Chapter 27

Marriage had seemed to her like the Holy of Holies. Her union with the man she loved seemed to her to be of equal significance with the union with God. But when she saw that this bond had been broken, the world was plunged into an abyss immeasurably remote from God. And it was not her husband who seemed to her to be guilty of infidelity; nor did she look upon her sister as being the guilty one; it was she herself who had been unfaithful and guilty in their eyes. She had not stood the test; she had been tried and found wanting; her strength had not been equal to her presumptions; God had rejected her. This conviction became irrevocably rooted in her heart.

In her union with Daniel music had become something divine; and she saw, now this union had been broken, something in music that was perilous, something that was to be avoided: she understood why she was so unemotional, why her feelings had dried up and vanished.

But she wanted to make one more effort to see whether she was entirely right in the analysis of her soul. One morning she went to Daniel, and asked him to play a certain passage from the “Harzreise.” She said she would like to hear the close of the slow middle movement which had always made such an appeal to her. Her request was made in such an urgent, anxious tone that Daniel granted it, though he did not feel like playing. As Gertrude listened, she became paler and paler: her diagnosis was being corroborated with fearful exactness. What had once been a source of ecstasy was now the cause of intense torture. The tones and harmonies seemed to be eating into her very soul; the pain she felt was so overwhelming, that it was only with the greatest exertion that she mustered up sufficient self-control to leave the room unaided. Daniel was dismayed.

On her return to the kitchen, Gertrude heard a most peculiar noise in her bedroom. She went in only to see that little Agnes had crept into the corner of the room where the harp stood, and was striking the strings with a copper spoon, highly pleased with her actions. Gertrude was seized with a vague, nameless terror. She took the harp into the kitchen, removed the strings from the frame, rolled them up, put them in a drawer, and carried the stringless frame up to the attic.

“What can I do?” she whispered to herself, and looked around in the attic with an expression of complete helplessness. She longed for peace, and it seemed peaceful up where she was. She stayed a while, leaning up against one of the beams, her eyes closed.

“What can I do?” That was the question she put to herself day and night. “I can no longer be of any help to my husband; to stand in his way merely because of the child is not right.” Such was the trend of her argument. She saw how he was suffering, how Eleanore was suffering, how each was suffering on account of the other, and how both were suffering because of the despicable vulgarity of the human race. She thought to herself that if she were not living, everything would be right. She imagined, indeed she was certain, that all the truth he had given her had had the sole purpose of whitewashing a lie, by which she was to be made to believe that her existence was a necessity to him. She was convinced that the weight of this lie was crushing the very life out of him. She wished to free him from it and its consequences. But how she was to do this she did not know. She knew that if Daniel and Eleanore could belong to each other in a legal, legitimate way, they would be vindicated in the eyes of God and man. But how this was to be brought about she did not know.

She sought and sought for a way out. Her ideas were vague but persistent. She felt that she was running around in a circle, unable to do more than stare at the centre of the circle. Every morning at five o’clock she would get up and go to church. She prayed with a devotion and passion that physically exhausted her heart.

One morning she knelt before the altar in unusually heart-rending despair. She thought she heard a small voice crying out to her and telling her to take her life.

She swooned; people rushed up to her, and wet her forehead with cold water. This enabled her to get up and go home. A peculiarly sorrowful and dreamy expression lay on her face.

She wanted to do some knitting, for she recalled that when she was a girl she was always able to dispel care and grief by knitting. But every stitch she made turned into the cry: “You must take your life.”

She knelt down by the cradle of little Agnes, but the child said to her only too distinctly: “Mother, you must take your life.”

Eleanore came in. On her brow was the light of enjoyed happiness; her whole body was happiness; her lips trembled and twitched with happiness. But her eyes said. “Sister, you must take your life.”

Philippina stood by the kitchen stove, and whispered to the coals: “Gertrude, you must take your life.” Her father came in, got his dinner, expressed his thanks for it, and went out murmuring, “Daughter, you must take your life; believe me, it will be for the best.”

