Part 45

Otherwise he was thoroughly unhappy. The beautiful evenness of his hair on the back of his neck had been transformed into a shaggy wilderness. He could be seen going along the street in a suit of clothes that was peppered with spots, while his Calabrian hat resembled a war tent that has gone through a number of major offensives.

He had again taken to frequenting the Paradise Café two or three times a week, not exactly to surrender himself to mournful memories, but because the coffee there cost twenty pfennigs, whereas the more modern cafés were charging twenty-five. His dinner consisted of a pot of coffee and a few rolls.

It came about that old Jordan likewise began to frequent the Paradise. For a long while the two men would go there, sit down at their chosen tables, and study each other at a distance. Finally the day came when they sat down together; then it became a custom for them to take their places at the same table, one back in the corner by the stove, where a quiet comradeship developed between them. It was rare that their conversation went beyond external platitudes.

Herr Carovius acted as though he were merely enduring old Jordan. But he never really became absorbed in his newspaper until the old man had come and sat down at the table with him, greeting him with marked respect as he did so. Jordan, however, did not conceal his delight when, on entering the café and casting his eyes around the room, they at last fell on Herr Carovius. While he sipped his coffee, he never took them off the wicked face of his _vis-à-vis_.

X

Philippina became Dorothea’s confidential friend.

At first it was nothing more than Dorothea’s desire to gossip that drew her to Philippina. Later she fell into the habit of telling her everything she knew. She felt no need of keeping any secret from Philippina, the inexplicable. The calm attentiveness with which Philippina listened to her flattered her, and left her without a vestige of suspicion. She felt that Philippina was too stupid and uncultivated to view her activities in perspective or pass judgment on them.

She liked to conjure up seductive pictures before the old maid’s imagination; for she loved to hear Philippina abuse the male of the species. If some bold plan were maturing in her mind, she would tell Philippina about it just as if it had already been executed. In this way she tested the possibility of really carrying out her designs, and procured for herself a foretaste of what was to follow.

It was chiefly Philippina’s utter ugliness that made her trust her. Such a homely creature was in her eyes not a woman, hardly a human being of either sex; and with her she felt she could talk just as much as she pleased, and say anything that came into her head. And since Philippina never spoke of Daniel in any but a derogatory and spiteful tone, Dorothea felt perfectly safe on that ground.

She would come into the kitchen, and sit down on a bench and talk: about a silk dress she had seen for sale; about the fine compliments Court Councillor Finkeldey had paid her; about the love affairs of these and the divorce proceedings of those; about Frau Feistelmann’s pearls, remarking that she would give ten years of her life if she also had such pearls. In fact, the word she used most frequently was “also.” She trembled and shook from head to foot with desires and wishes, low-minded unrest and lusts that flourish in the dark.

Often she would tell stories of her life in Munich. She told how she once spent a night with an artist in his studio, just for fun; and how on another occasion she had gone with an officer to the barracks at night simply on a wager. She told of all the fine-looking men who ran after her, and how she dropped them whenever she felt like it. She said she would let them kiss her sometimes, but that was all; or she would walk arm in arm with them through the forest, but that was all. She commented on the fact that in Munich you had to keep an eye out for the police and observe their hours, otherwise there might be trouble. For example, a swarthy Italian kept following her once—he was a regular Conte—and she couldn’t make the man go on about his business, and you know he rushed into her room and held a revolver before her face, and she screamed, of course she did, until the whole house was awake, and there was an awful excitement.

When Daniel endeavoured to put a stop to her wastefulness, she went to Philippina and complained. Philippina encouraged her. “Don’t you let him get away with anything,” said she, “let him feel that a woman with your beauty didn’t have to marry a skinflint.”

When she began to go with Edmund Hahn, she told Philippina all about it. “You ought to see him, Philippina,” she whispered in a mysterious way. “He is a regular Don Juan; he can turn the head of any woman.” She said he had been madly in love with her for two years, and now he was going to gamble for her; but in a very aristocratic and exclusive club, to which none but the nicest people belonged. “If I win, Philippina, I am going to make you a lovely present,” she said.

From then on her conversation became rather tangled and incoherent. She was out a great deal, and when she returned she was always in a rather uncertain condition. She had Philippina put up her hair, and every word she spoke during the operation was a lie. One time she confessed that she had not been in the theatre, as Daniel had supposed, but at the house of a certain Frau Bäumler, a good friend of Edmund Hahn. They had been gambling: she had won sixty marks. She looked at the door as if in fear, took out her purse, and showed Philippina three gold pieces.

