FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH
139
a symbol of Walter's music. The two of them had few secrets from
Ulrich. Scarcely had Clarisse welcomed him now, when she turned
away from him again, whirled swiftly back to Walter, once more
uttering her w,ar-cry "Frog-prince!" which Walter apparently did not
understand, and, her hands still twitching with the music, grabbed
him
wildly by the hair, both painfully and as though in pain. Her
husband made an amiably disconcerted face and came another step
nearer on his return out of the slippery void of music.
Then Clarisse and Ulrich went for a walk without him under
the slanting arrows of the evening sun. He remained behind at the
piano.
Clarisse said: "One's ability to forbid oneself something harm–
ful
is the test of one's vitality. The weary man is tempted by corrup–
tion! What do you say to that? Nietzsche declares it's a sign of weak–
ness for an artist to be too much concerned with the moral aspect
of his art." She had sat down on a little mound.
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders. When Clarisse had married his
boyhood friend three years earlier she had been twenty-two, and he
himself had given her the works of Nietzsche as a wedding present.
"If
I were Walter, I should challenge Nietzsche to a duel," he an–
swered, smiling.
Clarisse's slender back, floating in delicate outline under the
dress, arched like a bow. Her face too was tense with violent emotion,
and she kept it anxiously averted from her friend.
"You still combine the girlish and the heroic," Ulrich added.
It might have been a question, or it might not; it was a little joke,
and yet it held a little touch of affectionate admiration. Clarisse did
not quite understand what he meant, but the two words, which he
had used once before, pierced her as a burning arrow pierces a
thatched roof.
Now and then a wave of chaotically churning sound reached
them. Ulrich knew that she refused herself to Walter for weeks when
he played Wagner. And yet he did play Wagner, and did so with a
bad conscience, as though it were a schoolboy vice.
Clarisse would have liked to ask Ulrich how much he knew
about it, for Walter could never keep anything to himself. But she
was ashamed to ask. Now Ulrich had sat down too, on a little
mound nearby. And in the end she said something quite different.
