Part 26

This question made Eleanore’s ideas of order and duty quake and totter. She looked at her sister with incredulous eyes and in perfect silence. It was not the happy, gentle Gertrude that had spoken, but the Gertrude of months ago, the lonely, loveless Gertrude.

What difference does it make about you? Why are you getting excited? That was equivalent to saying: Make short work of your life, and don’t draw out the episode in his life any longer than you have to.

Eleanore took courage to carry out the plan she had had in mind for a long while and in which she placed her last hope.

One evening she went to Daniel and said: “I should like to go with you to Eschenbach, Daniel, and visit your mother.”

“Why do you wish to do that?” he asked in amazement. He and his mother did not write to each other: that was due first of all to their natures, and secondly to the condition in which each was now living. But he knew that Eleanore received an occasional letter from Eschenbach which she answered without consulting him. This had never seemed strange to him until now.

A few days later she repeated her wish; Daniel granted it. They decided upon the following Sunday for the excursion.

II

A warm, languid October sun shone over the land; the forests presented a gorgeous array of autumnal foliage; the fields lay stretched in barren rows; along the hills of Franconia floated clouds that looked like down driven by the wind.

They had taken the train as far as Triesdorf; from there they went on to Merckendorf by stage coach. The rest of the distance they walked. Daniel pointed to a flock of geese that were trotting around on the shore of an abandoned pond, and said: “That is our national bird; his cackle is our music. But it doesn’t sound so bad.”

A peasant woman passed by, and made the sign of the cross before the picture of a saint: “It is strange that everything has suddenly become Catholic,” said Eleanore.

Daniel nodded, and replied that when his father moved to Eschenbach a few other Protestant families were living there, all of whom joined in Protestant worship. Later, he said, most of them emigrated, leaving his mother as the only Protestant, so far as he knew, in the neighbourhood. But, Daniel remarked in the course of conversation, his mother had never had any unpleasant experience on this account, and he himself had frequently gone to church, primarily of course to hear the organ, though no one had ever taken offence at this. “There is a totally different type of people here,” he added, “people who lay greater stress on externals than we do, and yet are more secretive.”

Eleanore looked at the church tower whose Spanish-green roof rose from the valley. After a long silence she said: “I wonder whether it will be a boy or a girl, Gertrude’s baby? Oh, a girl, of course. Some day it will be in the world, and will look at me with eyes, with real eyes. How strange that a child of yours should look at me!”

“What is there strange about that? Many children are born, many look at some one.”

“What are you going to call it?” asked Eleanore.

“If it is blond and has blue eyes like yours, I am going to call it Eva.”

“Eva!” cried Eleanore, “no, that won’t do.” She herself had chosen the name of Eva for the child of the maid at the Rüdigers’. That he should now want to call Gertrude’s child by the same name seemed so strange to her.

“Why not Eva?” he asked. “There is something back of this objection on your part. Women always have something up their sleeve. Out with it! Why do you object to Eva?”

Eleanore smiled, and shook her head. She would have liked to make a clean confession to him, but she was not certain how he would take it: she was afraid he would turn back, enraged at her cunning. Once the child had been born and lay there before him, it would captivate him, and she knew it.

They had stopped and were looking out over the sunlit plains. “How alone we are!” said Daniel.

“Everything is easier here,” said Eleanore thoughtfully. “If one could only forget where one comes from, it would be easy to be happy.”

III

“I have been away for seven years,” said Daniel as they passed through the village gate. Everything seemed so ridiculously small—the Town Hall, the Church, the Market Place, and the Eschenbach Fountain. He had also pictured the houses and streets to himself as being cleaner and better kept. As he passed over the three steps at the front gate, each one of which was bulging out like a huge oyster shell, and entered the shop with its smell of spices, the past dwindled to nothing. Marian was so happy she could not speak. She reached one of her hands to Daniel, the other to Eleanore. Her first question was about Gertrude.

In the room sat a four-year-old child with blond hair and marvellous blue eyes. Its little face was of the most delicate beauty, its body was delicately formed.

“Who is the child? To whom does it belong?” asked Daniel.

“It is your own child, Daniel,” said his mother.

“My own child! Yes, for heaven’s sakes—!” He blushed, turned pale, looked first at his mother, and then at Eleanore.

“It is your own flesh and blood. Don’t you ever think of Meta any more?”

“Of Meta.... Oh, I see. And you, you adopted the child? And you, Eleanore, knew all about this? And you, Mother, took the child?” He sat down at the table, and covered his face with his hands. “That was what Eleanore had in mind?” he murmured timidly to himself. “And I presume that to make the story complete the child’s name is Eva ...?”