Philippina had to swear that she would not give Dorothea away. A few days later Dorothea got into another party and got out of it successfully, and Philippina had to renew her oath. The old maid could take an oath with an ease and glibness such as she might have displayed in saying good morning. In the bottom of her heart she never failed to grant herself absolution for the perjury she was committing. For the time being she wished to collect, take notes, follow the game wherever it went. Moreover, it tickled and satisfied her senses to think about relations and situations which she knew full well she could never herself experience.

Dorothea became more and more ensnared. Her eyes looked like will-o’-the-wisps, her laugh was jerky and convulsive. She never had time, either for her husband or her child. She would receive letters occasionally that she would read with greedy haste and then tear into shreds. Philippina came into her room once quite suddenly; Dorothea, terrified, hid a photograph she had been holding in her hand. When Philippina became indignant at the secrecy of her action, she said with an air of inoffensive superiority: “You would not understand it, Philippina. That is something I cannot discuss with any one.”

But Philippina’s vexation worried her: she showed her the photograph. It was the picture of a young man with a cold, crusty face. Dorothea said it was an American whom she had met at Frau Bäumler’s. He was said to be very rich and alone.

Every evening Philippina wanted to know something about the American. “Tell me about the American,” she would say.

One evening, quite late, Dorothea came into Philippina’s room with nothing on but her night-gown. Agnes and little Gottfried were asleep. “The American has a box at the theatre to-morrow evening. If you call for me you can see him,” she whispered.

“I am bursting with curiosity,” replied Philippina.

For a while Dorothea sat in perfect silence, and then exclaimed: “If I only had money, Philippin’, if I only had money!”

“I thought the American had piles of it,” replied Philippina.

“Of course he has money, lots of it,” said Dorothea, and her eyes flashed, “but—”

“But? What do you mean?”

“Do you think men do things without being compensated?”

“Oh, that’s it,” said Philippina reflectively, “that’s it.” She crouched on a hassock at Dorothea’s feet. “How pretty you are, how sweet,” she said in her bass voice: “God, what pretty little feet you have! And what smooth white skin! Marble’s got nothing on you.” And with the carnal concupiscence of a faun in woman’s form she took Dorothea’s leg in her hand and stroked the skin as far as the knee.

Dorothea shuddered. As she looked down at the cowering Philippina, she noticed that there was a button missing on her blouse. Through the opening, just between her breasts, she saw something brown. “What is that on your body there?” asked Dorothea.

Philippina blushed. “Nothing for you,” she replied in a rough tone, and held her hand over the opening in her blouse.

“Tell me, Philippina, tell me,” begged Dorothea, who could not stand the thought of any one keeping a secret from her: “Possibly it is your dowry. Possibly you have made a savings bank out of your bosom?” She laughed lustily.

Philippina got up: “Yes, it is my money,” she confessed with reluctance, and looked at Dorothea hostilely.

“It must be a whole lot. Look out, or some one will steal it from you. You will have to sleep on your stomach.”

Daniel came down from his study, and heard Dorothea laughing. Grief was gnawing at his heart; he passed hastily by the door.

XI

One evening, as Philippina came into the hall from the street, she saw a man coming up to her in the dark; he called her by name. She thought she recognised his voice, and on looking at him more closely saw that it was her father.

She had not spoken to him for ten years. She had seen him from time to time at a distance, but she had always made it a point to be going in another direction as soon as she saw him; she avoided him, absolutely.

“What’s the news?” she asked in a friendly tone.

Jason Philip cleared his throat, and tried to get out of the light in the hall and back into the shadow: he wished to conceal his shabby clothes from his daughter.

“Now, listen,” he began with affected naturalness, “you might inquire about your parents once in a while. The few steps over to our house wouldn’t make you break your legs. Honour thy father and thy mother, you know. Your mother deserves any kindness you can show her. As for me, well, I have dressed you down at times, but only when you needed it. You were a mischievous monkey, and you know it.”

He laughed; but there was the fire of fear in his eyes. Philippina was the embodiment of silence.

“As I was saying,” Jason Philip continued hastily, as if to prevent any inimical memories of his daughter from coming to his mind, “you might pay a little attention to your parents once in a while: Can’t you lend me ten marks? I have got to meet a bill to-morrow morning, and I haven’t got a pfennig. The boys, you know, I mean your brothers, are conducting themselves splendidly. They give me something the first of each month, and they do it regularly. But I don’t like to go to them about this piddling business to-morrow. I thought that as you were right here in the neighbourhood, I could come over and see you about it.”

