A few days later she went out during a pouring rain storm, and wandered about aimlessly through the streets. Every minute she feared—and hoped—she would fall over and become unconscious of herself and the world about her. She passed by two churches, the doors of which were locked. It was growing dark; she reached the apothecary shop of Herr Pflaum, and looked in through the glass door. Herr Seelenfromm was standing at the counter, mixing some medicine in a mortar. She went in and asked him whether he could not give her a narcotic. He said he could, and asked her what it should be. “One which makes you sleep for a long, long while,” she said, and smiled at him so as to make him inclined to fulfil her request. It was the first smile that had adorned her grief-stricken face for many a day. Herr Seelenfromm was just about to suggest a remedy to her. He sat down in a vain position so that he might avail himself of the opportunity to flirt with her a little. The apothecary, however, came up just then, and when he heard what Gertrude wanted, he cast a penetrating glance at her and said: “You had better go to the doctor, my good woman, and have him make you out a prescription. I have had some rather disagreeable experiences with cases of this kind.”
When Gertrude had finally dragged herself home, she found Philippina sitting by the cradle of little Agnes, rocking the child back and forth and humming a lullaby. “Where is Eleanore?” asked Gertrude.
“Where do you think she is?” said Philippina contemptuously: “She is upstairs with your husband.”
Gertrude heard Daniel playing the piano. She raised her head to hear what he was playing.
“She told me I was to go with her to Glaishammer to get a washwoman for you,” continued Philippina.
“Ah, what do we want with a washwoman?” said Gertrude; “we cannot afford one. It costs a great deal of money, and every cent of money spent means a drop of blood from Daniel’s veins. Don’t go to Glaishammer! I would rather do the washing myself!”
She knew, however, at that very moment that she had done her last washing. There was something so mournful about the light of the lamp. Agnes’s little face looked so pale as it peeped out from under the covers, Philippina cowered so witlessly at the floor. But all this was only for the moment; all this she could take with her up into a better world.
She bent down over the child, and kissed it, and kissed it with hot, burning lips. A lurk of unsoftened evil crept into Philippina’s face. “Listen, Gertrude, listen: you are all Greek to me,” said Philippina, “I don’t understand you.”
Gertrude went over to Eleanore’s room, where she stood for a while in the dark, trembling and thinking. At times she was startled: she heard some one walking about, and she thought the door would open. She could scarcely endure her impatience. Suddenly she remembered the attic and how quiet it was up there; there no one could disturb her. She decided to go up. On her way she went into the kitchen, and took a thick cord from a sugar-loaf.
As she passed by Daniel’s room, she noticed that the door was half open. He was still playing. Two candles were standing on the piano; Eleanore was leaning up against the side of the piano. She had on a pale blue dress that fell down over her beautiful body in peaceful folds.
Gertrude looked at the picture with wide-open eyes. There was an inimitable urging, a reaching aloft, and a painful sinking-back in the piece he was playing and in the way he was playing it. Gertrude went on up without making the slightest bit of noise. It was dark, but she found her way by feeling along with her hands.
After a half-hour had gone by, Philippina began to wonder where Gertrude was. She looked in the living room, then in Eleanore’s room, and then hastened up the steps and peeped through the open door into Daniel’s room. Daniel had stopped playing and was talking with Eleanore. Philippina turned back. On the stairs she met Jordan just then coming in from his evening walk. She lighted a candle, and looked in the kitchen. Gertrude was nowhere to be found.
“It is raining; there is her raincoat, and here is her umbrella, so she can’t have gone out,” thought Philippina to herself. She sat down on the kitchen table, and stared before her.
She was filled with an ugly, bitter suspicion; she scented a tragedy. In the course of another half-hour, she got up, took the lighted candle, and started out on a second search. Something drove her all about the house: she went out into the hall, into the various rooms, and then back to the kitchen.
All of a sudden she thought of the attic. It was the expression on Gertrude’s face the last time she kissed Agnes that made her think of it. Was not the attic of any house, and particularly the one in this house, the room that had the greatest attraction for her, and that her light-fearing fancy invariably chose as the most desirable and befitting place for her hidden actions?
She went up quickly and without making the least noise. Holding the lighted candle out before her, she stared at a rafter from which hung a human figure dressed in woman’s clothes. She wheeled about, uttering a stifled gurgle. A sort of drunkenness came over her; she was seized with a terrible desire to dance. She raised one leg, and sank her teeth deep into the nails of her right hand. In her convulsions she had the feeling that some one was crying out to her in a strong voice: “Set it on fire! Set it on fire!”
Near the chimney wall was a pile of letters and old newspapers. She fell on her knees, and exclaimed: “Blaze! Blaze!” And then, half with horror and half with rejoicing, she uttered a series of irrational, incoherent sounds that were nothing more than “Hu-hu, oi-oi, hu-hu, oi-oi!”
The fire from the papers flared up at once, and she ran down the steps with a roar and a bellow that are fearful to imagine, nerve-racking to hear.
In a few minutes the house was a bedlam. Daniel ran up thesteps, Eleanore close behind him. The women in the lower apartments came running up, screaming for water. Daniel and Eleanore turned back, and dragged a big pail full of water up the stairs. The fire alarm was turned in, the men made their way into the building, and with the help of many hands the flames were in time extinguished.
Jordan was the first to see the lifeless Gertrude. Standing in smoke and ashes, he sobbed and moaned, and finally fell to the floor as if struck on the head with an axe. The men carried Gertrude’s body out; her clothes were still smoking.
Philippina had vanished.
Itwas all over.
The visit of the doctor was over; and so was that of the coroner. The investigations of the various boards, including that of the fire department, the cross-examination, the taking of evidence, the coming to a decision—all this was over.
The cause of the fire remained unexplained; a guilty party could not be found. Philippina Schimmelweis had sworn that the fire had already started when she reached the attic. It was therefore assumed that the suicide had knocked over a lighted candle in her last moments.
