Daniel and Eleanore had reached a stage of mutual silence; it was not the first time, however, and it was as disagreeable now as it had been then. They would meet on the steps, and pass each other with a mere nod. If Eleanore came in to see Gertrude, Daniel withdrew.

Once Eleanore called when Gertrude was not at home. Daniel was stubborn; nor could Eleanore manage to make a single rational remark. He did not like her looks; he suspected her paleness and outward, enforced cheerfulness. “It is an undignified state of affairs, Eleanore,” he exclaimed, “we must make an end of it.”

Make an end of it? Yes—but how? This was the thought that came at once to Eleanore’s mind. Every day the chain that bound her to him became stronger.

Daniel was also tortured by the sight of Gertrude. He felt that she was watching him and that she was worried about him. More than that, the event was approaching that surrounded her with an atmosphere of suffering and made forbearance obligatory. Her features, though haggard and distorted, bore nevertheless an expression of mysterious transfiguration.

After Gertrude had noticed for some time that Daniel was being estranged from his work and that he had lost interest in everything, she decided to have a talk with Eleanore. She did it without preparation or tenderness.

“Can’t you see that you are ruining him?” she cried.

“You want me to be ruined, do you?” asked Eleanore, in surprised dismay. She had appreciated at once and without difficulty the complete range of Gertrude’s renunciation.

“What difference does it make about you?” replied Gertrude harshly; “what are you getting excited about?”

This question made Eleanore’s ideas of order and duty quake and totter. She looked at her sister with incredulous eyes and in perfect silence. It was not the happy, gentle Gertrude that had spoken, but the Gertrude of months ago, the lonely, loveless Gertrude.

What difference does it make about you? Why are you getting excited? That was equivalent to saying: Make short work of your life, and don’t draw out the episode in his life any longer than you have to.

Eleanore took courage to carry out the plan she had had in mind for a long while and in which she placed her last hope.

One evening she went to Daniel and said: “I should like to go with you to Eschenbach, Daniel, and visit your mother.”

“Why do you wish to do that?” he asked in amazement. He and his mother did not write to each other: that was due first of all to their natures, and secondly to the condition in which each was now living. But he knew that Eleanore received an occasional letter from Eschenbach which she answered without consulting him. This had never seemed strange to him until now.

A few days later she repeated her wish; Daniel granted it. They decided upon the following Sunday for the excursion.

II

A warm, languid October sun shone over the land; the forests presented a gorgeous array of autumnal foliage; the fields lay stretched in barren rows; along the hills of Franconia floated clouds that looked like down driven by the wind.

They had taken the train as far as Triesdorf; from there they went on to Merckendorf by stage coach. The rest of the distance they walked. Daniel pointed to a flock of geese that were trotting around on the shore of an abandoned pond, and said: “That is our national bird; his cackle is our music. But it doesn’t sound so bad.”

A peasant woman passed by, and made the sign of the cross before the picture of a saint: “It is strange that everything has suddenly become Catholic,” said Eleanore.

Daniel nodded, and replied that when his father moved to Eschenbach a few other Protestant families were living there, all of whom joined in Protestant worship. Later, he said, most of them emigrated, leaving his mother as the only Protestant, so far as he knew, in the neighbourhood. But, Daniel remarked in the course of conversation, his mother had never had any unpleasant experience on this account, and he himself had frequently gone to church, primarily of course to hear the organ, though no one had ever taken offence at this. “There is a totally different type of people here,” he added, “people who lay greater stress on externals than we do, and yet are more secretive.”

Eleanore looked at the church tower whose Spanish-green roof rose from the valley. After a long silence she said: “I wonder whether it will be a boy or a girl, Gertrude’s baby? Oh, a girl, of course. Some day it will be in the world, and will look at me with eyes, with real eyes. How strange that a child of yours should look at me!”

“What is there strange about that? Many children are born, many look at some one.”

“What are you going to call it?” asked Eleanore.

“If it is blond and has blue eyes like yours, I am going to call it Eva.”

“Eva!” cried Eleanore, “no, that won’t do.” She herself had chosen the name of Eva for the child of the maid at the RÜdigers’. That he should now want to call Gertrude’s child by the same name seemed so strange to her.

“Why not Eva?” he asked. “There is something back of this objection on your part. Women always have something up their sleeve. Out with it! Why do you object to Eva?”

Eleanore smiled, and shook her head. She would have liked to make a clean confession to him, but she was not certain how he would take it: she was afraid he would turn back, enraged at her cunning. Once the child had been born and lay there before him, it would captivate him, and she knew it.

They had stopped and were looking out over the sunlit plains. “How alone we are!” said Daniel.

“Everything is easier here,” said Eleanore thoughtfully. “If one could only forget where one comes from, it would be easy to be happy.”

III

“I have been away for seven years,” said Daniel as they passed through the village gate. Everything seemed so ridiculously small—the Town Hall, the Church, the Market Place, and the Eschenbach Fountain. He had also pictured the houses and streets to himself as being cleaner and better kept. As he passed over the three steps at the front gate, each one of which was bulging out like a huge oyster shell, and entered the shop with its smell of spices, the past dwindled to nothing. Marian was so happy she could not speak. She reached one of her hands to Daniel, the other to Eleanore. Her first question was about Gertrude.