“Yes, Eva,” whispered Eleanore, touched by the situation. “Go to your father, Eva, and shake hands with him.”

The child did as it had been told. Then Marian related to her son how Eleanore had brought the child to Eschenbach, and how Meta had married and gone to America with her husband.

Every look, every movement on the part of Marian showed how great her love for the child was: she guarded it as the apple of her eye.

The circle of wonderful events closed in around Daniel’s heart. Where responsibility lay and where guilt, where will power ended and fate began, Daniel could not say. To express gratitude would be vulgar; to conceal his emotions was difficult. He was ashamed of himself in the presence of both of the women. But when he looked at the living creature, his shame lost all meaning. And how exalted Eleanore appeared in his eyes just then! She seemed to him equally amiable and worthy of respect, whether he regarded her as an active or as a sentient, feeling woman. He almost shuddered at the thought that she was so near him; that what she had done had been done for him filled him with humility.

The strangest of all, however, was little Eva herself. He could not see enough of her; he was amazed at the trick nature had played: a human being of the noblest mien and form had been born of a gawky, uncouth servant girl. There was something divinely graceful and airy about the child. She had well-formed hands, delicate wrists, shapely ankles, and a clear, transparent forehead, on which a network of bluish veins spread out in various directions. Her laughter was the purest of music; and in her walk and gestures in general there was a rhythm which promised much for her future poise and winsomeness.

Daniel took Eleanore through the village and out to the old town gate. It was the time of the annual fair; Eschenbach was crowded. They returned on this account to the more quiet streets, and finally entered the church. The sexton came up and admitted Daniel to the choir. Daniel sat down at the organ; the sexton pumped the bellows; Eleanore took a seat on one of the little benches near the side wall.

Daniel’s eyes became fixed; his fingers touched the keys with supernatural power; he began to improvise. There were two motifs following each other in close succession; both were in fifths; they were united into one; they ran from the low to the high registers, from Hell through the World to Heaven. A hymn crowned the improvised composition.

He stood with Eleanore for a long while in the stillness. The songs echoed from the lofty arches. It seemed to both of them that the blood of the one was flowing into the body of the other. Incidents of the past faded from their memory; they seemed to have completed a long journey; there was no voice to remind them of their return; they were completely liberated from duties and made immune from care.

IV

Eleanore was to sleep with Marian and Eva; Daniel was to have his old room. He showed it to Eleanore; they stepped to the window and looked out. They saw Eva down in the yard dancing back and forth barefooted on a wooden balustrade. She kept her equilibrium by holding out her arms. The grace of her movements was so fairy-like that Daniel and Eleanore smiled at each other in astonishment.

After dinner Daniel went out in front of the house; Marian and Eleanore sat for a while at the window; the light of the lamp shone behind them. Later they came out into the street and joined Daniel. Marian, however, was uneasy on account of the child. She said that Eva had been restless all day and might cry for her. “Stay out just as long as you like; I will leave the door open,” she said, and went back.

Daniel and Eleanore returned to the fair. It was still early in the evening, but the crowd had disappeared. They sauntered around among the booths, and stopped to listen to the harangue of a mountebank or to watch peasant boys shooting at figures of various kinds and a glass ball that danced on a jet of water. There was a sea of red and green lanterns; sky-rockets were hissing into the air from the rampart; musicians were playing in the cafés, while hilarious tipplers sang or hooted as the spirit moved them.

They came to a grass plot, the sole illumination of which was the light from a circus wagon. On the steps of the wagon sat a man in tricot holding the head of a black poodle between his knees.

“Those were the last inhabitants of the earth,” said Daniel, after they had crossed the square. The noise died away, the gaudy lights disappeared.

“How far are you going?” asked Eleanore, without the remotest trace of fear in her voice.

“I am going on until I am with you,” was the quick reply.

The indistinct outline of a bridge became visible; under it the water flowed noiselessly. The path had a yellowish shimmer; there were no stars in the heavens. Suddenly the path seemed to come to an end; at the end of it were trees there that seemed to be moving closer and closer together; it became darker and darker; they stopped.

“We have told each other our whole story,” said Daniel. “In the way of words we owe each other nothing. We have had enough of talk; there has been no lack of sorrow and enough of error. We can no longer act differently, and therefore we dare not act differently any longer.”

“Be still,” whispered Eleanore, “I don’t like your wrangling; what you say is so unpeaceful and fiendish. Yesterday I dreamed that you were lying on your knees and had your folded hands uplifted. Then I loved you—very much.”

