Part 27

At that time the superstition still prevailed that the window in the room of a woman in confinement must never be opened. The air in the room was consequently heavy and ill-smelling. Eleanore could hardly stand it during the day; during the night she could not sleep. Moreover natural daylight could not enter the room, and, as if it were not already gloomy enough, the window had been hung with green curtains which were kept half drawn.

The most unpleasant feature of all, however, was the interminable round of visits from the women: custom had decreed that they should not be turned away. The wife of the director of the theatre came in; Martha Rübsam came in, and so did the wife of Councillor Kirschner, and the wives of the butcher, baker, preacher, and physician. And of course the wife of the apothecary called. No one of them failed to pour out an abundance of gratuitous advice or go into ecstasies over the beauty of the baby. Once Daniel came in just as such an assemblage was in the sick room. He looked first at one, then at another, threw back his head, and left without saying a word.

Herr Seelenfromm and M. Rivière were likewise not frightened by the distance; they called. Eleanore met them in the hall, and got rid of them by the usual method. And one day even Herr Carovius came around to inquire how mother and child were doing. Philippina received him; and Philippina was having a hard time of it at present: she was not allowed to enter Gertrude’s room; Gertrude would have nothing to do with her; she refused to see her.

So that she might not get too far behind with her work—for it meant her daily bread—Eleanore pushed the table up to the window, and despite the poor light, kept on writing. In the evening she would sit by the lamp and write, although she was so tired that she could hardly keep her eyes open.

After three days, Gertrude had no milk for the baby; it had to be fed with a bottle. It would cry for hours without stopping. And as soon as it was quiet, its clothes had to be washed or its bath prepared, or Gertrude wanted something, or one of the pestiferous visitors came in. Eleanore had to lay her work aside; in the evening she would fall across the bed and sleep with painful soundness for an hour or two. If the baby did not wake her by its hungry howling, the bad air did. Her head ached. Yet she concealed her weakness, her longing, her oppression. Not even Daniel noticed that there was anything wrong with her.

She had very little opportunity to talk with him. And yet there was probably not another pair of eyes in the whole world that could be so eloquent and communicative with admonition, promise, request, and cordial resignation. One evening they met each other at the kitchen door: “Eleanore, I am stifling,” he whispered to her.

She laid her hands on his shoulder, and looked at him in silence.

“Come with me,” he urged with a stupid air. “Come with me! Let’s run off.”

Eleanore smiled and thought to herself: “The demands of his soul are always a few leagues in advance of the humanly possible.”

The next morning he stormed into the room. Eleanore was only half dressed. With an expression of wrath flitting across her face she reached for a towel and draped it about her shoulders. He sat down on Gertrude’s bed, and let loose a torrent of words: “I am going to set Goethe’s ‘Wanderers Sturmlied’ to music! I am planning to make it a companion piece to the ‘Harzreise’ and publish the two in a cycle. I have not slept the whole night. The main motif is glorious.” He began to hum it over in a falsetto voice: “‘Oh, mortal man, if genius does not forsake thee, neither rain nor storm can breathe upon thy heart!’ How do you like that?”

Gertrude looked at him inspired.

“I should have a good drink on that idea,” he continued; “I have rarely felt such a longing for a flask of old wine. It’s a bloody shame that I can’t afford it. But you wait till I get a little money, and you will see a _bouteille_ of Tokay on my table every day.”

“My God, just listen how he raves! He’s going to have the best there is,” said Philippina angrily, as she entered the room in her stocking feet and heard Daniel’s remarks.

Daniel told her to keep her mouth shut and leave the room at once. He paid no attention to her reply, and cried out: “Something has got to happen. If I can’t drink, I at least want to dance. Dance with me, Eleanore; don’t be afraid, come, dance with me!” He threw his arms around her, pressed her to his bosom, sang a waltz melody, and drew the struggling and embarrassed girl across the floor.

Philippina broke out in her slimy, malicious laughter, and then shrieked at the top of her voice that Frau Kirschner was outside and wanted to see the Kapellmeister’s wife. Gertrude made an imploring gesture, the full meaning of which Daniel easily grasped. The baby began to cry, Eleanore tore herself away from Daniel’s embrace, arranged her hair, and hastened over to the cradle. Philippina opened the door to let the Councillor’s wife in. Just then a violent discussion was started in the hall. One could hear the voice of Jordan and that of some strange man.

It was the furniture dealer who had come to collect the money for the cradle. He was boiling with the rage that cares not how it may be expressed: he said he had already been there four times, and each time he was put off. The truth is, Daniel was very hard up.

