where he was. That enraged Jason Philip utterly, and he tried again to lay hands on the boy in order to drag him down by force. Daniel leapt back, and cried with a quivering voice: “Don’t touch me!”

Perhaps it was the silence of the nave that had an admonishing and terrifying effect on Jason Philip. Perhaps the extraordinary malignity and passion in the little fellow’s face caused him to desist. At all events he turned around and went without another word.

“The stage-coach is waiting. We’ll be late!” his wife called out to him.

He turned a sinister face to Marian. “You’re bringing up a fine product, I must say. You’ll have your own troubles with him.”

Marian’s eyes fell. She was not unprepared for the reproach. She was herself frightened at the boy’s savage obduracy, his self-centred insistence on his imaginings, his hardness and impatience and contempt of all restraint. It seemed to her as though fate had inspired the soul of her child with something of the foolish and torturing hatred which she had nursed during her pregnancy.

V

Jason Philip Schimmelweis left the dark basement on the square, rented a shop near the bridge by the museum, and set up as a bookseller. Thus his old ambition was realised at last.

He hired a shop-assistant, and Theresa sat all day at the till and learned to keep books.

When she asked her husband what was the source of his capital, he answered that a friend who had great confidence in his ability had advanced him the money at a low rate of interest. He added that he had been pledged not to divulge the name of his friend.

Theresa did not believe him. Her mind was full of dark forebodings. She brooded incessantly and grew to be watchful and suspicious. In secret she tried to ferret out the identity of this nameless friend, but came upon no trace. Now and then she tried to cross-question Jason Philip. On such occasions he would snarl at her malignantly. There was no talk of the return of the money or of the payment of interest on it, nor did the books show an entry of any sort. To rid herself of the anxieties that accompanied her through the years, it would have been necessary for Theresa to believe in helpful fairies. And she did not believe in them.

Nature had given her neither gaiety nor gentleness; under the pressure of this insoluble mystery she became ill-tempered as a wife and moody as a mother.

When there were no customers in the shop she would pick up books quite at random and read in them. Sometimes it was a novel dealing with crime, sometimes a garrulous tract dealing with secret vices. Such things were needed to attract a public that regarded the buying of books as a sinful waste. Without special pleasure, and with a morose sort of thirst for information, she read revelations of court life and the printed betrayals of all kinds of spies, adventurers, and rogues. Quite unconsciously she came to judge the world to which she had no real access according to these books which offered her as truth the issues of sick and pestilential minds.

But as the years went on, and prosperity raised Jason Philip definitely into the merchant class, he abandoned the shadier side of his business. He was a man who knew his age and who unfurled his sails when he was sure of a favourable wind. He entrusted his ship more and more to the ever swelling current of the political parties of the proletariat, and hoped to find his profit where, in a half-hearted way, his convictions lay. He exhibited a rebel’s front to the middle-classes, and held out a hand of unctuous fellowship to the toiler. He knew how to make his way! Many an insignificant shop-keeper had been known to exchange his musty rooms for a villa in the suburbs, to furnish it pretentiously, and to send his sons on trips abroad.

In these days, too, the old imperial city awoke from its romantic slumber. Once the sublime churches, the lovely curves of the bridges, and the quaint gables of the houses had formed an artistic whole. Now they became mere remnants. Castle and walls and mighty towers were ruins of an age of dreams now fortunately past. Iron rails were laid on the streets and rusty chains with strangely shaped lanterns were removed from the opening of narrow streets. Factories and smoke-stacks surrounded the venerable and picturesque city as an iron frame might surround the work of some old master.

“Modern man has got to have light and air,” said Jason Philip Schimmelweis, and clinked the coins in his trousers pocket.

VI

Daniel attended the gymnasium at Ansbach. He was to complete the course of studies that would entitle him to the reduction of his military service to one year and then enter business. This had been agreed upon between Jason Philip and Marian.

The boy’s zeal for study was small. His teachers shook their heads. Their considerable experience of the world had never yet offered them a being so constituted. He listened more eagerly to the lowing of a herd of cows and to the twittering of the sparrows than to the best founded principles of grammatical science. Some of them thought him dull, others malicious. He passed from class to class with difficulty and solely by virtue of a marvellous faculty of guessing. At especially critical moments he was saved through the help and advocacy of the music-master Spindler.

The families who gave the poor student his meals complained of his bad manners. The wife of Judge Hahn forbade him the house on account of his boorish answers. “Beggars must not be choosers,” she had called out after him.

Spindler was a man who asserted quite correctly that he had been meant for better things than wearing himself out in a provincial town. His white locks framed a face ennobled by the melancholy that speaks of lost ideals and illusions.

One summer morning Spindler had risen with the sun and gone for a long walk in the country. When he reached the first barn of the village of Dautenwinden he saw a company of strolling musicians, who had played dance music the evening before and far into the night, and who were now shaking from their hair and garments the straw and chaff amid which they had slept. Above them, under the open gable of the barn, Daniel Nothafft was lying in the straw. With an absorbed and devout expression he was seeking to elicit a melody from a flute which one of the musicians had loaned him.

Spindler stood still and looked up. The musicians laughed, but he did not share in their merriment. A long while passed before the unskilful player of the flute became aware of his teacher. Then he climbed down and tried to steal away with a shy greeting. Spindler stopped him. They walked on together, and Daniel confessed that he had not been able to tear himself away from the musicians since the preceding afternoon. The lad of fourteen was not able to express his feeling; but it seemed to him as though a higher power had forced him to breathe the same air at least with those who made music.

From that day on and for three years Daniel visited Spindler twice a week, and was most thoroughly grounded in counterpoint and harmony. The hours thus spent were both consecrated and winged. Spindler found a peculiar happiness in nourishing a passion whose development struck him as a reward for his many years of toneless isolation. And though the desperateness of this passion, though the rebelliousness and aimless wildness which streamed to him not only from the character of his pupil but also from that pupil’s first attempts at composition, gave him cause for anxiety, yet he hoped always to soothe the boy by pointing to the high and serene models and masters of his art.

And so the time came in which Daniel was to earn his own bread.

VII

Spindler journeyed to Eschenbach to confer with Marian Nothafft.

The woman did not understand him. She felt tempted to laugh.

Music had meant in her life the droning of a hurdy-gurdy, the singing of a club of men, the marching of a military band. Was her boy to wander from door to door and fiddle for pennies? Spindler seemed a mere madman to her. She pressed her hands together, and looked at him as at a man who was wasting trivial words on a tragic disaster. The music-master realised that his influence was as narrow as his world, and was forced to leave without accomplishing anything.

Marian wrote a letter to Jason Philip Schimmelweis.

One could almost see Jason Philip worrying his reddish brown beard with his nimble fingers and the scornful twinkling of his eyes; one could almost hear the sharp, northern inflection of his speech when his answer to Daniel arrived: “I expected nothing else of you than that it would be your dearest wish to be a wastrel. My dear boy, either you buckle under and make up your mind to become a decent member of society, or I leave you both to your own devices. There is no living in selling herrings and pepper, and so you will kindly imagine for yourself the fate of your mother, especially if a parasite like yourself clings to her.”

Daniel tore up the letter into innumerable bits and let them flutter out into the wind. His mother wept.

Then he went out into the forest, wandered about till nightfall, and slept in the hollow of a tree.

VIII

One might go on and tell the tale of continued rebellion, of angry words on both sides, of pleas and complaints and fruitless arguments, of bitter controversy and yet bitterer silence.

Daniel fled and returned and let the slothful days glide by, stormed about in the vicinity, and lay in the high grass beside the pools or opened his window at night, cursing the silence and envying the clouds their speed.

His mother followed him when he went to his little room and pressed her ear to the door, and then entered and saw the candle still lit, and went to his bed and was frightened at his gleaming eyes which grew sombre at her approach. Full of the memories of her early cares and fears for him, and thinking that the darkness and the sight of her weakness would prevail upon him, she pleaded and begged once more. And he looked up at her and something broke in his soul, and he promised to do as she demanded.

So we see him next at the house of the leather merchant Hamecher in Ansbach. He sits on a bale of leather in the long, dismal passage way or on the cellar steps or in the store room, and dreams and dreams and dreams. And gradually the worthy Hamecher’s indulgent surprise turned to blank astonishment and then to indignation, and at the end of six months he showed the useless fellow the door.

Once more Jason Philip condescended to grant his favour, and chose a new scene and new people for his nephew, if only to remove him from Spindler’s baneful influence. At the mention of the city of Bayreuth no one became aware of Daniel’s fiery ecstasy, for they had never heard of the name of Richard Wagner but always of the name of the wine merchant Maier. And so he came to Bayreuth, the Jerusalem of his yearning, and forced himself to an appearance of industry in order to remain in that spot where sun and air and earth and the very beasts and stones and refuse breathe that music of which Spindler had said that he himself had a profound presentiment of its nature but was too old to grasp and love it wholly.

Daniel did his best to make himself useful. But in spite of himself he scrawled music notes on the invoices, roared strange melodies in lonely vaults, and let the contents of a whole keg of wine leak out, because in front of him, on the floor, lay the score of the English Suites.

At a rehearsal he slipped into the Festival Playhouse, but was put out by a zealous watchman, and on this occasion made the acquaintance of Andreas Döderlein, who was a professor at the Nuremberg conservatory and a tireless apostle of the redeemer. Döderlein seemed not disinclined to understand and to help, and expressed a real delight at the deep, original enthusiasm and burning devotion of his protégé. And Daniel, intoxicated by a rather vague and not at all binding promise of a scholarship at the conservatory, fled from Bayreuth by night, made his way on foot back to Eschenbach, threw himself at his mother’s feet, and almost writhed there before her and begged and implored her, and in words almost wild sought to prevail on her to attempt to change the mind of Jason Philip. He tried to explain to her that his life and happiness, his very blood and heart were dedicated to this one thing. But she, who was once kindly, was now hard—hard as stone, cold as ice. She understood nothing, felt nothing, believed nothing, saw only the frightfulness, as she called it, of his incurable aberration.

All these matters might have been related at length. But they are as inevitable in their character and sequence as the sparks and smoke that follow upon fire. They are quite determinable; they have often happened, and have always had the same final effect.

What clung to Marian’s soul was an immemorial prejudice against a gipsy’s life and a stroller’s fate. Her ancestors and her husband’s had always earned their livelihood in the honest ways of a trade. She could not see what the free tuition at Döderlein’s conservatory would avail Daniel, since he had nothing wherewithal to sustain life. He told her that Spindler had taught him how to play on the piano, that he would perfect his skill and so earn his sustenance. She shook her head. Then he spoke to her of the greatness of art, of the ecstasy which an artist could communicate and the immortality he might win, and that perhaps it would be granted him to create something unique and incomparable. But these words she thought mad and pretentious delusions, and smiled contemptuously. And at that his soul turned away from her, and she seemed a mother to him no more.

When Jason Philip Schimmelweis learned what was afoot, he would not let the troublesome journey deter him, but appeared in Marian’s shop like an avenging angel. Daniel feared him no longer, since he had given up hoping for anything from him. He laughed to himself at the sight of the stubby, short-necked man in his rage. Gleams of mockery and of cunning still played over the red cheeks of Jason Philip, for he had a very high opinion of himself, and did not think the windy follies of a boy of nineteen worthy of the whole weight of his personality.

While he talked his little eyes sparkled, and his red, little tongue pushed away the recalcitrant hairs of his moustache from his voluble lips. Daniel stood by the door, leaning against the post, his arms folded across his chest, and regarded now his mother, who, dumb and suddenly old, sat in a corner of the sofa, now the oil portrait of his father on the opposite wall. A friend of Gottfried Nothafft’s youth, a painter who had been long lost and forgotten like his other works, had once painted it. It showed a man of serious bearing, and brought to mind the princely guildsman of the Middle Ages. Seeing the picture at that moment enlightened Daniel as to the ancestral strain that had brought him to this mood and to this hour.

And turning now once more to Jason Philip’s face, he thought he perceived in it the restlessness of an evil conscience. It seemed to him that this man was not acting from conviction but from an antecedent determination. It seemed to him further that he was faced, not merely by this one man and his rage and its accidental causes, but by a whole world in arms that was pledged to enmity against him. He had no inclination now to await the end of Jason Philip’s oratorical efforts, and left the room.

Jason Philip grew pale. “Don’t let us deceive ourselves, Marian,” he said. “You have nursed a viper on your bosom.”

Daniel stood by the Wolfram fountain in the square, and let the purple of the setting sun shine upon him. Round about him the stones and the beams of the ancient houses glowed, and the maids who came with pails to fetch water at the fountain gazed with astonishment into the brimming radiance of the sky. At this hour his native town grew very dear to Daniel. When Jason Philip entered the square, at the corner of which the stage-coach was waiting, he did his best not to be seen by Daniel and avoided him in a wide semi-circle. But Daniel turned around and fastened his eyes on the man, who strode rapidly and gazed stubbornly aside.

This thing too has happened before and will happen again. Nor is it amazing that the fugitive should turn and inspire terror in his pursuer.

IX

Daniel saw that he could not stay to be a burden to his mother with her small resources. She was poor and dependent on the judgment of a tyrannical kinsman. Mastering his passionate impulses, he forced himself to cool reflection and made a plan. He would have to work and earn so much money that after a year or more he would be able to go to Andreas Döderlein and remind him of his magnanimous offer. So he studied the advertisements in the papers and wrote letters of application. A printer in Mannheim wanted an assistant correspondent. Since he agreed to take the small wage offered, he was summoned to that city. Marian gave him his railway fare.

He endured the torment for three months. Then it grew unbearable. For seven months he slaved for an architect in Stuttgart, next four months for the municipal bath in Baden-Baden, finally for six weeks in a cigarette factory in Kaiserslautern.

He lived like a dog. In terror of having to spend money, he avoided all human intercourse. He was unspeakably lonely. Hunger and self-denial made him as lean as a rope. His cheeks grew hollow, his limbs trembled in their sockets. He patched his own clothes, and to save his shoes hammered curved bits of iron to the heels and toes. His aim sustained him; Andreas Döderlein beckoned in the distance.

Every night he counted the sum he had saved so far. And when at last, after sixteen months of self-denial, he had a fortune of two hundred marks, he thought he could risk the fateful step. As he reckoned and according to his present standard of life, he thought that this money would last him five months. Within that period new sources might open. He had come to know many people and had experienced many circumstances, but in reality he had known no one and experienced nothing, for he had stood in the world like a lantern with a covered light. With an enormous expenditure of energy he had restrained his mind from its native activity. He had throttled it for the sake of its future. Hence his whole soul had now the temperature of a blast furnace.

On his trip his fare was the accustomed one of dry bread and cheese. He had made a package of his few books and his music, and had despatched it in care of the railway station in Nuremberg. It was early spring. In fair weather he slept in the open. When it rained he took refuge in barns. A little bundle was his pillow and his ragged top-coat shielded him from frost. Not rarely farmers received him in kindly fashion and gave him a meal. Now and then a tramping apprentice joined him. But his silence did not invite companionship.

Once in the neighbourhood of Kitzingen he came upon a high fenced park. Under a maple tree in the park sat a young girl in a white dress reading a book. A voice called: “Sylvia!” Thereupon the girl arose, and with unforgettable grace of movement walked deeper into the garden.

And Daniel thought: Sylvia! A sound as though from a better world. He shuddered. Was it to be his lot to stand without a gate of life that gave everything to the eyes and nothing to the hands?

X

He sought out Andreas Döderlein at once. He was told that the professor was not in town. Two weeks later he stood once more before the old house. He was told that the professor could not be seen to-day. He was discouraged. But out of loyalty to his cause he returned at the end of three days and was received.

He entered an overheated room. The professor was sitting in an arm chair. On his knees was his little, eight-year-old daughter; in his right arm he held a large doll. The white tiles of the stove were adorned with pictured scenes from the Nibelungen legend; table and chairs were littered with music scores; the windows had leaded panes; in one corner there was a mass of artfully grouped objects—peacocks’ feathers, gay-coloured silks, Chinese fans. This combination was known as a Makart bouquet, and represented the taste of the period.

Döderlein put the little girl down and gave her her doll. Then he drew himself up to the fulness of his gigantic stature, a process that gave him obvious pleasure. His neck was so fat that his chin seemed to rest on a gelatinous mass.

He seemed not to recall Daniel. Cues had to be given him to distinguish this among his crowded memories. He snapped his fingers. It was a sign that his mind had reached the desired place. “Ah, yes, yes, yes! To be sure, to be sure, my dear young man! But what do you suppose? Just now when all available space is as crowded as a street strewn with crumbs is crowded with sparrows. We might take the matter up again in autumn. Yes, in autumn something might be done.”

A pause, during which the great man gave inarticulate sounds of profound regret. And was the young man, after all, so sure of a genuine talent? Had he considered that art was becoming more and more an idling place for the immature and the shipwrecked? It was so difficult to tell the sheep from the goats. And finally, granting talent, how was the young man equipped in the matter of moral energy? There, indisputably, the core of the problem was to be sought. Or didn’t he, perhaps, think so?

As through a fog Daniel observed that the little girl had approached him and looked him over with a curiously cold and testing glance. Almost he was impelled to stretch out his hand and cover the eyes of the child, whose manner was uncanny to him through some ghostly presentiment.

“I’m truly sorry that I can’t give you a more encouraging outlook.” Andreas Döderlein’s voice was oily, and showed a conscious delight in its own sound. “But as I said, there’s nothing to be done until autumn. Suppose you leave me your address. Put it down on this slip. No? Well, quite as you wish. Good-bye, young man, good-bye.”

Döderlein accompanied him to the door. Then he returned to his daughter, took her on his knee, picked up the doll, and said: “Human beings, my dear Dorothea, are a wretched set. If I were to compare them to sparrows on the road, I should be doing the sparrows but little honour. Heavens and earth! Wouldn’t even write his name on a slip of paper. Felt hurt! Well, well, well. What funny creatures men are. Wouldn’t leave his name. Well, well.”

He hummed the Walhalla motif, and Dorothea, bending over her doll, coquettishly kissed the waxen face.

Daniel, standing in front of the house, bit his lips like a man in a fever who does not want his teeth to rattle. Why, the depth of his soul asked him, why did you sit in their counting-houses and waste their time? Why did you crucify your body and bind my wings? Why were you deaf to me and desirous of gathering fruits where there are only stones? Why did you, like a coward, flee from your fate to their offices and ware-houses and iron safes and all their doleful business? For the sake of this hour? Poor fool!

And he answered: “Never again, my soul, never again.”

XI

In the beginning Marian had received a letter from Daniel every now and then. These letters became rarer. During the second year he wrote only once—a few lines at Christmas.

At the time when he was leaving his last place of employment he wrote her on a postcard that he was changing his residence again. But he did not tell her that he was going to Nuremberg. So spring passed and summer. Then her soul, which was wavering between fear and hope, was rudely jolted out of its dim state by a letter from Jason Philip.

He wrote that Daniel was loafing about in Nuremberg. Quite by accident he had met him a few days before near the fair booths on Schütt Island. His appearance was indescribable. He had tried to question him, but Daniel had disappeared. What had brought him to the city he, Jason Philip, could not see. But he was willing to wager that at the bottom of it was some shady trick, for the fellow had not looked like one who earns an honest living. So he proposed to Marian that she should come to Nuremberg and help in a raid on the vagabond, in order to prevent the unblemished name he bore from being permanently disgraced before it was too late. As a contribution to her travelling expenses he enclosed five marks in stamps.

Marian had received the letter at noon. She had at once locked up her house and shop. At two o’clock she had reached the station at Ansbach; at four she arrived in Nuremberg. Carrying her hand-bag, she asked her way to Plobenhof Street at every corner.

Theresa sat at the cashier’s desk. Her brown hair on her square peasant’s skull was smoothly combed. Zwanziger, the freckled shop-assistant, was busy unpacking books. Theresa greeted her sister with apparent friendliness, but she did not leave her place. She stretched out her hand across the ink-stand, and observed Marian’s shabby appearance—the worn shawl, the old-fashioned little cloth bonnet with its black velvet ribbands meeting in a bow under the chin.

“Go upstairs for a bit,” she said, “and let the children entertain you. Rieke will bring up your bag.”

“Where is your husband?” asked Marian.

“At an electors’ meeting,” Theresa answered morosely. “They couldn’t meet properly, according to him, if he isn’t there.”

At that moment a man in a workingman’s blouse entered the shop and began to talk to Theresa urgently in a soft but excited voice. “I bought the set of books and they’re my property,” said the man. “Suppose I did skip a payment. That’s no reason to lose my property. I call that sharp practice, Frau Schimmelweis, that’s what I call it.”

“What did Herr Wachsmuth buy of us?” Theresa turned to the shop-assistant.

“Schlosser’s ‘History of the World,’” was the prompt answer.

“Then you’d better read your contract,” Theresa said to the workingman. “The terms are all fixed there.”

“That’s sharp practice, Frau Schimmelweis, sharp practice,” the man repeated, as though this phrase summed up all he could express in the way of withering condemnation. “A fellow like me wants to get on and wants to learn something. All right. So I think I’ll buy me a book and get a step ahead in knowledge. So where do I go? To a party member, to Comrade Schimmelweis, thinking natural-like I’m safe in his hands. I pay sixty marks—hard earned money—for a history of the world, and manage to squeeze the payments out o’ my wages, and then, all of a sudden, when half the price is paid, I’m to have my property taken from me without so much as a by your leave just because I’m two payments in arrears.”

“Read your contract,” said Theresa. “Every point is stipulated.”

“No wonder people get rich,” the man went on. His voice grew louder and louder, and he glanced angrily at Jason Philip, who at that moment rushed into the shop with his hat crushed and his trousers sprinkled with mud. “No wonder that people can buy houses and speculate in real estate. Yes, Schimmelweis, I call such things sharp practice, and I don’t give a damn for your contract. Everybody knows by this time what kind of business is done here—more like a man-trap—and that these here instalments are just a scheme to squeeze the workingman dry. First you talk to him about education, and then you suck his blood. It’s hell!”

“Pull yourself together, Wachsmuth!” Jason Philip cried sternly.

Wachsmuth picked up his cap, and slammed the shopdoor behind him.

Marian Nothafft’s eyes passed mechanically over the titles of a row of fiercely red pamphlets spread out on a table. She read: “The Battle that Decides,” “Modern Slaveholders,” “The Rights of the Poor,” “Christianity and Capitalism,” “The Crimes of the Bourgeoisie.” Although these catch-words meant nothing to her, she felt in her heart once more her old, long forgotten hatred against machines.

XII

“Fetch me a sandwich, Theresa,” Jason Philip commanded, “I’m hungry as a wolf.”

“Didn’t you eat anything at the inn?” Theresa asked suspiciously.

“I was at no such place.” Jason Philip’s eyes gleamed, and he shook his head like a lion.

So Theresa went to fetch his sandwich. It was queer to observe how much distrust and contradiction she was able to express through the sloth of her movements. But her daughter Philippina was already hurrying down the stairs with the sandwich.

At this moment Jason Philip became aware of his sister-in-law. “Ah, there you are, you shrinking flower,” he said lightly, and held out his pudgy hand. “Theresa will put you up in the little room under the store-room. You have a pleasant view of the river there.”

Theresa handed him the bread. He sniffed at it, and frowned because it wasn’t thickly enough buttered. But he had not the courage to complain. He bit into it, and, with full cheeks, turned once more to Marian.

“Well, that son of yours has disappeared again. A nice situation. Shouldn’t wonder if he ended in the penitentiary. The best thing would be to ship him off to America; but it isn’t clear to me how we’re to get hold of him at all. It was really premature to ask you to come.”

“If only I knew what he’s living on,” Marian whispered, with repressed anguish.

Jason Philip indulged with broad psychical comfort in an anecdote: “I was reading the other day how a giraffe escaped from the Zoo. You’ve heard of giraffes. They are long-necked quadrupeds, very stupid and stubborn. The silly beast had run off into the woods, and the people didn’t know how to capture it. Then the keeper hung the stable-lantern over his chest and a bundle of hay on his back, and at nightfall went into the woods. Scarcely had the giraffe noticed the gleam of the lantern when it came up in its curiosity. At once the man swung around. It smelled the hay, nibbled, and began to feed. Slowly the man went on, and the beast went on nibbling and feeding. First thing you know it was back in its cage. Now don’t you think that when hunger begins to torment him, your Daniel could be tamed with a bit of hay too? It’s worth your thinking about.”

Jason Philip laughed merrily, and Zwanziger grinned. His boss was a source of humour. At night, when he sat in his favourite tap-rooms over his beer, he would entertain his boon companions with the witticisms of Schimmelweis, and always won their applause.

A lean old man with kid gloves and a top-hat entered the shop. It was growing dark, and he had peered carefully about before entering. He hurried up to Jason Philip, and said in a cracked falsetto: “How about the new publications? Anything very fine?” He rubbed his hands, and stared stupidly from under his thin, reddish lids. It was Count Schlemm-Nottheim, a cousin of the Baron von Auffenberg, the leader of the liberal party.

“I’m entirely at your service, sir,” said Jason Philip, holding himself as rigidly as a sergeant who is being addressed by a captain.

He led the count to a corner of the shop, and opened a heavy oaken chest. This chest contained the pornographic publications forbidden by the state. They were sold quite secretly and only to very reliable persons.

Jason Philip whispered, and the old count turned over the heap of books with avid fingers.

XIII

Marian climbed up the steep, dark stairs, and rang the upstairs bell. She had to tell the maid who she was and even mention her name to the children. The latter laughed at her stiff, rural courtesy. Philippina, who was twelve, acted arrogantly and swung her hips when she walked. All three had their mother’s square head and a cheesy complexion.

The maid brought up the bag. Then Theresa came too and helped her sister unpack. With her acrid, unfeeling voice she asked many questions, but without waiting for an answer told the tale of marriage and births and deaths that had taken place in the city. She avoided Marian’s eyes, because she was silently considering how long her sister’s visit would last and to what expense it would put her.

She did not mention Daniel, and her silence condemned him more completely than her husband’s acrimonious speeches. She held firmly an almost religious doctrine of the complete obedience which children owe their parents, and doubted Marian’s power to punish properly a breach of this sacred law.

When Marian was left alone, she sat down by the window of the little room, and gazed sadly down at the river. Without any curl of waves the yellow water glided by and washed the walls of the houses on the other bank. She had a view of the Museum Bridge and another bridge, and the crowding of people on the bridges disquieted her.

