A MAD LOVE

Browning

The scene, Vienna: the time, October in the early eighteen nineties.

I had been studying at the University a couple of semesters and had fallen in love with the gay good-humoured capital. In the Laudonstrasse I had two rooms and a bathroom. I put an Oriental rug or two in my sitting-room and I had to laugh when the maid-servant, the first time she came into the room, took off her boots for fear of hurting the carpet. It was a symbol to me of the contrasts so characteristic of Vienna between the primitive simplicity of a peasant folk and the stately ceremonial of the Court and extravagant luxuries of the nobility. The many-coloured cosmopolitan life drew me from my books; and I am afraid I was a poor student.

One day, seduced by the beauty of the afternoon, I made up my mind to take a long walk. I went down the Prater to the river. The great drive spread before me, tempting me on, but I had started too late; the carriages were all returning to the city at high speed; night was drawing down and there was a premonition of rain in the air.

I had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile beside the river when my attention was drawn to a Schutzmann who had gone over to wake a man on one of the benches. He stood before the huddled-up figure, speaking to it but getting no answer. I paused to see what he would do. He said something more; still no reply. Shrugging his shoulders he went off unconcernedly with the easy-going good nature of the Viennese. A glance showed me a man with a greyish beard sleeping heavily. Exchanging a smile of comprehension with the Schutzmann, I went on my way briskly, hoping still to get a walk before it rained.

An hour later a slight wind had arisen, and the leaves began to whirl down from the trees and a slow drizzle set in. The gay scene of the afternoon, with the sparkling river and the stream of carriages and well-dressed people, had all vanished, and as I walked back the desolation of the autumn evening grew on me.

As I neared the town I thought of the wastrel on the bench, and when I got opposite him I was struck by the fact that he did not seem to have moved in the meantime; he was still huddled up in the corner, with his head on his left arm; I could just distinguish the tuft of his beard.

“He’ll get wet,” I thought to myself; “I had better wake him.”

I went over and spoke to him, grasping his shoulder. No response: the sleep was too profound. A vague disquietude came over me. I touched his right hand, which was lying on his knee, and started back; it was cold. Could the man be dead? I pushed his leg and it moved with my hand; he was not dead, but sleeping the sleep of profound exhaustion.

I shook him vigorously, and after a moment or two he turned his head and looked at me.

“Wake up,” I said, “you’ll catch your death of cold here.”

At first he did not answer. His face struck me. The eyes looking at me were not large, but young and unfriendly keen, a light blue that went with his rufous hair and bronzed complexion. The beard was reddish grey and unkempt, but at the first glance I noticed his beaked nose and strong, bony jaws—the face of a man of character, strong and well-balanced. A small moustache shadowed the mouth; the lips were well-cut, sensitive but not sensual. If this man had come to grief, I said to myself, it was not through fleshly lusts. What could be the cause?

He was not badly dressed. His hands were clean and cared for. Why did he not speak?

“It is too cold and wet to sleep here,” I attacked again; “wake up; you must feel cold already.”

“What is that to you?” he said slowly. “Leave me alone!”

“I was afraid you’d catch cold,” I stammered in surprise.

“And if I want to catch an everlasting cold, what’s that to you?”

I was nonplussed—the man’s language, the extraordinary resolution in the toneless voice—all staggered me.

“I happened to touch your hand,” I said, “and found it cold, so I was afraid you’d get really ill sleeping here in the wet.”

“Oh, be damned!” he barked, “I was happily unconscious till you called me back to life. What possessed you? Couldn’t you leave me alone? I had left all the misery of living behind; now it’s all to do over again. Go away!”

“Will you, an educated man,” I said, “allow yourself to die here of cold like a starved dog? Come, man, have another wrestle with Fate.”

He did not move, but simply looked at me. “I don’t want another wrestle,” he said, in the same slow, toneless voice; “I am more than half-way through. Leave me alone!”

“You are not half-way through,” I exclaimed, feigning a laugh. “You’ll probably get pneumonia and have a dreadful month in a hospital.”

“I am cold all through already,” he said. “I have not eaten for a week. Death is at my heart.”

I was young and have more than a grain of obstinacy in me; I could not leave him to die.

“If I wanted to die,” I exclaimed, “I would take the pleasantest way out.”

He didn’t even answer; his eyes closed as if weary.

I persisted. “I’d go out like an artist, warm and happy. I’d meet Death rose-crowned like a conqueror.”

His eyes lightened, then his eyebrows went up and he made a motion with his hand as to say: “Have it as you will.”

A passing fiacre stopped at my lifted hand.

“Come,” I said, “I have a few gulden to spare.”

“You will have to carry me,” he replied. “I’m stiff.”

His immobility struck me. He had not moved all the time we had been talking. I put an arm round his waist and tried to lift him. The driver, with the ready servability of the Viennese, had nipped down from his box and now came across and helped me; with his aid we got the man into the fiacre and I gave the driver my address.

On the way my strange companion said nothing; with shut eyes he leant back in the cab. When we got to my lodgings, the Kutscher sprang off the box and came to the door.

“Can I help the gentleman?”

“I wish you would,” I replied; “it is only two flights up.”

In a few minutes we had got the man into my bed-room and put him in an easy-chair.

“Go to the restaurant at the corner,” I said to the driver, “and get me a bowl of hot soup, will you, and some hot water? I have brandy here, and wine.”

“Certainly, sir,” he said, and hurried off immediately.

I got out some warm winter underthings and tried to get my friend’s coat off, but found it very difficult. I went and got him a glass of brandy, but the moment he tried to swallow it he sputtered it all out.

“I’m sorry,” he apologised, “it’s like liquid fire.”

I made it weaker with some water and gave it to him again and he got it down, but the real help came when the coachman returned with some hot soup and bread. I arranged it on a little table and the first spoonful brought life back to the half-starved man. Meanwhile the coachman busied himself by taking off the man’s boots and putting on a pair of thick socks I handed him, and after the soup had taken effect we managed to undress him and pack him away in the bed.

“You are all right now,” said the coachman, rubbing his hands; “you’ll be asleep in five minutes. I wish I had such ’tendance.”

The hint was not lost on me. When paying him I gave him a glass of brandy, for which he thanked me by calling me “Herr Baron”! with the instinctive desire to please of the Viennese.

When he had gone I turned to the bed.

“I am not inclined to sleep,” said my friend. “And you don’t even know my name.”

“There is time for that,” I replied.

“It wouldn’t convey anything to you,” he said; “nobody knows me here; but my name is Hagedorn—Emanuel Hagedorn.”

“A long sleep will do you good,” I said; “if you let yourself go, you will soon be asleep. To-morrow is another day.”

I took his clothes and boots into my little sitting-room and closed the door. The boots, I found, were well made; the clothes travel-stained, but good; they only needed brushing and pressing. Meanwhile I would have to arrange a bed for myself in the sitting-room. I went down to see the landlady and soon got everything in order.

Suddenly I remembered that I had not eaten, so I went out and had a meal at the Friedenhof near by, where I sometimes went when the weather was bad. When I came back my bed was made up on the sofa and a little wood fire was burning on the hearth.

I listened at the door but heard nothing in the bedroom save regular quiet breathing. Reassured, I went to sleep. In the morning I was up early, but I had scarcely moved across the floor when I heard sounds in the other room. At almost the same moment the maid knocked, bringing coffee and bread and Hagedorn’s clothes. I called through the door, “Good-morning!” and went on dressing.

Half-an-hour later there was a tap at my door and Hagedorn came in quietly—self-possessed. As I stood up he nodded to me and we were for a moment opposite each other. I caught my breath; he was so calm and completely master of himself, without a trace of humility; there was an air of assured strength about him that was imposing.

I pointed to the arm-chair near me and said: “Won’t you sit down? Please throw off ceremony.”

He took the chair at once.

“How do you feel now?” I asked.

“Perfectly well,” he said; “without a trace of cold or even cough; I never felt better. Fasting must be good for one. My head is perfectly clear and I am fairly strong.”

“You will be better after a good meal,” I responded. “Where would you like to dine?”

“It is a matter of indifference to me,” he said. “I am in your hands in more senses than one, though I must warn you again, sooner or later you will recognise that your help and kindness have been wasted. You see,” he went on, “it was not a sudden resolve on my part, but a slowly ripening resolution that still holds, though I recognise the sense of what you said, that if one must kill oneself, one should choose the pleasantest way. Very practical, you English.”

“I am not English,” I corrected, “but Celt, and not very practical, I fear, but I feel that whoever wishes to swim can swim.”

He laughed grimly.

