Part 38

Whatever any of the visitors said went in one of Daniel’s ears and out of the other. It would often happen that there would be a number of people in his presence, and he would seem to be listening to them; and yet if you watched his face, you could see that he was completely absent-minded. If some one turned to him with a question, he would not infrequently smile like a child, and make no effort whatsoever to respond. No one had ever noticed him smile this way before.

He returned the money Philippina had loaned him at the time the piano was pawned. Philippina said: “Oi, oi, Daniel, you seem to be swimming in money!” She brought him the receipt, and then took the money to her room, where she did a lot of figuring to see whether the interest had been accurately calculated.

Little Agnes was sitting on the floor, sucking a stick of candy. She was always happy when Philippina was around; she was afraid of her father.

Friends had told him that his apartment was too large now; he was advised to give it up and take a smaller one. He became enraged; he said he would never do this voluntarily, for the house meant a great deal more to him than merely so many rented rooms; and he insisted that everything be left just as it was.

One day at the beginning of spring he said to Philippina: “I am going away for a long time. Watch the child, and don’t let the old man upstairs suffer for anything. I will send you the money to keep up the house on the first day of each month, and you will be held responsible for everything that takes place. Moreover; I want to pay you a set wage: I will give you five talers a month. There is no reason why you should work for me for nothing.”

The shaking and shuddering that Daniel had often had occasion to notice in Philippina returned. She shrugged her shoulders, looked as mean as only she could, and said: “Save your coppers; you’ll need ’em; you mustn’t try to act so rich all of a sudden; it ain’t good for your health. If you have any money to spend, go out and git Agnes a pair of shoes and a decent dress.” Daniel made no reply.

Her greediness in money matters had certainly not diminished since the day she began to pilfer from her parents. She loved money; she adored the shining metal; she liked to see it and feel it; she liked to take bank notes in her hands and caress them. It gave her intense pleasure to think that people looked upon her as being poor when she was actually carrying more than a thousand marks around in an old stocking stuffed down in her corset between her breasts. She loved to hear people complain of hard times. When a beggar reached out his hand to her on the street, she felt that he was doing it as an act of homage to her; she would cause her bosom to heave so that she might feel the presence of the stocking more keenly. She was pleased to think that one so young had made herself so secure against future eventualities of any kind.

She felt, despite all this, like scratching Daniel’s eyes out when he spoke of paying her regular monthly wages. This she regarded as base ingratitude. If it were at all possible for grief to find ineradicable lodgment in her envious, unenlightened, malicious soul, Daniel’s offer of so much per month made it so.

She ran into the kitchen, and hurled knives and forks in the sink. She went to old Jordan’s room, knocked on his door, and made him open it; then she told him with all the anger at her resourceful command that Daniel was going away. “There is hardly a cent in the house, and he’s going on a jamboree!” she exclaimed. “There is some damned wench back of this. Go tell him, Herr Inspector, go tell him what a dirty thing it is he’s doing—going away and leaving his child and his old father in the lurch. Do it, Herr Inspector, and you’ll get potato dumplings, ginger-bread, and sauce for dinner next Sunday.”

Jordan looked at Philippina timidly. His mouth watered for the food she had promised him; for she was holding him down to a near-starvation diet. He was often so hungry that he would sneak into the delicatessen shop, and buy himself ten pfennigs’ worth of real food.

“I will make inquiry as to the reason for his going,” murmured Jordan, “but I hardly believe that I will be able to move him one way or the other.”

“Well, you go out and take a little walk; git a bit of fresh air,” commanded Philippina; “I’ve got to straighten up your room. Your windows need washing; you can’t see through ’em for dirt.”

Late that evening Daniel came up to say good-bye to Jordan.

“Where are you going?” asked the old man.

“I want to see a little of the German Empire,” replied Daniel. “I have some business to attend to up in the North, in the cities and also out in the country.”

“Good luck to you,” said Jordan, much oppressed, “good luck to you, my dear son. How long are you going to be gone?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet; possibly for years.”

“For years?” asked Jordan. He looked at the floor; he tried to keep his eyes on the floor under his feet: “Then I suppose we might as well say good-bye forever.”

Daniel shook his head. “It makes no difference when I return, I will find you here,” he said with a note of strange assurance in his voice. “When fate has treated a man too harshly, there seems to come a time when it no longer bothers him; it evades him, in fact. It seems to me that this is the case with you: you are quite fateless.”