She walked through the streets, and stopped at the head of the Museum Bridge. She thought that every human being who lived in the town must pass by here sooner or later. Her attentive glance searched all faces, and where one escaped, she followed the figure as it melted into the dark. But as it grew later the people were fewer and fewer.

At night she would lie awake, and listen to the dull echo of the feet of the last passerby. Next day from morning to twilight she would wander up and down the streets. What she saw weighed on her heart. The city people seemed to her like dumb animals, tormented and angry. The narrow streets stopped her breath; the hubbub deadened her senses.

But she was never tired of seeking.

On the fifth day she did not come home until ten o’clock. Theresa, who had gone to bed, sent her a plate of lentil soup. While she was avidly eating the soup she heard steps in the hall and a knock at the door. Jason Philip entered. “Come along at once,” was all he said. But she understood. With trembling fingers she threw a shawl across her shoulders, since the October nights were growing cool, and followed him in silence.

They went up hill to Adler Street, turned into it and then into a narrow, dark little alley at the right. A lantern hung above a door and on a green glass pane were inscribed the words: “The Vale of Tears.” A greenish light suffused the stone stairs that led to the cellar, the kegs and the desolate room filled with chairs and benches. A sourish smell of wine arose from the place.

Beside the entrance there was a barred window. Beside it Jason Philip stopped, and beckoned Marian to join him.

At the long tables below them sat a queer crowd. They were young men, but such as one never finds in ordinary houses and only very rarely in the streets. Want seemed to have driven them to huddle here, and the night to have lured them from their hiding places—shipwrecked creatures they seemed who had fled to a cavern on some deserted shore. They had absurdly gay cravats and sad, pallid faces, and the greenish light made them look altogether like corpses. It was long since a barber had touched their hair or a tailor their garb.

A little aside from these sat two old fellows, habitual topers, not in the best circumstances themselves, yet rather astonished at this dreary Stygian crew. For they themselves at least received their weekly wage of a Saturday night, while those others had obviously for years not worked at all.

But in a dusky corner sat one at a piano and struck the keys with a strange might. He had no score before him, but played from memory. The instrument moaned; the strings hummed pitifully; the pedals creaked; but the man who played was so bewitched by his music that he cared little for the inadequacy of its communication. Wild as the tumult of the playing sounded, the shrill and raging chords, the wild clamour of the treble, the driven triplets and seething tremolos of the bass, yet the deep emotion of the player, the ecstasy and world-estranged madness in which he was, lent the scene a melancholy and a solemnity which would have had its effect even without the greenish cellar and the cavernous pallor of the listeners.

Marian had at once recognised the pianist as Daniel. She had to hold fast to the bars of the window and lean her knees against the wainscoting. It was not for nothing that Jason Philip was known as a thorough wag. The comparison to Daniel in the lion’s den was too much for him. He whispered the words to Marian. But since the window was open and the music had first risen and then, at this moment, paused, his words penetrated to the people below, and several heads turned toward him. Marian was thoughtless. She believed that the piece had ended. Faintly and fearfully she cried: “Daniel!”

Daniel leaped up, stared at her, saw Jason Philip’s mocking face, hastened to the door, the steps, and was beside them.

He stood in the doorway, and his lips began to form words. The unhappy boy, she thought, and it seemed to her as though power would be given her to press back to his heart the words she trembled to hear.

It was in vain. The words were uttered. He did not wish to see his mother any more; he was content to live alone and for himself and to be free. He needed no one. He needed only to be free.

Jason Philip hurled a glance of contempt at the blasphemous wretch, and drew Marian away with him. To the very corner of the alley they were accompanied by the excited voices of the people in the Vale of Tears.

Next morning Marian returned to Eschenbach.

FOES, BROTHERS, A FRIEND AND A MASK

I

Daniel had rented a room of the brush-maker Hadebusch and his wife, who lived on Jacob’s Square behind the church.

It was March, and a sudden cold had set in; and Frau Hadebusch had a superstitious fear of coal, which she characterised as Devil’s dung. At the back of the yard was the wood pile, and logs were brought in with which to feed the oven fires. But wood was dear, and had Daniel fed his little iron stove in the garret with such costly food, his monthly bill would have reached a fabulous height. He paid seven marks a month for his room and counted every penny so as not to shorten the period of his liberty by any needless expenditure.

So he sat freezing over his books and scores until the first warmth of spring stole in through the windows. The books he borrowed from the library at the King’s Gate, and paid six pfennigs a volume. Achim von Arnim and Jean Paul were his guides in those days: the one adorned the world of the senses for him, the other that of the soul.

On the police department’s identification blank Daniel had called himself a musician. Frau Hadebusch brought the paper into her living room, which, like all the rooms of the house, seemed built for dwarfs and reeked of limewater and lye. It was at the day’s end, and in the room were assembled Herr Francke and Herr Benjamin Dorn, who lodged on the second floor, and Frau Hadebusch’s son, who was weak-minded and crouched grinning beside the stove.

Herr Francke was a town traveller for a cigar house, and was regarded as a good deal of a Don Juan by the female servants of the neighbourhood. Benjamin Dorn was a clerk in the Prudentia Life Insurance Company, belonged to a Methodist congregation, and was respected by all the respectable on account of his Christian walk and conversation.

These gentlemen examined the document thoroughly and with frowns. Herr Francke gave it as his opinion that a musician who never made music could scarcely be regarded as one.

“He’s probably pawned his bass violin or bugle or whatever he was taught,” he said contemptuously; “perhaps he can only beat a drum. Well, I can do that too if I have one.”

“Yes, you’ve got to have a drum to be a drummer,” Benjamin Dorn remarked. “The question, however, is whether such a calling is in harmony with the principles of Christian modesty.” He laid his finger on his nose, and added: “It is a question which, with all proper humility, all proper humility, you understand, I would answer in the negative.”

“He hasn’t any relatives and no acquaintances at all,” Frau Hadebusch wailed, and her voice sounded like the scraping of carrots on a grater; “and no employment and no prospects and no boots or clothes but what he’s got on. In all my life I haven’t had no such lodger.”

The blank fluttered to the floor, whence the weak-minded Hadebusch Jr. picked it up, rolled it in the shape of a bag, and applied that bag, trumpet-like, to his lips, a procedure which caused the document in question to be gradually soaked through and thus withdrawn from its official uses. Frau Hadebusch was too little concerned over the police regulations to take further thought of her duties as the keeper of a lodging house.

Herr Francke drew from his pocket a pack of greasy cards and began to shuffle them. Frau Hadebusch giggled and it sounded like a witch rustling in the fire. The Methodist conquered his pious scruples, and placed his pfennigs on the table; the town-traveller turned up his sleeves as though he were about to wring a hen’s neck.

Before very long there arose a dissonant controversy, since Herr Francke’s relations with the goddess of fortune were strained and violent. The old brush-maker poked his head in at the door and cursed; the weak-minded boy blew dreamily on his paper trumpet; and the company that had been so peacefully at one separated in violence and rage.

II

Daniel wandered up to the castle, along the walls, over the bridges and planks.

It was his youth that caused him so to love the night that he forgot all men and seemed to himself to be alone on earth. It was his youth that delivered him up to things with such passion that he was able to weave the ghostly flowers of melodies about all that is visible—melodies that were so delicate, so eloquent, and so winged that no pen could ever record them. They vanished and died whenever he sought to capture them.

But it was also his youth that fired his eyes with hatred when he saw the comfort of lit windows, and filled his heart with bitterness against the satisfied, the indifferent, the strangers, the eternal strangers who had no consciousness of him.

He was so small and so great: small in the eyes of the world, great in his own estimation. When the tones burst from him like sparks from an anvil, he was a god. When he stood in the dark court behind the City Theatre waiting for the final chorus of “Fidelio” to penetrate the wall and reach his grateful ears, he was an outcast. Fountains of music rustled all about him. He looked into the eyes of the children and there was melody; he gazed up at the stars and there was harmony. He finally came to the point where there was no limit. His day was a waste place, his brain a parched field in the rain, his thoughts were birds of passage, his dreams a super-life.

He lived on bread and fruit, treating himself only every third day to a warm meal in the inn at the sign of the White Tower. There he would sit and listen at times, unobserved, to the quite remarkable conversation of some young fellows. This awakened in him a longing for intercourse with congenial companions. But when the brethren of the Vale of Tears finally took him into their circle, he was like a Robinson Crusoe or a Selkirk who had been abducted from his island.

III

Benjamin Dorn was a compassionate individual. The desire to save a lost soul filled him with the courage to pay Daniel Nothafft a visit. He hobbled up the creaky steps with his club-foot, and knocked timidly at the door.

“Can I be of service to you, Sir, in a Christian way?” he asked, after he had blown his nose.

Daniel looked at him in amazement.

“You know, I could help you in an unselfish, Christian way, to get a position. There is a great deal of work to be done down at the Prudentia. If I were to recommend you to Herr Zittel it certainly would not be in vain. Herr Zittel is head of the clerical department. I also stand in with Herr Diruf, and he is general agent. I come in contact nearly every day with Inspector Jordan, and Herr Jordan is a man of exceptional culture. His daughter Gertrude attended my Sunday-school class. She has received and still enjoys divine favour. If you were to entrust your case to me, you would be entering upon a righteous, wholesome career. I am always looking out for some one. To tell the truth, and not wishing to appear immodest, I was born that way.”

The man looked like a patchwork of qualmishness, tribulation, and unctuous piety, and his coat collar was badly frayed.

“That’s all right,” replied Daniel; “don’t you see that I am getting along quite well?”

The pious life-insurance agent sighed and brushed a drop from the tip of his nose with the back of his hand. “My dear Sir,” said he, “take to heart the words of Solomon: Pride goeth before a fall, but the humble in spirit obtain honour.”

“Yes, I’ll take that to heart,” said Daniel drily, and bent still lower over the score on which he was working.

Benjamin Dorn sighed again, and limped out of the room. With his thumbs pointing straight to high heaven above, he said to Frau Hadebusch: “You know, Frau Hadebusch, I simply can’t help it. I must lighten my heart in a Christian way. What do you think?”

“Good heavens, what’s he doing? What’s he up to now?” sighed the old lady, as she shoved her broom under her arm.

“As true as I stand here, the table is all covered with papers, and the papers are all covered with some kind of mysterious signs.”

Alarmed at the very thought of having a lodger up in the attic who was practising black magic, Frau Hadebusch sent her husband down to the district policeman. This enlightened official declared that the brush-maker was a gossip. Vexed at this unanticipated description of himself, the brush-maker went straightway to the inn at the sign of the Horse and got drunk, so drunk that Benjamin Dorn had to take him home. It was a beautiful moonlit night.

IV

Not far from Hadebusch’s was a little café known as The Paradise. Everything in it was diminutive, the proprietor, the waitress, the tables, the chairs and the portions. There the brethren from the Vale of Tears assembled to drag the gods down into the dust and destroy the universe in general.

Daniel wended his way thither. He knew the liliputian room and the starved faces. He was personally acquainted with the painter who never painted, the writer who never wrote, the student who never studied, and the inventor who never invented anything. He knew all about the sculptor who squandered such talents as he may have had in tinkering with plaster casts, the actor who had been on a leave of absence for years, and the half dozen mendicant Philistines who came here day after day to have a good time in their own repelling fashion. He knew the young Baron von Auffenberg who had broken with his family for reasons that were clear to no one but himself. He knew Herr Carovius, who invariably played the rôle of the observer, and who sat there in a sort of mysterious fashion, smiling to himself a smile of languishing irony, and stroking his hand over his long hair, which was cut straight across at the back of his neck.

He knew, ah, he knew by heart, the grease spots on the walls that had been rubbed in by the heads of the habitués, the indelible splotches on the tables, the hartshorn buttons on the proprietor’s vest, and the smoke-coloured curtains draped about the tiny windows. The loud, boisterous talking, the daily repetition of the same hackneyed remarks, the anarchistic swashbuckling of the painter whom his comrades had dubbed Kropotkin—all of these were familiar stories to him. He knew the philosophic cynicism of the student who felt that he was the Socrates of the nineteenth century, and who looked back on twenty-five wasted semesters as on so many battles fought and won.

The most interesting personage was Herr Carovius. He was a well-read man. That he knew a great deal about music was plain from many of his chance remarks. He was a brother-in-law of Andreas Döderlein, though he seemed to take anything but pride in the relationship. If any one mentioned Döderlein’s name in his presence, he screwed up his face, and began to shuffle about uneasily on his chair. He was an unfathomable, impenetrable personality. Even if his years—he was forty-five—had not won for him a measure of esteem, the malicious and mordant scorn he heaped on his fellow-men would have done so. People said he had a good deal of money. If this was brought to his attention, he employed the most ghastly oaths in asserting his poverty. But since he had neither calling nor profession and spent his days in unqualified idleness, it was apparent that his assertions on this point were wholly unfounded, and this despite the virility of his unconventional language.

“Say, tell me, who is that lanky quack there?” asked Herr Carovius, pointing to Daniel and looking at Schwalbe the sculptor. He had known Daniel for a long while, but every now and then it gave him a peculiar kind of pleasure to play the rôle of the newcomer.

The sculptor looked at him indignantly.

“That is a man who still has faith in himself,” he remarked rather morosely. “He is a man who has bathed in the dragon blood of illusions, and has become as invulnerable as Young Siegfried. He is convinced that the people who sleep in the houses around this part of town dream of his future greatness, and have already placed an order with the green-grocer for his laurel wreath. He has not the faintest idea that the only thing that is sacred to them is their midday meal, that they are ready to drink their beer at the first stroke of the gong, and to yawn when the light appears on Mount Sinai. He is completely taken up with himself; he is sufficient unto himself; and he gathers honey. The bee will have its honey, and if it is unable to get it from the flowers, it buzzes about the dung heap. As is evidently the case here. Prosit Nothafft,” he said in conclusion, and lifted his glass to Daniel.

Herr Carovius smiled in his usual languishing fashion. “Nothafft,” he bleated, “Nothafft, Nothafft, that is a fine name, but not exactly one that is predestined to a niche in Walhalla. It strikes me as being rather more appropriate for the sign of a tailor. Good Lord! The bones the young people gnaw at to-day were covered with meat in my time.”

And then, clasping his glasses a bit firmer onto his nose, he riveted his blinking, squinting eyes on the door. Eberhard von Auffenberg, elegant, slender, and disgruntled, entered to find life where others were throwing it away.

It was far into the night when the brethren went home. As they passed along through the streets they bellowed their nocturnal serenades at the windows of the otherwise peaceful houses.

As the hilarious laughter and vocal rowdyism reached Daniel’s ear, he detected from out of the hubbub a gentle voice in E-flat minor, accompanied by the inexorable eighth-notes sung with impressive vigour. Then the voice died away in a solemn E-flat major chord, and everything was as if sunk in the bottom of the sea.

V

Toward the end of the summer, Philippina, Jason Philip’s daughter, shot out the eye of her seven-year-old brother with a so-called bean-shooter.

The children were playing in the yard. Willibald, the older boy, wanted the shooter. Philippina, who had not the slightest sense of humour, snatched it from his hands, placed the stone on the elastic band and let it fly with all her might. Little Marcus ran in front of it. It was all over in a jiffy. A heart-rending scream caused the frightened mother to leave the shop and run out into the yard. She found the child lying on the ground convulsed with pain. While Theresa carried the boy into the house, Jason Philip ran for the doctor. But it was too late; the eye was lost.

Philippina hid. After considerable search her father found her under the cellar steps. He beat her so mercilessly that the neighbours had to come up and take him away.

Little Marcus was Theresa’s favourite child. She could not get over the accident. The obsession that had slumbered in her soul for years now became more persistent than ever: she began to brood over guilt in general and this case in particular.

At times she would get up in the night, light a candle, and walk about the house in her stocking feet. She would look behind the stove and under the table, and then crouch down with her ear against the maid’s door. She would examine the mouse-trap and if a mouse had been caught in it, she could not, try as she might, completely detach her own unrest from the mental disturbance of the little beast.

One day Jason Philip was stopped on the street by a well-known cabinet-maker and asked whether he had any old furniture for sale. Jason Philip replied that he was not at all familiar with the contents of the attic and sent him to Theresa. Theresa recalled that there was an old desk up in the attic that had been standing there for years. She suggested that they might be willing to dispose of this for a few taler, and accompanied the man to the room where the worn-out furniture was stored.

She opened the little wooden door. The cabinet-maker caught sight at once of the desk. It had only three legs and was just about ready to fall to pieces. “I can’t make you an offer for that,” said the cabinet-maker, and began to rap on it here and there, somewhat as a physician might sound a corpse. “The most I can offer you is twelve groschen.”

They haggled for a while, and finally agreed on sixteen. The man left at once, having promised to send one of his men up in the afternoon to get the desk. Theresa was already standing on the steps, when it occurred to her that it might be well to go through the drawers before letting the thing get out of the house: there might be some old documents in them. She went back up in the attic.

In the dust of one of the drawers she found, sure enough, a bundle of papers, and among them the receipt which Gottfried Nothafft had sent back to Jason Philip ten years before. She read in the indistinct light the confidential words of the deceased. She saw that Jason Philip had received three thousand taler.

After she had read this, she crumpled up the paper. Then she put it into her apron pocket and screamed out: “Be gone, Gottfried, be gone!”

She went down stairs into the kitchen. There she took her place by the table and stirred a mixture of flour and eggs, as completely absent-minded as it is possible for one to become who spends her time in that part of the house. Rieke, the maid, became so alarmed at her behaviour that she made the sign of the cross.

VI

When the midday meal was over, the children left the table and prepared to go to school. Jason Philip lighted a cigar, and took the newspaper from his pocket.

“Did you find anything for the second-hand furniture man?” he asked, as he puffed away.

“I found something for him and something for myself,” she said.

“What do you mean? You found something for yourself?”

“What do I mean? I mean just what I said. I have always known that there was something crooked about that money.”

“What money are you talking about? Listen, don’t speak to me in riddles! When you have anything to say to me, say it. Do you understand?”

“I mean Gottfried Nothafft’s money, Jason Philip,” said Theresa, almost in a whisper.

Jason Philip bent over the table. “Then you have at last found the old receipt, have you?” he asked with wide-opened eyes. “Ahem! You have found the receipt that I’ve been looking for for years ...?”

Theresa nodded. She took out a hairpin, and stuck it in a crust of bread. Jason Philip got up, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to walk back and forth. Just then Rieke came in and began to clear off the table. She went about her business in a slow but noisy fashion. She made things rattle, even if she could not make them hum. When she was through, Jason Philip, his hands pressed to his hips, his elbows protruding, planted himself before Theresa.

“I suppose you think I am going to let you browbeat me,” he began. “Well, my dear woman, you’re mistaken. Listen! Are you angry at me because I have created for you and your children a dignified existence? Do you take it amiss of me for having kept your sister from going to the poor-house? You act as though I had won that much money at the county fair, or had squandered an equal amount at the same place. The truth is, Gottfried Nothafft entrusted me with three thousand taler. That’s what he did; that’s the truth. It was his intention to keep the whole affair from the chatter of women. And he willed that I should use this hard-earned capital in a productive way, and not give it to the culprit who would waste it in debauchery and worse if possible.”

“Ill-gotten goods seldom prosper,” said Theresa, without looking up. “Things may go along all right for ten years, and that seems like a long time, but the vengeance of Heaven comes in the eleventh, as it has already come in the case of little Marcus.”

“Theresa—you’re talking like a mad woman,” said Jason Philip at the top of his voice. With that he picked up a chair, and threw it on the floor so violently that every cup, spoon, and plate in the room shook.

Theresa turned her peasant face toward him without the shadow of a trace of fear. He was a trifle alarmed: “You’ll have to be responsible, if you can, for any misfortune that visits us in the future.” She spoke these words with a deep voice.

“Do you think I am a bandit?” said Jason Philip. “Do you think I want to pocket the money? Don’t you think that I am capable of anything better or higher than that? Or is ambition of any sort quite beyond your powers of comprehension?”

“Well, what ambitions do you have?” asked Theresa in a tone of sullenness, her eyes in the meantime blinking.

“Listen,” Jason Philip continued, as he sat down on the chair he had so violently abused a minute before, and assumed the air of a teacher: “The culprit has got to submit, and that with good grace. He has got to fall on his knees before me. And he’ll come to it. I have made some inquiries; I am on his tracks; and I know that he has just about reached the end of his rope. He’ll come, depend upon it he’ll come around, and when he does he will whine. Then I am going to take him into the business. In this way we will see whether it is humanly possible to make a useful man out of him. If I can, and if he sticks, I’ll call him into the office, tell him the whole story, make everything as clear as day to him, and then offer to take him in as a partner in the firm. You have got to admit that he will be a made man if he becomes my partner. He will have sense enough himself to see this, and as sure as you are living, he will first kiss my hand and then eat out of it for the kindness I have shown him. And once this has all been put through, I will bind him to us more firmly than ever by having him marry Philippina.”

A wry smile disfigured Theresa’s face. “I see, so, so,” she said in a sing-song tone. “You will have him marry Philippina. I take it that you feel that she will be hard to marry, and that the man who does marry her will have his hands full. Well, that’s not a bad idea.”

“In this way,” continued Jason Philip, without detecting the scorn in Theresa’s words, “the account between the culprit and myself will be settled. He will become a decent member of society, the money will remain in the family, and Philippina will be cared for.”

“And suppose he does not come; suppose he does not fall on his knees; suppose you have made a miscalculation. What then?” Whether Jason Philip himself believed what he had said Theresa could not determine. Nor had she the slightest desire to enlighten herself on this point. She did not look him in the face, but contented herself with letting her eyes rest on his hands.

“Well—there will be time then to change my plans,” said Jason Philip, in a tone of peeved vexation. “Leave it to me. I have turned the whole situation over in my mind; I have omitted not the slightest detail. I know men, and I have never made a mistake in judging them. Mahlzeit!”

With that he went out.

Theresa remained seated for a while, her arms folded across her breast. Then she got up, and walked over to the door that opened on to the court. Suddenly she stopped as if rooted to the sill: she caught sight of Philippina, who was then sitting by the window mending a pair of socks. On her face there was an expression of naïveté that may be harmless in itself, but it was enough to arouse suspicion.

“What’s the matter with you, why didn’t you go to school?” asked Theresa uneasily.

“I couldn’t; I had a headache,” said Philippina curtly, and broke the thread as she gave a hasty jerk at the needle. Her dishevelled hair hung down over her forehead and quite concealed her face.

Theresa was silent. Her gloom-laden eyes rested on the diligent fingers of Philippina. It was easy to suspect that the girl had heard everything Jason Philip had said, for he had such a loud voice. She could have done this without going to the trouble of listening at the door. Theresa was minded to give the girl a talking-to; but she controlled herself, and quietly withdrew.

Philippina looked straight through her as she left. But she did not interrupt her work, and in a short while she could be heard humming a tune to herself. There was a challenge in her voice.

VII

Daniel’s money was about at an end. The new sources on which he had hoped to be able to draw were nowhere to be discovered. He defiantly closed the doors against care; and when fear showed its gloomy face, he shut up shop, and went out to drown his sorrows with the brethren of the Vale of Tears.

Schwalbe, the sculptor, had made the acquaintance of Zingarella, then engaged in singing lascivious couplets at the Academy, and invited the fellows to join him.

The Academy was a theatre of the lowest description. Smoking was, of course, permitted. When they arrived the performance was over. People were still sitting at many of the tables. Reeking as the auditorium was with the stench of stale beer, it left the impression of a dark, dank cavern.

With an indifference that seemed to argue that Zingarella made no distinction between chairs and people, she took her seat between the sculptor and the writer. She laughed, and yet it was not laughter; she spoke, and her words were empty; she stretched out her hands, and the gesture was lifeless. She fixed her eyes on no one; she merely gazed about. She had a habit of shaking her bracelet in a way that aroused sympathy. And after making a lewd remark she would turn her head to one side, and thereby stagger even the most hardened frequenter of this sort of places. Her complexion had been ruined by rouge, but underneath the skin there was something that glimmered like water under thin ice.

The former winsomeness of her lips was still traceable in the sorrowed curves of her now ravaged mouth.

At times her restless eyes, seeking whom they might entangle, were fixed on Daniel, then sitting quite alone at the lower end of the table. In order to avoid the unpleasant sensation associated with the thought of going up to such a distinguished-looking person and making herself known to him, she would have been grateful had some one picked her up and thrown her bodily at his feet. There was an element of strangeness about him. Zingarella saw that he had had nothing to do with women of her kind. This tortured her; she gnashed her teeth.

Daniel did not sense her hatred. As he looked into her face, marked with a life of transgression and already claimed by fate, he built up in his own soul a picture of inimitable chastity. He tried to see the playmate of a god. The curtain decorated with the distorted face of a harlequin, the acrobat and the dog trainer at the adjacent table, who were quarrelling over their money, the four half-grown gamblers directly behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and incessantly on perpetual motion—to all of this he paid not the slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in the bottom of the sea. He got up and left.

But as he saw the snow-covered streets before him and was unable to decide whether he should go home or not, Zingarella stepped up to him. “Come, be quick, before they see that we are together,” she whispered. And thus they walked along like two fugitives, whose information concerning each other stops short with the certainty that both are poor and wretched and are making their way through a snow storm.

“What is your name?” asked Daniel.

“My name is Anna Siebert.”

The clock in the St. Lorenz Church struck three. The one up in the tower of St. Sebaldus corroborated this reckoning by also striking three and in much deeper tones.

They came to an old house, and after floundering through a long, dark, ill-smelling passage way, entered a room in the basement. Anna Siebert lighted a lamp that had a red chimney. Gaudy garments of the soubrette hung on the wall. A big, grey cat lay on the table cover and purred. Anna Siebert took the cat in her arms and caressed it. Its name was Zephyr. It accompanied her wherever she went.

Daniel threw himself on a chair and looked at the lamp. Zingarella, standing before the mirror, stroked the cat. Gazing distractedly into space, she remarked that the manager had discharged her because the public was no longer satisfied with her work.

“Is this what you call the public?” asked Daniel, who never once took his eyes from the lamp, just as Anna Siebert kept hers rigidly fixed on the desolate distances of the mirror. “These fathers of families who side-step every now and then, these counter-jumpers, the mere looks of whom is enough to snatch your clothing from your body, this human filth at the sight of which God must conceal His face in shame—this is what you call the public?”