“Women float almost in spite of themselves,” he said—“fat hips and small head; they are only pulled down by their clothes—vanity. The athlete or thinker, head and muscles, goes under unless he swims; fat floats.”

“What age are you?” I broke in. The night before I thought he was fifty; now he looked much younger.

“Not thirty-four,” he replied. “You are astonished. My beard turned grey in the last three or four months (he had shaved it off, I noticed). It is hard to make up your mind to leave life; it costs blood!”

“I don’t want even to hear the story yet,” I said. “I want you to have a couple of days’ rest and get quite well and strong.”

“As you will,” he replied, “but you are warned.”

Two or three days passed, and as if by mutual consent we kept off the topic that was in both our minds. I did not go to the University, but instead took long walks with Hagedorn. It happened to be beautiful weather, almost like an American fall with its bright sunshine but softer, gentler skies, and the Viennese were gay and laughter-loving as only Viennese can be. Hagedorn did not talk much, and yet he impressed me as a man of real power. We went to the theatre almost every night. When I proposed the Opera he shook his head. “I call it the house of prostitution,” he said; “hateful, for it should be a temple.”

“Is it the operatic form you dislike,” I questioned, “or music?”

“Music is only in its infancy,” he remarked contemptuously, “and opera is a bastard form.”

“What do you mean by infancy?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and didn’t answer for a moment, and then began:

“Did it never strike you that other arts, arts of seeing, like drawing and painting, are universal; whereas music, the art of hearing, is merely national, or, if you will, European? As soon as our artists saw Chinese paintings and Chinese sculpture they recognised their greatness; Chinese pottery, too, ranks above our own. Even Japanese colour-prints revealed to us new decorative possibilities; painting is an art with a universal appeal. But Music! Let a Chinaman listen to a Wagner opera or a Beethoven symphony and he just shrugs his shoulders; it’s all to him a medly of unpleasant or, at best, meaningless noises. Go yourself to hear Japanese music and you will find nothing in it that appeals to you. Music as yet is in its infancy and I don’t care to listen to the babbling.”

This was not the first time the man had surprised me with new thoughts. As he sat there, turned sideways in indifference, his face, I thought, had the carved outlines and colour of a Venetian bronze. Every hour he interested me more; he had taste in food and wine, I noticed, and the manners of a great gentleman; he was surely “someone,” as the French say.

A few days later we went to an open-air restaurant outside the town, and after a good meal sat talking; or, rather, I talked about writing and writers, in doubt whether I should ever do anything worth while.

Suddenly Hagedorn broke out:

“Why put off the day of reckoning? I could not be better than I am, and you ought to know how hopeless this rescue work of yours is. I may even be able to do you some good, show you how foolish the whole struggle of life is, especially for the artist.”

Full of curiosity, I acquiesced.

“Let us walk back and talk it over,” I said. And back we went to my rooms.

He took a cigar and I lit a cigarette, and we sat opposite each other for what I felt was going to be an interesting talk, for in this week or so of intimacy Hagedorn had made a profound impression on me; his casual remarks were often original, indeed curiously provocative and stimulating. He was a few years older than I, but he had the air of being much older, much more experienced. He had evidently drunk deep of life; I had barely sipped the cup; yet I resented a little the sort of authority that sat naturally upon him.

“I want to tell you the whole story,” he began, “because you’ll understand it. I am an artist and you are training yourself to be an artist in words. It is we artists who come to the worst grief, not because we are weak, as the Philistines imagine, but because our burden is intolerably heavy—heavy, I often think, in proportion to our gifts.”

“What do you mean?” I exclaimed. “The burden should surely be light if the gifts are great.”

He shrugged his eyebrows in a way he had of indicating polite tolerance of my ignorance.

“You will hear,” he said.

“There are to my mind two sorts of artists. The best artists are great men first and artists afterwards. You may have noticed that I did not agree when you spoke of Beethoven and Wagner in the conventional way. These men are both great because they were great men, not because they’re great musicians. Wagner would have been, in my opinion, an even greater writer than musician, if he had given himself to literature. His early libretti are finer than his music.

“Then you have an artist like Franz Hals, who is a born painter, or Watteau; his very colours please you like a child’s smile; there is joy and beauty in the mere tints. Everyone can see that Watteau is infinitely more gifted as a painter than Rembrandt; Rembrandt carries it because he was the greater man.”

“How are you so sure he was the greater man?” I asked. “Where do you find the shortcoming in Watteau?”

Hagedorn paused for a moment, then began: “Do you know his Embarquement pour Cythère in the Louvre?”

I nodded, and he went on:

“You have the advantage of me. I have only seen a print; but the motive is that couples in love are going to sail to the Isle of Venus. The first couples are away up on a hill in the right-hand corner of the canvas; then to the left of them other pairs, and finally, down by the water’s edge on the lower left side, the boat. But the procession should have started from the left-hand top corner and gone down to the right; our eyes, probably through reading, move more easily from left to right. Had Watteau thought over the matter he could not have made such a blunder in construction. The brain-work in Rembrandt is far higher.”

“Of course, of course!” I cried. “A fair illustration.”

Hagedorn went on: “I often think a great painter should be able to paint a wonderful picture by merely putting different colours on a canvas without any representment of reality or likeness to the actual.”

“Then you’re a painter!” I cried.

“No, no!” he said. “I’m nothing. I was a musician with an extraordinary gift. Whether I had any greatness in me, you will be able to judge better than most; but I came to believe that I had.

“My father was a Kapellmeister in Salzburg; pure German, I believe. My mother was a singer who lost her voice with me, her first child. She must have been a Jewess, I think, but I never saw a pair that loved and lived in such unison as my father and mother. No one could have had a happier childhood than I. When I was six or seven they found out I had a wonderful ear, and they tried to keep me away from music. My father had a dread of precocity and infant prodigies. He always said that Mozart would have lived much longer and done much better work if he had not begun so early. He used to condemn our practice of starting racehorses at two years of age; he thought if we started them at five or six we should have better horses. And I dare say he was right. He had brains, my father, and my mother agreed with him in everything and always did what he wished.

“They sent me to school, and school was easy for me. I had a quick, retentive memory and learned without trouble. I tell you all this not to praise myself, but to make you understand the tragedy. Then I got to know a shoemaker who lived near us who had a violin, and I used to go round and play with him. I don’t know how I learnt, but I did. One day my father, who had been first violin in the orchestra at the Opera, took out his violin and played for us, I forget what. I was about ten. I took the violin from him and began to play. You should have seen his surprise and my mother’s pride, and my own gratified conceit. I shall never forget that day! But Fate hates the favourites of Fortune!

“After that they set me free. My father was delighted to teach me instrument after instrument, and I learnt three or four, including the ’cello and the piano.”

“Do you know four instruments?” I broke in.

“I can play any instrument,” he said carelessly.

“Good God!” I exclaimed, “and you found it difficult to make a living?”

“No, no!” he cried. “I never said that. I’ve found it difficult to live, but I never had any difficulty in making a living. It’s our dreams kill us. It is the heaven we see before us and cannot realise, or the Paradise we’ve been driven out of, that makes life disgusting to us and kills us. We artists die of our dreams as of the plague.”

“I do not understand,” I said. “Go on, please.”

“Let me come to the point at once,” he said.

“I am one of the few persons born with an ear for music; there are not three in a generation; I’ve never met another. You don’t know why or how Bach arranged his wohl temperirtes Clavier, do you? [I shook my head.] It would take too long to explain; but the piano is still imperfect. Take C sharp and D flat. They both sound the same to you; but C sharp is twelve vibrations faster than D flat. I can hear them; anyone can hear the difference on the violin. The violin can give you the true note; the piano doesn’t; that’s why a great violinist is often out of pitch with an orchestra, and why the only good music is that of a string quartet.”

“But you,” I cried—“can you hear all that?”

“I have absolute pitch,” he replied. “You do not know what that means. It means that between two notes that succeed each other you hear only an interval. I know myriads of tones between them. Our musical notation is all imperfect.

“Now, what does this imply? The painter is able to give you an idea of any living thing at once in three or four strokes. He can show you the difference between a woman’s figure and a man’s; between a cow and a buffalo; between a lion and a tiger. He can represent anything he sees. Why can’t the musician represent anything he hears? Why isn’t he able to give you the songs of birds, the sound of the wind in the trees, the long withdrawn rustle of the tide ebbing on a beach? Because music is a half-art, and the sounds of Nature are infinitely too complex for our silly scales.”

“But did not Wagner give us a storm at sea in Der Fliegende Hollaender? And what of the ‘Waldvogel’ in Siegfried?” I asked.

