The Dedalus Book of German Decadence

by Ray Furness

  Announced by his pugnacious motif, Hunding entered, paunchy and knock-kneed, like a cow. His beard was black with brown tufts. He stood there frowning, leaning heavily on his spear, and staring ox-eyed at the stranger guest. But as the primitive custom would have it he bade him welcome, in an enormous, rusty bass.

  Sieglinde laid the evening meal; Hunding’s slow, suspicious gaze moved to and fro between her and the stranger. Dull lout though he was, he could well see that they resembled one another, were of one and the same breed, that odd, untrammelled rebellious stock, which he hated, to which he felt inferior. They sat down, and Hunding, in a few words, introduced himself and accounted for his simple, regular, and orthodox existence. Thus he forced Siegmund to speak of himself –, and that was incomparably more difficult. Yet Siegmund spoke, he sang clearly and with wonderful beauty of his life and misfortunes. He told how he had been born with a twin sister – and as people do who dare not speak out, he called himself by a false name. He gave a moving account of the hatred and envy which had been the bane of his life and his strange father’s life, how their hall had been burnt, his sister carried off, how they had led in the forest a harried, persecuted, outlawed life; and how finally he had mysteriously lost his father as well … And then Siegmund sang the most painful thing of all: he told of his yearning for human beings, his longing and ceaseless loneliness. He sang of men and women, of friendship and love he had sometimes won, only to be thrust back again into the dark. A curse had lain upon him forever, he was marked by the brand of his strange origins. His speech had not been that of the others, nor theirs his. What he found good was vexation to them, he was galled by the ancient laws to which they paid honour. Always and everywhere he had lived amid anger and strife, he had borne the yoke of scorn and hatred and contempt – all because he was strange, of a breed and kind hopelessly different from them.

  The way Hunding reacted to all this was entirely characteristic. His reply showed no sympathy and no understanding, but only a sour disgust and suspicion of all Siegmund’s story. And finally understanding that the stranger standing here on his own hearth was the very outlaw he had, following a summons, been hunting that day, he behaved just as one would have expected of the brawny pedant he was. With a grim sort of courtesy he declared that his house was sacred and would protect the fugitive for that night, but that on the morrow he would have the honour of slaying him in battle. Gruffly he commanded Sieglinde to the inner chamber, to spice his night-drink for him and to wait for him in bed; then after a few more threats he followed her, taking all his weapons with him and leaving Siegmund alone and despairing by the hearth.

  Up in the box Siegmund bent over the velvet ledge and leaned his dark boyish head on his narrow red hand. His brows made two black furrows, and one foot, resting on the heel of his patent-leather shoe, was in constant nervous motion. But it stopped as he heard a whisper close to him.

  ‘Gigi!’

  His mouth, as he turned, had an insolent twist.

  Sieglinde was holding out to him a mother-of-pearl box with maraschino cherries.

  ‘The brandy chocolates are underneath,’ she whispered. But he accepted only a cherry, and as he took it out of the tissue paper wrapping she said in his ear:

  ‘She will come back to him again at once.’

  ‘I am not entirely unaware of the fact,’ he said, so loud that several heads were jerked angrily in his direction … Down in the darkness the great Siegmund was singing alone. From the depths of his heart he cried out for the sword – for a shining blade to swing on that day when there burst forth at last the bright flame of his anger and rage, which so long had smouldered deep in his heart. He saw the hilt glitter in the tree, saw the embers fade on the hearth, sank back in gloomy slumber – and started up, leaning on his hands in horrified delight when Sieglinde glided back to him in the darkness.