The Councillor’s wife took Daniel to one side, and made him an offer of a loan of two hundred marks. Daniel was silent; he bit his lips, and looked down at the floor. She scolded him: “You are always your own worst enemy. Now be reasonable, Nothafft, I will send the money over at noon. If you have any left, you may pay it back.”

Daniel went out, and gave the blustering furniture dealer his last ten-mark piece.

Frau Kirschner had brought a flask of Tokay wine with her for Gertrude. Tokay was regarded at that time as a sort of elixir of life.

“You see, so quickly are wishes fulfilled,” said Gertrude to Daniel in the evening, when he came into her room. She poured out a glass for him.

“Have you any bills to settle?” he asked, looking partly at Eleanore,

## partly at Gertrude, and striking his wallet, then bulging with notes.

“It’s Court Councillor’s money,” he said, “real Court Councillor’s money. How beautiful it looks, lousy fine, eh? And upon that stuff the salvation of my soul depends!” He threw the money on Gertrude’s bed, stuck out his tongue, and turned away in disgust.

Eleanore handed him the glass of Tokay; her eyes glistened with tears.

“No, Eleanore,” he said, “I have trifled it away. In my arrogance I imagined I could do something; I thought I could get somewhere. I sit down, brood over my ideas, and find that they are all wind-eggs. I have the feeling that I have taken a false oath. What good am I, Eleanore, what good am I, Gertrude?”

“Ah, take a drink, and perhaps your troubles will leave you,” said Eleanore, and stroked his brow with her hand.

Gertrude called out to her: “Quit that! Put that glass away!” She spoke so harshly that Eleanore sprang back, and Daniel got up.

“Leave me alone for a while,” she said. Daniel and Eleanore left the room.

Eleanore went into the living room, sat down at the table, and laid her head in her hands. “What can we do now?” she said to Daniel. The violin tone in her voice had something unusually touching about it.

Daniel set the candle he was carrying in the bay window. He bent down over the table, and took Eleanore by her small wrists. “Accept the bitter for the sake of the sweet,” he murmured. “Believe in me, believe in yourself, believe in the higher law. It is not possible that I merely imagined that there is a winged creature for me. I must have something to cling to, something indestructible, ah, even superhuman.”

“You must have something superhuman to cling to,” Eleanore repeated after him. She could not help but think that he had already made superhuman demands of the other woman, his wife, her sister, Gertrude. She raised her finger as if to warn him: it was a gesture of infinite timidity.

But Daniel scarcely saw what she had done. In his arrogant presumption and passion he could have smashed the universe to pieces, and then re-created it merely in order to mould this one creature after his own desires. He would have made her of boundless pliability, and yet active in her love for him; he would have had her spurn venerable commandments in a spirit of self-glorification, and yet cherish unequivocal confidence in him, the creature of need and defiance; and she would be cheerful withal.

“I am cold,” whispered Eleanore, peering into the dark shadows of the room.

VIII

To know that these eyes and their pure passion were so close to him; to be able to touch this cool, sincere, mutely-eloquent mouth with his lips; to be able to hold these hands in which passion resided as it does in the speechless unrest of a messenger; to be able to press this throbbing figure with all its willingness and hesitation to his bosom—it was almost too much for Daniel. It involved pain; it aroused an impatience, a thirst for more and more. His daily work was interrupted; his thoughts, plans, and arrangements were torn from their connection.

He spoke to people whom he knew as though they were total strangers; he amazed those whom he did not know by the loyal confidence he voluntarily placed in them. He forgot to put on his hat when he walked along the street; the distraction he revealed was the source of constant merriment to passersby and on-lookers. He would not know when it was noon; he would come home at three o’clock, thinking it was twelve. Once he came nearly being run over by a team of galloping horses; another time he had his umbrella taken straight from his hands without noticing it. This took place at the Ludwig Station.

“Oh, winged creature, winged creature,” he would say to himself, and smile like a somnambulist. Deep in his soul a sea of tones was surging. He listened to them with complete assurance, angry though he would become at times because of the failure of this or that. He was so absorbed in himself, so enmeshed in his own thoughts, that he scarcely saw the sky above him; houses, people, animals, and the things that are after all necessary to human existence existed only in his dreams, if at all.

Winged creature, winged creature!

IX

As soon as Gertrude could get up and go about, Eleanore accepted an invitation from Martha Rübsam to visit her aunt, Frau Seelenfromm, in Altdorf. The visit was to last two weeks. Eleanore looked upon it as a test that would determine whether she could do anything on her own account now: whether she could get along without Daniel.

