Jakob Wassermann

“ It seemed to him that music was really born at that moment.
He pressed Eleanore so tightly to his bosom that she could not breathe, and murmured between his teeth: “There is no choice left: we have got to remain lifeless and irresponsive to each other’s presence or wound one another with love.”
“The mask, the mask,” whispered Eleanore anxiously, and pointed over to the corner from which the mask of Zingarella, with the dim light falling on it, shone forth like the weirdly beautiful face of a spectre.
Philippina stood before the door, and listened to what they were saying. ”

“ Dorothea’s eyes sparkled with daring; she did not lower her lids. Suddenly, as if moved from within, Daniel bent over and kissed her on the forehead.
“You know who I am,” he said, and walked back and forth in the room. “You know how I have lived and how I am living at present. I am a guilty man, and a lonely man. My nature craves tenderness, but is unable to give tenderness in return. My lot is a hard one, and whoever decides to share it with me must be able to bear her part of this hardness. I am frequently my own enemy and the enemy of those who mean well by me. ”

“ Study the situation from all sides, so that we may make no false calculations. Fate, you know, is fate. Love can get control of me more than I can get control of myself, and when this takes place I will do everything in my power. But I must have confidence, unlimited confidence. If I were to lose confidence, I should be like a mortal proscribed to Hell, an outcast, an evil spirit. Examine yourself, Dorothea. You must know what you are doing; it is your affair, and it is a sacred one.”
“I cannot do otherwise, Daniel!” cried Dorothea, and threw herself on his bosom. ”

“ Gertrude had some bright moments; Agnes never. She was incapable of enthusiasm; she could not look up. For her heart, her soul was not merely asleep, torpid, lethargic; it was hopelessly dried up, withered. Life was not in it.
“I am not going to those Döderleins,” she said, crying.
But in the evening Daniel came over. He took Philippina to one side, and had a serious talk with her. He explained the reasons for his getting married a third time as well as he could without going too deeply into the subject. “I needed a wife; I needed a woman to keep house for me; I needed a companion. ”

“ He does not see; he has seen. He does not love; he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things, understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.
Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress, the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. ”

“ Taking hold of the latch, he stopped, and continued in his brooding way: “It is peculiar that a man can die by inches in a living body; that a man can have the feeling that he’s no longer a part of the present; and that he can no longer play his rôle, keep up with his own people, grasp what is going on about him, or know whether what is to come is good or evil. It is fearful when a man reaches that stage, fearful—fearful!”
He left the room, shaking his head. To Daniel his words sounded like a voice from the grave.
They had been silent for a long while, he and Eleanore. ”

“ Once he showed Eleanore eighteen variations of the same melody. He had spent the whole night making changes in a single composition. Eleanore’s heart was heavy: she came very nearly asking, “For whom, Daniel? For what? The trunk up in the attic?”
She slowly began to perceive that it is not brooding reason that climbs and conquers the steps of perfection, but moral will. Like a flash of lightning she recognised one day the demoniacal element in this impulse, an impulse she had been accustomed to ascribe to his everlasting fidgeting, fumbling, and grumbling. ”

“ It would be futile to act as the spy of Daniel and show how he left the attic room in the dead of night and crept down the stairs in felt slippers. We have no desire to hear of Eleanore’s pangs of conscience and her longings, her flights, her waiting in burning suspense; to relate how she endeavoured to avert the inevitable to-day and succumbed to-morrow would be to tell an idle tale. It is best to overlook all these things; to draw a curtain of mercy before them; for they are so human and so wholly without a trace of the miraculous. ”

“ By the way, how do you like her, the angel? Are you not a bit sorry for the neat little halo that now hangs like a piece of castoff clothing on the bedpost of an adulteress? Of course, geniuses are allowed to do as they please. O Eleanore, bloody lie that you are, you hypocritical soft, sneaking, slimy lie—Eleanore!”
With that Eberhard stepped up very calmly to the unleashed demon in pajamas, seized him by the throat, and held him with such a fierce and unrelenting grip that Herr Carovius sank to his knees, while his face became as blue as a boiled carp. ”

“ In the meantime be calm, my child, be calm,” said he, stroking her brown hair, “Old Carovius is still alive.”
Dorothea nestled up to him, and smiled: “What would you say, Uncle,” she began with a knavish and at the same time unusually attentive expression in her face, “if I were to marry Daniel Nothafft? You like him,” she continued in a flattering tone, and held him fast by the shoulder when he started back, “you like him, I know you do. I must marry somebody; for I do not wish to be an old maid, and I can’t stand Father any longer.”
Herr Carovius tore himself loose from her. ”

“ Daniel found the members of the orchestra only too glad to take the excursion over to Herr von Erfft’s. They were put up in a hotel; Daniel himself lived in the castle. The rehearsals were held with zeal and seriousness. Though the name of the Chancellor was still darkened by the clouds of political life, by the enmity of his opponents, by pettiness and misunderstanding, all these young people felt the power of the great Immortal, and were delighted with the idea of meaning something to him, even in the guise of an imaginary world and for only a fleeting hour or two. ”