The crowd of acquaintances and close friends had disappeared; this was over too. Hardened souls expressed their conventional sympathy to Kapellmeister Nothafft. That a man who had carried his head so high had suddenly been obliged to lower it in humility awakened a feeling of satisfaction. The punished evil-doer again gained public favour. Women from the better circles of society expatiated at length on the question whether a relation which in all justice would have to be designated as a criminal one while the poor woman was living could be transformed into a legal one after the lapse of a certain amount of time. With pimplike generosity and match-making indulgence they decided that it could.
The funeral was also over. Gertrude was buried in St. John’s Cemetery on a stormy day.
The preacher had preached a sermon, the mourners had stood with their hands stuffed in their coat pockets and their furs, for it was cold. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, Jordan cried out: “Farewell, Gertrude! Until we meet again, my child!”
There was one man who crowded right up to the edge of the grave: it was Herr Carovius. He looked over his nose glasses at Jordan and Daniel and Eleanore. It seemed to him that the latter, with her pale face and her black dress, was more beautiful than the most beautiful Madonna any Italian or Spaniard had ever immortalised on imperishable canvas.
He turned his frightened face to one side, and came very nearly falling over the heaped-up earth by the grave.
With regard to Daniel’s conduct, Pflaum, the apothecary, had this to say: “I should have expected more grief and sorrow from him, and not so much sullenness.”
“A hard-hearted man, an exceedingly hard-hearted man,” said Herr Seelenfromm in his grief.
Daniel was severely criticised for his discourteous treatment of the people from the City Theatre, every one of whom had come to the funeral. When several of them shook hands with him, he merely nodded, and blinked his eyes behind the round glasses which he had been wearing for some time.
Judge Kleinlein said: “He should be very grateful for the Christian burial, for despite the evidence that was turned in, it was not satisfactorily proved that the woman was in her right mind.”
Eleanore looked into the open grave. She thought: “Guilt is being heaped upon guilt, deep, serious guilt.”
All this was over now. Daniel and Eleanore and Jordan had come back to the house.
They felt lonely and deserted. Jordan shut himself up in his room. It was rare now that he took his accustomed evening walks; his coat-sleeves and the ends of his trouser legs had become more and more frayed. He pined away; his hair became snow white, his walk unsteady, his eye dim. But he was never ill, and he never complained of his fate. He never said anything at the table; he was a quiet man.
Eleanore moved back up with her father, and Daniel took his old room next to the dining room. There was all of a sudden so much space; he was surprised that the going of a single person could make such a vast difference.
Eleanore spent the whole day with little Agnes until Philippina came and relieved her. She also did her work close to Agnes.
When she had finished her writing, she had to look after the house. She could not cook, and had no desire to learn how, so she had a woman come in three times a week who prepared the midday meals. Twice a week she would prepare meals for two days, and once a week she would get them ready for three days. She was a modest woman who worked for very little money. Thefood she cooked merely needed to be heated over, and in the evening they always had sausage and sandwiches anyhow.
It was a practical arrangement, but no one praised Eleanore for it.
At first she spent her nights in Gertrude’s room with the child; she could not stand this, however, longer than three weeks. Either she could not sleep, or she had such terrible dreams.
Then she took to carrying the child up to her room with her and making a little bed for it on the sofa. But the child did not sleep so well there; Eleanore noticed that, as a result of all the excitement and hard work, she was losing strength.
Often in the night when she would take the child to quiet it—and become so tired and uneasy—she would make up her mind to have a talk with Daniel. But the next morning she would find it impossible to bring up the subject. She felt that the voice of Gertrude was admonishing her from beyond the grave and telling her to be patient.
She felt, too, that the time was drawing near when she would succumb to over-exertion; it made her anxious. Just then Philippina came in to help.
When Jason Philip heard that Philippina was going to Jordan’s daughters every day, he told her most emphatically and repeatedly that she had to quit it. Philippina paid not the slightest attention to him and did as she pleased.
“I’ll kill you,” cried Jason Philip at the girl.
Philippina shrugged her shoulders and laughed impudently.
Jason Philip saw that a grown person was standing before him; he was afraid of the evil look of his daughter.
It was long before he could make out what was taking her to his enemies. Then he learned that wherever she chanced to be, at home, or with acquaintances, or with strangers, she was spreading evil reports concerning Daniel and his family. This tended to make him a bit more indulgent: he too wanted to feast his ears on scandal from that quarter. At times he would enter into a conversation with Philippina, and when she told him the latest news he was filled with fiendish delight. “The day will come when I will get back at that music-maker, you see if I don’t,” he said.
Theresa was still confined to her bed. During his leisure hours Willibald had to read to her, either from the newspapers or fromtrashy novels. When she was alone she lay perfectly quiet and stared at the ceiling.
The time finally came when Willibald left school. He went to Fürth, where he was employed as an apprentice by a manufacturer. There was no doubt in any one’s mind but that he would become one of those loyal, temperate, industrious people who are the pride of their parents, and who climb the social ladder at the rate of an annual increase in salary of thirty marks.
The one-eyed Markus entered the paternal bookshop, where he soon familiarised himself with the novels of the world from Dumas and Luise Mühlbach to Ohnet and Zola, and with the popular sciences from Darwin to Mantegazza. His brain was a book catalogue, and his mouth an oracle of the tastes displayed at the last fair. But in reality he not only did not like the books, he regarded all this printed matter as a jolly fine deception practised on people who did not know what to do with their money. Zwanziger, the clerk, had married the widow of a cheese merchant, and was running a shop of his own on the Regensburg Chaussee.
“A rotten business,” said Jason Philip at the end of each month. “The trouble with me,” he invariably added, “is that I have been too much of an idealist. If I had worked as hard for myself as I have for other people, I would be a rich man to-day.”
