The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (12 page)

‘I stand and listen in the morning winds

Which whisper timid words into mine ear

Of people whom I’ve loved and early lost

And those I seek, and those I’ll never find  …’

He paused, surprised, and read the last few words again: they were the opposite of what his hopes, those hopes which had accompanied him here, had announced, loud and unequivocal. Was it an omen? He tore the poem into little pieces, and let it flutter with the wind. For he had learned to despise all those thoughts which had formed within him and which did not exactly correspond with the language which his soul was speaking at the moment of their genesis. Yet it also became apparent to him that that greatness which he had recognised as his master may have manifested itself in these verses, and he may perhaps have been a poor servant in that he no longer stood in a harmonious relationship with the words of the poem  …?

Deep in thought he gazed at the white specks which the wind blew away, and he felt that nagging feeling of doubt again, that uncertainty, when suddenly he noticed on the narrow footpath which ran through the meadow the delicate, slender form of a young girl who was dressed in the same colours as the crocuses and who was walking towards the Monopteros, looking in the direction from which the whirling scraps of paper were blowing.

In her features the spatial difference between them was transcended; her appearance seemed to Sebastian to be those of a tall, slender autumn crocus between all the other flowers, except that this one was moving across the grass instead of being rooted there, more hovering than moving, in that gentle rhythm in which the meadow rose to a hill, in which the path meandered amongst the lonely trees, and this rhythm caused the girl to slip into the lawn when she bent to pick a crocus, and glide forth again when she rose and added the flower to the ones which her left hand was pressing tightly to her breast. Sebastian walked down the path, slowly at first, but then quicker, towards the meadow, gazing at this apparition and delighting in the harmonious accord which existed between it and the landscape round about. He was drawn to think of the timid, silent creatures of the forest whose colouring so cunningly imitated the ferns and the foliage that one saw a pair of motionless eyes gazing from the thicket without noticing the animal to which they belonged and which inspired confidence rather than fear, for it was the sighing, peaceful forest itself which seemed to gaze into the eyes of the lonely wanderer […] He followed the girl with the crocuses some way behind; he came closer, and saw her face as she stepped on to the meadow to pick some more.

It was as fair and lovely as the morning, but also as overcast, and she looked at Sebastian with a dispassionate calm, and his heart found no cause to beat faster. Strange! She was like a fairy from his homeland, transported to these alien shores. And in his imagination he carried her to his room in the parental home, seeing how well the faded colours of her dress and her ash-blonde hair matched the olive hues of the wallpaper, the worn brown of the cupboards, chairs and panelling, and the gleam of the polished brass. So what was it: Life? He knew that he could not express it positively, in a neat formula. Previously he had thought it meant: Out There. But now that he had turned his back on his roots the concept Life had become blurred, and the attributes that he had previously bestowed upon it became confused, dangerous and ambiguous. The reason for this, perhaps, was that he and his parents had led such isolated lives; the reason that he was a poet was certainly more convincing. He looked at the girl carefully and sought for a name more fitting to her, a name which his soul could use to call her, to tell her what it was that oppressed her. Often, so often at home had loneliness slipped past him in many forms, through the room in which he was sitting, and whose ceiling its intensity had raised even higher, through the forest where he had wandered and whose treetops it had shaken more violently than the wind was wont to do, and he repeated to himself the fantastic names which he had sought to give it, names compounded of shimmering consonants and vowels in which light and shadow mixed in a cunning chiaroscuro. He would give this girl the name, Olivia, she was so gentle, and one can speak tender words to an Olivia. One could say to her: look, it would be lovely to take you in my arms and fly home with you, without having experienced – suffered, or enjoyed – what beckons, for you, Olivia, with your autumn crocuses, you are:
cowardliness.
Yes, I know you! And so I must avoid you, like peace, and dreams of my room at home, like the spirits of the forest and its silence, because I must not fall asleep or lose myself in the peace of insubstantial harmonies. If I had met you in the street I would have overlooked you or I might perhaps have taken you for a part of all that strangeness, but here you remind me too much of those things I should not think about. Meinewelt – who calls himself my friend – wrote about the shrillness of life, about dissonances which I was meant to tame, and to form into harmonies for my own use, and he continued that the poet was a conqueror of life’s utterances, not an idle listener to the endlessly harmonic tone of remoteness, and into this chord you would only bring a deep, scarcely audible note to which my ear would soon become accustomed, and I would be lulled more peacefully by that unchanging sound, that scarcely amplified chord if you were to slip into my loneliness! I know it well, when men are asked the question: what is Life? they have the answer ready: a Woman! They think of life as an act of communion, enacted with this woman, a companionship experienced day and night, a countenance kept close to theirs, ageing at their side with the passing of the years, but whose brow remains watchful, raised, when they cannot protect theirs, growing tireder, sinking to their breast, but I.  …

