Part 44

Dorothea lost her patience. She stepped up to the place on the wall where the mask of Zingarella had been hanging since his return home. “Daniel, I have been wanting for some time to ask you what that thing is. Why do you keep it there? What’s it for? It annoys me with its everlasting grin.”

Daniel woke up. “That is what you call a grin?” he asked, shaking his head; “Is it possible? That smile from the world beyond appeals to you as a grin?”

“Yes,” replied Dorothea defiantly, “the thing is grinning. And I don’t like it; I can’t stand that silly face; I don’t like it simply because you do like it so much. In fact, you seem to like it better than you do me.”

“No childishness, Dorothea!” said Daniel quietly. “You must get your mind on higher things; and you must respect my spirits.”

Dorothea became silent. She did not understand him. She looked at him with a touch of distrust. She thought the mask was a picture of one of his old sweethearts. She made a mouth.

“You said something about playing at the party, Dorothea,” continued Daniel. “Do you realise that I never heard you play? I will frankly confess to you that heretofore I have been afraid to hear you. I could tolerate only the excellent; or the promise of excellence. You may show both; and yet, what is the cause of my fear? You have not practised in a long while; not once since we have been living together. And yet you wish to play in public? That is strange, Dorothea. Be so good as to get your violin and play a piece for me, won’t you?”

Dorothea went into the next room, got her violin case, came out, took the violin, and began to rub the bow with rosin. As she was tuning the A string, she lifted her eyebrows and said: “Do you really want me to play?”

She bit her lips and played an _étude_ by Fiorillo. Having finished it but not having drawn a word of comment from Daniel, she again took up the violin and played a rather lamentable selection by Wieniawski.

Daniel maintained his silence for a long while. “Pretty good, Dorothea,” he said at last. “You have, other things being equal, a very pleasant pastime there.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dorothea with noticeable rapidity, a heavy blush colouring her cheeks.

“Is it anything more than that, Dorothea?”

“What do you mean?” she repeated, embarrassed and indignant. “I should think that my violin is more than a pastime.”

Daniel got up, walked over to her, took the bow gently from her hands, seized it by both ends, and broke it in two.

Dorothea screamed, and looked at him in hopeless consternation.

With great earnestness Daniel replied: “If the music I hear is not of unique superiority, it sounds in my ears like something that has been hashed over a thousand times. My wife must consider herself quite above a reasonably melodious dilettantism.”

Tears rushed to Dorothea’s eyes. Again she was unable to grasp the meaning of it all. She even imagined that Daniel was making a conscious effort to be cruel to her.

For her violin playing had been a means of pleasing—pleasing herself, the world. It had been a means of rising in the world, of compelling admiration in others and blinding others. This was the only consideration that made her submit to the stern discipline her father imposed upon her. She possessed ambition, but she sold herself to praise without regard for the praiser. And whatever an agreement of unknown origin demanded in the way of feeling, she fancied she could satisfy it by keeping her mind on her own wishes, pleasures, and delights while playing.

Daniel put his arms around her and kissed her. She broke away from him in petulance, and went over to the window. “You might have told me that I do not play well enough for you,” she exclaimed angrily and sobbed; “there was no need for you to break my bow. I never play. It never occurred to me to bother you by playing.” She wept like a spoiled child.

It cost Daniel a good deal of persuasion to pacify her. Finally he saw that there was no use to talk to her; he sighed and said nothing more. After a while he took her pocket handkerchief, and dried the tears from her eyes, laughing as he did so. “What was really in my mind was that party at Frau Feistelmann’s. I did not want you to go. For I do not put much faith in that kind of entertainment. They do not enrich you, though they do incite all kinds of desires. But because I have treated you harshly, you may go. Possibly it will make you forget your troubles, you little fool.”

“Oh, I thank you for your offer; but I don’t want to go,” replied Dorothea snappishly, and left the room.

IV

Yet Dorothea said the next day at the dinner table that she was going to accept the invitation. It would be much easier just to go and have it over with, she remarked, than to stay away and explain her absence. She said this in a way that would lead you to believe that it had cost her much effort to come to her decision.

“Certainly, go!” said Daniel. “I have already advised you to do it myself.”

She had had a dark blue velvet dress made, and she wanted to wear it for the first time on this occasion.

Toward five o’clock Daniel went to his bedroom. He saw Dorothea standing before the mirror in her new dress. It was a tall, narrow mirror on a console. Dorothea had received it from her father as a wedding present.

