She arose, laid aside her fancy work, and went to the piano. She sat down on the stool, where a couple of bound volumes had been lying, adjusted the lights, and began turning over the pages. Herr Spinell had brought a chair up beside her, and was sitting near her like a music teacher.
She played the Nocturne in E-Sharp Major, Opus 9, Number 2. Even if she truly was somewhat out of practice, nevertheless her execution was a bit of real artistry. The piano was at best middling, but after the first few strokes she could manage it tastefully and with assurance. She displayed a nervous sense of the differentiations in tone-quality, and an imaginative feel for the slowing and speeding up of rhythm. Her touch was firm as well as soft. Under her hands the melody sang its ultimate measure of sweetness, and the little embellishments wound with a hesitating charm about her fingers.
She was wearing the dress of the day she came here: the dark, heavy coat-suit and the soft velvet embroidery—all of which gave her hands and face such an unearthly frailty. The expression of her face did not change in playing, but it seemed as though the demarcation of her lips became clearer while the shadows deepened in the corners of her eyes. When she had finished, she laid her hands in her lap and went on looking at the notes. Herr Spinell continued to sit there, without a move or a sound.
She played another Nocturne—a second and a third. Then she arose, but only to look for new pieces on the top of the piano.
It occurred to Herr Spinell to examine the volumes in black boards which had been lying on the stool. Suddenly he let out an unintelligible exclamation, and his large white hands began fingering passionately one of these neglected volumes.
“Impossible! … It is not true! …” he said. “And yet I am not deceiving myself! … Do you know what this is? What was lying here? What I am holding now? …”
“What is it?” she asked.
Then he pointed in silence to the titlepage. He was quite pale, let the book sink down, and gazed at her with trembling lips.
“Indeed? How does that come to be here? Give it to me, then,” she said simply. Then she arranged the score, took her seat, and after a moment of stillness began with the first page.
He sat next to her, bent forward, his head lowered, and his hands folded across his knees. She played the opening plaintively, with an excessive slowness, with disquietingly long pauses between the individual figures. The yearning-motif, a lonely, wandering voice in the night, was heard softly uttering its uneasy question. A silence, and an expectation. And see … it answers: the same weak, lonely note, only this time brighter, more tender. Another silence. And then, in that marvellous dampened sforzato which is like a sudden starting up, and the first sacred insistence of passion, the love-motif set in, rose, writhed keenly to a sweet culmination, sank back in resolution—and with their deep song of heavy, pained astonishment the cellos came forward and continued the melody.
As she played on the miserable instrument, she tried with some success to bring out the effects of the orchestra. The run of the violins in their great climb rang with a brilliant precision. She played with a precise devotion, lingered credulously over every form, and raised up each element plainly and humbly like a priest lifting the holy wafer above his head. What happened? Two forces, two eager beings struggled in pain and sanctity towards each other, and embraced in a wild, enchanted hunger after the eternal and the absolute. … The overture flamed up and dropped. She stopped where the curtain opens, and kept looking in silence at the notes.
In the meantime the Rätin Spatz had reached boredom to a degree which deforms the face, drives the eyes out of the head, and produces a dreadful corpse-like appearance. Beyond that, this sort of music affected the nerves of her stomach, put this dyspeptic organism in a state of anguish which made the Rätin fear an attack of cramps. “I must go to my room,” she said weakly. “Goodbye; I’ll be back.”
Then she had left. It was much darker now. Outside, the snow could be seen falling thick and silent on the terrace. The two candles gave a restricted, wavering light.
“The second act,” he whispered; and she turned the pages and began with the second act.
A blare of horns was lost in the distance. What? Or was it the rustling of leaves? The soft gurgle of a spring? Night had already poured its silence everywhere, and there were no urgent warnings against surrender to the powers of melancholy. The holy secret was completed. The lights went out, the death-motif sank away with a peculiar, suddenly veiled quality; and with a driving impatience, melancholy let her white coverings flutter out to the lover approaching through the darkness with wide-open arms.
O abundant and insatiable rejoicing at union in the eternal Beyond-Things! Free of distressing error, escaped from the bonds of time and place, the you and the I, the meus and the tuus, melted together in an exalted happiness. The blinding malice of day might keep them apart, but no arrogant lie could deceive again these dwellers in darkness, since the strength of the magic potion had endowed them with sight. He who had looked with love on the night of death and its sweet secret, in the orgy of his vision now had only one desire, the yearning for the sacred night, the true, eternal, unifying …
Oh, fall about them, night of love, and give them that oblivion which they yearn for; encompass them with ecstasies, and make them free of this world of deceit and separation. Look, the last torch has gone out! Every thought and image has dropped away in
