Authors: David Stacton
He found him standing at the prow, watching the peaks beyond Rütli with impatience. Kainz did not go to join him. From the back there was something defeated, yet determined about the King, hunched over the prow
railing
like an exile being ferried between two countries.
Kainz could still see before him the figure of the King at the glacier, shimmering through snow blindness, yet in some way really there, by act of will. The thought sobered him. For an instant the King had been at his brain and in his body, with a sad desperation to get in. Ludwig did not turn around. Bewildered and frightened for his own security, Kainz turned back and sat on one
of the side benches, also watching the hills above the Rütli hut. He had his own reasons for not wanting to go there again.
When the boat docked the King was nowhere in sight. Going down the gangplank, Kainz saw him already standing on the shore, that grotesquely bottom-heavy body tugging at its feet. There were times when Ludwig seemed an apparition, the more terrible for being flesh and blood. The King was talking to the equerry Burkel. Burkel came over to Kainz and seemed disturbed.
“Where are we going now?”
“Up the Brünnen. He wants to hear Melchthal’s oath again,” said Burkel. He seemed to check Kainz mentally, not out of concern for him, but out of concern for the King’s wishes. He shrugged. “Make it if you can.”
Kainz felt that if he did not make it, something
dreadful
would happen. He sighed and forced himself to move forward. Fortunately the guides had been dismissed, and it was to the interest of the servants to help him on.
Ludwig
moved at the head of the procession, in and out of the trees, and would speak to no one. It was as though, having lost one tower of his defences, he was hastening to repair the other.
The gradient was not so bad as it looked, and the
servants
managed to help Kainz out when he stumbled. The sun was still hot and he felt filthy. His throat was completely dry. He was more worried about his voice than anything else. For two hours the party wound through the thin forest. Kainz was slightly drunk with the brandy that had been given him. The King had not spoken to him once.
He knew the reason for this trip: if Ludwig could not have the one thing, then he must have the other. Kainz even wanted to give him the other, but it was too late for
that. He could scarcely keep awake. Only by cursing Schiller rhythmically could he keep his feet in motion.
At last they reached a grassy meadow, open on one side to the lake. It was filled with late spring flowers, still blooming at this elevation, but somewhat dry to the touch. The King had gone into a patch of trees, no doubt to compose himself. Kainz sat down on the grass and tried to ignore the dull throbbing in his legs. In a moment the King would want Melchthal’s speeches, and mentally he began to search for them, rooting out the key phrases that would open memory. He found one, and then another, blinking drowsily, and then he could not find them any more, for memory opened down into sleep.
From time to time he felt himself prodded, but with the best will in the world he could not respond. No more can the chicken in the egg emerge until it is strong enough. From an immense height of blackness above him he could see the King against the glacier, weeping
bitterly
.
When he woke it was dark. The grass was damp. He sat up quickly, scrambling to his feet, but he was utterly alone. He blinked, fearful of the wild darkness, and of the velvet sky above him. The air seemed suspended. He knew at once what had happened.
He stumbled down the hill. In an hour he reached the shore. The Rütli hut was closed for the night. He had only a few francs with him. At last he managed to find a boatman to row him across the lake. It was like Tell after all, but Tell, Act I.
Two hours later he burst into his hotel room. It, too, was empty, but with the special emptiness of a room which people have left for good. The King’s light was on, but he did not dare to intrude upon him. He sank wearily down on the bed and went to sleep again.
When he woke he knew at once that he was alone. He shook his head, scarcely able to move in the bed. It was terrible. The room seemed dingy and the light hurt his eyes, but it was the sensation of being utterly alone that troubled him most. He wondered what had happened, only half realizing that he was still alive.
The door opened and an equerry came over to him. Through half closed lids, he saw the man move on tiptoe about the room, checking the louvers of the windows. He felt like a boy who has done something wrong,
helpless
and resentful at the same time.
“Does the King wish to see me?” he asked.
The equerry turned towards the bed. “The King has gone,” he said. He gave a crooked smile. “If you are well enough, we have got you a seat on the evening train.”
Clearly the equerry knew he was penniless. Kainz closed his eyes. He had not the strength either to feel angry or ashamed. That would come later. He took the train.
Staring out at the rain through the coach window, he realized that he had known this would happen, for the climb was not the cause of it. The climb was a substitute for something else.
Two days ago they had crossed Lake Lucerne to
re-enact
the scene on the Brünnen from Schiller.