“What is the matter with her?” thought Daniel, on noticing her complete lack of excitement. She was as if lost in the reflection of herself in the mirror. There was something rigid, drawn, transported about her eyes. She did not see that Daniel was standing in the room. When she raised her arm and turned her head, it was to enjoy these gestures in the mirror.

“Dorothea!” said Daniel gently.

She started, looked at him thoughtfully, and smiled a heady smile.

Daniel was anxious, apprehensive.

V

“I am related to Daniel, and we must address each other by the familiar _Du_,” said Philippina to Dorothea. Daniel’s wife agreed.

Every morning when Dorothea came into the kitchen Philippina would say: “Well, what did you dream?”

“I dreamt I was at the station and it was wartime, and some gipsies came along and carried me off,” said Dorothea on one occasion.

“Station means an unexpected visit; war means discord with various personalities; and gipsies mean that you are going to have to do with some flippant people.” All this Philippina rattled off in the High German of her secret code.

Philippina was also an adept in geomancy. Dorothea would often sit by her side, and ask her whether this fellow or that fellow were in love with her, whether this girl loved that fellow and the other girl another, and so on through the whole table of local infatuations. Philippina would make a number of dots on a sheet of paper, fill in the numbers, hold the list up to the light, and divulge the answer of the oracle.

In a very short while the two were one heart, one soul. Dorothea could always count on Philippina’s laughter of approval when she fell into one of her moods of excessive friskiness. And if Agnes failed to show the proper amount of interest, Philippina would poke her in the ribs and exclaim: “You little rascallion, has the cat got your tongue?”

Agnes would then sneak off in mournful silence to her school books, and sit for hours over the simplest kind of a problem in the whole arithmetic. Dorothea would occasionally bring her a piece of taffy. She would wrap it up, put it in her pocket, and give it the next day to a schoolmate from whose note book she had copied her sums in subtraction.

Herr Seelenfromm stopped Philippina on the street, and said to her: “Well, how are you getting along? How is the young wife making out?”

“Oi, oi, we’re living on the fat of the land, I say,” Philippina replied, stretching her mouth from ear to ear. “Chicken every day, cake too, wine always on hand, and one guest merely opens the door on another.”

“Nothafft must have made a pile of money,” remarked Herr Seelenfromm in amazement.

“Yes, he must. Nobody works at our house. The wife’s pocket-book at least is always crammed.”

The sky was blue, the sun was bright, spring had come.

VI

Andreas Döderlein always took Sunday dinner with his children. He loved a juicy leg of pork, a salad garnished with greens and eggs, and a tart drowned in sugar. Old Jordan, who was privileged to sit at the table, let the individual morsels dissolve on his tongue. He had never had such delicacies placed before him in his life. At times he would cast a glance of utter astonishment at Daniel.

He very rarely took part in the conversation. As soon as the dishes had been removed, he would get up and quietly go to his room.

“A very remarkable old man,” said Andreas Döderlein one Sunday, as he sat tipped back on his chair, picking his teeth.

“Ah, we have our troubles with him,” said Dorothea abusively, “he is an incorrigible pot-watcher. He comes to the kitchen ten times a day, sticks his nose up in the air, asks what we are going to have for dinner, and then goes out and stands in the hall, with the result that our guests come and stumble over him.”

Andreas Döderlein emitted a growl of lament.

“How are your finances, my son?” he asked, turning to Daniel with an air of marked affability. “Would you not like to bolster up your income by taking a position in the conservatory? You would have time for it; your work as organist at St. Ægydius does not take up all your time. Herold is going to be retired, you know. He is seventy-five and no longer able to meet the requirements. All that we will have to do will be for me to give you my backing. Three thousand marks a year, allocation to your widow after ten years of service, extra fees—I should think you would regard that as a most enticing offer. Or don’t you?”

Dorothea ran up to her father in a spirit of unrestrained jubilation, threw her arms around his bulky body, and kissed him on his flabby cheek.

“No thanks to me, my child,” said the Olympian; “to stand by you two is of course my duty.”

“What sort of a swollen stranger is that, anyhow?” thought Daniel to himself. “What does he want of me? Why does he come into my house and sit down at my table? Why is he so familiar with me? Why does he blow his breath on me?” Daniel was silent.

“I understand, my dear son, that you would abandon your leisure hours only with the greatest reluctance,” continued Döderlein with concealed sarcasm, “but after all, who can live precisely as he would like to live? Who can follow his own inclinations entirely? The everyday feature of human existence is powerful. Icarus must fall to the earth. With your wife anticipating a happy event, you cannot, of course, hesitate in the face of such an offer.”