If she passed by the well, something drew her to the edge; voices called to her from the depths. From every beaker she put to her lips to drink shone forth her image as if from beyond the tomb. On Sunday she climbed up the Vestner Tower, and let her eyes roam over the plains below as if in the grief of departure. She leaned forward out of the little window with a feeling of assuaging horror. The keeper, seeing what she was doing, rushed up, seized her arms, and made her get back.

If the cock crew, it was the crow of death; if the clock ticked, it was the tick of death; if the wind blew, it was a breath from beyond the grave. “You must take your life”—with this thought the air, the earth, the house, the church, the morning, the evening, and her dreams were full.

In April Eleanore was taken down with fever. Gertrude watched by her bedside night and day; she sacrificed herself. Daniel, worried about Eleanore, went around in a dazed condition. When he came to her bed he never noticed Gertrude. After Eleanore had begun to recover, Gertrude lay down; for she was very tired. But she could not sleep; she got up again.

She went into the kitchen in her bare feet, though she did not know why she went. It was the consuming restlessness of her heart that drove her from her bed. Her legs were heavy with exhaustion, but she did not like to stay in any one place for any length of time. Later Daniel came back from the city, and brought her a silver buckle which he fastened to her bracelet. Then he pressed his lips to her forehead, and said: “I thank you for having been so good to Eleanore.”

Gertrude stood as if rooted to the floor. Something seemed to cry incessantly within her; she felt that a mortally wounded beast was in her bosom wallowing in its blood. Long after Daniel had gone to his room she could still be seen standing in the middle of the floor. Wrapped in gloomy meditation, she removed the buckle from her bracelet: she thought she saw an ugly mark where the metal had touched her skin. She went into her room, opened the cabinet, and hid the buckle under a pile of linen.

She had only one wish: she wanted to sleep. But as soon as she would close her eyes her heart would begin to beat with doubled, trebled rapidity. She had to get up and walk back and forth in the room; she was struggling for breath.

XVIII

A few days later she went out during a pouring rain storm, and wandered about aimlessly through the streets. Every minute she feared—and hoped—she would fall over and become unconscious of herself and the world about her. She passed by two churches, the doors of which were locked. It was growing dark; she reached the apothecary shop of Herr Pflaum, and looked in through the glass door. Herr Seelenfromm was standing at the counter, mixing some medicine in a mortar. She went in and asked him whether he could not give her a narcotic. He said he could, and asked her what it should be. “One which makes you sleep for a long, long while,” she said, and smiled at him so as to make him inclined to fulfil her request. It was the first smile that had adorned her grief-stricken face for many a day. Herr Seelenfromm was just about to suggest a remedy to her. He sat down in a vain position so that he might avail himself of the opportunity to flirt with her a little. The apothecary, however, came up just then, and when he heard what Gertrude wanted, he cast a penetrating glance at her and said: “You had better go to the doctor, my good woman, and have him make you out a prescription. I have had some rather disagreeable experiences with cases of this kind.”

When Gertrude had finally dragged herself home, she found Philippina sitting by the cradle of little Agnes, rocking the child back and forth and humming a lullaby. “Where is Eleanore?” asked Gertrude.

“Where do you think she is?” said Philippina contemptuously: “She is upstairs with your husband.”

Gertrude heard Daniel playing the piano. She raised her head to hear what he was playing.

“She told me I was to go with her to Glaishammer to get a washwoman for you,” continued Philippina.

“Ah, what do we want with a washwoman?” said Gertrude; “we cannot afford one. It costs a great deal of money, and every cent of money spent means a drop of blood from Daniel’s veins. Don’t go to Glaishammer! I would rather do the washing myself!”

She knew, however, at that very moment that she had done her last washing. There was something so mournful about the light of the lamp. Agnes’s little face looked so pale as it peeped out from under the covers, Philippina cowered so witlessly at the floor. But all this was only for the moment; all this she could take with her up into a better world.