Jordan made no reply. He opened his eyes as if in fear, and sighed.

The next morning Daniel left home. He wore a brown hunting jacket buttoned close up to his neck with hartshorn buttons. Over this hung a top-coat and a cape. His broad-brimmed hat overshadowed his face, which looked young, although so serious and distracted that voices, glances, and sounds of any kind seemed to rebound from it like swift-running water from a smooth stone wall.

Philippina carried his luggage to the station. Her dress was literally smothered in garish, gaudy ribbons. The women in the market-place laughed on seeing her until they got a colic.

When Daniel took leave from her and boarded the train, she did not open her mouth; she wrinkled her forehead, rubbed the ends of her fingers against each other, stood perfectly quiet, and looked at the ground. Long after the train had left the station, she was still to be seen standing there in that unique position. A station official went up to her, and, with poorly concealed ridicule at the rare phenomenon, asked her what she was waiting for.

She turned her back on him, and started off. She came back by way of St. James’s Place, and talked for a quarter of an hour with her friend Frau Hadebusch. It was Sunday. Benjamin Dorn was just coming home from church. Seeing Philippina, he made a profound bow.

Frau Hadebusch slapped Philippina on the hip, and smiled at her knowingly.

Herr Francke was no longer living at Frau Hadebusch’s: he was in jail. He had promised to marry the cook of a certain distinguished family; but instead of hastening the coming of the happy day, he had gambled away the savings of his bride-to-be.

II

Daniel had a letter of introduction to the Prior of the Monastery at Löhriedt. He was looking for a manuscript that was supposed to have been written by a contemporary of Orlando di Lasso, if not by Di Lasso himself.

He remained for over two months, working at his collection. He found his association with the monks quite agreeable, and they liked him. One of them, who held him in especially high regard because of his ability as an organist, gave him to understand that it was a matter of unaffected regret to him that he could not greet him, Protestant that he was, with the confidence that a man of his singular distinction deserved.

“So! I wish I were a Jew,” said Daniel to him, “then you would have a really unqualified opportunity to see what God can do without your assistance.”

The monk in question was called Father Leonhard; he was a short, wiry fellow with black eyes and a dark complexion. He seemed to have had a great deal of experience with the world, and to have no little cause for contrition and repentance: there was nothing conventional about his religious practices; they were, on the contrary, of almost redundant fervour and renunciation. Daniel was impressed by the man’s faith, though his soul shuddered when in his presence: he regarded him as an enemy, a Philistine, and preferred not to look at him at all.

He lived close by the monastery in the house of a railroad official. Father Leonhard came in to visit him once. Daniel was sitting by the window busily engaged in making some corrections. The Father looked about the room: his eyes fell on a round, wooden box lying on a chair; it looked like a cake box.

“The people at home have sent you something to nibble at,” remarked the Father, as Daniel got up.

Daniel riveted his eyes on the monk, took the box, hesitated for a while, and then opened it. In it, carefully packed in sawdust, was the mask of Zingarella. It was a part of Daniel’s meagre luggage; wherever he went it followed him.

Father Leonhard sprang back terrified. “What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means sin and purification,” said Daniel, holding the mask up in the light of the setting sun. “It means grief and redemption, despair and mercy, love and death, chaos and form.”

From that day on, Father Leonhard never said another word to Daniel Nothafft. And whenever the strange musician chanced to play the organ, the monk arose as quickly as possible, left the church, and sought out some place where the tones could not reach him.

III

That summer Daniel came to Aix-la-Chapelle and the region of Liége, Louvain, and Malines. From there he wandered on foot to Ghent and Bruges.

In places where he had to make investigations, he was obliged to depend upon the letters he received from his publisher to make himself understood. Condemned to silence, he lived very much alone; he was a stranger in a strange land.

He had no interest in sights. It was rare that he looked at old paintings. The beautiful never caused him to stop unless it actually blocked his way. He went about as if in between two walls. He followed his nose, turned around only with the greatest reluctance, and never felt tired until he was ready to lie down to sleep.

And even when he was tired the feeling that he was being robbed of something gnawed at his soul; he was restless even when he slept. Haste coloured his eye, fashioned his step, and moulded his deeds. He ate his meals in haste, wrote his letters in haste, and talked in haste.

