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.”

“Well, hire out. Who cares? It’ll be one mouth less to feed.” “Your daughter is going to hire out,” said Theresa to her husband, when he came home that evening.

Jason Philip had been playing cards that day, and had lost. He was in a terrible humour: “She can go plumb to the Devil so far as I am concerned.” That was his comment.

The next morning Philippina sneaked up to the attic, and drew out her cash from the hole in the chimney: it amounted to nine hundred and forty marks, mostly in gold, which she had exchanged in the course of years for small coins. Through the opening in the wall the June sun fell upon her face, which, never young and bearing the stamp of extended crime, looked like that of a witch.

She put the money in a woollen stocking, rolled it up in a knot, stuffed it down her corset between her breasts, made the sign of the cross, and repeated one of her drivelling formulas. Her clothes, ribbons, and other possessions she had already packed in a basket. This she carried down the stairs, and, without saying good-bye to a soul, left the house.

Her brother Markus was standing with sprawled legs in the sun before the store, whistling. He caught sight of her with his one eye, smiled contemptuously at her, and cried: “Happy journey!”

Philippina turned to him, and said: “You branded lout! You’re going to have a lousy time of it, mark what I tell you!”

In this frame of mind and body she came to Daniel, and said to him: “I want to work for you. You don’t need to pay nothing if you ain’t got it.”

Daniel had been noticing for some time that Eleanore could not stand the exertion required of her by the extra work.

“Will you mind the baby and sleep with it?” Daniel asked. Philippina nodded and looked down.

“If you will take care of the child and act right toward it and me, I shall be awfully grateful to you,” he said, breathing more easily.

Thereupon Philippina threw her hands to her face, and shuddered from head to foot. She was not exactly crying; there was something much worse, much more despairing, in what she was doing than in mere crying. She seemed to be convulsed by some demoniac power; a ghastly dream seemed to have seized her in a moment of higher consciousness. She turned around and trotted into the room where the child was playing with a wooden horse.

She sat down on a foot-stool, and stared at the restless little creature.

Daniel stopped, stood perfectly still, and looked at her in a mood of solicitous reflection.

IV

During a rehearsal of “Traviata,” Daniel flew into a rage at FrÄulein Varini: “Listen, pay attention to your intonation, and keep in time. It’s enough to make a man lose his mind! What are you squeaking up at the gallery for? You’re supposed to be singing a song, and not whining for a little bit of cheap applause.”

The lady stepped out to the foot-lights with heaving bosom. Her offended dignity created something like the spread tail of a peacock about her hips: “How dare you?” she exclaimed: “I give you your choice: You can apologise or leave this place. Whatever you do, you are going to become acquainted with the power I have.”

Daniel folded his arms, let his eyes roam over the members of the orchestra, and said: “Good-bye, gentlemen. Since it is the director’s place to choose between me and this lady, there is no doubt whatever but that my term of usefulness in this position is up. And moreover, in an institution where meat is more valuable than music, I feel that I am quite superfluous.”

The other singers had come running out from the wings, and were standing crowded together on the stage looking down at the orchestra. When Daniel laid down his baton and walked away, every member of the orchestra rose as one man to his feet. It was a voluntary and almost overwhelming expression of speechless admiration. Though they had never loved this man, though they had regarded him as an evil, alien kill-joy, who interfered with their easy-going habits as musicians in that town, they nevertheless respected his energy, admired the nobility of his intentions, and at least had a vague idea of his genius.

FrÄulein Varini went into hysterics. The director was called in. He promised FrÄulein Varini immediate redress, and wrote a letter to Daniel requesting that he offer an apology.

Daniel replied in a brief note that he had no thought of changing his plans as announced when he left the building. He remarked that it was quite impossible for him to get along with FrÄulein Varini, that either he or she would have to quit, and that since she intended to remain he must consider his resignation as submitted and accepted.

That evening, as he was sitting at the table with Eleanore, he told her, after a long silence and in very few words, what had happened. Her response to him was a look of astonishment; that was all.

“Oh, it was the only thing I could do,” said Daniel, without looking up from his plate; “I was so heartily sick of the whole business.”

“What are you going to live on, you and your child?” asked Eleanore.

His eye became even darker and harsher: “You know, God who makes the lilies grow in the fields ... I can’t quote that old proverb exactly, my familiarity with the Bible is nothing to boast of.”

That was all they said. The window was open; there was a mysterious pulsing in the earth; the warm air had a disagreeable taste, somewhat like that of sweet oil.

When the clock in the tower struck ten, Eleanore got up and said good-night.

“Good-night!” replied Daniel, with bowed head.

V

That is the way it was now every evening between the two; for during the day they scarcely saw each other.

Daniel would sit perfectly still for hours at a time and brood.

He could not forget. He could not forget the burning, smoking border of the dress; nor the shoes that had some street mud on them; nor the face with the pinched upper lip, the dishevelled hair, the nervously knitted brow.

Under the linen in the clothes press he had found the silver buckle he had given her. “Why did she hide it there?” he asked himself. The condition of her soul when she opened the press and put the buckle in it became vivid, real; it became blended with his own soul, a part of his own being.

Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room; and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a face without flesh.

“Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?” This was the question that came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: “I will be your mother made young again.” And that other one, too: “I, too, am a living creature.”

He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.

She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each passing hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable mystery.

It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in the realisation of accumulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form over this earth.

It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel. And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician. Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows; it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for yesterday and storms to-morrow with unassimilative impatience. What he has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love; he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things, understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.

Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress, the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present by the brightness of visions.

He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a needle, put a glass to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed, or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning, always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he remembered—it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the myrtle wreath on her head—gave the impulse to the stirring presto in the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” he sketched on awakening from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.

But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping melody of the twenty-second Psalm arose in his mind, he trembled from head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was in the dead of night. The recurring bass figure of the presto sounded to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal words: “Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!” And he did hold his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked its way through the ice-locked region into which a passionate spell that was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.

He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.

He came on this account to cherish a feeling of superb disgust for shrewd dealers who were carried along on the wings of fashion. He took a dislike to anything that was famous; for fame smelled of and tasted to him like money. He shuddered at the mere thought of the chaos that arises from opinions and judgments; the disputes as to the merits of different schools and tendencies made him ill; he could not stand the perambulating virtuosos of all zones and nations, the feathers they manage to make fly, the noise they evoke, the truths they proclaim, the lies they wade about in and make a splash. He stood aghast at the mention of a concert hall or a theatre; he flew into a reasoned rage when he heard a neighbour playing a piano; he despised the false devotion of the masses, and scorned their impotent, imbecile transports.

All their music smelled of and tasted to him like money.

He had bought the biographies of the great masters. From them he familiarised himself with their distress and poverty; he read of the petty attitudes and fatuous mediocrity that stood deaf and dumb in the presence of immortal genius. But one day he chanced to read that Mozart’s body had been buried in a pauper’s grave. He hurled the book from him with an oath that he would never again touch a work of that sort. The mordant smoke of misanthropy blew into the fire of idolisation; he did not wish to see any one; he left the city, and found peace only after he had reached a lonely, unfrequented place in the forest, where he felt he was out of the reach of human feet and safe from the eyes of men.

At night he would walk rapidly through the streets; his head was always bowed. If he became tired, he betook himself to some unknown cafÉ where he was sure he would not meet any of his acquaintances. If some one whom he knew met him on the street, he did not speak; if any one spoke to him, he was blatant and bizarre in his replies, and hastened off as rapidly as he could, with some caustic bit of intended wit on his loosened tongue.

To enter the room where Philippina and the child were required much effort; at first he was able to do it only with pronounced aversion. Later he came somehow to be touched by the form and actions of the child: he would come in a few times each day for a minute or two only, take it up in his arms, have it poke its tiny hands into his face or even jerk at his nose glasses; he listened with undivided interest to its baby talk. Philippina would stand in the corner in the meanwhile, with her eyes on the floor and her mouth closed. He became painfully aware of his obligations to her because of her inexplicable fidelity to him, and knew that he would never be able to reward her for her unique and faithful assistance. He was grieved at the same time to see the child so motherless, so utterly without the attention that ennobles. The child’s bright eyes, its outstretched arms hurt him: he feared the feelings slumbering even then in its breast, and was driven away by the thought of what might happen in the future.

One morning in August he arose with the sun, went to the kitchen and got his own breakfast, took his walking stick, and left the house. He wanted to go to Eschenbach on foot.

He walked the entire day, making only very short stops for rest. At noon the heat became intense; he asked a peasant, who chanced to drive up in his hay wagon, if he might ride a little. He had no definite end in view, no plan. Something drew him on; what it was he did not know.

When he finally reached the little town it was late at night; the moon was shining. There was not a soul on the street. The windows of his mother’s house were all dark. He climbed up the steps, and sat down as close to the front door as was physically possible. He imagined he could hear his mother and the child she had in her care breathing.

It seemed so strange to him that his mother knew nothing of his presence. If she had known he was there, she would have unlocked the door and looked at him in astonishment. And if he had not felt like talking, he would have been obliged to lay his head in her lap and weep. Nothing else was possible; he could not speak. And yet the fear lest he talk, lest he be forced to tell everything, took such firm hold on him that he decided to start back home without letting his mother know that he had been there and without having seen either her or the child. The peculiar restlessness that had driven him away from his home and impelled him to go on this unusual journey was silenced as soon as he sat in the shadow of his mother’s little house.

