Free Remember Me by David Stacton Page B

fatal question, once Lohengrin was gone forever. Dawn seeped over the city and through the glass of the roof, contending with the artificial and mechanical night inside . Ludwig, his eyelids hurting him, strained for a last look after Lohengrin, but could see no one.
    All the same, like Elsa, he would pretend he had not asked the fatal question. For the world of the daytime is not the same as the world of the night, nor are the people who live in it the same people they are by dusk. Therefore from dawn until late evening he could still have Lohengrin in the person of Paul. Only in the lonely barracks of the night would he realize their relationship had become impossible. We can never forgive others for their participation in our own sins. It was something he did not dare to do.
    Meanwhile, in order to retain something of the magic of May, he went to Switzerland incognito, as Count Berg, with Paul, on a visit to Triebschen, where Wagner had established himself.
    Triebschen was a square house on top of a hillside, over which the trees waved like great fans of seaweed. In the garden of that villa it was possible once more to talk of important things. It was even possible, or so he hoped, to show by Paul’s presence, that Wagner might keep his Cosima. He had nothing against Cosima except that she was there and had a tendency to tell him what to do politically. She was the first of the over-weening women, but she was a great one. Ludwig wanted to show that he quite understood the situation, having a full life of his own. But it did not quite work that way.
    It was pleasant to talk to the Master, pleasanter still to put him in his place, and to show that the greatness of his accomplishment was dependent solely upon the greatness of his patron. While he talked, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Paul lurking in the garden. Yet all the time, somewhere in a high cool room inside, Cosima was waiting to laugh at him once he had gone. He was aware of that. The Master was not so great as his works. There was something specious even at Triebschen. Paul became more mortal and less like Lohengrin every day.
    So far he had been able to hide behind the shield of his public popularity. He returned to Munich almost with relief, as a man returns to his own work, after turning his hand to something a little beyond him.
    But as he drove from the station to the palace, for the first time in his life the crowds booed him.
    It was an enormous shock, for public popularity was one last refuge he had taken for granted, hit directly by a bomb.
    He shrank into himself, feeling as though he had been slapped. His carriage had no roof. There was nowhere to hide. He could only sit erect and smile and wave.
    His grandfather, Ludwig I, had told him that all crowds were treacherous, but until now he had not believed it. He felt coldly angry. He was their King. They had no right to boo. It was disloyal. For the moment he felt confused. The world fell around his ears.
    There was no Lohengrin. There was only that miserable creature Paul; the hatred of the crowds, and a memory of Wagner not as he was now, plump with success at Triebschen, but as he had first seen him, a squat, ugly man with the lolling head of a dwarf, in smelly clothes, who reeked of bad tobacco and had an evil temper . As usual, whenever he felt warm towards it, his world turned sour.
    He fled to Roseninsel, near Berg. There he had fireworks let off in the sky. The sky was not dark enough for them. It was instead suffused with the unattainable Alpenglow. The rockets sizzled up into the sky, following irregular courses, and burst like immortelles, shedding their dry petals of flame downward to the lake. It was pretty. Yet even there he was not safe from those booing crowds, nor from his ministers. What did they want ofhim? Against the pale sky, the glow of the rockets seemed timid and ineffectual. But as the night grew darker, the rockets seemed to shoot higher, and the great spluttering