She bent down over the child, and kissed it, and kissed it with hot, burning lips. A lurk of unsoftened evil crept into Philippina’s face. “Listen, Gertrude, listen: you are all Greek to me,” said Philippina, “I don’t understand you.”

Gertrude went over to Eleanore’s room, where she stood for a while in the dark, trembling and thinking. At times she was startled: she heard some one walking about, and she thought the door would open. She could scarcely endure her impatience. Suddenly she remembered the attic and how quiet it was up there; there no one could disturb her. She decided to go up. On her way she went into the kitchen, and took a thick cord from a sugar-loaf.

As she passed by Daniel’s room, she noticed that the door was half open. He was still playing. Two candles were standing on the piano; Eleanore was leaning up against the side of the piano. She had on a pale blue dress that fell down over her beautiful body in peaceful folds.

Gertrude looked at the picture with wide-open eyes. There was an inimitable urging, a reaching aloft, and a painful sinking-back in the piece he was playing and in the way he was playing it. Gertrude went on up without making the slightest bit of noise. It was dark, but she found her way by feeling along with her hands.

XIX

After a half-hour had gone by, Philippina began to wonder where Gertrude was. She looked in the living room, then in Eleanore’s room, and then hastened up the steps and peeped through the open door into Daniel’s room. Daniel had stopped playing and was talking with Eleanore. Philippina turned back. On the stairs she met Jordan just then coming in from his evening walk. She lighted a candle, and looked in the kitchen. Gertrude was nowhere to be found.

“It is raining; there is her raincoat, and here is her umbrella, so she can’t have gone out,” thought Philippina to herself. She sat down on the kitchen table, and stared before her.

She was filled with an ugly, bitter suspicion; she scented a tragedy. In the course of another half-hour, she got up, took the lighted candle, and started out on a second search. Something drove her all about the house: she went out into the hall, into the various rooms, and then back to the kitchen.

All of a sudden she thought of the attic. It was the expression on Gertrude’s face the last time she kissed Agnes that made her think of it. Was not the attic of any house, and particularly the one in this house, the room that had the greatest attraction for her, and that her light-fearing fancy invariably chose as the most desirable and befitting place for her hidden actions?

She went up quickly and without making the least noise. Holding the lighted candle out before her, she stared at a rafter from which hung a human figure dressed in woman’s clothes. She wheeled about, uttering a stifled gurgle. A sort of drunkenness came over her; she was seized with a terrible desire to dance. She raised one leg, and sank her teeth deep into the nails of her right hand. In her convulsions she had the feeling that some one was crying out to her in a strong voice: “Set it on fire! Set it on fire!”

Near the chimney wall was a pile of letters and old newspapers. She fell on her knees, and exclaimed: “Blaze! Blaze!” And then, half with horror and half with rejoicing, she uttered a series of irrational, incoherent sounds that were nothing more than “Hu-hu, oi-oi, hu-hu, oi-oi!”

The fire from the papers flared up at once, and she ran down the steps with a roar and a bellow that are fearful to imagine, nerve-racking to hear.

In a few minutes the house was a bedlam. Daniel ran up the steps, Eleanore close behind him. The women in the lower apartments came running up, screaming for water. Daniel and Eleanore turned back, and dragged a big pail full of water up the stairs. The fire alarm was turned in, the men made their way into the building, and with the help of many hands the flames were in time extinguished.

Jordan was the first to see the lifeless Gertrude. Standing in smoke and ashes, he sobbed and moaned, and finally fell to the floor as if struck on the head with an axe. The men carried Gertrude’s body out; her clothes were still smoking.

Philippina had vanished.

ELEANORE

I

It was all over.

The visit of the doctor was over; and so was that of the coroner. The investigations of the various boards, including that of the fire department, the cross-examination, the taking of evidence, the coming to a decision—all this was over.