Afterwards
they had gone to the Rütli hut by the lake. It was a Swiss national shrine, and accordingly well kept up. There were tables outside, and the footmen had brought along refreshments. Ludwig had stationed them about the grounds with torches.
Together, he and the King had gazed out at the lake in the twilight. Kainz had been very tired. Then he had felt a pressure on his arm, but a different pressure from that he had felt there before, at Berg. This pressure was
timid, ashamed, and yet imperative. It was too late for that sort of thing, and Kainz had shaken the hand off. No man can use another man’s body as the vehicle of his own escape. Escape in that sense is only transient, illusory, and mutual. Yet even so he wished now that he had not been so brusque.
In Munich he found waiting for him a favourable contract to appear in Berlin. With Court favour gone, even had he wanted to, he had no way to turn back. He signed at once. The day after he signed he received a large box. It was from the King. It contained eleven bottles of champagne. In the twelfth, wrote Ludwig, he had drunk his health. Kainz looked at the empty cradle and wanted to cry. He thought he understood. He went to Berlin all the same.
To reach fame we must travel very light and go alone, and he saw fame ahead of him now, down the road, with her smile of the Sphinx. All famous people have that smile, rapacious, yet sad. He would never play Didier again.
Yet the King was not mad. He was only ill from
loneliness
. Kainz shivered. The King had been born with an identity. But what happens when, after years of struggle, hardship and terror, at last you earn the right to say,
I
am
?
Where do you go then? Do you sit alone and drink a twelfth bottle of champagne? It was better to be an actor. At least an actor has an audience. He does not beat against a closed door, in an empty cell.
L
udwig felt badly about the matter. It was 1883. It was too late for delights. With Kainz the failure had been his own. With one gesture at the Rütli hut he had damned himself for good. Once more he sat alone in the tower room at Berg and opened the diary.
“On this day a year and a half ago, I saw the
unforgettable
third performance of Didier,” he wrote. The only freedom we have is our memory of past events. But was the performance so unforgettable as all that? Now he was not so sure. It seemed to him now that he forgot a little more of the unforgettable every day. It was
dreadful
to live in a world without events, silent, still, and dead. There was no sound anywhere. Wagner was not there. The speaking voice had failed, and there should be no more music. He could not bear to hear it any more.
Insomnia yawned beneath him like a pit. He could no longer sleep, yet did people realize that to lie awake all night long was not to be awake, but that sleeplessness was a parody of sleep? In some ways the Greeks were a primitive people. They recognized only the twin gods Mors and Thanatos, born of the night without benefit of a father. They did not know that awful boy who
masquerades
as both, in a stern mythology without women. Mors was a woman. Who was it made death male? But
sleep is masculine. It is a wiry, hooting boy, stalking our labours. Sometimes it is the erotic child, luring us on to bed. There, with a crooked smile, it vanishes.
In our waking life we steel ourselves to live alone. The stoics never slept. But there are some men who can never sleep alone. When life is so cold, they need another body to keep their bodies warm, otherwise they lie awake and shiver down the night. Insomnia is one of the diseases of unrequited and unrequitable love. It is a deficiency
dis-ease
. We lie awake, not because we cannot sleep, but in the futile hope that at last, as the body ebbs towards dawn, someone will come to make sleep possible.
When we lie sleepless, parody of our desires fits over us like a lid and we are buried alive. We have no choice. The sleepless are too tired to make a choice. The choice makes them. For the sleepless do not really lie awake. Instead they are cataleptic, but their minds are alive. One by one, as the hours ooze by, they are exposed to all the experiences which sleep alone makes bearable. They feel their body ebb, their metabolism approach the threshold of death, their limbs grow helpless and their breathing slow and shallow. The nightmare sits on their chest, they sweat, and they hear the tinkling rattle of that sistrum which in consciousness we call the death rattle, last music we shall ever make, inferior to the music of the swan.
Slowly the rats swarm up from the hold of the
unconscious
, and ravenously begin to gnaw the living body of the self. A plague has driven them to this. The plague is sleeplessness.
We lie awake until dawn. Vigilantly we watch the shadows. For if we lie awake until dawn, we have the chance to find in the daytime someone who will make the next night endurable. We can never lie awake long
enough, however. The nibbling rats reach the heart, and we fall asleep convulsively, with one last captive heave of the chest, to unseat the nightmare. When we wake we are tired and it is afternoon. It is then too late to find a
companion
to make the next night endurable. The shadows on the grass are already long.
