“I don’t understand it at all, Herr Spinell; a lot of it I can simply surmise. What does that mean, that ‘even then I am the world’?”
He explained it to her, quietly and briefly.
“Yes, so it is. But how does it come that you, who understand it so well, cannot play it, too?”
Strangely enough, he could not bear up under this harmless question. He reddened, wrung his hands, and sank back into his chair. “Those two things are seldom found together,” he at last said with an effort. “No, I cannot play. … But continue.”
And she went on into the drunken songs of this miracle play. Did love ever die? Tristan’s love? The love of your Isolde, and my Isolde? Oh, the strokes of death can never reach this eternal woman! What could death be but that which distresses us, which tricks lovers into disunion? In one sweet and, love brought them both together. … And if death destroys this, how else except with the very life of one could death be given to the other? And a mysterious interweaving of two melodies united them in the unnamed hope of Love’s Death, the endlessly inseparable enfolding in the Fairyland of night. Sweet night! Eternal night of love! All-inclusive land of holiness! Whoever has looked at you with understanding, how could he awake to desolate day again without sorrow? But ban all sorrow, friendly death! Free the hungering from the famine of awaking! O unattainable storm of rhythms; O rapture of the metaphysical certainty pressing forward chromatically! How is it acquired, how is it lost, this ravishment far from the loneliness of light? Soft desires without lies or sorrow; sublime, painless extinction; superspiritual twilight in the incommensurable! You, Isolde; I, Tristan; Tristan no longer, Isolde no longer.
Suddenly something very frightful happened. She left off playing, and held her hand over her eyes that she might peer into the darkness. And Herr Spinell turned quickly about in his chair. The door back there which led to the corridor had opened, and a strange form entered, supported on the arm of a second. It was a patient at Einfried who had not been able to take part in the sleigh-ride, but was employing this evening hour in one of her instinctive and mournful rounds of the institute; it was the wife of Pastor Höhlenrauch leaning on the arm of her nurse. Without looking up, she measured the rear of the room with uncertain, groping steps, and disappeared through the door opposite—speechless and staring, wandering without consciousness. There was a long silence.
“That was the Pastorin Höhlenrauch,” he said.
“Yes, that was poor Höhlenrauch,” she answered. Then she began turning the leaves again, and played the finish to it all, played Isolde’s Liebestod.
How colourless and clear her lips were, and how the shadows had deepened in the corners of her eyes! Above the eyebrow, across her transparent forehead, the tiny, pale-blue vein was becoming disturbingly swollen. Under her industrious hands the unutterable ascent was completed, broken suddenly by that almost dissolute pianissimo which is like a floor slipping from beneath the feet, and a drop into a sublime covetousness. The abundance of a mighty attainment and conclusion broke out, was repeated … a bewildering turmoil of unrestricted rejoicing. Then it changed its form and its flow, seemed on the point of expiring, wove the yearning-motif once more into its harmonies, exhaled, perished, faded, glided away. Deep silence.
They both listened, turned their heads to one side and listened.
“Those are bells,” she said.
“They are the sleighs. I am going now.”
He arose and crossed the room. But he stopped at the door, turned about, and for a few minutes kept changing from one foot to the other. And then it happened that he, at a distance of fifteen or twenty paces from her, dropped to his knees, dropped on both knees without a word. His long black coat trailed on the floor. He kept his hands folded over his mouth, and his shoulders twitched sharply.
She sat with her hands in her lap, leaning forward away from the piano, and looking at him. A forced, uncertain smile lay on her face, and her eyes were peering meditatively with such effort into the darkness that they showed a slight tendency to bulge.
Out of the distance came the approaching sounds of bells, snapping whips, and a jumble of human voices.
IX
The sleigh-party, which was the talk of everybody for some time, had taken place on the twenty-sixth of February. It thawed on the twenty-seventh, when everything melted, dropped, splashed, and flowed; and Herr Klöterjahn’s wife was getting along excellently. On the twenty-eighth she brought up a bit of blood … oh, insignificant; but it was blood. At the same time a much greater weakness than ever before came over her, and kept her confined to her bed.
Dr. Leander examined her, and his face was as hard as stone. Then he ordered what is prescribed by science: cracked ice, morphine, absolute quiet. Furthermore, the next day overwork forced him to transfer the case to Dr. Müller, who accepted it dutifully and faithfully, and in all mildness; a quiet, pale, insignificant, and unhappy man, whose modest and unheralded activities were devoted to the nearly well and the hopeless.
The opinion he expressed first of all was that the separation between the Klöterjahn couple had continued for quite a while now. It would be especially pleasant if Herr Klöterjahn could pay another visit to Einfried, provided that his thriving business would permit it. A