The cause of the fire remained unexplained; a guilty party could not be found. Philippina Schimmelweis had sworn that the fire had already started when she reached the attic. It was therefore assumed that the suicide had knocked over a lighted candle in her last moments.

The crowd of acquaintances and close friends had disappeared; this was over too. Hardened souls expressed their conventional sympathy to Kapellmeister Nothafft. That a man who had carried his head so high had suddenly been obliged to lower it in humility awakened a feeling of satisfaction. The punished evil-doer again gained public favour. Women from the better circles of society expatiated at length on the question whether a relation which in all justice would have to be designated as a criminal one while the poor woman was living could be transformed into a legal one after the lapse of a certain amount of time. With pimplike generosity and match-making indulgence they decided that it could.

The funeral was also over. Gertrude was buried in St. John’s Cemetery on a stormy day.

The preacher had preached a sermon, the mourners had stood with their hands stuffed in their coat pockets and their furs, for it was cold. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, Jordan cried out: “Farewell, Gertrude! Until we meet again, my child!”

There was one man who crowded right up to the edge of the grave: it was Herr Carovius. He looked over his nose glasses at Jordan and Daniel and Eleanore. It seemed to him that the latter, with her pale face and her black dress, was more beautiful than the most beautiful Madonna any Italian or Spaniard had ever immortalised on imperishable canvas.

He turned his frightened face to one side, and came very nearly falling over the heaped-up earth by the grave.

With regard to Daniel’s conduct, Pflaum, the apothecary, had this to say: “I should have expected more grief and sorrow from him, and not so much sullenness.”

“A hard-hearted man, an exceedingly hard-hearted man,” said Herr Seelenfromm in his grief.

Daniel was severely criticised for his discourteous treatment of the people from the City Theatre, every one of whom had come to the funeral. When several of them shook hands with him, he merely nodded, and blinked his eyes behind the round glasses which he had been wearing for some time.

Judge Kleinlein said: “He should be very grateful for the Christian burial, for despite the evidence that was turned in, it was not satisfactorily proved that the woman was in her right mind.”

Eleanore looked into the open grave. She thought: “Guilt is being heaped upon guilt, deep, serious guilt.”

All this was over now. Daniel and Eleanore and Jordan had come back to the house.

II

They felt lonely and deserted. Jordan shut himself up in his room. It was rare now that he took his accustomed evening walks; his coat-sleeves and the ends of his trouser legs had become more and more frayed. He pined away; his hair became snow white, his walk unsteady, his eye dim. But he was never ill, and he never complained of his fate. He never said anything at the table; he was a quiet man.

Eleanore moved back up with her father, and Daniel took his old room next to the dining room. There was all of a sudden so much space; he was surprised that the going of a single person could make such a vast difference.

Eleanore spent the whole day with little Agnes until Philippina came and relieved her. She also did her work close to Agnes.

When she had finished her writing, she had to look after the house. She could not cook, and had no desire to learn how, so she had a woman come in three times a week who prepared the midday meals. Twice a week she would prepare meals for two days, and once a week she would get them ready for three days. She was a modest woman who worked for very little money. The food she cooked merely needed to be heated over, and in the evening they always had sausage and sandwiches anyhow.

It was a practical arrangement, but no one praised Eleanore for it.

At first she spent her nights in Gertrude’s room with the child; she could not stand this, however, longer than three weeks. Either she could not sleep, or she had such terrible dreams.

Then she took to carrying the child up to her room with her and making a little bed for it on the sofa. But the child did not sleep so well there; Eleanore noticed that, as a result of all the excitement and hard work, she was losing strength.

Often in the night when she would take the child to quiet it—and become so tired and uneasy—she would make up her mind to have a talk with Daniel. But the next morning she would find it impossible to bring up the subject. She felt that the voice of Gertrude was admonishing her from beyond the grave and telling her to be patient.

She felt, too, that the time was drawing near when she would succumb to over-exertion; it made her anxious. Just then Philippina came in to help.

