The First Violin Part 21

I was not quite sure where that was, but did not ask further, for I was occupied in helping Miss Hallam, and wished to be with her as much as I could before she left.

The day of parting came, as come it must. Miss Hallam was gone. I had cried, and she had maintained the grim silence which was her only way of expressing emotion.

She was going back home to Skernford, to blindness, now known to be inevitable, to her saddened, joyless life. I was going to remain in Elberthal--for what? When I look back I ask myself--was I not as blind as she, in truth? In the afternoon of the day of Miss Hallam's departure, I left Frau Steinmann's house. Clara promised to come and see me sometimes. Frau Steinmann kissed me, and called me _liebes Kind_.

I got into the cab and directed the driver to go to Wehrhahn, 39.

He drove me along one or two streets into the one known as the Schadowstra.s.se, a long, wide street, in which stood the Tonhalle. A little past that building, round a corner, and he stopped, on the same side of the road.

"Not here!" said I, putting my head out of the window when I saw the window of the curiosity shop exactly opposite. "Not here!"

"Wehrhahn, 39, Fraulein?"

"Yes."

"This is it."

I stared around. Yes--on the wall stood in plainly to be read white letters, "Wehrhahn," and on the door of the house, 39. Yielding to a conviction that it was to be, I murmured "Kismet," and descended from my chariot. The woman of the house received me civilly. "The young lady for whom the Herr Direktor had taken lodgings? _Schon_! Please to come this way, Fraulein. The room was on the third _etage_." I followed her upstairs--steep, dark, narrow stairs, like those of the opposite house.

The room was a bare-looking, tolerably large one. There was a little closet of a bedroom opening from it--a sc.r.a.p of carpet upon the floor, and open windows letting in the air. The woman chatted good-naturedly enough.

"So! I hope the room will suit, Fraulein. It is truly not to be called richly furnished, but one doesn't need that when one is a _Sing-student_. I have had many in my time--ladies and gentlemen too--pupils of Herr von Francius often. _Na!_ what if they did make a great noise? I have no children--thank the good G.o.d! and one gets used to the screaming just as one gets used to everything else." Here she called me to the window.

"You might have worse prospects than this, Fraulein, and worse neighbors than those over the way. See! there is the old furniture shop where so many of the Herren Maler go, and then there there is Herr Duntze, the landscape painter, and Herr Knoop who paints _Genrebilder_ and does not make much by it--so a picture of a child with a raveled skein of wool, or a little girl making ear-rings for herself with bunches of cherries--for my part I don't see much in them, and wonder that there are people who will lay down good hard thalers for them. Then there is Herr Courvoisier, the musiker--but perhaps you know who he is."

"Yes," I a.s.sented.

"And his little son!" Here she threw up her hands. "_Ach!_ the poor man!

There are people who speak against him, and every one knows he and the Herr Direktor are not the best friends, but _sehn Sie wohl, Fraulein_, the Herr Direktor is well off, settled, provided for; Herr Courvoisier has his way to make yet, and the world before him; and what sort of a story it may be with the child, I don't know, but this I will say, let those dare to doubt it or question it who will, he is a good father--I know it. And the other young man with Herr Courvoisier--his friend, I suppose--he is a musiker too. I hear them practicing a good deal sometimes--things without any air or tune to them; for my part I wonder how they can go on with it. Give me a good song with a tune in it--'Drunten im Unterland,' or 'In Berlin, sagt er,' or something one knows. _Na!_ I suppose the fiddling all lies in the way of business, and perhaps they can fall asleep over it sometimes, as I do now and then over my knitting, when I'm weary. The young man, Herr Courvoisier's friend, looked ill when they first came; even now he is not to call a robust-looking person--but formerly he looked as if he would go out of the fugue altogether. _Entschuldigen_, Fraulein, if I use a few professional proverbs. My husband, the sainted man! was a piano-tuner by calling, and I have picked up some of his musical expressions and use them, more for his sake than any other reason--for I have heard too much music to believe in it so much as ignorant people do. _Nun!_ I will send Fraulein her box up, and then I hope she will feel comfortable and at home, and send for whatever she wants."

In a few moments my luggage had come upstairs, and when they who brought it had finally disappeared, I went to the window again and looked out.

Opposite, on the same _etage_, were two windows, corresponding to my two, wide open, letting me see into an empty room, in which there seemed to be books and many sheets of white paper, a music-desk and a vase of flowers. I also saw a piano in the clare-obscure, and another door, half open, leading into the inner room. All the inhabitants of the rooms were out. No tone came across to me--no movement of life. But the influence of the absent ones was there. Strange concourse of circ.u.mstances which had placed me as the opposite neighbor, in the same profession too, of Eugen Courvoisier! Pure chance it certainly was, for von Francius had certainly had no motive in bringing me hither.

