Chapter 5

Daniel had been in Berlin for weeks. He had been living a lonely life on the east side of the gigantic city. One of the managers of Philander and Sons came to see him. He returned the call, and in the course of two hours he was surrounded, contrary to his own will, by a veritable swarm of composers, directors, virtuosos, and musical critics.

Some had heard of him; to them he appeared to be a remarkable man. They threw out their nets to catch him, but he slipped through the meshes. Unprepared, however, as he was for their schemes, he could not help being caught in time. He had to give an account of himself, to unveil himself. He found himself under obligations, interested, and so forth, but in the end they could not prevail against him: he simply passed through them.

They laughed at his dialect and his rudeness. What drew them to him was his self-respect; what annoyed them was his secretiveness; what they found odd about him was the fact that, try as they might to associate with him, he would disappear entirely from them for months at a time.

A divorced young woman, a Jewess by the name of Regina Sussmann, fell in love with him. She recognised in Daniel an elemental nature. The more he avoided her the more persistent she became. At times it made him feel good to come once again into intimate association with a woman, to hear her bright voice, her step more delicate, her breathing more ardent than that of men. But he could not trust Regina Sussmann; she seemed to know too much. There was nothing of the plant-like about her, and without that characteristic any woman appealed to him as being unformed and uncultured.

One winter day she came to see him in his barren hall room in Greifswald Street. She sat down at the piano and began to improvise. At first it was all like a haze to him. Suddenly he was struck by her playing. What he heard made a half disagreeable, half painful impression on him. He seemed to be familiar with the piece. She was playing motifs from his quartette, his “Eleanore Quartette” as he had called it. It came out that Regina Sussmann had been present at the concert given in Leipzig three years ago when the quartette was performed.

After a painful pause Regina began to ask some questions that cut him to the very heart. She wanted to know what relation, if any, the composition bore to actual life. She was trying to lift the veil from his unknown fate. He thrust her from him. Then he felt sorry for her: he began to speak, with some hesitation, of his symphony. There was something bewitching, enchanting in the woman’s passionate silence and sympathy. He lost himself, forgot himself, disclosed his heart. He built up the work in words before her, pictured the seven movements like seven stairs in the tower of a temple, a glorious promenade in the upper spheres, a tragic storm with tragically cheerful pauses of memory and meditation, all accompanied by laughing genii that adorned and crowned the pillars of the structure of his dreams.

He went to the piano, began playing the melancholy leading motif and the two subsidiary themes, counterpointed them, ran into lofty crescendos, introduced variations, modulated and sang at the same time. The pupils of his eyes became distended until they shone behind his glasses like seas of green fire. Regina Sussmann fell on her knees by the piano. It may be that she was so affected by his playing that she could not act otherwise; and it may be that she wished thereby to give him visible proof of her respect and adoration. All of a sudden the woman became repulsive to him. The unleashed longing of her eyes filled him with disgust. Her kneeling position appealed to him as a gesture of mockery and ridicule: a memory had been desecrated. He sprang to his feet and rushed out of the room, leaving her behind and quite alone. He never said a word; he merely bit his lips in anger and left. When he came back home late that night, he was afraid he might meet her again; but she was not there. Only a letter lay on the table by the lamp.

She wrote that she had understood him; that she understood he had been living in the past as if in an impregnable fortress, surrounded by shadows that were not to be dispelled or disturbed by the presumption of any living human being. She remarked that she had neither intention nor desire to encroach upon his peace of mind, that she was merely concerned for his future, and was wondering how he would fight down his hunger of body and soul.

“Shameless wretch,” cried Daniel, “a spy and a woman!”

She remarked, with almost perverse humility, that she had recognised his greatness, that he was the genius she had been waiting for, and that her one desire was to serve him. That is, she wished to serve him at a distance, seeing that he could not endure her presence. She implored him to grant her this poor privilege, not merely for his own sake, but for the sake of humanity as well.

Daniel threw the letter in the stove. In the night he woke up with a burning desire for delicate contact with an untouched woman. He dreamed of a smile on the face of a seventeen-year-old girl innocently playing around him—and shuddered at himself and the thought of himself.

Shortly after this he went to Dresden, where he had some work to do in the Royal library.

People came to him anxious to place themselves at his service. Many signs told him that Regina Sussmann was making fervent propaganda for him.

One day he received a letter from a musical society in Magdeburg, asking him to give a concert there. He hesitated for a long while, and then agreed to accede to their wish. Outwardly it could not be called an unusually successful evening, but his auditors felt his power. People with the thinnest smattering of music forgot themselves and became infatuated with his arms and his eyes. An uncertain, undetermined happiness which he brought to the hearts of real musicians carried him further along on his career. For two successive winters he directed concerts in the provincial towns of North Germany. He was the first to accustom the people to strictly classical programmes. It is rare that the first in any enterprise of this kind reaps the gratitude of those who pay to hear him. Had he not desisted with such Puritanical severity from feeding the people on popular songs, opera selections, and favourite melodies, his activity would have been much better rewarded. As it was, his name was mentioned with respect, but he passed through the streets unacclaimed.

Regina Sussmann was always on hand when he gave a concert. He knew it, even if he did not see her. At times he caught sight of her sitting in the front row. She never approached him. Articles redolent with adulation appeared in the papers about him: it was manifest that she had been influential in having them written. Once he met her on the steps of a hotel. She stopped and cast her eyes to the ground; she was pale. He passed by her. Again he was filled with longing to come into intimate contact with an untouched woman. Was his heart already hungry, as she had predicted? He bit his lips, and worked throughout the whole night. He felt that he was being fearfully endangered by the prosy insipidity of the age and the world he was living in. But could he not escape the terrors of such without having recourse to a woman? The shadows receded, enveloped in sorrow, Gertrude and Eleanore, wrapped in the embrace of sisters.

“Don’t!” they cried. He saw at once that his provincial concerts were leading him to false goals, enflaming false ambitions, robbing him of his strength. He no longer found it possible to endure the sight of brilliantly lighted halls, and the over-dressed people who came empty and left untransformed. It all seemed to him like a lie. He desisted; he threw it all overboard just as the temptation was strongest, just as the Berlin Philharmonic invited him to give a concert of his own works in its hall.

He had suddenly disappeared. In less than three months his name had become a saga.