1<40
PARTISAN REVIEW
"You don't love Walter," she said. "You are not really his friend."
It sounded challenging, but she laughed as she said it.
Ulrich gave an unexpected answer. "The thing is, we're boyhood
friends. You were still a child, Clarisse, when we were already in
the unmistakable relationship of a youthful friendship drawing to its
close. We admired each other innumerable years ago, and now we
mistrust each other with intimate understanding. Each of us would
like to free himself from the painful feeling that he once mistook
the other for himself, and so we serve each other as incorruptible
distorting-mirrors."
"So," Clarisse said, "you don't believe that he will still achieve
something after all?"
"There is no example of inevitability that can compare with
the sight of a gifted young man narrowing down into an ordinary
old man- not through personal misfortune, merely through the pro–
cess of dehydration to which he was predestined."
Clarisse closed her lips tightly. Their long-standing youthful
agreement that conviction should come before consideration for the
other's feelings made her heart beat high; but it hurt. Music! Un–
ceasingly the sounds came churning over toward them. She listened.
Now, when they sat silent, one could distinctly hear how the piano
was seething and boiling.
If
one was not on one's guard, it seemed
to be coming up out of the little grassy mounds like the "flickering
flames" around Briinnhilde.
It would have been hard to say what Walter really was. He
was a pleasant person with eloquent, meaningful eyes-that at any
rate was
definit~ven
today, although he was already past his
thirty-fourth year. For some time now he had had a job in some
government office dealing with the fine arts. His father had pro–
cured
him
this comfortable position and added the threat that he
would stop his allowance if he did not accept it. For actually Walter
was a painter. While he was reading art history at the university he
had also worked in a painting class at the academy, and later had
lived for some time in a studio. And when he had married Clarisse
and shortly afterward moved into this house on the edge of the town
with her, he had still been
.a
painter. But now, it seemed, he was a
musician again. In the course of the ten years of his love he had
sometimes been the one, sometimes the other, and even a poet into