Daniel cast an angry look at Dorothea.

“I will think it over,” said Daniel, got up, and left the room.

“It is unpleasant for him,” complained Dorothea; “he values his leisure above everything else in the world. But I will do all in my power to bring him around, Father. And you keep at him. He will resist and object. I know him.”

Thus it was brought to light that Daniel was no longer a mysterious and unfathomable individual in her estimation. She had found him out; she had divined him, in her way to be sure. He was much simpler than she had imagined, and at times she was really a bit angry at him for not arousing her curiosity more than he did. What she had fancied as highly interesting, thrilling, intoxicating, had proved to be quite simple and ordinary. The charm was gone, never to return. Her sole diversion lay in her attempts to get complete control over him through the skilful manipulation of her senses and her priceless youth.

Daniel felt that she was disappointed; he had been afraid of this all along. His anxiety increased with time, for it was evident that everything he said or did disappointed her. His anxiety caused him to be indulgent, where he had formerly been unbending. The difference in their ages made him patient and tractable. He feared he could not show her the love that she in her freshness and natural, unconsumed robustness desired. On this account he denied himself many things which he formerly could not have got along without, and put up with, many things that would have been intolerable to him as a younger man.

It needed only a single hour at night to make him promise to accept the position old Herold was leaving. He, as parsimonious with words as in the expression of feelings, succumbed to her cat-like cuddling. He capitulated in the face of her unpitying ridicule, and surrendered all to the prurient agility of a young body. Dark powers there are that set up dependencies between man and woman. When they rule, things do not work out in accordance with set calculation or inborn character. It takes but a single hour of the night to bend the most sacred truth of life into a lie.

VII

In the course of time Daniel had to provide for an increase in his annual salary. Dorothea had made a great many innovations that cost money. She had bought a dressing table, a number of cabinets, and a bath tub. The lamps, dishes, bed covers, and curtains she found old-fashioned, and simply went out and bought new ones.

Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to go shopping. Then the bills came in, and Daniel shook his head. He begged her to be more saving, but she would fall on his neck, and beseech and beseech until he acceded to every single one of her wishes.

She rarely came home with empty hands. It may have been only little things that she bought, a manikin of porcelain with a tile hat and an umbrella, or a pagoda with a wag-head, or even merely a mouse-trap—but they all cost money.

Philippina would be called in; Philippina was to admire the purchases. And she would say with apparent delight: “Now ain’t that sweet!” Or, “Now that’s fine; we needed a mouse-trap so bad! There was a mouse on the clothes rack just yesterday, cross my heart, Daniel.”

As to hats, dresses, stockings, shoes, laces, and blouses—when it came to these Dorothea was a stranger to such concepts as measure or modesty. She wanted to compete with the wives of the rich people whose parties she attended, and next to whom she sat in the pastry shop or at the theatre.

She was given free tickets to the theatre and the concerts. But once when she had told Daniel that the director had sent her a ticket, he learned from Philippina that she had bought the ticket and paid for it with her own money. He did not call her to account, but he could not get the thought out of his mind that she had believed she had deceived him.

He did not accompany her on her pleasure jaunts; he wanted to work and not double even the smallest expenditure by going with her. Dorothea had become accustomed to this. She looked upon his apathy toward the theatre and his dislike of social distractions as a caprice, a crotchet on his part. She never considered what he had gone through in the way of theatricals and concerts; she had completely forgotten what he had confessed to her in a decisive hour.

When she came home late in the evening with burning cheeks and glowing eyes, Daniel did not have the courage to give her the advice he felt she so sorely needed. “Why snatch her from her heaven?” he thought. “She will become demure and quiet in time; her wild lust for pleasure will fade and disappear.”

He was afraid of her pouting mien, her tears, her perplexed looks, her defiant running about. But he lacked the words to express himself. He knew how ineffectual warning and reproach might be and were. Empty talking back and forth he could not stand, while if he made a really human remark it found no response. She did not appreciate what he said; she misunderstood, misinterpreted everything. She laughed, shrugged her shoulders, pouted, called him an old grouch, or cooed like a dove. She did not look at him with real eyes; there was no flow of soul in what she did.

Gloom filled his heart.

The waste in the household affairs became worse and worse from week to week. Daniel would have felt like a corner grocer if he had never let her know how much he had saved, or had given her less than she asked for. And so his money was soon all gone. Dorothea troubled herself very little about the economic side of their married life. She told Philippina what to do, and fell into a rage if her orders were not promptly obeyed.

