Part 47

Thereupon she said that she could not recall having seen him, when still a child, in her father’s house, and she was surprised at this, for he had such a striking personality. She devoured him with her eyes; they began to burn as they always did when she wanted to make some kind of human capture, and blind greed came over her. She unbent; she spoke in her very sweetest voice; in her laugh and her smile there was, in fact, something irresistible, something like that trait we notice in good, confiding, but at times obstinate children.

But she noticed that this man studied her, not as if she were a young married woman who were trying to please him and gain his sympathy, rather as a curious variety of the human species. There was something in his face that made her tremble with irritation, and all of a sudden her eyes were filled with hate and distrust.

Benda felt sorry for her. This everlasting attempt to make a seductive gesture, this fishing for words that would convey a double meaning, this self-betrayal, this excitement about nothing, made him feel sad. Dorothea did not seem to him a bad woman. Whatever else she might be accused of, it did not seem to him that she was guilty of downright immoral practices. He felt that she was merely misguided, poisoned, a phantom and a fool.

His mind went back to certain Ethiopian women in the very heart of Africa; he thought of their noble walk, the proud restfulness of their features, their chaste nudeness, and their inseparability from the earth and the air.

He nevertheless understood his friend: the musician could not help but succumb to the charms of the phantom; the lonely man sought the least lonely of all human beings.

As he was coming to this conclusion, Daniel entered the room. He greeted Benda, and said to Dorothea: “There is a girl outside who says she has some ostrich feathers for you. Did you order any feathers?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Dorothea hastily, “it is a present from my friend, Emmy Büttinger.”

“Who’s she?”

“You don’t know her? Why, she is the sister of Frau Feistelmann. You must help me,” she said, turning to Benda, “for you must know all about this kind of things. There where you have been ostriches must be as thick as chickens here at home.” Laughing, she went out, and returned in due time with a big box, from which, cautiously and with evident delight, she took two big feathers, one white, one black. Holding them by the stem, she laid them across her hair, stepped up to the mirror, and looked at herself with an intoxicated mien.

In this mien there was something so extraordinary, indeed uncanny, that Benda could not help but cast a horrified glance at Daniel.

“This is the first time I ever knew what a mirror was,” he said to himself.

III

That evening Daniel visited Benda in his home. Benda showed him some armour and implements he had brought back with him from Africa. In explaining some of the more unusual objects, he described at length the customs of the African blacks.

Then he was seized with a headache, sat down in his easy chair, and was silent for a long while. He suddenly looked like an old man. The ravages his health had suffered while in the tropics became visible.

“Did you ever see Dorothea’s mother?” he asked, by way of breaking the long silence.

Daniel shook his head: “It is said that she is vegetating, a mere shadow of her former self, in some kind of an institution in Erlangen,” he replied.

“I have been told that neither Andreas Döderlein nor his daughter has ever, in all these years, taken the slightest interest in the unfortunate woman,” continued Benda. “Well, as to Andreas Döderlein, I have always known what to expect of him.”

Daniel looked up. “You hinted once that Döderlein was guilty of reprehensible conduct with regard to his wife. Do you recall? Is that in any way connected with Dorothea and her life? Do you care to discuss the matter?”

“I have no objection whatever to throwing such light on the incident as I have,” replied Benda. “It does have to do with Dorothea, and it explains, perhaps, some things about her. That is, it is possible that her character is in part due to the kind of father she grew up under and the kind of mother she lost when a mere child. It is strange the way these things work out: I am myself, in a way, interwoven with your own fate.”

He was silent for a while; memories were rushing to his mind. Then he began: “If you had ever known Marguerite Döderlein, she would have been just as unforgettable to you as she is to me. She and Eleanore—those were the two really musical women I have known in my life. They were both all nature, all soul. Marguerite’s youth was a prison; her brother Carovius was the jailer. When she married Döderlein, she somehow fancied she would escape from that prison, but she merely exchanged one for the other. And yet she hardly knew how it all came about. She accepted everything just as it came to her with unwavering fidelity and gentleness. Her soul remained unlacerated, unembittered.”