In the room sat a four-year-old child with blond hair and marvellous blue eyes. Its little face was of the most delicate beauty, its body was delicately formed.

“Who is the child? To whom does it belong?” asked Daniel.

“It is your own child, Daniel,” said his mother.

“My own child! Yes, for heaven’s sakes—!” He blushed, turned pale, looked first at his mother, and then at Eleanore.

“It is your own flesh and blood. Don’t you ever think of Meta any more?”

“Of Meta.... Oh, I see. And you, you adopted the child? And you, Eleanore, knew all about this? And you, Mother, took the child?” He sat down at the table, and covered his face with his hands. “That was what Eleanore had in mind?” he murmured timidly to himself. “And I presume that to make the story complete the child’s name is Eva...?”

“Yes, Eva,” whispered Eleanore, touched by the situation. “Go to your father, Eva, and shake hands with him.”

The child did as it had been told. Then Marian related to her son how Eleanore had brought the child to Eschenbach, and how Meta had married and gone to America with her husband.

Every look, every movement on the part of Marian showed how great her love for the child was: she guarded it as the apple of her eye.

The circle of wonderful events closed in around Daniel’s heart. Where responsibility lay and where guilt, where will power ended and fate began, Daniel could not say. To express gratitude would be vulgar; to conceal his emotions was difficult. He was ashamed of himself in the presence of both of the women. But when he looked at the living creature, his shame lost all meaning. And how exalted Eleanore appeared in his eyes just then! She seemed to him equally amiable and worthy of respect, whether he regarded her as an active or as a sentient, feeling woman. He almost shuddered at the thought that she was so near him; that what she had done had been done for him filled him with humility.

The strangest of all, however, was little Eva herself. He could not see enough of her; he was amazed at the trick nature had played: a human being of the noblest mien and form had been born of a gawky, uncouth servant girl. There was something divinely graceful and airy about the child. She had well-formed hands, delicate wrists, shapely ankles, and a clear, transparent forehead, on which a network of bluish veins spread out in various directions. Her laughter was the purest of music; and in her walk and gestures in general there was a rhythm which promised much for her future poise and winsomeness.

Daniel took Eleanore through the village and out to the old town gate. It was the time of the annual fair; Eschenbach was crowded. They returned on this account to the more quiet streets, and finally entered the church. The sexton came up and admitted Daniel to the choir. Daniel sat down at the organ; the sexton pumped the bellows; Eleanore took a seat on one of the little benches near the side wall.

Daniel’s eyes became fixed; his fingers touched the keys with supernatural power; he began to improvise. There were two motifs following each other in close succession; both were in fifths; they were united into one; they ran from the low to the high registers, from Hell through the World to Heaven. A hymn crowned the improvised composition.

He stood with Eleanore for a long while in the stillness. The songs echoed from the lofty arches. It seemed to both of them that the blood of the one was flowing into the body of the other. Incidents of the past faded from their memory; they seemed to have completed a long journey; there was no voice to remind them of their return; they were completely liberated from duties and made immune from care.

IV

Eleanore was to sleep with Marian and Eva; Daniel was to have his old room. He showed it to Eleanore; they stepped to the window and looked out. They saw Eva down in the yard dancing back and forth barefooted on a wooden balustrade. She kept her equilibrium by holding out her arms. The grace of her movements was so fairy-like that Daniel and Eleanore smiled at each other in astonishment.

After dinner Daniel went out in front of the house; Marian and Eleanore sat for a while at the window; the light of the lamp shone behind them. Later they came out into the street and joined Daniel. Marian, however, was uneasy on account of the child. She said that Eva had been restless all day and might cry for her. “Stay out just as long as you like; I will leave the door open,” she said, and went back.

Daniel and Eleanore returned to the fair. It was still early in the evening, but the crowd had disappeared. They sauntered around among the booths, and stopped to listen to the harangue of a mountebank or to watch peasant boys shooting at figures of various kinds and a glass ball that danced on a jet of water. There was a sea of red and green lanterns; sky-rockets were hissing into the air from the rampart; musicians were playing in the cafÉs, while hilarious tipplers sang or hooted as the spirit moved them.

They came to a grass plot, the sole illumination of which was the light from a circus wagon. On the steps of the wagon sat a man in tricot holding the head of a black poodle between his knees.

“Those were the last inhabitants of the earth,” said Daniel, after they had crossed the square. The noise died away, the gaudy lights disappeared.

“How far are you going?” asked Eleanore, without the remotest trace of fear in her voice.

“I am going on until I am with you,” was the quick reply.

The indistinct outline of a bridge became visible; under it the water flowed noiselessly. The path had a yellowish shimmer; there were no stars in the heavens. Suddenly the path seemed to come to an end; at the end of it were trees there that seemed to be moving closer and closer together; it became darker and darker; they stopped.

“We have told each other our whole story,” said Daniel. “In the way of words we owe each other nothing. We have had enough of talk; there has been no lack of sorrow and enough of error. We can no longer act differently, and therefore we dare not act differently any longer.”