But he was so tired that he soon fell asleep. He dreamed that the child and the old lady were standing before him, that the former had a great bunch of grapes in her hand and the latter a shovel and was shovelling up the earth, her face revealing a soul of sorrows. Eva seemed to him to be much more beautiful than she had been a year ago; he felt drawn to the child by an uncontrollable power and a painful love that stood in a most unusual relation to what his mother was doing. The longer his mother shovelled in the earth the heavier his heart became, but he could not say anything; he felt as if a glorious song were pouring forth from his soul, a song such as he had never heard in his life. Enraptured by its beauty, he woke up. At first he thought he could still hear it, but it was only the splashing of the water in the Wolfram fountain.

The moon was high in the heavens. Daniel went over to the fountain just as the night watchman came along, blew his trumpet and sang: “Listen, all men, I wish to tell that it has struck two from the town-hall bell.” The watchman noticed the lonely man standing by the fountain, was startled at first, but then continued on his rounds, repeating from time to time the words of his official song.

Often as a child Daniel had read the inscription on the base of the Wolfram figure. Now he read the words, irradiated by the light of the moon, and they had a totally different meaning:

Simple words, but Daniel read them in the light of a full experience, dipped his hands in the basin, and rubbed them over his eyes drunk with sleep; then casting one more glance at his mother’s house, he turned in the direction of the road leading away from the town.

Out in the fields it was too damp for him to lie down to rest. Near an isolated farm house he found a hay rick, went up to it, and lay down.

VI

Every time Eleanore looked at Daniel her heart was filled with the same anxiety. She did not understand him; she could not comprehend a single one of his movements. Such joy as she had arose from meditation on the past.

He did not seem to be able to recall her. One word, any word, from him would have relieved her of her anguish; but he spoke to her precisely as he spoke to Philippina or to Frau KÜtt, the woman who came in to do the housework.

It was bad enough to live with Philippina, to feel the incessant hatred of this secretive person; to suspect that she knew things that would not stand the light of day. But to see the child handed over to her, treated by her as though it were her own and guarded by her with a jealousy that made her face wrinkle with rage if Eleanore presumed to stay with it for as much as five minutes, this was infinitely worse.

It was bad enough to have to accept with filial obedience the society of the speechless old father who spent his days and nights in his own mysterious way, striving without peace of any kind to reach an unknown goal. This made it hard for Eleanore. It was spooky in the rooms upstairs, and equally spooky in the ones downstairs. Eleanore dreaded the coming winter. At times she felt that her own voice had an unreal sound, and that her most commonplace remark echoed with the gloom of unhappy premonitions.

She sought refuge in the old pictures of her longings—southern landscapes with groves and statues and a sea of supernatural blue. But she was too mature to find enduring satisfaction in empty dreams; she preferred, and felt it were better, to forget her grief in the distractions of hard work. It was not until the pen fell from her hand, weighed down with distress at the thought of so many unadorned and unrelieved hours, that something drew her back into the realm of spirits and visions. And then it was that she sought support, that she endeavoured to get a footing, in the world of actual objects round about her.

She would take a pear, and think herself, so to speak, into the very heart of this bit of fruit, just as if it were possible to find protection, shelter in so small a space. Or she would take a piece of coloured glass, hold it in her hand, and look at the world of reality about her, hoping that the commonplace would in this way be made to seem more beautiful. Or she looked into the burning fire, and studied, with a smile on her face, the romantic tongues of flames. Or she had a longing to look at old pictures: she went to the Germanic Museum, and spent an entire morning there, standing before a Crucifixion, a Last Supper, her eye and her heart filled with flowing emotion.

Her love for flowers became stronger than ever, and she began to study them. The most of them she picked herself; those that grew only in gardens she bought from the florists, paying very little for them. After she had made several purchases, they refused to take any more money from her; they gave her just as many flowers as she wanted. She took them home, and made bouquets out of them.

One evening she was frightened by Philippina, who came rushing up to her just as she was arranging her flowers and told her that little Agnes had a high fever. Eleanore went out and got the doctor, who immediately reassured her. As she returned, her astonishment was intense and unusual. Reaching the door, her eyes fell on the flowers: they seemed wonderfully beautiful to her; the harmony and play of their colours was so striking that she involuntarily looked around in the illusion that a stranger had called during her absence, brought the flowers, and arranged them in their artistic bouquets.

In the meantime poverty was haunting the house in very tangible form. Neither the butcher nor the baker was willing any longer to deliver goods on credit. It was quite impossible for Eleanore to support five people with her clerical work, to say nothing of keeping them in clothes and paying the rent. However hard she might work, the most she could do was to get enough money for the barest necessities. Her cares multiplied day by day.

She had always been an implacable foe of debts; she would not make them. But after all, the people could not starve, and so she had to contract debts now. Bitter humiliations were unavoidable; she looked into the future with untempered dread. She racked her brain trying to devise plans, deplored her weakness and the gaps in her training, bemoaned the neglect both she and Daniel were suffering, and was quite disturbed to see that Philippina’s heart was filled with joy at the thought that the destitution of the household with its accompanying mental anguish was rapidly increasing.

Twice a day the druggist sent in his bill; finally he came in person. It was along toward evening when he rang. Philippina treated him so impolitely that he became impudent, and made such a noise that the people on the lower floors came out into the hall and leaned over the railing of the stairs. Eleanore ran down and stood before the man with folded hands. Jordan also left his room and looked on, sighing.

Others came in and started trouble. Philippina came up to Eleanore, and, with a smile on her face as if she were going to tell of some great good fortune that had come to the family, said: “There’s another down there, Eleanore; come down and give him a piece of your mind, or I’m thinking he’s going to call the police.”

After quiet had been restored, Philippina began to rage and rant: “Daniel’s a dunderhead. He could live like a Kaiser if he’d mix with the right people. I know a woman who is lousy with money, and she’s going to git a lot more; but Daniel, the poor bloke, ain’t got a ghost of an idea as to how to work people.” She laughed furiously; or, in order to ventilate her spiteful rage, she picked up some object and smashed it to pieces on the floor.

Eleanore did not hear what she had said. Her hope was gone. Daniel had been out of work for three months: who could explain his strange inactivity? The rent would be due in a short while, and then what?

One morning she went to Daniel’s room and said: “Daniel, we are out of money.”

He was sitting at the table reading; he looked at her as if he had to think for a while who she was: “Just have patience,” he said, “you are not going to starve.”

“I am doing all that I possibly can, Daniel,” continued Eleanore; “but tell me, please, how are you planning to keep the house going? I see no way out. Tell me, Daniel, tell me, please, what you are going to do.”

“A musician must be poor, Eleanore,” replied Daniel, and looked at her with eyes that seemed to be frozen.

“But he has got to live, I should think.”

“You can’t live from husks alone, and I am not going to work my head off for husks.”

“Daniel, oh Daniel, where is your mind? And where is your heart?” cried Eleanore in despair.

“Where I should have been long ago,” he replied, without the shadow of a ray of hope. He got up, and turning his face away from Eleanore, said in a half-audible voice: “Let’s have no argument, no cogency, no urgency. Not now! Not now when I am creeping along on the earth with such light as is left me, trying to grope my way out of the hole. A man doesn’t give up the ghost so quickly as all that, Eleanore. The stomach is a very elastic piece of skin.”

He went into the other room, sat down at the piano, and struck a slow-moving bass chord.

Eleanore turned to the wall, and buried her feverish brow in her hands.

VII

It was not in Eleanore’s nature to submit to a misfortune without first having made every possible effort to evade it.

She wrote for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that she had finished all that was asked of her long before her time was really up.

Then she looked around for a better paying position; it was in vain. Women had never been paid well, she had no recommendations, no personal connections, nothing on which she could depend or to which she might refer.

Finally it occurred to her that she might make some money out of her flowers. She went to the florist at St. Lorenz Place, taking with her a garland of carnations and mignonettes she had made the day before. She told the florist she knew a great deal about flowers and had had considerable experience in handling them.

The man laughed at her, and told her he could find no sale for that kind of things, and that, even if he could, he would have to ask so little for them that it would not pay her to make them. Eleanore took her flowers back home; she was profoundly discouraged. She saw herself how perishable flowers were; these withered that same evening. Nothing could be expected from that source.

She had not noticed that, as she left the florist shop, a man on the other side of the street had stopped and looked at her. He was a haggard young individual with a pale, peevish expression on his face, a man with a chin the unimpressiveness of which was hidden behind a Vandyke beard.

He stood for a long while and looked at Eleanore as she walked down the street. There could be no doubt but that something in her general bearing and her face had drawn his attention to her; had awakened in him a feeling that was nobler than mere curiosity or the satisfaction an idler derives from gaping.

The young man finally began to move; he walked rather stiffly across the square and entered the florist’s shop. A few minutes later the florist, a man past middle age, with the typical toper’s nose, threw open his door and removed his cap, actions which in addition to his fawning bow were unmistakable proof to the merchants on either side of him that it was no ordinary sale he had just made. The young man went his way, ambling along in shiftless indifference to where he was or the time of day.