He rested his head on his hand; his voice became gentler. “We loved one another before we had ever spoken a word to each other. We met each other a few times on the street, once in a while in the park; and a number of times she stole up to me in the theatre. I was not reserved: I offered her my life, but she always insisted that she could not live without her child and be happy. I respected her feelings and restrained my own. For a while things went on in this way. We tortured ourselves, practised resignation, but were drawn together again, and then Döderlein suddenly began to be suspicious. Whether his suspicion was due to whisperings or to what he himself had at some time seen his wife do—it was impossible for her to play the hypocrite—I really do not know. At any rate he began to abuse her in the most perfidious manner. He tried to disturb her conscience. One night he went to her bed with a crucifix in his hand, and made her swear, swear on the life of her child, that she would never deceive him. He used all manner of threats and unctuous fustian. She took the oath.”

“Yes, my friend, she took the oath. And this oath seemed to her much more solemn and serious than the oath she had taken at the altar the day they were married. I knew nothing about it; she kept out of my sight. I could not endure it. One day she came to me again to say good-bye. There followed a moment when human strength was no longer of avail, and human deliberation the emptiest of words. The fatal situation developed. The delicately moulded woman succumbed to a sense of guilt; her heart grew irresponsive to feelings, her mind dark. She was stricken with the delusion that her child was slowly dying in her arms, and one day she collapsed completely. The rest is known.”

Benda got up, went over to the window, and looked out into the darkness.

Daniel felt as if a rope were being tightened about his neck. He too got up, murmured a farewell, and left.

IV

He had reached the Behaim monument when he began to walk more slowly. A short distance before him he saw a man and a woman. He recognized Dorothea.

They were speaking very rapidly and in subdued tones. Daniel followed them; and when they reached the door of his house and turned to go in, he stopped in the shadow of the church.

The man seemed to be angry and excited: Dorothea was trying to quiet him. She was standing close by him; she held his hand in hers until she unlocked the door. First she whispered, looked up at the house anxiously, and then said out loud: “Good night, Edmund. Sweet dreams!”

The man went on his way without lifting his hat. Dorothea hastened in.

Daniel was trembling in his whole body. There was something in his eyes that seemed to be beseeching; and there was something mystic about them. He watched until the light had been lighted upstairs and the window shade drawn. He was tortured by the stillness of the Square; when the clock in the tower struck eleven he thought he could hear the blood roaring in his ears.

It was only with difficulty that he dragged himself into the house. Dorothea, already in her night-gown, was sitting at the table in the living room, sewing a ribbon on the dress she had just been wearing: it had somehow got loose.

They spoke to each other. Daniel stood behind her, near the stove, and looked over at the back of her bared neck as if held by a spell. One cold shiver after another was running through his body.

“Who gave you those ostrich feathers?” he asked, suddenly and rather brusquely. The question slipped from his lips before he himself was aware of it. He would have liked to say something else.

Dorothea raised her head with a jerk. “I thought I told you,” she replied, and he noticed that she coloured up.

“I cannot believe that a perfect stranger, and a woman at that, is making you such costly presents,” said Daniel slowly.

Dorothea got up, and looked at him rather undecidedly. “Very well, if you simply must know, I bought them myself,” she said with unusual defiance. “But you don’t need to try to browbeat me like that; I’ll get the money that I paid for them. And you needn’t think for a minute that I am going to let you draw up a family budget, and expect to make me live by it.”

“You didn’t buy those feathers,” said Daniel, cutting her off in the middle of her harangue.

“I didn’t buy them, and they were not given to me! How did I get them then? Stole them perhaps?” Dorothea was scornful; but cowardice made it impossible for her to look Daniel in the face.

“I have never in my life talked to any one in this way, nor has any one ever spoken to me like that,” thought Daniel to himself. He turned deathly pale, went up to her, and placed his hand like an iron vise about her arm. “I shall permit you to waste my money; I shall not object if you fritter your time away in the company of good-for-nothing people; if you regard my health and peace of mind as of no consequence whatever, I shall say nothing; if you let your poor little child suffer and pine away, I shall keep quiet. I shall submit to all of this. And why shouldn’t I? Why should I want to have my meals served at regular hours? Why should I insist that my morning coffee be warm and my rolls fresh from the baker? Why should I be so exacting as to ask that my clothes be mended, my windows washed, my room swept, and my table in order? I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth; I have never known what it was to be comfortable.”

“Oh, listen, Daniel, it’s too bad about you,” said Dorothea in an anxious tone, “but let go of my arm.”

