Part 29

It was a very mysterious visit the singer paid him. One afternoon during a fearful snow storm the bell rang; and when Gertrude opened the door, she saw a woman wearing a heavy black veil standing before her, who said she wished to speak to Kapellmeister Nothafft. Gertrude took her up to Daniel’s room. The stranger told Daniel she had been wishing to make his acquaintance for a long time, and, now on her way to Italy, she had been detained in the city for a few days by the illness of a near friend. This, she said, she regarded as a hint from fate itself. She had come to extend him her greetings, and particularly to thank him for his songs, a copy of which a friend had been good enough to present to her at a time when she was living under the weight of a great sorrow.

She spoke with an accent that had a Northern note in it, but easily and fluently; she gave the impression of a woman who had seen a great deal of the world and had profited by her travels. Daniel asked her with whom he had the pleasure of speaking, but she smiled, and asked permission to conceal her name for the present. She said that it really did not make much difference, and that it might be more agreeable to him later to think that an unknown woman had come to him to express her appreciation than to recall that Fräulein So-and-So had been there: she hoped that her very anonymity would make a more lasting impression on his memory than could be made by a woman of whom he knew only what everybody knows.

The mingling of the jocose and the serious, of the mind and the heart, in the words of the stranger pleased Daniel. Though his replies were curt and cool, it was plain that she was affording him much pleasure: she was reminding him of the fact that his creations had not after all sunk into an echoless abyss. In course of time, the conversation turned again to the songs; she said she would like very much to sing some of them for him. Daniel was pleased. He got the score, sat down at the piano, and the enigmatic woman began to sing. At the very first note Daniel was enraptured; he had never heard such a voice: so soft, so pure, so emotional, so unlike the conventional product of the conservatory. As soon as she had finished the first song, he looked up at her in unaffected embarrassment, and murmured: “Who are you, anyhow? Who are you?”

“No investigations or cross-questioning, please,” replied the singer, and, blushing at the praise Daniel was bestowing on her by his very behaviour, she laughed and said, “The next song, please, that one by Eichendorff!”

Gertrude, who had not wished to remain longer than was necessary because of the unkempt impression she knew she made, had hastened down to the kitchen. And now Eleanore came in, after having knocked at the door with all imaginable timidity. She had heard the strange voice, had rushed out into the hall, and, unable to restrain her curiosity any longer, had come in to see the singer.

Daniel nodded to her with radiant eyes, the stranger greeted her cordially though calmly, and then began to sing the next song; after this she took up the third, and so on until she had sung the complete cycle of six. Old Jordan was standing behind the door; he had his hands pressed to his face and was listening; he was much moved.

“Well, I must be going,” said the strange woman, after she had finished the last song. She shook hands with Daniel, and said: “It has been a beautiful hour.”

“It has been one of the most beautiful hours I have ever experienced,” said Daniel.

“Farewell!”

“Farewell!”

The strange woman went away, leaving behind her not a trace of anything other than the memory of a joy that grew more fabulous as the storm-tossed years rolled by. Daniel never saw her again, and never heard from her again.

XVII

While the woman was singing, Gertrude had been standing down in the hall listening. She knew every note of every song; every melody in the accompaniment seemed to her like an old, familiar picture. She was also aware that an artist by the grace of God had been in the house.

But how strange it was that she should find nothing unusual in the incident. She felt that a living stream in her bosom had dried up, leaving nothing but sand and stones in its bed. This inability to feel, this being dead to all sensations, took the form of excruciating pangs of conscience.

“My God, my God, what has happened to me?” she sighed, and wrung her hands.

That evening she went to the Church of Our Lady, and prayed for a long while. Her prayer did not appease her, however; she came back home more disquieted than ever.

The door of the living room was open: Daniel and Eleanore were sitting by the lamp, reading together from a book. The baby began to move; Eleanore had left the door open so that she might be able to hear the child when it woke up. Gertrude took the child in her arms, quieted it, and returned to the door leading into the living room. Daniel and Eleanore had turned their backs to the door, and were so absorbed in their reading that they were not aware of Gertrude’s presence.

A light suddenly came into Gertrude’s heart: she became conscious of her guilt—the guilt she had been trying in vain to fathom now for so many cruel weeks.

She did not have enough of the power of love; therein lay her guilt. She had assumed an obligation that was quite beyond her power to fulfil: she had entered into marriage without having the requisite strength of heart.

Marriage had seemed to her like the Holy of Holies. Her union with the man she loved seemed to her to be of equal significance with the union with God. But when she saw that this bond had been broken, the world was plunged into an abyss immeasurably remote from God. And it was not her husband who seemed to her to be guilty of infidelity; nor did she look upon her sister as being the guilty one; it was she herself who had been unfaithful and guilty in their eyes. She had not stood the test; she had been tried and found wanting; her strength had not been equal to her presumptions; God had rejected her. This conviction became irrevocably rooted in her heart.

In her union with Daniel music had become something divine; and she saw, now this union had been broken, something in music that was perilous, something that was to be avoided: she understood why she was so unemotional, why her feelings had dried up and vanished.