“Well, however that may be,” Anna Siebert continued in a colourless voice, “the manager rushed into my dressing room, threw the contract at my feet, and said I had swindled him. How on earth could I have swindled him? I am no prima donna and my agent had told him so. You can’t expect a Patti on twenty marks a week. In Elberfeld I got twenty-five, and a year ago in Zürich I even drew sixty. Now he comes to me and says he doesn’t need to pay me anything. What am I to live off of? And you’ve got to live, haven’t you, Zephyr,” said Anna as she picked up the cat, pressed its warm fur to her cheek, and repeated, “You’ve got to live.”

She let her arms fall to her sides, the cat sprang on the floor, hunched up its back, wagged its tail, and purred. She then went up to Daniel, fell on her knees, and laid her head on his side. “I have reached the end,” she murmured in a scarcely audible voice, “I am at the end of all things.”

The snow beat against the window panes. With an expression on his face as though his own thoughts were murdering each other, Daniel looked into the corner from which Zephyr’s yellowish eyes were shining. The muscles of his face twitched like a fish on being taken from the hook.

And as he cowered in this fashion, the poor girl pressed against his body, his shoulders lowered, past visions again arose from the depths of the sea. First he heard a ravishing arpeggio in A-flat major and above it, a majestic theme, commanding quiet, as it were, in sixteenth triads. The two blended, in forte, with a powerful chord of sevens. There was a struggling, a separating, a wandering on, and out of the subdued pianissimo there arose and floated in space a gentle voice in E-flat minor. O voice from the sea, O humanity on earth! The eighth note, unpitiable as ever in its elemental power, cut into the bass with the strength that moves and burrows as it advances, until it was caught up by the redeemed voice in E-flat major. And now everything suddenly became real. What had formerly been clouds and dreams, longing and wishing, at last took shape and form and stood before him. Indeed he himself became true, real, and conscious of his existence in a world of actualities.

On his way home he covered his face with his hands, for the windows of the houses gaped at him like the hollow eyes of a demi-monde.

VIII

Zingarella could not imagine why the strange man had left. He seemed to be quite indifferent. Her heart beat with numerical accuracy, but there was no strength in the beats. The sole creature through which she was bound to the world was Zephyr.

Night followed night, day followed day. Each was like the preceding. She spoke when people took enough trouble to speak to her. She laughed when they had the incomprehensible desire to hear laughter. To-day she wrapped this dress around her shivering body, to-morrow another. She waited for the time to come when she was to do something definite. She lay in bed and dreaded the darkness; she pondered on the injustice of the world; she thought of her own disgrace, and reflected on the need that surrounded her. It was too much for her to bear.

A man would come, and at daylight he would leave and mingle with the rest of the people on the street. When she awoke she could no longer recall what he looked like. The landlady would bring in soup and meat. Then some one knocked at the door; but she did not open it. She had no desire to find out who it was. Perhaps it was the man who had been with her the night before; perhaps it was another.

She had neither curiosity nor hope. Her soul had dissolved like a piece of salt in water. When she returned home on the third day she found Zephyr lying by the coal-scuttle dead. She knelt down, touched the cold fur, wrinkled her brow, shook her bracelet, and went out.

It was getting along toward night, and the air was heavy with mist. She went first through lighted streets, and then turned into others that were not lighted. She passed through avenues of leafless trees, and walked across silent squares. The snow made walking difficult. When it was too deep, she was obliged to stop every now and then and take a deep breath.

She reached the river at a point where the shore was quite flat and the water shallow. Without thinking for a moment, without a moment’s hesitation, just as if she were blind, or as if she saw a bridge where there was none, she walked in.

First she felt the water trickling into her shoes. Then she could feel her legs getting wet, as her clothes, soft, slippery, and ice-cold, clung to her body. Now her breast was under the water, and now her neck. She sank down, glided away, took one deep breath, smiled, and as she smiled she lost consciousness.

The next day her body was washed up on the shore some distance beyond the city. It was taken to the morgue of the Rochus Cemetery.

IX

Schwalbe, the sculptor, was attending a funeral. His nephew had died, and was being buried in the same cemetery.

As he passed by the morgue he caught sight of the body of a girl. After the child had been buried he went back to the morgue. A few people were standing near the body, one of whom said, “She was a singer down at the Academy.”

Schwalbe was struck by the pure and beautiful expression on the girl’s face. He studied it long and with no little emotion. Then he went to the superintendent, and asked if he might take a death mask. The permission was given him, and in a few hours he returned with the necessary implements.

When he removed the mask from the face, he held something truly wonderful in his hands. It showed the features of a sixteen-year-old girl, a face full at once of sweetness and melancholy, and, most charming of all, an angelic smile on the curved lips of this mouth of sorrow. It resembled the work of a renowned artist, so much so that the sculptor was suddenly seized with a burning desire to regain his lost art.

He was nevertheless obliged within a week to sell the mask to the caster by whom he was employed in Pfannenschmied Street. Schwalbe needed ready money. The caster hung the mask by the door at the entrance to his shop.

X

At the end of December Daniel found himself with not a cent of cash, so that he was obliged to sell his sole remaining treasure, the score of the Bach mass in B-minor. Spindler had presented it to him when he left, and now he had to take it to the second-hand dealer and part with it for a mere pittance.

Unless he cared to lie in bed the whole day, he was obliged to walk the streets in order to keep warm. His poverty made it out of the question for him to go to any of the cafés, and so he was excluded from association with the brethren of the Vale of Tears. He had moreover taken a violent dislike to them.

One evening he was standing out in front of the Church of Ægydius, listening to the organ that some one was playing. The icy wind blew through his thin clothing. When the concert was over he went down to the square, and leaned up against the wall of one of the houses. He was tremendously lonesome; he was lonely beyond words.

Just then two men came along who wished to enter the very house against the wall of which he leaned. He was cold. One of these men was Benjamin Dorn, the other was Jordan. Benjamin Dorn spoke to him; Jordan stood by in silence, apparently quite appreciative of the condition in which the young man found himself, as he stood there in the cold and made unfriendly replies to the questions that were put to him. Jordan invited Daniel up to his room. Daniel, chilled to the very marrow of his bones, and able to visualise nothing but a warm stove, accepted the invitation.

Thus Daniel came in contact with Jordan’s family. He had three children: Gertrude, aged nineteen, Eleanore, aged sixteen, and Benno, fifteen years old and still a student at the gymnasium. His wife was dead.

Gertrude was said to be a pietist. She went to church every day, and had an inclination toward the Catholic religion, a fact which gave Jordan, as an inveterate Protestant, no little worry. During the day she looked after the house; but as soon as she had everything in order, she would take her place by the quilting frame and work on crowns of thorns, hearts run through with swords, and languishing angels for a mission. There she would sit, hour after hour, with bowed head and knit.

The first time Daniel saw her she had on a Nile green dress, fastened about her hips with a girdle of scales, while her wavy brown hair hung loose over her shoulders. It was in this make-up that he always saw her when he thought of her years after: Nile green dress, bowed head, sitting at the quilting frame, and quite unaware of his presence, a picture of unamiability, conscious or affected.

Eleanore was entirely different. She was like a lamp carried through a dark room.

For some time she had been employed in the offices of the Prudentia, for she wished to make her own living. So far as it was humanly possible to determine from her casual remarks, she thoroughly enjoyed her work. She liked to make out receipts for premiums, lick stamps, copy letters, and see so many people come in and go out. Stout old Diruf and lanky Zittel did everything they could to keep her interested, and if, despite their efforts, it was seen that a morose mood was invading her otherwise cheerful disposition, they took her out to the merry-go-round, and in a short time her wonted buoyancy had returned.

She seemed like a child, and yet she was every inch a woman. She insisted on wearing her little felt cap at a jaunty angle on her blond hair. When she entered the room, the atmosphere in it underwent a change; it was easier to breathe; it was fresher. People somehow disapproved of the fact that her eyes were so radiantly blue, and that her two rows of perfect white teeth were constantly shining from out between her soft, peach-like lips. They said she was light-hearted; they said she was a butterfly. Benjamin Dorn was of the opinion that she was a creature possessed of the devil of sensuality and finding her completest satisfaction in earthly finery and frippery. For some time there had been an affair of an intimate nature between her and Baron von Auffenberg. Just what it was no one knew precisely; the facts were not obtainable. But Benjamin Dorn, experienced ferreter that he was, could not see two people of different sexes together without imagining that he was an accomplice in the hereditary sin of human kind. And one day he caught Eleanore alone in the company of Baron von Auffenberg. From that day on she was, in his estimation, a lost soul.

The fact concerning Eleanore was this: life never came very close to her. It comes right up to other people, strangles them, or drags them along with it. It kept its distance from Eleanore, for she lived in a glass case. If she had sorrow of any kind, if some painfully indeterminable sensation was gnawing at her soul, if the vulgarity and banality of a base and disjointed world came her way, the glass case in which she lived simply became more spacious than ever, and the things or thoughts that swarmed around it more and more incomprehensible.

One can always laugh if one lives in a glass case. Even bad dreams remain on the outside. Even longing becomes nothing more than a purple breath which clouds the crystal from without, not from within.

The people were quite right in saying that Jordan was bringing up his daughters like princesses. Both were far removed from the customary things of life: the one was translated to the realm of darkness, the other to that of light.

Daniel saw both of them. They were just as strange to him as he to them. He saw the brother, too, a tall, glib, dapper youth. He saw the old house with its dilapidated stairs, its rooms filled with cumbersome, provincial furniture. He saw the alternating currents of life in this family: there was now rest, now unrest, now quiet, now storm. Life flowed out from the house, and then life, the same or of a different origin, flowed back in again. When he came, he talked with Jordan himself rather than with any one else; for he always knew when Jordan would be at home. They spoke in a free and easy fashion and about things in general. If their conversation could be characterised more fully, it might be said that Daniel was reserved and Jordan tactful. Gertrude sat by the table and attended to her needlework.

Daniel came and warmed himself by the stove. If he was offered a sandwich or a cup of coffee he declined. If the offer was made with noticeable insistency, he shook his head and distorted the features of his face until he resembled an irritated ape. It was the peasant spirit of defiance in him that made him act this way. He nourished a measure of small-minded anxiety lest he be indebted to somebody for something. To temptations, yielding to which would have been spiritually mortifying, he was impervious. When, consequently, his need became overpowering, he simply stayed away.

XI

His want grew into a purple sheen. To him there was an element of the ridiculous in the whole situation: it was 1882 and he had nothing to eat; he was twenty-three years old and quite without food.

Frau Hadebusch, virago that she could be when a dubious debtor failed to fulfil his obligations, stormed her way up the steps. The rent was long overdue, and uncanny councils were being held in the living room, in which an invalid from the Wasp’s Nest and a soap-maker from Kamerarius Street were taking part.

In his despair, Daniel thought of entering the army. He reported at the barracks, was examined—and rejected because of a hollow chest.

At first there was the purple sheen. He saw it as he stood on the hangman’s bridge and looked down into the water where pieces of ice were drifting about. But when he raised his distressed face a gigantic countenance became visible. The great vaulted arch of heaven was a countenance fearfully distorted by vengeance and scorn. Of escape from it there could be no thought. Within his soul everything became wrapped in darkness. Tones and pictures ran together, giving the disagreeably inarticulate impression that would be made by drawing a wet rag across a fresh, well-ordered creation.

As he walked on, it seemed to him that the horror of the vision was diminishing. The countenance became smaller and more amiable. It was now not much larger than the façade of a church and what wrath remained seemed to be concentrated in the forehead. An old woman passed by, carrying apples in her apron. He trembled at the smell of them; but he did not reach out; he did not try to take a single one of them from her; he still held himself in control. By this time the entire vision was not much larger than the top of a tree, and in it were the traces of mercy.

The sun was high in the heavens, the snow was melting, birds were chirping everywhere. As he sauntered along with uncertain steps through Pfannenschmied Street he suddenly stopped as if rooted to the pavement. There was the vision: he caught sight of it in bodily form on the door jamb of the shop. He could not see that it was the mask of Zingarella. Of course not, for it was a transfigured face, and how could he have grasped a reality in his present state of mind? He looked from within out. The thing before him was a vision; it joined high heaven with the earth below; it was a promise. He could have thrown himself down on the street and wept, for it seemed to him that he was saved.

The incomparable resignation and friendly grief in the expression of the mask, the sanctity under the long eyelashes, the half extinguished smile playing around the mouth of sorrow, the element of ghostliness, a being far removed from death and equally far removed from life—all this caused his feeling to swell into one of credulous devotion. His entire future seemed to depend upon coming into possession of the mask. Without a moment’s hesitation or consideration he rushed into the shop.

Within he found a young man whom the caster addressed most respectfully as Dr. Benda, and who was about thirty years old. Dr. Benda was being shown a number of successful casts of a figure entitled “The Fountain of Virtue.” It was quite a little while before the caster turned to Daniel and asked him what he wanted. In a somewhat rude voice and with an unsteady gesture, Daniel made it clear to him that he wished to buy the mask. The caster removed it from the door, laid it on the counter, and named his price. He looked at the shabby clothing of the newly arrived customer, concluded at once that the price, ten marks, would be more than he could afford, and turned again to Dr. Benda, so that Daniel might have time to make up his mind.

The two conversed for quite a while. When the caster finally turned around, he was not a little surprised to see that Daniel was still standing at the counter. He stood there in fact with half closed eyes, his left hand lying on the face of the mask. The caster exchanged a somewhat dazed glance with Dr. Benda, who, in a moment of forewarning sympathy, grasped the situation perfectly in which the stranger found himself. Dr. Benda somehow understood, owing to his instinct for appreciation of unusual predicaments, the man’s poverty, his isolation, and even the ardour of his wish. Subduing as well as he might the feeling of ordinary reserve, he stepped up to Daniel, and said to him calmly, quietly, seriously, and without the slightest trace of condescension: “If you will permit me to advance you the money for the mask, you will do me a substantial favor.”

Daniel gritted his teeth—just a little. His face turned to a greenish hue. But the face of his would-be friend, schooled in affairs of the spirit, showed a winning trace of human kindness. It conquered Daniel; it made him gentle. He submitted. Dr. Benda laid the money for the mask on the counter, and Daniel was as silent as the tomb.

When they left the shop, Daniel held the mask under his arm so tightly that the paper wrapping was crushed, if the mask itself was not. The sad state of his clothing and his haggard appearance in general struck Dr. Benda at once and forcibly. He needed to ask but a few well chosen questions to get at the underlying cause of this misery, physical and spiritual, in human form. He pretended that he had not lunched and invited Daniel to be his guest at the inn at the sign of the Grape.

Daniel felt that his soul had suddenly been unlocked by a magic key. At last—he had ears and could hear, eyes and could see. It seemed to him that he had come up to earth from out of some lightless, subterranean cavern. And when they separated he had a friend.

THE NERO OF TO-DAY

I

The spectacle of wellnigh complete degeneracy offered by the roister-doistering slough brethren of the Vale of Tears gave Herr Carovius a new lease on life. He had a really affable tendency to associate with men who were standing just on the brink of human existence. He always drank a great deal of liqueur. The brand he preferred above all others was what is known as Knickebein. Once he had enjoyed his liberal potion, he became jovial, friendly, companionable. In these moods he would venture the hardiest of assertions, not merely in the field of eroticism, but against the government and divine providence as well.

And yet, when he trippled home with mincing steps, there was in his face an expression of cowardly, petty smirking. It was the sign of his inner return to virtuous living; for his night was not as his day. The one belied the other.

He had a quite respectable income; the house in which he lived was his own private property. It was pointed out to strangers as one of the sights of the town; it was certainly one of the oldest and gloomiest buildings in that part of the country. An especially attractive feature of it was the smart and graceful bay-window. Above the beautifully arched outer door there was a patrician coat-of-arms, consisting of two crossed spears with a helmet above. This was chiselled into the stone. In the narrow court was a draw-well literally set in a frame of moss. Each floor of the house had its own gallery, richly supplied with the most artistic of carvings. The stairway was spacious; the tread of the steps was broad, the elevation slight; there were four landings. It symbolised in truth the leisurely, comfortable tarrying of centuries gone before and now a matter of easy memory only.

Often in the nighttime, Herr Carovius recognised in the distance the massive figure of his brother-in-law, Andreas Döderlein, the professor of music. Not wishing to meet him, Herr Carovius would stand at the street corner, until the light from Döderlein’s study assured him that the professor was at home. On other occasions he would come in contact with the occupant of the second floor, Dr. Friedrich Benda. When these two came together, there was invariably a competitive tipping of hats and passing of compliments. Each wished to outdo the other in matters of courtesy. Neither was willing to take precedence over the other. The polished civility of the young man made an even greater degree of pretty behaviour on the part of Herr Carovius imperative, with the result that his excessive refinement of manners made him appear awkward, while his embarrassment made coherent speech difficult and at times impossible.

When however he came alone, he would take the huge key from his pocket, unlock the door, light a candle, hold it high above his head, and spy into every nook and cranny of the barn-like hall before entering his apartment on the ground floor.

II

Herr Carovius was a regular customer at the Crocodile Inn; a table was always reserved for him. Around it there assembled every noon the following companions: Solicitor of the Treasury Korn, assistant magistrate Hesselberger, assistant postmaster Kitzler, apothecary Pflaum, jeweller Gründlich, and baker Degen. Judge Kleinlein also joined them occasionally as a guest of honour.

They gossiped about their neighbours, their acquaintances, their friends, and their colleagues. What they said ran the whole gamut of human emotions from an innocent anecdote up to venomous calumny. Not a single event was immune from malicious backstairs comment. Reputations were sullied without discrimination; objections were taken to the conduct of every living soul; every family was shown to have its skeleton in the closet.

When the luncheon was finished, the men all withdrew and went about their business, with the exception of Herr Carovius. He remained to read the papers. For him it was one of the most important hours of the day. Having feasted his ears with friends in private, he now turned to a study of the follies, transgressions, and tragedies that make up everyday life.

He read three papers every day: one was a local sheet, one a great Berlin daily, and the third a paper published in Hamburg. He never deviated; it was these three, week in and week out. And he read them from beginning to end; politics, special articles, and advertisements were of equal concern to him. In this way he familiarised himself with the advance of civilisation, the changes civic life was undergoing, and the general status of the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat.

Nothing escaped him. He was as much interested in the murder of a peasant in a Pommeranian village as he was in the loss of a pearl necklace on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. He read with equal concentration of the sinking of a steamer in the South Sea and the wedding of a member of the Royal Family in Westminster Abbey. He could work up just as much enthusiasm over the latest fashions as he could over the massacring of enslaved Armenians by the Turks. If he read with care and reflection of the death of a leading citizen, he pursued the same course with regard to the reprehending of a relatively harmless vagabond.

It is only fair to remark, however, that his real sympathy was with those events that have to be entered on the calamitous side of life’s ledger. This was due to a bizarre kink in his philosophy: he studied the world primarily from the point of view of its wars, earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, cyclones, and public and private tragedies in the lives of men. Happy and reassuring events, such as the birth of a healthy child, the conferring of an order of distinction, heroic deeds, the winning of a prize in the lottery, the publication of a good book, or the announcement of a legitimate and successful speculation made no impression on him. At times they even annoyed him. He kept his mind, in other words, riveted on the evils, sorrows, woes, and tribulations that come to pass either on this earth or in the starry firmament above, and that were somehow brought to his attention.

His brain was a storehouse of fearful and ferocious happenings; it was a catalogue, an inventory of disease, seduction, theft, robbery, larceny, assassination, murder, catastrophe, pest, incest, suicide, duel, bankruptcy, and the never failing family quarrel.

If he chanced to enrich his collection by the addition of some especially curious or unheard-of incident, he took out his pocket diary, noted the date, and then wrote: “In Amberg a preacher had a hemorrhage while delivering his morning sermon.” Or: “In Cochin China a tiger killed and ate fourteen children, and then, forcing its way into the bungalow of a settler, bit off the head of a woman as she was sleeping peacefully by the side of her husband.” Or: “In Copenhagen a former actress, now ninety years old, mounted a huge vegetable basket on the market place, and recited Lady Macbeth’s monologue. Her unconventional behaviour attracted such a large crowd of passersby that several people were crushed to death in the excitement.”

This done, he would go home, happy as a man can be. To idlers standing in the doorways or servants looking out the windows he would extend the greetings of the day, and that with really conspicuous cordiality.

If a fire broke out in the city, he was present. As his eyes peered into the flames, they seemed intoxicated, obsessed, seized with uncanniness. He would hum a tune of some sort, look into the anxious faces of those immediately concerned, busy himself with whatever had been salvaged, and attempt to force his gratuitous advice on the fire chief.

If a prominent citizen died, he never failed to attend the funeral, and, where possible, to join the procession on the way to the cemetery. He would stand by the grave with bowed head, and take in every word of the funeral discourse. But his lips twitched in a peculiar fashion, as if he felt that he were understood, and flattered.

And in truth all this did flatter him. The defeat, distress, and death of other people, the betrayals that take place in any community, the highhanded injustice of those in power, the oppression of the poor, the violence that was done to right and righteousness, and the sufferings which had to be borne by thousands day after day, all this flattered him; it interested him; it lulled him into a comfortable feeling of personal security.

But then he sat down at his piano at home, and played an adagio of Beethoven or an impromptu by Schubert, his eyes with fine frenzy rolling in the meantime. And when the mighty chorus in a Bach oratorio resounded, he became pale with ecstasy. At the hearing of a good song well sung he could shed copious tears.

He idolised music.

He was a provincial with unfettered instincts. He was an agitator with a tendency to conservatism. He was a Nero without servants, without power, and without land. He was a musician from despair and out of vanity. He was a Nero in our own day.

He was the Nero of our day living in three rooms. He was a lonely bachelor and a bookworm. He exchanged his views with the corner grocer; he discussed city ordinances with the night watchman; he was a tyrant through and through and a hangman at heart; he indulged in eavesdropping at the shrine of fate, and in this way concocted the most improbable of combinations and wanton deeds of violence; he was constantly on the lookout for misfortune, litigation, and shame; he rejoiced at every failure, and was delighted with oppression, whether at home or abroad. He hung with unqualified joy on the imagined ruins of imaginary disaster, and took equal pleasure in the actual debacles of life as it was lived about him. And alongside of this innate and at times unexpressed gruesomeness and bloodthirstiness, he was filled with a torturing passion for music. This was Herr Carovius. Such was his life.

III

For nine long years, that is, from the time she was fifteen until she was twenty-four, his sister Marguerite kept house for him. She got his breakfast, made his bed, darned his socks, and brushed his clothes; and all he knew about her was that she had yellowish hair, a skin full of freckles, and a timid, child-like voice. His astonishment was consequently unbounded when Andreas Döderlein called one day and proposed to her. He had moved into the house the year before. Herr Carovius was amazed for the very simple reason that he had never known Marguerite except as a fourteen-year-old girl.

He took her to task. With unusual effort she summoned the courage to tell him that she was going to marry Döderlein. “You are a shameless prostitute,” he said, though he did not dare to show Andreas Döderlein the door. The wedding took place.

One evening he was sitting in the company of the young couple. Andreas Döderlein, being in an unusually happy mood, went to the piano, and began playing the shepherd’s motif from Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.”

Herr Carovius sprang to his feet as if stung by a viper, and exclaimed: “Stop playing that foul magic! You know as well as you are living that I don’t believe in it.”

“What do you mean, brother?” asked Andreas Döderlein, his head bowed in grief.

“What are you trying to do? Are you trying to teach me something about this poisoner of wells?” shouted Herr Carovius, and his face took on the enraged expression of a hunchback who has just been taunted about his deformity. “Does the professor imagine that he knows better than I do who this Richard Wagner is, this comedian, this Jew who goes about masked as the Germanic Messiah, this cacaphonist, this bungler, botcher, and bully, this court sycophant, this Pulchinello who pokes fun at the whole German Empire and the rest of Europe led about by the nose, this Richard Wagner? Very well, if you have anything to teach me about him, go on! Proceed! I am listening. Go on! Pluck up your courage.” With this he leaned back in his chair, and laughed a laughter punctuated with asthmatic sighs, his hands in the meantime resting folded across his stomach.

Andreas Döderlein rose to his full stature, see-sawed a bit on the tips of his toes, and looked down on Herr Carovius as one might look down upon a flea that one had caught and was just in the act of crushing between two finger nails. “Oh, ho,” he said, “how interesting! Upon my word, brother Carovius, you are an interesting individual. But if some one were to offer me all the money in the world, I should not like to be so ... interesting. Not I. And you, Marguerite, would you like to be so interesting?”

There was something distinctly annihilating in this air of superiority. It had its full effect on Herr Carovius: his unleashed laughter was immediately converted into a gurgling titter. He opened his eyes wide and rolled them behind his nose-glasses, thus making himself look like a water-spitting figure on a civic fountain. Marguerite, however, timid as she was, never saying a word without making herself smaller by hiding her hands, glanced in helpless fashion from her brother to her husband, and dropped her head before them.

Was the feeling of Herr Carovius for Andreas Döderlein one of hatred? It was hatred and more. It was a feeling of venomous embitterment with which he thought of him, his name, his wife, his child, the thick, bulky wedding ring on his finger, and the gelatinous mass of flesh on his neck. From that evening on he never again visited his sister. If Marguerite got up enough courage to visit him, he treated her with crabbed contempt. She finally came to the point where she would pass his door with not a thought of entering it.

When the first child was born and the maid brought him the glad tidings, he squinted into the corner, tittered, and made bold to say: “Well, my congratulations. It is good that the Döderleins are not to become extinct, for so long as one of them is living, plaisir will not have vanished from the earth.”

Little Dorothea formed in time the habit of playing on the steps or around the old windlass well in the backyard. Herr Carovius procured forthwith a mean dog and named him Cæsar. Cæsar was tied to a chain, to be sure, but his snarls, his growls, his vicious teeth were hardly calculated to inspire the child with a love for the place near him. She soon stopped playing at home.

Four years had elapsed since the Carovius-Döderlein wedding. Herr Carovius was celebrating his birthday. Marguerite called with Dorothea. The child recited a poem which she had learned by heart for her uncle’s benefit. Carovius shook with laughter when he saw the girl dressed up like a doll and realised that the recital was imminent. Dorothea had of course the enunciation of one of her age. When through, Herr Carovius said: “Honestly, it would never have occurred to me that such a little toad could croak so beautifully.”

Though the man knew so little about women that it would be perilous to attempt to measure his ignorance of them, he nevertheless felt, as he looked into Marguerite’s radiant face, a certain disappointment in life—a disappointment which he would try at once to benumb but which delighted him.

IV

About this time Herr Becker died. He was the senior city official, and had been living in the second story of the apartment for twenty-eight years. Dr. Benda moved in at once with his mother.