Hagedorn laughed scornfully. “Talk to me of that storm; it’s childish. And the ‘Waldvogel’! Why not ask a painter to paint the wood-beast? He’d ask you, ‘Which one, squirrel or bear?’ The wood-bird is just as ridiculous. Wagner had to use a flute for his bird’s note, simply because there is a surface likeness between a blackbird’s song and a flute, but the violin can give the tone much better if he had only known it. Don’t let us talk of Wagner as a musician!

“Mascagni tried to give the nightingale in Parisina; the song went on for forty-five minutes and was intolerably bad; they had to cut out the bird. I gave that opera the name it’s known by now in Italy, ‘Opera a forbici’—the opera with the scissors. Do you remember The Creation, by Haydn, and the beasts in it? Isn’t that imitation ridiculous?”

I nodded.

“But can you render the nightingale’s song?” I probed.

He bowed his head. “So that any nightingale near will answer me at once, even in broad daylight.”

“Good God!” I cried in utter astonishment.

“I can give you the music of the wind in the trees too,” he went on, “or of the sea in storm or calm; I can imitate whatever I hear, exactly as a draughtsman-artist can reproduce any form or any scene at will.”

“What a gift!” I cried again.

Hagedorn shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the alphabet of my art; but the gift made me infinitely conceited, and was one cause of my undoing.

“My parents got so proud of me that they humoured me in everything. I began to appear at concerts and to show off. My father did all he could to hold me back; he kept me on at school till I was about fourteen, but I would not hear of the university. I did not go through even the top classes in the gymnasium. Life tempted me terribly and lessons were intolerable to one who had tasted the heady wine of applause from great audiences. Girls sought me out like moths seek a light, and I was eager to meet them. I got into life too early, and drank too deep with that desperate, unquenchable thirst of youth. I took double mouthfuls, as the French say....

“The only thing except making love and kissing I would practise was my violin, unless, of course, I was learning some new instrument; but that was part of my showing off. I really had only to conquer the little technical difficulties peculiar to each instrument, and almost at once I was master of it. I knew its weaknesses and its powers by instinct, and soon got to the end of them. But a violin—if you get a good one—has hardly any limitations; its virtues are yours and its shortcomings yours——”

“I would give anything to hear you play!” I exclaimed. “We must get a violin. But I cannot afford a Stradivarius,” I added lugubriously. “I am quite poor.”

“A Stradivarius is not needed,” he replied. “I can find a violin as good as any Strad, here in Vienna in a week; the best things have few lovers.”

“What would such a violin cost?” I asked.

“Oh! anywhere from fifty to two hundred kronen; it’s a matter of chance; I may not find one in a month.”

“I will let you have the money,” I said. “I want to hear you play so much. But weren’t you in request everywhere; weren’t you tempted at every moment by big offers?”

“I was in Paris playing on my own hook,” he replied, “with an apartment on the Grand Boulevard before I was seventeen. That same summer I played at the Albert Hall in London. I do not need to tell you what my nom de théâtre was. It’s better forgotten. Gifts don’t matter; it is by the soul alone we count.”

“But how did you come to grief?” I asked. “You had everything: health, strength, fine presence, extraordinary talent; eminence in an art while still a youth. What brought you to despair?”

“Looking back,” he said, “it seems to me that a good many causes combined over several years; but I would prefer, if you are content, to let you find out for yourself. The forces are all there still; they are operating now as before, but I think you ought to be convinced first that I am not bragging or extolling my powers unduly. If you’ll buy me a violin, you’ll always get your money back for it, and a few days’ practice will make it easy for me to show you what I can do.”

I gave him the money that same day, and for nearly a week afterwards scarcely saw him, except at an occasional meal; then he appeared with a violin.

“Fortune favoured me,” he said. “I’ve got an Amatis—as good an instrument as one could wish to have; luck has always been with me. Now if you are going regularly to your lectures I will practise here every morning, and you can make any arrangements you like for hearing me play, say, on Tuesday week, and I will try to show you that you did not help a wastrel.”

Having started as a journalist in the States, I had formed connections with some newspapers in Vienna and got to know a good many critics. Since meeting Hagedorn I had talked to two or three of my journalist friends about him, and now I told them of his extraordinary powers and got them all intensely interested. I issued invitations for the next Tuesday afternoon, and besought all the journalists I knew to bring any real critics with them. They all told me they would turn up, and one in particular, the best writer on a musical weekly, declared he would have a great surprise for us; he would bring one of the greatest artists in the world to hear my friend. I could not help going in and reading his cordial, and kindly letter to Hagedorn, hoping it would excite him and nerve him to do his very best. He listened to me reading the letter and then said:

“I am glad for you, my friend; your probation won’t be long.”

“But you don’t see!” I exclaimed. “If this great musician takes you up, swears you are extraordinary, anything, everything may come to pass.”

He shook his head. “It is not a cancer spot you can cut out,” he said, “or a sore to cure. But I shall be ready. You’ll see. Only do not let them see me or meet me. Keep them in the other room.”

I was a little surprised, but I arranged chairs in my sitting-room so as to seat about twenty-five or thirty people.

When the great afternoon came I was intensely excited. The room was crowded—forty people instead of twenty-five, and all on tiptoe of expectance. Suddenly the musical critic entered, bringing with him Joachim.

“I don’t need to introduce Joachim to you,” he said, “the greatest violin player in the world.”

Of course I insisted on his taking the seat of honour, and I could not help sneaking into the back room to tell Hagedorn that Joachim had come to hear him. He smiled, but his eyes were sad, and I returned a little chilled. He had given me the outline of the programme, and it ran something like this:

1. A young nightingale learning to sing.

2. A nightingale after he has found his love.

3. How he should sing.

4. A Comment on Life.

I announced the first three, and we all sat down to listen in strained attention. After a little pause the nightingale’s notes began to fall like golden beads. At the first break in the voice—extraordinarily lifelike—I saw Joachim start, and from that moment I knew Hagedorn had conquered. There was a hush when he stopped playing, and after a moment quiet applause—I had almost said reverent applause—silenced almost immediately by new notes that rang out in a song of desire and joy.

Words cannot describe such sounds; at least I have no words to describe them. I can be excused for not attempting a task beyond Shelley’s powers. But as the music ceased Joachim jumped to his feet and silenced the clapping.

“No applause,” he said; “let us hear the next; it is most astonishing.”

A moment or two later the next song began—what the nightingale should sing. It went from panting desire to throbs of joy, and from joy to triumph, and then came broken wailing notes caught up now and then with faint reminders of the love-ecstasy. Then—abruptly—silence. Joachim started to his feet again.

“He is not only a great master of the violin,” he said, “but a great, great musician. Who is he? Please let me meet him.”

I stood between him and the door and told him that my friend did not want to be known. The surprise, the admiration of all was manifest. Everyone declared that the performance was wonderful, epoch-making. One after the other found new words with which to praise the unknown master.

Suddenly Hagedorn began to play again. I announced “A Comment on Life.” In absolute silence everyone began to listen.

What was he playing? It was all light and gay and hopeful, like a spring morning, the joy mounting rapidly to passion and delight; higher still to rapture, and then—idiot laughter tore the air! A phantasmagoria began of all sorts of emotions mixed together—joy and pleasure broken by dreadful, meaningless chucklings; moanings and imprecations shrilled to shrieks and ravings, only to die away in ghastly mutterings. We looked at each other; plainly the musician was depicting a madhouse. Exquisite moments of joy and sighs of pleasure, ending in howls of rage and ear-piercing screams—appalling! Then a heavy silence!

No one applauded. I looked up. Joachim was shaking his head.

“Dreadful! Dreadfully painful,” he said. “Art must not give itself to pain. What a pity! A most remarkable mastery. What a pity!” and he hurried from the room. No wish to meet Hagedorn now. The men vanished as quickly as they had come. One alone remained—a young fellow I had scarcely noticed, a critic on a daily paper, since famous, then just beginning to be known.

“Great work!” he cried to me. “Let them all go. I have listened to the greatest violinist I ever expect to hear; greater than Joachim, greater than anyone; a great original master; I must meet him!”

“Come and dine to-night and I will see if I can bring him,” I said.

“Tell him from me,” said the young man, “that I am on my knees before him. He is a great, great man—astounding!”

When he had gone I hurried into the next room to see Hagedorn. He had laid his violin on the bed and was seated in the arm-chair.

“You heard,” I said.