“ Every one, Eleanore, owes himself his share of happiness, and he can get it if he simply makes up his mind to it. It is not until he has neglected it, abandoned it, and passed it by, that his fate makes a slave out of him.”
“That is just what I do not understand,” said Eleanore, and looked into his face with a more cheerful sense of freedom. “It wounds my heart to see you waging a losing battle against self-deception and ugly defiance. We two cannot think of committing a base deed, Daniel. It is impossible, isn’t it?” ”

“ You must leave men behind and move above them; you dare not become a citizen; you dare not allow yourself to be taken up with things that are dear to you; you must have no companion, neither man nor maid. Time must hover over you cold and quiet. Let your heart be encased in bronze, for music is a flame that breaks through and consumes all there is in the man who created it, except the stuff the gods have forged about their chosen son.”
Why should the picture of this red-haired Jewess, from whom Daniel had fled in terror, not have vanished? ”

“ He was squaring accounts with the woman he had been unable to bring before his Neronic tribunal in bodily form; and all the pent-up hatred in his heart for the musician Nothafft he was emptying into the music of another man. The envy of the man doomed to limit his display of talent to the appreciation of what another had created laid violent hands on the creator; the impotence of the taster was infuriated at the cook. It was as if a flunked and floored comedian had gone out into the woods to declaim his part with nothing but the echo of his own voice to answer back. ”

“ She knelt down by the cradle of little Agnes, but the child said to her only too distinctly: “Mother, you must take your life.”
Eleanore came in. On her brow was the light of enjoyed happiness; her whole body was happiness; her lips trembled and twitched with happiness. But her eyes said. “Sister, you must take your life.”
Philippina stood by the kitchen stove, and whispered to the coals: “Gertrude, you must take your life.” Her father came in, got his dinner, expressed his thanks for it, and went out murmuring, “Daughter, you must take your life; believe me, it will be for the best.” ”

“ At the insinuations of the apothecary his fancy took on new life: he was not a man in whose soul old emotions died out; his lusts never became extinct. Lying on the sofa, taking his midday siesta, he would picture the figure of Eleanore dancing around him in diminutive form. When he sat at the piano and played an étude, he imagined he saw Daniel standing beside him criticising his technique—and doing it with much show of arrogance. When he went out of evenings, he saw Nothafft displayed on all the signs, while every demi-monde bore Eleanore’s features. ”

“ But she noticed that this man studied her, not as if she were a young married woman who were trying to please him and gain his sympathy, rather as a curious variety of the human species. There was something in his face that made her tremble with irritation, and all of a sudden her eyes were filled with hate and distrust.
Benda felt sorry for her. This everlasting attempt to make a seductive gesture, this fishing for words that would convey a double meaning, this self-betrayal, this excitement about nothing, made him feel sad. Dorothea did not seem to him a bad woman. ”

“ I have been a man, a husband, and a father; that is, I have been a father! My existence scorns the laws and purposes of nature. To eat, to drink, to sleep—oh, what repulsive occupations! And yet, if I do not eat, I get hungry; if I do not drink, I get thirsty; if I do not sleep, I get sick. How simple, how aimless it all is! For me the birds no longer sing, the bells no longer ring, the musicians have no more music.”
Owing to her desire to find consolation of some kind and at any price, she turned to Eberhard and Sylvia; they were now visiting Daniel almost every day. ”

“ She was silent, just as Daniel himself was silent. All she did was to lay her hand on his forehead occasionally. He murmured: “Mother, oh Mother!” She replied: “Now don’t! Don’t think of me!”
She said to herself: “When an Eleanore dies in the full bloom of youth, one must mourn until the soul of its own accord again grows hungry for life.”
At first Eva had tried to play with her little step-sister; but Philippina had chased her from the room. Once she turned against the enraged daughter of Jason Philip Schimmelweis, and said: “I’ll tell my father on you!” ”

“ With great earnestness Daniel replied: “If the music I hear is not of unique superiority, it sounds in my ears like something that has been hashed over a thousand times. My wife must consider herself quite above a reasonably melodious dilettantism.”
Tears rushed to Dorothea’s eyes. Again she was unable to grasp the meaning of it all. She even imagined that Daniel was making a conscious effort to be cruel to her.
For her violin playing had been a means of pleasing—pleasing herself, the world. It had been a means of rising in the world, of compelling admiration in others and blinding others. ”

“ But if I am bound to them only by the ties of duty, they are not symbols; they are mere phantoms, conceptions of human speech. There is no duty but the duty of love.”
Sylvia had sat in perfect silence. Unconsciously she had followed the most beautiful law of harmonious souls: to wield an influence, to have power, not through the use of words and the elaboration of reasons, but by a pure life, an unquestioned existence. Agreement and disagreement lay like a play of light and shadow on her brow.
In this way she reminded Eberhard more and more of Eleanore. ”