Carovius told all about this at the reserved table in the Crocodile. His companions were in a position to tell him a great deal more about the ancestry and past life of the Bendas. They were said to have been very rich once, to have lost their money in the great panic, and to be living at present in quite moderate circumstances. Benda’s father was said to have shot himself, and his mother was reported to have taken the boy to school every morning. Solicitor Korn had been told that, despite his youth, Dr. Benda had written a number of scientific books on biology, but that this had not enabled him to reach his desired goal.

“What goal?” the table companions asked in unison.

“Why, he wanted to be made a professor, but people had objected.” Why had they objected? came the question from more than one throat. “Well, you see it was this way: the man is a Jew, and the authorities are not going to appoint a Jew to an official position in a university without raising objections. That is to be taken as a matter of course.” That this was in very truth to be taken as a matter of course was also the opinion of Herr Carovius, who, however, insisted that Benda didn’t exactly look like a Jew; he looked more like a tolerably fat Dutchman. He was in truth not quite blond, but he was not dark either, and his nose was as straight as a rule.

“That is just the point: that’s the Jewish trick,” remarked the Judge, and took a mighty draught from his beer glass. “In olden times,” he said, “the Jews all had the yellow spots, aquiline noses, and hair like bushmen. But to-day no Christian can be certain who is Jew and who is Gentile.” To this the whole table agreed.

Herr Carovius at once began a system of espionage. He studied the faces of the new tenants, and was particularly careful to note when they went out and when they came in and with whom they associated. He knew precisely when they turned the lights out at night and when they opened the windows in the morning. He could tell exactly how many rugs they had, how much coal they burned, how much meat they ate, how many letters they received, what walks they preferred, what people they spoke to, and who recognised them. As if this were not enough, he went down to the bookstore, bought the complete works of Dr. Benda, and read these heavy scientific treatises in the sweat of his brow. He was annoyed at the thought that they had not been critically reviewed. He would have embraced any one who would have told him that they were all perfectly worthless compilations.

One evening, along towards spring, he chanced to go into the backyard to feed Cæsar. He looked up, and saw Marguerite standing on the balcony. She did not see him, for she was also looking up. On the balcony of the second floor, across the court from her, stood Friedrich Benda, responding to some mute signals Marguerite was giving him. Finally they both stopped and merely looked at each other, until Marguerite caught sight of her brother, when she quickly disappeared behind the glass door draped with green curtains.

“Aha,” thought Carovius, “there’s something up.” The scene warmed his very blood.

From that day on he avoided the court. He sat instead for hours at a time in a room from which he could look out through a crack and see everything that was taking place at the windows and on the balconies. He discovered that signals were being sent from the first floor up to the second by changing the position of a flower pot on the railing of the balcony, and that these signals were answered by having a yellow cloth flutter on now a vertical, now a horizontal pole.

At times Marguerite would come out quite timidly, and look up; at times Benda appeared, and stood for a while at the window completely absorbed, as it seemed, in melancholy thoughts. Herr Carovius caught them together but on one single occasion. He opened the window as quickly as he could, and placed his ear so that he could hear what was being said, but it so happened that over in the adjoining yard some one was just then nailing a box together. As a result of the noise it was impossible for him to understand their remarks.

Since that day they exchanged no more signals, and never again appeared on the balcony.

Carovius rubbed his hands at the thought that the majestic Andreas Döderlein had after all grown horns. But his joy waned when he reflected that two other people were deriving profit from the situation. That should not be; that had to be corrected.

And so he stood at times in the evening out in the narrow passage at the entrance to his apartment. His bathrobe fell down over his bony body in many folds. In his right hand he carried a candle. Thus equipped, he listened in, or rather into, the stillness of the house.

At times he would take a dark lantern, walk up the stairs slowly, step by step, and listen, listen with the greedy ears of a man who was determined to hear something. There was something in the air that told him of secret, and of course illicit, transactions.

Was it the same medium through which he learned of the weakening of Marguerite’s mind and the beclouding of her soul? Was it this that told him of her mental anxiety and the ever growing delusion of her terrified and broken heart?

Later he learned of her mad outbursts of anxiety concerning the life of her child. He heard that she would never allow the child out of her sight; that she regarded the natural warmth of her body as a high fever; that every morning she would stand by Dorothea’s bed, weep, take her in her arms, feel her pulse, and wrap her body in warm clothing. He heard, too, that night after night she sat by the child’s bedside watching over her and praying for her, while the child herself slept like an old shoe. All this he learned from the maid.

One day Herr Carovius came home, and found an ambulance and a crowd of gaping people before the house. As he went up the stairway he heard a hushed whimpering. Marguerite was being dragged from the house by two men. The rear of this procession was brought up by Andreas Döderlein, on whose face there was an expression of accusation. The room door was open. He looked in, and saw bits of broken glasses and dishes, and in the midst of the debris sat Dorothea. Her mouth was puckered as if just on the point of weeping, and a cloth was bound about her forehead. The maid stood in the door wringing her hands. And on a step above was Friedrich Benda, white as a sheet, and evidently suffering from great mental anxiety.

Marguerite offered but little resistance. She looked behind her, and tried to see what the child was doing. Herr Carovius buried his hands in his overcoat pockets, and followed the mournful caravan out on to the street. The poor woman was taken to the insane asylum at Erlangen.

Herr Carovius said to himself: somebody is responsible for all this. He determined at once to bring the guilty party to account. He took this stand neither out of grief nor from a feeling of love for his fellow men. His action was motivated by his hatred of a world in which something is constantly going on, and in the midst of which he was condemned to an inactive and deedless life.

V

Not much could be learned from Döderlein’s maid. The efforts to draw something out of little Dorothea were also fruitless. She was wrapped up in her own affairs. She arranged her ribbons, played with her toys, recounted the small incidents of her uneventful life, and could hardly be persuaded even to listen to the ingenious questions Carovius put to her when he stopped her out in the hall and asked her about this and that.

One day he went over to Erlangen to visit his sister in the insane asylum. He thought that he might be able to get some clue to this mystery from her.

He found her sitting in the corner of a room, stroking her long, yellowish hair. Her head was bowed; her eyes were fixed on the floor. Through no cunning that he could devise was it possible to entice a single statement from her.

The physician said: “She is a harmless patient, but most secretive and passionate. She must have suffered for years from some heavy burden on her soul.”

Herr Carovius left her, and went back to the station. The sun was shining bright. He soon saw to his infinite discomfort that it was impossible to eliminate the picture of the melancholy woman from his inner eye. He went into a café and drank some whiskey. On the return journey an old woman sat opposite him who seemed to understand him. There was a trace of compassion in her eyes. This made him so uneasy that he found it necessary to change his seat.

He had met with unanticipated difficulties in his investigation. He recognised these fully, but consoled himself with the thought that there was still time. It occurred to him that he might somehow get hold of Dr. Benda and cross-question him. He recalled having seen Friedrich Benda meet little Dorothea on the stairway once, and no sooner had he seen her coming than he made every effort to avoid her. That set Carovius to thinking.

Some gas pipes had to be installed in the apartment about that time, and this gave him, as superintendent, a splendid opportunity to go up and see Benda. The doctor was just then making his final attempt to claim his rights—the rights of a man and a scholar—against the conspiracy of enemies who were really immune before the law.

He was all alone when Carovius called. He took him straight to his study. The walls of his hall as well as those of his room were covered with books from floor to ceiling. Benda said he was just getting ready to go on an extended journey. The finished politeness with which he removed the books from a chair and the tense way in which he eyed Herr Carovius made it clear to the latter that this was neither the time nor the place to engage in mock conversation. Carovius talked gas pipes. Benda finished all he had to say on this subject in two short, crisp sentences and got up to go.

Herr Carovius got up too, removed his nose glasses, and rubbed them with his bright blue handkerchief. “Where are you going, if I may ask?” There was an expression of apparent sympathy in his question.

Benda made it a habit never to treat any man impolitely, however little regard he might have for him personally. He said that he was going to Kiel to deliver his trial lecture at the university.

“Bravo!” cried Carovius, falling at once into the tone of awkward familiarity. “You have simply got to show those fellows that you are not a coward. Bravo!”

“I don’t quite understand you,” said Benda in amazement. His antipathy for the man was growing. And no one recognised this better than Carovius himself.

He cast a sideglance that reeked with hypocrisy at the young scholar. “My dear doctor, you must not look upon me as a poor uncultured yokel,” he said, “anch’ io sono pittore. I have read, among other things, your monograph on the morphogenetic achievements of the original sulcate cell. Listen, man! I take off my hat to that book. Of course, it is not exactly original, but then it is one of your earlier works. The idea developed in it follows pretty closely that of the evolutionary and mechanical theories of the much slandered Wilhelm Roux. And yet I am bound to say you display considerable independence in your method. Indeed you do. And more than that, you throw much needed light on the mysteries of God himself. There is a good deal of incoherent drivel these days about the freedom of science. Well, you’ll have to show me where it is. Scientists? They are a lot of conceited pin-heads, each working for himself, and incurably jealous of what his colleagues are doing. Up and at ’em, Doctor, that’s my advice, and luck to you!”

Benda was amazed to hear Carovius mention a work that was otherwise known only to specialists. This however merely tended to increase his distrust. He knew too much about the man to stand before him without a feeling of hostility. He merely needed to call to mind the story of the woman whose youth he had made into a waste place and a prison to be made aware of the fact that it was quite impossible to stand in his presence and breathe easily. The air of the room in which Carovius chanced to be was heavy, stuffy, depressing.

Benda’s bearing, however, remained unchanged. He replied in a serious tone: “It is not after all easy to get along with people. Each has his own place and wants to keep it. I thank you very much for your visit and your kind words, but my time is limited. I have a great deal to do—”

“Oh, certainly,” said Carovius hastily, while a rancorous grin flitted across his face, “but you don’t need to drive me away. I am going on my own accord. I have an engagement at the district court at five o’clock, I am to sign some sort of a document concerning the detention of my sister in the insane asylum. It probably has to do with the settling of her estate or something like that. Who knows? By the way, what have you to say about the affair? You knew her rather intimately. No hedging, doctor. There she sits in the cell and combs her hair. Can you imagine who is responsible? You know a woman doesn’t lose her mind from a mere love affair. And this music swindler down stairs—it is impossible to get him to show his true colours. Yes, we all have our troubles.”

In order to take the sting out of his impudent insinuations, for he regretted having made a premature move with his trump card, Carovius smiled in a scurrilous fashion, ducked his head, coward that he was, and riveted his greedy, banal eyes on Benda.

But Benda was looking down. His eyes had been attracted by the fancy buckle shoes of Herr Carovius. He was repelled by the man’s foppish socks with the yellow stripes which were made more conspicuous by the fact that his trousers were too high. He had a feeling of unmitigated mental nausea, too, when he noticed how Carovius lifted first one foot and then the other from the floor, and then set it down, heel first. It was a detestable habit; and indulging in it made an ugly noise.

VI

Benda’s absence lasted for hardly a year. His mother had not accompanied him this time. She was not feeling well, and there was some danger that she was losing her eyesight.

After his return he took to silent brooding. Though he never said a word to his mother about the disappointment he had experienced, she knew precisely what he had gone through, and spared him the humiliation that would have followed any questions she might have asked.

He was oppressed by the memories the house awakened in him. Forgotten pictures became living ones. The figure of the murdered woman appeared in the nighttime on the balcony. Her shadow fell upon him, nestled up to him in fact, as he sat at his writing-desk.

There were a great many things that still bound him to her whose spirit had vanished from the earth, though her body remained.

It was impossible for him to forget her gentle look or the coyness of her hands. He knew her fate; he knew her soul. But he was condemned to silence. To withdraw from contact with the world and into the deepest of loneliness had been her lot; it had also been his. At present it was possible to get only one picture of her, the one her brother had given: she sat in her cell and combed her yellow hair.

He held no one responsible; he blamed no one. He merely regretted that men are as they are.

A former university friend of his came in, and tried to get him interested in collaborating on a great scientific work. He declined. As soon as his colleague of other days had gone, he visualised to himself the entire conversation: The man was affable and insistent; and yet there was in his very being an underground, enigmatic hostility. It was the hostility he invariably felt whenever he had anything to do, either of a purely external, business nature or in a social way, with men of other faith. The least he had to fear was a prejudiced inimicality, as if the individual in question were on the point of calling out to him: You stay on that side, I’ll stay on this. Keep off the bridge.

He was fully aware of this, but his pride forbade his fighting against it. He renounced his natural right to life and a living. He declined the university conceded privilege of co-existence. To go out and actually win for himself the right to participate in the inevitable contest of forces, or to secure even this poor privilege by supplication, or to defend it by argument, or to cajole it into his possession by political wiles, seemed to him contrary to reason and at odds with common sense. He would not do it.

He refused to knock at the door which he himself had bolted and barricaded.

From this self-imposed embarrassment he suffered to an almost intolerable degree. It was the irrational and fraudulent phase of matters that made him suffer. Did men act as they did because they were so strong in their faith? Not at all. Did he believe in those racial differences which made them believe? Not at all. He felt at home on the soil that nourished him; he felt under obligations to the weal and woe of his people; he was bound heart and soul to the best of them, and realised that he had been spiritually developed by their language, ideas, and ideals.

Everything else was a lie. They knew that it was a lie too, but out of his pride they forged a weapon and turned it against him. To deny his relationship to them, a relationship that had been proved by his achievements and enthusiasm, was a part of their plan; it was also a part of their evil designs.

To strike up acquaintances, seek out congenial companions, or take an active part in social organisations was repulsive to him. He did not care to be dragged into fruitless and empty community of effort or social co-operation. Defiant and alone, he explained his case to himself. Since it merely intensified his agony to compare his lot with that of others who seemed to be similarly situated, he did not do it. He avoided in truth all reflections that might have made the world appear to him as having at least a semblance of justice.

He was consequently filled with a longing which took more definite shape day by day, and finally developed into a positive and irrevocable decision.

About this time he made the acquaintance of Daniel, and through him he came to know other people. He saw at once that there was something unusual about Daniel; that there was something in him which he had never before noticed in any one. Even his outer distress was a challenge to greater activity, while his inner agitation never permitted his associates to rest in idle peace.

It was not easy to be of assistance to him; he rejected all gifts which he could not repay. He had to be convinced first of his duty and indebtedness to the friend whom fate had made cross his path. And even then he stood out for the privilege of being theoretically ungrateful.

Benda and his mother succeeded in getting him a position as a tutor in some private families. He had to give piano lessons to young boys and girls. The compensation was not great, but it at least helped him out for the time being.

After the day’s work was done, the evenings and nights bound the two more and more firmly together.

VII

One evening Daniel entered the house and met Herr Carovius. But he was so absorbed in thought that he passed by without noticing him. Carovius looked at him angrily, and walked back to the hall to see where the young man was going. When he heard him ring the bell on the second floor, an uneasy expression came over his face. He rubbed his chin with his left hand.

“The idea of passing by me as though I were a block of wood,” murmured Carovius spitefully. “Just wait, young man, I’ll make you pay for that.”

Instead of leaving the house as he had wished, Carovius went into his apartment, lighted a candle, and tripped hastily through three rooms, in which there were old cabinets and trunks filled with books and music scores. There was also a piano in one. He then took a key from his pocket, and unlocked a fourth room, which had closed shades and was in fact otherwise quite oddly arranged.

He went to a table which reached almost the full length of the room, picked up a piece of white paper, sat down, and wrote with red ink: “Daniel Nothafft. Musician. Two months in jail.”

He then covered the paper with mucilage, pasted it on a wooden box which looked like a miniature sentry-house, and nailed a lid on the box, using tacks that were lying ready for this purpose.

There were at least five dozen such boxes on the long table, the majority of which had names attached to them and had been nailed up.

The closed room Herr Carovius called his court chamber. What he did in it he termed the regulation of his affairs with humanity, and the collection of little wooden cells he called his jail. Every individual who had offended, hurt, humiliated, or defrauded him was assigned such a keep in which he was obliged to languish, figuratively, until his time, determined by a formal sentence, was up.

Nor was this all. In the middle section of the table there were a number of diminutive sand heaps, about thirty in all, and on each one was a small wooden cross and on each cross was a name. That was Herr Carovius’s cemetery, and those who were figuratively buried there were, so far as he was concerned, dead, even though they were still going about their earthly affairs as lively and cheerful as ever. They were people whose mundane careers were finished, as he saw it, and under each of their accounts, reckoned exclusively in sins, he had drawn a heavy line. They were such people as Richard Wagner and his champions, the local stationer to whom he had advanced some money years ago and who entered a plea of bankruptcy a few months later, the authors of bad books that were widely read, or of books which he loathed without having read them, as, for instance, those of Zola.

There were still a third noteworthy section of the table, and that was the so-called Academy. This consisted of a plot of ground, surrounded by an iron fence, and divided up into twelve or fifteen square fields, each of which was painted in fresh green. In the middle of each field there was a wooden peg about two inches high, and to the middle of each peg there was attached a name-plate. From the tops of some of these pegs little banners of green cloth fluttered in the breeze.

The fact is, Herr Carovius had a weakness for association with aristocrats. In his heart of hearts he admired the manners of the aristocracy, their indifference and self-complacency, their irrefragable traditions and their noiseless and harmonious behaviour. To the pegs of the Academy he had affixed the names of some of the best families he had known; among others, those of the Tuchers, the Hallers, the Humbsers, the Kramer-Kleets, and the Auffenbergs. Whenever he had succeeded in making the personal acquaintance of the members of any of these families, he went straightway to the Academy and hoisted the appropriate flag.

But, despite all his effort, he had never in the course of time been able to run up more than three flags, and these only for a brief period and without any marked success. Some one had recognised him on the street or spoken to him at the concert, and that was all. The Academy looked, in contradistinction to the jail and the cemetery, quite deserted. Finally he was able to hoist the Auffenberg banner. Herr Carovius felt that the Academy had a great future.

VIII

Kropotkin the painter had once upon a time received an order to make a copy of a Holbein for Baron Siegmund von Auffenberg. He never finished the picture, owing to lack of ability; but he had become acquainted with Baron Eberhard, and years later, having met him quite accidentally, took him to the Paradise, where the infamous brethren were then in the habit of gathering.

Eberhard’s appearance at the Paradise was short-lived; he disappeared in fact as quickly as he had appeared. But this brief space was sufficient for Herr Carovius to become intimately acquainted with him.

The first time he sat at the same table with him he was noticeably excited. His face shone with a mild spiritual glow. His voice was sweet and gentle, his remarks of an unusually agreeable moderation.

He turned the conversation to a discussion of the superiorities of birth, and lauded the distinction of the hereditary classes. He said it was from them only that the people could acquire civic virtue. The brethren scorned his point of view. Herr Carovius came back at them with an annihilating jest.

During the rendition of this hallelujah-solo in praise of the nobility, Eberhard von Auffenberg intrenched himself behind a sullen silence. And though Carovius used every available opportunity from then on to flatter the young nobleman in his cunning, crafty way, he failed. The most he could do was to inspire Eberhard to lift his thrush-bearded chin in the air and make some sarcastic remark. Fawn as he might, Carovius was stumped at every turn.

One night, however, the two enjoyed each other’s company on the way home. That is, Carovius never left Eberhard’s side. Annoyed at the failure of his former tactics, he thought he would try his luck in another way: he ridiculed the arrogance of a certain caste which affected to attach less importance to a man like himself than to some jackanapes whose handkerchief was adorned with an embroidered crown.

“What are you, any way, what is your vocation?” asked Eberhard von Auffenberg.

“I don’t do anything,” replied Carovius.

“Nothing at all? That is quite agreeable.”

“Oh, I do work a little at music,” added Herr Carovius, entirely pleased at the curiosity of the Baron.

“Now, you see, that is after all something,” said the Baron. “I for my part am as unmusical as a shot-gun. And if you do not do anything but interest yourself in music, you must have a great deal of money.”

Herr Carovius turned away. The positive dread of being taken for a rich man wrestled with the vain desire to make the young Baron feel that he really was somebody. “I have a little,” he remarked with a titter, “a little.”

“Very well; if you will loan me ten thousand marks, it will give me great pleasure to make you a present of the crown on my handkerchief,” said Eberhard von Auffenberg.

Herr Carovius stopped stock still, and opened his mouth and his eyes: “Baron, you are taking the liberty of jesting with me.” But when Eberhard indicated that he was quite serious, Carovius continued, blank amazement forcing his voice to its highest pitch: “But my dear Sir, your father has an income of half a million. A mere income! The tax receipts show it.”

“Well, I am not talking about my father,” said Eberhard coldly, and once more threw his chin in the air. “It is evidently a part of your heraldic prejudices to feel that you can coax the income of my father into my own pockets.”

They were standing under a gas lamp at the Haller Gate. It was dripping rain, and they had raised their umbrellas. It was perfectly still; it was also late. Not a human being was to be seen anywhere. Carovius looked at the seriously offended young man, the young man looked at Carovius, then grinning a grin of embarrassment, and neither knew how to take the other.

“You are surprised,” said Eberhard, resuming the conversation. “You are surprised, and I don’t blame you. I am a discontented guest in my own skin; that much I can assure you. I am as abortive a creature as ever was born. I inherited far too much that is superfluous, and not nearly enough of the necessities. There are all manner of mysteries about me; but they are on the outside. Within there is nothing but stale, dead air.”

He stared at the ground as though he were talking to himself, and as though he had forgotten that any one was listening, and continued: “Have you ever seen old knights carved in stone in old churches? If you have, you have seen me. I feel as if I were the father of my father, and as if he had had me buried alive, and an evil spirit had turned me to stone, and my hands were lying crossed over my breast and could not move. I grew up with a sister, and I see her as though it were yesterday”—at this point his face took on an expression of fantastic senility—“walking through the hall, proud, dainty, innocent, with roses in her hand. She is married to a captain of cavalry, a fellow who treats his men like Negro slaves, and who never returns the greeting of a civilian unless he is drunk. She had to marry him. I could not prevent it. Somebody forced her into it. And if she is carrying roses now, it is as if a corpse were singing songs.”

Herr Carovius felt most uneasy. He was not accustomed to hearing things like this. Where he lived people called a spade a spade. He pricked up his ears and made a wry face. “It is the way he has been trained that makes him talk like that,” he thought; “it is the result of constantly sitting on gold-embroidered chairs and seeing nothing about him but paintings.”

“I am going to sit on such chairs too,” he was happy to think, “and I shall see the paintings, too.” He pictured himself between the Baron and the Baroness, marching up to the portals of the castle, flanked on either side by a row of liveried servants, the nervous masses catching sight of the splendour as well as they might. The rear of this procession was being brought up by the young Baron, who had returned home as the penitent Prodigal Son.

“One must have a feeling of personal security,” remarked Carovius. He wondered whether the Baron had reached his majority. Eberhard replied that he had just completed his twenty-first year, and that certain things had made him feel that it would be wise to live independent of his family and to renounce his claims to all family rights for the time being. What he really had in mind was the desire to avoid, so far as humanly possible, association with all professional money-lenders.

Herr Carovius felt that this was an extremely serious case. He claimed moreover to understand it perfectly and to be ready for anything, but insisted that nothing must be withheld, that he must be given undiluted wine. He made this remark just as if he were holding a glass of old Johannisberger out in the rain, sniffing as he did with appreciative nostrils.

“I am very discreet,” he said, “very taciturn.” He looked at the Baron tenderly.

The young Baron nodded.

“The wearer of purple is recognised wherever he goes,” continued Herr Carovius, “and if he lays the purple aside he stands at once in need of reticent friends. I am reserved.”

The Baron nodded again. “If you will permit me, I shall visit you in a few days.” With that he ended the conversation.

He started off toward the Avenue, walking stiffly. It was not hard to see that he was ill at ease. Herr Carovius walked away with mincing, merry steps down toward the small end of the alley, singing an aria from the “Barber of Seville” as he went.

At the end of the first week he was taken down with a disconcerting suspicion that the Baron had made a fool of him. He was filled with a wrath that had to be cooled. One morning, just as he was leaving his apartment, he saw two milk cans filled with milk standing in the outer hall. One was for the first floor, the other for the second. The milkmaid had placed them there for the time being, and had gone over to have a little morning chat with her neighbour. Herr Carovius went to his lumber-room, which also served as the kitchen, took down a jug of vinegar, came back, looked around with all the caution he could summon, and then poured half of the contents of the jug into one can and the other half into the other.

Two days later he decided not to give Cæsar anything to eat, so that he would terrify the neighbours by his howling. This worked. The dog howled and whined and barked night after night. It was enough to melt the heart of a stone. Nobody could sleep. Andreas Döderlein went to the police, but they told him that the case was beyond their jurisdiction.

Herr Carovius lay in bed rejoicing with exceeding great joy over the fact that the people could not sleep. He became enamoured of the idea that it might be possible, through some ingenious invention, to rob a whole city or a whole nation of its sleep. The inventor could then move about conscious of the fact that he was at once the distributor and the destroyer of the world’s supply of sleep. If he so elected to exploit his invention, he could revel in the sight of an entire people pining, drying up, and eventually dying from the want of sleep.

After Cæsar had become quite savage, Herr Carovius decided to unleash him. It was just after sunset. He slipped up to the beast from the rear, and opened the chain lock. The dog ran like mad through the court and the hall, and out on to the street.

Just at this moment young Baron von Auffenberg was entering to pay Herr Carovius that promised visit. He jumped back from the beast, but it sprang at his body, and in a jiffy the Baron was lying full length on the pavement. Cæsar left him, made a straight line for the open door of a butcher shop across the street, sprang in, and snatched a fancy cut from one of the hooks.

In order to see just how much damage the dog would really do, Herr Carovius ran after him, hypocritically feigning as he ran an expression of horror, and acting as though the beast had somehow broken his chain and got loose. The first sight that caught his eyes was that of the young Baron as he rose to his feet and limped over toward his host to-be.

The horror of Herr Carovius at once became real. With the diligence of a seasoned flunkey, he stooped over, picked up the Baron’s hat, dusted it, stammered all sorts of apologies, gazed at high heaven like a martyred saint, and brushed the dirt from Eberhard’s trousers. Then the dog came back, a huge piece of meat in his mouth. The butcher came to the door and shook his fists. The butcher’s boy stuck two fingers in his mouth, and whistled for the police. They came, too, and Herr Carovius had to pay for the meat.

He then took the Baron into his living-room, plying him in the meantime with innumerable questions as to how he felt. Having been stunned by the fall, the Baron asked to lie down for a few minutes on the couch. Herr Carovius granted his wish, smothering him with sighs of affection and exclamations of regret.