Jason Philip was lying. His sons gave him no help whatsoever. Willibald was living in Breslau, where he had a poorly paid position as a bookkeeper and was just barely making ends meet. Markus was good for nothing, and head over heels in debt.

Philippina thought the matter over for a moment, and then told her father to wait. She went upstairs. Jason Philip waited at the door, whistling softly. Many years had passed by since he first attacked the civil powers, urged on by a rebellion of noble thoughts in his soul. Many years had passed by since he had made his peace with these same civil powers. Nevertheless, he continued to whistle the “Marseillaise.”

Philippina came waddling down the steps, dragged herself over to the door, and gave her father a five-mark piece. “There,” she bellowed, “I haven’t any more myself.”

But Jason Philip was satisfied with half the amount he had asked for. He was now equipped for an onslaught on the nearest café with its corned beef, sausages, and new beer.

From this time on he came around to the house on Ægydius Place quite frequently. He would stand in the hall, look around for Philippina, and if he found her, beg her for money. The amounts Philippina gave him became smaller and smaller. Finally she took to giving him ten pfennigs when he came.

XII

It frequently happened that Daniel would not answer when any one asked him a question. His ear lost the words, his eye the pictures, signs, faces, gestures. He was in his own way; he was a torment to himself.

Something drew him there and then here. He would leave the house, and then be taken with a longing to return. He noticed that people were laughing at him; laughing at him behind his back. He read mockery in the eyes of his pupils; the maids in the house tittered when he passed by.

What did they know? What were they concealing? Perhaps his soul could have told what they knew and what they concealed; but he was unwilling to drag it all out into the realm of known, nameable things.

As if an invisible slanderer were at his side, unwilling to leave him, leave him in peace, his despair increased. “What have you done, Daniel!” a voice within him cried, “what have you done!” The shades of the sisters, arm in arm, arose before him.

The feeling of having made a mistake, a mistake that could never be rectified, burned like fire within him. His work, so nearly completed, had suddenly died away.

For the sake of his symphony, he forced himself into a quiet frame of mind at night, made room for faint-hearted hopes, and lulled his presentient soul into peace.

The thing that troubled him worst of all was the way Philippina looked at him.

Since the birth of the child he had been living in Eleanore’s room. Old Jordan was consideration itself: he went around in his stocking feet so as not to disturb him.

One night Daniel took the candle, and went downstairs to Dorothea’s room. She woke up, screamed, looked at him bewildered, recognised him, became indignant, and then laughed mockingly and sensually.

He sat down on the side of her bed, and took her right hand between his two. But he had a disagreeable sensation on feeling her hand in his, and looked at her fingers. They were not finely formed: they were thicker at the ends than in the middle; they could not remain quiet; they twitched constantly.

“This can’t keep up, Dorothea,” he said in a kindly tone, “you are ruining your own life and mine too. Why do you have all these people around you? Is the pleasure you derive from associating with them so great that it benumbs your conscience? I have no idea what you are doing. Tell me about it. The household affairs are in a wretched condition; everything is in disorder. And that cigar smoke out in the living room! I opened a window. And your child! It has no mother. Look at its little face, and see how pale and sickly it looks!”

“Well, I can’t help it; Philippina puts poppy in the milk so that it will sleep longer,” Dorothea answered, after the fashion of guilty women: of the various reproaches Daniel had cast at her, she seized upon the one of which she felt the least guilty. But after this, Daniel had no more to say.

“I am so tired and sleepy,” said Dorothea, and again blinked at him out of one corner of her eye with that mocking, sensual look. As he showed no inclination to leave, she yawned, and continued in an angry tone: “Why do you wake a person up in the middle of the night, if all you want is to scold them? Get out of here, you loathsome thing!”

She turned her back on him, and rested her head on her hand. Opposite her bed was a mirror in a gold frame. She saw herself in it; she was pleased with herself lying there in that offended mood, and she smiled.

Daniel, who had been so cruel to noble women now become shades, saw how she smiled at herself, infatuated with herself: he took pity on such child-like vanity.