“Everything. Your Joachim was characteristic; true to type, as I knew he would be. The limitations pleased him; my mastery of the instrument even. He has some greatness in him; but the moment I showed him a little more than he was prepared for—revolt, resentment—‘Art was not made,’ if you please, ‘to give itself to pain.’ Instead of a madhouse I ought to have given them a Jew’s view of heaven with golden streets and pearly gates—a childish vision of a tawdry Paradise. But I hope you are satisfied, my friend?”

“More than satisfied,” I replied. “Satisfied that everything you have told me about yourself and your art is true; that you are the greatest musician I have ever heard or expect to hear. I believe you are a great man too, and I am infinitely sorry for you. You heard what young Neumann said. Do you expect, out of forty fools, to get more than two to see you as you are? I think this is the only city in the world in which you could find two enthusiastic admirers!”

He put his hands on my shoulders.

“You are a great boy,” he said, “and if anybody could help me, you would; but it’s too late, if indeed it were ever possible.”

That night young Neumann came to dinner and Hagedorn allowed me to introduce him as the violinist. Neumann said everything I have said here, and said it at far greater length and better, or at least more enthusiastically. He admitted with gay laughter that if he had only heard the madhouse thing he would not have come back for more, but he declared that it seasoned the nightingale’s songs and formed the most perfect contrast to them.

“I want you to play me the thing in all music I love best,” he said to Hagedorn. “It’s the——”

“Stop!” cried Hagedorn. “Don’t say another word; don’t tell me what it is.” And he went into the inner room and began to play.

“He has guessed right,” said Neumann, as the strains floated through the room. And for a wonderful quarter of an hour we listened to the love duet in the second act of Tristan, marvellously rendered, perfectly, so that expectation was surpassed, desire sated.

When he came into the room again Neumann took his hands, with tears in his eyes, and said simply:

“I cannot thank you. Words are nothing.”

“Let us go and dine,” I said, and we went out together. But during dinner we were all very silent. There did not seem much to say, and when we returned to the house and Neumann left us at the door, I could only say to Hagedorn:

“It has been a great day for me, a great day.”

He nodded and went into his bedroom without a word, but I noticed now that his face had something Sphinx-like in it; it was as if carved in stone to endurance.

The next morning Neumann called, just as the coffee came.

“I have been up all night,” he said, “utterly unable to sleep. I could scarcely wait till it was eight o’clock so that I might come round and say that I put myself at your service. Whatever I can do in Vienna I will do. You ought to have been known ten years ago from one end of the world to the other. Give me the chance of telling Vienna who you are and of showing them what you can do.”

Hagedorn smiled. “It is really kind of you,” he said. “Talk it over with my friend here and decide whatever you please.”

“We must give a series of concerts,” cried Neumann in wild excitement; “subscription concerts, half-a-dozen or a dozen, in a large hall, but not too large. I know the very place. We will put the price high and every seat will be filled, and after the first concert every ticket will be worth fifty times its weight in gold. I know Vienna. It is not deaf to genius. I feel sure of a triumph.”

“Not a dozen concerts,” interrupted Hagedorn. “Say three, if you like.”

“I want a crescendo effect,” argued Neumann. “Please give me six concerts and write the programmes. I am sure you can do anything you want to. Pick the musicians you care to honour and give their little-known pieces. Only play one or two of your own things in each concert. Match yourself with the greatest. I tell you, man, it will be a triumph!”

It was good to hear him. That was what I felt too. Surely, surely it was possible to save such an extraordinary genius.

We soon found that our task was going to be an easy one. Neumann got the hall and Hagedorn gave me the programmes for three concerts. He had headed them: “Old Masters”; “Modern Masters”; “The Future.” Neumann begged for more, but he shook his head.

“I want to repay my friend here,” he said. “That’s all.”

Neumann declared that with six concerts we would make fifty thousand kronen—a sum far beyond our hopes or wishes—but he begged so hard that at length Hagedorn consented. I did not interfere with a word. I had already grown doubtful of my right to interfere: “The heart knoweth its own bitterness.”

Finally they settled on four concerts. I could scarcely wait for the first one. At Neumann’s request Hagedorn had made the programmes very long. He began by playing some well-known things from Bach, and insisted on playing them on the instrument for which they were intended—the harpsichord. In his hands the little tinkling instrument became a wonder, and for the first time in my life a fugue of Bach showed itself as an exquisite thing, a jewel as beautiful as a sonnet of Wordsworth—divine music, impeccably perfect.

Then he played Beethoven’s Sonata in B flat: we all had heard it again and again. I had never realised it was so wonderful. Then Mozart, grace and sweetness and joy incarnate.

And then Wagner; the famous passage in the Meistersinger that is, after all, the great egotist’s own trial and supreme triumph.

They were all rendered as I have never heard them rendered before or since, and the audience was enthusiastic as only a Viennese audience can be. For ten minutes the whole programme was interrupted while men stood on their chairs and women clustered together like a flock of doves in front of the platform applauding, laughing, chattering, crying. Really, they seemed to know how great a man he was.

When the women began to crowd into the aisle Hagedorn left the stage. He had insisted upon not even giving his name; the concert was given by “a musician.” Only Neumann and I were on the stage, and I went out with Hagedorn.

When the tumult subsided he came in again and began to play on the violin. First a fugue almost like one of Bach’s. Then he gave us imitations of various masters, almost as beautiful as the originals. Then a pause, and he began a lark’s song. Just a lark’s song some summer morning on a sun-bathed down or upland. What a song! The soul of joy was in it; it was simply irresistible. When he had finished and had bowed and walked off the stage, the audience went mad. In two minutes they had crowded on to the stage. They must see him and speak to him. But when I went out to get him I found he had left the theatre. I went back and told the people that it was impossible to find him. The afternoon papers told us that the price of the remaining seats for the next three concerts had trebled. Neumann was more than delighted.

“Let me see him,” he cried.

“Go and find him,” I said. “You may have more influence with him than I have. I want him encouraged.”

“Encouraged!” exclaimed Neumann. “He must need a lot of encouragement if such appreciation is not enough for him,” and away he went.

When I got home I found Hagedorn had not yet returned. He came in quietly, about half-past six, and we went out to dinner. I had never known him more depressed.

“All this enthusiasm has made no difference to you?” I asked.

He shook his head, and his eyebrows went up.

“The price of the seats has trebled,” I went on.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“But why, why are you so hopeless?” I cried. “Neumann says he has never seen such enthusiasm. The director of the Opera House has written to him, asking for your name and address. It seems his wife and daughter were in the audience and are wild with admiration.”

Hagedorn shook his head. “I’ve had it all before,” he said, “ten years and more ago. Praise does not satisfy the heart, my friend. Life to me is like an obscene monkeys’ cage: I could give you the gibberings and scratchings, the rages and sensualities; but what good would it all do?...

“When I was able to take life seriously, able to hope and enjoy, I failed; the audiences never wanted the best in me, never; but the imitations and childish things. I went on, in spite of the growing conviction that I was born out of due time. Five hundred years hence someone will come who will do my work, and find perhaps half-a-dozen who know him and want him; to-day it is too soon, and I have no wish to encourage or help men; I’m sick of them and their sordid squalor and soulless stupidity.

“Life tests all of us to breaking-point,” he went on, after a long silence. “I know now that the road I trod is the upward road and has been travelled by all who grow. The higher we climb in this world’s esteem the heavier our fall. You remember the text in the Bible, Those whom he loveth he chasteneth. It is so true, that; divinely true. Those whom he loveth he chasteneth, continually, perpetually, without let-up, to the very limit of their endurance. To those whom He hates He gives everything, lavishly, and then the fall is—fatal. ’Twas here in Vienna I met my fate: you may as well hear the whole story now, though it’s not worth the telling....

“I used to send my mother newspaper clippings of my triumphs, and for one reason or another she was always calling me back to her, always wanting me near her. Her mother’s heart was full of apprehension; perfect love is one with fear. Well, I came back to her more than once to rest and recruit. But I no longer shared their religious belief (my mother had long before accepted my father’s Lutheranism), and that made a coolness. Besides, the hope of the ideal always tempted me away again, and a year or so later I would return again to see her and to brag.

“When I was about twenty-two or three I stayed away some years—a foolish, light love affair in Paris that ripened me—but again I returned just before I was twenty-six with two hundred thousand gulden in the bank. I was rich: I loved horses and drove them in the Prater where you found me! drove them tandem, drove four-in-hand, and generally had a pretty girl beside me on the box seat.

“When I went to the Opera I used to go behind the scenes and brag to my heart’s content. With that charming humour of the Viennese they would push me on the stage to play something in the middle of an opera. No one could have been more favoured than I: and then without warning—my fate.

