Part 31

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 of his 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 rife All creatures of the world. By water all our eyes are purled; It washes clean man’s very soul And 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.

VI

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 that she 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 weakness and 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.

VII

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 walked down 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.

VIII

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 of his 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.