The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (35 page)

‘Quite, quite soft you are again,' she said, stroking his shaven cheeks.

‘Your little arms feel like satin,' he said, running his hand down her tender forearm. He breathed in the violet odour of her hair.

She kissed him on his closed eyelids; he kissed her on the throat where the pendant hung. They kissed one another's hands. They loved one another sweetly, sensually, for sheer mutual delight in their own well-groomed, pampered, expensive smell. They played together like puppies, biting each other with their lips. Then he got up.

‘We mustn't be too late today,' he said. He turned the top of the perfume bottle upside down on his handkerchief one last time, rubbed a drop into his narrow red hands, took his gloves, and declared himself ready to go.

He put out the light and they went along the red-carpeted corridor hung with dark old oil paintings and down the steps past the little organ. In the vestibule on the ground floor Wendelin was waiting with their coats, gigantic in his long yellow ulster. They yielded their shoulders to his ministrations; Sieglinde's dark head was half lost in her collar of silver fox. Followed by the servant they passed through the stone-paved vestibule into the outer air. It was mild, and there were great ragged flakes of snow in the pearly air. The coupé awaited them. The coachman bent down with his hand to his cockaded hat while Wendelin ushered the brother and sister to their seats; then the door banged shut, he swung himself up to the box, and the carriage was at once in swift motion. It crackled over the gravel, glided through the high, wide gate, curved smoothly to the right, and rolled away.

The luxurious little space in which they sat was pervaded by a gentle warmth. ‘Shall I shut us in?' Siegmund asked. She nodded and he drew the brown silk curtains across the polished panes.

They were in the city's heart. Lights flew past behind the curtains. Their horses' hoofs rhythmically beat the ground, the carriage swayed noiselessly over the uneven ground, and round them roared and shrieked and thundered the machinery of urban life. Quite safe and shut away they sat among the quilted brown silk cushions, hand in hand. The carriage drew up and stopped. Wendelin was at the door to help them out. A little group of grey-faced shivering people stood in the brilliance of the arc-lights and followed them with hostile glances as they passed through the lobby. It was already late, they were the last. They mounted the staircase, threw their cloaks over Wendelin's arms, paused a second before a high mirror, then went through the little door into their box. They were greeted by the last sounds before the hush – voices and the slamming of seats. The lackey pushed their plush-upholstered chairs beneath them; at that moment the lights went down and below their box the orchestra broke into the wild pulsating notes of the prelude.

Night, and tempest  …  And they, who had been wafted hither on the wings of ease, with no petty annoyances on the way, were in exactly the right mood and could give all their attention at once. Storm, a raging tempest, the wailing of the winds in the woods. The angry god's command resounded, once, twice repeated in its wrath, obediently the thunder crashed. The curtain flew up as though blown by the storm. There was the rude hall, dark save for a glow on the pagan hearth. In the centre towered up the trunk of the ash tree. Siegmund appeared in the doorway and leaned against the wooden post, beaten and harried by the storm. Wearily he moved forwards on his sturdy legs wrapped round with hide and thongs. He was rosy-skinned, with a straw-coloured beard; beneath his blond brows and the blond forelock of his wig his blue eyes were directed upon the conductor, with an imploring gaze. At last the orchestra gave way to his voice, which rang clear and metallic, though he tried to make it sound like a gasp. He sang a few bars, to the effect that no matter to whom the hearth belonged he must rest upon it; and at the last word he let himself drop heavily on the bearskin rug and lay there with his head cushioned on his plump arms. His breast heaved in slumber.

A minute passed, filled with the singing, speaking flow of the music, rolling its waves at the feet of the events on the stage  …  Sieglinde entered from the left. She had an alabaster bosom which heaved magnificently against the neckline of her fur-trimmed muslin dress. She displayed surprise at the sight of the stranger; pressed her chin upon her breast until furrows appeared round the lips as they formed the words, words giving expression to her surprise in tones which swelled, soft and warm, from her white throat and were given shape by her tongue and her mobile lips.

