Antisemitism -- Fiction; Jews -- Austria -- Fiction; Middle class -- Fiction; Vienna (Austria) -- Fiction
When George had finished inspecting the old letters and was putting
his own papers in order, he found in an old green case some musical
jottings of his boyhood, whose very existence had so completely
vanished from his memory, that if they had been put before him as the
records of some one else he would not have known the difference. Some
affected him with a kind of pleasant pain, for they seemed to him to
contain promises which he was perhaps never to fulfil. And yet he had
been feeling lately that something had been hatching within him. He saw
his development as a mysterious but definite line which showed the way
from those first promising notes in the green case to quite new ideas,
and this much he knew--the two songs out of the "Westöstliche Divan"
which he had set to music this summer on a sultry afternoon, while
Felician lay in his hammock and his father worked in his armchair on
the cool terrace, could not have been composed by your ordinary person.
George moved back a step from the window as though surprised by an
absolutely unexpected thought. He had never before realised with such
clearness that there had been an absolute break in his life since
his father's death down to to-day. During the whole time he had not
given a single thought to Anna Rosner to whom he had sent the songs
in manuscript. And he felt pleasurably thrilled at the thought that
he could hear her melodious melancholy voice again and accompany her
singing on that somewhat heavy piano, as soon as he wished. And he
remembered the old house in the Paulanergasse, with its low door and
badly lighted stairs which he had not been up more than three or four
times, in the mood in which a man thinks of something which he has
known very long and held very dear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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