and walked slowly out of the hall, no one stirred, but the headmaster, who was sitting in the last row, got up and bowed to them, when they went past him, and after a pause he turned to the music master who sat at his side and said: “They did not play for the people who have been burned out; they played for their father.”
That was the first time they had played in public since their childhood.
“More and more stars,” thought Amadeus clasping his hands round his knees. “And I fancied that all light had been extinguished in these years.”
Yes, and then Erasmus entered a cavalry regiment as a second lieutenant, and Aegidius had taken over the large estate, and he, Amadeus, in his turn had studied, and sitting at the large oak table, with “the whole of the Prophet Jeremiah” open in front of him, had written down verses and melodies and had slowly gone his father’s way of “doing nothing,” as the methodical people said.
Yet there was so much to be done, so immeasurably much. For years and decades; and just now under the silent stars it seemed to him as if centuries had passed. For if nothing else could be done, there was one thing that had to be done: to try to find the hidden meaning of a song that fishergirls sang on the sand dunes of Kurland:
Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow,
Dance, I want you to be gay.
Grita had known it even when she was spinning her shroud. But he did not know it, and neither the folio volumes nor the microscope could impart that to him. He who relies only on the intellect must walk with crutches, even though they be set with precious stones, and at the first breath of fate will break like matchsticks.
Of the old people there was now only Christoph, the coachman, left, and often Amadeus sat with him at dusk on the oat bin. On the large estates in the eastern provinces the coachman had always been of special importance, because the horses, too, had been of particular importance. The faithful coachmen were the imperturbable kings among all the retainers on the estate. They drove the babies to church to be christened, the young couples to be married, and the dead in their coffins to be buried, and in the twilight of their stables the young sons learned the wisdom of a long life of service.
Christoph had light blue eyes and a small beard under his clean-shaven chin. The beard, at that time, was already white. He was the only one who addressed Amadeus with the familiar “Du.” He said Herr Baron – but then he fell back into the familiar form of speech.
“You must not worry so much, Herr Baron,” he said, drawing at his short pipe on whose porcelain bowl there was a brightly colored picture of the old emperor. “Not about his lordship, your father, either. All is well with your father, the old lord, for he has gone to the nether world, do you understand? Some go to join those in the heavenly world, but then we do not hear them anymore. But the others – a man can hear them – if he doesn’t go out to look for them.”
“Do you hear him, Christoph?”
The coachman took the pipe out of his mouth and nodded. “Sometimes, Herr Baron,” he said very quietly.
“Where the three big juniper bushes stand on the moor, before one passes the peat bog – that’s where I hear him. The horses get restive there, because a little light stands among the heather. And then I hear him say: ‘Well, how are you and everybody, Christoph?’ and I answer, ‘Things are all right, Herr Baron.’ Then we drive past and the light disappears. You see, he has gone down again, Herr Baron.”
“You can still do that,” Amadeus said after a while. “Your feet still reach into the underworld.”
Christoph shook his head doubtfully, pressing the tobacco more tightly into his pipe. “I don’t know, Herr Baron, whether it’s the feet,” he said. “I think it’s because we still have faith. Never let anyone drive you four-in-hand, Herr Baron, as the countess does. Whoever drives four-in-hand has lost his faith. Christ went on foot.”
Yes, much had flowed into him in his childhood – mysterious and incongruous tales. It had probably helped him to come through the years, the tens of years, the First World War and the revolution, the collapse of a nation and the decay of the Western world. Those mysterious powers of the underworld had protected him, that which was incomprehensible to reason, yes, that at which reason smiled. The spinning wheel and the oat bin had been more to him than the folio volumes. Long before books had been written people had spun – even in the earliest fairytales, and while they were spinning they had sung: “Dance, my laddie, full of sorrow, dance, I want you to be gay . . .” And that’s perhaps what he did, even when it seemed to others that he did nothing.
And now at last he got up. The light of the moon still shone over the world and from a distance the wind brought now and again the fragment of a tune from a loudspeaker. It sounded as if a delirious patient were talking in his sleep.
“That’s what they have kept,” thought Amadeus while he climbed up among the stones. “Victors and vanquished, dancing. But not full of sorrow. Not even the defeated are full of sorrow – to say nothing of their gaiety.”
The air had become cooler and the juniper bushes stood like dark pilgrims among the heather, each with its long shadow. The moonlight made everything unreal. A softly sparkling world, but it was unreal and unsubstantial. The dead had as much room in it as the living, and the baron had seen so many dead people.
Then behind a wood of low pine trees, there was the shepherd’s hut. Dark and massive, with its steep low gable, and the moonlight shone like silver on the thatched reed roof. Amadeus had no home now and would never have one again, but there might be a roof to cover him in this ruined world, and this, thatched and gray, looked as if it might have space under it for innocent animals and for guilty human beings. It was an old roof, and the shepherd had spent a life under it, and he had learned silence and wisdom. Amadeus had often sat with him on the threshold, from which could be seen a vast expanse of sky and a view over the Vogelsberg on one hand and over the Thueringer Wald on the other. The earth here was poor and barren, but the landscape was grand and lonely, and here the shepherd had had his visions, and his face had been shaped by this country, as these rocks had been shaped by the subterranean fires millions of years ago.
It was from this threshold that they had fetched him. The last he had seen was the tall, lean figure of the shepherd holding up his crook under the drifting clouds. And the last he had heard had been his fearless, solemn voice calling as from a mouth of brass: “He who makes prisoners shall himself be taken to prison. He who takes the sword, shall perish by the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”
Two of them had only turned and jeered, but the third had looked round and made a threatening gesture with his fist.
Throughout four long years Amadeus had searched for it: the patience and the faith of the saints. He had not found it.
Ah, and now he would see them again, his two brothers, and he was afraid. So afraid that his heart throbbed and his hands trembled, when he saw the feeble gleam of light behind the reed curtain of the small window.
He was afraid for many reasons, his heart was afraid, and reason could not give a name to it. What he first realized was that he was afraid to touch a human being. Not only was he afraid of their words and opinions, their looks and gestures. But there was an actual physical fear of touching them. When a man has slept for a long time on a plank bed with two others, he no longer thinks of the human body as something sacred. When one’s habitation has been a dark, airless room filled with the bodies, the breathing, the groaning, and the delirium of human beings, he recoils before men, unless he has “the patience and the faith of the saints.” But he did not have them.
As
