The stream had washed me ashore. Once again I stood in the silent theatre passage. What now? I felt for the little figures in my pocket—but already this impulse died away. Around me was the inexhaustible world of doors, notices and magic mirrors. Listlessly I read the first words that caught my eye, and shuddered.
How One Kills For Love
was what it said.
Swiftly a picture was flashed upon my memory with a jerk and remained there one instant. Hermine at the table of a restaurant, turning all at once from the wine and food, lost in an abyss of speech, with a terrifying earnestness in her face as she said that she would have one aim only in making me her lover, and it was that she should die by my hand. A heavy wave of anguish and darkness flooded my heart. Suddenly everything confronted me once more. Suddenly once more the sense of the last call of fate gripped my heart. Desperately I felt in my pocket for the little figures so that I might practise a little magic and rearrange the layout of the board. The figures were no longer there. Instead of them I pulled out a knife. In mortal dread I ran along the corridor, past every door. I stood opposite the gigantic mirror. I looked into it. In the mirror there stood a beautiful wolf as tall as myself. He stood still, glancing shyly from unquiet eyes. As he leered at me, his eyes blazed and he grinned a little so that his chops parted and showed his red tongue.
Where was Pablo? Where was Hermine? Where was that clever fellow who had discoursed so pleasantly about the building up of the personality?
Again I looked into the mirror. I had been mad. I must have been mad. There was no wolf in the mirror, lolling his tongue in his maw. It was I, Harry. My face was grey, forsaken of all fancies, fordone with all vice, horribly pale. Still it was a human being, someone one could speak to.
“Harry,” I said, “what are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” said he in the mirror, “I am only waiting. I am waiting for death.”
“Where is death then?”
“Coming,” said the other. And I heard from the empty spaces within the theatre the sound of music, a beautiful and awful music, that music from Don Giovanni that heralds the approach of the guest of stone. With an awful and an iron clang it rang through the ghostly house, coming from the other world, from the immortals.
“Mozart,” I thought, and with the word conjured up the most beloved and the most exalted picture that my inner life contained.
At that, there rang out behind me a peal of laughter, a clear and ice-cold laughter out of a world beyond unknown to men, a world born of sufferings, purged and divine humour. I turned about, frozen through with the blessing of this laughter, and there came Mozart. He passed by me laughing as he went and, strolling quietly on, he opened the door of one of the boxes and went in. Eagerly I followed the god of my youth, the object, all my life long, of love and veneration. The music rang on. Mozart was leaning over the front of the box. Of the theatre nothing was to be seen. Darkness filled the boundless space.
“You see,” said Mozart, “it goes all right without the saxophone—though to be sure, I shouldn’t wish to tread on the toes of that famous instrument.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We are in the last act of Don Giovanni. Leporello is on his knees. A superb scene, and the music is fine too. There is a lot in it, certainly, that’s very human, but you can hear the other world in it—the laughter, eh?”
“It is the last great music ever written,” said I with the pomposity of a schoolmaster. “Certainly, there was Schubert to come. Hugo Wolf also, and I must not forget the poor, lovely Chopin either. You frown, Maestro? Oh, yes, Beethoven—he is wonderful too. But all that—beautiful as it may be—has something rhapsodical about it, something of disintegration. A work of such plentitude and power as Don Giovanni has never since arisen among men.”
“Don’t overstrain yourself,” laughed Mozart, in frightful mockery. “You’re a musician yourself, I perceive. Well, I have given up the trade and retired to take my ease. It is only for amusement that I look on at the business now and then.”
He raised his hands as though he were conducting, and a moon, or some pale constellation, rose somewhere. I looked over the edge of the box into immeasurable depths of space. Mist and clouds floated there. Mountains and seashores glimmered, and beneath us extended worldwide a desert plain. On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy aspect, with a long beard, who drearily led a large following of some ten thousand men in black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and Mozart said:
“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him all his time.”
I realised that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment were superfluous.
“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with a nod.
And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and sad step.
“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as the most extreme