As the Baron lay on the couch, trying to regain his vital spirits, Herr Carovius went to the piano and played the rondo from Weber’s sonata in A flat major. His technique was superb; his emotion was touching.

After the concert the transactions began.

INSPECTOR JORDAN AND HIS CHILDREN

I

Benno Jordan was now a senior in the gymnasium and had begun to play mischievous pranks. He also declared that he was no longer minded to tolerate the tyranny of the school, and that he had not the slightest desire to enter the university. He was a wilful, obstinate boy with a marked tendency to sociability. He paid a great deal of attention to his clothes, and was proud of his handsome face.

After repeated conversations with the seventeen-year-old boy, Jordan decided to get him a job as a clerk in the offices of the Prudentia. He discussed the situation with the general agent, and Alfons Diruf gave his consent. Benno began his work at fifty marks a month.

When Jordan would come home of an evening, the first thing he would hear from Eleanore was that Benno had an engagement with some of his friends, and that they were in the Alfas Garden, or in the Wolf’s Glen, or in Café Merkur, where the orchestrion, then a new invention, was being played for the first time.

“Lord, what is to become of the next generation?” said Jordan, quite worried. “All they think about is having a good time. Why, I never in my whole life thought of merely amusing myself.”

Anxious about Benno’s behaviour, Jordan called on the chief of the clerical department. The little man with the waxened, weazened, face expressed himself as quite satisfied with the new employé. Jordan took him by the hand; it was his way of displaying gratitude. And he was grateful, though it was hard for him to subdue a feeling of solicitude. He recognised the boy’s external amiability, but felt convinced that this merely covered and concealed a decayed soul.

Alfons Diruf was obese and gloomy. His clothes were made in Paris, and on the ring finger of his left hand was a brilliant diamond.

Since the Prudentia had introduced the so-called workmen’s insurance, the number of clerks on its payroll had been increased by about twenty-five thousand. Of these eighty-four were under Diruf’s direct supervision. They were located in three rooms of a house in Fürther Street. They were pale and they were silent. Diruf himself had a private office which resembled the boudoirs of a woman of the world. The curtains were of blue silk, a bathing nymph by Thumann hung on the wall, and the whole place smelled of musk.

Three times a day he would leave his fair retreat, and, with the mien of disgust, make the rounds of the clerks’ quarters. When they saw him coming, heads ducked, hands scurried across the books, feet stopped scraping, and all whispering died out.

He gave the impression of a man who hated his job, but in reality he loved it. He liked the clerks because of their servile docility and their famished faces. He liked them because they came promptly every morning and went away every evening tired as tired could be, and because day after day, year in and year out, they sat there and wrote, wrote, wrote.

He liked the inspectors because day after day, year in and year out, they did a great deal of work for a very little money. He liked the agents and sub-agents who made it possible for the company to issue hundreds of new policies every day. He liked their dirty clothes and tattered boots, their hungry looks, their misleading but effective line of talk, and their sad faces.

The special bait of the workmen’s insurance was the small premium, carrying with it a small policy. In this way the man of small means was to be educated in thrift. As a rule, however, the small man realised, when it was too late, that the agent had promised more than the company could do. He became distrustful; his weekly savings were so scant that it was impossible for him to pay his premiums regularly; with the expiration of each week it became increasingly difficult to make up the back payments, and, before he knew precisely what had happened, his policy had been declared void, and the money he had paid in on it confiscated.

In this way the company made millions. It was the pfennigs of the poorest classes that constituted these millions, made the dividends rise higher and higher, increased the army of clerks, and filled the pockets of the agents.

These agents were recruited from the scum of human society. They were made up of bankrupts, decadent students, gamblers, topers, and beggars. They came from the ranks of those who had been pursued by misfortune and who bore the marks of crime. No one was too small or too bad.

Alfons Diruf, however, saw that it would vastly improve the credit of the company if to this list of outcasts he would add a few eminently respectable citizens. He consequently went out on his own responsibility, and looked for help. His quest brought him to Jason Philip Schimmelweis.

“It’s a gold mine,” he said; “you work for an ideal, and you get something out of it for yourself. Ideals, incidentally, that are not profitable are idiotic.” With that he blew the smoke of his Havana cigar through his nose.

Jason Philip understood. It was not necessary to flatter the leader and politician that was admittedly in him. He nearly ran his legs off working for the company. Alfons Diruf loved this socialist bookkeeper, after a fashion.

Inspector Jordan saw however that the countless brokers were encroaching on his territory and stirring up distrust on the part of his better clients. He lost his interest. The directors felt obliged to send Alfons Diruf a critical memorandum explaining Jordan’s case, and showing that he was no longer as efficient as he used to be.

II

Daniel had grown tired of his room in the attic and the society of brush-maker Hadebusch. He announced that he was going to move. Surrounded by a cloud of smells from boiled cabbage, Frau Hadebusch raged about the ingratitude of man. Her shrieks called Herr Francke and the Methodist from out their warm holes; the brush-maker and his imbecile son also appeared in the dimly lighted vestibule; and before these five Hogarth figures stood the defenceless sinner, Daniel Nothafft.

He looked about in the suburbs of St. Mary, but found everything too dear. He went out to New Gate, but everything was taken. He tried the St. John district, and that pleased him best of all. Late in the afternoon he came to a house in the Long Row, at the entrance to which hung a “To Let” sign.

He pulled the bell cord, and a beautiful servant girl took him into a room. Through the window he could look out on a garden filled with old trees. A spinster came in, and smiled at the pleasure he took in the room and the view.

“I must see my sister,” she said, as he asked her about the price.

She called out into the hall, and her sister, likewise an elderly and kindly spinster, came in. They held a council, the deliberations of which were conducted in muffled tones, and then agreed that they would have to consult Albertina. She was the third sister. The first tip-toed to the door and, with pointed lips, called the name, Albertina, out into the long hall with as much coyness as had been employed in summoning the second sister.

Albertina was the youngest of the three; she was about forty. But she had forgotten, like Jasmina and Saloma, to erase twenty years from the calendar: all three had preserved the youthful charm of their girlhood.

Albertina blushed as she looked at the young man, and her modesty was contagious; the two sisters also blushed. She told Daniel that they were the Rüdiger sisters. With that she remained silent, and looked down as though she had divulged her entire fate. She informed Daniel that they had decided to rent the room to some dependable young man, because there had been considerable petty thieving in the neighbourhood of late and they would like to enjoy the protection of a man, for they were entirely alone, except for the boy who tended the garden. They told him also that they had had several offers, but that they had declined them because they did not like the appearance of the applicants. In affairs of this kind, indeed in everything, the three sisters were always of like mind.

Fräulein Saloma asked Daniel what he did. He replied that he was a musician. A chorus of surprise greeted his ears, rendered in perfect time by the three female voices. Fräulein Jasmina asked him whether he was a singer or a violinist. He replied that he was neither, that he was a composer, or that he at least hoped to become one. With that an expression of intense spirituality spread over the faces of the sisters, so that they looked like triplets. Aha, a creative artist! “Y-e-s,” said Daniel, “if you wish to put it that way: a creative artist.”

They hopped into the corner like so many sparrows, and went into serious conference. Fräulein Saloma, as chairman, wanted to know whether a monthly rent of twelve marks would be too much. No, replied Daniel, that would not be excessive. He said it without giving the matter the slightest consideration, and then shook hands with the sisters. Fräulein Jasmina added that he could use the piano on the first floor whenever he wished to, and that it merely needed tuning. Daniel shook her hand again, this time with special warmth. His joy had awakened in him a measure of clumsy familiarity.

Before he left the house he went out into the garden, and stood for a while under one of the trees. A tree to myself at last, he thought. Up in the top a blackbird was singing. Meta the servant looked out from the door where she was standing, astonished at it all.

Fräulein Albertina said to her sisters: “He seems like an interesting young man, but he has bad manners.”

“Artists attach no importance to externalities,” replied Fräulein Jasmina with knitted brow.

“A great mistake. He always looked as if he had just come out of a bandbox. You remember, don’t you?”

The other two nodded. The three then walked down the garden path, arm in arm.

III

Daniel was standing in the vegetable market before the Goose Man Fountain, eating apples.

The sun was shining, and he noticed that the shadow of the fountain was moving slowly toward the church. It made him sad to see that time was passing and how it was passing. When he turned around, however, and saw that the bronze figure of the man with the two geese under his arms was not merely indifferent to the passing of time but confident that all is well, he could not help but laugh.

What made him laugh was partly the calm of the man: he was always waiting for something, and he was always there. He was likewise amused at the thought that two geese could make a man look so contented.

IV

As Daniel was going home one afternoon from a piano lesson, he met Eleanore Jordan. He told her about his new room and the three bizarre creatures in the house in the Long Row.

Eleanore had heard all about them. She said they were the daughters of the geometrician Rüdiger, and that he had left the town some time ago because of a quarrel with the citizens, or rather with one of the gilds. The origin of the trouble was the picture of a certain painter. More she did not know, other than that Rüdiger had gone to Switzerland and lost his life by falling down one of the mountains. The sisters, she said, were the laughing stock of the town. They never left the house except on certain days, when they went out to the nearby cemetery at the Church of St. John to place flowers on the grave of that painter.

Daniel hardly listened to what she said. They were standing at the St. Sebaldus Church, and the chimes began to play. “Magnificent,” he murmured, “an ascending triad in A.”

Eleanore asked him how he was getting along, and looked with regret at his sunken cheeks. Her virile expression was rather displeasing to him. He was surprised to see how rarely she lowered her eye lids. He said he was getting along quite well. She smiled.

“It’s terrible that a man has to have a monster in his body that must be fed,” he remarked. “Otherwise one could storm the heavens and steal the songs of the angels. But this was not to be. You have first to flutter your wings until they are wounded and break your chains, and by that time such ethereal power as you may have had is dissipated.”

He wrinkled his face until he again looked like the wily ape. “But I am going to see it through,” he said. “I want to find out whether God drew me from the urn as a blank or a prize.” He could be very eloquent when he talked about himself.

Eleanore smiled. It seemed to her that it was merely necessary to bring a little order into his life. She consequently assumed the responsibility of looking after his room.

In Tetzel Street they met the inspector. As Jordan walked along at the side of his beloved daughter, it seemed to him that the grey walls and weather-beaten stones of the houses were no longer so earthy or weighed down with time. Eleanore looked toward the West into the purple glow of the setting sun. She was not quite herself. There came moments when she suffered from homesickness for a fairer land.

She thought of Italy. She conjured up lovely visions of sunny bays, blooming groves, and white statues.

Daniel however went on toward the Füll. The workmen were coming from the suburbs, and in their tired faces he felt that he recognised his own world. “Oh,” he sighed, “I should like to get nearer the stars, to make the acquaintance of more dependable hearts, of hearts that are truer even than my own.”

Just then he looked up at Benda’s window, and saw his light. He was ashamed of himself.

V

The first time Eleanore visited Daniel it was along toward evening. She heard from a distance the piano and the shrill crowing of Daniel’s voice. Down in the hall she saw three white figures cuddled up close to each other like hens on a roost.

It was the Rüdiger sisters trying to drink in the creative efforts of the artist. That they were eavesdropping at the fount of art they understood both in the good and the bad sense: their enthusiasm was praiseworthy, their courtesy was deficient. When they caught sight of Eleanore on the stairway, they were terrified, and rustled into the adjoining room.

The three elderly hearts beat impetuously. It was Jasmina’s turn to read from Rückert’s poems. Jasmina had not the shadow of a desire to perform; her sisters were equally disinclined to listen.

“It is not right,” the three kept saying, when they heard of Eleanore’s visits. “It is not right.” Even Meta the maid was of the opinion that her calls were highly unconventional.

As Daniel played on and merely nodded to her, Eleanore’s eyes fell on the mask of Zingarella. She stepped up, took it down from the nail on the wall, and examined it in perfect silence.

Daniel had in the meantime left the piano. A loud cry from him startled her: “What the devil are you doing?” he exclaimed in a tone of immoderate anger. He took the mask, which she was handling so lightly and tremulously, out of her hands, and replaced it on the nail with affectionate care.

The sensitive girl at once began to cry. She turned to one side in order to conceal her tears. Daniel was irritated, but the first thought that occurred to him was how he could make amends for his rudeness. He fetched a worn book, and offered to lend it to her. It was a translation of that beautiful old novel, “Manon Lescaut.”

Eleanore came frequently after office hours, but never remained long; she did not wish to make the people at home uneasy. During the short time she stayed she always found a number of things to do, such as straightening up the papers on his table or arranging his scores.

She became acquainted with Benda; he took a liking to her. It did him good merely to be in her presence, and he could not understand why she did not have the same wholesome effect on Daniel. Daniel seemed thoroughly unappreciative of the girl. He was like a man who goes along the street carrying a basket full of eggs: his sole ambition for the time being is to see that not a single egg is lost or broken.

The two would frequently accompany the girl home. Daniel always talked about himself, and Benda listened with a smile. Or Benda talked about Daniel, and Daniel was all ears.

What did people say? That Eleanore was now trotting around with three men, whereas she formerly had only one on her string, the Baron, and that you are going to hear from this affair.

Every now and then a snip of ugly gossip reached Eleanore’s ears. She paid not the slightest attention to it. She looked out from her glass case on to the world with cool and cheerful indifference, quite incapable of placing the established interpretation on the glances of calumniators.

VI

Benda could have sketched Daniel’s face in the darkness: the round forehead, the little nose, pointed and mulish, the rigidly pinched lips, the angular musician’s chin, and the deep dimples in his cheeks.

His ignorance of the musician was complete. Like all scholars, he nurtured an ingrained distrust when it came to the supernatural influence of art. For the great musical compositions which, in the course of time and as a result of the homage of succeeding generations, had come to be regarded as exemplary and incontestable, he had a feeling of reverence. For the creations of his contemporaries he had no ear.

That it was hard to understand and appreciate, he knew. That it was bitter not to be understood or appreciated, he had experienced. That the discipline associated with all intellectual work demands its tribute in the form of sacrificial renunciation needed no proof in his case.

The musician was something new to him. How did he regard him? As a blind man whose soul was on fire. As a drunken man who made the impression of repulsive sobriety on other men. As an obsessed individual who was living an excruciatingly lonely life and was unaware of it. As an unpolished peasant with the nerves of a degenerate.

The scientist wished to find the established and formulated law in the musician—a task that could lead only to despair. The friend surveyed the life of his friend; he allowed the personalities of many young men whom he had met in life to pass before his mind’s eye. He looked for the criteria of common interests; he sought a law, even here. He sat in the dusk, and read from the works of the philosopher Mainländer. Then he laid the book to one side, and said to himself: “The youth of to-day are lacerating, devastating themselves.... It is a fearful age. Measure, proportion, and balance are gone. Every model becomes a caricature. The individual is absolutely dependent upon himself. The flame is without container, and threatens to burn the hand that would check it.”

In Daniel he had found his brother in fate. Music became his brother in torture. On seeing his friend lacerated and devastated, he saw twitch from the eye of Gorgo herself the profoundest of wisdom. But he did not lay bare his own heart.

One night, after unending conversation had brought them both to silence—like ships which, tossed about by the winds, at last drift into the harbour—Benda, taking up with an angry, exasperated remark by Daniel as it echoed back from the other shore of this silence, said: “We must not be vain. We dare not usurp a privilege which has no other basis than our inner task. We must never stand before our own picture. It seems to me that an artist should be of exalted modesty, and that without this modesty he is nothing but a more or less remarkable lout.”

Daniel looked up at once. Benda’s big teeth were visible under his bushy moustache. He had a habit of pulling his lips apart whenever he was searching for a really incisive word.

Benda continued: “The great majority of what you call talent is ignominious. Talent is a feather duster. All that comes from the finger tips is evil. The man who has a distinct goal and is willing to suffer in order to reach it, that man we can use. And otherwise—how beautiful it all is after all! Heaven is above us, the earth is beneath us, and in between stands immortal man.”

Daniel got up, and seized Benda’s hand. There was nothing more vanquishing than Benda’s handshake. His good strong right became a vise in which he shook a man’s hand until it became limp, a perfectly delightful benevolence radiating from his eyes in the meanwhile.

The two men exchanged the fraternal “thou.”

VII

Eleanore returned the copy of “Manon Lescaut.” When Daniel asked her how she liked it, she never said a word. Since he thought that it was an excellent book, he began to scold.

She said: “I cannot read books in which there is so much talk about love.”

He gazed into space in order to allow her voice time to die away. There was a violin tone in her speech, the charm of which he could not escape. When he fully realised what she had said, he laughed a short laugh, and remarked that her attitude was one of affected coyness. She shook her head. Then he teased her about going with young Auffenberg, and asked her whether real love affairs were just as disagreeable to her as those related in novels.

The flaming blue of her eyes compelled him to look down. It was not pleasant for him to admit, by action, that the expression in her face was stronger than his own. She left, and did not allow herself to be seen for a few days.

When she returned, he was naïve enough to renew his banter. She took her seat on the corner sofa, and looked straight into his face: “Do we really intend to remain friends, Daniel?” she asked.

He cast a side glance of amazement at her, not because he was particularly struck by her charming suavity and marked winsomeness, but rather because the violin tone in her throat resounded more strongly and clearly than ever. But it was quite impossible for him to give an affirmative reply to her question without puckering up his lips and putting his hands in his trouser pockets.

She said she had no desire to seem important in his estimation, that she merely wanted him to regard her as different from other girls. She insisted that he concede her one privilege if they were to remain friends: he was not to talk to her about love, either seriously or in jest. She remarked that for months the very word love had called up ghost-like recollections. Why this was so, she said she could not tell him, not now, perhaps years from now when both had grown old. She could not do it, for if she endeavoured to refresh old memories or revive what she had half forgotten, her whole past arose before her, flat, languid, and insipid, easily misinterpreted by the person who heard the story, however clear it might be to her. She repeated that this was the way it was, and she could not help it. Once again she asked that he spare her feelings on this point.

Her face took on a serious expression; it resembled an old picture. There was something dream-like in her words.

“Well, if that is all you have on your mind, Eleanore, I am sure that it will be easy for me to respect your wish,” said Daniel. There was a manifest lack of feeling in the kindness he displayed. It seemed indeed that the secret to which she was attaching so much importance was far removed from his egotistically encircled world. The little fountain in the garden was rustling. He listened to see if he could not catch the dominating tone in the continual splashing.

Eleanore turned to him now with renewed if not novel candour. She was closer to him in every way—her eyes, her hands, and her words.

VIII

Daniel had just completed an orchestral work which he had entitled “Vineta.” He wished to have Benda hear it. One evening about six Benda came in. Everything was ready. Daniel sat down at the piano. His face was pale, his smooth upper lip was trembling.

“Now think of the sea; think of a storm; think of a boat with people in it. Picture to yourself a wonderful aurora borealis and a sunken city rising from the sea. Imagine a sea that had suddenly become calm, and in the light a strange phenomenon. Conjure up such a scene before your mind’s eye, or conjure up something totally different, for this is a false way of getting at the meaning of music. It is plain prostitution to think anything of the kind. Ice-flat.”

He was just about to begin, when some one knocked at the door. Eleanore entered. She whisked across the room, and took her seat on the sofa.

The piece opened with a quiet rhythmical, mournful movement, which suddenly changed to a raging presto. The melodic figure was shattered like a bouquet of flowers in a waterfall almost before it had had time to take shape and display real composure. The dissipated elements, scattered to the four corners of the earth, then returned, hesitatingly and with evident contrition, to be reunited in a single chain. It seemed that the mad whirlwind had left them richer, purer and more spiritual. They pealed forth now, one after the other, in a slow-moving decrescendo, until they constituted a solemn chorus played in moderato, melting at last into the lovely and serious main theme, which in the finale streamed away and beyond into infinity, dying out on an arpeggiated chord.

Where the piano failed to produce the full effect, Daniel helped out with his crow-like voice. It was the uncanny energy of expression that prevented his singing from having a comic effect.

Benda’s eyes were so strained in the effort to listen intelligently and appreciatively that they became dazed, glazed. Had he been asked he could not have said whether the work was a success or a failure. The feature of the performance that convinced him was the man and the magnetism that radiated from the man. The work itself he could neither fathom nor evaluate. It took hold of him nevertheless because of its inseparable association with the human phenomenon.

Daniel got up, stumbled over to the sofa, buried his face in his hands, and sighed: “Do you feel it? Do you really feel it?” He then rose, lunged at the piano, seized the score, and hurled it to the floor: “Ah, it’s no account; it is nothing; it is an abominable botch.”

He threw himself on the sofa a second time. Eleanore, sitting perfectly motionless in the other corner, looked at him with the eyes of an astonished child.

Benda had gone to the window, and was looking out into the trees and the grey clouds of the sky. Then he turned around. “That something must be done for you and your cause is clear,” he said.

Eleanore stretched out her arms toward Benda as though she wished to thank him. Her lips began to move. But when she saw Daniel she did not dare to say a word, until she suddenly exclaimed: “Heavens, there are two buttons on his vest which are hanging by a thread.” She ran out of the room. In a few moments she returned with needle and thread, which she had had Meta give her, sat down at Daniel’s side, and sewed the buttons on.

Benda had to laugh. But what she did had a tranquilising effect; she seemed to enable life to win the victory over the insidious pranks of apparitions.

IX

In years gone by, Benda had known the theatrical manager and impresario Dörmaul. He went to Dörmaul now, and took Daniel’s new work along with him; for the versatile parvenu, who always had a number of irons in the fire, also published music.

A few weeks elapsed before Benda heard from Dörmaul: “Incomprehensible stuff! Crazy attempt to be original! You couldn’t coax a dog away from the stove with it.” Such was Dörmaul’s opinion.

A young man with fiery red hair followed Benda to the door and spoke to him. He said his name was Wurzelmann and that he was a musician himself; that he had attended the Vienna Conservatory, where his teacher had given him a letter of recommendation to Alexander Dörmaul. He also told Benda that Dörmaul was planning to form an opera company that would visit the smaller cities of the provinces, and that he was to be the Kapellmeister.

He spoke in the detestable idiom of the Oriental Jew. Benda was politely cold.

The main point was still to come: “Vineta” had aroused Wurzelmann’s profound admiration; he had read the score on the side: “A great talent, Doctor, a talent such as we have not had for a long, long while,” said Wurzelmann.

“Yes, but what am I to say about Herr Dörmaul’s opinion?” asked Benda. He found it difficult to trust the man before him, and was using the judgment of the man behind him as a foil.

“Don’t you know Dörmaul? I thought you did. Whenever he has no authority to fear he becomes very bold. Lay the Ninth Symphony before him without Beethoven’s name to it, and he will tell you at once that it is rubbish. Do you want to bet?”

“Honestly?” asked Benda, somewhat concerned.

“Give me the score, and I’ll promise you to arouse the least sensitive from their lethargy with it. With a work of that kind you have got to blow the trumpet.”

Benda thought it over. He had no use for trumpet-blowing, and no confidence in those who did the blowing. And yet he consented, for he did not feel justified in arbitrarily depriving Daniel of a chance.

It turned out that Wurzelmann had told the truth. A fortnight later Daniel was informed that the Orchestral Union had decided to perform his work in February. In order to provide its hearers with a more elaborate picture of his creative ability, the Union asked him for a second work. His compositions were perfect; others needed revision.

Wurzelmann boasted of having won his way to the seats of the mighty. He had the cordial approval of such professors of music as Wackerbarth and Herold. His masterpiece of diplomacy lay in the fact that he had secured Andreas Döderlein as director of the orchestra.

His store of suggestions was inexhaustible, his plans without number. He mentioned the fact that when the company was on the road they would have to have a second Kapellmeister, since he himself would have to function at times as substitute director: “Leave it all to me, dear Nothafft,” he said, “Alexander Dörmaul has got to dance to my tune, and my tune is this: It is Nothafft or nobody for Kapellmeister.”

If he began with humility, he concluded with familiarity. Daniel hated red-headed people, particularly when they had inflamed eyes and slobbered when they spoke.

“He is an unappetising fellow, your Wurzelmann,” he said to Benda, “and it is embarrassing to me to be indebted to him. He imagines he flatters me when he speaks contemptibly of himself. What he deserves is a kick or two.”

Benda was silent. Touched by Wurzelmann’s devoted efforts, he had called him servule, or the “little slave.” It was pleasant to think that there was some one to remove the stumbling blocks from the road, so that the feet of him who had risen from obscurity might find a place to walk. But the little slave was filled with the admiration of the Jew, born in poverty and oppression, for the genius of the other race.

Benda knew this. He was uneasy at the thought of it; for other and no less disingenuous fanatics regarded Wurzelmann’s behaviour merely as a racial peculiarity.

X

Summer with its hot August days had come. The two friends took frequent walks out to the suburbs, strolling through the forests of Feucht and Fischbach, or climbing the high hills about the city.

Eleanore joined them on one of these excursions. It was a joy to see her drink in the fragrance of the flowers and the fir trees or study the various cloud formations and the alternating scenes of the landscape. When she did this she was like a bird gliding along on noiseless wing in the upper regions, far removed from the grime of the earth, bathing in the undefiled air of the clouds.

She listened to the conversation of the friends with intelligent attention. A piercing glance or a wrinkle of the brow showed that she was taking sides, and accepting or rejecting in her own mind the views that were being set forth. If she was moved to express an opinion of her own, she generally hit the nail on the head.

As they were returning home, night set in. The sky was clear; the stars were shining. There were a great number of falling stars. Eleanore remarked that she really did not have as many wishes as she could express under these circumstances. The erudite Benda replied with a smile that in these August nights there were frequently so many groups of asteroids that the whole firmament seemed to be in motion, and that one could easily grow tired of so many wishes.

Eleanore wanted to know what an asteroid was. Benda explained it to her as well as he could. Then he told her all about constellations and the milky way, and explained to her that the latter consists of millions of individual stars. He also spoke of the size of the stars; and since he referred to them occasionally as suns and worlds, she became somewhat sceptical, and asked him whether there were any earths among the stars. “Earths? What do you mean by earths?” he asked. “Why, earths, just like the one we live on,” she replied. Having been told that there were earths among the stars, Eleanore raised a number of rather cleverly framed questions about the trees and animals and people that might be found on these other earths. She was told that it was highly probable that they were all inhabited about as our own: “Why should this globe enjoy special privileges?” he asked. He added, however, that even if the inhabitants of the other earths did not have the same mental faculties that we have, they were at least beings endowed with reason and instinct.