“Be still,” whispered Eleanore, “I don’t like your wrangling; what you say is so unpeaceful and fiendish. Yesterday I dreamed that you were lying on your knees and had your folded hands uplifted. Then I loved you—very much.”

“Do you need dreams in order to love me, girl? I don’t; I need you just as you are. I will soon be thirty years old, Eleanore. A man never really wakes up until he is thirty; it is then that he conquers the world. You know what rests within me; you suspect it. You know too how I need you; you feel it. You are my soul; you are created out of my music; without you I am an empty hull, a patchwork, a violin without strings.”

“Oh, Daniel, I believe you, and yet it is not all true,” replied Eleanore. He thought he could see in the darkness her mockingly ironical smile: “Somewhere, I am almost tempted to say in God, it is not true. If we were better, if we were beings in the image of God and acting in God’s ways, we would have to desist from our own ways. Then it would be wonderful to live: it would be like living above the clouds, happy, at peace, pure.”

“Does that come from your heart, Eleanore?”

“My dear, dear man! My heart, like yours, has been beclouded and bewitched. I cannot give you up. I have settled my accounts. In my soul I am entirely conscious of my guilt. I know what I am doing and assume full responsibility for my action. There is no use to struggle any longer; the water is already swirling over our heads. I simply want to say that you should not delude yourself into believing that we have risen up above other people by what we have done, that we have deserved the gratitude of fate. No, Daniel, what we are doing is precisely what all those do who fall. Let me stay with you, dearest; kiss me, kiss me to death.”

V

Philippina had promised Eleanore to look after Jordan and Gertrude on Sunday.

As she was crossing Five Points, she went into a shop, and asked for three pfennigs’ worth of court plaster. While doing some housework she had scratched herself on a nail. The clerk gave her the plaster, and asked her what was the news.

“Ah, you poor bloke, you want to know the very latest, don’t you?” she snarled, and then grinned with blatant self-complacency.

“The later the better,” said the fellow with a lustful smirk.

Philippina bent over the counter, and whispered: “They’re taking their wedding trip to-day.” She laughed in a lewd, imbecile way. The clerk stared at her with wide-opened eyes and mouth. Two hours later the news was in the mouth of every hussy in that section of the city.

Gertrude was in bed. The day woman who did the cooking gave Philippina a plate with Jordan’s dinner on it: Meat, vegetables, and a few sour plums. Philippina ate two of the plums on the way up to his room, and licked her fingers.

The whole forenoon she spent rummaging around in Eleanore’s room; she looked through the cabinets, the presses, and the pockets of Eleanore’s dresses. As it began to grow dark, Jordan suddenly entered, in hat and great coat, and looked on in speechless and enraged amazement at the girl’s inexplicable curiosity.

Philippina took the broom from the corner, and began to sweep with all her might. While sweeping she sang, out of tune, impudently, and savagely:

Jordan went away without saying anything. He had forgotten to lock his room. Hardly had Philippina noticed that he had left the key in the door, when she opened it and went in.

She spied around with cowardly, superstitious eyes. She was afraid of the old inspector, as she would have been afraid of an invincible magician. For such cases she had a number of formulas at her tongue’s end. She murmured: “Put earth in, close the lid, hold your thumbs, spit on your shoe.” She spat on her shoe.

She then began to examine the cabinet, for she believed that it contained all of Jordan’s secrets. But she could not open the lock, try as she might. She then went at the writing desk; she was angry. There she found, in plain wooden frames, the pictures of Gertrude and Eleanore. She ran out, got a large needle, came back, and stuck it in the picture of Eleanore right between the eyes. Then she took Gertrude’s picture, and after she had held it for a while, looking at it with her gloomy eyes, she noticed that it was spotted with blood. The plaster had come off her finger, and the finger had started to bleed.

“Come now, Philippina,” she said to herself, “go and see how Gertrude is making out.” Entering Gertrude’s room, she found her asleep. Creeping up to her bed on her tiptoes, she took a chair, straddled it, leaned her chin on the back, and stared fixedly at the face of the young woman, now just barely visible in the darkness of the room.

Gertrude dreamed that a black bird was hovering over her and picking at her breast with its pointed beak. She screamed and woke up.

Shortly after this Gertrude had to send for the midwife.

During the night, Gertrude gave birth to a girl; she had suffered terrible pains. Philippina had seen and heard it all. She had run back and forth, from the kitchen to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the kitchen, for hours; she was like an insane person; she kept mumbling something to herself. What she mumbled no one knew.

Gertrude had called in vain for Daniel; in vain had she waited for him the whole day.

“Where in the world can Daniel be?” cried Philippina, “where can Daniel be with his damned Eleanore?” She sat in the corner with her hands folded, her hair tangled and knotted, her face distorted with the grimaces of madness. The midwife was still busy with Gertrude; the new-born child was crying pitifully.