“One evening I was at a loose end. I did not know what to do with myself or where to go. I had just got rid of a girl who was plaguing me with her love which I had tired of; it was too complete, had no limit, no sparkle; nothing bores like meek adoration.

“I had been dining at a restaurant in the Ringstrasse when a couple of men came up to me, one a journalist named Goldescu, and the other a musical critic on some paper; I forget his name. They were wild to take me to see a dancer—‘as great a dancer,’ Goldescu said, ‘as you are a musician. She will be on to-night for half-an-hour.’

“I had nothing to do and nothing better to propose, so I went with them. It was a little restaurant in the Rumanian quarter—a cellar in fact, long, low and no doubt dark in the daytime. We went down a dozen steps to it. A crowd of common people sat about drinking the sour Rumanian wine, Dragasan. The first phrase I heard was ‘Datche me vin’—almost pure Latin. Rumania was a Roman colony under Trajan.

“The proprietor played the Rumanian national instrument, the Kobza, a sort of cross between the guitar and mandolin, and as I got accustomed to the smoke I saw that there was a low stage at the far end of the room. It might have been six or eight feet deep and perhaps a foot high, with a green baize curtain in front of it. No pretence of footlights except two gas-jets in the corners and one in the middle.

“I could not drink the common wine, but the proprietor began to treat us with a good deal of politeness and soon brought me a Tokai which was excellent—one of the great wines of the world.

“My friends talked. Goldescu was a clever fellow and interested me, perhaps because he was of a different race, and too cynical even to believe in virtue, much less seek it.

“After trying to eat one of their strange salads I asked when the show was going to begin, and the proprietor told me he would bring Marie on as soon as he could, but she did not usually appear till eleven o’clock. There was a comic singer who bored me to extinction, and then the proprietor came out beaming: ‘She has come and will appear immediately.’

“I drew my chair clear of the table so as to have an uninterrupted view down the middle of the room. The curtains were drawn aside and we saw a small girlish figure on the stage; Goldescu had said something about her being a Jewess; but she was not of the Jewish type, I thought. Her nose was small and straight; true, her eyes were large and dark and her hair black; but her lips, too, were refined and pretty; and with a certain sense of colour contrast she had thrown yellow veils about her. She was just pretty, I concluded; very pretty even, but nothing more. I had seen more beautiful women, but—there was something provocative-intense about her, besides a dainty aloofness and self-possession.

“The music began—a sort of slow, vague theme, and Marie began to dance; at first very slowly, gracefully; and as she danced she discarded veil after veil. The music took on character. I began to see that it was a sort of representation of love, such a theme as you might witness any evening at the Opera, only there was no pirouetting here, or fast little runs and poisings on a toe; nothing acrobatic; simply at first lithe swayings, hesitations and refusals—reserve apparent always and a sort of fugitive grace; then the yielding little by little, the figure growing clearer and clearer as the veils went, till she stood outlined before us, and reached complete abandonment by sinking down and backward on the stage with outstretched arms while the curtains drew together shutting her off.

“It was charming, graceful, clothed with beauty and the modesty of art. The applause was tremendous; they called for the dance again and again, but no one came. We called too, and applauded loudly, insistently. At length the proprietor went behind the scenes but came back disconsolate. Marie refused to do anything more or to come out. She would bow to the audience when she was dressed and that was all.

“I don’t know how it was, but the simplicity of her methods grew upon me. She was a real artist; her form more perfect even than her face. For some reason or other, in my Uebermuth (I was very arrogant), I thought I would bring her out, so I went over and took a violin from one of the musicians. The proprietor, divining my intention, drew the curtains aside and I stepped on the stage and began to play. I first played some imitations of birds and then a love improvisation giving the spirit of her dancing. I had never played better. Still she did not appear. I put down the instrument and went off with my friends, content never to see the place again or the little Rumanian girl.

“The days passed into weeks; it annoyed me to realise that I could not forget the dancer or blot her from memory. Often I asked myself what was the secret of her influence; why did she live with me when more beautiful women were quickly forgotten? I could never find an answer. Time and again I was on the point of asking Goldescu to bring about a meeting and introduce me; but I disliked the cynical effrontery of the fellow and hated even to think of him in connection with Marie’s reserved beauty and charm.

“One day I met him walking with a girl. I saw the grace of her before I recognised who it was, and from some way off I noticed how people turned to look at her. When Goldescu introduced us she exclaimed:

“‘I hope you don’t mind my disappearing the other evening. If you had stopped after your imitation of the lark I would have come out to meet you. I wanted to tell you how wonderful that bird’s song was; but you rendered the very soul of my dancing with your music and that broke me all up. I could not come out in that bouge with red eyes.’

“‘Very human, these artists,’ cried Goldescu in a comic voice, and we both had to smile.

“‘He’s an artist,’ she said, ‘but I’m only a half-artist, an executant; my body’s my instrument; it happens to be a good one, but if it were a poor one I could do nothing; whereas he doesn’t depend on the instrument at all; his art is in his soul.’

“‘Charming of you,’ I protested, ‘but unjust to yourself. You rendered love delightfully. ’Twas like the Cherubino of Mozart; a quality of youth in it, of freshness and a hint of mature passion as well—an entrancing mixture.’

“She flushed slightly. ‘You don’t know how good it is to be praised by you,’ she said simply, giving me her eyes. ‘If I could be deceived about myself your praise would do it, but—but——’

“‘What does the “but” mean?’ I asked.

“She pointed. ‘We women always want perfection; don’t praise me then. I am curious about you. You carry one’s soul away by your playing, but who are you, you? You seem too young to have climbed the heights.’

“‘Age is not a matter of years,’ I replied. ‘I’m as old as Time.’

“‘A great phrase,’ she cried delightedly, ‘and true. Oh, if only——’

“‘If you two want to make love,’ Goldescu interrupted, ‘why select the street?’

“She shrank at that; so I raised my hat and said: ‘Please let me know where you dance next and I’ll come.’

“I went; her eyes told me she understood that I could not bear our feeling to be cheapened by the Jew’s appraisement.

“I’ve tried to give you a true impression of that first meeting,” said Hagedorn, “but I’ve failed. It was all very simple and I’ve made it sound highfalutin. I’m not an artist in words, you see. But to me she was a revelation, a miracle of frankness, sympathy—charm.

“But ten minutes after I left her I could not help wondering why she went about with that Jew; what was the attraction, the connection. Fishy, it seemed to me; for I knew him, knew that no good thing could live in his atmosphere. I ought to tell you about him but I can’t. I’m conscious I’m not fair to him; no human being could be as vile, sordid, soulless, unscrupulous, cruel and vain as I knew him to be. I’ve heard him boast of things an assassin would be ashamed of. Yet he was big and handsome in a common style, a good writer, a good actor too, and always carried himself with an assured mastery in life. He always held the floor wherever he was. I remember his saying once he could always borrow money from the worldly wise by saying: ‘Give me a hundred gulden; I don’t promise ever to pay you back. You should be willing to pay for my society’; and from greenhorns by insisting it was a loan to be returned next day. The funny part of it was, he said, that a second loan was always easier to get than the first; humans hated to confess even to themselves that they had been fooled. And he believed as little in woman’s virtue as in man’s generosity.

“‘Their refusals,’ he used to say, ‘are all either coldness or calculation. Choose the right moment and——’

“‘And your mother?’ someone retorted one evening.

“‘My race tells you,’ he responded.

“A common nature and mind sharpened by life.

“When we walked together a dozen girls gave him the glad eye for one who noticed me. Don’t think I was envious of his gifts or looks; I never was envious in my life. But though he sought me out I had avoided him always till I found him with Marie.

“Two or three days after that meeting on the street he sent me a ‘wire’ to say he’d call for me at seven to take me to a new dance. I was ready and went with him.

“‘You lucky dog,’ he began. ‘She’s always talking about you and your playing; it’ll be your own fault if you don’t win her, and she’s a seductive little devil. I shouldn’t be surprised if it was her first “affair.” Fancy a professional dancer a virgin—everything’s possible in this mad world! And she certainly has what the French call “the devil in her body.”’

“I could not discuss her with him. The thought of seeing her quickened my blood and with beating heart and glad eyes I went to my fate.

“Yet all the preliminaries were hateful to me. When we reached the concert hall the performance had begun, so Goldescu took me round to the stage door and went to her dressing-room as if it had been his own.

“‘You know the way?’ I asked in surprise.

“‘I should think so,’ he replied characteristically. ‘I’ve paid to learn it in every theatre in Vienna.’