“Do you mean to tell me that such people as you and Daniel and I may be living up there in those starry regions?”

“Certainly.”

“And that there are countless peoples and humanities up among the stars of whom we know nothing at all?”

“Certainly.”

Eleanore sat down on a milestone by the roadside, gazed out into space with trembling lips, and broke out crying. Benda took her hand, and caressed it.

“I am awfully sorry for all those peoples up there,” Eleanore sobbed, looked up, smiled, and let the tears take their course. Benda would have liked to take Daniel by the arm, and shout into his ear: “Look at her now!” Daniel was looking at her, but he did not see her.

XI

One evening in October, Inspector Jordan left his house in Broad Street, buttoned his top coat more closely about him, and walked hastily through a connecting alley that was so narrow that it seemed as if some one had taken a big knife and cut the houses in two. His goal was Carolina Street. It was late, and he was hungry. Doubting whether Gertrude would have a warm supper ready for him, he went to an inn.

He had spent two full hours there trying to get a rich hops dealer to take out some insurance. The man had him explain over and over again the advantages of insurance, studied the tables backwards and forwards, and yet he was unable to come to a decision. Then the waiter brought him his dinner. There he sat, smacking his lips with the noise of human contentment, his great white napkin tied under his chin in such a fashion that the two corners of it stuck out on either side of his massive head, giving the appearance of two white ears. He had offended Jordan’s social instincts: he had not thought it worth while to wait for an invitation.

Among other guests in the inn was Bonengel, the barber. He recognised Jordan and spoke to him. He took a seat in the background, picked out the ugliest and greasiest of the waitresses, and ordered a bulky portion of sausage and sauerkraut.

He told lascivious anecdotes. When the waitress brought him his food, she tittered, and said: “He is a jolly good fellow, Bonengel is.”

Jordan began to eat rapidly, but soon lost his appetite, pushed his plate to one side, propped his chin on his hands, and stared at the immobile clouds of tobacco smoke before him.

He had a feeling that it was no longer possible to keep at this work day after day, year in and year out. Running from one end of the city to the other, up and down the same stairs, through the same old streets—he could not do it. Answering the same questions, making the same assertions, refuting the same objections, praising the same plan in the same words, feigning the same interest and quieting the same distrust day after day—no, he could not do it. Disturbing the same people in their domestic peace, prodding himself on to new effort every morning, listening to the same curtain lectures of that monster of monsters, the insatiate stock market, and standing up under the commands of his chief, Alfons Diruf—no, he was no longer equal to it. It was all contrary to the dignity of a man of his years.

He was ashamed of himself; and he was fearfully tired.

He thought of his past life. He recalled how he had risen from poverty, and worked up to the position of a highly respected merchant. That was when he was in Ulm. There he had married Agnes, the blond daughter of the railroad engineer.

But why had he never become rich? Other men who were distinctly inferior to him in shrewdness, diligence, and polish were now wealthy; he was poor. Three times he had been threatened with bankruptcy, and three times friends had come to his rescue. Then a partner joined him, invested some capital in the firm, and the business was once more on its feet.

But it turned out that this partner was a stranger to loyalty and quite without conscience. “Jordan is a drag on the business,” he would say to his customers, “Jordan is stupid, Jordan cannot make a calculation.” And the partner never rested until Jordan was paid a set sum and eased out of the firm.

He then tried his fortune here and there for eight or nine years. “Don’t worry, Jordan,” said Agnes, “everything will come out well.” But it did not. Whatever Jordan took hold of, he took hold of at the wrong end at the wrong time with the wrong people.

He could not get on. Not only because his hand was heavy and his head too honest, but because he had allowed himself to be befooled by a chimera.

Early in life he had had a dream, and all his enterprise and industry were directed toward the fulfilment of this dream. It had been impossible: he had never been able to save up enough money. Every time he discussed his favourite wish with Agnes, and told her about the happy days when he would be able to live his own life and be his own boss, she encouraged him and tried to help him. But it seemed now that she had known all along that he had merely been dreaming, and that her magnanimity had prompted her not to jolt him out of his delusion.

It had always seemed to him that the world of dolls was a world in itself. He had taken an enchanted delight in picturing the types of faces, clothes, and hair he would design for his various dolls, big and little. Dolls of the most variegated charm peopled his fancy: there were princesses of different degrees of proximity to the throne, fisher maids and mermaids; there were shepherds and shepherdesses, Casperls and lusty imps, dolls with heads of porcelain and dolls with heads of wax, all so faithfully imitated that it would require anthropomorphic skill to detect that they were not human beings. Their hair was, of course, to be human hair. Some of them were to wear the costumes of foreign races, while others were to be dressed up like fairy figures, sprites, and gnomes. There was to be a Haroun al Raschid and an Oriental Dervish.

The last time he moved his choice fell on Nuremberg. He was attracted to Nuremberg because it was the centre of the doll industry.

About this time Agnes died, and he was left alone with the three children for whom he had to make a living. He no longer had the courage to hope for success or prosperity; even the doll factory had become a chimera. He had but one ambition: he wished to lay aside ten thousand marks for each of his three daughters, so that they would be provided for in any event after his death. The boy, he thought, could take care of himself.

Up to the present, however, he had not been able to place the half of this sum in the bank. And now, suppose he lost his position; suppose the frailties of old age prevented him from making his own living; suppose he was obliged to draw on the savings of years for his own support. How could he look his daughters in the face in the evening of his earthly life?

“The slag hid behind something in the cellar, and when his wife tried to bring him his pants, she let them fall in the flour bin.” This elegant remark emanated from Bonengel the barber.

His auditors gurgled, the waitress roared.

As Jordan walked home he could hear above the wind the voice of Bonengel the barber. It sounded like the rattling of a pair of hair-clippers.

He disliked walking up the steps to his front door; they were so narrow; they creaked as though they were ready to fall down; and he was always afraid he would meet some blind people. An oculist lived on the first floor, and he had often seen sightless persons feeling their way around.

A letter was lying on his table. The cover bore the address of the General Agency of the Prudentia Insurance Co. He walked up and down a while before opening it. It was his discharge papers.

XII

Friedrich Benda became more and more dejected. He saw that as a private individual he would have to waste energy that should be going into his profession. It seemed to him that he was condemned to bury his talent in eternal obscurity.

He broke off from the most of his acquaintances; with others he quit corresponding. If friends spoke to him on the street, he turned his head. His sense of honour had been wounded; he was on the point of losing his self-respect.

Daniel was the only one who failed to notice the change that was coming over him. Probably he had accustomed himself to the belief that Benda’s life was orderly and agreeable. The plebeian prosperity of the family in which he himself lived probably made him feel that that was the way his friend was living. At all events he never asked any questions, and was never once struck by the fact that Benda would sit before him for hours with his face wrapped in bitter, melancholy gloom.

Benda smiled at Daniel’s naïveté; for he felt that his attitude was due to naïveté and nothing more. He harboured no resentment. He decided not to say a word about his condition to Daniel, then all taken up with himself and his music. It was, however, at times impossible for him to prevent his smarting and his desire to put an end to his ineffectual existence from breaking through the coating of reserve in which he had encased himself.

Late in the afternoon of a dismal day, Benda called for Daniel just as he was finishing one of his piano lessons. The two friends decided to take a walk and then dine together at Benda’s.

In the hallway they met the Rüdiger sisters as they were returning from their daily stroll through the garden. Benda greeted them with an antiquated politeness; Daniel just barely touched the rim of his hat. The sisters lined up as if ready for a cotillion, and returned the greetings with infinite grace. Fräulein Jasmina let a rose fall, and when Benda picked it up for her, she pressed her hand against her scarcely noticeable breast and gave voice to her gratitude, again with infinite grace.

When they reached the street, Benda said in a tone of compassion: “They are three delicate creatures; they live their lonely lives like vestal virgins guarding a sacred fire.”

Daniel smiled. “Yes, a sacred fire? Do you refer to the incident with the painter?”

“Yes, I do; and he was no ordinary painter, either, let me tell you. I heard the whole story the other day. The painter was Anselm Feuerbach.”

Daniel knew nothing whatever about Anselm Feuerbach. He was impressed, however, by the name, which, by virtue of a mysterious magic, struck his ear like the chime of a noble bell. “Tell me about him,” he said.

The story was as follows: Four years before his death, that is, six years ago, Anselm Feuerbach came to Nuremberg for the last time to visit his mother. He was already sick in body and soul, and was much disappointed in his alleged friends. The incessant torture resulting from lack of appreciation had told on his health. A few of the more enlightened citizens, however, recalled his fame, as it floated about in the heavy air of Germany, somewhat befogged and quite expatriated, and the Chamber of Commerce placed an order with Feuerbach for a painting to be hung in the Palace of Justice. Feuerbach accepted the order, choosing as his theme Emperor Ludwig in the act of conferring on the citizens of Nuremberg the right to free trade. When the picture was completed, there was a great deal of dissatisfaction with it. The merchants had expected something totally different: they had looked for a cheap but striking canvas after the style of Kreling, and not this dignified, classical work by Feuerbach.

Nor was this all. The hanging space was so small that several inches of the canvas had to be run into the wall, and the light was wretched. The Chamber of Commerce proceeded at once to make trouble with regard to the paying of Feuerbach’s bill. An ugly quarrel arose in which Rüdiger, the geometrician, who had always been an ardent champion of Feuerbach, took the artist’s part. It finally reached the point where Rüdiger left the city, swearing he would never return. His daughters had all three loved Feuerbach from the time he lived in their father’s house.

“As a matter of fact, if there ever was an amiable artist,” Benda said in conclusion, “it was Anselm Feuerbach. Would you like to see him? Come, then.”

They were near the Cemetery of St. John. The gate was open, and Daniel followed Benda. They walked along a narrow path, until Benda pointed to a flat stone bearing the name of Albrecht Dürer. After this they came to Feuerbach’s grave. A bronze tablet, already quite darkened with age and weather, bore Feuerbach’s face in profile. Beneath it lay a laurel wreath, the withered leaves of which were fluttering in the wind.

“What a life he lived!” said Benda in a low tone. “And what a death he died! The death of a hunted dog!”

As they walked back to the city, night came on. Daniel had removed his hat, and was walking along at Benda’s side looking straight ahead. Benda was as nervous as he had ever been in his life.

“A German life, and a German death,” he exclaimed. “He stretched out his hand to give, and the people spat in it. He gives and gives and gives, and they take and take and take, without gratitude, yea, rather with, scorn. The only thing they study is their consanguinity table. They make the microscope and the catechism copulate; their philosophy and their police systems live in mésalliance. Good demeanour they know not; of human agreements they have never heard. They decide to do something, and they do it. That is all. There is no longer a place for me in Germany. I am leaving.”

“You are going to leave? Where are you going?” asked Daniel, in faithful amazement. Benda bit his lips, and was silent.

“Do you see these big white spots here? They have neither mountains nor rivers on them. Those are places that have never been trod upon by European feet. There is where I am going.” He smiled a gentle smile.

“Really? When?” asked Daniel, filled with dismay at the thought of losing his friend.

“I have not decided when, but it will be soon. I have work to do over there. I need air, room, sky, the free animal and the free plant.”

Benda’s mother came in. She was rather tall, walked with the difficulties of age, had sharp features and deep-set eyes.

She looked first at her son and then at Daniel. Then her eyes fell on the atlas and remained fixed upon it, filled with an expression of horror and anxiety.

Daniel did not know what to say. Benda, still smiling to himself, began to talk about other things.

XIII

At the death of her mother, Gertrude Jordan was nine years old. She had crept into the death chamber and sat by the bier for three hours. Perhaps her seclusion from the world and association with people dated from that hour. As she was leaving the death room, the clock on the wall struck, and a cock crowed in the distance.

“Why do you tick, clock?” she asked in a loud voice, “why do you crow, cock?” And again: “Who makes you tick, clock, who makes you crow, cock?”

She had grown up, and no one knew anything about her. It was even difficult for her own father to approach her; how she was constituted, mentally and spiritually, he did not know. She never associated with girls of her own age. Her dark eyes glowed with wrath when she heard the senseless, sensuous laughter of other girls.

The first time she partook of the holy communion she swooned and had to be carried out. Jordan then took her to Pommersfelden to his sister, the widow of the district physician Kupferschmied. At the end of one week she returned alone, completely broken in spirit. She had seen a calf slaughtered; the sight had made her almost insane.

From the time she was fifteen years old she had insisted on having her own bed room. When she was sixteen she demanded that the maid be discharged; she herself did all the cooking and kept house. As soon as she had finished her work, she would take her seat by the quilting frame.

Through her father, Benjamin Dorn had come into the family. Gertrude liked him because Eleanore made fun of him. He did not seem to her like a man; he reminded her rather of the languishing angels she embroidered. He brought her all his religious tracts and edifying pamphlets, but she could not grasp the language. He took her to the Methodist revivals, but the noisy gnashing of teeth at these meetings terrified her, and after a few times it was impossible to persuade her to go back. He also recommended that she read the Bible, but she could find nothing in it that brought her peace of mind. It seemed that she had a wound in her soul that would not heal. Long after she had abandoned Benjamin Dorn and his cheap sanctimoniousness, he imagined that she still loved him and looked up to him. She managed, however, to come into his presence only on the rarest occasions, and then she never spoke to him.

Divine worship in the Protestant church seemed to her like a sort of bargain day on which the people assembled to do business with Heaven instead of on work days. She missed the dignity; the sermons left her cold; the ritual made not the slightest appeal to her.

She never heard from any one at any time a single sentence that really enlightened her or remained fixed in her memory. It was the jejune insipidity of an entire age, the stale flatness of the world that she felt to the very depths of her soul. If she wished to make her heart glow, if she became unusually fearful of the empty air and the empty day, she stole secretly into the Church of Our Lady or into St. Sebaldus, where the house of God was more solemnly decorated, where there were more lights burning, where the prayers had a more mysterious sound, the priests seemed to be more affected by what they were doing, and where the worshipper could sense the awful meaning of life and death.

All external beauty, however, was repulsive to her. She hated even beautiful scenery and fair weather, regarding them as temptations to mortal man intended to lead him into some sort of folly. She loved nothing about herself, neither her face nor her voice. She was indeed frightened at the sound of her own deep voice. She did not like her hair, nor had she any use for her hands.

One winter evening she took from her hand the gold ring, an heirloom from her mother, presented to her by her father, and threw it into the creek. Then she bowed down over the ledge, and seemed to feel as if she had relieved her soul of a great burden.

Eleanore tried time and time again to come near her sister, but each time she was thrust back. Though Gertrude never conversed with people, every word that was said about Eleanore reached her ears; she felt ashamed of her sister. She could not bear the looks of Eleanore, took an intense dislike to her, and in the end was obliged to summon all her courage in order to return her greeting. It was impossible for her, however, to reproach Eleanore; for that she did not have sufficient command of language. In truth, her control of words was exceedingly limited. Everything, grief as well as injustice, she was forced to stifle within her own soul. She grieved about Eleanore, and became at the same time more and more nervous and excited. It seemed that something about her sister was tantalising her, drawing her on, worrying her, making her lose sleep.

Her restlessness became so great that she could no longer sit at the quilting frame; in fact, it was no longer possible for her to do any kind of exacting work. Something drew her out of the house, and once she was away, something forthwith drew her back home. Her heart beat violently when she was alone, and yet, if her father or brother or Eleanore came in, she could not stand their presence, and took refuge in her own room. If it was hot, she closed the windows; if it was cold, she opened them and leaned out. If it was quiet, she was filled with fear; if it was not quiet, she longed for peace. She could not say her prayers; she had none to say; her mind and soul were muted, muffled, dumb. She felt the hours following each other in regular order as something terrible; she wanted to skip over years, just as one might skip over pages of a tiresome book. And when the worst came to the worst, and she did not know what on earth to do, she ran to the Church of Our Lady, threw herself prostrate before the high altar, buried her face, and remained perfectly motionless until her soul had found greater peace.

Something made her go to Eleanore; she did not want to do it, but she could not help it. She was naturally vigilant, and she wished to ward off misfortune if possible. She was obsessed with an uncanny feeling, a gruesome curiosity. She dogged her sister’s steps in secret. One time she saw from a distance that Eleanore had started off with a man who had been waiting for her. She could not move from the spot; Eleanore caught sight of her.

The next day Eleanore came to her voluntarily, and told her quite candidly of her relation to Eberhard von Auffenberg. Concerning what she knew of Eberhard’s fate she said nothing; she merely indicated that he was extremely unhappy. She told her how she had met him the previous winter on the Dutzendteich at the ice carnival, how he ran after her, how glad she was to show him a little friendship, and how much he needed friendship.

Gertrude was silent for a long while. Finally she said, with a voice so deep that it seemed to have burst from being too full: “You two either must get married, or you must not see each other any more. What you are doing is a crime.”

“A crime?” said Eleanore astonished, “how so?”

“Ask your conscience,” was the answer, spoken with eyes riveted on the ground.

“My conscience is quite clear.”

“Then you have none,” said Gertrude harshly. “You lie, and you are being lied to. You are sunk in sin; there is no hope for you. That man’s evil looks! His ugly thoughts! And the thoughts of the other men! They are all beyond redemption. You are spotted through and through. You don’t know it, but I do.”

She got up, kicked the chair from her with her heels, and stared at Eleanore with her mysterious black eyes: “Never mention this to me again,” she whispered with trembling lips, “never, never!” With that she went out.

Eleanore felt something like actual loathing for her own sister. Filled with an indescribable foreboding, she detected in Gertrude the adversary that fate had marked out for her.

XIV

When the autumn days came on and it began to get cold, Daniel was a frequent visitor at Jordan’s. Although he had a warm stove now of his own, he took pleasure in remembering the comfortable corner of a year ago. He had a greater affection for things and rooms than he had for human beings.

It was rare that he came in contact with Jordan, for now that he was no longer with the Prudentia, it was hard to locate him: he was doing odd jobs for a number of concerns, and this kept him more or less on the go. Benno came home after office hours, only to betake himself to his room, where he shaved and made himself as elegant-looking as possible for the social engagements of the evening. He did not like to be alone with Gertrude, so he never came until after six o’clock, when he knew that Eleanore would be at home. Realising that Eleanore was diligently pursuing the study of French and English, and that her evenings were therefore of great value to her, he begged her not to be disturbed by his visits. He said that he found nothing so agreeable as sitting still and saying nothing. After an hour or two, however, he left, murmuring an indistinct farewell as he did so.

At times he would bring a book with him and read. If he chanced to look up, he saw Eleanore bending over the writing table, her hair, bathed in a flood of golden light from the lamp, falling in fine silken threads over her temples, while her mouth was firmly closed, her lips inclined to droop at the corners, but in a lovely fashion. Then he saw Gertrude. She did not wear her hair loose; she put it up in a tight knot above her neck. Her dress was no longer the Nile green; it was made of brown cloth, and on the front was a row of glistening black buttons.

At times Eleanore would make some remark to him, and he would reply. At times the remarks between the two spun out into a verbal skirmish. Eleanore teased, and he was gruff; or he mocked, and Eleanore delivered a curtain lecture. Gertrude would sit with an expression of helpless amazement on her face, and look at the window. She purposely remained unoccupied; she purposely postponed her household duties. The thought of leaving the two alone in the room was unbearable.

What Daniel did and said, how he walked or sat or stood, how he put his hands in his pockets and smacked his lips, all this and more aroused a sense of fear and shame in her. She regarded his candour as impudent presumption; she looked upon his capriciousness as malevolent irrationality; his indifferent manners and his disposition to slander she felt certain were of a piece with the scorn of the devil.

On one occasion he dropped a caustic remark about the bigots who contend that God is a moralising censor. Having this phase of ethics under discussion, he also paid his respects to those people who look upon every worm-eaten pastor as an archangel. Gertrude got up with a jerk, and stared at him. He stood his ground; he merely shrugged his shoulders. Gertrude whispered: “Men without faith are worse than contagious diseases.”

Daniel laughed. Then he became serious, and asked her what she understood by faith. He wanted to know whether she felt that faith was a matter of lip service. She replied, with bowed head, that she could not discuss sacred matters with a man who had renounced all religion. Daniel told her that her remark was slanderous. He wanted to know whether she had ever taken the pains to find out precisely how he stood in matters of religion, and if not, was this the reason she passed such final judgment on him with such suddenness and conviction. He asked her point blank whether she was quite certain that her so-called faith was better than his so-called unfaith. Not content with this, he asked where she got her authority, her courage, her feeling of security; whether she felt she had evidence to prove that she had carefully examined his soul; and whether she had at any time interviewed God.

He laughed again, whistled, and left.

Gertrude remained motionless for a while, her eyes fixed on the floor. Eleanore supported her chin on her hand, and looked at her compassionately. Gertrude began to tremble in her whole body, and, without raising her head, she stretched out her arms to Eleanore. Though quite unable to interpret this accusing gesture, Eleanore was terrified.

The next time Daniel came, he resumed his seat by the stove, and remained silent for a while. Then, without the slightest warning or apparent motivation, he began to discuss religion. And how? With the old spirit of defiance, as if from an ambuscade from which he could send out his poisoned arrows, with calculating maliciousness and cold rebellion, with the air of a man who has been defeated, who is now being pursued, and who is willing to concede more to the earthly order of things than to the divine. Thus he sat, the incarnation of blasphemy, and once more shuffled the features of his face until he looked like the sedulous ape.

Eleanore felt that he was denying both himself and God, and that with violence. She went over to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder. Gertrude, a death-like pallor playing over her face, got up, passed by her and Daniel, and did not appear again that evening. Nor did she appear the following evening. From that time on she avoided his presence.

For one remarkable second and no longer, Daniel fixed his eyes on the shape of Gertrude’s legs. He became suddenly conscious of the fact that she was a woman and he was a man. During this second, one of the rarest of his life, he perceived the outer surface of her body, but without the enveloping clothes. He thought of her as a nude figure. It lasted only a second, but he pictured her to himself as a nude. Everything she had said and done fell from her like so much clothing.

He had a feeling that his eyes had been opened; that he had really seen for the first time in his life; and that what he now saw was the body of the world.

The nude picture followed him. He fought against his disquietude. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He conjured up the picture in order to destroy it with coolness and composure; but it would not be destroyed, nor would it vanish. One day he chanced to meet Gertrude by the beautiful fountain. He stopped, stood as if petrified, and forgot to speak to her.

XV

It was a cold, clear day in the middle of December. Eleanore wanted to go skating after dinner. She was known in the entire city for her skill on the ice. An irrepressible vivacity and sense of freedom pulsed through her body. It seemed to her lamentable that she should have to sit down in the overheated, sticky air of the office among all those clerks, and write.

She went, nevertheless, to the office, took her place among the clerks, and wrote as usual. Herr Zittel’s eyes shone through the lenses of his spectacles like two poison flasks. But she did not make much progress; time dragged; it dragged even more heavily and slowly than Herr Diruf’s feet, as he made his rounds through the room. Eleanore looked up. She felt as if his gloomy eyes were resting on her. Conscious of having failed to perform her duty as she might have done, she blushed.

Finally the clock struck six. The other clerks left, making much noise as they did so. Eleanore waited as usual until they had all gone, for she did not like to mix with them. Just then Benjamin Dorn came wabbling in: “The Chief would like to speak to Fräulein Jordan,” he said, and bent his long neck like a swan. Eleanore was surprised: what on earth could Herr Diruf want with her? Possibly it had to do with Benno.

Alfons Diruf was sitting at his desk as she entered. He wrote one more line, and then stared at her. There was something in his expression that drove the blood from her cheeks. Involuntarily she looked down at herself and felt her flesh creep.

“You wanted to see me,” she said.

“Yes, I wanted to see you,” he replied, and made a weary attempt to smile.

There was another pause. In her anxiety Eleanore looked first at one object in the room and then at another; first at the bathing nymph, then at the silk curtains, then at the Chinese lampshade.

“Well, sweetheart,” said Herr Diruf, his smile gradually changing into a sort of convulsion, “we are not bad, are we? By the beard of the prophet, we are all right, aren’t we? Hunh?”

Eleanore lowered her head. She thought she had misunderstood him: “You wanted to see me,” she said in a loud voice.

Diruf laid his hand, palm down, on the edge of his desk. His solitaire threw off actual sparks of brilliancy. “I can crush every one of you,” he said, as he shoved his hand along the edge of the desk toward Eleanore. “That boy out there, your brother, is an underhanded sharper. If I want to I can make him turn a somersault, believe me.” He shoved his fat hand a little farther along, as if it were some dangerous engine and his solitaire a signal lamp. “I can make the whole pack of you dance whenever I want to. Can’t I, sweetheart? Capito? Comprenez-vous?”

Eleanore looked into Alfons Diruf’s smeary eyes with unspeakable amazement.

Diruf got up, walked over to her, and put his arms around her shoulders. “Well, if the boy is a sweet-toothed tom-cat who can easily be led astray, you are a purring pussy-cat,” he said with a tone of terrible tenderness, and held the girl so tight in his arms that she could not possibly move. “Now be quiet, sweetheart; be calm, my little bosom; don’t worry, you little devil!”

Horror, hot and cold, came over her, and filled her with unnamable dismay. Contact with the man had a more gruesome effect on her than anything she had ever even dreamed of. One jerk as though it were a matter of life and death, and she was free. White as a sheet, she nevertheless stood there before him, and smiled. It was a rare smile, something quite beyond the bounds of what is ordinarily called a smile. Alfons Diruf was no longer fat and fierce; he was like a pricked bubble; he was done for. And finding himself alone, he stood there for a while and gaped at the floor. He looked and felt hopelessly stupid.

Eleanore hastened through the streets, and suddenly discovered that she was in the Long Row. She turned around. Benda, then on the way over to call on Daniel, caught sight of her, recognised her by the light of the gas lamp, stopped as she passed by him, and looked after her not a little concerned.

When she reached home, she sank down on the sofa exhausted. To rid her mind of the memory of the past hour, she took refuge in her longing, longing for a southern country. Her longing was so intense, her desire to go south so fervent, that her face shone as if in fever. But the glass case had at last been broken.

The bell rang shortly before eight; she said to Gertrude: “If it is Daniel, send him away. I cannot see any one this evening.”

“Are you ill?” asked Gertrude with characteristic sternness.

“I don’t know; I simply do not want to see anybody,” said Eleanore, and smiled again as she had smiled in Diruf’s office.