The next morning the florist’s errand boy came to Eleanore, and told her that his chief had something very important to say to her, and that she should come at once. Eleanore followed the call without delay. As she entered the shop, the florist greeted her with unusual politeness, and told her that a man who took a special fancy to the kind of flowers she had shown him the day before had been there and placed an order for two such bouquets, or even three, a week at twenty marks each. He advised her to exercise all diligence in making the flowers and said that when such a rain of good fortune descended upon one it was wise to let other things take care of themselves. The only condition the florist imposed on her was absolute silence. The customer did not wish his name to be known, nor did he wish to be seen. He remarked casually that there was manifestly some whim or crotchet back of the man’s action, such as is so frequently the case with aristocratic people.

Who was happier than Eleanore! She never bothered herself for a minute about the illogical and legendary element in the offer of a man who only a day before had appeared so shrewd and cautious. She drank in every word of the florist’s detailed statement, and merely believed that in this city, among its inhabitants, there was an eccentric fellow who was willing to pay such a princely price for her flowers simply because he liked flowers and was pleased with the way she put them up. Though she had not been spoiled by fortune, the transformation that had suddenly taken place in her circumstances awakened in her not the slightest suspicion or surprise. She was too happy to be distrustful, too grateful to become inquisitive. Her thoughts were on Daniel, who, she felt, was saved. The whole way home she smiled to herself as if lost in dreams.

Evening after evening she sat with the flowers she had gathered in the forenoon from the forests, the meadows, and the gardens out by the city fortress, where an old gardener went with her and picked out the choicest specimens for her. He had a crippled son who fell in love with Eleanore and always stood in the door and smiled at her when she came. He promised he would get her flowers from the green house during the winter.

The butcher was paid, the baker was paid; the druggist was paid, and so was the rent. Philippina shook her head, and swore there was something wrong. She was convinced that it would all come out some day, even if you had to scratch the dung hill to get at the secret. She told the people about a ghost that carried on every night up in the attic; and once when the moon was shining she came running into the room and swore that a bony finger had rapped on the window.

Eleanore bound roses and gilliflowers, tulips and pansies, mosses, ferns, and what-not into beautiful tapestried pictures, or wound them into wreaths and garlands. She gave herself up to this novel occupation with the sacrificial love of a woman of her type; and at times she became dizzy from so much fragrance. But this mattered not. She arranged her flowers; and then she would lean out of the window, and sing gently into the night.

Daniel was ignorant of what she was doing; he had not troubled himself about the distressing poverty of past weeks; he did not concern himself now with their abundance; where it came from he never asked.

VIII

Eberhard von Auffenberg had returned to the city shortly after the death of Gertrude Nothafft. The last large sum he had received from Herr Carovius, now nearly a year ago, he had almost used up. He found Herr Carovius quite changed in his attitude toward him. Herr Carovius declared that he was bankrupt, that he could not get any more money for him. Instead of complaining or boasting, or flattering his princely friend, or trying to incite him to activity of some kind, as he had been accustomed to do, he wrapped himself in a silence that could not be regarded as a favourable omen.

Eberhard had no desire to beg. Herr Carovius’s personality was so disagreeable to him that he refused to investigate the cause of his novel behaviour. He let his thoughts take their own course; and they drifted into other channels.

The gossip afloat concerning Eleanore had naturally reached his ears. Herr Carovius had seen to it that there was no lack of insinuations, either written or oral. But Eberhard had ignored them. Offensive insults that had dared attach themselves to Eleanore seemed to him as incredible as litter from the street on the radiant moon.

One day he had to call on Herr Carovius because of a note that had been protested. They discussed the affair in a dry, business-like way, and then, all of a sudden, Herr Carovius fixed his piercing eyes on the Baron, walked around the table time after time, dressed in his sleeping gown, and told, without the omission of a single detail, of the lamentable death of Daniel Nothafft’s young wife.

He became highly excited; why, it would be hard to say. “Let us hope that the Kapellmeisterette will come to his senses now,” he cried in a falsetto voice. “He is already on the point of starvation; ah, believe me, he is nearly done for. It will be necessary to take up a collection for the unrecognised genius. He has already put one of his women in the grave, the other is still kicking. By the way, how do you like her, the angel? Are you not a bit sorry for the neat little halo that now hangs like a piece of castoff clothing on the bedpost of an adulteress? Of course, geniuses are allowed to do as they please. O Eleanore, bloody lie that you are, you hypocritical soft, sneaking, slimy lie—Eleanore!”

With that Eberhard stepped up very calmly to the unleashed demon in pajamas, seized him by the throat, and held him with such a fierce and unrelenting grip that Herr Carovius sank to his knees, while his face became as blue as a boiled carp. After this he was remarkably quiet; he crept away. At times he tittered like a simpleton; at times a venomous glance shot forth from under his eyelids. But that was all.

Eberhard poured some water in a basin, dipped his hands in it, dried them, and went away.

The picture of the whining man with the puffed and swollen eyes and the blue face was indelibly stamped on Eberhard’s memory. He had felt a greedy, voluptuous desire to commit murder. He felt he was not merely punishing and passing final judgment on his own tormentor and persecutor, but on the hidden enemy of humanity, the arch-criminal of the age, the destroyer of all noble seed.

And yet the exalted outburst of Herr Carovius had precisely the effect that Eberhard had least expected. His confidence in Eleanore’s innocence had been shaken. There may have been in Herr Carovius’s voice, despite the slanderous wrath with which his cowardly tongue was coated, something that sounded truer than the wretch himself suspected. Eberhard saw just then, for the first time in his life, the adored figure of the girl as a human being like all other human beings; and as if through a distant vision he experienced in his heart what had taken place.

His illusions were destroyed.

In his soul he had gone through the trials of renunciation long ago. His passionate wishes of former times had gone through a process of weakening from loss of blood. He had learned to bow to the inevitable; he had made a special effort to acquire this bit of earthly wisdom. When he surveyed the life he had lived in the past five years, it resembled, despite its flux and the incessant change from city to city and country to country, a sojourn in a room with closed doors and drawn shades.

When he had returned to the city, which he loved simply because Eleanore lived in it, he had had no intention of reminding Eleanore of the expiration of the time mutually agreed upon. He felt that it would be a banal display of poor taste to appear before her once again as an awkward, jilted suitor, and try to reconnect the thread where it had been so ruthlessly broken five years ago. He had intended not to disturb her or worry her in any way. But to go to her and speak with her, that had been the one bright ray of hope in all these empty years.

After the scene with Herr Carovius he decided quite firmly to keep away from Eleanore.

His ready cash had shrunk to a few hundred marks. He discharged his servants, disposed of some of his jewelry, and rented one of those little houses that are stuck on the rocks up by the castle like so many wasp nests. The house he took had been occupied before him by the Pfragners, and with its three rooms was not much larger than a fair-sized cage in a menagerie. But he had taken it into his head to live there, and that was all there was to it. He bought some old furniture, and adorned the slanting walls of the dilapidated barracks with such pictures as he had.

One evening there was a knock at the green door of the cottage. Eberhard opened, and saw Herr Carovius standing before him.

Herr Carovius entered the Baron’s doll house, looked around in astonishment, and, pale as a sheet, said: “So help me God, it seems to me you are trying to play the rÔle of a hermit. This won’t do; this is no place for a Baron; I will not stand for it.”

Eberhard reached for the book he had been reading, a volume of Carl du Prel, and read on without replying to Herr Carovius or even taking notice of the fact that he was present.

Herr Carovius tripped from one foot to the other. “Perhaps the Baron will be so good as to take a look at his account,” he said in a beseeching tone. “I am in a tight place. My capital is gone, and my debts in the shape of interest have been swelling like the Pegnitz in the spring of the year. Would you like to know what I have been living on for the last three months? I have been living on turnips, potato peelings, and brick cheese; that has been my daily diet; and I have submitted to it for the sake of my Baron.”

“I am not a bit interested in what you have been eating,” said the Baron arrogantly, and kept on reading.

Herr Carovius continued with an imbecile sulk: “When you left me recently because of that little quarrel we had about the Goose Man, it never occurred to me that you were going to take the matter so seriously. Lovers like to be teased, I thought. He’ll come back, I thought, he’ll come back just as sure as laughter follows tickling. Well, I was mistaken. I thought you were of a more gentle disposition, and that you would be more indulgent with an old friend. Yes, we make mistakes sometimes.”

Eberhard remained silent.

Herr Carovius sighed, and sat down timidly on the narrow edge of the sofa that stood next to the whitewashed wall. He sat there for almost an hour in perfect silence. Eberhard appreciated neither the ridiculous nor the fantastic element in the conduct of his guest. He read on.

And then, all of a sudden, Herr Carovius sprang to his feet, took his wallet from his pocket, drew out a thousand-mark note, and laid it, together with a blank receipt, across the page Eberhard was reading. Before the Baron could recover from his amazement he had already disappeared, closing the door behind him. The sound of his footsteps on the street could be heard in the room; but he was gone.

What rare living creatures there are, O World, and what rare dead ones, too! This is the thought that passed through Eberhard’s mind.

IX

That two men as radically different by nature as Eberhard and Daniel chanced to meet and be drawn together at the very period of their lives when both had voluntarily renounced human society was due to one of those decrees of Providence that contain in them either a law of crystallisation or the attraction of polar forces, however much they may seem to be matters of pure chance.