It pained him to feel that men were looking at him. Although he invariably sought out the most deserted corner of whatever inn he chanced to stop at, and thereby avoided becoming, so far as he might, the target of the curious, he was nevertheless gaped at, watched, and studied wherever he went. For everything about him was conspicuous: the energy of his gestures, the agility of his mimicry, the way he showed his teeth, and the nervous, hacking step with which he moved through groups of gossiping people.

He had anticipated with rare pleasure the sight of the sea. He was prepared to behold the monstrous, titanic, seething, and surging element, the tempest of the Apocalypse. He was disappointed by the peaceful rise and fall of the tide, the harmless rolling back and forth of the waves. He concluded that it were better for one not to become acquainted with things that had inspired one’s fancy with reverential awe.

He could quarrel with nature just as he could quarrel with men. The phases of nature which he regarded as her imperfections excited his anger. He was fond, however, of a certain spot in the forest; or he liked a tree in the plain, or sunset along the canal.

He liked best of all the narrow streets of the cities, when the gentle murmurings of song wafted forth from the open windows, or when the light from the lamp shone forth from the windows after they had been closed. He loved to pass by courts and cellars, gates and fences; when the face of an old man, or that of a young girl, came suddenly to view, when workmen went home from the factories, or soldiers from the barracks, or seamen from the harbours, he saw a story in each of them; he felt as one feels on reading an exciting book.

One day when he was in Cleve he walked the streets at night all alone. He noticed a man and a woman and five children, all poorly dressed, standing near a church. Lying before them on the pavement were several bundles containing their earthly possessions. A man came up after a while and addressed them in a stern, domineering tone; they picked up their bundles and followed him: it was a mournful procession. They were emigrants; the man had told them about their ship.

Daniel felt as if a cord in his soul had been made taut and were vibrating without making a sound. The steps of the eight people, as they died away in the distance, developed gradually into a rhythmical, musical movement. What had been confused became ordered; what had been dark shone forth in light. Weighed down with heaviness of soul, he went on, his eyes fixed on the ground as if he were looking for something. He no longer saw, nor could he hear. Nor did he know what time it was.

After a year and a half of congealed torpidity, the March wind once more began to blow in his soul.

But it was like a disease; he was being consumed with impatience. His immediate goal was the cloister of Œsede at Osnabrück, and from there he wanted to go to Berlin. He could not bear to sit in the railway carriages: in Wesel he placed his trunk on a freight train, and went from there on foot, his top-coat hung over his arm, his knapsack strapped across his back. Despite the inclement weather he walked from eight to ten hours every day. It was towards the end of October, the mornings and evenings were chilly, the roads were muddy, the inns were wretched. This did not deter him from going on: he walked and walked, sought and sought, often until late at night, passionately absorbed in himself.

When he came to the coal and iron district, he raised his head more and more frequently. The houses were black, the earth and the air were black, blackened men met him on the road. Copper wires hummed in the fog and mist, hammers clinked, wheels hummed, chimneys smoked, whistles blew—it was like a dream vision, like the landscape of an unknown and accursed star.

One evening he left a little inn which he had entered to get something to eat and drink. It was eight miles to Dortmund, where he planned to stay over night. He had left the main road, when all of a sudden the fire from the blast-furnaces leaped up, giving the mist the appearance of a blood-red sea. Miners were coming in to the village; in the light of the furnaces their tired, blackened faces looked like so many demoniac caricatures. Far or near, it was impossible to say, a horse could be seen drawing a car over shining rails. On it stood a man flourishing his whip. Beast, man, and car all seemed to be of colossal size; the “gee” and “haw” of the driver sounded like the mad cries of a spectre; the iron sounds from the forges resembled the bellowing of tormented creatures.

Daniel had found what he had been looking for: he had found the mournful melody that had driven him away the day Eleanore died. He had, to be sure, put it on the paper then and there, but it had remained without consequence: it had been buried in the grave with Eleanore.

Now it had arisen, and its soul—its consequence—had arisen with it; it was expanded into a wonderful arch, arranged and limbed like a body, and filled as the world is full.

Music had been born to him again from the machine, from the world of machinery.

IV

Jason Philip Schimmelweis had been obliged to give up his house by the museum bridge. He could not pay the rent; his business was ruined. By a mere coincident it came about that the house on the Corn Market had a cheap apartment that was vacant, and he took it. It was the same house in which he lived when he made so much money twenty years ago.