VI

Daniel held the child in his arms, and looked at it carefully but without love. “You little worm, what do you want in this world?” he said to his daughter. He still had his hat on; so had Eleanore. Both of them were dressed just as they came from the station; they were embarrassed and excited at what had happened. Eleanore was exceedingly pale; her great eyes looked dreamy; her body seemed of almost boyish slenderness. At times she smiled; then the smile died away, as if she did not have the courage to appear so cheerful.

Inspector Jordan was also in the room, acting as he had always acted since his bankruptcy—like a guest who feels that he is a burden to the family. He said very humbly: “I have suggested to Gertrude that she call the child Agnes after my deceased wife.”

“Very well, let’s call her Agnes,” said Daniel.

Gertrude asked that the child be brought to her so that she could nurse it. Eleanore carried it over and laid it at her breast. As the hands of the sisters touched, Gertrude looked up quickly: there was an indescribable expression of thoughtfulness, knowingness, and kindliness on her face. Eleanore fell on her knees, threw her arms around Gertrude’s neck, and kissed her passionately. Gertrude reached out her left hand to Daniel; he gave her his right hand with some hesitancy. Jordan was radiant with joy: “It is so good, children, to see that you all love each other, so good,” he said with visible emotion.

“Daniel, you must move up into Father’s quarters at once,” said Gertrude. “Your piano, bed, and all your things must be taken up, and Eleanore will move into your room. I have already spoken to Father about it, and he feels that it will be a good arrangement. He will be very quiet so as not disturb you. The crying of the baby would make it impossible for you to work.”

“It is a very practical solution of the problem,” said Jordan, speaking for Daniel, and looked down at his frayed coat-sleeves, which he tried to conceal by hiding them behind his back. “I am also glad that Eleanore will be with you. A man, you know, has a habit of going to bed long before a woman quits her daily work. Is that not true, my son-in-law?” With that he clapped Daniel on the shoulder.

“During Gertrude’s confinement I will sleep here in her room,” said Eleanore, avoiding Daniel’s eyes as she said so. “She cannot stay alone, and it costs too much to keep a nurse.”

“Exactly,” said Jordan, and went to the door. But he turned around: “I should like to know,” he asked in a tone of great grief, “who has been at Gertrude’s and Eleanore’s pictures. The one is covered with spots of blood, and the other has a hole punched in it. Isn’t that very strange? I can’t understand it: I can’t imagine who could have done me this injury.” He shook his head and went out.

“Do you realise that to-morrow is the first of November?” asked Gertrude. “Have you the rent ready? Did Father make any money last month?”

“No, he didn’t,” replied Eleanore, “but I have almost enough to pay the landlord.”

It was no longer possible to depend upon Jordan. He was supported by his children, and seemed to find the arrangement neither strange nor humiliating. At times he would allude in a mysterious way to a big enterprise that was going to claim the whole of his attention and bring him a great deal of money and honour. But if you asked him about it, he would wrinkle his brow and put his finger to his lips.

“I owe the man more than the rent,” said Daniel. He kissed Gertrude on the forehead, and went out.

“Put the child in the cradle, and come over here,” said Gertrude to Eleanore, as soon as Daniel had closed the door behind him. Eleanore did as she had been told. The baby was asleep. She took it up, looked at its wrinkled face, and carried it to the cradle. Then she went over to Gertrude’s bed.

Gertrude seized her by her hands, and drew her down to her with more strength than one would have imagined her to have just then. The eyes of the two women were drawn close together. “You must make him happy, Eleanore,” she said in a hoarse voice, and with a sickly glimmer in her eyes. “If you do not, it would be better if one of us were dead.”

Despite her terror, Eleanore loosened Gertrude’s hold on her with great gentleness. “It is hard to discuss that subject, Gertrude; it is hard to live and hard to think about it all.” Eleanore breathed these words into Gertrude’s ears.

“You must make him happy; you must make him happy! Repeat it to yourself and keep it in your mind every day, every hour, every minute. You must, you must, you must.” Gertrude was almost beside herself.

“I will learn how to do it,” replied Eleanore slowly and seriously. “I am ... I hardly know what I am or how I feel. But be patient with me, Gertrude, I will learn how to make him happy.” She looked into Gertrude’s face with anxious curiosity. Gertrude however pressed her hands against Eleanore’s cheeks, drew her down to her again, and kissed her with unusual fervour. “I too must learn how,” whispered Gertrude, “I must learn the whole of life from the very beginning.”

Some one knocked at the door. The midwife came in to look after her patient.

VII

At that time the superstition still prevailed that the window in the room of a woman in confinement must never be opened. The air in the room was consequently heavy and ill-smelling. Eleanore could hardly stand it during the day; during the night she could not sleep. Moreover natural daylight could not enter the room, and, as if it were not already gloomy enough, the window had been hung with green curtains which were kept half drawn.

The most unpleasant feature of all, however, was the interminable round of visits from the women: custom had decreed that they should not be turned away. The wife of the director of the theatre came in; Martha RÜbsam came in, and so did the wife of Councillor Kirschner, and the wives of the butcher, baker, preacher, and physician. And of course the wife of the apothecary called. No one of them failed to pour out an abundance of gratuitous advice or go into ecstasies over the beauty of the baby. Once Daniel came in just as such an assemblage was in the sick room. He looked first at one, then at another, threw back his head, and left without saying a word.