He went to the café and discussed politics. He had developed into a perpetual grumbler; he was pleased with nothing, neither the government nor the opposition. To hear him talk you would have thought that the opposing parties had been forced to narrow their platforms down to the differences between the views of Prince Bismarck and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. When Kaiser Wilhelm I died, Jason Philip acted as though his appointment to the chancellorship was imminent. And when in that same memorable year Kaiser Friedrich succumbed to his sufferings, Jason Philip resembled the pilot on whose isolated fearlessness the rescue of the storm-tossed ship of state depends.
The born hero always finds a sphere of activity, a forum from which to express his views. If public life has rejected him, he goes to the café, where he is sure to find a congenial element.
One day Theresa got up from the bed where she had spent fifteen unbroken months, and seemed all of a sudden completely recovered. The physician said it was the strangest case that had ever come under his observation. But Jason Philip said: “It is the triumph of a good constitution.” With that he went to the café, drank beer, made fiery political speeches, and played skat.
But Theresa left her bed not as a woman forty-six years old—that was her age—but as a woman of seventy. She had only a few sparsely distributed grey hairs left on her square head, her face was full of wrinkles, her eye was hard and cold. From that time on, however, she did not seem to age. She did not quarrel any more, attended to her affairs in a straightforward, self-assured way, and observed her increasing impoverishment with unexpected calm.
She lived on herring, potatoes, and coffee; it was the same diet on which Philippina and Markus lived, with the one exception that Markus, as the child nearest her heart, was allowed a piece of sugar for his coffee. Jason Philip was also put on a diet: he never dared open his mouth about it, either.
Philippina stood it for a while in silence; finally she said to her mother: “I can’t stand this chicory brew forever.”
“Then you’ll have to lap up water, you will,” replied Theresa.
“No, I won’t,” said Philippina. “I am going to hire out.”
“Well, hire out. Who cares? It’ll be one mouth less to feed.” “Your daughter is going to hire out,” said Theresa to her husband, when he came home that evening.
Jason Philip had been playing cards that day, and had lost. He was in a terrible humour: “She can go plumb to the Devil so far as I am concerned.” That was his comment.
The next morning Philippina sneaked up to the attic, and drew out her cash from the hole in the chimney: it amounted to nine hundred and forty marks, mostly in gold, which she had exchanged in the course of years for small coins. Through the opening in the wall the June sun fell upon her face, which, never young and bearing the stamp of extended crime, looked like that of a witch.
She put the money in a woollen stocking, rolled it up in a knot, stuffed it down her corset between her breasts, made the sign of the cross, and repeated one of her drivelling formulas. Her clothes, ribbons, and other possessions she had already packed in a basket. This she carried down the stairs, and, without saying good-bye to a soul, left the house.
Her brother Markus was standing with sprawled legs in the sun before the store, whistling. He caught sight of her with his one eye, smiled contemptuously at her, and cried: “Happy journey!”
Philippina turned to him, and said: “You branded lout! You’re going to have a lousy time of it, mark what I tell you!”
In this frame of mind and body she came to Daniel, and said to him: “I want to work for you. You don’t need to pay nothing if you ain’t got it.”
Daniel had been noticing for some time that Eleanore could not stand the exertion required of her by the extra work.
“Will you mind the baby and sleep with it?” Daniel asked. Philippina nodded and looked down.
“If you will take care of the child and act right toward it and me, I shall be awfully grateful to you,” he said, breathing more easily.
Thereupon Philippina threw her hands to her face, and shuddered from head to foot. She was not exactly crying; there was something much worse, much more despairing, in what she was doing than in mere crying. She seemed to be convulsed by some demoniac power; a ghastly dream seemed to have seized her in a moment of higher consciousness. She turned around and trotted into the room where the child was playing with a wooden horse.
She sat down on a foot-stool, and stared at the restless little creature.
Daniel stopped, stood perfectly still, and looked at her in a mood of solicitous reflection.
During a rehearsal of “Traviata,” Daniel flew into a rage at Fräulein Varini: “Listen, pay attention to your intonation, and keep in time. It’s enough to make a man lose his mind! What are you squeaking up at the gallery for? You’re supposed to be singing a song, and not whining for a little bit of cheap applause.”
The lady stepped out to the foot-lights with heaving bosom. Her offended dignity created something like the spread tail of a peacock about her hips: “How dare you?” she exclaimed: “I give you your choice: You can apologise or leave this place. Whatever you do, you are going to become acquainted with the power I have.”
Daniel folded his arms, let his eyes roam over the members of the orchestra, and said: “Good-bye, gentlemen. Since it is the director’s place to choose between me and this lady, there is no doubt whatever but that my term of usefulness in this position is up. And moreover, in an institution where meat is more valuable than music, I feel that I am quite superfluous.”
The other singers had come running out from the wings, andwere standing crowded together on the stage looking down at the orchestra. When Daniel laid down his baton and walked away, every member of the orchestra rose as one man to his feet. It was a voluntary and almost overwhelming expression of speechless admiration. Though they had never loved this man, though they had regarded him as an evil, alien kill-joy, who interfered with their easy-going habits as musicians in that town, they nevertheless respected his energy, admired the nobility of his intentions, and at least had a vague idea of his genius.
Fräulein Varini went into hysterics. The director was called in. He promised Fräulein Varini immediate redress, and wrote a letter to Daniel requesting that he offer an apology.
Daniel replied in a brief note that he had no thought of changing his plans as announced when he left the building. He remarked that it was quite impossible for him to get along with Fräulein Varini, that either he or she would have to quit, and that since she intended to remain he must consider his resignation as submitted and accepted.
That evening, as he was sitting at the table with Eleanore, he told her, after a long silence and in very few words, what had happened. Her response to him was a look of astonishment; that was all.
“Oh, it was the only thing I could do,” said Daniel, without looking up from his plate; “I was so heartily sick of the whole business.”
“What are you going to live on, you and your child?” asked Eleanore.
His eye became even darker and harsher: “You know, God who makes the lilies grow in the fields ... I can’t quote that old proverb exactly, my familiarity with the Bible is nothing to boast of.”