"Kismet!" I murmured once again, and wondered what the future would bring.

CHAPTER XV.

"He looks his angel in the face Without a blush: nor heeds disgrace, Whom naught disgraceful done Disgraces. Who knows nothing base Fears nothing known."

It was noon. The probe to "Tannhauser" was over, and we, the members of the kapelle, turned out, and stood in a knot around the orchestra entrance to the Elberthal Theater.

It was a raw October noontide. The last traces of the by-gone summer were being swept away by equinoctial gales, which whirled the remaining yellowing leaves from the trees, and strewed with them the walks of the deserted Hofgarten; a stormy gray sky promised rain at the earliest opportunity; our Rhine went gliding by like a stream of ruffled lead.

"Proper theater weather," observed one of my fellow-musicians; "but it doesn't seem to suit you, Friedhelm. What makes you look so down?"

I shrugged my shoulders. Existence was not at that time very pleasant to me; my life's hues were somewhat of the color of the autumn skies and of the dull river. I scarcely knew why I stood with the others now; it was more a mechanical pause before I took my spiritless way home, than because I felt any interest in what was going on.

"I should say he will be younger by a long way than old Kohler,"

observed Karl Linders, one of the violoncellists, a young man with an unfailing flow of good nature, good spirits, and eagerness to enjoy every pleasure which came in his way, which qualities were the objects of my deep wonder and mild envy. "And they say," he continued, "that he's coming to-night; so Friedhelm, my boy, you may look out. Your master's on the way."

"So!" said I, lending but an indifferent attention; "what is his name?"

"That's his way of gently intimating that he hasn't got no master," said Karl, jocosely, but the general answer to my question was, "I don't know."

"But they say," said a tall man who wore spectacles and sat behind me in the first violins--"they say that von Francius doesn't like the appointment. He wanted some one else, but Die Direktion managed to beat him. He dislikes the new fellow beforehand, whatever he may be."

"So! Then he will have a roughish time of it!" agreed one or two others.

The "he" of whom they spoke was the coming man who should take the place of the leader of the first violins--it followed that he would be at least an excellent performer--possibly a clever man in many other ways, for the post was in many ways a good one. Our kapelle was no mean one--in our own estimation at any rate. Our late first violinist, who had recently died, had been on visiting terms with persons of the highest respectability, had given lessons to the very best families, and might have been seen bowing to young ladies and important dowagers almost any day. No wonder his successor was speculated about with some curiosity.

"_Alle Wetter!_" cried Karl Linders, impatiently--that young man was much given to impatience--"what does von Francius want? He can't have everything. I suppose this new fellow plays a little too well for his taste. He will have to give him a solo now and then instead of keeping them all for himself."

"_Weiss 's nit_," said another, shrugging his shoulders, "I've only heard that von Francius had a row with the Direction, and was outvoted."

"What a sweet temper he will be in at the probe to-morrow!" laughed Karl. "Won't he give it to the _Madchen_ right and left!"

"What time is he coming?" proceeded one of the oboists.

"Don't know; know nothing about it; perhaps he'll appear in 'Tannhauser'

to-night. Look out, Friedhelm."

"Here comes little Luischen," said Karl, with a winning smile, a straightening of his collar, and a general arming-for-conquest expression, as some of the "ladies of the chorus and ballet," appeared from the side door. "Isn't she pretty?" he went on, in an audible aside to me. "I've a crow to pluck with her too. _Tag_, Fraulein!" he added, advancing to the young lady who had so struck him.

He was "struck" on an average once a week, every time with the most beautiful and charming of her s.e.x. The others, with one or two exceptions, also turned. I said good-morning to Linders, who wished, with a n.o.ble generosity, to make me a partaker in his cheerful conversation with Fraulein Luise of the first soprans, slipped from his grasp and took my way homeward. Fraulein Luischen was no doubt very pretty, and in her way a companionable person. Unfortunately I never could appreciate that way. With every wish to accommodate myself to the only society with which fortune supplied me, it was but ill that I succeeded.

