“Which I shall not do by committing another.”
“I do not understand you; but you owe something to her and to us all.”
“I shall never be able to pay all my debts. Well, to please you—there!” and he glanced at Carla, who just then passed on Golm’s arm to the nearest table; “you see how she has waited for me!”
“Paula!” exclaimed Elsa to a young lady, “my brother is anxious to take you in to supper, but does not dare ask you because you refused him the other day. At that table!—Prince Clemda, at that table, please, near Count Golm and Ottomar—there are just four places empty—every seat must be occupied.”
“At your orders,” said Clemda; “allons, Werben!”
Ottomar, with the lady on his arm, still stood undecided.
“Will a Werben allow a Golm to say that he left the field clear for him?” whispered Elsa in his ear.
She regretted the words as soon as they were spoken: how could any cause prosper that was fed from the spring of injured vanity? But Ottomar had already led away her friend, and it was high time for her also to take her place. She was too late already. She had hoped that Reinhold would sit by her; but room must be made for another couple who had been wandering from table to table, and the whole arrangement was thus disturbed. Still he was opposite to her, and she had the satisfaction of seeing him—of noticing his eyes so often, it could hardly be unintentionally, turned towards her—if only for a moment; of hearing his hearty laugh, which had so enchanted Meta, and which she herself, as she secretly acknowledged, found so enchanting; the calm clearness of his words when he joined in the conversation, the modest silence with which he readily allowed the witty Schönau to take the lead in the conversation. The latter, now that he thought it worth his while, spoke his real opinion of Wagner and Wagnerism, and explained how he saw in Wagner, not the prophet of the future, but, on the contrary, the last exponent of a great past; how the mixing and mingling of arts, which Wagner held up as their highest development, had everywhere and at all times prepared and accompanied their downfall; how the blind fanaticism of his supporters, and the tyrannical intolerance with which they cried down every opposite opinion, was for him not a proof of their strength, but, on the contrary, of their weakness, the overpowering consciousness of which they sought to drown in this manner; and how, to his eyes, the only comfort to be derived from the whole affair was that the despotism usurped by the Wagnerites hung on one life only, namely, that of the master himself, and that his empire must fall into ruins as soon as he abandoned the scene, because his so-called theory did not rest on true principles of art, did not result necessarily from the essence of art, but was nothing more than the abstraction of his own highly-gifted, energetic but capricious and exceptional nature, of which it might truly be said that its like would hardly be seen again.
“Believe me, my friends, to his helpless disciples Mephistopheles’ saying will be carried out; they will have the parts in their hands, but the spiritual bond that united them will be gone forever.”
Schönau had addressed his words chiefly to Elsa, but Elsa’s thoughts were wandering, and yet she generally listened to him with so much pleasure; and he was talking today even better than usual, with a certain passion which was very striking in the usually quiet, reserved man. Her friends had often teased her about Captain Schönau, and she had never denied that she liked him; and now, while he was speaking, and her eyes wandered from him to Reinhold and back again, and she compared, almost against her will, these two men who were so unlike one another, she asked herself how it could be that one should like one man so much and yet like another a great deal better, even though the former had undoubtedly far more brilliant ideas beneath his broad, sharply-chiselled brow, than the other who listened to him with such respectful attention; besides, how curious it was, that while the one had for years frequented their house as an intimate friend, she had never troubled herself to think whether he enjoyed himself there, while her head was now constantly troubling itself with the question whether the other, who was their guest for the first time today, had come willingly and would wish to come again, and she rejoiced to see how contentedly he was chatting with pretty Emilie Fischbach, and how he now, in his openhearted way, lifted his glass to her and drained it, while his eyes looked so kindly and so steadily into hers. Yes, she was happy, and would have been entirely so if the talk at the long table near them had been somewhat less loud and excited, and if Ottomar’s voice had not several times rung out so loudly that she started in terror, and was relieved when the sounds of laughter and the clinking of glasses drowned his clear tones. She knew that it was always particularly noisy and jolly at the table at which Ottomar sat.
Today more than ever. “A Werben will not leave the field clear for a Golm!” The words sounded in Ottomar’s ear as he sat at table by his partner, opposite to Golm and Carla, and they reechoed in his passion-filled heart; and, if no one else remarked it, to Carla there was a tone in