  Hunding, drugged and intoxicated, was sleeping like a log. Together they rejoiced at the outwitting of the dolt; they laughed, and their eyes had the same way of narrowing as they laughed. Then Sieglinde stole a look at the conductor, received her cue, and putting her lips in position sang a long recitative: related the heart-breaking tale of how they had forced her, forsaken, strange and wild as she was, to give herself to the crude and savage Hunding and to count herself lucky in an honourable marriage which might bury her dark origins in oblivion. She sang too, sweetly and soothingly, of the strange old man in the hat and how he had driven the sword-blade into the trunk of the ash tree, to await the coming of the one who alone was able to draw it out. Passionately she prayed in song that it might be he whom she had in mind, whom she knew and grievously longed for, the consoler of her sorrows, the friend who should be more than friend, the avenger of her shame, whom once she had lost, whom in her abasement she wept for, her brother in suffering, her saviour, her rescuer …

  But at this point Siegmund flung about her his two rosy arms. He pressed her cheek against the pelt that covered his breast and holding her so, sang above her head – sang out his exultation to the four winds, in a silver trumpeting of sound. Hot in his breast burned the oath that bound him to her, his fair companion. All the yearning of his hunted life found assuagement in her, and in her he found everything that had been so scornfully refused him when he had sought the company of men and women, when he had sought friendship and love with that arrogance which came from shyness and the consciousness of his stigma. Shame was her lot, as his was suffering, dishonoured was she as he was outcast, and revenge – their revenge – was to be this love between brother and sister.

  The storm whistled, a gust of wind burst open the door, a flood of white electric light poured into the hall. Divested of darkness they stood and sang their song of spring and spring’s sister, love!

  Crouching on the bearskin they looked at each other in the white light, as they sang their duet of love. Their bare arms touched each other as they held each other by the temples and gazed into each other’s eyes, and as they sang their mouths were very near. They compared their eyes, their foreheads, their voices – they were the same. The growing, urging recognition wrung from his breast his father’s name; she called him by his: Siegmund! Siegmund! He freed the sword, he swung it above his head, and ecstatically she sang to him, revealing who she was: his twin sister, Sieglinde. In rapture he stretched out his arms to her, his bride, she sank upon his breast – the curtain fell as the music swelled into a roaring, rushing, foaming whirlpool of passion – swirled and swirled and with one mighty throb stood still.

  Rapturous applause. The lights went on. A thousand people got up, stretched unobtrusively as they clapped, then made ready to leave the hall, with heads still turned towards the stage, where the singers appeared before the curtain, like masks hung out in a row at a fair. Hunding too came out and smiled politely, despite all that had just been happening.

  Siegmund pushed back his chair and stood up. He was hot; little red patches showed on his cheek-bones, above the lean, sallow, shaven cheeks.

  ‘For my part,’ he said, ‘what I want now is a breath of fresh air. Siegmund was pretty feeble, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Sieglinde, ‘and the orchestra felt the need to drag during the the Spring Song.’

  ‘Frightfully sentimental,’ said Siegmund, shrugging his narrow shoulders in his dress coat. ‘Are you coming out?’ She lingered a moment, with her elbow on the ledge, still gazing at the stage. He looked at her as she rose and took up her silver scarf. Her soft, full lips were quivering.

  They went into the foyer and mingled with the slow-moving throng, greeting acquaintances, downstairs and up again, sometimes hand in hand.

  ‘I should enjoy an ice,’ she said, ‘if it were not almost certain to be of inferior quality.’

  ‘Impossible,’ he said. So they ate bonbons out of their box – maraschino cherries and chocolate beans filled with cognac.

  The bell rang and they looked on contemptuously as the crowds rushed back to their seats, blocking the corridors. They wa
ited until all was quiet, regaining their places just as the lights went down again and silence and darkness fell soothingly upon the hall. A bell rang quietly, the conductor raised his arms and summoned up anew the wave of splendid sound.