Herr Seelenfromm and M. RiviÈre were likewise not frightened by the distance; they called. Eleanore met them in the hall, and got rid of them by the usual method. And one day even Herr Carovius came around to inquire how mother and child were doing. Philippina received him; and Philippina was having a hard time of it at present: she was not allowed to enter Gertrude’s room; Gertrude would have nothing to do with her; she refused to see her.

So that she might not get too far behind with her work—for it meant her daily bread—Eleanore pushed the table up to the window, and despite the poor light, kept on writing. In the evening she would sit by the lamp and write, although she was so tired that she could hardly keep her eyes open.

After three days, Gertrude had no milk for the baby; it had to be fed with a bottle. It would cry for hours without stopping. And as soon as it was quiet, its clothes had to be washed or its bath prepared, or Gertrude wanted something, or one of the pestiferous visitors came in. Eleanore had to lay her work aside; in the evening she would fall across the bed and sleep with painful soundness for an hour or two. If the baby did not wake her by its hungry howling, the bad air did. Her head ached. Yet she concealed her weakness, her longing, her oppression. Not even Daniel noticed that there was anything wrong with her.

She had very little opportunity to talk with him. And yet there was probably not another pair of eyes in the whole world that could be so eloquent and communicative with admonition, promise, request, and cordial resignation. One evening they met each other at the kitchen door: “Eleanore, I am stifling,” he whispered to her.

She laid her hands on his shoulder, and looked at him in silence.

“Come with me,” he urged with a stupid air. “Come with me! Let’s run off.”

Eleanore smiled and thought to herself: “The demands of his soul are always a few leagues in advance of the humanly possible.”

The next morning he stormed into the room. Eleanore was only half dressed. With an expression of wrath flitting across her face she reached for a towel and draped it about her shoulders. He sat down on Gertrude’s bed, and let loose a torrent of words: “I am going to set Goethe’s ‘Wanderers Sturmlied’ to music! I am planning to make it a companion piece to the ‘Harzreise’ and publish the two in a cycle. I have not slept the whole night. The main motif is glorious.” He began to hum it over in a falsetto voice: “‘Oh, mortal man, if genius does not forsake thee, neither rain nor storm can breathe upon thy heart!’ How do you like that?”

Gertrude looked at him inspired.

“I should have a good drink on that idea,” he continued; “I have rarely felt such a longing for a flask of old wine. It’s a bloody shame that I can’t afford it. But you wait till I get a little money, and you will see a bouteille of Tokay on my table every day.”

“My God, just listen how he raves! He’s going to have the best there is,” said Philippina angrily, as she entered the room in her stocking feet and heard Daniel’s remarks.

Daniel told her to keep her mouth shut and leave the room at once. He paid no attention to her reply, and cried out: “Something has got to happen. If I can’t drink, I at least want to dance. Dance with me, Eleanore; don’t be afraid, come, dance with me!” He threw his arms around her, pressed her to his bosom, sang a waltz melody, and drew the struggling and embarrassed girl across the floor.

Philippina broke out in her slimy, malicious laughter, and then shrieked at the top of her voice that Frau Kirschner was outside and wanted to see the Kapellmeister’s wife. Gertrude made an imploring gesture, the full meaning of which Daniel easily grasped. The baby began to cry, Eleanore tore herself away from Daniel’s embrace, arranged her hair, and hastened over to the cradle. Philippina opened the door to let the Councillor’s wife in. Just then a violent discussion was started in the hall. One could hear the voice of Jordan and that of some strange man.

It was the furniture dealer who had come to collect the money for the cradle. He was boiling with the rage that cares not how it may be expressed: he said he had already been there four times, and each time he was put off. The truth is, Daniel was very hard up.

The Councillor’s wife took Daniel to one side, and made him an offer of a loan of two hundred marks. Daniel was silent; he bit his lips, and looked down at the floor. She scolded him: “You are always your own worst enemy. Now be reasonable, Nothafft, I will send the money over at noon. If you have any left, you may pay it back.”

Daniel went out, and gave the blustering furniture dealer his last ten-mark piece.

Frau Kirschner had brought a flask of Tokay wine with her for Gertrude. Tokay was regarded at that time as a sort of elixir of life.

“You see, so quickly are wishes fulfilled,” said Gertrude to Daniel in the evening, when he came into her room. She poured out a glass for him.

“Have you any bills to settle?” he asked, looking partly at Eleanore, partly at Gertrude, and striking his wallet, then bulging with notes. “It’s Court Councillor’s money,” he said, “real Court Councillor’s money. How beautiful it looks, lousy fine, eh? And upon that stuff the salvation of my soul depends!” He threw the money on Gertrude’s bed, stuck out his tongue, and turned away in disgust.

Eleanore handed him the glass of Tokay; her eyes glistened with tears.

“No, Eleanore,” he said, “I have trifled it away. In my arrogance I imagined I could do something; I thought I could get somewhere. I sit down, brood over my ideas, and find that they are all wind-eggs. I have the feeling that I have taken a false oath. What good am I, Eleanore, what good am I, Gertrude?”

