Part 42

He was in error concerning the hot desire that burned in her eyes to know about Eschenbach. Her question made him feel good; he believed that he was on the scent of warm-heartedness; he thought he had found a soul that was eager to help through knowledge. He was seized with the desire of the mature man to fashion an untouched soul in harmony with the picture of his dreams. “My mother used to live there,” he replied hesitatingly, “she has died.”

“Yes—and?” breathed Dorothea. She saw that that was not all.

He felt that this uncompromising reticence was not right; he felt a sense of guilt. With still greater hesitation—and immediate repentance—he added: “A child of mine also lived there; she was eleven years old. She has disappeared; no one knows where she is.”

Dorothea folded her hands, “A child? And disappeared? Simply vanished?” she whispered excitedly.

Herr Carovius looked like a man sitting on a hot iron. “Eleven years old?” he asked, hungry for sensation, “why—that was, then—before the time ...”

“Yes, it was before the time,” said Daniel gloomily and by way of confirmation. He had betrayed himself, and was angry at himself for having done so. He became silent; it was impossible to get him to say another word.

Herr Carovius noticed how Dorothea hung on Daniel’s eyes. A tormenting suspicion arose in him. “Yesterday out on St. Joseph’s Place, I was talking with one of your admirers, the fellow who shatters the wings of the stage with his ranting,” he began with malice aforethought. “The blade had the nerve to say to me: ‘You’d better hurry up and get Dorothea Döderlein a husband, or people will talk their tongues loose in their throats.’”

“That is not true,” cried Dorothea indignantly, blushing to the roots of her hair. “He didn’t say that.”

Herr Carovius laughed malevolently. “Well, if it is not true, it is pretty well put together,” he said with his usual bleat.

When Daniel left, Dorothea accompanied him to the outside door.

“It’s a pity,” murmured Daniel, “a pity!”

“Why a pity? I am free. There isn’t a soul in the world who has any claim on me.” She looked at him with the courage of a real woman.

“There are remarks that are just like grease spots,” he replied.

“Well, who can keep from the dirt these days?” she asked, almost wild with excitement.

Daniel let his eyes rest on her as though she were some material object. He said slowly and seriously: “Keep your hands and your eyes off of me, Dorothea. I will bring you no happiness.”

Her lips opened, thirsty. “I should like to take a walk with you some time,” she whispered, and her features trembled with an ecstasy which he was dupe enough to believe was meant for him; in reality Dorothea was thinking of the adventurer and the disclosure of the secret.

“Many years ago,” said Daniel, “you will scarcely recall it, I protected you here in this very same gateway from a big dog. Do you remember?”

“No! Or do I? Wait a minute! Yes, I remember, that is, quite indistinctly. You did that?” Dorothea seized his hands with gratitude.

“Fine! Then we will go walking to-morrow morning. Where? Oh, it doesn’t make much difference,” said Daniel.

“But you must tell me everything, you hear? everything.” Dorothea was as insistent as she had been in the room a short while ago; and she was more impetuous and impatient.

They agreed upon the place where they would meet.

XIV

At first they took short walks in remote parts of the city; then they took longer ones. On Mid-Summer Day they strolled out to Kraftshof and the grove of the Pegnitz shepherds. Daniel made unconscious effort to avoid the places where he had once walked with Eleanore.

There came moments when Dorothea’s exuberance made him pensive and sad; he felt the weight of his forty years; they were inclined to make him hypochondriacal. Was it the vengeance of fate that made him slow up when they came to a hill, while Dorothea ran on ahead and waited for him, laughing?

She did not see the flowers, the trees, the animals, or the clouds. But when she saw people a change came over her: she would become more

## active; or she would mobilise her resources; or she seemed to strike up

a spiritual liaison with them. It might be only a peasant boy on an errand or a vagabond going nowhere; she would shake her hips and laugh one note higher.

“Her youth has gone to her head, like wine,” Daniel thought to himself.

Once she took a box of chocolate bon-bons along. Having had enough of them herself and seeing that Daniel did not care for them, she threw what was left away. Daniel reproached her for her wastefulness. “Why drag it along?” she asked with perfect lack of embarrassment, “when you have enough of a thing you throw it away.” She showed her white teeth, and took in one deep breath of fresh air after another.

Daniel studied her. “She is invulnerable,” he said to himself; “her power to wish is invincible, her fulness of life complete.” He felt that she bore a certain resemblance to his Eva; that she was one of those elves of light in whose cheerfulness there is occasionally a touch of the terrible. He decided then and there not to let mischievous chance have its own way: he was going to put out his hand when he felt it was advisable.