Their coming together took place on the day after Daniel had gone to Eschenbach. At the break of day, Daniel had decided to return by way of Schwabach, both for the sake of variety and because this was the shorter route. The sun was hotter than on the day before; and when it had reached the height of its ability to dry up the land and scorch a human being, Daniel lay down in the forests. Late in the afternoon, just as he was approaching Schwabach, great black clouds began to gather in the West; a fearful storm was evidently to be expected. Heavy streaks of lightning flashed across the sky; and although Daniel tried to hasten his steps, the storm overtook him. Before he could reach the shelter of a house, he was wet to the skin from head to foot.

The rain came down in torrents. He waited a long while, and then had to start out in it again, arriving finally at the station shivering with cold. As he went to buy his ticket he noticed a lean, haggard, unusual looking individual standing at the ticket window. It is quite probable that, vexed by his uncomfortable condition, Daniel treated him none too courteously; he pushed up against him, whereupon the man turned around, and Daniel recognised the young Baron, Eberhard von Auffenberg. Eberhard in turn recognised Daniel. It is unlikely that there was at that time another face in the world which could belong so completely to just one person as that of Daniel.

The Baron had been attracted to Schwabach by his affection for a certain person there, an affection he had preserved from the days of his childhood. There lived in Schwabach at the time a woman who had been his nurse. Her undivided and resigned love for him was touching. She was as proud of him as she might have been had she been able to say that in him she had been responsible for the childhood training of the noblest specimen of manhood known to human history. And he was fond of her; the stories she told him he could still recall, and he did recall them frequently and with pleasure. She had married the foreman of a tin mill, and had sons and daughters of her own. Eberhard had been planning for years to visit her. This visit had now been paid. But Eberhard could not say that he had derived extraordinary pleasure from it: it had taken an inner figure from his soul. And, on the other hand, whether the nurse felt, on seeing the tall, lank, stiff, and ill-humoured foster son, that enraptured charm she so much liked to conjure up before her imagination, is a question that had better remain unanswered.

When Eberhard became aware of the condition in which Daniel then found himself, his feelings of chivalry were moved. With the dauntless courage of which he was capable, he subdued the apathy he had cherished toward Daniel ever since he first came to know him, and to which actual detestation and disquieting jealousy had been added a few weeks ago. “You have been out in the rain,” said Eberhard courteously, but with a reserve that was rigid if not quite forbidding or impenetrable.

“I look like it, don’t I?” said Daniel with a scowl.

“You will catch cold if you are not careful. May I offer you my top coat?” continued Eberhard more courteously. He felt as if he could see the figure of Eleanore rising up behind Daniel, that she was quite surrounded by flowers, and that she was smiling at him in joy and gratitude. He bit his lips and blushed.

Daniel shook his head: “I am accustomed to all kinds of weather. Thank you.”

“Well, then, at least wrap this around your neck; the water is running down your back.” Thereupon Eberhard reached him a white silk kerchief he drew from the pocket of his coat. Daniel make a wry face, but took the kerchief, threw it about his neck, and tied it in a knot under his chin.

“You are right,” he admitted, and drew his head down between his shoulders: “It all reminds me of a good warm bed.”

Eberhard stared at the locomotive of the in-coming train. “Plebeian,” he thought, with inner contempt.

Nevertheless he joined this same plebeian in the third-class carriage, though he had bought a ticket for first class. Was it the white silk kerchief that so suddenly attracted him to the plebeian? What else could it have been? For during the entire journey they sat opposite each other in absolute silence. It was a remarkable pair: the one in a shabby, wet suit with a hat that looked partly as though it belonged to a cheap sign painter, and partly as though it were the sole head gear of a gypsy bard, and with a big pair of spectacles from which the eyes flashed green and unsteady; the other looking as though he had just stepped out of a bandbox, not a particle of dust on his clothing, in patent leather slippers, English straw hat, and with an American cigarette in his mouth.

Next to them sat a peasant woman with a chicken basket on her lap, a red-headed girl who held the hind part of pig on her knees, and a workman whose face was bandaged.

At times they looked at each other. If they chanced to catch each other’s eye, the Baron would at once look down, and Daniel, bored as he was, would gaze out of the window at the rain. But there must have been something unusually communicative and mutually intelligent in the few glances with which they involuntarily honoured each other during the journey; for when the train pulled into the station, they left together, and walked along the street quite peacefully, side by side, just as if it were to be taken as a matter of fact that they would remain in each other’s company.

Man is a gregarious animal; given the right conditions, one man will seek out the company of another. Neither defiance nor reserve is of the slightest avail; there is something that conquers the strongest man when he finds another who will yield. Then it is that what was formerly regarded as contentment with loneliness is unmasked and shown to be nothing more than ordinary self-deception.

“I presume you wish to go home and change your clothes,” said Eberhard, standing on the street corner.

“I am already dry,” said Daniel, “and I really have no desire to go home. Over there on SchÜtt Island is a little inn called the Peter Vischer. I like it because it is frequented only by old people who talk about old times, and because it is situated on a bridge, so that you have the feeling you are in a ship floating around on the water.”

Eberhard went along. From eight o’clock till midnight they sat there opposite each other. Their conversation was limited to such remarks as, “It is really quite comfortable here.”—“It seems to have stopped raining.”—“Yes, it has stopped.”—“That old white-bearded man over by the stove who is doing so much talking is a watchmaker from Unschlitt Place.”—“So? He looks pretty husky.”—“He is said to have fought in the battle of WÖrth.”—And so their remarks ran.

When they separated, Eberhard knew that Daniel would again be at the Peter Vischer on Wednesday of the following week, and Daniel knew that he would find the Baron there.

X

Philippina was on her knees by the hearth, cleaning out the ashes; Eleanore was sitting by the kitchen table, adding up the week’s expenses in a narrow note-book.

“You ought-a git married, Eleanore,” said Philippina, as she blew on a hot coal, “’deed you ought; it’s the right time for you.”

“Ah, leave me alone,” said Eleanore angrily.

Philippina crouched still lower on the hearth: “I mean well by you, I do,” she said. “You’re simply killing yourself here. With your white skin and sugary eyes—uhm, uhm! You bet if I had ’em like yours I’d git one. Men are all as dumb as shoats outside of a sty.”

“Keep quiet,” said Eleanore, and went on counting: “Seven from fifteen leaves eight....”

“An angel has made your bed,” interrupted Philippina with a giggle. “I know a fellow,” she went on, her face becoming rather sour, “he’s just the right one. Money? whew! He’s stuck on you too, believe me! If I wuz to go to him and say, Eleanore Jordan is willing, I believe the old codger would give me a bag of gold. Cross my heart, Eleanore, and he’s a fine man too. He can play the piano just as good as Daniel, if not better. When he plays you can see the sparks fly.”

Eleanore got up, and closed the book. “Do you want me to give you a present for finding me a man, Philippina?” she asked, with a sympathetic smile. “And you are trying to sound me? Go on, you fool.”

“Come wind and blow my fire hot, so that my soup be not forgot,” whispered Philippina with a gloomy face.

Eleanore left the kitchen and went upstairs. Her heart was full of longing; it was in truth almost bursting with longing.

It was at the beginning of October that Daniel for the first time visited Eberhard in his doll house up by the castle.

They had met each other in the Peter Vischer on the evening agreed upon, but there was a special party there that evening, a sort of a clam-bake; the place was crowded; the noise was disagreeable, so that they left much earlier than they had intended.

They walked along in silence until they reached the Town Hall, when Eberhard said: “Won’t you come up and sit awhile with me?” Daniel nodded.

Eberhard lighted the six candles of a chandelier in his diminutive room. Seeing that Daniel was surprised, he said: “There is nothing I hate worse than gas or oil. That is light; gas and oil merely give off illuminated stench.”

For a while there was complete silence in the room; Daniel had stretched out on the sofa.

“Illuminated stench,” he repeated with a smile of satisfaction. “That is not bad; it is the new age in which we are living. I believe they call it fin de siÈcle. The day when things flourish is gone; everything has to be manufactured now. Men have become Americans, gruesomely sobered by the intoxication of doing a big business; women have lost their nicety of instinct; the cities have become colossal steam engines; everybody, young and old, is on his belly adoring the so-called wonders of science, just as if it really meant anything to humanity that a loafer in Paris can sip his morning coffee and crunch his rolls while reading that the Pope spent a restful night, or that a gun has been invented which will send a bullet through fourteen people one after another, whereas the best record up to the present had been only seven to a shot. Who can create anything, who can draw anything from his soul under such conditions? It is madness, it is immoral discipline.”

“Oh, I don’t know; I think a man can draw something from within his soul,” said the Baron, in whose face a bored, peeved expression gave way to one of suspense. “It is possible, for example, to conjure the invisible spirit into visibility.”

Daniel, who had not yet suspected that the Baron was, in a way, speaking from another country and in a strange tongue, continued: “The whole supply of interest and enthusiasm at the disposal of the nation has been used up. The venerable creations of days gone by still have nominal value; that is, they are still gaped at and praised, but creative, reproductive, and moulding power they no longer have. Otherwise hocus-pocus alone prospers, and he who does forgive it is not forgiven. But life is short; I feel it every day; and if you do not attend to the plant, it soon withers and dies.”