“I could have struck the dog in the face.

“At his knock she opened—‘Come in’—and in we went, though she was not half-dressed.

“‘The days have seemed long,’ she said, turning at once to me. ‘I have thought about you a great deal.’

“I, too, had thought about her; in fact I had hardly thought of anything else.

“The stage bell sounded.

“‘I must get ready,’ she said; ‘forgive me! You’ll come back?’

“‘I shall be delighted! After the show?’ I asked.

“‘After my dance,’ she corrected, smiling. ‘I’ll need only ten minutes to get rid of the grease paint and change: I’ll grudge the minutes.’

“She had voiced my very thought. ‘So shall I,’ I replied like an echo, and we went to our Press seats in the front row.

“Marie’s dance was announced as ‘A Joy Dance,’ and she appeared all in rose; but the skirt was short and the stuff was so thin and so soft that it clung and drew attention to the beauties of her figure in the most provocative way. My mouth parched while looking at her: I could scarcely draw breath, and heavy pulses hammered in my temples. I was filled with a blind rage of jealousy; all these men seeing her nudity seemed an outrage.

“‘In the beginning dress was mere decoration,’ said Goldescu, ‘and not clothing, we are told. Marioutza is a true primitive, eh?’

“I could not trust myself to speak. ‘How could she? Why?’

“I was all interrogation and revolt; angry beyond control. Yet even in my rage I recognised that she was dancing marvellously; now like a lily swaying in water, now floating like thistledown, seeming to rebound as lightly as she came to earth; and when the music quickened and she sprang from the stage, one really felt that she might go higher indefinitely—

It all showed such a union of rare natural gifts and long assiduous practice as only an artist could appreciate.

“She ended her dance by springing into the wings and left us with the image of her willowy, slight figure outlined as distinctly as a figure on a Greek vase.

“We walked about for a few minutes and on turning found her at the stage door.

“‘What do you think of it?’ she asked with the anxiety of the true artist. For the life of me I could not answer as I wanted to.

“‘I liked it, of course,’ I said, ‘liked it immensely; but I preferred your Love Dance.’

“‘Really?’ she cried in such chagrined disappointment that I had to mitigate the rebuff. ‘I mean, love is a greater theme than joy,’ I began. ‘Don’t you think——’

“Goldescu chose this moment to take his leave. ‘Don’t let him cast you down!’ he cried. ‘I’ve never seen you more entrancing: you’re a marvel; but alas! I’ve something special on to-night,’ he added. We let him go almost without noticing him.

“On our way to her rooms the girl enthralled me. She seemed to divine my secret thoughts and my jealousy vanished before her outspokenness. Our talk was confidential and intimate from the beginning.

“‘Your playing the other night,’ she began, ‘was magical, but I was overwrought by it and—and—I wanted to meet you under better conditions: you understand?’

“Of course I understood. It was my own feeling.

“‘I want you to like my Joy Dance,’ she went on. ‘I wrote the music for it myself. Often as a girl the beauty of our river and woodland in summer and the song of the birds used to make me weep for joy. Bukarest is so lovely and I wanted to render that beauty that’s one with joy and delight. I’ve a pretty figure and I’m glad of it. We all love beauty; don’t we?’

“I felt that I had been a brute.

“‘I know, I understand,’ I cried; ‘but I’m a man and had already put you apart and above everyone, and when you showed your figure it made me jealous; it was petty of me.’

“‘Let me explain it to you,’ she said with her childlike sincerity. ‘You know, we dancers look on our bodies as you do on your violin, as our instrument. You love a fine one and know all its good points and so do we. How often we used to laugh at some girl with big shoulders and bust trying to learn to dance; she couldn’t: the instrument was not right.’

“‘But do you like exposing yourself?’ I asked, all my innate prejudices coming to rationalise my jealousy.

“‘I don’t think of it in that way,’ she replied. ‘I want to express a certain emotion: I try to do it as perfectly as I can; I never even think whether I am showing a few inches more or less of figure.... Is that immodest of me? You know, I want you to know me as I am—my faults even. Others may take the grease paint for my complexion: I want you to see me as I really am, heart and soul and all!... I think as a girl I was almost without modesty, in mind as in body. I used to picture and imagine all things to myself. I was dreadfully curious, longed to know this and that. The mind is immoral, isn’t it? or rather it has nothing to do with morality?’ And she looked up at me anxiously. I nodded and she went on:

“‘My mother used to be shocked at me. She was a Catholic and religious, and when she found me studying my figure in the glass (I often wanted to kiss it) she told me that I must be modest, and that the body was sinful.

“‘I couldn’t believe it. I don’t now. I love the curve of my neck, and my small breasts are lovely to me; and even my slender feet please me intimately.’

“I was shaken with delight: she was clear as crystal, with a woman’s depth and a woman’s delight in her beauty. I smiled and she continued:

“‘Am I immodest? I don’t think so. If there were anything ugly about me I’d conceal it and be ashamed of it. I hate my legs because the muscles show; but I can’t help that; it’s part of my art and I’m not modest or immodest about them: I just recognise the fact——’

“‘You dear!’ I cried, ‘I’ve called modesty the fig-leaf of ugliness.’

“‘That’s it, that’s it,’ she crowed with delight; ‘that’s the truth; the talk of the girls in the dance classes I call immodest; but——

“‘I like your strong, stern face,’ she broke off, ‘and the boy’s eyes you have and your bronzed-fair skin pleases me. Why shouldn’t I say so? But most of all, your genius, your wonderful playing, the divine spirit in you——’

“‘You must hear me once at my best!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ll play for you better than I’ve ever played. Let me see. On Friday I play at Prince Lichtenstein’s. Would you come?’

“‘Goldescu wants me to dance there,’ she said. ‘Suppose we both perform in public, yet just for each other?’

“She was ravishing and her eyes held mine. Why were they so beautiful to me? Was it the long dark lashes or the brown brook depths? I can’t say. For the first time in my life I knew love. I could not help touching her hips as we walked side by side; I was drunk with desire. I knew it was love I felt, love once for all, love that was deathless; this was my mate; the strength of my feeling frightened me. I longed to take her in my arms, but refrained; though the passion of admiration I felt for her and her sacred boldness was clear enough, I’m sure, for now and again her eyes gave themselves to mine.

“At her door she held out her hand and though I wanted her lips I restrained myself. I had had so much; I did not want to go in. I wanted to drink the divine cup little by little and prolong the ecstasy. But I could not help putting my hands on her shoulders and looking deep into her eyes while I said: ‘Auf Wiedersehn! Mein Alles!’

“I’m conscious I’ve remembered badly; given you no idea of her charm for me.

“I went home as if on air, drunk with the hope that she loved me, crazy with desire sharpened by this and that picture of her slight fleeting girl’s figure.

“Next morning I awoke to find a letter from her begging me to send or bring her the music I had composed for her Love Dance, so that, as she said, ‘even when dancing I may feel inspired by your spirit.’

“I sat down at once and wrote out the music and took it to her apartment that same afternoon. It was the first time I had seen her in her frame, so to speak. The drawing-room was very simple; half-a-dozen photos of men and girl friends; three or four prints of famous dancers, all sent her by Goldescu, she told me, and nothing more except a piano and the usual furniture. At first she seemed shy; her eyes withdrawn; her hands, I remember, were very cold, but her face was lovelier than I thought; she grew on one; surely her eyes were larger than the night before.

“She made me talk about myself and my tours, of Paris and London and Madrid; ‘people everywhere much the same,’ was her comment. I had to tell her of my mother and father and my beginnings and all I hoped to be and do.

“Then a samovar was brought in and we had tea, and afterwards I went to the piano and played my Love Dance music for her, and as I ended she put her hand on my shoulder and I could not help putting my arm round her waist, seeking to draw her to me. At first she yielded and I thought she was going to kiss me; but then she grew stiff and looked into my eyes and smiled, shaking her head:

she chanted mischievously, the brown eyes alight. She pleased me so intimately that even her caprices were delightful. She wanted to try my music over before me; she played quite well, I found; and then I had to play it again while she danced. ‘Oh, I shall have a new effect!’ she triumphed. ‘You’re a dear, dear magician!’ she cried, and for a moment put her glowing cheek against mine.

“I don’t know why I record all this, but I want you to understand the full perfection of my love. Whatever she did or refused to do pleased me; her boldness of speech and virginal shrinking from even a kiss delighted me equally.

“That evening at Prince Lichtenstein’s was a triumph. She danced divinely and I really think my music helped her. I am sure as she sank backward on the floor, while the music throbbed with passion and sang with delight, no human figure had ever shown a more complete abandonment.

