Sophie and the Sibyl

Author:Patricia Duncker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Max therefore had twenty-four hours in which to fester with confused indignation. He was mildly aware of the Darwin debate. He had even sat smoking beside Wolfgang, while the publisher corrected the proofs of various tracts, for and against, listening to his brother’s fulminations, without ever absorbing the arguments. For it is perfectly possible to saunter through life, especially if you are wealthy, young and in good health, taking the view that the intellectual controversies of the age are there for you to enjoy, dip into from time to time and ignore at your pleasure. He had peacefully nodded at Miss Gibbons’s breathless enthusiasm for the Development Theory as they careered round the ballroom in Homburg, accepting her torrent of evolutionary certainties as something peculiar, which occasionally poured forth from English spinsters. Above all, this rigorous discussion happened elsewhere, and did not affect him personally. Now it had. And without his consent.

Max simmered with unspoken disagreements. The Fall of the Roman Empire, in so far as he understood the causes of its slow demise, led him to believe that steam engines, gas lighting, new markets, numerous wars, and a general improvement in education and living standards, were no guarantee of national survival. Progress, far from being inevitable, remained a precarious business. The littleness of humankind, the meanness of our understanding, and the viciousness of our habits, both in modern Berlin and in Southern Gaul, during Lucian’s peaceful withdrawal into retirement, impressed him with their similarities. Lucian and the Sibyl, noble giants on fire with their misguided faith, walked the world, confident that Reason and Truth would triumph for all eternity. Max saw no grounds whatsoever for this benevolent optimism. The evidence supporting that ancient, unfashionable doctrine of innate evil, against which our better natures struggle if they can, galloped towards him, transformed into a host of grinning demons, waving banners. He passed an uncomfortable rainy morning in his hotel rooms, drinking coffee, smoking and staring at tiny patterns in the wallpaper.

Herr Klesmer and the sun arrived in the early afternoon. The musician stormed in, barely announced, his white mane shaking, and his head thrown back, like an orator reaching a climax. The peculiar manner of his entrance arrested Max in mid-stride. He had begun to pace from the fireplace to the furthest windows, from which he could see nothing but gabled roofs and yellowing trees. Max had last seen Klesmer plunging through the streets of Berlin, followed by a Bacchic train of admirers. Now the musician appeared once more, as if he had walked the world since then, gathering garlands of praise and prodigious roars of eulogy.

Klesmer froze in a dramatic attitude, his ferocious glare fixed upon Max, as if he was taking part in a game of charades, and had achieved the perfect pose for the tableau.

‘Good day to you, sir!’ He suddenly bowed, as an afterthought, then, holding his hat at a theatrical angle, he delivered his request.

‘I wish you to be on your guard tonight, sir. I am counting on your support, for there may well be trouble.

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