A cloud of fantastic visions beat about him, fed by the flame of his wishes, his desires, his hopes for the future, and the gentle, quiet tone of the autumnal landscape, together with the pale violet of the crocuses, and only the sated and deeper tints remained, those colours which he saw at home beyond the range of mountains, in the mists which gathered across the setting sun and in which the eye saw such amazing, over-powering images – giants that fought, danced, murdered and loved – when it forgot the silence of nature over which night was breaking.

When Sebastian reached the cross-roads, one path leading to the town, the other deeper into the English Garden, and thought of the girl again she was not to be seen, no matter in which direction he looked. But he recalled her apparition with gratitude and vowed to return to this part of the park, and at this same hour, whenever he needed the peace that she had given him today.

And then he took the road into the town.

[…]

As they were seeking their places in the darkened auditorium the last bars of the overture signalled the raising of the curtain. A muted melody rose from the orchestra, and the finely-cut features of Richard Strauss could be seen against the background of the players.

Dressed in white, a crowd of lamenting ephebes, maidens and elders swarmed around a marble altar in a dark funereal grove, with torches and wreaths in their hands; everyday faces, singing songs of night, threnodies in an archaistic minuet, passions forced into a lace jabot a la Louis Quinze  …  and suddenly the isolated cry ‘Euridice!’ from a man with a woman’s hips and a high voice, the whole impression muted, mannered and mild, like an Ionic column with a Baroque capital. ‘Orpheus is written for an alto voice,’ Meinewelt whispered, ‘Isn’t that a wonderful piece of alienation? We hear a woman representing a man who is lamenting the beloved.’

The chorus now separated to perform sombre, stately measures: a youth mounted the steps to the altar and extinguished his torch at the top. All were silent, and laid their wreaths at the base of the sacred, memorial flame, disappearing silently into the undergrowth; gradually the orchestra died into silence. Orpheus alone remained. He gazed around him, then up at the architraves, at the painted trees and the dead torch before the white altar whose flame – a real one – flared and twisted. Abstractedly he seized his lyre and plucked the strings which gave forth a quiet, humming sound, he raised his brow and the footlights cast light and darkness across his delicate features. He was singing a recitative, quiet, sustained and dignified, misted over darkly by the irretrievable loss of the lamented one.

‘I hope you like it?’ Meinewelt asked quietly. ‘By the way, I’ve just seen her, she’s here!’

‘Who? Euridice?’

‘Her, Désirée, the woman I told you about in the foyer. How she sits there, God, how she sits there!’

Sebastian gazed steadfastly at Orpheus who had thrown away his lyre and broken out into sobs of desperation. How strange it all is, mused Sebastian  …  Where is the stage? Where am I? I have been brought into a theatre before I have really seen what reality is: and am I to trust his, Meinewelt’s guidance? At home I didn’t recognize any division between dream and reality, between myself as poet and man, my twin brother. And now all this new confusion! Am I Orpheus, or is he me? I am sitting here motionless between all these people, my senses alert to what is happening, and through me are flooding the feelings of centuries! […] My God, why do I feel like this? I cannot shake it off, why don’t the trees bow before him and the wild animals creep from the bushes when they hear such laments? But of course, it’s only a stage in a theatre  …  And in real life? But I’m forgetting, it’s only a legend. And yet, he – or she – has tears in her eyes and she weeps for a woman, and it affects me so deeply. What’s Hecuba to her? And she knows that she’ll win Euridice, and then lose her, because she’s learned her lines. The spectators sit in silence and listen, entranced.