That was all they said. The window was open; there was a mysterious pulsing in the earth; the warm air had a disagreeable taste, somewhat like that of sweet oil.
When the clock in the tower struck ten, Eleanore got up and said good-night.
“Good-night!” replied Daniel, with bowed head.
That is the way it was now every evening between the two; for during the day they scarcely saw each other.
Daniel would sit perfectly still for hours at a time and brood.
He could not forget. He could not forget the burning, smoking border of the dress; nor the shoes that had some street mud on them; nor the face with the pinched upper lip, the dishevelled hair, the nervously knitted brow.
Under the linen in the clothes press he had found the silver buckle he had given her. “Why did she hide it there?” he asked himself. The condition of her soul when she opened the press and put the buckle in it became vivid, real; it became blended with his own soul, a part of his own being.
Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room; and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a face without flesh.
“Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?” This was the question that came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: “I will be your mother made young again.” And that other one, too: “I, too, am a living creature.”
He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.
She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each passing hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable mystery.
It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in the realisation of accumulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form over this earth.
It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel. And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician. Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows; it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for yesterday and stormsto-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love; he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things, understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.
Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress, the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present by the brightness of visions.
He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed, or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning, always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he remembered—it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the myrtle wreath on her head—gave the impulse to the stirringprestoin the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he sketched on awakening from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.
But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping melody of the twenty-secondPsalm arose in his mind, he trembled from head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was in the dead of night. The recurring bass figure of theprestosounded to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal words: “Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!” And he did hold his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked its way through the ice-locked region into which a passionate spell that was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.
He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.
He came on this account to cherish a feeling of superb disgust for shrewd dealers who were carried along on the wings of fashion. He took a dislike to anything that was famous; for fame smelled of and tasted to him like money. He shuddered at the mere thought of the chaos that arises from opinions and judgments; the disputes as to the merits of different schools and tendencies made him ill; he could not stand the perambulating virtuosos of all zones and nations, the feathers they manage to make fly, the noise they evoke, the truths they proclaim, the lies they wade about in and make a splash. He stood aghast at the mention of a concert hall or a theatre; he flew into a reasoned rage when he heard a neighbour playing a piano; he despised the false devotion of the masses, and scorned their impotent, imbecile transports.
All their music smelled of and tasted to him like money.
He had bought the biographies of the great masters. From them he familiarised himself with their distress and poverty; he read of the petty attitudes and fatuous mediocrity that stood deaf and dumb in the presence of immortal genius. But one day he chanced to read that Mozart’s body had been buried in a pauper’s grave. He hurled the book from him with an oath that he would never again touch a work of that sort. The mordant smoke of misanthropy blew into the fire of idolisation; he did not wish tosee any one; he left the city, and found peace only after he had reached a lonely, unfrequented place in the forest, where he felt he was out of the reach of human feet and safe from the eyes of men.
At night he would walk rapidly through the streets; his head was always bowed. If he became tired, he betook himself to some unknown café where he was sure he would not meet any of his acquaintances. If some one whom he knew met him on the street, he did not speak; if any one spoke to him, he was blatant and bizarre in his replies, and hastened off as rapidly as he could, with some caustic bit of intended wit on his loosened tongue.
To enter the room where Philippina and the child were required much effort; at first he was able to do it only with pronounced aversion. Later he came somehow to be touched by the form and actions of the child: he would come in a few times each day for a minute or two only, take it up in his arms, have it poke its tiny hands into his face or even jerk at his nose glasses; he listened with undivided interest to its baby talk. Philippina would stand in the corner in the meanwhile, with her eyes on the floor and her mouth closed. He became painfully aware of his obligations to her because of her inexplicable fidelity to him, and knew that he would never be able to reward her for her unique and faithful assistance. He was grieved at the same time to see the child so motherless, so utterly without the attention that ennobles. The child’s bright eyes, its outstretched arms hurt him: he feared the feelings slumbering even then in its breast, and was driven away by the thought of what might happen in the future.
One morning in August he arose with the sun, went to the kitchen and got his own breakfast, took his walking stick, and left the house. He wanted to go to Eschenbach on foot.
He walked the entire day, making only very short stops for rest. At noon the heat became intense; he asked a peasant, who chanced to drive up in his hay wagon, if he might ride a little. He had no definite end in view, no plan. Something drew him on; what it was he did not know.
When he finally reached the little town it was late at night; the moon was shining. There was not a soul on the street. The windows of his mother’s house were all dark. He climbed up the steps, and sat down as close to the front door as was physically possible. He imagined he could hear his mother and the child she had in her care breathing.
It seemed so strange to him that his mother knew nothing ofhis presence. If she had known he was there, she would have unlocked the door and looked at him in astonishment. And if he had not felt like talking, he would have been obliged to lay his head in her lap and weep. Nothing else was possible; he could not speak. And yet the fear lest he talk, lest he be forced to tell everything, took such firm hold on him that he decided to start back home without letting his mother know that he had been there and without having seen either her or the child. The peculiar restlessness that had driven him away from his home and impelled him to go on this unusual journey was silenced as soon as he sat in the shadow of his mother’s little house.
But he was so tired that he soon fell asleep. He dreamed that the child and the old lady were standing before him, that the former had a great bunch of grapes in her hand and the latter a shovel and was shovelling up the earth, her face revealing a soul of sorrows. Eva seemed to him to be much more beautiful than she had been a year ago; he felt drawn to the child by an uncontrollable power and a painful love that stood in a most unusual relation to what his mother was doing. The longer his mother shovelled in the earth the heavier his heart became, but he could not say anything; he felt as if a glorious song were pouring forth from his soul, a song such as he had never heard in his life. Enraptured by its beauty, he woke up. At first he thought he could still hear it, but it was only the splashing of the water in the Wolfram fountain.
The moon was high in the heavens. Daniel went over to the fountain just as the night watchman came along, blew his trumpet and sang: “Listen, all men, I wish to tell that it has struck two from the town-hall bell.” The watchman noticed the lonely man standing by the fountain, was startled at first, but then continued on his rounds, repeating from time to time the words of his official song.
