He called to the landlady, who was not there. He took me under the arms in order to help me up, and when I saw that there was no escape, that he would not let me be, I felt strong again, stood up, and went to my room, where he followed me. There he regarded me, as I thought, with suspicion. I pointed to my leg as if it pained me, and he believed me. I found my pocketbook and gave him some money. He thanked me, and finally pressed the thing, which I had not taken, into my hands. It was a telegram. Exhausted, I stood by the table and tried to think. Did something still hold me? Had something broken through my ban? What lay there? A telegram. From whom? I was all one. It had nothing to do with me. It was brutal to bring me telegrams now. Now, when I had taken care of everything, at the last minute someone must send me a telegram! I looked around. There was a letter also upon the table. I put the letter in my pocket—it did not interest me. But the telegram bothered me. It stuck in my mind and disturbed my equanimity. I sat down and looked at it lying there and I did not know whether to read it or not. It was an invasion upon my liberty—I did not doubt that. Someone wished to prevent me—to stop me. Someone begrudged me my flight, wished me to drain the dregs of my sorrow that I should be spared no sting, no stab, no pain. Why the telegram harassed me, I did not know. For a long time I sat by the table and dared not open it, with the feeling that it concealed the power to pull me back, and compel me to endure the unendurable which I wished to escape. When I finally did open it, my hand trembled and I deciphered it slowly, as if it had been written in a strange, foreign language. It read:
“Father dying. Please come at once.
“Mother.”
Gradually I took in what it meant. Yesterday I thought I sorrowed for my parents that I must hurt them, although it had been but a superficial consideration. Now they opposed me; they called me back; they made their right over me felt. Suddenly there came into my mind the conversation with my father at Christmas time. Young people, he had said, could go so far in their egoism and independence as to throw away their lives for the sake of an unsatisfied wish. But he, who realized that his life was bound up with other lives, could not let his own desires carry him that far. Now I was held by such a bond. My father lay dying. My mother was alone with him. She called me. His death and her need did not at the moment touch my heart. I believed I knew worse sorrows; but that it was not possible to add to their agony, to ignore their call, to run away—that I could perceive.
In the evening I was at the station, ready for my journey. I did what was necessary mechanically, and yet conscientiously—bought my ticket, gathered up the change that was given back to me, went out to the platform and entered a compartment. I took a seat in the corner and prepared for a long night ride. A young man came in, looked around, spoke to me, and seated himself opposite me. He asked me something. I only looked at him, thinking of nothing and wishing nothing, but that he would let me alone. He coughed, rose, took his yellow leather bag, and sought another place.
The train sped through the night, blind in its foolish haste, exactly as dull and conscientious as I—as if there were something to lose or something to save. Hours afterwards, when I put my hand in my pocket, I felt the letter. That’s there, too, I thought, and opened it. In it my publishers wrote about concerts and terms, and informed me that things were going well and progressing. A great critic in Munich had written an article about me. He congratulated me on it; and there lay a clipping from a paper, an article with my name as the title—a long drivel about the condition of present-day music and about Wagner and about Brahms; and then a criticism of my chamber music and of my song, with generous praise and wishes for success. And as I read the little black letters, it became clear to me, little by little, that it had to do with me, that the world and fame stretched out their hands to me, and for a moment I could smile.
But the letter and the article had torn the bandage from my eyes. Unexpectedly I looked back to the world and saw myself not extinguished and blotted out, but, instead, in the midst of it, belonging to it. I must live; I must let what would, happen. How was it possible? Now everything came back to me—what I had felt in the last five days; and what I had felt only dully; and of what I had thought to avoid; and it all seemed mawkish, bitter and painful. It was a death sentence and I had not executed it. I must leave it unexecuted!
I heard the train rattle. I opened the window and saw dark, low things passing by; sad, leafless trees with black branches; houses under great roofs; and distant hills. All these seemed to exist unwillingly; seemed to breathe pain and opposition. Some thought it beautiful, but to me it seemed only sad. I thought of the song, “Has God willed it so?” And no matter how I sought to look upon the trees and fields and roofs, how zealously I listened to the click of the wheels, or how intensely I riveted my thoughts on everything outside of myself that I might think on without growing desperate—it was not long possible.
I could hardly think of my father. He faded with the trees, and with the passing things of the night, into forgetfulness. And against my will, in spite of my efforts, my thoughts turned back where they had no right to go. I saw a garden with old trees, and in it a house with palms in its hall, and on all the walls old, sombre paintings. I entered and walked up the steps past the pictures, and no one saw me. I passed through as a shadow passes. There was a slim woman with brown hair whose back was turned to me. I saw them both—held in close embrace. And I saw my friend, Heinrich Muoth, smile so sadly and cruelly as he so often did. No doubt he knew that he would mistreat and misuse this one. There was no help for it. It was senseless that this beautiful woman should fall to this miserable corrupter, and that for me all love and friendship counted for naught. It was senseless—but it was so.