“It is not only hocus-pocus,” replied Eberhard, who was now completely transformed, though he did not grasp the painful indignation of the musician. “You see, I have associated but very little with men. My refuge has been the realm of departed and invisible spirits who take on visible form only when a believing soul makes an unaffected appeal to them. It was my task to de-sensualise and de-materialise myself; then the spirits took on shape and form.”

Daniel straightened up, and saw how pale the Baron had become. It seemed to him that they were both quite close together, and at the same time poles removed from each other. He could not refrain however from taking up the thread of his thought. “Yes, yes,” he exclaimed with the same short, jerky laugh that accompanied the beginning of the conversation, “my little spirits also demand faith, credulity, and whine and cry for form and shape. You have expressed yourself in an admirable way, Baron.”

“And have you given up in final resignation with regard to your spirits?” asked Eberhard, in a serious tone.

“Resignation? To what? Of what? Do you imagine that is necessary in my case? I am the counterpart of Cronos. My children devour me; they devour my living body. I conjure up spirits and endow them with flesh and blood, and in return for what I do they convert me into a shadow. They are rebellious fellows, I tell you, quite without mercy. I am supposed to arouse a citizenry on their behalf that is petrified with indifference. The very thing, or things, that offend and disgust me, I am supposed to take up and carry about on an unencumbered shoulder. I am supposed to be their prostitute and offer them my body at a price. I am supposed to be their retail grocer and haggle in their behalf. There is something inspiring about a struggle, and when the enemy is worthy of one’s steel there is a distinct pleasure in entering the fray. But my little spirits want to be pampered and have a lot of attention paid them. The hate, consequently, that is being dammed up within me is possibly nothing but rage at my fruitless wooing. No, mine is not an honest hate, because I long to get at every ragged beggar who will have nothing to do with my spirits, because my entire life consists in pleading for an audience with people who do not care to listen, and scraping together pennies of love from people who cannot love, because two or three are not enough for me, because I must have thousands and am nothing if I don’t have thousands, and pine away in anguish and distress if I cannot imagine that the whole world is keeping step with my pace and keeping in time with the swing of my baton. I can despise Mushroom Mike who lies down by his wife at night drunk as a fool, and to whom the name of Beethoven is an empty sound; Jason Philip Schimmelweis makes me laugh when he looks me in the face and says, I don’t give a damn for all your art. And yet there is humanity in such people, and so long as this is true I must have them; I must convince them, even if my heart is torn from my breast in the attempt. Would you call this life? This digging-up of corpses from the graves, and breathing the breath of life into them so that they may dance? And doing it with the consciousness that this moment is the only one? I am; I exist; here is the table, there are the wax candles, and over there sits a man; and when I have stopped talking everything is different, everything is as if a year had passed by, and everything is irrevocable. Show me a way to humanity, to men, and then I will believe in God.”

The Baron’s head swam; his brain felt close; it seemed to be sultry, stuffy in his skull. He could not help but think of certain exciting meetings where the people had sat in the dark in trembling expectancy and then suddenly heard a voice from beyond the tomb at the sound of which the marrow froze in their bones. He hardly dared look at the place where Daniel was sitting. The words of the musician caused him infinite pain: there lay in them a greediness, a shamelessness, and a gruesomeness that filled him with terror.

He could almost have asked: And Eleanore? And Eleanore?

But however much he felt repelled, owing to his training, association, and general views of life, there was nevertheless something about the whole situation before which he bowed. He could not have said precisely what it was, but it seemed to be a compromise between fear and convulsion.

As he was pondering over it all, he heard a rattling at the window. He looked up, and saw the face of Herr Carovius pressed so tightly against the pane that his nose was as flat as a pancake, while his glasses looked like two opalescent grease spots on the water.

Daniel also looked up; he too saw the face of Herr Carovius, then distorted with wrath and filled with threats. He looked at the Baron in amazement; the latter got up and said: “You will have to pardon the annoyance; I forgot to draw the blinds.”

With that he went to the window, and pulled down the dark shade over the face of Herr Carovius.

XII

That same night, just as Daniel was crossing the hall of his apartment, he detected a strong scent of flowers. He had smelt them before, but they had never seemed to be so fragrant as at present. Because of the season of the year, the sensation was all the more pronounced and unusual.

He sniffed around for a while, and then saw that the door to Eleanore’s room was open: her light was shining out on the stairs.

When Daniel was not at home of an evening, Eleanore always kept her door open so that she could hear when he came in. Daniel was unaware of this; he had never seen the light on any previous night.

He thought for a moment, then locked the door, and went up the stairs. But Eleanore must have heard his approaching footsteps; for she stepped hastily out into the vestibule, and said with evident embarrassment: “Please stay downstairs, Daniel; Father is asleep. If you wish I will come down to the living room.”

She did not wait for his answer, but went into her room, got the table lamp, and followed Daniel to the living room. Daniel closed the window, and shook as if he were cold; for it was a cool night, and there was no fire in the stove.

“What is this I smell?” he asked. “Have you so many flowers up in your room?”

“Yes, I have some flowers,” replied Eleanore, and blushed.

He looked at her rather sharply, but was disinclined to make any further inquiry, or he was not interested in knowing what this all meant. He walked around the room with his hands in his pockets.

Eleanore had sat down on a chair; she never once took her eyes off Daniel.

“Listen, Daniel,” she said suddenly, and the violin tone of her voice lifted him from his mute and heavy meditations, “I know now what Father is doing.”

“Well, what is the old man doing?” asked Daniel distractedly.

“He is working at a doll, Daniel.”

“At a doll? Are you trying to poke fun at me?”

Eleanore, whose cheeks had turned pale, began to tell her story: “Yesterday afternoon, Father took advantage of the beautiful weather, and went on a walk for the first time in a long while. During his absence, I went to his room to straighten it up a little. I noticed that the door to the large cabinet was not closed as usual, but was standing ajar. He probably forgot to lock it. I did not suspect anything, and knew that there was no harm in what I was going to do, so I opened the door, and what did I see? A big doll, about the size of a four-year-old child, a wax figure with big eyes and long, yellow hair. But there were no clothes on it: the lower part of the back and the front from the neck to the legs had been removed. Inside, there where a person’s heart and entrails are, was a network of wheels and screws and little tubes and wires, all made of real metal.”

“That is strange, really strange. Well?”

“He is making something,” continued Eleanore, “that much is clear. But if I could tell you how I felt when I saw the thing! I never felt so sad in my life. I have shown him so little love, just as Fate has been so unlovely to him. And everything—the air and the light and the people and how one feels towards the people and how they feel towards you, all seemed to me to be so hopelessly without love that I could not help it: I just sat down before that doll and cried. The poor man! The poor old man!”

“Strange, really strange,” repeated Daniel.

After a while, as if conscious of his guilt, he took a seat by the table. Eleanore however got up, went to the window, and leaned her forehead against the glass.

“Come here to me, Eleanore,” said Daniel in a changed tone of voice.

She came. He took her hand and looked into her face. “How in the world have you been keeping the house going all this time?” he asked, viewing the situation in the light of his guilty conscience.

Eleanore let her eyes fall to the floor. “I have done my writing, and I have had considerable success with the flowers. I have even been able to save a little money. Don’t look at me like that, Daniel. It was nothing wonderful I did; you have no reason to feel especially grateful to me.”

He drew her down on his knees, and threw his arms around her shoulders. “You probably think I have forgotten you,” he said sorrowfully, and looked up, “that I have forgotten my Eleanore. Forget my Eleanore? My spirit sister? No, no, dear heart, you have known for a long while that we have begun our common pilgrimage—for life, for death.”

Eleanore lay in his arms; her face was perfectly white; her body was rigid; her eyes were closed.

Daniel kissed her eyes: “You must hold me, keep me, even when it seems that I have left you,” he murmured.

Then he carried her in his arms through the door into his room.

“I have so longed, I have been so full of longing,” she said, pressing her lips to his neck.

XIII

Before one could realise it, winter had come, and the Place with the Church was covered with snow.

Eleanore had gone skating; when she returned she sat down in the living room to wait for Daniel. There she sat with her fur cap on her head, holding her skates in her hand by the cord: she was tired—and she was thinking.

Daniel entered the room and greeted her; she looked up, and said with a gentle voice: “I am with child, Daniel; I found it out to-day.”

He fell on his knees, and kissed the tips of her fingers. Eleanore drew a deep breath; a smile of dream-like cheerfulness spread over her face.

The following day Daniel went to the Town Hall, and made arrangements to have the banns posted.

Hardly had Philippina heard that Daniel and Eleanore were to get married in February when she disappeared; she did not leave a trace of her whereabouts behind her. Little Agnes cried in vain for her “Pina.” Six days after Philippina had left, she came back just as mysteriously as she had gone away. She was desperately gloomy; her hair was towsled, her clothes were wrinkled, there were no soles on her shoes; she was as speechless as a clod, and remained so for weeks.

No one knew, nor has any one ever found out, what she did during those six days or where she had been.