She tended the stranger. Bending over him so that her bosom strained towards him from the wilderness of fur like ripe buds, she proffered him the drinking-horn with both hands. He drank. The music spoke movingly to him of cool refreshment and cherishing care. They looked at each other with the beginning of enchantment, a first dim recognition, silently abandoning themselves while the orchestra sang in a melody of profound enchantment.

She gave him mead, first touching the horn with her lips, then watching while he took a long draught. Again their glances met and mingled, while below, the melody voiced their yearning. Then he rose, in deep dejection, turning away painfully, his arms hanging at his sides, to the door, that he might remove from her sight his affliction, his loneliness, his persecuted, hated existence and bear it back into the wild. She called upon him but he did not hear; heedless of self she lifted up her arms and confessed her intolerable anguish. He stopped. Her eyes fell. Below them the music spoke darkly of the bond of suffering that united them. He stayed. He folded his arms and remained by the hearth, awaiting his destiny.

Announced by his pugnacious motif, Hunding entered, paunchy and knock-kneed, like a cow. His beard was black with brown tufts. He stood there frowning, leaning heavily on his spear, and staring ox-eyed at the stranger guest. But as the primitive custom would have it he bade him welcome, in an enormous, rusty bass.

Sieglinde laid the evening meal; Hunding's slow, suspicious gaze moved to and fro between her and the stranger. Dull lout though he was, he could well see that they resembled one another, were of one and the same breed, that odd, untrammelled rebellious stock, which he hated, to which he felt inferior. They sat down, and Hunding, in a few words, introduced himself and accounted for his simple, regular, and orthodox existence. Thus he forced Siegmund to speak of himself –, and that was incomparably more difficult. Yet Siegmund spoke, he sang clearly and with wonderful beauty of his life and misfortunes. He told how he had been born with a twin sister – and as people do who dare not speak out, he called himself by a false name. He gave a moving account of the hatred and envy which had been the bane of his life and his strange father's life, how their hall had been burnt, his sister carried off, how they had led in the forest a harried, persecuted, outlawed life; and how finally he had mysteriously lost his father as well  …  And then Siegmund sang the most painful thing of all: he told of his yearning for human beings, his longing and ceaseless loneliness. He sang of men and women, of friendship and love he had sometimes won, only to be thrust back again into the dark. A curse had lain upon him forever, he was marked by the brand of his strange origins. His speech had not been that of the others, nor theirs his. What he found good was vexation to them, he was galled by the ancient laws to which they paid honour. Always and everywhere he had lived amid anger and strife, he had borne the yoke of scorn and hatred and contempt – all because he was strange, of a breed and kind hopelessly different from them.

The way Hunding reacted to all this was entirely characteristic. His reply showed no sympathy and no understanding, but only a sour disgust and suspicion of all Siegmund's story. And finally understanding that the stranger standing here on his own hearth was the very outlaw he had, following a summons, been hunting that day, he behaved just as one would have expected of the brawny pedant he was. With a grim sort of courtesy he declared that his house was sacred and would protect the fugitive for that night, but that on the morrow he would have the honour of slaying him in battle. Gruffly he commanded Sieglinde to the inner chamber, to spice his night-drink for him and to wait for him in bed; then after a few more threats he followed her, taking all his weapons with him and leaving Siegmund alone and despairing by the hearth.

Up in the box Siegmund bent over the velvet ledge and leaned his dark boyish head on his narrow red hand. His brows made two black furrows, and one foot, resting on the heel of his patent-leather shoe, was in constant nervous motion. But it stopped as he heard a whisper close to him.

‘Gigi!'

His mouth, as he turned, had an insolent twist.

Sieglinde was holding out to him a mother-of-pearl box with maraschino cherries.

‘The brandy chocolates are underneath,' she whispered. But he accepted only a cherry, and as he took it out of the tissue paper wrapping she said in his ear:

‘She will come back to him again at once.'

‘I am not entirely unaware of the fact,' he said, so loud that several heads were jerked angrily in his direction  …  Down in the darkness the great Siegmund was singing alone. From the depths of his heart he cried out for the sword – for a shining blade to swing on that day when there burst forth at last the bright flame of his anger and rage, which so long had smouldered deep in his heart. He saw the hilt glitter in the tree, saw the embers fade on the hearth, sank back in gloomy slumber – and started up, leaning on his hands in horrified delight when Sieglinde glided back to him in the darkness.

