Yes, he would take counsel. It was harder than he thought. By the necessary inquiry into his affairs, it turned out that nothing more of his fortune was left to him. Where had it gone? He had lived so simply these last years, quite like a beggar. Where was the money?
The great sympathy which he had always felt for every living being, for everything that feels pain, had latterly become morbid and exaggerated in character. He gave and gave to every one who turned to him; gave without reckoning, without thinking, assisted every need, every weakness, every burden, in order to alleviate a grief, were it only for an hour. He gave until he had nothing more to give. The only thing that was left him to procure relief for his unhappy child was to again appear before the public. So he took up anew the wanderer's staff.
This time also he allowed his former manager, Herr Braun, to plan his foreign tour. He gave his first concert beyond the frontier in Königsberg. He did not feel anxious about the audience. With the thundering applause which had everywhere fallen to his share at his last concert tour still ringing in his ears, he quite did not comprehend the possibility of a fiasco. Another kind of discomfort tormented him.
In the recently flown years, which he had earnestly and solitarily passed in the effort to listen once more to the inner voices, which had been silenced in the mad whirl of his virtuoso life, but which anew, at first hesitatingly, but then ever more powerfully, more enthusiastically, vibrated through his mind--in these four years of exclusively creative activity, virtuosity had lost its nimbus for him. This kind of triumph seemed to him small, quite degrading. He was really ashamed to appear before the public with his old arts. But--he did it for his child.
But not the slightest doubt that he would be received with rejoicings occurred to him. He was mistaken. When early in February he gave his first concert in Königsberg, the hall was half empty, the audience remained cold. How was that possible?
He thought that the critics would revenge him for the pitiable indifference of the throng, that his colleagues would bring him ovations, would rebuild for him his old pedestal of subjection and flattery. But no. The critics were lukewarm, and the artist world showed itself quite adverse.