“The audience went crazy; you know our Viennese and how they love to show their feelings. Well, I never saw anything like the enthusiasm displayed that night. I suppose there were five hundred guests in the great ballroom, the best names in Austria, and they were all entranced. They cheered and kissed their hands to her in wild admiration.

“She came to me before them all with glowing cheeks.

“‘O Master,’ she cried, ‘what music! I felt as if I were in your arms. Do you really love me? Can you? Are you sure?’

“For a moment I was tongue-tied and thought-bound too.

“‘You know I love you,’ I heard myself say. And at once before them all she gave me her lips, as if we had been alone. I adored her for her noble courage.

“Love to ordinary people is the event of their lives; but artists often have a tenfold keener delight. Suppose a sculptor suddenly finds in the woman he loves the most perfect model he has ever met; his passion is extraordinarily sharpened. Suppose a woman has tried for years and years to dance better than anyone else and suddenly finds her powers intensified by a musician who gives her surprising melodies, her æsthetic ambitions are all realised beyond hope; if she’s inclined to love the musician you can easily see how her passion will be heightened. That’s how I explain the bursting forth of Marie’s love. As for me, well, from the beginning she had been to me perfection perfected. At last I had found the ideal we all long for, and my very soul was ravished.

“I looked up and the men and women were all smiling, as I thought, maliciously or disdainfully. (What were we to them after all but a musician and a dancing-girl?) I had an inspiration. Taking her by the hand I led her over to Prince Lichtenstein and bowing said: ‘Prince, you have often been kind to me, but never so kind as to-night; for in your house I have found my bride.’

“Everyone applauded and shouted, and Lichtenstein swore they must celebrate the betrothal of the two greatest artists in the world; and indeed we did celebrate it all night long, for the early morning sunshine was gilding the house as the Prince took us to the door and sent us home in his state carriage with outriders, if you please, and all his guests cheering on the steps. And even then he would not let us go till I had promised to celebrate the marriage in his palace.

“I took my love to her rooms and she would have me go in with her; so I sent the carriage home and stayed. And there with shining great eyes she told me she had loved me from the first and only wanted to make me happy, and as I kissed her holding her in my arms I was more than happy, drunk with pride and joy, delirious with desire.

“Next week my father and mother came to Vienna and I took a house and began to furnish it, and Prince Lichtenstein sent me some pictures and others of the nobility followed suit. The Gross-Herzog Rudolph, who called himself my first admirer, gave me the whole drawing-room furniture—pictures and all—from one of his palaces.

“Our marriage was an event, but the part I liked best was that my mother had taken a great fancy to Marie and told me at the wedding she hoped to be a grandmother in a year.

“They say happiness has no history and I found it true; I could tell you little or nothing of the next three years, except that as I learned to know my wife’s nature I loved her more and more. Positively she had no faults and a myriad of high qualities, all set off by gaiety and sweet temper.

“After the first season in Vienna I took her for a tour through Italy and the second year through Spain. We learned everything together, languages and all. I found it easy with a few performances each year to increase our fortune; the only drawback to our joy was that we had no children, but neither of us missed anything; at least I certainly did not, and my wife assured me she was content. But she was always encouraging me to write an opera or an oratorio to show how great I was! The Passion of St. Matthew by Bach was her favourite: I ought to do a great oratorio! I didn’t want to face the work; I was continually plagued by the idea of making first a new and scientific musical notation. I wanted to go to China and Japan and learn their music and then build up a music which should include theirs and be as effective in Peking or Kyoto as in Paris or Vienna. Meanwhile I worked constantly in my own lazy way and made up my mind to spend the next summer in Shanghai. Marie consented.

“But that season in Vienna, for some reason or other, perhaps to excite my ambition, she took up her dancing again, and got Goldescu to get her engagements and play publicity manager. I wrote several new themes for her and she certainly embroidered them superbly.

“I don’t think our passion had lost its keen edge; I found Marie a wonderful mistress, with an extraordinary congeniality of taste and desires. It was she who first taught me to love pictures. If I proposed to go into the Carpathians in mid-winter to hunt bear and wolves, or in summer to go to the Lido at Venice for a week’s bathing, she clapped her hands and crowed joyful acceptance. Never was there such a joyous, eager companion.

“I often wondered what her own intimate wish was: had she desires apart from mine?

“I had bought a little country place twenty or thirty miles from Vienna and I went there frequently, sometimes without her, to put it in order.

“Once or twice I had been annoyed by her liking for Goldescu; she always told me she had known him as boy and girl together, and had never even kissed him; his cynical effrontery, she insisted, disgusted her; but she had no good reason to give him up; he was so serviceable; she used him for this and for that and I believed her. I would have believed whatever she chose to tell me. I was too happy even to work at my art, too happy to measure how happy I was when the blow fell.

“I had gone out to our country place one Saturday and found the water-tank that supplied the bathroom had burst and overflowed everywhere. I wired to Vienna for skilled help and stayed to set them to work. I wrote my wife I should not be in Vienna before Wednesday or Thursday and returned on Monday afternoon to get fifteen feet of piping that was urgently needed. I got the piping and I saw that I had half-an-hour before I could catch my train. Naturally I drove to my home and went upstairs. The drawing-room door was ajar; hearing low voices, I pushed it half open. On the sofa opposite was my wife nestling in the corner and leaning over her, half behind her, was Goldescu. As I was about to speak he leaned forward, lifted up her chin and kissed her on the mouth. I was petrified; literally unconscious that I drew the door to; suddenly I found myself at the stair-head, yards away, shivering with cold. Like a sleep-walker I passed down into the hall, picked up the coil of piping, went out the front door, found a droshky and drove to the station—mechanically!

“I gave the coil of piping to the overseer, who told me I must have caught a chill and following his advice I went to bed. He gave me a hot rum. I fell asleep and four hours afterwards awoke to a tempest of rage and hate that altered my whole nature.

“The rest can be told briefly. In the morning I wired my lawyer, who was also my father’s; I told him the truth and begged him to tell it to my parents. I made over half of all I possessed to my wife, asked the lawyer to tell her the truth if she pressed for it and that evening took train for Venice. Since then I have been a wanderer over the face of the globe. I buried myself for two years in China and think I know their music now and their language and the spirit of that great people as well.

“I went all through Japan time and again and understand, I think, their music.

“But I’ve never done anything: the truth is I’ve never recovered from the shock of that afternoon. I used to hate her when I thought of it; often feared I should go mad with hate; but now I’m just cold to it all; it might have happened to someone else for all I care; but with my love I lost my love of life; all the uses of living became stale, flat and tedious to me.

“Three months ago I returned to Austria after six years of wandering, and went down to Salzburg. My father and mother were both dead. I came to Vienna meaning to make an end; what was there for me to live for?

“You saved my life; for a brief space I’ve warmed myself with your inexhaustible strength and vigorous love of living, but it can’t go on....

“‘Everyone,’ says the Russian, ‘gets tired of holding up an empty sack.’ You’d get tired in time, my friend, or if you did not, you must feel that I am tired already; I have travelled the path before, know all the toils and triumphs of it, and therefore it all says nothing to me—nothing! I got the best of life too easily, too early; I can’t struggle; I won’t; it’s fat that floats,” he added disdainfully.

“Did your wife never write to you or seek to see you to explain?” I asked in amazement.

“She wrote,” he said, “and the lawyer forwarded it; but I never read the letter; I would not reopen the wound; the cicatrice was painful enough; why should I let her torture me again?”

“But you can’t tell anything from the act,” I insisted; “one might kiss and nothing more.”

He shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

“You haven’t followed my story with full sympathy,” he said....

“Surely you know without my telling you that I went through all the tortures of hell. At first I wanted to go back and kill the Jew, and when that madness left me the memory of her beauty and her kisses drove me crazy. She had made me feel more intensely than anyone: her body was always before me, in its slim beauty; I’d see it, touch it, get drunk with the odour of it. A thousand times I said to myself: ‘I’ll go back. What does it matter to me whom she kissed so long as she’ll kiss me, give me the illusion of love?’ My body ached for her, man; a thousand times my mouth parched and desire choked me.

“And my maimed, lost soul cried for her day and night incessantly. I was lonely always and missed her as the blind man misses his eyesight.... Time and again I found myself in the train, once at least I got to Vienna and then went back.... I could not face the ruins of such perfect happiness, such divine bliss....

“Don’t think I blamed her! No, I quickly got over that. ‘She may have kissed him,’ I said to myself, ‘for any one of a thousand reasons; the flesh is faithless in woman as in man; she may even have loved me best, nay, she must have loved me best, else why did she marry me and not him whom she had known all her life?’...