[…]

Désirée Wilmoth was sitting in a box in the stalls: she was wearing her cameo which was gleaming on her heart against the deep-violet background of her plain brocade dress, cut low in the Florentine manner; the cameo shone in a milky iridescence. Her throat was visible, as was a narrow strip of her splendid bosom. Meinewelt saw and heard nothing of the opera, and only had eyes for the gleaming spot on her heart: his imagination seized hold of it, and he soon saw her gleaming white body, hard, with classical outlines: one unique jewel […] ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered, before the final scene. ‘There’s the final apotheosis, I know, but let’s get out  …  Come.’ They left the theatre on tiptoe. And in the street Sebastian stood still. ‘Meinewelt, who is she?’ The editor looked at him. A radiance had spread over this young countenance, and candles were flickering in his eyes as though the joy of life had set them in the windows when the Queen was passing. Meinewelt slipped his arm through Sebastian’s and pulled him forwards. ‘Come, let’s go and see her. She said I should, after the performance. We’ll go there now  …’ They set off, and as they walked Sebastian asked about Sulzwasser, whom Meinewelt had pointed out before the opera began, and who had exchanged a few words. ‘Well, what did he say to you, Sebastian?’

‘He didn’t look me in the face. He looked down at me, and his gaze had a biting quality, I felt it on my skin  …  and then he gazed at the lady in the box. It offended me that he kept staring at the box as though he had no interest at all in what he was saying to me. It was the same old stuff, young man, young poet, and in a mixture of pity and irony. But who
is
she, Meinewelt? I beg you, tell me, and who is this man?’

‘Oh, someone who plays the stock exchange, some millionaire, I don’t know. Certainly he has a name, and is talented; he invented something once  …  He’s one of those youthful acquaintances that stick to you for ever afterwards like a burr which you can’t shake off.’

‘He was talking about Parsifal, I couldn’t quite make out the context, Parsifal and Kundry, Orpheus and the Maenads  …  I couldn’t understand a word, yet there seemed to be some sort of intelligence at work. But, my God, why did he seem to be so repulsive? He also claimed that Orpheus was the first
decadent
and that you had done well to take me to this opera above all, there was no other work which made the listener feel so close to the hero  …’

[…]

He strode forward impetuously, and Meinewelt had difficulty in keeping in step with him  …  The smooth facade of the Imperial Library reared up before them with the pointed twin towers of the Ludwigskirche in the background. During the ride to the theatre, and also that morning, Sebastian had been struck by a sudden vision of Venice, and had recalled an old print that his father had had in an album at home and which he had often looked at – Venice, a section of the Doge’s Palace with the thin needle of the Campanile behind; and this had sufficed to still the yearning of a youthful soul, the flight towards beauty, the past, the sun – and this gentle reminiscence made him tremble with ecstasy. To glide along the canals in a black gondola, past the Lido, out into the rocking plain of the lagoons, half sitting, half reclining, his cheek resting against a warm hand, a round knee, and on the lids of his eyes, eyes turned inwards, towards happiness, to feel mild blessing rain, to hold back the verses which would break forth under an unspeakable pressure, to restrain them so that the holy, silent hour should not be tainted; to know nothing of the presence of the world than the music of the waves and the cries of the gondolier, melancholy and melodious, and to glide through the year-long evening hours, with no wishes, no desires, endless  …

‘Look!’

Meinewelt had seized his arm. An English coupé was driving past them, drawn by two greyish yellow horses, and the figure within the carriage became visible as it passed beneath a street lamp. Startled, Sebastian doffed his cap and gazed after the carriage, which drew all his dreams with it and was soon swallowed up by the darkness.

‘Meinewelt, don’t torment me!’

‘It was Désirée Wilmoth.’

‘You’ve already mentioned that name.’

‘And the name is enough. I’m not a poet, and can’t drag all sorts of adjectives from my brain; besides, she’s not the sort of woman who needs any. Do we not say Astarte? Semiramis? Sarah Bernhardt? I simply say, Désirée Wilmoth. That should suffice. That is nothing more, and nothing less, than everything.’