And sleeplessness makes day and night the same. Everything has a like grey texture. There is not light enough for hope. We think of suicide, but we are too weak to act on the thought. Yet the idea is consoling. Then we could sleep. But that too is a delusion. What is the use of sleep, if we cannot know we sleep? The self says yes. The body says not yet. The self says now. The body says too tired. The self says yes. The body then says no. We are too tired. At dawn we fall asleep.
For the world is utterly empty. There is no one left alive to tell us we may sleep, and the bird at dawn is too far off. Her song to wake another world, in our world says good-bye.
*
Berg was a station on an endless route. Linderhof had failed. Herrenchiemsee was dangerous and unfinished. Neuschwanstein was emptier each time he entered it. There remained Falkenstein, which would be the perfect grail to house the ideal of purity. It would rise upon its rock like an organ prelude, in great buttresses of sound. It was what he believed in in Wagner, and if Wagner was gone, at least the belief remained.
But to build he must have money, and there was no money left. He summoned Richard. Richard’s face seemed numb, yet under its features there must be
somewhere
the Richard he had once known, who was capable of understanding what it was he needed. Richard must be made to realize that a loan was essential, no matter
what its source. He did not quite know how to make him realize that, for though he could explain what
Falkenstein
was to be, he could no longer explain, even to
himself
, exactly why he had to build it.
He paced up and down through the halls of Berg, with Richard beside him, talking endlessly. It was something to do. It occupied the nights. It kept him from
self-indulgence.
At the end of each corridor he would turn to look at Richard, but no communication was any longer possible between them. Richard was not intelligent. Richard was only tired and loyal. He had somehow to make Richard see what Falkenstein was for.
What was it for? He glanced round him. He looked out of the window to the quiet surface of the Starnbergsee. What was Falkenstein? It was the shell of an ideal, which is all we have left when the ideal has died. Yet from the configuration of the shell we can at least tell what the ideal was like when it was alive, and how what we believe now had some such remote living ancestor, frozen like a trilobite in the pressure of a rock.
To raise money was impossible.
“You must raise it. What are you for?” shouted
Ludwig,
and was immediately sorry, for Richard blinked. That was enough. Ludwig did not want to hurt him. He did not want to hurt anybody. He only wanted his help. Perhaps that hurt most of all, yet surely there must be somebody to help.
Richard looked at him curiously and said he would try to raise yet another loan. Ludwig was only mildly
mollified
. The promise was merely a crust stuck through a grating. We are never rewarded for what we do: we are only punished for what we have not done. Munich hated him for loving what Munich hated. There was nothing so implacable as ignorance. The blind hate those who
can see. The captive do not want liberty. They want the destruction of the free. The walls of our prison topple down on us very slowly. We have plenty of time to watch them fall.
He would bring Wagner to Falkenstein when it was complete. Then Wagner would see what Ludwig saw in him. If Ludwig could not create himself, he did at least have the power to make creation visible and possible. At any rate he had had that power once. Now he must have it again, or silence would stifle him.
Somewhere Richard raised 40,000 marks. It was enough to break ground for the foundations. If the tough soil was once broken, then the shoot might come up. Why do we have to have money in order to thaw the heart, when the sun thaws the ground so easily? Is the sun life’s money? As far as Ludwig was concerned, if there was no love, there should at least be understanding, even if he had to build it on a mountain top. He ordered the work to commerce. Everyone else had turned to dust. If he could not have Wagner back, at least he could have the emotion he had first felt for Wagner embodied in
Falkenstein
. Perhaps when Wagner saw it he would feel
differently
.
But in this life it is impossible to trick the executioner. He is wilier than we and he waits. In Venice Wagner died.
*
At Berg the torches burned all night. Ludwig sent Burkel to Venice at once, to help bring the body back home. He had seen others die. They were strangers. But Wagner was part of himself. Wagner was his noblest work, which he had coddled, coaxed, and paid for. To have Wagner still was to lose the power of speech. A part of him died.
If we must sit in the shadows, as we must, then no amount of light can ever help. Day after day we fight against little men, who are afraid to grow. We lose and there is nothing we can do then but to defend ourselves. That they kill us with their misunderstanding and neglect is not so bad: what they do to our bodies after we are dead is worse than indignity. Maggots secrete a fluid to make death edible. So do men. They call it grief.