Awakening out of a sort of sleep or unconsciousness I looked out of the window into a gray dawn. I stretched my still limbs. I felt a sense of oppression and fear, and saw only trouble and grief before me. But, after all, now I must think of my father and of my mother.
It was still gray dawn when I caught sight of the houses and bridges of my native town. In the smells and noise of the station I was so overcome by weariness and repugnance that I could hardly alight. I took my light bag and stepped into the nearest carriage. We went over the smooth asphalt, over slightly frozen ground, over threatening pavements, and finally stopped before the big door of our house. It was closed, and when, troubled and terrified, I rang the bell no one came to open. I looked up at the house and it seemed as if I were in some unpleasant nightmare where every door was locked and I must climb over the roof. The driver watched curiously and waited. I went anxiously to the other door which I had seldom entered, indeed, not for years. This was open. Behind it was my father’s office, and as I entered I saw the clerks sitting there, as always, in their gray coats, dull and dusty. They stood up at my entrance and bowed to me, for I was now the heir. The bookkeeper, Klemm, who appeared as he had for twenty years, looked at me sorrowfully and questioningly.
“Why is the front door locked?” I asked.
“Because no one is there.”
“Where is my father?”
“In the hospital, and your mother, also.”
“Is he still alive?”
“He was alive this morning but it is expected ?”
“Yes. What is the trouble?”
“What? Oh! It is still the foot. It was not treated right, we all insist. The pain was so bad he cried aloud. Then he was taken to the hospital. Now it is blood poisoning. At half-past ten yesterday we telegraphed you.”
“Yes, thank you. Now bring me some bread and a glass of wine, quickly, and order a carriage, please.”
They ran about and whispered. Then everything was still. Someone gave me a tray and a glass. I ate the bread and drank the wine. I stepped into a carriage. The horse panted; and soon I stood at the entrance of the hospital where nurses with white caps and aprons, and blue striped dresses went through the corridors.
Someone took me by the hand and led me to a room where I saw my mother in tears. She nodded to me. In a narrow iron bed lay my father, changed and shrunken; his short gray beard seemed to stand up oddly in the air.
He was still awake, opened his eyes, and recognized me in spite of the fever.
“Still writing music?” he asked, softly, and his voice and glance were friendly and jesting. He looked at me with a tired, ironical wisdom, but he had nothing more to say, and it seemed to me that he looked into my heart and saw and understood all.
“Father,” I called, but he only smiled, looked at me half-mockingly, though with a half-wandering glance, then closed his eyes again!
“How you look! ” said my mother, as she embraced me. “Did it shock you so?”
I could not answer. A young physician entered, and behind him an older one. They gave my dying father some morphine, and he did not again open those wise eyes which but a moment since had looked so omniscient. We sat beside him and watched him as he lay there, saw him grow quiet—then his face change. So we waited for the end.
He lived several hours and died late in the afternoon. I felt nothing but dumb sorrow and deep weariness, and sat silently, with hot, dry eyes. Towards evening I fell asleep in my chair at the side of my dead father.
CHAPTER V
THAT life is hard to live, I had before this perceived vaguely. Now I had a new cause to brood upon it. To this day the feeling of opposition which was rooted in that experience has never left me. While my life has been barren and irksome, it seems to others, and many times to myself, rich and full. To me the life of a man seems like a profound sad night which could not be endured, if there did not blaze here and there a flash of light whose sudden brightness is so full of comfort and wonder that these seconds can extinguish and make up for the years of darkness.
That darkness—the inconsolable gloom—that is the terrible circle of daily life! Why does one arise each morning, eat, drink and then again lay himself down? The child, a savage, the healthy young man, the animal, does not suffer under the boredom of this circle of routine things and actions. He who does not suffer from thinking, likes to get up in the morning, to eat and to drink. But when this clearness and the reason for it is lost to him, he seeks enviously and expectantly to find some flash of real light in the course of the day—a light that may exalt and extinguish the feeling of time with all its thoughts of apprehension and of the end of all.
We can call these flashes creative, because it seems that they bring with them the feeling of our union with the Creator, while in them we perceive that all is as it should be. It is what the mystics have called “Illumination.” Perhaps it is the radiance of this flash that makes everything afterwards seem so dark. Perhaps it is the free, almost magic, rapture of this flash of light that makes us find all life afterwards so different and harsh and depressing. I do not know. I have never got very far in thinking or philosophizing. But this I do know. If there is a blessed state in Paradise, it must be an unbroken continuance of such a flash. And if man can reach this state only through sorrow and through purification by pain, then no sorrow and no pain is so great that man should flee from it.