  Siegmund looked down into the orchestra. The sunken space stood out bright against the darkness of the listening house; hands fingered, arms drew the bows, cheeks puffed out – all these simple folk laboured zealously to bring to utterance the work of a master who suffered and created; created the noble and simple visions enacted above on the stage. Creation? How did one create? Siegmund felt a pain in his breast, a burning or gnawing, something like an exquisite urgency. To do what? For what? It was all so dark, so shamefully unclear! Two thoughts, two words he sensed: creation, passion. His temples glowed and throbbed, and it came to him as in a yearning vision that creation was born of passion and was reshaped anew as passion. He saw the pale, spent woman hanging on the breast of the fugitive to whom she had given herself, he saw her love and her destiny, and felt that life, in order to be creative, must be like that. He saw his own life, and knew its contradictions, its clear understanding and spoilt voluptuousness, its splendid security and idle spite, its weakness and wittiness, its languid contempt; his life, so full of words, so void of acts, so full of cleverness, so empty of emotion and he felt again the burning, the searing anguish which yet was sweet – whither, and to what end? Creation? Experience? Passion?

  The finale of the act came, the curtain fell. Light, applause, general exit. Sieglinde and Siegmund spent the interval as before. They scarcely spoke, as they walked hand-in-hand through the corridors and up and down the steps. She offered him the liqueur chocolates, but he did not take any. She looked at him, but withdrew her gaze as his rested upon her, walking rather constrained at his side and enduring his eye. Her childish shoulders under the silver web of her scarf looked like those of an Egyptian statue, a little too high and too square. Upon her cheeks burned the same fire he felt in his own.

  Again they waited until the crowd had gone in and took their seats at the last possible moment. Storms and wind and driving cloud; wild, heathenish cries of exultation. Eight females, not exactly beauties, eight untrammelled, laughing maidens of the wild, were disporting themselves amid a rocky scene. Brünnhilde broke in upon their merriment with her fears. They fled in terror before the approaching wrath of Wotan, leaving her alone to face him. The angry god nearly annihilated his daughter – but his wrath roared itself out, by degrees grew gentle and dispersed into a mild melancholy, on which note it ended. A noble prospect opened out, the scene was pervaded with epic and religious splendour. Brünnhilde slept. The god mounted the rocks. Great, full-bodied flames, rising, falling, and flickering glowed all over the boards. The Valkyrie lay with her coat of mail and her shield on her mossy couch ringed round with fire and smoke, with leaping, dancing tongues, with the magic sleep-compelling fire-music. But she had saved Sieglinde, in whose womb there grew and waxed the seed of that hated unprized race, chosen of the gods, from which the twins had sprung, who had mingled their misfortunes and their afflictions in free and mutual bliss.

  Siegmund and Sieglinde left their box; Wendelin was outside, towering in his yellow ulster and holding their cloaks for them to put on. Like a gigantic slave he followed the two dark, slender, fur-mantled, exotic creatures down the stairs to where the carriage waited and the pair of large finely matched glossy thoroughbreds tossed their proud heads in the winter night. Wendelin ushered the twins into their warm little silk-lined retreat, closed the door, and the coupé stood poised for yet a second, quivering slightly from the swing with which Wendelin agilely mounted the box. Then it glided swiftly away and left the theatre behind. Again they rolled noiselessly, easily over the uneven ground to the brisk rhythm of the horses’ hooves, sheltered from the shrill harshness of the bustling life through which they passed. They sat as silent and remote as they had sat in their opera-box facing the stage – almost, one might say, in the same atmosphere. Nothing was there which could alienate them from that extravagant and stormily passionate world which worked upon them with its magic power to draw them to itself.

  The carriage stopped; they did not at once realize where they were, or that they had arrived before the door of their parents’ house. Then Wendelin appeared at the window, and the porter came out of his lodge to open the door.

  ‘Are my father and mother at home?’ Siegmund asked, looking over the porter’s head and blinking as though he were staring into the sun.

  No, they had not returned from dinner at the Erlangers’. Nor was Kunz at home; Märit too was out, no one knew where, for she went entirely her own way.

  They left their overcoats in the vestibule on the ground floor and went up the stairs and through the first-floor hall into the dining-room. It stretched out before them, immense in its murky splendour. Only one chandelier was lit, over the table at the farther end which had been laid and where Florian was waiting to serve them. They moved noiselessly across the thick carpet, and Florian seated them in their softly upholstered chairs. Then a gesture from Siegmund dismissed him, they would dispense with his services.