“Ah, take a drink, and perhaps your troubles will leave you,” said Eleanore, and stroked his brow with her hand.

Gertrude called out to her: “Quit that! Put that glass away!” She spoke so harshly that Eleanore sprang back, and Daniel got up.

“Leave me alone for a while,” she said. Daniel and Eleanore left the room.

Eleanore went into the living room, sat down at the table, and laid her head in her hands. “What can we do now?” she said to Daniel. The violin tone in her voice had something unusually touching about it.

Daniel set the candle he was carrying in the bay window. He bent down over the table, and took Eleanore by her small wrists. “Accept the bitter for the sake of the sweet,” he murmured. “Believe in me, believe in yourself, believe in the higher law. It is not possible that I merely imagined that there is a winged creature for me. I must have something to cling to, something indestructible, ah, even superhuman.”

“You must have something superhuman to cling to,” Eleanore repeated after him. She could not help but think that he had already made superhuman demands of the other woman, his wife, her sister, Gertrude. She raised her finger as if to warn him: it was a gesture of infinite timidity.

But Daniel scarcely saw what she had done. In his arrogant presumption and passion he could have smashed the universe to pieces, and then re-created it merely in order to mould this one creature after his own desires. He would have made her of boundless pliability, and yet active in her love for him; he would have had her spurn venerable commandments in a spirit of self-glorification, and yet cherish unequivocal confidence in him, the creature of need and defiance; and she would be cheerful withal.

“I am cold,” whispered Eleanore, peering into the dark shadows of the room.

VIII

To know that these eyes and their pure passion were so close to him; to be able to touch this cool, sincere, mutely-eloquent mouth with his lips; to be able to hold these hands in which passion resided as it does in the speechless unrest of a messenger; to be able to press this throbbing figure with all its willingness and hesitation to his bosom—it was almost too much for Daniel. It involved pain; it aroused an impatience, a thirst for more and more. His daily work was interrupted; his thoughts, plans, and arrangements were torn from their connection.

He spoke to people whom he knew as though they were total strangers; he amazed those whom he did not know by the loyal confidence he voluntarily placed in them. He forgot to put on his hat when he walked along the street; the distraction he revealed was the source of constant merriment to passersby and on-lookers. He would not know when it was noon; he would come home at three o’clock, thinking it was twelve. Once he came nearly being run over by a team of galloping horses; another time he had his umbrella taken straight from his hands without noticing it. This took place at the Ludwig Station.

“Oh, winged creature, winged creature,” he would say to himself, and smile like a somnambulist. Deep in his soul a sea of tones was surging. He listened to them with complete assurance, angry though he would become at times because of the failure of this or that. He was so absorbed in himself, so enmeshed in his own thoughts, that he scarcely saw the sky above him; houses, people, animals, and the things that are after all necessary to human existence existed only in his dreams, if at all.

Winged creature, winged creature!

IX

As soon as Gertrude could get up and go about, Eleanore accepted an invitation from Martha RÜbsam to visit her aunt, Frau Seelenfromm, in Altdorf. The visit was to last two weeks. Eleanore looked upon it as a test that would determine whether she could do anything on her own account now: whether she could get along without Daniel.

But she saw that she could no longer live without him. In the lonely house she came to the conclusion that her love was great enough to enable her to bear the monstrous burden fate had been trying to impose upon her. She saw that neither flight nor concealment nor anything else could save her, could save Daniel, could give back to Gertrude what she had lost, what had been taken from her.

There were times, to be sure, when she asked herself whether it was all true and real; whether it could be possible. She walked in darkness surrounded by demons. Her being was plunged into the deepest and strangest bewilderment; confusion enveloped her; there was sorrow in the effort she made to avert the inexorable.

But in one of her sleepless nights she thought she was covering Daniel’s mind with a flame of fire; she thought she heard his voice calling out to her with a power she had never known before.

No one she had ever seen was so vivacious, so alive as he. Her slumbering fancy had awakened at the sound of his voice and the feel of his warm breath. She felt that people owed him a great deal; and since they did not seem inclined to pay their debts, it was her duty to make restitution to Daniel for their neglect.

She could not survey the ways of his art: the musician in him made neither a strange nor a special appeal to her. She grasped and felt only him himself; to her he was Daniel. She grasped and felt only the man who was born to do lofty, the loftiest, deeds and who passed by the base and evil in men in silence; who knew that he had been chosen but was obliged to renounce the privilege of ruling; who was always in full armour, ready to defend a threatened sanctuary.

Of such a man, of such a knight and warrior, she had dreamt even when a child. For although she looked at things and circumstances with the eyes of truth, her soul had always been full of secret dreams and visions. Back of her unceasing and unfading activity the genii of romanticism had been spinning their bright-coloured threads; it was they that had formed the glass case in which she had lived for so long, impervious to the touch of mortal hand, immune to the flames of love.

The morning following that night she explained to her friend that she was going home. Martha tried in vain to get her to stay: she was almost ill with longing.