He loosened his grip on her arm, but did not let it go. “You may associate with whomsoever you please. Let those people treasure you to whom you are a treasure. So far as money is concerned, you can have all that I have. Here it is, take it.” He drew from his pocket an embroidered purse filled with coins, and hurled them on the table. “So that you can wear fine dresses, I will play the organ on Sundays. So that you can go to masquerade balls and parties of all kinds, I will try to beat a little music into some twenty-odd unmusical idiots. I will do more than that: I will promise never to bother myself about your behaviour: I will never ask you where you have been or where you are going. But listen, Dorothea,” he said, as his face flushed with anger and anxiety, his voice rising as if by unconscious pressure, “don’t you ever dare dishonour my name! It is the only thing I have. I owe humanity an irreparable debt for it. It invests me not simply with what is known as civic honour, it gives me also the honour I feel and enjoy when I stand in the presence of what I have created. Lie, and you besmirch my name! Lie, and you sully and debase it! I am probably not as much afraid as you think I am of being regarded as a cuckold, though I admit that the thought of it makes my blood boil. But I want to say to you here and now, that when I think of you in the arms of another man I feel within me a deep desire, a real lust for murder. But you would throw me into the last pit of hell and damnation, if you were to repay the truths I have told you and given you with lies, lies, lies. You must not, you dare not, imagine for a minute that I am so selfish and vulgar as not to be able to understand that a change might come over your heart. But that is one thing; telling a lie and living a lie is quite another. It is impossible for me to live side by side with another human being except in absolute truth. A lie, the lie, crushes what there is in me of the divine. A lie to me is carrion and corruption. Tell me, then, whether you have been and are true to me! Don’t be afraid, Dorothea, and don’t be ashamed. Everything may be right yet and work out as it should. But tell me: Have you been deceiving me?”

“I—deceiving you?” breathed Dorothea, and looked into his face as if hypnotised, never so much as moving an eyelash. “What do you mean? Deceiving you? Do you really think that I would be capable of such baseness?”

“You have no lover? No other man has touched you since you have been my wife?”

“A lover? Some other man has touched me?” she repeated with that same hypnotic look. In her child-like face there was the glow of unadulterated honour and undiluted innocence.

“You have been having no secret _rendezvous_, you have not been receiving treacherous letters, nor writing them, you have promised no man anything, not even in jest?”

“Ah, well now, Daniel, listen! In jest. That’s another matter. Who knows? You know me, and you know how one talks and laughs.”

“And you assure me that all this mysterious abuse that is being whispered into my ears and to which your conduct has given a certain amount of plausibility is nothing in the world but wickedness on the part of people who know us, nothing but calumny?”

“Yes, Daniel: it is merely wickedness, meanness, and calumny.”

“You are willing that God above should never grant you another minute of peace, if you have been lying to me? Do you wish that, Dorothea?”

Dorothea balked; she blinked a little. Then she said quite softly: “Those are terrible words, Daniel. But if you insist upon it, I am willing to abide by the curse you have made a possibility.”

Daniel breathed a breath of relief. He felt that a mighty load had been taken from his heart. And in grateful emotion he went up to his wife, and pressed her to his bosom.

But at the same time he was repelled by something. He felt that the creature he was pressing to his heart was without rhythm, or vibration, or law, or order. He began again to be gnawed at by torture, this time of a new species and coming from another direction.

As he opened the door to the hall, he heard a rustle; and he saw a dark figure hastening over to the room that opened on the court.

V

Left alone, Dorothea stared for a while into space, as motionless as a statue. Then she took her violin and bow from the case—she had bought a new bow to take the place of the one that had been broken—and began to play: a cadence, a trill, a waltz. Her face took on a hardened, resolute expression.

She soon let the instrument fall from her hands, and began to think. She laid the violin to one side, took off her slippers, sneaked out of the room in her stocking feet and across the hall, and listened at the door to Philippina’s room. She opened it cautiously and heard a sound snoring from Philippina’s bed, which stood next to the door.

The lamp had almost burned down; it gave so little light that the bed clothes could hardly be seen.

She stole up to Philippina’s couch of repose, step by step, without making the slightest noise, bent down, stretched out her arm, groped around over the body of the inexplicable creature who was sleeping there, and was on the point of raising the covers and reaching for Philippina’s breast. Philippina ceased snoring, woke up as if she had been struck in the face by the rays of a magic lantern, opened her eyes, and looked at Dorothea with a speechless threat. Not a muscle of her face moved.

Dorothea collected her thoughts instantly. With the expression on her face of one who has just succeeded in carrying out some good joke, she threw her whole body on Philippina and pressed her face to her cheek, nauseated though she was by the stench of her breath and the bed clothes.

“Listen, Philippina, the American wants to give you something,” she whispered.