A few days after the burial of my father I still went around in bewilderment and soul-weariness. I started on an aimless walk on a suburban, country road. The pretty little houses awoke in me a hazy recollection, on which I pondered as I went along, until I recognized the garden and house of my former teacher, who, a few years before, had desired to lead me to a belief in theosophy. I went in. He came to meet me, recognized me, and took me hospitably into his room, where among the books and vases of flowers a light, pleasing aroma of tobacco floated.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Ah, you have just lost your father. You look troubled. Did it affect you so deeply?”
“No,” I said, “the death of my father would have grieved me more had I not known him so well. But in my last visit with him we became friends, and I lost that painful, guilty feeling that one has towards good parents when one accepts more love from them than one can give.”
“I am glad of that.”
“How about you and your philosophy? I should so like to hear about you because things are bad with me.”
“What is the trouble?”
“Everything. I cannot live and I cannot die. Everything seems false and futile.”
Mr. Lohe twisted his good, contented, peasant face painfully. I must confess that this good, rather fat face had annoyed me, and in no way did I expect from him or his philosophy any solace. I only desired to hear him talk, to show how powerless was his philosophy, and to punish his contentment and his optimistic belief. I did not feel friendly towards him, or towards anyone.
But the man was not so self-satisfied or entrenched in his dogma as I had thought. He looked at me lovingly with real concern. Then, with a melancholy shake of his blonde head, he said decisively:
“You are ill, dear man. Perhaps it is only physical. If so it will soon heal. In that case you must stay in the country, work hard, and eat no meat. But I believe it is something else, that your illness is of the mind.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes. You have a sickness which is very much the fashion now, and which one meets every day in intelligent men. The doctors, naturally, know nothing of it. It is akin to moral insanity, and can also be called individualism, or imaginary loneliness. The modern books are full of it. The idea has settled upon you that you are isolated, that no one seeks you and no one understands you. Is it not so?”
“Practically, yes.” I admitted in astonishment.
“You see! For one who once has this illusion, a few disillusions are enough to make him believe that between him and others there are practically no connections, but great misunderstandings; and that each wanders alone in absolute solitariness—can never make himself really understood by another, and has nothing in common to share with another. It ensues, too, that such a sick person becomes proud and thinks all other normal people understand and love one another. If this sickness should become universal, mankind would die out. But it is only to be found in Central Europe and in high positions. In the young it is curable. No doubt it even belongs to the inevitable adolescent illnesses of youth.”
His slightly ironic, resonant, pedantic tone angered me a little. When he saw that I did not smile and had no defense of myself to make, the friendly, sympathetic expression returned to his face.
“Forgive me,” he said kindly. “You have the real illness—not my favorite caricature of it. But there is indeed a cure for it. It is but imaginary that there is no bridge between you and men—that each goes his way alone and misunderstood. On the contrary, that which men have in common is much more and of more importance than that which each has himself alone, and by which he is separated from the others.”
“That may be,” I said. “But how will it help me to know that? I am no philosopher, and my sorrow is not that I cannot find truth. I don’t desire to be a philosopher and thinker but simply to live a little more contentedly and easily.”
“Well, seek for that, then. It is not necessary to study books and chase theories. But you must have faith in your physician while you are ill. Will you try it?”
“I will test it, gladly.”
“Good! If you were sick in body and the doctor advised you to take the baths or to drink his medicine, or to go to the seashore, you might not understand why this or that remedy should help you, but you would try it and follow his directions. Do the same with the prescription I give you.
“Try for a time to learn more of others and to think less of yourself. It is the only road to health. When a thought of yourself comes into your head, tell it to go away. It will go. Thoughts are things.”
“But how shall I do that? One naturally thinks first of himself.”
“You must conquer that.
You must come to a certain routine concerning yourself and your health. You must learn to think, what does it matter about me? Only in that way will you help your cure. Particularly, you must learn to love someone so much that his well-being is more important to you than your own. I do not mean that you should fall in love. That would be quite the opposite! ”
“I understand. But on whom shall I put this to the test?”
“Commence with those nearest to you—with your friends, with your family. There is your mother. She has suffered a great loss. She is now alone and needs comfort. Take care of her. Stay with her, and try to mean something to her.”
“We do not understand each other, my mother and I. That will be difficult.”
“Yes, if your desires go no further, it will not be easy. That old story of misunderstanding! You must not always think that another does not understand you. Perhaps you are not wholly just. You should first seek yourself to understand others, to give others joy, to be just to others. If you do that and begin with your mother— You see, you must say to yourself: Life doesn’t give me much pleasure, one way or another, so why should I not try to seek it in this way? You have lost your love for your own life. Therefore don’t treat your life with consideration. Put a charge upon yourself and give up a little of your comfort.”
Gertrude Page 12