Martha let her go; she had the very saddest of thoughts concerning Eleanore’s future; for the unhappy incidents of that unhappy home had reached Martha’s sensitive ears. She did not worry because of moral principles; she was not that kind of a woman. She worried over Eleanore out of genuine affection: it pained her to know that she could no longer admire Eleanore.

X

In the meanwhile Daniel had told his wife that a child of his was living with his mother in Eschenbach, and that he had known nothing about it until Eleanore took him over there. He told her the child’s name and how old it was and who its mother was, and gave her a detailed description of that celebrated New Year’s Night on which he had embraced the maid. He told her how he had stood out in front of her house that night and longed for her with all his senses, and how he felt, when he looked at little Eva, as if Providence had only seemed to use the body of a strange woman, and that Eva was in reality Gertrude’s own child.

To this Gertrude replied: “I never want to see that child.”

“You will be ashamed of having made this remark once you do see the child,” replied Daniel. “You should not be envious of a creature whom God brought into the world so that the world may be more beautiful.”

“Don’t speak of God!” said Gertrude quickly and with uplifted hand. Then, after a pause, during which Daniel looked at her angrily, she added with a painful smile: “The very idea: I, jealous, envious! O no, Daniel.”

The way she pressed her hands to her bosom convinced Daniel, and quite emphatically too, that she did not know the feeling of envy or jealousy. He said nothing, but remained in her room for an unusually long while. When she was cutting bread, she let the knife fall. He sprang and picked it up for her. He had never done this before. Gertrude looked at him as he bent over. Her eyes became dim, flared up, and then became dim again.

“Don’t speak of God!” Somehow Daniel could not get these words out of his mind.

When Eleanore returned she was terrified at the expression on Daniel’s face. He seemed dazed; his eyes were inflamed as though he too had not been able to sleep; he could hardly talk. Finally he demanded that she swear to him never to go away again.

She hesitated to take an oath of this kind, but he became more and more insistent, and she took it. He threw his arms about her with passionate impetuosity; just then the door opened, and Gertrude stood on the threshold. Daniel hastened to her, and wanted to take her by the hand; but she stepped back and back until she reached her bedroom.

It was evening; covers were laid for four: Jordan was to take dinner with them that evening. He came down promptly; Eleanore brought in the food; but Gertrude was nowhere to be found. Eleanore went in to her. She was sitting by the cradle, combing her hair with slow deliberation.

“Won’t you eat with us, Gertrude?” asked Eleanore.

Gertrude did not seem to hear her. In a few minutes she got up, walked over to the mirror on the wall, pressed her hair with the palms of her hands to her two cheeks, and looked in the mirror with wide-opened eyes.

“Come, Gertrude,” said Eleanore, rather timidly, “Daniel is waiting.”

“That they are in there again,” murmured Gertrude, “it seems like a sin.” She turned around, and beckoned to Eleanore.

Eleanore went over to her in perfect obedience. Gertrude threw her arms around her neck until her left temple touched Eleanore’s right one with only her hair hanging between them like a curtain. Gertrude again looked in the mirror; her eyes became rigid; she said: “Oh yes, you are more beautiful, much more beautiful, a hundred times more beautiful.”

Just then the child began to stir, and since Gertrude was still standing immovable before the mirror, Eleanore went to the cradle. Hardly had Gertrude noticed what she had done, when she rushed out and cried with terrifying rudeness: “Don’t touch that child! Don’t touch it, I say!” She then went up, snatched the child from the cradle, and went back to her bed with it, saying gently and yet threateningly: “It belongs to me, to me and to no one else.”

Since this incident, Eleanore knew that a fearful change had come over her sister. She did not know whether other people noticed it; she did not even know whether Daniel was aware of it. But she knew it, and it frightened her.

One afternoon, about sunset, Eleanore came in and found Gertrude on her knees in the hall scrubbing the floor. “You shouldn’t do that, Gertrude,” said Eleanore, “you are not strong enough for that kind of work yet.”

Gertrude made no reply; she kept on scrubbing.

“Why don’t you dress better?” continued Eleanore; “Daniel does not like to see you going about in that ugly old brown skirt. Believe me, it makes him angry.”

Gertrude straightened up on her knees, and said with disconcerting humility: “You dress up; it is not well for two to look so nice. What shall I do?” she asked, and let her head sink. “You wear your gold chain and the corals in your ears. That pleases me; that is the way it should be. But I have no gold chain; I have no corals. If I had them, I wouldn’t wear them; and if I wore them, it would not be right.”

“Ah, Gertrude, what are you talking about?” asked Eleanore.

The ringing of the church bells could be heard in the hall. Gertrude folded her hands in prayer. There was a stern solemnity in her action. In her kneeling position she looked as though she were petrified.

Eleanore went into the room with a heavy heart.

XI

Through the dividing walls Daniel and Eleanore were irresistibly drawn to each other. They accompanied each other in their thoughts; each divined the other’s wishes and feelings. If he came home in a bad humour, if she was anxious and restless, they both needed merely to sit down by each other to regain their peace.