“But the heart does not reason, my friend; it aches and contracts in agony, or it triumphs and grows big and joyful. My heart bled and my life-blood drained away. Day and night I cried: ‘Why? Why? Oh, my soul! Marie! why?’ The pain choked me and I lived without living, without joy or hope or interest, till gradually, years later, away off there in China, I found myself taking a faint interest in music; but my heart was dead and my interest in life was no longer living, vivid, but mere curiosity....

“They say that cells in the body can outlive the body’s death for years; my music cells will outlive soul and body in me; but the little corpse-light of life is not strong enough to do any good; I’m finished....

“Are you answered, my friend?”

“I understand,” I said. “But, nevertheless,” I persisted, “it’s your duty to write a great piece of really new music, music that shall appeal to every human ear. Think, man, of the fame to be won; immortal reputation as the Bahnbrecher, the Roadmaker to a new Kingdom of the Spirit. You owe a debt to Humanity; pay it first; your life’s not your own.”

“How often I’ve said the same thing to myself,” he began slowly; “if you only knew how much I grew in those happy years. I had divined nearly everything I learned later in China; the music of the future is clear to me from the tom-tom of the savage to—— But I can’t write, man; I can’t; the love of my art is dead in me; she killed my very soul.

“All the music I’ve played here for you is old, old stuff; it has all been memory music, every note of it. You surely know that you must be alive, intensely alive, before you can create anything! It’s the life in you that you impart. I’m dead: the heart is cold in me; the soul a corpse. I can do nothing worth the doing——”

“Don’t say that,” I protested. “Think how much nobler your work will be if you do it without joy and without hope; but do it; make a beginning at least that the world will never forget——”

He shook his head. “I can’t. You will not understand. The bad alone survives in me. What good would it do to picture a madhouse or a wild beast’s cage? Your Joachim was right; art is there to cheer, encourage, console, warn even if you will; but never to horrify and disgust and discourage. And I see nothing but beasts, lunatics, idiots; the posturing, gibbering apes are loathsome to me!”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I exclaimed, laughing; “but you don’t dislike Neumann or me, do you? Well, another concert or two and you’ll find hundreds like us to love and admire you, and our love will inspire you to do the new work.”

He shook his head. “What an optimist you are! You see you had the knocks first, the training first that hardened you; I had the triumphs first that left me soft and weak.”

“At any rate give yourself time,” I pleaded; “do nothing hastily; don’t go off at half-cock, as we Americans say; another triumph or two will make a difference; you know the French proverb, ‘L’appetit vient en mangeant’—the appetite grows with eating.”

He smiled. “I owe you that; at least I won’t do anything till I must”; and forced therewith to be content I went off to consult with Neumann, whom I brought back with me to dinner.

The second concert was a far greater triumph than the first; all the best music-lovers in Vienna were there and prepared now to welcome a great master. As he stood bowing on the platform at the end and the audience cheered and cheered and the women even came up in crowds to the stage, I made my way to the side door that led behind the stage. As I got there a young woman addressed me:

“Are you Herr ——?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “I am his wife, take me to him!”

“I would, so gladly,” I exclaimed, “but is this the right moment?”

She looked at me with wide frightened hazel eyes. “What do you mean? I must see him. Explain.... My God, speak, man! will you take me to him?”

She was quivering with excitement; she caught my arm in her hands as if I were about to evade her; she was certainly very pretty; I tried to persuade her for his sake.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” I said impressively; “but now and here you won’t get a chance of a quiet talk; he’ll probably have left the place as he did last time before I can catch him; but he lives with me. I’ll get you a good opportunity, madame, where you can use all your persuasiveness. I want you to succeed and save him, I promise you——”

“Oh, now, now,” she interrupted; “please, please, for God’s sake. I’ve waited so long, all these weary years; please,” and the tears poured down her cheeks.

“Come,” I said, unable to resist, “we’ll find him if we can,” and hurriedly I took her through the passage to the waiting-room, but Hagedorn had “left two minutes before,” as Neumann told me, looking intently at my companion.

“Go to my rooms at once, Neumann,” I cried, “and if Hagedorn is there keep him till we come, or keep with him at least till you bring about a meeting. For the love of God, don’t lose sight of him till we all meet. If you don’t understand, please believe I have good reason, and don’t tell Hagedorn I was with a lady; just say I must meet him, see!”

“I understand,” replied Neumann. “I’m off; and if he’s not in your rooms I’ll wait there for you. What a success, eh?” And the next moment he was gone.

“Now,” I said, “madame, we can go quietly to my place. Should we drive or walk? It’s only ten minutes’ drive.”

“As you please,” she replied quietly. So I took her outside and got into a fiacre with her and gave my address.

“Shall I explain to you?” she began as soon as we were alone. “I feel that you know the story, know it perhaps better than I do. Why did he leave me? Why didn’t he answer my letters? It wasn’t because of one kiss?”

“I fear it was,” was my answer. “I’m not defending him or accusing you; but that’s what he says. He must have always been an idealist.”

“That’s why I loved him,” she cried; “but, good God! how unjust, how cruel of him! I can hardly explain how it happened; perhaps you won’t understand. We women do so much out of pity, for pity’s sake.

“I had told Goldescu that his cynical way of talking disgusted and pained me; it did him harm too; he was growing coarser, worse, and I was so happy. I wanted to help him; so I told him he must stop jeering or I’d have to cease seeing him.

“He didn’t speak for a little while and I thought I had been hard on him.

“Then he began in a strange, passionate voice:

“‘You blame me for being cynical; it’s too much. I’m cynical because I was a fool, lost my chance. Are you stone-blind? I might have won you, was near it years ago and waited thinking you would come to me, waited too long, and he won you in an hour. That Musiker! And now you blame me for being cynical—you! the cause of it! you!’

“I was thunderstruck, shaken.

“‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered. ‘We women are always sorry, you know, for giving love-pain!’

“‘Don’t be sorry,’ he cried, ‘I couldn’t stand that. I never meant to tell you; don’t be sorry; I’m the only one should grieve, but say you forgive me.’

“‘Of course I forgive you,’ I cried.

“‘I’ll try to be better. We’ll never talk of it again,’ he said. ‘One kiss of forgiveness,’ and before I thought he lifted my face and kissed me—a long kiss.

“As soon as I felt how he was kissing me I pulled away and started up hot with rage.

“‘A poor comedy,’ I cried, ‘but even you can only play it once with me,’ and I went to the door; it was open.

“Vaguely I wondered why; after Goldescu had gone I wondered, but then forgot all about it till I got that awful letter from the lawyer.

“I couldn’t believe that; it all seemed too monstrous to me; it does now! Like a horrible nightmare turning sweet sleep to horror.

“A thousand times I cried: ‘Why should he leave me?’ Goldescu kissed me without my will; I was as if hypnotised; the next moment I stopped him. I’ve never seen him since; wouldn’t see him. I loved no one but my husband, no one, ever! Oh! Oh!” And again the tears drowned her face and voice.

I pitied her so that I could not help trying to console her:

“Don’t fear, please; it will all come right, it must”—the usual inanities.

When we got upstairs Neumann met us.

“He’s not been home yet, but he’s sure to come before dinner. You’ll not forget you’re both dining with me; this lady too, if she’ll come.”

“We may be late,” I said, “but we’ll come if possible.”

Neumann took the hint and left.

As soon as we were alone Madame Hagedorn began to fidget. “I feel misfortune in the air,” she repeated.... “You know I feel sure if I can talk to him I can convince him that my love never changed. And then I’ll love him so, he’ll have to love me again. Don’t you think so?”

Then she began again graming and grieving: “I’ve been so unhappy, and now so fearful. Are you sure he has not been here? Is this where he sleeps?” and she pointed to my sofa-bed.

“No, no,” I replied; “he occupies the bedroom in there,” and I motioned to the door.

“Let’s go in and see if he’s been in,” she cried.

I went first and opened the door; the bed, the chairs, his clothes—all in the usual order. “You see,” I said, turning to her, “he’s not been here”; but even as I spoke she pointed to the head of the bed and there, pinned on the pillow, was a sheet of paper.

I took it and read:

“I knew she was in the hall; I felt her presence; I saw her speaking to you; I fled.

“It’s no use, man. I will not renew the intolerable anguish; I dare not. I prefer to—— Good-bye. You did all that could be done.... I forgive, but there is only one way to forget.

“E. H.”

AKBAR: “THE MIGHTIEST”