Often as a child Daniel had read the inscription on the base of the Wolfram figure. Now he read the words, irradiated by the light of the moon, and they had a totally different meaning:
Water gives to the trees their life,And makes with fertile vigour rifeAll creatures of the world.By water all our eyes are purled;It washes clean man’s very soulAnd makes it like an angel, whole.
Water gives to the trees their life,And makes with fertile vigour rifeAll creatures of the world.By water all our eyes are purled;It washes clean man’s very soulAnd makes it like an angel, whole.
Simple words, but Daniel read them in the light of a full experience, dipped his hands in the basin, and rubbed them over his eyes drunk with sleep; then casting one more glance at his mother’s house, he turned in the direction of the road leading away from the town.
Out in the fields it was too damp for him to lie down to rest. Near an isolated farm house he found a hay rick, went up to it, and lay down.
Every time Eleanore looked at Daniel her heart was filled with the same anxiety. She did not understand him; she could not comprehend a single one of his movements. Such joy as she had arose from meditation on the past.
He did not seem to be able to recall her. One word, any word, from him would have relieved her of her anguish; but he spoke to her precisely as he spoke to Philippina or to Frau Kütt, the woman who came in to do the housework.
It was bad enough to live with Philippina, to feel the incessant hatred of this secretive person; to suspect that she knew things that would not stand the light of day. But to see the child handed over to her, treated by her as though it were her own and guarded by her with a jealousy that made her face wrinkle with rage if Eleanore presumed to stay with it for as much as five minutes, this was infinitely worse.
It was bad enough to have to accept with filial obedience the society of the speechless old father who spent his days and nights in his own mysterious way, striving without peace of any kind to reach an unknown goal. This made it hard for Eleanore. It was spooky in the rooms upstairs, and equally spooky in the ones downstairs. Eleanore dreaded the coming winter. At times she felt that her own voice had an unreal sound, and that her most commonplace remark echoed with the gloom of unhappy premonitions.
She sought refuge in the old pictures of her longings—southern landscapes with groves and statues and a sea of supernatural blue. But she was too mature to find enduring satisfaction in empty dreams; she preferred, and felt it were better, to forget her grief in the distractions of hard work. It was not until the pen fell from her hand, weighed down with distress at the thought of so many unadorned and unrelieved hours, that something drew her back into the realm of spirits and visions. And then it was thatshe sought support, that she endeavoured to get a footing, in the world of actual objects round about her.
She would take a pear, and think herself, so to speak, into the very heart of this bit of fruit, just as if it were possible to find protection, shelter in so small a space. Or she would take a piece of coloured glass, hold it in her hand, and look at the world of reality about her, hoping that the commonplace would in this way be made to seem more beautiful. Or she looked into the burning fire, and studied, with a smile on her face, the romantic tongues of flames. Or she had a longing to look at old pictures: she went to the Germanic Museum, and spent an entire morning there, standing before a Crucifixion, a Last Supper, her eye and her heart filled with flowing emotion.
Her love for flowers became stronger than ever, and she began to study them. The most of them she picked herself; those that grew only in gardens she bought from the florists, paying very little for them. After she had made several purchases, they refused to take any more money from her; they gave her just as many flowers as she wanted. She took them home, and made bouquets out of them.
One evening she was frightened by Philippina, who came rushing up to her just as she was arranging her flowers and told her that little Agnes had a high fever. Eleanore went out and got the doctor, who immediately reassured her. As she returned, her astonishment was intense and unusual. Reaching the door, her eyes fell on the flowers: they seemed wonderfully beautiful to her; the harmony and play of their colours was so striking that she involuntarily looked around in the illusion that a stranger had called during her absence, brought the flowers, and arranged them in their artistic bouquets.
In the meantime poverty was haunting the house in very tangible form. Neither the butcher nor the baker was willing any longer to deliver goods on credit. It was quite impossible for Eleanore to support five people with her clerical work, to say nothing of keeping them in clothes and paying the rent. However hard she might work, the most she could do was to get enough money for the barest necessities. Her cares multiplied day by day.
She had always been an implacable foe of debts; she would not make them. But after all, the people could not starve, and so she had to contract debts now. Bitter humiliations were unavoidable; she looked into the future with untempered dread. She racked her brain trying to devise plans, deplored her weaknessand the gaps in her training, bemoaned the neglect both she and Daniel were suffering, and was quite disturbed to see that Philippina’s heart was filled with joy at the thought that the destitution of the household with its accompanying mental anguish was rapidly increasing.
Twice a day the druggist sent in his bill; finally he came in person. It was along toward evening when he rang. Philippina treated him so impolitely that he became impudent, and made such a noise that the people on the lower floors came out into the hall and leaned over the railing of the stairs. Eleanore ran down and stood before the man with folded hands. Jordan also left his room and looked on, sighing.
Others came in and started trouble. Philippina came up to Eleanore, and, with a smile on her face as if she were going to tell of some great good fortune that had come to the family, said: “There’s another down there, Eleanore; come down and give him a piece of your mind, or I’m thinking he’s going to call the police.”
After quiet had been restored, Philippina began to rage and rant: “Daniel’s a dunderhead. He could live like a Kaiser if he’d mix with the right people. I know a woman who is lousy with money, and she’s going to git a lot more; but Daniel, the poor bloke, ain’t got a ghost of an idea as to how to work people.” She laughed furiously; or, in order to ventilate her spiteful rage, she picked up some object and smashed it to pieces on the floor.
Eleanore did not hear what she had said. Her hope was gone. Daniel had been out of work for three months: who could explain his strange inactivity? The rent would be due in a short while, and then what?
One morning she went to Daniel’s room and said: “Daniel, we are out of money.”
He was sitting at the table reading; he looked at her as if he had to think for a while who she was: “Just have patience,” he said, “you are not going to starve.”