But she wanted to make one more effort to see whether she was entirely right in the analysis of her soul. One morning she went to Daniel, and asked him to play a certain passage from the “Harzreise.” She said she would like to hear the close of the slow middle movement which had always made such an appeal to her. Her request was made in such an urgent, anxious tone that Daniel granted it, though he did not feel like playing. As Gertrude listened, she became paler and paler: her diagnosis was being corroborated with fearful exactness. What had once been a source of ecstasy was now the cause of intense torture. The tones and harmonies seemed to be eating into her very soul; the pain she felt was so overwhelming, that it was only with the greatest exertion that she mustered up sufficient self-control to leave the room unaided. Daniel was dismayed.

On her return to the kitchen, Gertrude heard a most peculiar noise in her bedroom. She went in only to see that little Agnes had crept into the corner of the room where the harp stood, and was striking the strings with a copper spoon, highly pleased with her actions. Gertrude was seized with a vague, nameless terror. She took the harp into the kitchen, removed the strings from the frame, rolled them up, put them in a drawer, and carried the stringless frame up to the attic.

“What can I do?” she whispered to herself, and looked around in the attic with an expression of complete helplessness. She longed for peace, and it seemed peaceful up where she was. She stayed a while, leaning up against one of the beams, her eyes closed.

“What can I do?” That was the question she put to herself day and night. “I can no longer be of any help to my husband; to stand in his way merely because of the child is not right.” Such was the trend of her argument. She saw how he was suffering, how Eleanore was suffering, how each was suffering on account of the other, and how both were suffering because of the despicable vulgarity of the human race. She thought to herself that if she were not living, everything would be right. She imagined, indeed she was certain, that all the truth he had given her had had the sole purpose of whitewashing a lie, by which she was to be made to believe that her existence was a necessity to him. She was convinced that the weight of this lie was crushing the very life out of him. She wished to free him from it and its consequences. But how she was to do this she did not know. She knew that if Daniel and Eleanore could belong to each other in a legal, legitimate way, they would be vindicated in the eyes of God and man. But how this was to be brought about she did not know.

She sought and sought for a way out. Her ideas were vague but persistent. She felt that she was running around in a circle, unable to do more than stare at the centre of the circle. Every morning at five o’clock she would get up and go to church. She prayed with a devotion and passion that physically exhausted her heart.

One morning she knelt before the altar in unusually heart-rending despair. She thought she heard a small voice crying out to her and telling her to take her life.

She swooned; people rushed up to her, and wet her forehead with cold water. This enabled her to get up and go home. A peculiarly sorrowful and dreamy expression lay on her face.

She wanted to do some knitting, for she recalled that when she was a girl she was always able to dispel care and grief by knitting. But every stitch she made turned into the cry: “You must take your life.”

She knelt down by the cradle of little Agnes, but the child said to her only too distinctly: “Mother, you must take your life.”

Eleanore came in. On her brow was the light of enjoyed happiness; her whole body was happiness; her lips trembled and twitched with happiness. But her eyes said. “Sister, you must take your life.”

Philippina stood by the kitchen stove, and whispered to the coals: “Gertrude, you must take your life.” Her father came in, got his dinner, expressed his thanks for it, and went out murmuring, “Daughter, you must take your life; believe me, it will be for the best.”

If she passed by the well, something drew her to the edge; voices called to her from the depths. From every beaker she put to her lips to drink shone forth her image as if from beyond the tomb. On Sunday she climbed up the Vestner Tower, and let her eyes roam over the plains below as if in the grief of departure. She leaned forward out of the little window with a feeling of assuaging horror. The keeper, seeing what she was doing, rushed up, seized her arms, and made her get back.

If the cock crew, it was the crow of death; if the clock ticked, it was the tick of death; if the wind blew, it was a breath from beyond the grave. “You must take your life”—with this thought the air, the earth, the house, the church, the morning, the evening, and her dreams were full.

In April Eleanore was taken down with fever. Gertrude watched by her bedside night and day; she sacrificed herself. Daniel, worried about Eleanore, went around in a dazed condition. When he came to her bed he never noticed Gertrude. After Eleanore had begun to recover, Gertrude lay down; for she was very tired. But she could not sleep; she got up again.

She went into the kitchen in her bare feet, though she did not know why she went. It was the consuming restlessness of her heart that drove her from her bed. Her legs were heavy with exhaustion, but she did not like to stay in any one place for any length of time. Later Daniel came back from the city, and brought her a silver buckle which he fastened to her bracelet. Then he pressed his lips to her forehead, and said: “I thank you for having been so good to Eleanore.”

Gertrude stood as if rooted to the floor. Something seemed to cry incessantly within her; she felt that a mortally wounded beast was in her bosom wallowing in its blood. Long after Daniel had gone to his room she could still be seen standing in the middle of the floor. Wrapped in gloomy meditation, she removed the buckle from her bracelet: she thought she saw an ugly mark where the metal had touched her skin. She went into her room, opened the cabinet, and hid the buckle under a pile of linen.

She had only one wish: she wanted to sleep. But as soon as she would close her eyes her heart would begin to beat with doubled, trebled rapidity. She had to get up and walk back and forth in the room; she was struggling for breath.

XVIII

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.

XIX

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 the steps, 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.

ELEANORE

I

It was 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.