“Do you need dreams in order to love me, girl? I don’t; I need you just as you are. I will soon be thirty years old, Eleanore. A man never really wakes up until he is thirty; it is then that he conquers the world. You know what rests within me; you suspect it. You know too how I need you; you feel it. You are my soul; you are created out of my music; without you I am an empty hull, a patchwork, a violin without strings.”

“Oh, Daniel, I believe you, and yet it is not all true,” replied Eleanore. He thought he could see in the darkness her mockingly ironical smile: “Somewhere, I am almost tempted to say in God, it is not true. If we were better, if we were beings in the image of God and acting in God’s ways, we would have to desist from our own ways. Then it would be wonderful to live: it would be like living above the clouds, happy, at peace, pure.”

“Does that come from your heart, Eleanore?”

“My dear, dear man! My heart, like yours, has been beclouded and bewitched. I cannot give you up. I have settled my accounts. In my soul I am entirely conscious of my guilt. I know what I am doing and assume full responsibility for my action. There is no use to struggle any longer; the water is already swirling over our heads. I simply want to say that you should not delude yourself into believing that we have risen up above other people by what we have done, that we have deserved the gratitude of fate. No, Daniel, what we are doing is precisely what all those do who fall. Let me stay with you, dearest; kiss me, kiss me to death.”

V

Philippina had promised Eleanore to look after Jordan and Gertrude on Sunday.

As she was crossing Five Points, she went into a shop, and asked for three pfennigs’ worth of court plaster. While doing some housework she had scratched herself on a nail. The clerk gave her the plaster, and asked her what was the news.

“Ah, you poor bloke, you want to know the very latest, don’t you?” she snarled, and then grinned with blatant self-complacency.

“The later the better,” said the fellow with a lustful smirk.

Philippina bent over the counter, and whispered: “They’re taking their wedding trip to-day.” She laughed in a lewd, imbecile way. The clerk stared at her with wide-opened eyes and mouth. Two hours later the news was in the mouth of every hussy in that section of the city.

Gertrude was in bed. The day woman who did the cooking gave Philippina a plate with Jordan’s dinner on it: Meat, vegetables, and a few sour plums. Philippina ate two of the plums on the way up to his room, and licked her fingers.

The whole forenoon she spent rummaging around in Eleanore’s room; she looked through the cabinets, the presses, and the pockets of Eleanore’s dresses. As it began to grow dark, Jordan suddenly entered, in hat and great coat, and looked on in speechless and enraged amazement at the girl’s inexplicable curiosity.

Philippina took the broom from the corner, and began to sweep with all her might. While sweeping she sang, out of tune, impudently, and savagely:

“No fire, no coal, so warmly glows As secret love that no one knows.”

Jordan went away without saying anything. He had forgotten to lock his room. Hardly had Philippina noticed that he had left the key in the door, when she opened it and went in.

She spied around with cowardly, superstitious eyes. She was afraid of the old inspector, as she would have been afraid of an invincible magician. For such cases she had a number of formulas at her tongue’s end. She murmured: “Put earth in, close the lid, hold your thumbs, spit on your shoe.” She spat on her shoe.

She then began to examine the cabinet, for she believed that it contained all of Jordan’s secrets. But she could not open the lock, try as she might. She then went at the writing desk; she was angry. There she found, in plain wooden frames, the pictures of Gertrude and Eleanore. She ran out, got a large needle, came back, and stuck it in the picture of Eleanore right between the eyes. Then she took Gertrude’s picture, and after she had held it for a while, looking at it with her gloomy eyes, she noticed that it was spotted with blood. The plaster had come off her finger, and the finger had started to bleed.

“Come now, Philippina,” she said to herself, “go and see how Gertrude is making out.” Entering Gertrude’s room, she found her asleep. Creeping up to her bed on her tiptoes, she took a chair, straddled it, leaned her chin on the back, and stared fixedly at the face of the young woman, now just barely visible in the darkness of the room.

Gertrude dreamed that a black bird was hovering over her and picking at her breast with its pointed beak. She screamed and woke up.

Shortly after this Gertrude had to send for the midwife.

During the night, Gertrude gave birth to a girl; she had suffered terrible pains. Philippina had seen and heard it all. She had run back and forth, from the kitchen to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the kitchen, for hours; she was like an insane person; she kept mumbling something to herself. What she mumbled no one knew.

Gertrude had called in vain for Daniel; in vain had she waited for him the whole day.

“Where in the world can Daniel be?” cried Philippina, “where can Daniel be with his damned Eleanore?” She sat in the corner with her hands folded, her hair tangled and knotted, her face distorted with the grimaces of madness. The midwife was still busy with Gertrude; the new-born child was crying pitifully.