“There is a Chinese fairy tale about a Princess,” he said, and bent down over Dorothea, “who received from her mother as a wedding present a set of jewel boxes. There was a costly present in each box, but the last, smallest, innermost one was locked, and the Princess had to promise that she would never open it. She kept her promise for a while, but curiosity at last got the better of her, she forgot her vow, and opened the last little box by force. There was a mirror in it; and when she looked into it and saw how beautiful she was, she began to abuse her husband. She tortured him so that he killed her one day.”

Dorothea looked at him terrified. Then she laughed and said: “What a stupid story! Such a tale of horror!” She laid her cheek on the pillow, and again looked in the mirror.

The following morning Daniel received an anonymous letter. It read as follows: “You will be guarding your own honour if you keep a sharp lookout on your wife. A Well-wisher.”

A cold fever came over him. For a few days he dragged his body from room to room as if poisoned. He avoided every one in the house. One night he again felt a desire to go down to Dorothea. When he reached the door to her room, he found it bolted. He knocked, but received no answer. He knocked again, this time more vigorously. He heard her turn her head on the pillow. “Let me sleep!” cried Dorothea angrily.

“Open the door, Dorothea,” he begged.

“No, I will not; I want to sleep.” These were the words that reached his ear from behind the bolted door.

He pressed three or four times on the latch, implored her three or four times to let him come in, but received no answer. He did not wish to make any more noise, looked straight ahead as if into a dark hole, and then turned and went back to his room in the attic.

XIII

Friedrich Benda was again in Europe. All the newspapers contained accounts of the discoveries made on the expedition. Last autumn Arab dealers in ivory had found him in the land of Niam-Niam, taken an interest in him, and finally brought him, then seemingly in the throes of imminent death, back to the Nile. In England he was celebrated as a hero and a bold pioneer; the Royal Geographical Society had made him an honorary member; and the incidents of his journey were the talk of the day.

Toward the close of April he came to Nuremberg to visit his mother. The blind old woman had been carefully and cautiously prepared for his coming. She nevertheless came very near dying with joy; her life was in grave danger for a while.

Benda had not wished to stay more than a week: his business and his work called him back to London; he had lectures to deliver, and he had to see a book through the press, a book in which he had given a description of the years spent in Africa.

At the urgent request of his mother he had decided to stay longer. Moreover, during the first days of his visit to Nuremberg, he suffered from a severe attack of a fever he had brought with him from the tropics, and this forced him to remain in bed. The news of his presence in the city finally became generally known, and he was annoyed by the curiosity of many people who had formerly never concerned themselves about him in the slightest.

He was eager to see Daniel; every hour of delay in meeting his old friend was an hour of reproach. But his mother insisted that he stay with her; he had to sit near her and tell of his experiences in Africa.

When he heard of the outer events in Daniel’s life he was filled with terror. The fact that made the profoundest impression on him was Daniel’s marriage to Dorothea Döderlein. People told him a great many things about their life and how they were getting along, and with each passing day he felt that it would be more difficult to go to Daniel. One evening he got his courage together and decided to go. He got as far as Ægydius Place, when he was seized with such a feeling of sadness and discomfort at the thought of all the changes that time and fate had made that he turned back. He felt as if he might be deceived by a picture which would perhaps still show the features of Daniel as he looked in former years, but that he would be so changed inwardly that words would be unable to bring the two together.

He longed to talk with some one who loved Daniel and who had followed his career with pure motives. He had to think for a long while: where was there such a person? He thought of old Herold and went to him. He directed the conversation without digression to a point that was of prime importance to him. And in order to put the old man in as confidential a frame of mind as possible, he reminded him of a night when the three of them, Daniel, Herold, and Benda, had sat in the Mohren Cellar drinking wine and discussing things in general, important and unimportant, that have a direct bearing on life.

The old man nodded; he recalled the evening. He spoke of Daniel’s genius with a modesty and a deference that made Benda’s heart swell. He raised his finger, and said with a fine fire in his eye: “I’ll stand good for him. I prophesy on the word of the Bible: A star will rise from Jacob.”

Then he spoke of Eleanore; he was passionately fond of her. He told how she had brought him the quartette, and how she had glowed with inspiration and the desire to help. He also had a good deal to say about Gertrude, especially with regard to her mental breakdown and her death.

Benda left the old man at once quiet and disquieted. He walked along the street for a long while, rapt in thought. When he looked up he saw that he was standing before Daniel’s house. He went in.

XIV

Daniel knew that Benda had returned: Philippina had read it in the newspaper and told him about it. Dorothea, who had learned of his return from her father, had also spoken to him about it. He had also heard other people speak of it.