Eleanore insisted on a church wedding; this caused Daniel a great deal of worry; it made him run many a vexatious errand. But he consented to do as Eleanore had asked; for he did not wish to deprive her of any pleasure she might imagine such a ceremony would give her. Eleanore made her own white dress and her veil. Gisela Degen, a younger sister of Martha RÜbsam, and Elsa Schneider, the daughter of the rector of the Church of St. Ægydius, were to be her bridesmaids. Marian Nothafft and Eva were also to come over from Eschenbach; Eleanore had already sent them the money for the tickets.

“Help me with my sewing, Philippina,” said Eleanore one evening, and handed her silent house companion the veil, the border of which had to be made.

Philippina took her seat opposite Eleanore, and began to sew; she was silent. In the meanwhile, little Agnes, tottering about on the floor, fell and began to cry in a most pitiable fashion. Eleanore hastened over and picked the child up. Just then she heard a sound as if cloth were being torn. She looked around, and saw that the veil had an ugly rip in it: “You wicked thing! What do you mean, Philippina?” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t do it; it tore itself,” growled Philippina, taking every precaution to see that Eleanore might not catch her cowardly eye.

“You just leave that alone! Keep your hands off of it! You will sew evil thoughts into my veil,” replied Eleanore, filled with forebodings.

Philippina got up. “Well, it’s torn anyway, the veil,” she said in a defiant tone; “if harm is to come it will come; you can’t keep it off by sending me away.” Philippina left the room.

The injury to the veil was not as great as Eleanore had feared. It was a relatively easy matter to cut off the torn piece entirely, and still use the remainder.

But from that hour Eleanore was filled with sadness: her face might be compared to a beautiful landscape on which the first fog of autumn has settled. It is probable that the tearing of her veil had nothing to do with her depression: there was not a shimmer of superstition in her. Perhaps it was merely happiness and fulfilment: it may be that she felt the end had come, that happiness and fulfilment leave nothing more to be desired, that life from then on would be nothing but a hum-drum existence which does not give but only takes.

Perhaps her mind was darkened and weighed down with grief because of the life within her body; for that which is to come sends out its rays of melancholy just as well as that which has come and gone. What was there to hinder a pure soul from having an inner premonition of the fate that was in store for it? Why should this soul not learn in its dreams of the inevitable that was not so far ahead?

It was impossible to notice any change in Eleanore; her eyes were bright; she seemed peaceful. She would often sit before the mask of Zingarella; she hung it with fresh flowers every day: to her the mask was a mysterious picture of all that her own being, her own life, embraced.

Marian Nothafft came to the wedding alone. Just as in the case of Daniel’s wedding to Gertrude, she had left the child with a neighbour. She told Daniel and Eleanore that she could not think of taking the child out on such a journey in the dead of winter. She mentioned Eva’s name or talked about her only in a half audible, subdued voice, a tender smile playing gently about her lips.

Among those present at the wedding in the Ægydius Church were Judge and Frau RÜbsam, Councillor Bock, Impresario DÖrmaul, Philippina Schimmelweis, Marian Nothafft, and Inspector Jordan. On the very last bench sat Herr Carovius; underneath one of the pillars, unseen by most of the people in the church, stood Baron Eberhard von Auffenberg.

Philippina walked along in an ugly, crouched, cowering fashion by the side of Jordan; had it not been that she was constantly chewing her finger nails, one would have thought she was asleep.

As the bridal couple was marching up to the altar, the sun broke out, and shone through the windows of the old church. The effect was touching; for just then Eleanore raised her head, stroked her veil back from her forehead, and caught the full light of the sun in her radiant face.

Old Jordan had laid his forehead on the prayer-desk; his back was quivering.

XIV

Late at night and in senseless excitement—for he was thinking of a bridal bed that filled him with the most intense pangs of jealousy—Herr Carovius sat in his room playing Chopin’s Étude of the revolution. He would begin it again and again; he struck the keys with ever-increasing violence; the time in which he played the Étude became wilder and wilder; the swing of his gestures became more and more eloquent; and his face became more and more threatening.

He was squaring accounts with the woman he had been unable to bring before his Neronic tribunal in bodily form; and all the pent-up hatred in his heart for the musician Nothafft he was emptying into the music of another man. The envy of the man doomed to limit his display of talent to the appreciation of what another had created laid violent hands on the creator; the impotence of the taster was infuriated at the cook. It was as if a flunked and floored comedian had gone out into the woods to declaim his part with nothing but the echo of his own voice to answer back.

His hatred of things in general, of the customs of human society, of order and prosperity, of state and family, of love and marriage, of man and woman, had burst out into lurid flames. It was rare that a man had so cut, slashed, and vilified himself as did this depatriated citizen while playing the piano. He converted music into an orgy, a debauch, a debasing crime.

“Enough!” he bellowed, as he closed with an ear-splitting discord. He shut the piano with a vituperative bang, and threw himself into a rickety leather chair.

What his inner eye saw mocks at language and defies human speech. He was in that house over there; it lay in his power to murder his rival; he could abuse the woman who had been denied him by the wily tricks of circumstances; he chastised her; he dragged her from her bed of pleasure by the hair. He feasted on her sense of shame and on the angry twitchings of the musician, tied, bound, and gagged. He spared them no word of calumniation. The whole city stood before his court, and listened to the sentence he passed. Everybody stood in awe of him.

Thus it is that the citizen of the moral stature of Herr Carovius satisfies his thirst for revenge. Thus does the Nero of our time punish the crimes mankind commits against him in that it creates pleasures and enjoyments of which he is not in a position to partake.

But because he felt more abandoned to-day than ever, and more fearful in his abandonment, and because he felt so keenly the injustice done him by the man on whom he had hung for years with dog-like fidelity, and who avoided him to-day as one avoids an old dog that is no longer fit for anything, he decided in the depths of his embittered soul to avenge himself, and to do it by a means that would be quite different from playing the piano in accordance with the rules of his own perverted fancy.

With this decision in mind he sought sleep—at last.

XV

Jordan was now living all alone in the two attic rooms. He had asked of his own will that he be permitted to take over the clerical work Eleanore had been doing, and her employers had agreed to this arrangement. He was consequently enabled to pay the rent and a little on his board.

Daniel and Eleanore slept in the corner room in the front. Daniel moved his piano into the living room, and did all his work there. Philippina and Agnes remained in the room next to the kitchen.

Eleanore still made the bouquets, and still received the fancy price for them from the unknown purchaser. But she did not attend to her flowers in Daniel’s presence, or even near him; she did this in the old room up next to the roof.

Her father would sit by her, and look at her thoughtfully. She had the feeling that he knew of everything that had taken place between her and Gertrude and Daniel, but, out of infinite delicacy and modesty, and also in grief and pain, had never said a word about it. For previous to her marriage with Daniel, he had never been with her; he had never sat and looked at her so attentively; he had always passed by her in great haste, and had always shown an inclination to be alone.

She had the feeling that he knew a great deal in general about men and things, but rarely said anything because of his superior sense of gentleness and compassion.

Daniel lived about as he did before the wedding. He would sit at the table until late at night and write. It often happened that Eleanore would find him sitting there with his pen in his hand, sound asleep, when she got up early in the morning. She always smiled when this took place, and wakened him by kissing him on the forehead.

He wrote the notes direct from his memory, from his head, just as other people write letters. He no longer needed an instrument to try what he had composed or to give him an inspiration for a new theme.

Once he showed Eleanore eighteen variations of the same melody. He had spent the whole night making changes in a single composition. Eleanore’s heart was heavy: she came very nearly asking, “For whom, Daniel? For what? The trunk up in the attic?”

She slowly began to perceive that it is not brooding reason that climbs and conquers the steps of perfection, but moral will. Like a flash of lightning she recognised one day the demoniacal element in this impulse, an impulse she had been accustomed to ascribe to his everlasting fidgeting, fumbling, and grumbling. She shuddered at the hitherto unsuspected distress of the man, and took pity on him: he was burying himself in darkness in order to give the world more light.

The world? What did it know about the creations of her Daniel! The big trunk was full of opus upon opus, and not a soul troubled itself about all these musical treasures resting in a single coffin.

There was something wrong here, she thought. There must be a lost or broken wheel in the clock-work of time; there was some disease among men; some poison, some evil, some heinous oversight.

She could think of nothing else. One day she decided to visit old Herold. At first he acted as though he would chew her to pieces, but afterwards he became more civil, at least civil enough to listen to her. Her features were remarkably brilliant and agile as she spoke. He expressed himself as follows later on: “If some one had promised me eternal blessedness on condition that I forget the picture of this pregnant woman, as she stood before me and argued the case of Daniel Nothafft vs. The Public, I would have been obliged to forego the offer, for I could never have fulfilled my part of the agreement. Forget her? Who would demand the impossible?”

Old Herold begged her to send him one of Daniel’s latest compositions, if she could. She said she would, and the next morning she took from the trunk the quartette in B minor for strings, and carried it over to the professor. He laid the score before him, and began to read. Eleanore took a seat, and patiently studied the many little painted pictures that hung on the wall.

The hour was up. The white-haired man turned the last leaf and struck his clenched fist on the paper, while around his leonine mouth there was a play partly of wrath and partly of awe. He said: “The case will be placed on the calendar, you worthiest of all Eleanores, but I am no longer the herald.”