It was Daniel, to be sure. Benda had told him that he had seen Eleanore out in front of the house; and when he learned that she had not been to call on Daniel, his anxiety increased. “There is something wrong here,” he said, “you had better go see her.” After they had talked the situation over for a while Benda accompanied Daniel as far as Ægydius Place, in order to make sure that he inquired after Eleanore.

Gertrude opened the iron door. “Eleanore does not want you to come in,” she said, with a trace of joy in her eyes.

“Why not? What has happened?”

“She does not wish to see you,” said the monosyllabic Gertrude, and gazed into the light of the hall lamp.

“Is she ill?”

“No!”

“Then she has got to tell me herself that she does not wish to see me.”

“Go!” commanded Gertrude and tossed her head back.

Her gloomy eyes hung on his, and the two stood there for a moment opposite each other, like two racers who have come in at the same goal at the same time but from opposite directions. Daniel then turned around, and went down the steps in silence. Gertrude remained standing for a time, her head sinking deeper and deeper all the while on her breast. Suddenly she covered her face with her hands; a cold shudder ran through her body.

XVI

Before going to bed, Eleanore wrote a letter to Herr Zittel informing him that she was leaving the Prudentia at once.

Lying in bed, she could not sleep. She saw herself on the ice cutting bold and novel figures. The spectators, grouped about her in a wide circle, admired her skill. She saw the sea with fishing smacks and coloured sails. She saw gardens full of roses.

Her father and Benno had come home long ago. She heard the bell up in the nearby church tower strike twelve—and then one—and then two.

She heard some one walking back and forth in the house; she heard some one opening and closing a door. Then the steps died away, and all was quiet. She got up, went to the door, and listened. A deep sigh reached her ear from the next room. She opened the door just a little, without making the slightest noise, and peeped out through the crack.

Gertrude was standing by the open window; she was in her night-gown and bare feet. The moon was shining on the square in front of the house; the glitter of the snow on the roofs made it seem quite cold. The spooky illumination made the girl’s face look spooky. Her loose flowing hair looked as black as ebony.

Eleanore ran into the room, and closed the window. “What on earth are you doing, Gertrude?” she exclaimed; “are you getting ready to take your life?”

Gertrude’s slender body shivered in the cold; her toes were all bent in as if she were having a convulsion. “Yes,” she said with marked moroseness, “that is what I would like to do.”

“That’s what you would like to do?” replied Eleanore, also trembling with cold. “And your father? Haven’t you the slightest consideration for him? Do you want to give him more worry than he already has? What is the matter with you, you crazy girl?”

“I am a sinner, Eleanore,” cried Gertrude, fell on her knees, and clasped Eleanore about the hips. “I am a sinner.”

“Yes? A sinner? What sin, pray, have you committed?” asked Eleanore, and bent down over her.

“Why am I in that house there, in that prison?” cried Gertrude, and clasped her hands to her breast. “Evil has come over me, evil has taken possession of me. I have evil thoughts. Look at me, Eleanore, look at me!”

Her voice had now mounted to the pitch of a piercing shriek. Eleanore stepped back from her, terror-stricken. Gertrude fell head first on the floor. Her hair covered her bent and twitching back.

The door leading to Jordan’s room opened, and he himself came in carrying a lighted candle. In default of pajamas, he had thrown a chequered shawl around his shoulders, the fringes of which were dangling about his knees. He had a white-peaked night-cap on his head.

Quite beside himself, he looked at the two girls and wanted to say something; but he was speechless. When much worried he would always smirk. It was a disagreeable habit. In Eleanore it always aroused a feeling of intense compassion. “There is nothing wrong, father,” she stammered, and made an awkward gesture which indicated to him that it would be most agreeable to her if he would go away. “Gertrude has pains in her stomach; she tried to go to the medicine chest to get a few drops. Please go, father; I’ll put her to bed.”

“I will go to the doctor, or I will call Benno and have him go,” said Jordan.

“No, father, it is not necessary. Please go away!”

He appreciated Eleanore’s impatience and obediently withdrew, shielding the light of the candle with his hand; his gigantic shadow followed along behind him like some unclassified animal.

“Get up, Gertrude, get up and come with me!” said Eleanore.

Gertrude was taken back to her room. After she had been in bed for a few minutes, there was a knock at the door. It was Jordan; he asked how she felt. Eleanore told him everything was all right.

Until the moon had disappeared below the church roof, Eleanore sat on Gertrude’s bed, and held her mute hand in her own. Though she had thrown a cloak about her shoulders, she was cold. Gertrude lay with open, lifeless eyes. Every movement of Eleanore’s face revealed the changing moods of her soul: she was thinking over an unending series of grave thoughts. When it became quite dark, Gertrude turned her face to Eleanore, and said softly: “Please get in bed with me, Eleanore. If I see you sleeping, possibly I can sleep too.”

Eleanore laid the cloak to one side, and slipped in under the covers. The two girls cuddled up to each other, and in a few minutes both were sound asleep.

VOICES FROM WITHOUT AND VOICES FROM WITHIN

I

Daniel gradually gained followers. Those whom the “little slave” won over to his cause were hardly to be called patrons: they were patriots. They were delighted at the thought that a maestro should have been born and risen to fame in soulful old Franconia. In the actual life of their protégé they took but little interest.

Daniel’s followers were young people.

Professor Herold was a strange man. His reputation reached far beyond the boundaries of his native province, and yet, owing to his whimsical peculiarities, he had not the slightest desire to leave home. On such sons and daughters of the natives as were diligent in their pursuit of musical studies, he poured out the whole of his sarcasm. His chief, his darling ambition was to wean them away from their fondness for worthless music and clap-trap performances of it. He did not succeed: you were not considered educated unless you could play the piano, and in the homes of these merchants education was highly regarded.

Enticed by his name, all kinds of people came from a distance to take lessons from Professor Herold. Having read the score of “Vineta,” he said to two of these: “Fetch me that fellow dead or alive.” And they fetched him.

The two came more frequently to Daniel, and then others, pupils of Professors Wackerbarth and Döderlein. At times he would take luncheon with them in the students’ restaurant. We will call them the long-haired, or the pale-faced. Many of them looked like snake-charmers. They were almost without exception hopelessly stupid, but they all had some kind of a bee in their bonnet.

There were some young girls among them; we will call them the dreamy-eyed, or the lost-in-dreams. Daniel had no use for them whatsoever. His patience with the long-haired was equally lacking.

He told “the old man,” as Professor Herold was called, of his antipathy to these students. Professor Herold snapped like a vicious dog, brushed the white bristles back over his enormous head, and said: “Well, my young original, you have made a discovery. Don’t you know that music cajoles into its magic circle the very riff-raff of any community? Don’t you know that music is a subterfuge for the neglect of human duty? Don’t you know that the voluptuous fumes it spreads over the cities results in the general corrosion and consumption of men’s hearts? Don’t you know that of every five hundred so-called artists, four hundred and ninety-nine are nothing but the cripple guard of God above? Therefore he who does not come to music with the holiest fire burning in the depths of his soul has his blood in time transformed by it into glue, his mind into a heap of rubbish.”

Whereat he pushed Daniel out of the door, so that he might work undisturbed on his little pictures. Of these the walls of his room were full. He painted them in his leisure hours. They were small in size, and smaller still in merit; but he was proud of them. They represented scenes from country life.

II

On New Year’s Eve, Dörmaul, the impresario, gave a dinner in the Little Swan, to which he invited Daniel. Dörmaul was quite well disposed toward Daniel. He said he had recognised the young man’s talents at the sight of his very first note. He promised to publish “Vineta” and also the work Daniel had finished in the meantime, entitled “Nuremberg Serenade.” He also seemed inclined to consider favourably Daniel’s appointment in his newly founded opera company.

Among those present at the dinner were Professors Herold and Wackerbarth, Wurzelmann, a few of the long-haired and a few of the lost-in-dreams. Andreas Döderlein had promised to come in later. He appeared, as a matter of fact, five minutes before midnight, and stood in the wide-opened door as ceremonious as the New Year itself.

He went up to Daniel, and extended him his right hand.

“Look who’s here! Our Benjamin and our John, not to mention our Daniel,” he said, glancing at the last of the trio. “Congratulations, my young star! What do the annals from Andreas Döderlein’s nose for news have to report? Back in Bayreuth, when we used to draw our wine by the flask, he merely had to sniffle around a bit to know just how things were. Isn’t that true, Benjamin?”

Nobody denied it. Benjamin let right yield to mercy. The mighty man removed his storm-cape from his shoulders as though it were ermine he were doffing before condescending to associate with ordinary mortals.

Professor Wackerbarth had a wife who beat him and gave him nothing to eat: he regarded this as a rare opportunity to eat his fill and have a good time generally. But it was a poor sort of a good time.

One of the long-haired sang the champagne song, and Wurzelmann made a witty speech. Döderlein suggested that now was the time to let the mice dance and the fleas hop. When one of the lost-in-dreams sang David’s March, which according to the rules of Bayreuth could not be classed as real music, Döderlein exclaimed: “Give me Lethe, my fair one.” By “Lethe” he meant punch.

Daniel drank Lethe too. He embraced old Herold, shook hands with Andreas Döderlein, and tried to waltz with Wurzelmann. He was not drunk; he was merely happy.

Then it became too close for him in the room. He took his hat, put on his overcoat, and hurried out.

The air was warm, mild. A south wind was blowing. Heaven above, heaven below, the houses were standing on clouds. One breath made him thirsty for the next one. There was a bay-window; it was so beautiful that he felt like kneeling before it. There was a fountain; it was so snug and exotic that it seemed like a poem. There were the arches of the bridge; in them was the dim reflection of the water. There were two towers; they were as delicate as a spider’s web.

He rejoiced and exclaimed: “Oh world, art thou real? Art thou my world, and am I living in thee? My world, my year, my time, and I in it all, I myself!”

III

He stood on Ægydius Place, and looked up at the windows in Jordan’s house. They were all dark.

He wanted to call out, but the name that was on his lips filled him with anxiety. The passionate flutter of his heart almost tore his breast asunder.

He had to do something; he had to speak; he had to ask questions and hear a human voice. Consequently, he hurried out to the Füll, stood under Benda’s window, and called Benda’s name. The clocks struck three.

The blinds were soon drawn to one side, and Benda’s stoutish figure appeared at the open window. “Daniel? Is it you? What’s up?”

“Nothing. I merely wanted to bring you New Year’s greetings.”

“Do you think you are bringing me something good? Go home and go to bed.”

“Ah, let me come in a little while, Friedrich. Let’s chat for a moment or two about happiness!”

“Be reasonable! We might frighten happiness away by our talk.”

“Philistine! Well, give me your blessing at least.”

“You have it. Now go, night owl, and let the people sleep.”

Another window opened on the ground floor. Herr Carovius’s desolate nocturnal physiognomy appeared at the window, looked up, looked down on the disturber of the peace on the street, and with one mighty grim, grinning sound on his lips, his revengeful fist swinging in the meanwhile, the indignant man closed the window with a bang.

Something impelled Daniel to return to Ægydius Place. Again he looked up at the windows, this time beseechingly. The storm within his heart became more violent. For a long time he ran through the streets, and reached home at last along toward five o’clock.

As he passed through the dark hall, he saw a light up on the landing. Meta was carrying it. She was already stirring about, ready to begin her morning’s work. He hesitated; he looked at her; with three steps he was by her side.

“So late?” she whispered with premonitory embarrassment, and began to finger her dress, which she had not yet buttoned up.

“Oh, what a joy to take hold of a living human being on this glorious day!” he exclaimed.

She offered some resistance, but when he tried to take her into her room, she bent her body backward, and thus pressed about his wrist. She was still carrying the light.

“Oh, if you only knew how I feel, Meta. I need you. Hold me tight in your arms.”

She made no more resistance. Perhaps she too was not without her fervent desire. Perhaps it was the time of day that made nature more insistent than usual. Perhaps she was suffering from loneliness in the company of the three sisters. It was still night and dark; but for her it was already day; it was the first day in the year, and she greeted it in festive mood. She yielded to him.

She was a virgin; she had no idea of the responsibility she was taking upon herself. Man had never been exactly a mystery to her, but now she felt for the first time the congenerous creature—and she gave in to him.

Daniel returned to earth after having knocked at the portals of the gods with tremendous wishes. The gods smiled their profoundest smile; for they had decided to have an especial fate arise from this hour.

IV

A meeting of the Social Democrats was being held in Gosten Court. They had met to discuss the Chancellor’s speech on accident insurance.

The first speaker was Deputy Störbecker. But his voice had no carrying power, and what he said died away almost unheard.

Jason Philip Schimmelweis followed him. He presented a fearful indictment of the government. The official representative of the government advised him to be more reserved, whereupon he reinvigorated himself with a draught of beer. Then he hurled the full beaker of that wrathful scorn for which his heart, beating for the people, was noted, at the head of the individual who was first and foremost responsible for the affairs of the Empire. He did not mention Bismarck by name; he spoke instead of a certain bogey. He snatched the halo from his head, swore that he would some day unmask him and show the people that he was a traitor, branded his fame as a tissue of lies, his deeds as the disgrace of the century.

The venomous and eloquent hatred of the pudgy little man inflamed the minds that drank in his oratory. Jason Philip was greeted with a tumult of applause as he took his seat. His face was a bright scarlet red.

The leaders of the party, however, were noticeably quiet. In a moment or two, Deputy Störbecker returned with two comrades eager to enter into a debate with Jason Philip. He followed them into a side room. Exalted at the thought that they had been delegated to express to him the gratitude of the party for his speech, he smiled the smile of vanity and caressed his beard with his fingers.

“What is the matter, gentlemen? Why are you so serious? Did I go too far? I assume complete responsibility for everything I said. But be calm! They are getting afraid of us. The air has a dubious odour. The French are becoming cantankerous again.”

“No, Comrade Schimmelweis, that is not it. You have got to vindicate yourself. You are a Proteus, Comrade Schimmelweis. Your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing. You are treating us disgracefully. You are ploughing in the widow’s garden. You preach water and guzzle wine. You have entered into a conspiracy with the grafters of the town. You are in collusion with the people down at the Prudentia, and you are filling your own coffers in this gigantic swindle. From morning to night you enrich yourself with the hard-earned pennies of the poor. That is sharp practice, Jason Philip Schimmelweis, sharp practice, we say. Now you have got to sever all connection with the Prudentia, or the Party is going to kick you out.”

Then it was that Jason Philip Schimmelweis rose to his true heights of eloquence. He insisted that his hands were clean, his left one and also his right one; that he was working in the interest of a good cause; and that threats could not intimidate him. He made it plain that he would bow to no dictatorship operating under the mask of equality and fraternity. He cried out that if the people wanted a scandal they could have it, but they would find him armed to the teeth. And he assured them that wherever he went in this wide, wide world, he would find the doors open to welcome him.

He then made a sudden about-face, and left his comrades standing. On the way home he continued to murmur murmurs of embitterment to himself.

Like a seasoned sailor eager to escape the storms of a raging sea, he steered his good ship toward other and more hospitable shores. Three days later he went to Baron Siegmund von Auffenberg, the leader of the Liberals, and offered him his services. He told him that he was willing to make any sacrifice for the great Liberal Party.

V

For thirty-five minutes, by his own watch, he cooled his heels in the ante-chamber. He made one caustic remark after another touching on the arrested development of the feeling of equality among the rich. Genuine rebel that he was, he did not repudiate himself even when he was practising high treason.

When he was finally taken into the office, he was not blinded in the slightest by the luxuriousness of the furniture, the rugs, or the oil paintings. He displayed not the remotest shimmer of servility on meeting the illustrious Baron. He sat down on one of the chairs with complete equanimity, took no notice of the French-speaking parrot, and never cast a single glance at the breakfast table covered with appetising tid-bits. But he did present his case with all due straightforwardness and simplicity.

“Fine,” said the Baron, “fine! I hardly believe that you will find it necessary to make a radical change in your battlefront. A conscienceless agitator you have never been. You have a family, a home of your own; your affairs are in good condition; and in the bottom of your heart you love order and discipline. I have in truth been expecting you for a long while. Nor am I exaggerating when I confess to you that you had to bolt, sooner or later.”

Jason Philip blushed with satisfaction. With the bearing of a cabman who has just pocketed his tip, he replied: “I thank you very much, Baron.”

“On one point we are wholly agreed,” said the Baron, “and it seems to me to be the most important—”

“Quite right,” interrupted Jason Philip, “you allude to the fight against Bismarck. Yes, on this point we are, I hope, of precisely the same opinion. I will do my part. Hand and heart on it, Baron. I could look with perfectly cold blood on this knight of obscurantism writhing on the rack.”

Herr von Auffenberg heard this temperamental statement with noticeably tenuous reassurance. He smiled just a little, and then said: “Wait a minute, my friend, don’t be quite so savage.” He reached for his smelling salts, held them to his nose, and closed his eyes. Then he got up, folded his hands across his back, and walked up and down the room a few times.

What he said after this was as familiar to him as the letters of the alphabet. While Jason Philip gaped at his lips in dumb inspiration, the Baron himself thought of things that had not the remotest connection with what he said.

“The very same man who tried to make the new Empire inhabitable, with the aid of a liberal code of laws, and who brought the long-drawn-out quarrel between the Emperor and the Pope to a happy conclusion, is now trying, by word, thought, and deed, gradually to destroy all liberal traditions and to proclaim the Roman High Priest as the real creator of peace. All that the German Chancellor could do to give the final blow to liberalism he has done. The reaction has not hesitated to abandon the idea of the Kulturkampf and to work instead in the interests of class hatred and racial prejudice, nurturing them even with deeds of violence. Faced with the crimes they themselves have committed, they will see their own children despised and rejected.”

“Dépêche-toi, mon bon garçon,” screeched the parrot.

“I am happy at the thought of having snatched a precious booty from the claws of anarchy, and of having won a new citizen for the State, my dear Herr Schimmelweis. But for the time being it will be advisable for you to keep somewhat in the background. They will be inclined to make your change of political conviction the subject of vociferous attacks, and that might injure the cause.”

VI

What was the old Baron really thinking about while he delivered this political speech?

There was just one thought in his mind; the same sullen, concealed anger gnawed incessantly at his heart.

He thought incessantly of his son, of the contempt which he had experienced because of him, and was still experiencing daily, even hourly, because of the fact that Eberhard had withdrawn from his power, had repudiated him.

He could not get over the fact that he had heaped up millions, and that Eberhard, so far as it was humanly possible to calculate—and in accordance with the law—would some day fall heir to a part of these millions. He knew very little about poverty; but his poisoned mind could think of nothing else than the satisfaction he would derive from being able, somehow, to deliver this abortive scion of his own name and blood over to poverty. Thus did he wish to take vengeance; thus would he punish.

But it was impossible for him to wreak vengeance on his son as he would have liked to: between the execution of the punishment and himself stood the law. The very thought that his riches were increasing daily, hourly, that the millions he had were creating new millions without his moving a finger, that he could not even stop the flood if he wished to, and that consequently the share of this disloyal, rebellious, and hateful son was becoming larger daily, even hourly—this thought he could not endure. It poisoned his peace of mind, paralysed his powers, robbed him of all natural and legitimate joy, and enveloped his days in a cloud of despair.

A modern Midas, he transformed everything he touched into gold; and the more gold he had the sadder his life became, the more revengeful his soul.

The tones of a piano reached his ear; it was his wife who was playing. She played Mendelssohn’s “Song Without Words.” He shook with disgust; for of all things repulsive, music was to him the most repulsive.

“Dépêche-toi, mon bon garçon,” screeched the parrot.

VII

During Jason Philip’s absence, poorly dressed people frequently came to the shop and demanded that Theresa give them back the money they had paid in on their insurance.

Some of them became very much excited when Theresa told them that she would do nothing of the kind, that the insurance was the affair of her husband, and that she had nothing whatever to do with it. A locksmith’s apprentice had given a sound thrashing to Zwanziger, the clerk, who had hastened up to protect the wife of his employer. A gold-beater from Fürth had created so much excitement that the police had to be called in. A cooper’s widow, who had managed to pay her premiums for one year, but had been unable to continue the payment for the quite sufficient reason that she had been in the hospital, fell headlong to the floor in epileptic convulsions when she heard how matters stood.

It finally reached the point where Theresa was frightened every time she saw a strange face. She breathed more easily when a day had passed without some disagreeable scene, but trembled at the thought of what might happen on the day to come.

What disturbed her more than anything else was the inexplicable disappearance of small sums of money; this had been going on for some time. A man came into the office once and laid his monthly premium, one taler in all, on the counter. When he left, Theresa closed the door behind him in order that she might be able to watch the snow storm from the window. When she returned to the desk the taler had disappeared. She asked where it was. Jason Philip, who was just then handing some books up the ladder to Zwanziger, became so gruff that one might have thought she had accused him of the theft. She counted the money over in the till, but in vain; the taler had vanished.

She had forgotten, or had not noticed, that Philippina had been in the office. She had brought her father his evening sandwiches, and then gone out again without making the slightest noise; she wore felt shoes.

On another occasion she missed a number of groschen from her purse. On still another, a spice merchant came in and demanded that she pay a bill of three marks. She was certain she had already paid it; she was certain she had given Philippina the money to pay it. Philippina was called in. She, however, denied having anything to do with it, and acted with such self-assurance that Theresa, completely puzzled, reached down in her pocket and handed over the three marks in perfect silence.

She had suspected the maid, she had suspected the clerk. She even suspected Jason Philip himself; she thought that he was appropriating money to pay his drinking expenses. And she suspected Philippina. But in no case could she produce the evidence; her spying and investigating were in vain. Then the thieving stopped again.

For Philippina, who had been doing all the stealing, feared she might be discovered, and adopted a less hazardous method of making herself a rich woman: she stole books, and sold them to the second-hand dealer. She was sly enough to take books that had been on the shelves for a long while, and not to do all her business with one dealer: she would go first to one and then to another.

The money which she scraped together in this way, as secretly and greedily as a jack-daw, she hid in the attic. There was a loose brick in the wall near the chimney. This she removed; and in time she removed other bricks. And once her treasures were safely stored in the hole, she would replace the bricks and set a board up against them.

When everything had become perfectly quiet and she felt wholly at ease, she would sit down, fold her hands, and give herself up to speechless meditation, an evil and fanatic dream playing over her features as she did.

VIII

One evening in February, Theresa and Philippina chanced to be sitting by the lamp mending the week’s wash. Jason Philip entered the room; there was a sheepish expression on his face; he rubbed his hands.

Since Theresa did not consider it worth her trouble to ask him why he was in such a good humour, he suddenly laughed out loud and said: “Now we can pack up, my dear. I see it in writing: The wonder of the age, or the humiliated relatives. A touching tableau presented by Herr Daniel Nothafft of the Schimmelweis family.”

“I do not understand you; you are talking like a harlequin again,” said Theresa.

“Compositions by Daniel are going to be played in a public concert,” Philippina informed her mother with that old, harsh voice of hers.

“How do you know?” asked Theresa, in a tone of evident distrust.

“I read it in the paper.”

“The miracle is to take place in the Harmony Society,” said Jason Philip, by way of confirming Philippina’s remark, with an expression of enigmatic malevolence. “There is to be a public rehearsal on Thursday, and there is nothing on earth that can keep me away. The music dealer, Zierfuss, has given me two tickets, and if you want to, why, you can come along and see how they make a local hero out of a plain loafer.”

“I?” responded Theresa, in a tone of contemptuous amazement, “not one step will I take. What have I got to do with your imbecile concerts?”

“But these gentlemen are going to be disillusioned, terribly so,” continued Jason Philip in a threatening tone. “There is still a certain amount of common sense left, just as there are means of proceeding against a common, ordinary swindler.”

Philippina raised her head in the mood of a person who has come to a sudden decision: “C’n I go ’long, Pop?” she asked, her ears as red as fire.

It was more than a request. Jason Philip was startled at the intractable expression on the girl’s face. “Sure,” he said, avoiding as well as he could the mute opposition on the part of Theresa, “but take a whistle along so that you can make cat calls.”

He sank back with a comfortable sigh on his chair, and stretched out his legs. Philippina knelt down and took off his boots. He then put on his slippers. Each of them bore a motto embroidered in red. On the left one were the words “For tired father”; on the right one, “Consolation.”

IX

Eleanore had not told her father why she had left her position with Alfons Diruf. Nor did Jordan ask her why when he learned that she did not wish to speak about it. He suspected that there was some disagreeable incident back of it, and if he maintained a strict silence it was because he feared his own wrath and grief.

She soon found another position. A schoolmate and good friend of hers, Martha Degen, the daughter of the pastry-baker, had married Herr Rübsam, a notary public and an old man to boot. Eleanore visited the Rübsams occasionally, as did also her father; and in the course of conversation it came out that Herr Rübsam needed an assistant copyist. Since it was then impossible to give Eleanore a desk in the office, she was allowed to do all her work at home.

Friedrich Benda had also given her a cordial letter of recommendation to Herr Bock, Counsellor of Archives, who was just then engaged in writing a voluminous work on the history of Nuremberg. It would be her task to arrange Herr Bock’s muddled manuscript.

It was a laborious undertaking, but she learned a great deal from it. Her thirsty mind would draw nourishment even from dry and lifeless subjects.

She was seized with a desire to fill up the gaps in her education. She begged Benda first for this book and then for that one. And after having written the whole day long, she would often sit down and read until late at night.

Everything she came in contact with she either assimilated or shook off: she dragged nothing along in the form of surface impedimenta; it became a part of her being, or she threw it to one side.

Daniel had not called for a long while. He was busy with the rehearsals which Wurzelmann was conducting. Professor Döderlein was not to take charge of the orchestra until it had been thoroughly drilled. The programme was to consist of Daniel’s works and the “Leonore Overture.” Wurzelmann referred to the Beethoven number as “a good third horse in the team.”

Daniel also had a lot of business to transact with the impresario Dörmaul: the company was to go on the road in March, and many things had to be attended to. The contract he signed was for three years at a salary of six hundred marks a year.

A few days before the public rehearsal he came to Jordan’s with three tickets: one for Jordan himself and the other two for the sisters. The public rehearsal was quite like a regular concert; over a hundred persons had been invited.

Jordan was just getting ready to go out. “That is fine, that is great: I can hear some more music now. I am looking forward to the concert with extreme pleasure. When I was a young fellow I rarely missed a concert. But that was long ago; indeed, when I think it over I see how old I am. The years pass by like milestones on the highway of life. Well, Daniel, I thank you, thank you very much!”

Eleanore’s joy was also great. As soon as her father had gone, she remarked that Daniel had looked for Gertrude; but she had left the room as soon as she saw him coming. Eleanore opened the door, and cried: “Gertrude, come in, right away! I have a surprise for you.”