None of us is defeated by death. At the last moment we can go over to the other side, accepted as were the crusaders by the Saracens for our prowess and our valour. Without loss of dignity we join the ranks of those who fight the living. To cross the threshold is as trivial, though as painful, but as meaningless, as circumcision, which is an act in its very nature clean. But the living desire to make all things like themselves, and the revenge they take upon the bodies we leave behind us is equivalent to the sack of a town too long brave under siege. In that sense only is death horrible. The Greeks did well to burn.
The revenge of those who hated us in life is to deify us dead, for that way they obliterate the fact that we were human. Burkel brought him a complete report. The Master had died at his desk. Cosima held him for many hours. Then he was laid out. He was catheterized. His body was painted with arsenic so poisonous that Cosima could no longer approach it. When she was allowed in to see him, he had been taken away for good. Only a tinctured chrysalis remained. His features had been twisted into a smile and a death mask had been taken, to show that no one had ever made him suffer. At least we have the power to make the dead simper with our own bland indifference.
He was placed in a lead casket and the lid sealed down. The body was taken to Beyreuth. There it was eulogized;
for no ideal, no aspiration, no grandeur, no nobility does Man admire until it has been immunized by death. The obsequies, wrote Burkel, were dignified. Burkel was a fool. Of course they were dignified. They were graced by the silence of relief. Man fights insight every day. We canonize the illustrious dead in the same spirit in which a hunter cuts a new notch in an already well-notched gun.
He avoided the funeral, but to Beyreuth and
Wahnfried
he must go, to see if anything was left. He arrived late in the afternoon, alone, leaving Burkel in the carriage outside on the road. He was a pilgrim now.
Wagner was of Saxony, and Wahnfried, his house, had a naked, cold, northern look that fitted oddly in
Beyreuth
. It had the winter smell. He opened its gate and stood on the gravel path inside. In front of the house, surrounded by shrubs, stood a bust of himself. It shocked him. It showed him in youth, when he had first met the Master. It was as though there were two graves at Wahnfried, not one. The bust seemed to usher him in to witness the greatness of a stranger. With a glance at the curtained windows, Ludwig moved round the side of the house, towards the garden at the rear.
There was still snow on the ground. It had been
snowing
when the coffin was brought here. Perhaps it was the same snow. Over it some dull minister had spoken some empty pious words. They could have had nothing to do with Wagner. Christianity is meaningless, for we are at its ebb. It is merely a salt
étang
left by a receding sea; for the spirit, like faith itself, is tidal. It can never be captured inland, in the lake of one religion only, and that evaporated past its flood.
He had almost reached the rear garden. He paused and then went on. Before him was the monument, crusted with snow. Had it snowed in Venice, too, as the black
gondolas bore their burden to the station? Why, when water is the source of all life, together with the sun, is it that it is in mist the great barque of death flows smoothly towards us down the stream, hiding with
drifting
curtains of snow a figure we cannot see, a shadowy presence which floats away on the waters of life, but which is more than life? Must all our meaning go away with us? As the gondolas paraded sadly down that last lagoon, did they take the world away with them, or did they take us to the world? Somewhere did a snub-nosed boat put out to sea, even while the coffin was being loaded on the train for Germany?
It had been snowing. He did not know.
He looked at the great slab of stone there in the garden. Beyond it lay small mounds in the earth. These were the little graves of faithful dogs, of Far-Frisch, Köchel, Wolf, Gremmie, Froh, and Marka. He remembered Marka. In his memory there also started up and stretched the black dog of his childhood, the dog Doppelgnäger who would follow him now, eager for an affection he could not give it. Dogs, like people, are ambiguous. When they follow us, how can we be sure that they do not pursue?
He sat for a long time in the garden, in the snow. It was peaceful there. But Wagner was dead. The great star had fallen, that had given him the means to plot his own course against the sky. Yet there was still a long way to go. The walls of Falkenstein dissolved.
Wagner had been mean and presumptuous, and had used him badly. He had known all that. It did not
matter
. All men were mean in some things, and he had done with men. But Wagner had also been truly great. Even our reliable beacons must be built by human hands, and though the contractor cheats, we do not mind, for
beacons
we must have, to cut the gloom.
The time had come to enter the pyramid. A ship had sailed over the horizon. If he was not to lose that guide, then he must hasten to cast off his own ropes, in order to be free to follow. He would enter loneliness for the last time, like a voyage or a monument, and who is to say the two are not the same? Anthony was dead.
Burkel was waiting. He would return to Berg. He got up and left himself behind. If he was no longer himself, it did not matter what he chose to do. When there is no one left whom we can love, what then is love? He knew the answer now, but found it frightening. It was more than he could face.