III

When Jason Philip heard that Philippina was going to Jordan’s daughters every day, he told her most emphatically and repeatedly that she had to quit it. Philippina paid not the slightest attention to him and did as she pleased.

“I’ll kill you,” cried Jason Philip at the girl.

Philippina shrugged her shoulders and laughed impudently.

Jason Philip saw that a grown person was standing before him; he was afraid of the evil look of his daughter.

It was long before he could make out what was taking her to his enemies. Then he learned that wherever she chanced to be, at home, or with acquaintances, or with strangers, she was spreading evil reports concerning Daniel and his family. This tended to make him a bit more indulgent: he too wanted to feast his ears on scandal from that quarter. At times he would enter into a conversation with Philippina, and when she told him the latest news he was filled with fiendish delight. “The day will come when I will get back at that music-maker, you see if I don’t,” he said.

Theresa was still confined to her bed. During his leisure hours Willibald had to read to her, either from the newspapers or from trashy novels. When she was alone she lay perfectly quiet and stared at the ceiling.

The time finally came when Willibald left school. He went to Fürth, where he was employed as an apprentice by a manufacturer. There was no doubt in any one’s mind but that he would become one of those loyal, temperate, industrious people who are the pride of their parents, and who climb the social ladder at the rate of an annual increase in salary of thirty marks.

The one-eyed Markus entered the paternal bookshop, where he soon familiarised himself with the novels of the world from Dumas and Luise Mühlbach to Ohnet and Zola, and with the popular sciences from Darwin to Mantegazza. His brain was a book catalogue, and his mouth an oracle of the tastes displayed at the last fair. But in reality he not only did not like the books, he regarded all this printed matter as a jolly fine deception practised on people who did not know what to do with their money. Zwanziger, the clerk, had married the widow of a cheese merchant, and was running a shop of his own on the Regensburg Chaussee.

“A rotten business,” said Jason Philip at the end of each month. “The trouble with me,” he invariably added, “is that I have been too much of an idealist. If I had worked as hard for myself as I have for other people, I would be a rich man to-day.”

He went to the café and discussed politics. He had developed into a perpetual grumbler; he was pleased with nothing, neither the government nor the opposition. To hear him talk you would have thought that the opposing parties had been forced to narrow their platforms down to the differences between the views of Prince Bismarck and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. When Kaiser Wilhelm I died, Jason Philip acted as though his appointment to the chancellorship was imminent. And when in that same memorable year Kaiser Friedrich succumbed to his sufferings, Jason Philip resembled the pilot on whose isolated fearlessness the rescue of the storm-tossed ship of state depends.

The born hero always finds a sphere of activity, a forum from which to express his views. If public life has rejected him, he goes to the café, where he is sure to find a congenial element.

One day Theresa got up from the bed where she had spent fifteen unbroken months, and seemed all of a sudden completely recovered. The physician said it was the strangest case that had ever come under his observation. But Jason Philip said: “It is the triumph of a good constitution.” With that he went to the café, drank beer, made fiery political speeches, and played skat.

But Theresa left her bed not as a woman forty-six years old—that was her age—but as a woman of seventy. She had only a few sparsely distributed grey hairs left on her square head, her face was full of wrinkles, her eye was hard and cold. From that time on, however, she did not seem to age. She did not quarrel any more, attended to her affairs in a straightforward, self-assured way, and observed her increasing impoverishment with unexpected calm.

She lived on herring, potatoes, and coffee; it was the same diet on which Philippina and Markus lived, with the one exception that Markus, as the child nearest her heart, was allowed a piece of sugar for his coffee. Jason Philip was also put on a diet: he never dared open his mouth about it, either.

Philippina stood it for a while in silence; finally she said to her mother: “I can’t stand this chicory brew forever.”

“Then you’ll have to lap up water, you will,” replied Theresa.

“No, I won’t,” said Philippina. “I am going to hire out.”