“When are you going to begin to tell me the stories?” she asked: “I must, I must know all about you,” she added with much warmth of expression. “There are days and nights when I cannot rest. Tell me! Tell me!”

That was the truth. In order to penetrate his life history, which she pictured to herself as full of passionate, checkered events, she had done everything that he had demanded of her.

Daniel refused; he was silent; he was afraid he would darken the girl’s pure mind, jeopardise her unsuspecting innocence. He was afraid to conjure up the shadows.

One day she was talking along in her easy way, and while so doing she tripped herself up. She had begun to tell him about the men she had been going with; and before she knew what she was doing, she had fallen into the tone she used when she talked with her Uncle Carovius. Becoming suddenly aware of her indiscretion, she stopped, embarrassed. Daniel’s serious questions caused her to make some confessions she would otherwise never have thought of making. She told a goodly number of rather murky and ugly stories, and it was very hard for her to act as though she were innocent or the victim of circumstances. At last, unable longer to escape from the net she had woven, she made a clean breast of her whole life, painted it all in the gaudiest colours, and then waited in breathless—but agreeable—suspense to see what effect it would have on Daniel.

Daniel was silent for a while; then he made a motion with his outstretched hand as if he were cutting something in two: “Away from them, Dorothea, or away from me!”

Dorothea bowed her head, and then looked at him timidly from head to foot. The decisiveness with which he spoke was something new to her, though it was by no means offensive. A voluptuous shudder ran through her limbs. “Yes,” she whispered girlishly, “I am going to put an end to it. I never realised what it all meant. But don’t be angry, will you? No, you won’t, will you?”

She came closer to him; her eyes were filled with tears. “Don’t be angry at me,” she said again, “poor Dorothea can’t help it. She is not responsible for it.”

“But how did you come to do it?” asked Daniel. “I can’t see how it was possible. Weren’t you disgusted to the very bottom of your soul? How could you go about under God’s free heavens with such hyenas? Why, girl, the very thought of it fills me with scepticism about everything.”

“What should I have done, Daniel?” she said, calling him by his baptismal name for the first time. She spoke with a felicitous mixture of submissiveness and boldness that touched and at the same time enchanted him. “What should I have done? They come and talk to you, and spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven’t got anybody else in the world to talk to.” Such was her defence, effective even if more voluble than coherent.

They walked on. They were passing through a valley in the forest. On either side were tall pine trees, the crowns of which were lighted by the evening sun.

“You can’t play with Fate, Dorothea,” said Daniel. “It does not permit smudging or muddling, if we are to stand the test. It keeps a faultless ledger; the entries it makes on both sides are the embodiment of accuracy. Debts that we contract must always be paid, somehow, somewhere.”

Dorothea felt that he was getting started; that the great, good story was about to come. She stopped, spread her shawl on the ground, and took a graceful position on it, all eyes and ears. Daniel threw himself on the moss beside her.

And he told his story—into the moss where little insects were creeping around. He never raised either his eye or his voice. At times Dorothea had to bend over to hear him.

He told about Gertrude, her torpor, her awakening, her love, her resignation. He told about Eleanore; told how he had loved her without knowing it. He told how Eleanore, out of an excess of passion and suffering, became his, how Gertrude wandered about dazed, unhappy, lost, until she finally took her life: “Then we went up to the attic, and found it on fire and her lifeless body hanging from the rafter.”

He told how Gertrude had lived on as a shadow by the side of Eleanore, and how Eleanore became a flower girl, and how Philippina the inexplicable, and still inexplicable, had come into his family, and how Gertrude’s child lived there like an unfed foundling, and how the other child, the child he had had by the maid, had found such a warm spot in his heart.

He told of his meeting the two sisters, their speaking and their remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his experiences with the Dörmaul opera company, the light thrown on his drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him, his separation from him, the brush-maker’s house on St. James’s Place, the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle Erfft, the old father of the two sisters and his strange doings—all of this he described in the tone of a man awakening from a deep sleep. There was a confidence in what he said and the way he said it that mayhap terrified the hovering spirits of the evening, though it did not fill Dorothea’s eyes, then glistening like polished metal, with a more intimate or cordial light.

When he looked up he felt he saw two sombre figures standing on the edge of the forest; he felt he saw the two sisters, and that they were casting mournful, reproachful glances at him.

He got up. “And all that,” he concluded, “all that has been drunk up, like rain by the parched earth, by a work on which I have been labouring for the past seven years. For seven years. Two more years, and I will give it to the world, provided this unsteady globe has not fallen into the sun by that time.”

Dorothea had a confused, haphazard idea as to the type of man that was standing before her. She was seized with a prickling desire for him such as she had thus far never experienced. She began to love him, in her way. Something impelled her to seek shelter by him, near him, somewhat as a bird flies under the crown of a tree at the approach of a storm. Daniel interpreted the timidity with which she put her arm in his as a sign of gratitude.