I, Friedhelm Helfen, was at that time a lonely, soured misanthrope of two-and-twenty. Let the announcement sound as absurd as it may, it is simply and absolutely true, I was literally alone in the world. My last relative had died and left me entirely without any one who could have even a theoretical reason for taking any interest in me. Gradually, during the last few months, I had fallen into evil places of thought and imagination. There had been a time before, as there has been a time since--as it is with me now--when I worshiped my art with all my strength as the most beautiful thing on earth; the art of arts--the most beautiful and perfect development of beauty which mankind has yet succeeded in attaining to, and when the very fact of its being so and of my being gifted with some poor power of expressing and interpreting that beauty was enough for me--gave me a place in the world with which I was satisfied, and made life understandable to me. At that time this belief--my natural and normal state--was clouded over; between me and the G.o.ddess of my idolatry had fallen a veil; I wasted my brain tissue in trying to philosophize--cracked my head, and almost my reason over the endless, unanswerable question, _Cui bono?_ that question which may so easily become the destruction of the fool who once allows himself to be drawn into dallying with it. _Cui bono?_ is a mental Delilah who will shear the locks of the most arrogant Samson. And into the arms and to the tender mercies of this Delilah I had given myself. I was in a fair way of being lost forever in her snares, which she sets for the feet of men. To what use all this toil? To what use--music? After by dint of hard twisting my thoughts and coping desperately with problems that I did not understand, having managed to extract a conviction that there was use in music--a use to beautify, gladden, and elevate--I began to ask myself further, "What is it to me whether mankind is elevated or not? made better or worse? higher or lower?"

Only one who has asked himself that question, as I did, in bitter earnest, and fairly faced the answer, can know the horror, the blackness, the emptiness of the abyss into which it gives one a glimpse.

Blackness of darkness--no standpoint, no vantage-ground--it is a horror of horrors; it haunted me then day and night, and const.i.tuted itself not only my companion but my tyrant.

I was in bad health too. At night, when the joyless day was over, the work done, the play played out, the smell of the foot-lights and gas and the dust of the stage dispersed, a deadly weariness used to overcome me; an utter, tired, miserable apathy; and alone, surrounded by loneliness, I let my morbid thoughts carry me whither they would. It had gone so far that I had even begun to say to myself lately:

"Friedhelm Helfen, you are not wanted. On the other side this life is a nothingness so large that you will be as nothing in it. Launch yourself into it. The story that suicide is wrong and immoral is, like other things, to be taken with reservation. There is no absolute right and wrong. Suicide is sometimes the highest form of right and reason."

This mood was strong upon me on that particular day, and as I paced along the Schadowstra.s.se toward the Wehrhahn, where my lodging was, the very stones seemed to cry out, "The world is weary, and you are not wanted in it."

A heavy, cold, beating rain began to fall. I entered the room which served me as living- and sleeping-room. From habit I ate and drank at the same restauration as that frequented by my _confreres_ of the orchestra. I leaned my elbows upon the table, and listened drearily to the beat of the rain upon the pane. Scattered sheets of music containing, some great, others little thoughts, lay around me. Lately it seemed as if the flavor was gone from them. The other night Beethoven himself had failed to move me, and I accepted it as a sign that all was over with me. In an hour it would be time to go out and seek dinner, if I made up my mind to have any dinner. Then there would be the afternoon--the dreary, wet afternoon, the tramp through the soaking streets, with the lamp-light shining into the pools of water, to the theater; the lights, the people, the weary round of painted ballet-girls, and accustomed voices and faces of audience and performers. The same number of bars to play, the same to leave unplayed; the whole dreary story, gone through so often before, to be gone through so often again.

The restauration did not see me that day; I remained in the house. There was to be a great concert in the course of a week or two; the "Tower of Babel" was to be given at it. I had the music. I practiced my part, and I remember being a little touched with the exquisite loveliness of one of the choruses, that sung by the "Children of j.a.phet" as they wander sadly away with their punishment upon them into the _Waldeinsamkeit_ (that lovely and untranslatable word) one of the purest and most pathetic melodies ever composed.

It was dark that afternoon. I had not stirred from my hole since coming in from the probe--had neither eaten nor drunk, and was in full possession of the uninterrupted solitude coveted by busy men. Once I thought that it would have been pleasant if some one had known and cared for me well enough to run up the stairs, put his head into the room, and talk to me about his affairs.

To the sound of gustily blowing wind and rain beating on the pane, the afternoon hours dragged slowly by, and the world went on outside and around me until about five o'clock. Then there came a knock at my door, an occurrence so unprecedented that I sat and stared at the said door instead of speaking, as if Edgar Poe's raven had put in a sudden appearance and begun to croak its "never-more" at me.

The door was opened. A dreadful, dirty-looking young woman, a servant of the house, stood in the door-way.

"What do you want?" I inquired.