“I am doing all that I possibly can, Daniel,” continued Eleanore; “but tell me, please, how are you planning to keep the house going? I see no way out. Tell me, Daniel, tell me, please, what you are going to do.”
“A musician must be poor, Eleanore,” replied Daniel, and looked at her with eyes that seemed to be frozen.
“But he has got to live, I should think.”
“You can’t live from husks alone, and I am not going to work my head off for husks.”
“Daniel, oh Daniel, where is your mind? And where is your heart?” cried Eleanore in despair.
“Where I should have been long ago,” he replied, without the shadow of a ray of hope. He got up, and turning his face away from Eleanore, said in a half-audible voice: “Let’s have no argument, no cogency, no urgency. Not now! Not now when I am creeping along on the earth with such light as is left me, trying to grope my way out of the hole. A man doesn’t give up the ghost so quickly as all that, Eleanore. The stomach is a very elastic piece of skin.”
He went into the other room, sat down at the piano, and struck a slow-moving bass chord.
Eleanore turned to the wall, and buried her feverish brow in her hands.
It was not in Eleanore’s nature to submit to a misfortune without first having made every possible effort to evade it.
She wrote for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that she had finished all that was asked of her long before her time was really up.
Then she looked around for a better paying position; it was in vain. Women had never been paid well, she had no recommendations, no personal connections, nothing on which she could depend or to which she might refer.
Finally it occurred to her that she might make some money out of her flowers. She went to the florist at St. Lorenz Place, taking with her a garland of carnations and mignonettes she had made the day before. She told the florist she knew a great deal about flowers and had had considerable experience in handling them.
The man laughed at her, and told her he could find no sale for that kind of things, and that, even if he could, he would have to ask so little for them that it would not pay her to make them. Eleanore took her flowers back home; she was profoundly discouraged. She saw herself how perishable flowers were; these withered that same evening. Nothing could be expected from that source.
She had not noticed that, as she left the florist shop, a man on the other side of the street had stopped and looked at her. He was a haggard young individual with a pale, peevish expression on his face, a man with a chin the unimpressiveness of which was hidden behind a Vandyke beard.
He stood for a long while and looked at Eleanore as she walkeddown the street. There could be no doubt but that something in her general bearing and her face had drawn his attention to her; had awakened in him a feeling that was nobler than mere curiosity or the satisfaction an idler derives from gaping.
The young man finally began to move; he walked rather stiffly across the square and entered the florist’s shop. A few minutes later the florist, a man past middle age, with the typical toper’s nose, threw open his door and removed his cap, actions which in addition to his fawning bow were unmistakable proof to the merchants on either side of him that it was no ordinary sale he had just made. The young man went his way, ambling along in shiftless indifference to where he was or the time of day.
The next morning the florist’s errand boy came to Eleanore, and told her that his chief had something very important to say to her, and that she should come at once. Eleanore followed the call without delay. As she entered the shop, the florist greeted her with unusual politeness, and told her that a man who took a special fancy to the kind of flowers she had shown him the day before had been there and placed an order for two such bouquets, or even three, a week at twenty marks each. He advised her to exercise all diligence in making the flowers and said that when such a rain of good fortune descended upon one it was wise to let other things take care of themselves. The only condition the florist imposed on her was absolute silence. The customer did not wish his name to be known, nor did he wish to be seen. He remarked casually that there was manifestly some whim or crotchet back of the man’s action, such as is so frequently the case with aristocratic people.
Who was happier than Eleanore! She never bothered herself for a minute about the illogical and legendary element in the offer of a man who only a day before had appeared so shrewd and cautious. She drank in every word of the florist’s detailed statement, and merely believed that in this city, among its inhabitants, there was an eccentric fellow who was willing to pay such a princely price for her flowers simply because he liked flowers and was pleased with the way she put them up. Though she had not been spoiled by fortune, the transformation that had suddenly taken place in her circumstances awakened in her not the slightest suspicion or surprise. She was too happy to be distrustful, too grateful to become inquisitive. Her thoughts were on Daniel, who, she felt, was saved. The whole way home she smiled to herself as if lost in dreams.
Evening after evening she sat with the flowers she had gathered in the forenoon from the forests, the meadows, and the gardens out by the city fortress, where an old gardener went with her and picked out the choicest specimens for her. He had a crippled son who fell in love with Eleanore and always stood in the door and smiled at her when she came. He promised he would get her flowers from the green house during the winter.
The butcher was paid, the baker was paid; the druggist was paid, and so was the rent. Philippina shook her head, and swore there was something wrong. She was convinced that it would all come out some day, even if you had to scratch the dung hill to get at the secret. She told the people about a ghost that carried on every night up in the attic; and once when the moon was shining she came running into the room and swore that a bony finger had rapped on the window.
Eleanore bound roses and gilliflowers, tulips and pansies, mosses, ferns, and what-not into beautiful tapestried pictures, or wound them into wreaths and garlands. She gave herself up to this novel occupation with the sacrificial love of a woman of her type; and at times she became dizzy from so much fragrance. But this mattered not. She arranged her flowers; and then she would lean out of the window, and sing gently into the night.
Daniel was ignorant of what she was doing; he had not troubled himself about the distressing poverty of past weeks; he did not concern himself now with their abundance; where it came from he never asked.
Eberhard von Auffenberg had returned to the city shortly after the death of Gertrude Nothafft. The last large sum he had received from Herr Carovius, now nearly a year ago, he had almost used up. He found Herr Carovius quite changed in his attitude toward him. Herr Carovius declared that he was bankrupt, that he could not get any more money for him. Instead of complaining or boasting, or flattering his princely friend, or trying to incite him to activity of some kind, as he had been accustomed to do, he wrapped himself in a silence that could not be regarded as a favourable omen.
Eberhard had no desire to beg. Herr Carovius’s personality was so disagreeable to him that he refused to investigate the cause ofhis novel behaviour. He let his thoughts take their own course; and they drifted into other channels.