And in this mood he took her back to the city.

XV

It was in this pulsing, urging, joyful mood that Daniel worked at and completed the fifth movement of his symphony, a _scherzo_ of grand proportions, beginning with a clarinet figure that symbolised laughing _sans-souci_. All the possibilities of joy developed from this simple motif. Nor was retrospection or consolation lacking. If the main themes, mindful of their former pre-eminence, seemed inclined to widen the bed of their stream, they were appeased and forced back into their original channel by artistic and capriciously alternating means. Once all three themes flowed along together, gaining strength apparently through their union, rose to a wonderful fugue, and seemed to be just on the point of gaining the victory when the whole orchestra, above the chord in D sevenths, was seized by the waltz melody, those melancholy sister-strains were taken up by the violins, and fled, dirge-like, to their unknown abodes. Just before the jubilant crescendo of the finale, a bassoon solo held one of them fast on its distant, grief-stricken heights.

Daniel sketched the sixth movement in the following fourteen nights.

He was fully aware of the fact that he had never been able to work this way before. When a man accomplishes the extraordinary, he knows it. It seizes him like a disease, and fills him like a profound dream.

At times he felt as though he must tell some one about it, even if it were only Herr Carovius. But once the flame had died down, he could not help but laugh at the temptation to which he had felt himself subjected. “Patience,” he thought, feeling more assured than ever, “patience, patience!”

Since his work on the manuscripts was completed and his connection with the firm of Philander and Sons dissolved, he began to look around for another position. He had saved in the course of the last few years four thousand marks, but he wished to keep this sum intact.

He learned that the position of organist at the Church of St. Ægydius was vacant; he went to the pastor, who recommended him to his superiors. It was decided that he should play something before the church consistory. This he did one morning in October. The trial proved eminently successful to his exacting auditors.

He was appointed organist at St. Ægydius’s at a salary of twelve hundred marks a year. When he played on Sundays and holidays, the people came into the church just to hear him.

XVI

Among the suitors for the hand of Dorothea on whom Andreas Döderlein looked with special favour was the mill owner, a man by the name of Weisskopf. Herr Weisskopf was passionately fond of music. He had greatly admired Dorothea when she gave her concert, and had sent her a laurel wreath.

One day Herr Weisskopf came in and took dinner with the Döderleins. When he left, Döderlein said to his daughter: “My dear Dorothea, from this day on you may consider yourself betrothed. This admirable man desires to have you as his lawfully wedded wife. It is a great good fortune; the man is as rich as Crœsus.”

Instead of making a reply, Dorothea laughed heartily. But she knew that the time had come when something had to be done. Her mobile face twitched with scorn, fear, and desire.

“Think it over; sleep on it. I have promised Herr Weisskopf to let him know to-morrow,” said Döderlein, black-browed.

A week before this, Andreas Döderlein, confidently expecting that Herr Weisskopf would ask for the hand of his daughter, had borrowed a thousand marks from him. The miller had loaned him the money believing that he was thereby securing a promissory note on Dorothea. Döderlein had placed himself under obligations, and was consequently determined to carry out his plans with regard to the marriage of his daughter.

But Dorothea’s behaviour made it safe to predict that objections would be raised on her part. Döderlein was in trouble; he sought distraction. Sixteen years ago he had begun an _opus_ entitled “All Souls: a Symphonic Picture.” Five pages of the score had been written, and since then he had never undertaken creative work. He rummaged around in his desk, found the score, went to the piano, and tried to take up the thread where he had lost it sixteen years ago. He tried to imagine the intervening time merely as a pause, an afternoon siesta.

It would not go. He sighed. He sat before the instrument, and stared at the paper like a schoolboy who has a problem to solve but has forgotten the rule. He seemed to lament the loss of his artistic ability. He felt so hollow. The notes grinned at him; they mocked him. His thoughts turned involuntarily to the miller. He improvised for a while. Dorothea stuck her head in the door and sang: “Rhinegold, Rhinegold, pu-re gold.”

He was enraged; he got up, slammed the lid of the piano, took his hat and top coat, left the house, and went out to see his friend in the suburbs.

When he returned that night, he saw Dorothea standing in the door with a man. It was the actor, Edmund Hahn. They were carrying on a heated conversation in whispers. The man was holding Dorothea by the arm, but when Döderlein became visible from the unlighted street, he uttered an ugly oath and quickly disappeared.

Dorothea looked her father straight, and impudently, in the face, and followed him into the dark house.