Was Jason Philip no longer in touch with modern business methods? Had he become too old and infirm to make the public hungry for literary nourishment? Were his advertisements without allurement, his baits without scent? No one felt inclined to buy expensive lexicons and editions de luxe on the instalment plan. The rich old fellows with a nose for dubious reading matter never came around any more. Jason Philip had become a dilatory debtor; the publishers no longer gave him books on approval; he was placed on the black list.

He took to abusing modern writers, contending that it was no wonder that the writing of books was left exclusively to good-for-nothing subjects of the Empire, for the whole nation was suffering from cerebral atrophy.

But his reasoning was of no avail; his business collapse was imminent; in a jiffy it was a hard reality. A man by the name of Rindskopf bought his stock and furnishings at brokers’ prices, and the firm of Jason Philip Schimmelweis had ceased to exist.

In his distress Jason Philip appealed to the Liberal party. He boasted of his friendship with the former leader of the party, Baron von Auffenberg, but this only made matters worse: one renegade was depending upon the support of another. This was natural: birds of a feather flock together.

Then he went to the Masons, and began to feel around for their help; he tried to be made a member of one of the better lodges. He was given to understand that there was some doubt as to the loyalty of his convictions, with the result that the Masons would have none of him.

For some time he found actual difficulty in earning his daily bread. He had resigned his position with the Prudentia Insurance Company long ago. Ever since a certain interpellation in the Reichstag and a long lawsuit in which the Prudentia became involved, and which was decided in favour of its opponents, the standing of the company had suffered irreparably.

Jason Philip had no other choice: he had to go back to bookbinding; he had to return to pasting, cutting, and folding. He returned in the evening of his life, downcast, impoverished, and embittered, to the position from which he had started as an ambitious, resourceful, stout-hearted, and self-assured man years ago. His eloquence had proved of no avail, his cunning had not helped him, nor his change of political conviction, nor his familiarity with the favourable turns of the market, nor his speculations. He had never believed that the order of things in the world about him was just and righteous, neither as a Socialist nor as a Liberal. And now he was convinced that it was impossible to write a motto on the basis of business principles that would be fit material for a copy book in a kindergarten.

Willibald was still the same efficient clerk. Markus had got a job in a furniture store, where he spent his leisure hours studying Volapük, convinced as he was that all the nations of the earth would soon be using this great fraternal tongue.

Theresa moved into the house on the Corn Market with as much peace and placidity as if she had been anticipating such a change for years. There was a bay window in the house, and by this she sat when her work in the kitchen was done, knitting socks for her sons. At times she would scratch her grey head with her knitting needle, at times she would reach over and take a sip of cold, unsugared coffee, a small pot of which she always kept by her side. Hers was the most depressed face then known to the human family; hers were the horniest, wrinkliest peasant hands that formed part of any citizen of the City of Nuremberg.

She thought without ceasing of all that nice money that had passed through her hands during the two decades she had stood behind the counter of the establishment in the Plobenhof Street.

She tried to imagine where all the money had gone, who was using it now, and who was being tormented by it. For she was rid of it, and in the bottom of her heart she was glad that she no longer had it.

One day Jason Philip came rushing from his workshop into her room. He had a newspaper in his hand; his face was radiant with joy. “At last, my dear, at last! I have been avenged. Jason Philip Schimmelweis was after all a good prophet. Well, what do you say?” he continued, as Theresa looked at him without any noticeable display of curiosity, “what do you say? I’ll bet you can’t guess. No, you will never be able to guess what’s happened; it’s too much for a woman’s brain.” He mounted a chair, held the paper in his hand as if it were the flag of his country, waved it, and shouted: “Bismarck is done for! He’s got to go. The Kaiser hates him! Now let come what may, I have not lived in vain.”

Jason Philip had the feeling that it was due to his efforts that the reins of government had been snatched from the hands of the Iron Chancellor. His satisfaction found expression in blatancy and in actions that were thoroughly at odds with a man of his age. He held up his acquaintances on the street, and demanded that they offer him their congratulations. He went to his favourite café, and ordered a barrel of beer for the rejuvenation of his friends. He delivered an oration, spiced with all the forms of sarcasm known to the art of cheap politics and embellished with innumerable popular phrases, explaining why he regarded this as the happiest day of his eventful life.

He said: “If fate were to do me the favour of allowing me to stand face to face with this menace to public institutions, this unscrupulous tyrant, I would not, believe me, mince matters in the slightest: I would tell him things no mortal man has thus far dared say to him.”