He walked back and forth, wrung his hands, and cried: “What structure! What colourful tones! What a wealth of melody, rhythm, and originality! What discipline, sweetness, power! What a splendid fellow he is! And to think that a man like that lives right here among us, and plagues and tortures himself! A disgrace and a shame it is! Come, my dear woman, we will go to him at once. I want to press him to my bosom....”

But Eleanore, whose face burned with the feeling of good fortune, interrupted him, and said: “If you do that, you will spoil everything. It will be much better to tell me what to do. He will become more and more obstinate and bitter, if some ray of light does not soon fall on what he has thus far created.”

The old man thought for a while: “You leave the score with me; I’ll see what I can do with it; I have an idea,” he replied, after a short time had elapsed.

Eleanore went back home full of hope.

The quartette was sent to Berlin, and placed in the hands of a man of influence and discrimination. Some professional musicians soon became acquainted with it and its merits. Professor Herold received a number of enthusiastic letters, and answered them with characteristic and becoming shrewdness. A cycle of sagas was soon afloat in Berlin concerning the habits and personality of the unknown master. It was said that he was an anchorite who lived in the Franconian forests and preached renunciation of all earthly pleasures.

In Leipzig the quartette was played before an invited audience. The applause was quite different from what it ordinarily was in the case of a public that is surfeited with musical novelties.

Thereby Daniel finally learned what had been done. One day he received a letter from the man who had arranged the concert, a certain Herr LÖwenberg. The letter closed as follows: “A community of admirers is anxious to come into possession of your compositions. They send you their greetings at present with cordial gratitude.”

Daniel could scarcely believe his own eyes; it was like magic. Without saying a word he handed the letter to Eleanore. She read it, and looked at him quietly.

“Yes, I am guilty,” she said, “I stole the quartette.”

“Is that so? Do you realise, Eleanore, what you have done to me?”

Eleanore’s face coloured with surprise and fear.

“You ought to know; probably in the future you will lose interest in such womanish wiles.”

He walked back and forth, and then stepped up very close to her: “You probably think I am an idiotic simpleton, a dullard. You seem to feel that I am one of those rustic imbeciles, who has had his fingers frozen once, and spends his days thereafter sitting behind the stove, grunting and shaking every time anybody says weather to him. Well, you are wrong. There was a period when I felt more or less like that, but that time is no more.”

He started to walk back and forth again; again he stopped: “It is not because I think they are too good, nor is it because I am too inert or cowardly, that I keep my compositions under lock and key. I would have to have wheels in my head if I did not have sense enough to know that the effect of a piece is just as much a part of it as heat is a part of fire. Those people who claim that they can quite dispense with recognition and success are liars and that only. What I have created is no longer my property: it longs to reach the world; it is a part of the world; and I must give it to the world, provided, do you hear? provided it is a living thing.”

“Well then, Daniel,” said Eleanore, somewhat relieved.

“That is where the trouble lies,” he continued, as though he had never been interrupted, “it all depends on whether the piece has life, reality, the essence of true being in it. What is the use of feeding people with unripe or half-baked stuff? They have far too much of that already. There are too many who try and even can, but what they create lacks the evidence that high heaven insisted on its being created: there is no divine must about it. My imperfect creations would merely serve as so many stumbling blocks to my perfect ones. If a man has once been seduced by the public and its applause, so that he is satisfied with what is only half perfect, his ear grows deaf, his soul blind before he knows it, and he is the devil’s prey forever. It is an easy matter to make a false step, but there is no such thing as turning back with corrective pace. It cannot be done; for however numerous the possibilities may be, the actual deed is a one-time affair. And however fructifying encouragement from without may be, its effects are in the end murderous if it is allowed to drown out conscience. What I have created in all these years is good enough so far as it goes, but it is merely the preparatory drill to the really great work that is hovering before my mind. It is possible that I flatter myself; it may be that I am being cajoled by fraud and led on by visions; but it is in me, I feel certain of it, and it must come to light. Then we shall see what sort of creature it is. Then all my previous works will have ceased to exist; then I will bestir myself in a public way; I will come out and be the man that I really am. You can depend on it.”

Daniel had never talked to Eleanore in this way before. As she looked at him, overcome almost by the passion of his words, and saw him standing there so utterly fearless, so unyielding and unpitying, her breast heaved with a sigh, and she said: “God grant that you succeed, and that you live to enjoy the fruits of your ambition.”

“It is all a matter of fate, Eleanore,” he replied.

He demanded the quartette; it was sent back to him.

From then on Eleanore suppressed even the slightest sense of discontent that arose in her heart. She felt that he needed cruelty and harshness for his small life in order to preserve love and patience for the great life.

Yes, she prayed to Heaven that she might leave him harsh and cruel.

XVI

“Eleanore is my wife,” said Daniel every now and then; he would even stop in the middle of the street in order to enjoy to the full, and preserve if possible, the blessed realisation of this fact.

He always knew it. Yet when he was with Eleanore he frequently forgot her presence. There were days when he would pass by her as though she were some chance acquaintance.

Then there were other days when his happiness made him sceptical; he would say: “Is it then really happiness? Am I happy? If so, why is it that I do not feel my happiness more fervently, terribly?”

He would frequently study her form, her hands, her walk, and wish that he had new eyes, so that he might see her anew. He went away merely in order that he might see her better. In the night he would take a candle, and go up to her bed: a gentle anguish seemed to disappear from her features, his own pulse beat more rapidly. This was caused by the flame-blue of her eyes.

There is a point where the most demure and chaste woman differs in no wise from a prostitute. This is the source of infinite grief to the man who loves. No woman suspects or can understand it.

It was one day while he was brooding and musing and quarrelling without definite reason, in the arms of his beloved, that the profound, melancholy motif in the first movement of his symphony in D minor came to him. This symphony gradually grew into the great vision of his life, and, many years later, one of his women admirers gave it the modifying title of Promethean. The first time the theme sounded in his ears he roared like a wild beast, but with joy. It seemed to him that music was really born at that moment.

He pressed Eleanore so tightly to his bosom that she could not breathe, and murmured between his teeth: “There is no choice left: we have got to remain lifeless and irresponsive to each other’s presence or wound one another with love.”

“The mask, the mask,” whispered Eleanore anxiously, and pointed over to the corner from which the mask of Zingarella, with the dim light falling on it, shone forth like the weirdly beautiful face of a spectre.

Philippina stood before the door, and listened to what they were saying. She had caught a rat, killed it, and laid the cadaver in the door. The next morning, as Eleanore was going into the kitchen, she saw the dead rat, screamed, and went back to her room trembling with fright.

Daniel stroked her hair, and said: “Don’t worry, Eleanore. Rats belong to married life just as truly as salty soup, broken dishes, and holes in the stockings.”

“Now listen, Daniel, is that meant as a reproach?” she asked.

“No, my dear, it is not a reproach; it is merely a picture of the world. You have the soul of a princess; you know nothing about rats. Look at those black, staring, pearly eyes: they remind me of Jason Philip Schimmelweis and Alfons Diruf and Alexander DÖrmaul; they remind me of the reserved table, the Kaffeeklatsch, smelly feet, evenings at the club, and everything else that is unappetising, vulgar, and base. Don’t look at me in such astonishment, Eleanore, I have just had an ugly dream; that is all. I dreamt that a miserable-looking wretch came up to me and kept asking me what your name is, and I couldn’t tell him. Just think of it: I could not recall your name. It was terribly annoying. Farewell, farewell.”

He had put on his hat and left. He ran out in the direction of Feucht, and stayed the entire day in the open fields without taking a single bit of nourishment except a piece of black bread and a glass of milk. But when he returned in the evening his pockets were bulging with notes he had jotted down while out there by himself.

He came back by way of the Castle, and knocked at Eberhard’s door. Since there was no one at home, he sauntered around for a while along the old rampart, and then returned about nine o’clock. But the windows were still dark.

He had not seen Eberhard for two months. He could still recall the Baron’s depression and worry the last time he had talked with him—it was toward the end of March: he had spoken very little at that time and had gazed into space with remarkably lifeless eyes. He gave the impression of a man who is on the point of doing something quite out of the ordinary if not distinctly terrible.

Daniel did not become aware of this until now; the Baron’s troubles, whatever they were, had not occurred to him during the past weeks; he was sorry for having neglected him so.

XVII

When he came home Eleanore was suffering from premature birth pains. Philippina greeted him with the words: “There is going to be an increase in the family, Daniel.” Whereat she burst out in a coarse laugh.

“Shut up, you beast,” cried Daniel: “How long has she been suffering? Why didn’t you get the nurse?”

“Can I leave the child here alone? Don’t growl so!” replied Philippina angrily. She went out for the nurse. In a half an hour she came back with her: it was Frau Hadebusch.

Daniel had a disagreeable feeling. He wanted to raise some questions and make some objections, but Frau Hadebusch’s nimble tongue anticipated him. She grinned, curtsied, rolled her eyes, and went through the entire category of acquired mannerisms on the part of a woman of her type, and then unloaded her life history: Her duly wedded husband had said farewell to this vale of tears three years ago, and since then she had been supporting, as well as she could, herself and her poor Henry, the idiot, by hiring out as a midwife. She seemed already to have come to an understanding with Eleanore, for when she entered the room, Eleanore greeted her as though she were an old acquaintance.

While Daniel was alone with Eleanore for a few minutes, he asked her in an indignant tone: “How did you ever come to get that vicious woman?”