Hunding, drugged and intoxicated, was sleeping like a log. Together they rejoiced at the outwitting of the dolt; they laughed, and their eyes had the same way of narrowing as they laughed. Then Sieglinde stole a look at the conductor, received her cue, and putting her lips in position sang a long recitative: related the heart-breaking tale of how they had forced her, forsaken, strange and wild as she was, to give herself to the crude and savage Hunding and to count herself lucky in an honourable marriage which might bury her dark origins in oblivion. She sang too, sweetly and soothingly, of the strange old man in the hat and how he had driven the sword-blade into the trunk of the ash tree, to await the coming of the one who alone was able to draw it out. Passionately she prayed in song that it might be he whom she had in mind, whom she knew and grievously longed for, the consoler of her sorrows, the friend who should be more than friend, the avenger of her shame, whom once she had lost, whom in her abasement she wept for, her brother in suffering, her saviour, her rescuer  …

But at this point Siegmund flung about her his two rosy arms. He pressed her cheek against the pelt that covered his breast and holding her so, sang above her head – sang out his exultation to the four winds, in a silver trumpeting of sound. Hot in his breast burned the oath that bound him to her, his fair companion. All the yearning of his hunted life found assuagement in her, and in her he found everything that had been so scornfully refused him when he had sought the company of men and women, when he had sought friendship and love with that arrogance which came from shyness and the consciousness of his stigma. Shame was her lot, as his was suffering, dishonoured was she as he was outcast, and revenge – their revenge – was to be this love between brother and sister.

The storm whistled, a gust of wind burst open the door, a flood of white electric light poured into the hall. Divested of darkness they stood and sang their song of spring and spring's sister, love!

Crouching on the bearskin they looked at each other in the white light, as they sang their duet of love. Their bare arms touched each other as they held each other by the temples and gazed into each other's eyes, and as they sang their mouths were very near. They compared their eyes, their foreheads, their voices – they were the same. The growing, urging recognition wrung from his breast his father's name; she called him by his: Siegmund! Siegmund! He freed the sword, he swung it above his head, and ecstatically she sang to him, revealing who she was: his twin sister, Sieglinde. In rapture he stretched out his arms to her, his bride, she sank upon his breast – the curtain fell as the music swelled into a roaring, rushing, foaming whirlpool of passion – swirled and swirled and with one mighty throb stood still.

Rapturous applause. The lights went on. A thousand people got up, stretched unobtrusively as they clapped, then made ready to leave the hall, with heads still turned towards the stage, where the singers appeared before the curtain, like masks hung out in a row at a fair. Hunding too came out and smiled politely, despite all that had just been happening.

Siegmund pushed back his chair and stood up. He was hot; little red patches showed on his cheek-bones, above the lean, sallow, shaven cheeks.

‘For my part,' he said, ‘what I want now is a breath of fresh air. Siegmund was pretty feeble, wasn't he?'

‘Yes,' answered Sieglinde, ‘and the orchestra felt the need to drag during the the Spring Song.'

‘Frightfully sentimental,' said Siegmund, shrugging his narrow shoulders in his dress coat. ‘Are you coming out?' She lingered a moment, with her elbow on the ledge, still gazing at the stage. He looked at her as she rose and took up her silver scarf. Her soft, full lips were quivering.

They went into the foyer and mingled with the slow-moving throng, greeting acquaintances, downstairs and up again, sometimes hand in hand.

‘I should enjoy an ice,' she said, ‘if it were not almost certain to be of inferior quality.'

‘Impossible,' he said. So they ate bonbons out of their box – maraschino cherries and chocolate beans filled with cognac.

The bell rang and they looked on contemptuously as the crowds rushed back to their seats, blocking the corridors. They waited until all was quiet, regaining their places just as the lights went down again and silence and darkness fell soothingly upon the hall. A bell rang quietly, the conductor raised his arms and summoned up anew the wave of splendid sound.