  The table was laid with a dish of fruit, a plate of sandwiches, a jug of red wine. An electric tea-kettle hummed upon a great silver tray, with all the accoutrements about it.

  Siegmund ate a caviar sandwich and poured out wine into a slender glass where it glowed a dark ruby red. He drank in quick gulps, and grumblingly stated his opinion that red wine and caviar were a combination offensive to good taste. He drew out his case, jerkily selected a cigarette, and began to smoke, leaning back with his hands in his pockets, wrinkling up his face and twitching his cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other. His strong growth of beard was already beginning to show again under the high cheek-bones; the two black furrows stood out on the bridge of his nose.

  Sieglinde had made herself some tea and added a drop of burgundy. She touched the fragile porcelain cup delicately with her full, soft lips and as she drank she looked across at Siegmund with her great humid black eyes.

  She set down her cup and leaned her dark, sweet little head upon her slender hand. Her eyes rested full upon him, with such liquid, speechless eloquence that, in comparison, what she actually said seemed less than nothing.

  ‘Won’t you have any more to eat, Gigi?’

  ‘One would not draw,’ he said, ‘from the fact that I am smoking, the conclusion that I intend to eat more.’

  ‘But you have had nothing but bonbons since tea. Take a peach, at least.’

  He shrugged his shoulders – or rather he wriggled them like a naughty child, in his tail coat.

  ‘This is boring. I am going upstairs. Good night.’

  He finished his wine, tossed away his table-napkin, and slouched away, with his hands in his pockets, into the darkness at the other end of the room.

  He went upstairs to his room, where he turned on the light – not much, only two or three bulbs, which made a wide white circle on the ceiling. Then he stood considering what to do next. The good-night had not been final; this was not how they were used to take leave of each other at the close of the day. She was sure to come to his room. He flung off his coat, put on his fur-trimmed smoking-jacket, and lighted another cigarette. He lay down on the chaise-longue; sat up again, tried another posture, with his cheek in the pillow; threw himself on his back again and so remained awhile, with his hands under his head.

  The subtle, bitter scent of the tobacco mingled with that of the cosmetics, the soaps, and the toilet waters; their combined perfume hung in the tepid air of the room and Siegmund breathed it in with conscious pleasure, finding it sweeter than ever. Closing his eyes he surrendered to this atmosphere, as a man will console himself with some delicate pleasure of the senses for the extraordinary harshness of his lot.

  Then suddenly he started up again, tossed away his cigarette and stood in front of the white wardrobe, which had long mirrors let into each of its three divisions. He moved very c
lose to the middle one and, eye to eye, he studied himself. His curiosity subjected each feature to a meticulous examination; he opened the two side wings and studied both profiles as well. For a long time he stood there, scrutinising the signs of his race, the slightly drooping nose, the full lips that rested so softly on each other; the high cheek-bones, the thick black, curling hair that grew far down on the temples and parted so decidedly on one side; finally the eyes under the knit brows, those large black eyes that flowed like fire and had an expression of weary sufferance.

  In the mirror he saw the bearskin lying behind him, spreading out its claws beside the bed. He turned round, and went over to it with tragic, stumbling steps; after a moment of hesitation he sank down and stretched out on the skin, his head pillowed on his arm.

  For a while he lay motionless, then propped his head on his elbows, with his cheeks resting on his slim reddish hands, and fell again into contemplation of his image opposite him in the mirror. There was a knock on the door. He started, reddened, and moved as though to get up – but sank back again, his head against his outstretched arm, and stopped there, silent.

  Sieglinde entered. Her eyes searched the room, without finding him at once. Then with a start she saw him lying on the rug.

  ‘Gigi, what ever are you doing there? Are you ill?’ She ran to him, bent over him and, stroking his hair and forehead, repeated, ‘You’re not ill, are you?’

  He shook his head, looking up at her from below as she continued to caress him.