138
PARTISAN REVIEW
that was a cross between a dachshund and a bulldog, which had
subjugated his friends' lives to itself, down to the very pictures on
the wall and the spindly lines of the artsy-craftsy reproduction furni–
ture; even the fact that there was no maid, but only a daily woman
who came in to cook and clean, was part of the same thing. Beyond
the windows of this house the vineyards rose, with their clumps of
old trees and their crooked little houses, toward the sweeping outline
of the forest. But nearer at hand everything was untidy, bare,
scattered and as though burnt by acid, as it always is where the
edges of big cities go seeping out into the countryside. It was the
piano that threw out the arc spanning that foreground and the pleas–
ant distance; black and gleaming, it sent pillars of fire, all tenderness
and heroism, flaring out through the walls, though indeed they
crumbled into an infinitely fine ash of sound and fell to the ground
only a few hundred yards away, without ever reaching the hillside
with the fir trees where the tavern stood, a halfway house, on the
road leading into the forest. And yet the rooms could make the
piano roar and resound; they were one of those megaphones through
which the soul sends its cry out, into the universe-like a rutting
stag answered by nothing but the self-same rival belling of thousands
of other solitary souls roaring at the universe. Ulrich's strong posi–
tion in this house rested on the fact that he declared music to be a
failure of the will and a confusion of the mind, and spoke of it with
more contempt than he really felt; for to Walter and Clarisse music
was at that time the paramount hope and dread. They partly de–
spised him for his attitude, and partly venerated him like an evil
spirit.
When they had got to the end of the music, Walter remained
sitting, soft, drained-out, and forlorn, on
his
half-turned stool at the
piano. But Clarisse got up and welcomed the intruder eagerly. Her
hands and face were still twitching with the electric charge of the
music, and her smile squeezed out under the tension of ecstasy and
disgust.
"Frog-prince!" she said, nodding back at the music or Walter.
Ulrich felt the springy strength of the tie between himself and her
tightening again. On his last visit she had told him about a terrible
dream she had had: a slippery creature had tried to overwhelm her
in her sleep, a belly-soft, tender and atrocious great frog, and it was