The gossip afloat concerning Eleanore had naturally reached his ears. Herr Carovius had seen to it that there was no lack of insinuations, either written or oral. But Eberhard had ignored them. Offensive insults that had dared attach themselves to Eleanore seemed to him as incredible as litter from the street on the radiant moon.
One day he had to call on Herr Carovius because of a note that had been protested. They discussed the affair in a dry, business-like way, and then, all of a sudden, Herr Carovius fixed his piercing eyes on the Baron, walked around the table time after time, dressed in his sleeping gown, and told, without the omission of a single detail, of the lamentable death of Daniel Nothafft’s young wife.
He became highly excited; why, it would be hard to say. “Let us hope that the Kapellmeisterette will come to his senses now,” he cried in a falsetto voice. “He is already on the point of starvation; ah, believe me, he is nearly done for. It will be necessary to take up a collection for the unrecognised genius. He has already put one of his women in the grave, the other is still kicking. By the way, how do you like her, the angel? Are you not a bit sorry for the neat little halo that now hangs like a piece of castoff clothing on the bedpost of an adulteress? Of course, geniuses are allowed to do as they please. O Eleanore, bloody lie that you are, you hypocritical soft, sneaking, slimy lie—Eleanore!”
With that Eberhard stepped up very calmly to the unleashed demon in pajamas, seized him by the throat, and held him with such a fierce and unrelenting grip that Herr Carovius sank to his knees, while his face became as blue as a boiled carp. After this he was remarkably quiet; he crept away. At times he tittered like a simpleton; at times a venomous glance shot forth from under his eyelids. But that was all.
Eberhard poured some water in a basin, dipped his hands in it, dried them, and went away.
The picture of the whining man with the puffed and swollen eyes and the blue face was indelibly stamped on Eberhard’s memory. He had felt a greedy, voluptuous desire to commit murder. He felt he was not merely punishing and passing final judgment on his own tormentor and persecutor, but on the hidden enemy of humanity, the arch-criminal of the age, the destroyer of all noble seed.
And yet the exalted outburst of Herr Carovius had precisely the effect that Eberhard had least expected. His confidence in Eleanore’s innocence had been shaken. There may have been in Herr Carovius’s voice, despite the slanderous wrath with which his cowardly tongue was coated, something that sounded truer than the wretch himself suspected. Eberhard saw just then, for the first time in his life, the adored figure of the girl as a human being like all other human beings; and as if through a distant vision he experienced in his heart what had taken place.
His illusions were destroyed.
In his soul he had gone through the trials of renunciation long ago. His passionate wishes of former times had gone through a process of weakening from loss of blood. He had learned to bow to the inevitable; he had made a special effort to acquire this bit of earthly wisdom. When he surveyed the life he had lived in the past five years, it resembled, despite its flux and the incessant change from city to city and country to country, a sojourn in a room with closed doors and drawn shades.
When he had returned to the city, which he loved simply because Eleanore lived in it, he had had no intention of reminding Eleanore of the expiration of the time mutually agreed upon. He felt that it would be a banal display of poor taste to appear before her once again as an awkward, jilted suitor, and try to reconnect the thread where it had been so ruthlessly broken five years ago. He had intended not to disturb her or worry her in any way. But to go to her and speak with her, that had been the one bright ray of hope in all these empty years.
After the scene with Herr Carovius he decided quite firmly to keep away from Eleanore.
His ready cash had shrunk to a few hundred marks. He discharged his servants, disposed of some of his jewelry, and rented one of those little houses that are stuck on the rocks up by the castle like so many wasp nests. The house he took had been occupied before him by the Pfragners, and with its three rooms was not much larger than a fair-sized cage in a menagerie. But he had taken it into his head to live there, and that was all there was to it. He bought some old furniture, and adorned the slanting walls of the dilapidated barracks with such pictures as he had.
One evening there was a knock at the green door of the cottage. Eberhard opened, and saw Herr Carovius standing before him.
Herr Carovius entered the Baron’s doll house, looked around in astonishment, and, pale as a sheet, said: “So help me God, it seems to me you are trying to play the rôle of a hermit. This won’t do; this is no place for a Baron; I will not stand for it.”
Eberhard reached for the book he had been reading, a volume of Carl du Prel, and read on without replying to Herr Carovius or even taking notice of the fact that he was present.
Herr Carovius tripped from one foot to the other. “Perhaps the Baron will be so good as to take a look at his account,” he said in a beseeching tone. “I am in a tight place. My capital is gone, and my debts in the shape of interest have been swelling like the Pegnitz in the spring of the year. Would you like to know what I have been living on for the last three months? I have been living on turnips, potato peelings, and brick cheese; that has been my daily diet; and I have submitted to it for the sake of my Baron.”
“I am not a bit interested in what you have been eating,” said the Baron arrogantly, and kept on reading.
Herr Carovius continued with an imbecile sulk: “When you left me recently because of that little quarrel we had about the Goose Man, it never occurred to me that you were going to take the matter so seriously. Lovers like to be teased, I thought. He’ll come back, I thought, he’ll come back just as sure as laughter follows tickling. Well, I was mistaken. I thought you were of a more gentle disposition, and that you would be more indulgent with an old friend. Yes, we make mistakes sometimes.”
Eberhard remained silent.
Herr Carovius sighed, and sat down timidly on the narrow edge of the sofa that stood next to the whitewashed wall. He sat there for almost an hour in perfect silence. Eberhard appreciated neither the ridiculous nor the fantastic element in the conduct of his guest. He read on.
And then, all of a sudden, Herr Carovius sprang to his feet, took his wallet from his pocket, drew out a thousand-mark note, and laid it, together with a blank receipt, across the page Eberhard was reading. Before the Baron could recover from his amazement he had already disappeared, closing the door behind him. The sound of his footsteps on the street could be heard in the room; but he was gone.
What rare living creatures there are, O World, and what rare dead ones, too! This is the thought that passed through Eberhard’s mind.
