Chapter 41

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.

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.