After a while Gertrude came in.

“A ticket for you to Daniel’s concert,” said Eleanore, radiant with joy, and handed her the green card of admission.

Gertrude looked at Eleanore; and she wanted to look at Daniel. But her heavy glance, slowly rising from the floor, barely reached his face before it returned to its downward position, aggrieved and pained. Then she shook her head, and said: “A ticket for the concert? For me? Are you serious, Eleanore?” Again she shook her head, amazed and indignant. Whereupon she went to the window, leaned her arm against the cross bars, and pressed her head against her arm.

Daniel followed her with looks of glowing anger. “You can take sheep to the slaughter,” he said, “you can throw thieves in a dungeon, you can transport lepers to a hospital for incurables, but you cannot force an emotional girl to listen to music.”

He became silent; a pause ensued. Tortured at the thought that Daniel’s eyes were riveted on her back, Gertrude turned around, went to the stove, sat down, and pressed her cheek against the Dutch tiles.

Daniel took two steps, stood by her side, and exclaimed: “But suppose I request that you go? Suppose my peace of mind or something else of importance to the world, consolation, liberation, or improvement, depends on your going? Suppose I request that you go for one of these reasons? What then?”

Gertrude had become as pale as death. She looked at him for a moment, then turned her face to one side, drew up her shoulders as if she were shivering with cold, and said: “Well—then—then—I’ll go. But I will be sorry for it ... sorry for it.”

Eleanore was a witness to this scene. Her eyes, wide open when it began, grew larger and larger as it advanced through its successive stages. As she looked at Daniel a kindly, languishing moisture came to them, and she smiled.

Daniel, however, had become vexed. He mumbled a good-bye and left. Eleanore went to the window and watched him as he ran across the square, holding his hat with both hands as a shield against the driving wind.

“He is an amusing fellow,” she said, “an amusing fellow.”

She then lifted her eyes to the clouds, whose swift flight above the church roof pleased her.

X

It was the original intention to begin the regular evening concert with the third “Fidelio Overture.” Döderlein was of the opinion that it offered no special difficulties: the general rehearsal was to be devoted primarily to the works of the novice. He raised his baton, and silence filled the auditorium.

The “Nuremberg Serenade” opened with ensemble playing of the wind instruments. It was a jovial, virile theme which the violins took up after the wind instruments, plucked it to pieces in their capricious way, and gradually led it over into the realm of dreams. The night became living: a gentle summer wind blew, glow worms flitted about, Gothic towers stood out in the sultry darkness, plebeian figures crept into the narrow, angular alleys; it was night in Nuremberg. The acclamation a glorious past with an admonition to the future fell upon the smug complacency of the present, the heroic mingled with the jocose, the fantastic with the burlesque, romanticism found its counterpart, and all this was achieved through a flood of genuine melody in which stodginess played no part, while charm was abundant in every turn and tune.

The professional musicians were astonished; and their astonishment was vigorously expressed in their criticisms. The general admiration, to be sure, was somewhat deafened by the unpleasant end that the rehearsal was destined to come to; but one critic, who enjoyed complete independence of soul, though an unfortunate incident in his life had compelled him to relinquish his influential circle in the city and retire to a limited sphere of activity in the province, wrote: “This artist has the unquestioned ability to become the light and leader of his generation. Nature created him, his star developed him. May Heaven give him the power and patience indispensable to the artist, if he would be born again and become a man above the gifts of men. If he only does not reach out too soon for the ripe fruits, and, intoxicated by the allurements of the lower passions, fail to hear the voice of his heart! He has taken a lofty flight; the azure gates of renown have swung wide open to him. Let him only be cautious about his second descent into the night.”

The same connoisseur found the composition of “Vineta” less ingenious, and its instrumentation suffering from the lean experience of a beginner. Yet even this work was strongly applauded. The impresario Dörmaul clapped his hands until the perspiration poured from his face. Wurzelmann was beside himself with enthusiasm. Old Herold smiled all over his face. The long-haired found it of course quite difficult to subdue their jealousy, but even they were not stingy with their recognition.

But how did Herr Carovius feel? His spittle had a bitter taste, his body pained him. When Andreas Döderlein turned to the audience and bowed, Carovius laughed a laugh of tremendous contempt. And Jason Philip Schimmelweis? He would have felt much more comfortable if the hand-clapping had been so much ear-boxing, and Daniel Nothafft, the culprit, had been the objective. The boy who had been cast out had become the leader of men! Jason Philip put his hand to his forehead, shook his head, and was on the point of exclaiming, “Oh, ye deceivers and deceived! Listen, listen! I know the boy; I know the man who has made fools of you here this evening!” He waited to see whether the misunderstanding, the colossal swindle, would not be cleared up automatically. He did not wait in vain.

At the close of the “Serenade,” Jordan was struck by Gertrude’s feverish paleness. He asked her whether she felt ill, but received no reply. During the performance of the second piece she kept putting her hands to her bosom, as if she were suffering from repressed convulsions. Her eyes were now lifeless, now glowing with an uncanny fire. As soon as the piece was finished, she turned to her father and asked him to take her home. Jordan was frightened. Those sitting next to him looked at the girl’s pale face, sympathised with her, and made conventional remarks. Eleanore wanted to go home too, but Gertrude whispered to her in her imperious way and told her to stay. Familiar as she was with Gertrude’s disposition, she thought that it was simply a passing attack of some kind, and regained her composure.

Daniel was standing at the door, talking to Benda and Wurzelmann. He was very much excited; his two companions were trying to appease his embitterment against Andreas Döderlein. “Ah, the man doesn’t know a thing about his profession,” he exclaimed, and scorned all attempts to effect a reconciliation between him and the leader of the orchestra. “What is left of my compositions is debris only. He drags the time, never even tries to make a legatura, scorns a piano every time he comes to one, pays no attention to crescendos, never retards—it is terrible! My works cannot be played in public like that!”

Gertrude and her father passed by quickly and without greeting. Daniel was stupefied. The lifeless expression in Gertrude’s face unnerved him. He felt as if he had been struck by a hammer, as if his own fate were inseparably connected with that of the girl. Her step, her eyes, her mouth were, he felt, a part of his own being. And the fact that she passed by without even speaking to him, cold, reserved, hostile, filled him with such intense anger that from then on he was not accountable for what he did.

The flood of melody in Beethoven’s great work was on the point of pouring forth from the orchestra in all its exalted ruggedness. What happened? There came forth instead a confused, noisy clash and clatter. Daniel was seized with violent restlessness. It was hard enough to see his own works bungled; to see this creation with its delicate soul and titanic power, a work which he knew as he knew few things on this earth, torn to tatters and bungled all around was more than he could stand. The trumpet solo did not sound as though it came from some distant land of fairy spirits: it was manifestly at the people’s feet and it was flat. He began to tremble. When the calm melancholy andante, completely robbed of all measure and proportion by the unskilled hand of the leader and made to dissipate in senseless sounds, reached his ear, he was beside himself. He rushed on to the platform, seized the arm of the conductor with his icy fingers, and shouted: “That is enough! That is no way to treat a divine creation!”

The people rose in their seats. The instruments suddenly became silent, with the exception of a cello which still whimpered from the corner. Andreas Döderlein bounded back, looked at the mad man, his mouth as wide as he could open it, laid the baton on the desk, and stammered: “By Jupiter, this is unheard of!” The musicians left their places and grouped themselves around the strange man; the tumult in the public grew worse and worse. They asked questions, threatened, tried to set each other at ease, scolded and raged. In the meantime Daniel Nothafft, his head bowed, his back bent, stood there on the platform, glowing with anger and determined to have his revenge.

A few minutes later, Andreas Döderlein was sitting at the table in the musicians’ waiting room. He looked like Emperor Barbarossa in Kyffhäuser. He had well founded reason to express his contempt for the decadence and impiety of the youth of to-day. It was superfluous for him to remark that a man who would conduct himself as Daniel had done should be eliminated from the ranks of those who lay claim to the help and consideration of sane people. The dignified gentlemen of the Orchestral Union were of the same opinion; you could search the annals of history from the beginning of time, and you would never find a case like this. Mild eyes flashed, grey beards wagged. The deliberation was brief, the sentence just. A committee waited on Daniel to inform him that his compositions had been struck from the programme. The news spread like wild-fire.

Who was happier than Jason Philip Schimmelweis?

He was like a man who gets up from the table with a full stomach, after having sat down at it fearing lest he starve to death. On his way home he whistled and laughed alternately and with well balanced proportion.

“There you see it again,” he said to his daughter, as she walked along at his side, “you see it again: you cannot get blood from a turnip any more than you can get happiness from misery. A jackass remains a jackass, a culprit a culprit, and loafing never fails to bring the loafer to a disgraceful end. The Devil has a short but nimble tail; and it makes no difference how slovenly he may conduct his business, his recruits have got to pay the piper in the end. This will be a windfall for mother. Let’s hurry so that we can serve it to her while it’s still hot!”

And Philippina—she had never taken her eyes off the floor the entire evening—seemed to be utterly unconscious of the fact at present that she was surrounded by houses and people. She was a defeated woman; she wanted to be. She had much to conceal; her young breast was a hell of emotions, but her ugly, gloomy old face was as inanimate and empty as a stone.

Herr Carovius waited at the gate. After all the other people had gone, Daniel, Benda, Wurzelmann, and Eleanore came along. Daniel’s storm cape fluttered in the wind; his hat was drawn down over his eyes. Herr Carovius stepped up before him.

“A heroic deed, my dear Nothafft,” he miauled. “I could embrace you. From this time on you can count me among your friends. Now stand still, you human being transformed into a hurricane. I must say of course that so far as your music is concerned, I am not with you. There is too much hullaballoo in it, and not enough plain hellishness to suit me. But rid this country of the whole tribe of Döderleins, and you will find that I am your man. Not that I would invite you to take dinner with me, so that you could have me make you a loan, not on your life. I am only a poor musician myself. But otherwise I am at your service. I hope you sleep well to-night—and get the hullaballoo out of your music just as soon as you can.”

He tittered, and then scampered away. Daniel looked at him with a feeling of astonishment. Wurzelmann laughed, and said he had never seen such a queer codger in all his life. All four stood there for a while, not knowing exactly what to think, and in the meantime it was snowing and raining. Asked by Benda where he wished to go, Daniel said he was going home. But what could he do at home? Why couldn’t he go home with Benda? “No,” said Daniel, “I can’t do that: I am a burden to every one to-day, including myself. Say, little servant, how are you feeling?” he said, turning to Wurzelmann, “how about a drink or two?”

Wurzelmann, somewhat embarrassed, said that he had an engagement. There was something repulsive in the way he declined the invitation.

“Ah, you, with your old engagement,” said Daniel, “I don’t give a hang where you are going; I am going along.”

“No, you’re not, Daniel,” cried Eleanore. And when Daniel looked at her in astonishment, she blushed and continued: “You are not going with him; he is going to see some women!”

The three young men laughed, and in her confusion Eleanore laughed too.

“How tragic you are, little Eleanore,” said Daniel in a tone of unusual flippancy, “what do you want me to do? Do you think that Wurzelmann and I are just alike when it comes to an evening’s amusement? Do you think the earth claims me as soon as I see a tear?”

“Let him go,” whispered Benda to the girl, “he is right. Don’t bring an artificial light into this darkness; it serves his purpose; let him do with it as he pleases.”

Eleanore looked at Benda with wide-opened eyes. “Darkness? What do you mean? The fire then was merely a will-o’-the-wisp,” she said, her eyes shining with pride, “I see him full of light.” Daniel had heard what she said. “Really, Eleanore?” he asked with greedy curiosity.

She nodded: “Really, Daniel.”

“For that you can have anything you want from me.”

“Well then I beg you and Benda to come over to our house. Father will be delighted to see you, and we will have something to eat.”

“Fine. That sounds good to me. Addio, Wurzelmann, and remember me to the girls. You are coming along, aren’t you, Friedrich?”

Benda first made a few polite remarks, and then said he would accept.

“You liked it then, did you, Eleanore?” asked Daniel, as they walked along the street.

Eleanore was silent. To Daniel her silence was moving. But he soon forgot the impression it made on him; and it was a long, long while, indeed even years, before he recalled this scene.

XI

Jordan had taken Gertrude home. He was very careful not to ask her any questions that would cause her pain. On reaching the house he lighted a lamp and helped her take off her cloak.

“How do you feel?” he asked in a kindly tone, “are you better?”

Gertrude turned to one side, and sat down on a chair.

“Well, we’ll drink a cup of hot tea,” continued the old man; “then my child will go to bed, and to-morrow morning she will be all right again. Yes?”

Gertrude got up. “Father,” she sighed, and felt around for the tea table as a means of support.

“Gertrude, what is the matter?” cried Jordan in dismay.

She moved the upper part of her body in her characteristic way—as though it were limp and she were trying to drag it along with her—and a faint smile came over her face. All of a sudden she burst out crying and ran to her room. Jordan heard her bolt the door, looked anxiously before him, waited a moment or two, and then crept up to her door on his tiptoes.

He placed his hands under his chin and listened. Gertrude was crying. It was an even and touching cry, not so much filled with grief as her sobs generally were, and seemed to be expiratory rather than the reverse.

As Jordan let the lonely, unhappy, and impenetrable life of his daughter pass by him in mental review, he became painfully aware of the fact that this was the first time in her life that she had ever heard real music. “Is it possible?” he asked. He tried to think of another time that would make him disbelieve the accuracy of his unpleasant observation.

He said to himself: Her case is simple; the hitherto unknown sweetness and power concealed in the ensemble playing of the violins, the euphony of the orchestra, and the beauty of the melody with all its fateful directness has made the same impression on her that the sunlight makes on a person from whose eyes a cataract has just been removed. Her soul has suffered from hunger; that is where the trouble lies. She has struggled too fiercely with the incomprehensible and the intangible.

His instinct of love told him that the best thing to do was to let her cry. It will do her good; it will relieve her soul. He pulled a chair up to her door, sat down, and listened. When he could no longer hear her crying, his heart grew easier.

XII

Eleanore was right. Her father was quite pleased to see Daniel and Benda. “I am proud of you,” he said to Daniel, “and for your visit to me I thank you. I feel flattered.”

“If you had stayed a half hour longer, you might feel differently about it,” replied Daniel.

Eleanore gave her father a brief account of what had taken place at the concert. Jordan listened attentively, looked at Daniel, and, with a wrinkle on his forehead, said, “Is it possible?”

“Yes, it is possible; it had to happen,” said Daniel.

“Well, if it had to happen, it is a good thing that it is over,” was the dispassionate response.

Eleanore took her father’s hand; the back of it was covered with big yellow spots; she kissed it. Then she set the table, got everything ready for the meal, went in and out of the room in a most cheerful way, and did not forget to put the water on the stove to boil. She had asked about Gertrude as soon as she came home, but for some reason or other her father seemed disinclined to say anything on the subject, from which Eleanore inferred that there was nothing seriously wrong.

Finally they sat down at the table. Eleanore was quite pleased to see the three men whom she liked so much gathered together in this way. There was a feeling of gratitude in her heart toward each one of them. But she was also hungry: she ate four sandwiches, one right after the other. When she saw that Daniel was not eating, she stepped up behind his chair, bent over him so far that the loose flowing hair from her temples tickled his face, and said: “Are you embarrassed? Or don’t you like the way the sausages have been prepared? Would you like something else?”

Daniel evaded the questions; he was out of sorts. And yet in the bottom of his heart the contact with the girl made a pleasing impression on him; it was in truth almost a saving impression. For his thoughts continually and obstinately returned to the girl who had fled, and whose presence he missed without exactly wishing that she were at the table with the others.

Benda spoke of the political changes that might, he feared, take place because of the death of Gambetta. Jordan, who always took a warm interest in the affairs of the Fatherland, made a number of true and humane remarks about the tense feeling then existing between France and Germany, whereupon the door to Gertrude’s room opened and Gertrude herself stood on the threshold.

Deep silence filled the room; they all looked at her.

Strangely enough, she was not wearing the dress she had on at the concert. She had put on the Nile green dress, the one in which Daniel saw her for the first time. Jordan and Eleanore hardly noticed the change; they were too much absorbed in the expression on the girl’s face. Daniel was also astonished; he could not look away.

Her expression had become softer, freer, brighter. The unrest in which her face had heretofore been clouded had disappeared. Even the outlines of her face seemed to have changed: the arch of her eyebrows was higher, the oval of her cheeks more delicate.

She leaned against the door; she even leaned her head against the door. Her left hand, hanging at her side, seemed indolent, limp, indifferent. Her right hand was pressed against her bosom. Standing in this position, she studied the faces of those who were sitting at the table, while a timid and gentle smile played about her lips.

Jordan’s first suspicion was that she had lost her mind. He sprang up, and hastened over to her. But she gave him her hand, and offered no resistance at all to being led over to the table.

Suddenly she fixed her silent gaze on Daniel. He got up involuntarily, and seized the back of his chair. His colour changed; he distorted the corners of his mouth; he was nervous. But when Gertrude withdrew her hand from her father’s and extended it to him, and when he took it and his eye met hers—he could not help but look at her—his solicitude vanished. For what he read in her eyes was an unreserved and irrevocable capitulation of her whole self, and Daniel was the victor. His face grew gentle, grateful, dreamy, and resplendent.

It was not merely the sensuous charm revealed in the feeling which Gertrude betrayed that moved him: it was the fact that she came as she had come, a penitent and a convert. The sublime conviction that he had been able to transform a soul and awaken it to new life touched him deeply.

This it was that drew him to Gertrude more than her countenance, her expression, and her body combined. And now he saw all three—her countenance, her expression, and her body.

Jordan had a foreboding of something. He felt that he would have to take the girl in his arms and flee with her. Pictures of future misfortune crowded upon his imagination; the hope he had cherished for Gertrude was crushed to the earth.

Benda stared at his plate in silence. Nevertheless, just as if he had other eyes than those with which he saw earthly things, he noticed that Eleanore’s hands and lips were trembling, that with each succeeding second she grew paler, that she cast a distrustful glance first at her father, then at her sister, and then at Daniel, and that she finally, as if overcome with a feeling of exhaustion, slipped away from her place by the table lamp, stole into a corner, and sat down on the hassock.

But after they had all resumed their seats at the table, Gertrude sitting between Benda and her father, Eleanore came up and sat down next to Daniel. She never took her eyes off Gertrude; she looked at her in breathless surprise, Gertrude smiled as she had smiled when leaning against the door, timidly and passionately.

From that moment on, the conversation lagged, Benda suggested to his friend that it was time for them to leave. They thanked Jordan for his hospitality and departed. Jordan accompanied them down the stairs and unlocked the front door. When he returned, Eleanore was just going to her room: “Well, Eleanore, are you not going to say good-night?” he called after her.

She turned around, nodded conventionally, and closed the door.

Gertrude was still sitting at the table. Jordan was walking up and down the room. Suddenly she sprang up, stepped in his way, forced him to stop, threw her arms about his neck, and kissed him on the forehead. She had never done that before.

She too had gone to sleep. Jordan felt terribly alone. He heard the street door open and close; he heard some one enter. It was Benno. Jordan thought that his son would come in, for he must have seen the light through the crack of the door. But Benno evidently had no desire to see his father. He went to his room at the other end of the hall, and closed the door behind him just as if he were a servant.

“They are all three in bed,” thought Jordan to himself, “and what do I know about them?”

He shook his head, removed the hanging lamp from its frame, and locked the room, holding the lamp very carefully as he did so.

XIII

Eleanore had not seen Eberhard von Auffenberg for a number of weeks. He wrote her a card, asking for the privilege of meeting her somewhere. The place in fact was always the same—the bridge at the gate to the Zoölogical Garden. Immediately after sunset she betook herself to that point. It was a warm March evening; there was not a breath of wind; the sky was covered with clouds.

They strolled up the castle hill, and when they had reached the parapet, Eleanore said, gently laughing: “Now listen, I have talked enough; you say something.”

“It is so pleasant to be silent with you,” replied Eberhard in a downcast mood.

Filled with a disagreeable premonition, Eleanore sought out one of the many hundreds of lights dimly flickering down in the city, fixed her eyes on it, and stubbornly refused to look at any other earthly object.

“If I appeal to you at this hour,” the young Baron finally began, “it is to a certain extent exactly as if I were appealing to the Supreme Court. My expectations in life have, with one single exception, been utterly and irrevocably crushed. It depends quite upon you, Eleanore, whether I am to become and remain a useless parasite of human society, or a man who has firmly decided to pay for his share of happiness by an equal amount of honest work. I offer you everything I have. It is not much, but I offer it to you without haggling and forever. You and you alone can save me. That is what I wanted to say to you.”

He looked up at the clouds, leaning on his cane, which he had placed behind his back.

“I have forbidden you to speak of this,” whispered Eleanore in profound dismay, “and you promised me that you would not say anything about it.”

“I gave you my promise because I loved you; I break it for the same reason,” replied Eberhard. “I feel that such a promise is the act of a foolish child, when the building up or the tearing down of a human life depends upon it. If you are of a different opinion, I can only beg your pardon. Probably I have been mistaken.”

Eleanore shook her head; she was grieved.

“It was my plan to go to England with you, and there we would be married,” continued Eberhard. “It is quite impossible for me to get married here: I loathe this city. It is impossible, because if I did my people would in all probability set up some claims to which they are no longer entitled and for which I would fight. The mere thought of doing this repels me. And it is also impossible because ...” at this he stopped and bit his lips.

Eleanore looked at him; she was filled with curiosity. His pedantic enumeration of the various hindrances as well as the romanticism of his plans amused her. When she detected the expression of downright grief in his face, she felt sorry for him. She came one step nearer to him; he took her hand, bowed, and pressed his lips to her fingers. She jerked her hand back.

“Fatal circumstances have placed me in a most humiliating situation; if I am not to succumb to them, I must shake them off at once,” said Eberhard anxiously. “I was inexperienced; I have been deceived. There is a person connected with my case who hardly deserves the name of a human being; he is a monster in the garb of an honest citizen. I have not the faintest idea what I am to do next, Eleanore. I must leave at once. In a strange country I may regain my strength and mental clearness. With you I could defy the universe. Believe in me, have confidence in me!”

Eleanore let her head sink. The despair of this usually reserved man touched her heart. Her mouth twitched as she sought for words.

“I cannot get married, Eberhard,” she said, “really, I cannot. I did not entice you to me; you dare not reproach me. I have tried to make my attitude toward you perfectly clear from the very first time I met you. I cannot get married; I cannot.”

For five or six minutes there was a silence that was interrupted only by human voices in the distance and the sound of carriages from the streets down in the city. In the compassion that Eleanore after all felt for Eberhard she sensed the harshness of her unqualified refusal. She looked at him courageously, firmly, and said: “It is not obstinacy on my part, Eberhard; nor is it stupid anxiety, nor imagination, nor lack of respect. Truth to tell I have a very high opinion of you. But there must be something quite unnatural about me, for you see that I loathe the very idea of getting married. I detest the thought of living with a man. I like you, but when you touch me as you did a little while ago when you kissed my hand, a shudder runs through my whole body.”

Eberhard looked at her in astonishment; he was morose, too.

She continued: “It has been in me since my childhood; perhaps I was born with it, just as other people are born with a physical defect. It may be that I have been this way ever since a certain day in my life. It was an autumn evening in Pappenheim, where my aunt then lived. My sister Gertrude and I were walking in a great fruit garden; we came to a thorn hedge, and sitting by the hedge was an old woman. My father and mother were far away, and the old woman said to my sister, then about seven: Be on your guard against everything that sings and rings. To me she said: Be careful never to have a child. The next day the woman was found dead under the hedge. She was over ninety years old, and for more than fifty years she had peddled herbs in Altmühltal. I naturally had not the vaguest idea what she meant at the time by ‘having a child,’ but her remark stuck in my heart like an arrow. It grew up with me; it became a part of me. And when I learned what it meant, it was a picture by the side of the picture of death. Now you must not think that I have gone through life thus far filled with a feeling of despicable fear. Not at all. I simply have no desires. The idea does not attract me. If it ever does, many questions will I ask about life and death! I will laugh at the old woman under the hedge and do what I must.”

As she spoke these last words, her face took on a strangely chaste and fanciful expression. Eberhard could not take his eyes from her. “Ah, there are after all fairy creatures on this flat, stale, and unprofitable earth,” he thought, “enchanted princesses, mysterious Melusinas.” He smiled somewhat distrustfully—as a matter of habit. But from this moment his frank, open, wooing attachment to the girl was transformed into a consuming passion.

He was proud, and man enough to subdue his feelings. But he yearned more than ever, and was tortured by his yearnings to know something more than the vague knowledge he had at present about that glass case, that spirit-chest in which, so near and yet so far, this lovely creature lived, impervious to the touch of mortal hands and immune to the flames of love.

“You are rejecting me, then?” he asked.

“Well, it is at least advisable that for the time being we avoid each other’s presence.”

“Advisable for me, you think. And for the time being? How am I to interpret that?”

“Well, let us say for five years.”

“Why exactly five years? Why not twenty? Why not fifty? It would be all the same.”

“It seems to me that five years is just the right amount of time, Eberhard.”

“Five years! Each year has twelve times thirty, fifty-two times seven days. Why, the arithmetic of it is enough to make a man lose his mind.”

“But it must be five years,” said Eleanore gently though firmly. “In five years I will not have changed. And if I am just the same in five years from now, why, we’ll talk it over again. I must not exclude myself from the world forever. My father often says: What looks like fate at Easter is a mere whim by Pentecost. I prefer to wait until Pentecost and not to forget my friend in the meantime.”

She gave him her hand with a smile.

He shook his head: “No, I can’t take your hand; another one of those shudders will run through you if I do. Farewell, Eleanore.”

“And you too, Eberhard, farewell!”

Eberhard started down the hill. Suddenly he stopped, turned around, and said: “Just one thing more. That musician—Nothafft is his name, isn’t it?—is engaged to your sister, isn’t he?”

“Yes, Gertrude and Daniel will get married some day. But who told you about it?”

“The musician himself was in a restaurant. The fellows were drinking, and he was so incautious as to raise his glass, and, somewhat after the fashion of an intoxicated drum-major, he himself drank to Gertrude’s health. For some time there was talk of his marrying you. It is much better as it is. I can’t stand artists. I can’t even have due respect for them, these indiscreet hotspurs. Good night, Eleanore.”

And with that he vanished in the darkness.