That two men as radically different by nature as Eberhard and Daniel chanced to meet and be drawn together at the very period of their lives when both had voluntarily renounced human society was due to one of those decrees of Providence that contain in them either a law of crystallisation or the attraction of polar forces, however much they may seem to be matters of pure chance.
Their coming together took place on the day after Daniel had gone to Eschenbach. At the break of day, Daniel had decided to return by way of Schwabach, both for the sake of variety and because this was the shorter route. The sun was hotter than on the day before; and when it had reached the height of its ability to dry up the land and scorch a human being, Daniel lay down in the forests. Late in the afternoon, just as he was approaching Schwabach, great black clouds began to gather in the West; a fearful storm was evidently to be expected. Heavy streaks of lightning flashed across the sky; and although Daniel tried to hasten his steps, the storm overtook him. Before he could reach the shelter of a house, he was wet to the skin from head to foot.
The rain came down in torrents. He waited a long while, and then had to start out in it again, arriving finally at the station shivering with cold. As he went to buy his ticket he noticed a lean, haggard, unusual looking individual standing at the ticket window. It is quite probable that, vexed by his uncomfortable condition, Daniel treated him none too courteously; he pushed up against him, whereupon the man turned around, and Daniel recognised the young Baron, Eberhard von Auffenberg. Eberhard in turn recognised Daniel. It is unlikely that there was at that time another face in the world which could belong so completely to just one person as that of Daniel.
The Baron had been attracted to Schwabach by his affection for a certain person there, an affection he had preserved from the days of his childhood. There lived in Schwabach at the time a woman who had been his nurse. Her undivided and resigned love for him was touching. She was as proud of him as she might have been had she been able to say that in him she had been responsible for the childhood training of the noblest specimen of manhood known to human history. And he was fond of her; the stories she told him he could still recall, and he did recall them frequently and with pleasure. She had married the foreman of a tin mill, and had sons and daughters of her own. Eberhard had been planningfor years to visit her. This visit had now been paid. But Eberhard could not say that he had derived extraordinary pleasure from it: it had taken an inner figure from his soul. And, on the other hand, whether the nurse felt, on seeing the tall, lank, stiff, and ill-humoured foster son, that enraptured charm she so much liked to conjure up before her imagination, is a question that had better remain unanswered.
When Eberhard became aware of the condition in which Daniel then found himself, his feelings of chivalry were moved. With the dauntless courage of which he was capable, he subdued the apathy he had cherished toward Daniel ever since he first came to know him, and to which actual detestation and disquieting jealousy had been added a few weeks ago. “You have been out in the rain,” said Eberhard courteously, but with a reserve that was rigid if not quite forbidding or impenetrable.
“I look like it, don’t I?” said Daniel with a scowl.
“You will catch cold if you are not careful. May I offer you my top coat?” continued Eberhard more courteously. He felt as if he could see the figure of Eleanore rising up behind Daniel, that she was quite surrounded by flowers, and that she was smiling at him in joy and gratitude. He bit his lips and blushed.
Daniel shook his head: “I am accustomed to all kinds of weather. Thank you.”
“Well, then, at least wrap this around your neck; the water is running down your back.” Thereupon Eberhard reached him a white silk kerchief he drew from the pocket of his coat. Daniel make a wry face, but took the kerchief, threw it about his neck, and tied it in a knot under his chin.
“You are right,” he admitted, and drew his head down between his shoulders: “It all reminds me of a good warm bed.”
Eberhard stared at the locomotive of the in-coming train. “Plebeian,” he thought, with inner contempt.
Nevertheless he joined this same plebeian in the third-class carriage, though he had bought a ticket for first class. Was it the white silk kerchief that so suddenly attracted him to the plebeian? What else could it have been? For during the entire journey they sat opposite each other in absolute silence. It was a remarkable pair: the one in a shabby, wet suit with a hat that looked partly as though it belonged to a cheap sign painter, and partly as though it were the sole head gear of a gypsy bard, and with a big pair of spectacles from which the eyes flashed green and unsteady; the other looking as though he had just stepped out of abandbox, not a particle of dust on his clothing, in patent leather slippers, English straw hat, and with an American cigarette in his mouth.
Next to them sat a peasant woman with a chicken basket on her lap, a red-headed girl who held the hind part of pig on her knees, and a workman whose face was bandaged.
At times they looked at each other. If they chanced to catch each other’s eye, the Baron would at once look down, and Daniel, bored as he was, would gaze out of the window at the rain. But there must have been something unusually communicative and mutually intelligent in the few glances with which they involuntarily honoured each other during the journey; for when the train pulled into the station, they left together, and walked along the street quite peacefully, side by side, just as if it were to be taken as a matter of fact that they would remain in each other’s company.
Man is a gregarious animal; given the right conditions, one man will seek out the company of another. Neither defiance nor reserve is of the slightest avail; there is something that conquers the strongest man when he finds another who will yield. Then it is that what was formerly regarded as contentment with loneliness is unmasked and shown to be nothing more than ordinary self-deception.
“I presume you wish to go home and change your clothes,” said Eberhard, standing on the street corner.
“I am already dry,” said Daniel, “and I really have no desire to go home. Over there on Schütt Island is a little inn called the Peter Vischer. I like it because it is frequented only by old people who talk about old times, and because it is situated on a bridge, so that you have the feeling you are in a ship floating around on the water.”
Eberhard went along. From eight o’clock till midnight they sat there opposite each other. Their conversation was limited to such remarks as, “It is really quite comfortable here.”—“It seems to have stopped raining.”—“Yes, it has stopped.”—“That old white-bearded man over by the stove who is doing so much talking is a watchmaker from Unschlitt Place.”—“So? He looks pretty husky.”—“He is said to have fought in the battle of Wörth.”—And so their remarks ran.
When they separated, Eberhard knew that Daniel would again be at the Peter Vischer on Wednesday of the following week, and Daniel knew that he would find the Baron there.