But she saw that she could no longer live without him. In the lonely house she came to the conclusion that her love was great enough to enable her to bear the monstrous burden fate had been trying to impose upon her. She saw that neither flight nor concealment nor anything else could save her, could save Daniel, could give back to Gertrude what she had lost, what had been taken from her.

There were times, to be sure, when she asked herself whether it was all true and real; whether it could be possible. She walked in darkness surrounded by demons. Her being was plunged into the deepest and strangest bewilderment; confusion enveloped her; there was sorrow in the effort she made to avert the inexorable.

But in one of her sleepless nights she thought she was covering Daniel’s mind with a flame of fire; she thought she heard his voice calling out to her with a power she had never known before.

No one she had ever seen was so vivacious, so alive as he. Her slumbering fancy had awakened at the sound of his voice and the feel of his warm breath. She felt that people owed him a great deal; and since they did not seem inclined to pay their debts, it was her duty to make restitution to Daniel for their neglect.

She could not survey the ways of his art: the musician in him made neither a strange nor a special appeal to her. She grasped and felt only him himself; to her he was Daniel. She grasped and felt only the man who was born to do lofty, the loftiest, deeds and who passed by the base and evil in men in silence; who knew that he had been chosen but was obliged to renounce the privilege of ruling; who was always in full armour, ready to defend a threatened sanctuary.

Of such a man, of such a knight and warrior, she had dreamt even when a child. For although she looked at things and circumstances with the eyes of truth, her soul had always been full of secret dreams and visions. Back of her unceasing and unfading activity the genii of romanticism had been spinning their bright-coloured threads; it was they that had formed the glass case in which she had lived for so long, impervious to the touch of mortal hand, immune to the flames of love.

The morning following that night she explained to her friend that she was going home. Martha tried in vain to get her to stay: she was almost ill with longing.

Martha let her go; she had the very saddest of thoughts concerning Eleanore’s future; for the unhappy incidents of that unhappy home had reached Martha’s sensitive ears. She did not worry because of moral principles; she was not that kind of a woman. She worried over Eleanore out of genuine affection: it pained her to know that she could no longer admire Eleanore.

X

In the meanwhile Daniel had told his wife that a child of his was living with his mother in Eschenbach, and that he had known nothing about it until Eleanore took him over there. He told her the child’s name and how old it was and who its mother was, and gave her a detailed description of that celebrated New Year’s Night on which he had embraced the maid. He told her how he had stood out in front of her house that night and longed for her with all his senses, and how he felt, when he looked at little Eva, as if Providence had only seemed to use the body of a strange woman, and that Eva was in reality Gertrude’s own child.

To this Gertrude replied: “I never want to see that child.”

“You will be ashamed of having made this remark once you do see the child,” replied Daniel. “You should not be envious of a creature whom God brought into the world so that the world may be more beautiful.”

“Don’t speak of God!” said Gertrude quickly and with uplifted hand. Then, after a pause, during which Daniel looked at her angrily, she added with a painful smile: “The very idea: I, jealous, envious! O no, Daniel.”

The way she pressed her hands to her bosom convinced Daniel, and quite emphatically too, that she did not know the feeling of envy or jealousy. He said nothing, but remained in her room for an unusually long while. When she was cutting bread, she let the knife fall. He sprang and picked it up for her. He had never done this before. Gertrude looked at him as he bent over. Her eyes became dim, flared up, and then became dim again.

“Don’t speak of God!” Somehow Daniel could not get these words out of his mind.

When Eleanore returned she was terrified at the expression on Daniel’s face. He seemed dazed; his eyes were inflamed as though he too had not been able to sleep; he could hardly talk. Finally he demanded that she swear to him never to go away again.

She hesitated to take an oath of this kind, but he became more and more insistent, and she took it. He threw his arms about her with passionate impetuosity; just then the door opened, and Gertrude stood on the threshold. Daniel hastened to her, and wanted to take her by the hand; but she stepped back and back until she reached her bedroom.

It was evening; covers were laid for four: Jordan was to take dinner with them that evening. He came down promptly; Eleanore brought in the food; but Gertrude was nowhere to be found. Eleanore went in to her. She was sitting by the cradle, combing her hair with slow deliberation.

“Won’t you eat with us, Gertrude?” asked Eleanore.

Gertrude did not seem to hear her. In a few minutes she got up, walked over to the mirror on the wall, pressed her hair with the palms of her hands to her two cheeks, and looked in the mirror with wide-opened eyes.

“Come, Gertrude,” said Eleanore, rather timidly, “Daniel is waiting.”