When they were upstairs and had lighted the lamp, Döderlein turned to her, and asked her threateningly: “What do you mean by these immodest associations? Tell me! I want an answer!”

“I don’t want to marry your flour sack. That’s my answer,” said Dorothea, with a defiant toss of her head.

“Well, we’ll see,” said Döderlein, pale with rage and ploughing through his hair with his fingers, “we’ll see. Get out of here! I have no desire to lose my well-earned sleep on account of such an ungrateful hussy. We’ll take up the subject again to-morrow morning.”

The next morning Dorothea hastened to Herr Carovius. “Uncle,” she stammered, “he wants to marry me to that flour sack.”

“Yes? Well, I suppose I’ll have to visit that second-rate musician in his studio again and give him a piece of my mind. In the meantime be calm, my child, be calm,” said he, stroking her brown hair, “Old Carovius is still alive.”

Dorothea nestled up to him, and smiled: “What would you say, Uncle,” she began with a knavish and at the same time unusually attentive expression in her face, “if I were to marry Daniel Nothafft? You like him,” she continued in a flattering tone, and held him fast by the shoulder when he started back, “you like him, I know you do. I must marry somebody; for I do not wish to be an old maid, and I can’t stand Father any longer.”

Herr Carovius tore himself loose from her. “To the insane asylum with you!” he cried. “I would rather see you go to bed with that meal sack. Is the Devil in you, you prostitute? If your skin itches, scratch it, so far as I am concerned, but take a stable boy to do it, as Empress Katherine of blessed memory did. Buy fine dresses, bedizen yourself with tom-foolery of all shades and colours, go to dances and lap up champagne, make music or throw your damn fiddle on the dung heap, do anything you want to do, I’ll pay for it; but that green-eyed phantast, that lunk-headed rat-catcher, that woman-eater and music-box bird, no, no! Never! Send him humping down the stairs and out the front door! For God’s sake and the sake of all the saints, don’t marry him! Don’t, I say. If you do, it’s all off between you and me.”

There was such a look of hate and fear in Herr Carovius’s face that Dorothea was almost frightened. His hair was as towsled as the twigs of an abandoned bird’s nest; water was dripping from the corners of his mouth; his eyes were inflamed; his glasses were on the tip of his nose.

Nothing could have made Dorothea more pleased with the story Daniel had told her than Herr Carovius’s ravings. Her eyes were opened wide, her mouth was thirsty. If she had hesitated at times before, she did so no more. She loved money; greed was a part of her make-up from the hour she was born. But if Herr Carovius had laid the whole of his treasures at her feet, and said to her, “You may have them if you will renounce Daniel Nothafft,” she would have replied, “Your money, my Daniel.”

Something terribly strange and strong drew her to the man she had just heard so volubly cursed. That sensual prickling was of a more dangerous violence and warmth in his presence than in that of any other man she had ever known; and she had known a number. To her he was a riddle and a mystery; she wanted to solve the one and clear up the other. He had possessed so many women, indubitably more than he had confessed to her; and she wished now to possess him. He was so quiet, so clever, so resolute: she wanted his quietness, his cleverness, his resoluteness. She wanted everything he had, his charm, his magic, his power over men, all that he displayed and all that he concealed.

She thought of him constantly; she thought in truth of no one else, and nothing else. Her thoughts fluttered about his picture, shyly, greedily, and as playfully as a kitten. He had managed to bring will power and unity into her senses. She wanted to have him.

The rain beat against the window. Terrified at Dorothea’s thoughtfulness, Herr Carovius pressed his hands to his cheeks. “I see, I see, you want to leave me all alone,” he said in a tone that sounded like the howling of a dog in the middle of the night. “You want to deceive me, to surrender me to the enemy, to leave me nothing, nothing but the privilege of sitting here and staring at my four walls. I see, I see.”

“Be still, Uncle, nothing is going to happen. It is all a huge joke,” said Dorothea with feigned good humour and kind intentions. She walked to the door slowly, looking back every now and then with a smile on her face.

XVII

It was early in the morning when Dorothea rang Daniel’s bell. Philippina opened the door, but she did not wish to let Dorothea in. She forced an entrance, however, and, standing in the door, she inspected Philippina with the eye of arrogance, always a clear-sighted organ.

“Look out, Philippin’, there’s something rotten here,” murmured Philippina to herself.

Daniel was at work. He got up and looked at Dorothea, who carefully closed the door.

“Here I am, Daniel,” she said, and breathed a sigh of relief, like a swimmer who has just reached the land.

“What is it all about?” asked Daniel, seemingly ill inclined to become excited.

“I have done what you wanted me to do, Daniel: I have broken away from them. I cannot tolerate Father a minute longer. Where should I go if not to you?”