Chapter 6

He spent the summer, autumn, and winter of 1893 wandering around. Now he was in a remote Thuringian village, now in some town in the Rhön region, now in the mountains of Saxony, now in a fishing village on the Baltic. Throughout the day he worked on his manuscripts, in the evening he composed. No one except the members of the firm of Philander and Sons knew where he was. He did not dare hide himself from the people who were sending him the cheque at the end of the month.

He gradually became so unaccustomed to talking that it was only with difficulty that he could ask a hotel-keeper about the price of his room. This unrelieved silence chiselled his lips into ghastly sharpness.

He never heard from his mother or his children. He seemed to have forgotten that there were human beings living who thought of him with affection and anxiety.

The only messages he received from the world were letters that were forwarded to him at intervals of from four to five weeks by the musical firm in Mayence. These letters were written by Regina Sussmann, though they were not signed in her name: the signature at the close of each one was “The Swallow.” She addressed Daniel by the familiar Du, and not by the more conventional and polite Sie.

She told him of her life, wrote of the books she had read, the people she had met, and gave him her views on music. Her communications became in time indispensable to him; he was touched by her fidelity; he was pleased that she did not use her own name. She had a remarkable finesse and power of expression, and however ungenuine and artificial she may have appealed to him in personal association, everything she wrote seemed to him to be natural and convincing. She never expressed a wish that he do something impossible and never uttered a complaint. On the other hand, there was a passion of the intelligence about her that was quite new to him; she was unlike the women he had known. And there was a fervour and certainty in her appreciation of his being before which he bowed as at the sound of a higher voice.

Though he never answered her letters, he looked forward to receiving them, and became impatient if one were overdue. He often thought of the swallow when he would step to the window on a dark night. He thought of her as an all-seeing spirit that hovered in the air. The swallow—that was fraught with meaning—the restless, delicate, swift-flying swallow. And in his mind’s eye he saw the swallow that hovered over Ægydius Place when Eberhard came to take him up to the room with the withered flowers.

He wrote to Philippina: “Decorate my graves. Buy two wreaths, and lay them on the graves.”

“You must mount to the clouds, Daniel, otherwise you are lost,” was one passage in one of the letters from the Swallow. Another, much longer, ran: “As soon as you feel one loneliness creeping over you, you must hasten into another, an unknown one. If your path seems blocked, you must storm the hedges before you. If an arm surrounds you, you must tear yourself loose, even though it cost blood and tears. 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? There was a Muse such as poets dream of! “Jewess, wonderful Jewess,” thought Daniel, and this word—Jewess—took on for him a meaning, a power, and a prophetic flight all its own.

“The work, Daniel Nothafft, the work,” wrote this second Rahel in another letter, “the rape of Prometheus, when are you going to lay it at the feet of impoverished humanity? The age is like wine that tastes of the earth; your work must be the filter. The age is like an epileptic body convulsed with agonies; your work must be the healing hand that one lays on the diseased brow. When will you finally give, O parsimonious mortal? when ripen, tree? when flood the valley, stream?”

But the tree was in no hurry to cast off the ripened fruit; the stream found that the way to the sea was long and tortuous; it had to break through mountains and wash away the rocks. Oh, those nights of torment when an existing form crashed and fell to the earth in pieces! Oh, those hundreds of laborious nights in which there was no sleep, nothing but the excited raging of many voices! Those grey mornings on which the sun shone on tattered leaves and a distorted face, a face full of suffering that was always old and yet new! And those moonlight nights, when some one moved along singing, not as one sings with joy, but as the heretics who sat on the martyr benches of the Inquisition! Then there were the rainy nights, the stormy nights, the nights when it snowed, and when he chased after the phantom of a melody that was already half his own, and half an incorporeal thing wandering around in boundless space under the stars.

Each landscape became a pale vision: bush and grass and flower, like spun yarn seen in a fever, the people who passed by, and the clouds fibrillated above the forests were of one and the same constituency. Nothing was tangible; the palate lost its sense of taste, the finger its sense of touch. Bad weather was welcome; it subdued the noises, made men quieter. Cursed be the mill that clappers, the carpenter who drives the nails, the teamster who calls to his jaded pair, the laughter of children, the croaking of frogs, the twittering of birds! An insensate man looks down upon the scene, one who is deaf and dumb, one who would snatch all clothing and decorations from the world, to the end that neither colour nor splendour of any description may divert his eye, one who mounts to heaven at night to steal the eternal fire, and who burrows in the graves of the dead by day—an outcast.

In the beginning of spring, he started on the third movement, an andante with variations. It expressed the gruesome peace that hovered over Eleanore’s slumbering face one night before her death. The springs within him were all suddenly dried up; he could not tell why his hand was paralysed, his fancy immobile.

One evening he returned from a long journey to Arnstein, a little place in Lower Franconia, where he had then pitched his tent. He was living in the house of a seamstress, a poor widow, and as he came into the room he noticed her ten-year-old daughter standing by the open box in which he had kept the mask of Zingarella. Out of a perfectly harmless curiosity the child had removed the lid, and was standing bewitched at the unexpected sight.

When Daniel’s eyes fell on her, she was frightened; her body shook with fear; she tried to run away. “No, no, stay!” cried Daniel. He felt the emaciated body, the timidly quivering figure, and a distant memory sunk its claws deep into his breast. The mouth of the mask seemed to speak; the cheeks and forehead shone with a brilliant whiteness. And as he turned his eyes away there was a little elf dancing over him; and this little elf aroused a guilty unrest in his heart.