“That they are in there again,” murmured Gertrude, “it seems like a sin.” She turned around, and beckoned to Eleanore.

Eleanore went over to her in perfect obedience. Gertrude threw her arms around her neck until her left temple touched Eleanore’s right one with only her hair hanging between them like a curtain. Gertrude again looked in the mirror; her eyes became rigid; she said: “Oh yes, you are more beautiful, much more beautiful, a hundred times more beautiful.”

Just then the child began to stir, and since Gertrude was still standing immovable before the mirror, Eleanore went to the cradle. Hardly had Gertrude noticed what she had done, when she rushed out and cried with terrifying rudeness: “Don’t touch that child! Don’t touch it, I say!” She then went up, snatched the child from the cradle, and went back to her bed with it, saying gently and yet threateningly: “It belongs to me, to me and to no one else.”

Since this incident, Eleanore knew that a fearful change had come over her sister. She did not know whether other people noticed it; she did not even know whether Daniel was aware of it. But she knew it, and it frightened her.

One afternoon, about sunset, Eleanore came in and found Gertrude on her knees in the hall scrubbing the floor. “You shouldn’t do that, Gertrude,” said Eleanore, “you are not strong enough for that kind of work yet.”

Gertrude made no reply; she kept on scrubbing.

“Why don’t you dress better?” continued Eleanore; “Daniel does not like to see you going about in that ugly old brown skirt. Believe me, it makes him angry.”

Gertrude straightened up on her knees, and said with disconcerting humility: “You dress up; it is not well for two to look so nice. What shall I do?” she asked, and let her head sink. “You wear your gold chain and the corals in your ears. That pleases me; that is the way it should be. But I have no gold chain; I have no corals. If I had them, I wouldn’t wear them; and if I wore them, it would not be right.”

“Ah, Gertrude, what are you talking about?” asked Eleanore.

The ringing of the church bells could be heard in the hall. Gertrude folded her hands in prayer. There was a stern solemnity in her action. In her kneeling position she looked as though she were petrified.

Eleanore went into the room with a heavy heart.

XI

Through the dividing walls Daniel and Eleanore were irresistibly drawn to each other. They accompanied each other in their thoughts; each divined the other’s wishes and feelings. If he came home in a bad humour, if she was anxious and restless, they both needed merely to sit down by each other to regain their peace.

If Daniel’s power of persuasion was great, Eleanore’s example was equally great. A dish would displease Daniel. Eleanore would not only eat it, but would praise it; and Daniel would then eat it too, and like it. Gertrude had prepared the food, and Eleanore felt it was her duty to spare her sister as much humiliation as possible. But Gertrude did not want to be treated indulgently. She would lay her knife and fork aside, and say: “Daniel is right. It is not fit to eat.” She would get up and go into the kitchen and make a porridge that would take the place of the inedible dish. That was the way she acted: she was always resigned, diligent, and quiet; she made every possible effort to do her duty. Daniel and Eleanore looked at each other embarrassed; but their embarrassment was transformed in time into mutual ecstasy: they could not keep from looking at each other.

There was nothing of the seducer in Daniel’s sexual equipment. On the other hand he was dependent to a very high degree upon his wishes and desires; and in his passionate obstinacy he not infrequently lacked consideration. Eleanore however possessed profound calmness, cheerful certainty, and a goodly measure of indulgence; and she knew exactly how to make use of these traits. The claims that were made on her patience and moderation would have harassed a heart steeled in the actualities of politics and flooded with worldly experiences. She however found a safe and unerring guide in the instincts of her nature, and was never tired.

The trait in her to which he took most frequent and violent exception was what he called her plebeian caution; she seemed determined to pay due and conventional respect to appearances. He did not wish to lay claim to the hours of his love as though they were a stolen possession; he did not wish to sneak across bridges and through halls; he did not wish to whisper; he did not wish to lie in wait for a secret tryst; he rebelled at the thought of coming and going in fear and trembling.

There is not the slightest use to investigate all the secrecies between Daniel and Eleanore. It will serve no useful end to infringe with unskilled hand on the work of the evil spirit Asmodeus, who makes walls transparent and allows his devotees to look into bed chambers. It would be futile to act as the spy of Daniel and show how he left the attic room in the dead of night and crept down the stairs in felt slippers. We have no desire to hear of Eleanore’s pangs of conscience and her longings, her flights, her waiting in burning suspense; to relate how she endeavoured to avert the inevitable to-day and succumbed to-morrow would be to tell an idle tale. It is best to overlook all these things; to draw a curtain of mercy before them; for they are so human and so wholly without a trace of the miraculous.