VI

Daniel held the child in his arms, and looked at it carefully but without love. “You little worm, what do you want in this world?” he said to his daughter. He still had his hat on; so had Eleanore. Both of them were dressed just as they came from the station; they were embarrassed and excited at what had happened. Eleanore was exceedingly pale; her great eyes looked dreamy; her body seemed of almost boyish slenderness. At times she smiled; then the smile died away, as if she did not have the courage to appear so cheerful.

Inspector Jordan was also in the room, acting as he had always acted since his bankruptcy—like a guest who feels that he is a burden to the family. He said very humbly: “I have suggested to Gertrude that she call the child Agnes after my deceased wife.”

“Very well, let’s call her Agnes,” said Daniel.

Gertrude asked that the child be brought to her so that she could nurse it. Eleanore carried it over and laid it at her breast. As the hands of the sisters touched, Gertrude looked up quickly: there was an indescribable expression of thoughtfulness, knowingness, and kindliness on her face. Eleanore fell on her knees, threw her arms around Gertrude’s neck, and kissed her passionately. Gertrude reached out her left hand to Daniel; he gave her his right hand with some hesitancy. Jordan was radiant with joy: “It is so good, children, to see that you all love each other, so good,” he said with visible emotion.

“Daniel, you must move up into Father’s quarters at once,” said Gertrude. “Your piano, bed, and all your things must be taken up, and Eleanore will move into your room. I have already spoken to Father about it, and he feels that it will be a good arrangement. He will be very quiet so as not disturb you. The crying of the baby would make it impossible for you to work.”

“It is a very practical solution of the problem,” said Jordan, speaking for Daniel, and looked down at his frayed coat-sleeves, which he tried to conceal by hiding them behind his back. “I am also glad that Eleanore will be with you. A man, you know, has a habit of going to bed long before a woman quits her daily work. Is that not true, my son-in-law?” With that he clapped Daniel on the shoulder.

“During Gertrude’s confinement I will sleep here in her room,” said Eleanore, avoiding Daniel’s eyes as she said so. “She cannot stay alone, and it costs too much to keep a nurse.”

“Exactly,” said Jordan, and went to the door. But he turned around: “I should like to know,” he asked in a tone of great grief, “who has been at Gertrude’s and Eleanore’s pictures. The one is covered with spots of blood, and the other has a hole punched in it. Isn’t that very strange? I can’t understand it: I can’t imagine who could have done me this injury.” He shook his head and went out.

“Do you realise that to-morrow is the first of November?” asked Gertrude. “Have you the rent ready? Did Father make any money last month?”

“No, he didn’t,” replied Eleanore, “but I have almost enough to pay the landlord.”

It was no longer possible to depend upon Jordan. He was supported by his children, and seemed to find the arrangement neither strange nor humiliating. At times he would allude in a mysterious way to a big enterprise that was going to claim the whole of his attention and bring him a great deal of money and honour. But if you asked him about it, he would wrinkle his brow and put his finger to his lips.

“I owe the man more than the rent,” said Daniel. He kissed Gertrude on the forehead, and went out.

“Put the child in the cradle, and come over here,” said Gertrude to Eleanore, as soon as Daniel had closed the door behind him. Eleanore did as she had been told. The baby was asleep. She took it up, looked at its wrinkled face, and carried it to the cradle. Then she went over to Gertrude’s bed.

Gertrude seized her by her hands, and drew her down to her with more strength than one would have imagined her to have just then. The eyes of the two women were drawn close together. “You must make him happy, Eleanore,” she said in a hoarse voice, and with a sickly glimmer in her eyes. “If you do not, it would be better if one of us were dead.”

Despite her terror, Eleanore loosened Gertrude’s hold on her with great gentleness. “It is hard to discuss that subject, Gertrude; it is hard to live and hard to think about it all.” Eleanore breathed these words into Gertrude’s ears.

“You must make him happy; you must make him happy! Repeat it to yourself and keep it in your mind every day, every hour, every minute. You must, you must, you must.” Gertrude was almost beside herself.

“I will learn how to do it,” replied Eleanore slowly and seriously. “I am ... I hardly know what I am or how I feel. But be patient with me, Gertrude, I will learn how to make him happy.” She looked into Gertrude’s face with anxious curiosity. Gertrude however pressed her hands against Eleanore’s cheeks, drew her down to her again, and kissed her with unusual fervour. “I too must learn how,” whispered Gertrude, “I must learn the whole of life from the very beginning.”

Some one knocked at the door. The midwife came in to look after her patient.

VII