Eleanore replied in a gentle and unsuspecting tone: “She came to me one day, and asked to be called in when the child was born. She said she was awfully fond of you, and that you had once lived in her house. Well, I thought, what difference does it make who comes, so I engaged her, and there she is.”

It was only with the greatest difficulty that she finished saying what was on her mind. Her face, white as a sheet, was pinched with an expression of terrific pain. She reached for Daniel’s hand, and held it so tightly that he became rigid with anxiety.

When she began to groan, Daniel turned away and pressed his fists together. Frau Hadebusch came in with a tub of hot water: “This is no place for men,” she exclaimed with a kindly twisting of her face, took Daniel by the shoulder, and pushed him out the door.

Little Agnes was standing in the hall. “Father,” she said.

“Put that child to bed!” said Daniel, turning to Philippina.

Jordan came out of the kitchen. He held an earthen bowl of soup in his hand. It had been saved for him, and all he had to do was to hold it over the fire and heat it up. He went up to Daniel, and said, as his chin quivered: “May God protect her, and be merciful to her!”

“Quit that kind of talk, Father,” said Daniel impatiently. “God rules with reservations that make me insane.”

“Won’t you say good-night to little Agnes?” asked Philippina in a rude, rough tone from the other room.

He went in; the child looked at him timidly. The more it grew, the greater his own shyness became in its presence. And the constant association of Eleanore with the child had always been a source of worry to him. There was one thing of which he was mortally certain: he could not see Eleanore in bodily form and precisely as she was, when Agnes, with her Gertrude eyes and her arched Eleanore mouth, was present in the room with Eleanore. He felt that Eleanore had been transformed into the sister of Agnes, that she was still only a sister. And this he felt was something fatal.

Both of the sisters looked at him out of Agnes’s big childish eyes; in her they were both melted and moulded into a single being. A presageful horror crept over him. Sisters! The word had a solemn sound in his ears; it seemed full of mysterious meaning; it took on mythical greatness.

“Sleep, baby, sleep, outside are two sheep, a black one and a white one...” sang Philippina in her imbecile way. It was astonishing the amount of malevolence there was in her sing-song.

Daniel could not stand it in the house; he went out on the street, and wandered around until midnight. If he made up his mind to go home, the thought occurred to him at once that Frau Hadebusch would prevent him from going into Eleanore’s room. He felt like lying down on the pavement and waiting until some one came and told him how Eleanore was getting along.

XVIII

It struck one just as he came home. The maid from the first floor and the maid from the second were standing on the stairs. They had not been able to sleep; they had heard the cries of the young woman from their rooms, had come out, joined each other, listened, trembled, and whispered.

Daniel heard one of them say: “The Kapellmeister should send for the doctor.”

The other sobbed and replied: “Yes, but a doctor can’t work miracles.”

“Lord, Lord,” they cried, as a nerve-racking cry from Eleanore rang through the bleak house.

Daniel sprang up the steps. “Run for Dr. MÜller just as fast as your feet can carry you,” said Daniel to Philippina, who was then standing in the kitchen in her bare feet with her hair hanging down her back. Daniel was breathing heavily; Philippina was making some tea. Daniel then hastened into Eleanore’s room; Frau Hadebusch tried to keep him out, but he pushed her to one side, gritted his teeth, and threw himself on the floor by Eleanore’s bed.

She raised her head; she was a pale as death; the perspiration was pouring down over her face. “You shouldn’t be here, Daniel, you shouldn’t see me,” she said with much effort, but her tone was so commanding and final that Daniel got up and slowly left the room. He was seized with a strange, violent anger. He went out into the kitchen and drank a glass of water, and then hurled the glass on the floor: it broke into a hundred pieces.

Frau Hadebusch had followed him; she looked very much discouraged. When he noticed the frame of mind she was in, he became dizzy; he had to sit down in order to keep from falling. “Ah, the doctor will come,” he said in a brusque tone.

“My God, it makes you sick at the stomach to see how women suffer to-day,” said the old lady in her shrillest, one-tooth voice; it was quite plain that she was pleased to know that the doctor was coming. The present case had got her into serious trouble, and she wanted to get out of it. “The devil to these women who are so delicately built,” she had said about an hour ago to the grinning Philippina.

Philippina came back with the announcement that Dr. MÜller was on a vacation: “Well, is he the only physician in the city, you dumb ox?” howled Daniel, “go get Dr. Dingolfinger; he lives here close by: right over there by the Peller House. But wait a minute! You stay here; I’ll go get him.”

Dr. Dingolfinger was a Jewish physician, a rather old man, and Daniel had to ring and ring to get him out of his bed. But finally he heard the bell, got up, and followed Daniel across the square. Daniel had left the lantern burning at the front gate, and with it he lighted the doctor through the court and up the stairs.

Then he sat down on the bench in the kitchen; how long he sat there he did not know; he bent his body forward and buried his head in his hands. The screams became worse and worse: they were no longer the cries of Eleanore but of some unsouled, dehumanised being. Daniel heard them all; he could think of nothing, he could feel nothing but that voice. At times the terrible cry ran through his heart: Sisters! Sisters!

Frau Hadebusch came out several times to get hot water. The yellow tooth in her lower jaw stuck out like a cracked, lecherous remainder and reminder of her past life. Once Dr. Dingolfinger himself came out, rummaged around in his leather case, which he had left in the hall, looked at Daniel, and said: “It is going to come out all right; it will all be over in a short while.” At that Philippina poked at the fire, and put on fresh coals. She looked at Daniel out of one corner of her eye, and went on her way. From time to time old Jordan rapped on the wall to have Philippina come up and tell him how things were going.

It must have been about four o’clock in the morning; the gloomy, grey stones in the walls of the court yard were already being covered with rosy tints from the East. There was a cry so fearful, so like that of a voice from the wilds of the heart, that Daniel sprang to his feet and stood trembling in every limb.

Then it became quiet, mysteriously, uncannily quiet.

XIX

He sat down again; after a while his eyes closed, and he fell asleep.

He must have slept about half an hour when he was wakened by the sound of footsteps.

Standing around him were the physician, Frau Hadebusch, and Philippina. The doctor said something at which Daniel shook his head. It sounded like: “Unfortunately I cannot keep the sad news from you.” Daniel did not understand him; he drew his lips apart, and thought: “The idea of dreaming such disordered stuff!”

“Mother and child are both dead,” said the old physician, with tears in his eyes. “Both dead. It was a boy. Science was powerless; nature was hostile and the stronger of the two.”

“So delicately built,” murmured Frau Hadebusch, in a tone of disapproval, “as delicate as the stem of a plant.”

When Daniel at last realised that he was not dreaming, that these were in bitter truth Philippina’s glistening eyes and Frau Hadebusch’s goatish tooth and Dr. Dingolfinger’s silvery beard, and that these were actual words that were being spoken to him, he fell over and became unconscious.

XX

Pain, grief, despair, such terms do not describe his condition.

He knew nothing about himself; he had no thoughts; he lay on the sofa in the living room day and night, ate nothing, said nothing, and never moved.

When they carried the empty coffin into the death chamber, he burrowed his face into the corner of the sofa. Old Jordan tottered through the room to take a last look at his dead daughter. “He has sinned,” Jordan sobbed, “sinned against God in Heaven.”

In the hall some people were whispering. Martha RÜbsam and her husband had come in. Martha was crying. Her slender figure with her pale face appeared in the doorway; she looked around for Daniel.

“Don’t you want to see your Eleanore before the coffin is closed?” asked Philippina in a hollow voice.

He never moved; the twitchings of his face were terrible to behold.

Beside him on the table was some cold food; also some bread and apples.

They carried the coffin out. He felt that where his heart once was there was now a dark, empty space. The church bell rang, the rain splashed against the window panes.

During the second night he felt his soul suddenly become incoherent, lax. This was followed by a brief flaring up within him, whereupon his eyes were filled with hot, burning tears. He resigned himself to the situation without audible display of grief; he felt all of a sudden that he had now for the first time in his life really sensed the beauty of the pure triad in the major key.

Another day passed by. He could hear old Jordan walking about in the room above him, ceaselessly and with heavy tread. He felt cold; Philippina came in; he asked her to get him a blanket. Philippina was most eager to be of service to him. The door bell rang; Philippina opened.

Before her stood a lady and a gentleman. There was something so refined about them that Philippina did not dare raise any objections when they quietly came in and went straight to the living room: the door had not been closed, and they could see Daniel lying on the sofa.

Daniel looked at them quite indifferently. Gradually he began to collect his thoughts, to compose himself, to come to himself.

His guests were Eberhard von Auffenberg and his cousin, Sylvia von Erfft. They were betrothed.

Taken up as he had latterly been with the marked changes and transformations in his life, Eberhard had not heard of the death of Eleanore until a few hours ago.

It was a rare visit. None of the three said a word. Daniel lay wrapped in his blanket; he never moved. Finally, when his friends were about to leave, Sylvia got up, and turning to Daniel, said: “I did not know Eleanore, but I feel as if I had lost one of my own dear friends.”

Eberhard tossed his chin in the air, turned pale, and was as silent as the tomb.

They repeated their visit on the following day, and then on the next day, and so on. The presence of the two people came in time to have a beneficent effect on Daniel.