“Jesus, you’re punching my belly in,” replied Philippina, and gasped for breath. When Dorothea had straightened up, she said: “Well, has he already given you something? That’s the main thing.”

“He gave me the feathers. Isn’t that something?” replied Dorothea, “and he is going to give me a set of rubies.”

“I wish you already had ’em. It seems to me that your American don’t exactly hail from Givetown. I’ve been told that he ain’t so damn rich after all. When are you goin’ to meet him again, your lover?”

“To-morrow evening, between six and seven. Oh, I am so glad, so glad, Philippina. He is so young.”

“Yes, young! That’s a lot, ain’t it?” murmured Philippina contemptuously.

“He has such a pretty mole on his neck, way down on his neck, down there,” she said, pointing to the same spot on Philippina’s neck. “Right there! Does it tickle you? Does it make you feel good?”

“Don’t laugh so loud, you’ll waken little Gottfried,” said Philippina in a testy, morose tone. “And get out of here! I’m sleepy.”

“Good-night, then, you pesky old dormouse,” said Dorothea, in seemingly good-natured banter, and left the room.

Hardly had she closed the door behind her when Philippina sprang like an enraged demon from her bed, clenched her fist, and hissed: “Damned thief and whore! She wanted to rob me, that’s what she did, the dirty wench! You wait! Your days in this place are numbered. Somebody’s going to squeal, believe me, and when they do, they’ll get you right.”

She drew her red petticoat over her legs, tied it tightly, and went to the door to lock it. The lock had been out of order for some time; she could not budge it. She carried a chair over to the door, placed it directly underneath the lock, folded her arms, sat down on it, and remained sitting there for an hour or so blinking her evil eyes.

When no longer able to keep from going to sleep, she got up, placed the folding table against the door, and got back into bed, murmuring imprecations such as were second nature to her.

VI

The following day began with a heavy rain storm. Daniel had had a restless night; he went to his work quite early. But his head was so heavy that he had to stop every now and then, and rest it on his hand. There was no blood, no swing to his ideas.

Toward eight o’clock the postman came, and asked for Inspector Jordan. The old man had to sign a receipt in acknowledgment of a solemnly sealed money order.

In the letter the postman gave him were two hundred dollars in bills and a note from Benno. The letter had been mailed in Galveston. Benno wrote that he had made inquiries and found that his father was still living. He said he had been quite successful in the New World, and as a proof of his prosperity he was sending him the enclosed sum, with the best of greetings, in payment for the trouble he had cost his father.

It was a cold epistle. But the old man was beside himself with joy. He ran to Daniel and then to Philippina, held the crisp notes in the air, and stammered: “Look, people! He is rich. He has sent me two hundred dollars! He has become an honest man, he has. He remembers his old father, he does! Really this is a great day! A great day, Daniel, because of something else that has just been finished.” He added with a mysterious smile: “A blessed day in the history of a great cause!”

He dressed and went down town; he wanted to tell his friends the news.

Daniel called down to know if his breakfast was ready; nobody answered. Thereupon he went to the kitchen, and got himself a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread. Philippina came in a little later. Her hair looked as though a hurricane had struck it; she was in her worst humour. She snarled at Daniel, asking him why in the name of God he couldn’t wait till the coffee had been boiled.

“Leave me in peace, Philippina,” he said, “I need peace.”

“Peace!” she roared, “peace, the same old story: you want peace!” She threw a wild, contemptuous glance at the open chest containing Daniel’s scores, leaned against the table, put the tips of her dirty fingers on the score he was then studying, and shrieked: “There is the cause of the whole _malheur_! The whole _malheur_, I say, comes from this damned note-smearing of yours! The idea of a man settin’ down and dabbing them pot-hooks on good white paper, day after day, year in and year out! What does it all mean? Tell me! While you’re doin’ it, everything else is moving—like a crab, backwards. Jesus, you’re a man, and yet you spend your time at that kind of stuff! I’d be ashamed to admit it.”

Not prepared for this enigmatic outburst of anger and hate, Daniel looked at Philippina utterly dazed. “Get out of here,” he cried indignantly. “Get out of here, I say,” and pointed to the door.

She got out. “The damned dabbery!” she bellowed with reinforced maliciousness.

From ten to twelve, Daniel had to lecture at the conservatory. His heart beat violently, though he was unable to explain his excitement. It was more than a foreboding: he felt as if he had heard a piece of terribly bad news and the real nature of it had slipped his memory.