Still burning with exuberance, I added admiringly that no one would ever pen so masterly a portrait again; hereupon, turning abruptly away, he bit his lip, threw the sheets of paper down and growled scornfully: “Don’t talk such nonsense! Masterly? What would you know about it?” This brusque remark (probably just a shield hastily assumed to hide his impatient modesty) was enough to ruin my day. And in the afternoon, when I was alone with his wife, I suddenly fell into a kind of fit of hysteria, grasped her hands and said: “Tell me, why does he hate me so? Why does he despise me so much? What have I done to him, why does everything I say irritate him? Help me—tell me what to do! Why can’t he bear me—tell me, please tell me!”

At this, assailed by my wild outburst, she turned a bright eye on me. “Not bear you?” And a laugh broke from her mouth, a laugh rising to such shrill heights of malice that I involuntarily flinched. “Not bear you?” she repeated, looking angrily into my startled eyes. But then she bent closer—her gaze gradually softened and then became even softer, almost sympathetic—and suddenly, for the first time, she stroked my hair. “Oh, you really are a child, a stupid child who notices nothing, sees nothing, knows nothing. But it’s better that way— or you would be even more confused.”

And with a sudden movement she turned away.


I sought calm in vain—as if tied up in a black sack in an anxious dream from which there was no awakening, I struggled to understand, to rouse myself from the mysterious confusion of these conflicting feelings.

Four months had passed in this way—weeks of self-improvement and transformation such as I had never imagined. The term was fast approaching an end, and I faced the imminent vacation with a sense of dread, for I loved my purgatory, and the soberly non-intellectual atmosphere of my home threatened me like exile and deprivation. I was already hatching secret plans to pretend to my parents that important work kept me here, weaving a skilful tissue of lies and excuses to prolong my present existence, although it was devouring me. But the day and the hour had long ago been ordained for me elsewhere. That hour hung invisibly over me, just as the sound of the bell striking midday lies latent in the metal, ready to chime suddenly and gravely, urging laggards to work or to departure.

How well that fateful evening began, how deceptively well! I had been sitting at table with the two of them—the windows were open, and a twilit sky with white clouds was slowly filling their darkened frames: there was something mild and clear in their majestically hovering glow; one could not help feeling it deep within. His wife and I had been talking more casually, more easily, with more animation than usual. My teacher sat in silence, ignoring our conversation, but his silence presided over it with folded wings, so to speak. Looking sideways, I glanced surreptitiously at him—there was something curiously radiant about him today, a restlessness devoid of anything nervous, like the movement of those summer clouds. Sometimes he took his wine glass and held it up to the light to appreciate the colour, and when my happy glance followed that gesture he smiled slightly and raised the glass to me. I had seldom seen his face so untroubled, his movements so smooth and composed; he sat there in almost solemn cheerfulness, as if he heard music in the street outside, or were listening to some unseen conversation. His lips, around which tiny movements usually played, were still and soft as a peeled fruit, and his forehead when he turned it gently to the window took on the refraction of the mild light and seemed to me nobler than ever. It was wonderful to see him at peace like that: I did not know whether it was the reflection of the pure summer evening, whether the mild, soft air did him good, or whether some pleasant thought were illuminating him from within. But used as I was to reading his countenance like a book, I felt that

today a kinder God had smoothed out the folds and crevices of his heart.

And it was with curious solemnity, too, that he rose and with his usual movement of the head invited me to follow him to his study: for a man who normally moved fast, he trod with strange gravity. Then he turned back, took an unopened bottle of wine from the sideboard— this too was unusual—and carried it thoughtfully into the study with him. His wife, like me, seemed to notice something strange in his behaviour; she looked up from her needlework with surprise in her eyes and, silent and intent, observed his unusually measured step as we went to the study to work.

The familiar dimness of the darkened room awaited us as usual; there was only a golden circle of light cast by the lamp on the piled white sheets of paper lying ready. I sat in my usual place and repeated the last few sentences of the manuscript; he always needed to hear the rhythm, which acted as a tuning fork, to get himself in the right mood and let the words stream on. But while he usually started immediately once that rhythm was established, this time no words came. Silence spread in the room, a tense silence already pressing in on us from the walls. He still seemed not quite to have collected himself, for I heard him pacing nervously behind my back. “Read it over again!” Odd how restlessly his voice suddenly vibrated. I repeated the last few paragraphs: now he started, going straight on from what I had said, dictating more abruptly but faster and with more consistency than usual. Five sentences set the scene; until now he had been describing the cultural prerequisites of the drama, painting a fresco of the period, an outline of its history. Now he turned to the drama itself, a genre finally settling down after all its vagabond wanderings, its rides across country in carts, building itself a home licensed by right and privilege, first the Rose Theatre and the Fortuna, wooden houses for plays that were wooden themselves, but then the workmen build a new wooden structure to match the broader breast of the new poetic genre, grown to virility; it rises on the banks of the Thames, on piles thrust into the damp and otherwise unprofitable muddy ground, a massive wooden building with an ungainly hexagonal tower, the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare, the great master, will strut the stage. As if cast up by the sea like a strange ship, with a piratical red flag on the topmost mast, it stands there firmly anchored in the mud.