“It’s too dull for her here. My God, such a young woman!” said Philippina to Daniel with simulated regret. “She wants to have a good time; she wants to enjoy her life. And you can’t blame her.”

Philippina was the mistress of the house. She went to the market, paid the bills, superintended the cook and the washwoman, and rejoiced with exceeding great and fiendish joy when she saw how rapidly everything was going downhill, downhill irresistibly and as sure as your life.

VIII

As the time approached for Dorothea’s confinement she very rarely left the house. She would lie in bed until about eleven o’clock, when she would get up, dress, comb her hair, go through her wardrobe, and write letters.

She carried on a most elaborate correspondence; those who received her letters praised her amusing style.

After luncheon she would go back to bed; and late in the afternoon her visitors came in, not merely women but all sorts of young men. It often happened that Daniel did not even know the names of the people. He would withdraw to the room Eleanore had formerly occupied, and from which he could hear laughter and loud talk resounding through the hall.

By evening Dorothea was tired. She would sit in the rocking chair and read the newspaper, or the _Wiener Mode_, generally not in the best of humour.

Daniel confidently believed that all this would change for the better as soon as the child had been born; he believed that the feeling of a mother and the duties of a mother would have a broadening and subduing effect on her.

Late in the autumn Dorothea gave birth to a boy, who was baptised Gottfried. She could not do enough by way of showing her affection for the child; her transports were expressed in the most childish terms; her display of tenderness was almost excessive.

For six days she nursed the child herself. Then the novelty wore off, friends told her it would ruin her shape to keep it up, and she quit. “It makes you stout,” she said to Philippina, “and cow’s milk is just as good, if not better.”

Philippina opened her mouth and eyes as wide as she could when she saw Dorothea standing before the mirror, stripped to the hips, studying the symmetry of her body with a seriousness that no one had ever noticed in her before.

Dorothea became coldly indifferent toward her child; it seemed that she had entirely forgotten that she was a mother. The baby slept in the room with Philippina and Agnes, both of whom cared for it. Its mother was otherwise engaged.

As if to make up for lost time and to indemnify herself for the suffering and general inconvenience to which she had been put in the last few months, Dorothea rushed with mad greediness into new pleasures and strange diversions. Soon however she found herself embarrassed from a lack of funds. Daniel told her, kindly but firmly, that the salaries he was drawing as organist and teacher were just barely enough to keep the house going, and that he was curtailing his own personal needs as much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. “We are not peasants,” he said, “and that we are not living from the mercy of chance is a flaw in me rather than in my favour.”

“You old pinch-penny!” said Dorothea. Ugly wrinkles appeared on her brow. “If you had not made me disgusted with my art, I might have been able to make a little money too,” she added.

He looked down at the floor in complete silence. She however began thinking about ways and means of getting her hands on money. “Uncle Carovius might help me,” she thought. She took to visiting her father more frequently, and every time she came she would stand out in the hall for a while hoping to see Herr Carovius. One day he appeared. She wanted to speak to him, smile at him, win him over. But one look from that face, filled with petrified and ineradicable rage, showed her that any attempt to approach the old man and get him in a friendly frame of mind would be fruitless.

On the way home she chanced to meet the actor Edmund Hahn. She had not seen him since she had been married. The actor seemed tremendously pleased to see her. They walked along together, engaged in a zealous conversation, talking at first loudly and then gently.

IX

The day Dorothea got married, Herr Carovius had gone to his lawyer to have the will he had drawn up the night before attested to. He had bequeathed his entire fortune, including his home and the furniture, to an institution to be erected after his death for the benefit of orphans of noble birth. Baron Eberhard von Auffenberg had been named as first director of the institution and sole executor of his will.

Herr Carovius refused to have anything more to do with music. He had a leather cover made for his long, narrow grand piano, and enshrouded in this, the instrument resembled a stuffed animal. He looked back on his passion for music as one of the aberrations of his youth, though he realised that he was chastising his spirit till it hurt when he took this attitude.

The method he employed to keep from having nothing to do was characteristic of the man: he went through all the books of his library looking for typographical errors. He spent hours every day at this work; he read the scientific treatises and the volumes of pure literature with his attention fixed on individual letters. When, after infinite search, he discovered a word that had been misspelled, or a grammatical slip, he felt like a fisherman who, after waiting long and patiently, finally sees a fish dangling on the hook.