If Daniel’s power of persuasion was great, Eleanore’s example was equally great. A dish would displease Daniel. Eleanore would not only eat it, but would praise it; and Daniel would then eat it too, and like it. Gertrude had prepared the food, and Eleanore felt it was her duty to spare her sister as much humiliation as possible. But Gertrude did not want to be treated indulgently. She would lay her knife and fork aside, and say: “Daniel is right. It is not fit to eat.” She would get up and go into the kitchen and make a porridge that would take the place of the inedible dish. That was the way she acted: she was always resigned, diligent, and quiet; she made every possible effort to do her duty. Daniel and Eleanore looked at each other embarrassed; but their embarrassment was transformed in time into mutual ecstasy: they could not keep from looking at each other.

There was nothing of the seducer in Daniel’s sexual equipment. On the other hand he was dependent to a very high degree upon his wishes and desires; and in his passionate obstinacy he not infrequently lacked consideration. Eleanore however possessed profound calmness, cheerful certainty, and a goodly measure of indulgence; and she knew exactly how to make use of these traits. The claims that were made on her patience and moderation would have harassed a heart steeled in the actualities of politics and flooded with worldly experiences. She however found a safe and unerring guide in the instincts of her nature, and was never tired.

The trait in her to which he took most frequent and violent exception was what he called her plebeian caution; she seemed determined to pay due and conventional respect to appearances. He did not wish to lay claim to the hours of his love as though they were a stolen possession; he did not wish to sneak across bridges and through halls; he did not wish to whisper; he did not wish to lie in wait for a secret tryst; he rebelled at the thought of coming and going in fear and trembling.

There is not the slightest use to investigate all the secrecies between Daniel and Eleanore. It will serve no useful end to infringe with unskilled hand on the work of the evil spirit Asmodeus, who makes walls transparent and allows his devotees to look into bed chambers. It would be futile to act as the spy of Daniel and show how he left the attic room in the dead of night and crept down the stairs in felt slippers. We have no desire to hear of Eleanore’s pangs of conscience and her longings, her flights, her waiting in burning suspense; to relate how she endeavoured to avert the inevitable to-day and succumbed to-morrow would be to tell an idle tale. It is best to overlook all these things; to draw a curtain of mercy before them; for they are so human and so wholly without a trace of the miraculous.

It will be enough to touch upon a single night on which Daniel went to Eleanore’s room and said: “I have never yet seen you as a lover sees his beloved.” Eleanore was sitting on the edge of her bed, trembling. She blew out the candle. Daniel heard the rustling of her clothes. She went up to the stove and opened the front draft door. There was a red hot coal fire in the stove. She stood before him with the purple glow of the burning coals upon her body, slender, delicate, nude. Her figure, peculiarly beautiful, was filled with the most harmonious of inspiration; it was ensouled. And since the play of her limbs, as they became conscious of the light, was suddenly stiffened with shame, Eleanore bent her head over to the wall where the mask of Zingarella, which he had given her, was hanging. She took it down, and held it with both hands so that the purple glow from the stove fell also on it. As she did this she smiled in a way that cut Daniel to the very heart: something eternal came over him; he had a premonition of the end; he feared fate.

At the same time Gertrude rose up in her bed, and stared with eyes as if she were beholding, who knows whom? at the door. After she had stared for a long while, she got up, opened the door, went out into the hall without making the slightest noise, came back, went out again, came back again, and got in bed, left the door open, sat upright and gazed at the closed door across the hall behind which she knew Daniel and Eleanore were. Her hair hung down in two long braids on either side of her head. Her pale face in this frame of black hair above it and on both sides of it looked like a wax figure in an old black frame.

Of the pictures that were being formed in her mind and soul, there was not a single twitching of the muscles to indicate what they looked like.

For her the entire world lay behind that door. It seemed to her that she could no longer endure the knowledge she had of what was taking place. In her maddened imagination she saw women stealing through the halls of the house; in every corner there was a woman, and with every woman there was a man; they embraced each other, and sank their teeth into each other’s flesh. It was all as criminal as it was irrational; it was a shame and an abomination to behold. Everywhere she looked she saw reprehensible nudeness; all clothes seemed to be made of glass; she could look neither at a man nor at a woman without turning pale. She had only one refuge: the cradle of her child. She would rush to it and pray. But as soon as her prayer was ended she again felt stifled in the poisoned air about her, while the desire to acquit herself of the crime of which she felt guilty, unable though she was to define the crime or determine her part in it, robbed her of her sleep. She felt that a great jagged stone was suspended over her head, that it was becoming less and less firmly attached every day, and that its fall if not imminent was certain.

Hour after hour passed by; Daniel finally appeared in the vestibule. He was not a little terrified when he saw the burning lamp and Gertrude sitting up in bed.

He went into the bedroom, closed the door, walked up to the cradle, looked at the child, and then went over to Gertrude. She cast a glance of infinite inquiry at him. It was a look that seemed to implore him for a decision, a judgment. At the same time she put out her hands as if to ward off any approach on his part. When she saw that he was astonished, she softened the expression on her face, and said: “Give me your hand.”

She took his right hand, stroked it, and whispered: “Poor hand, poor hand.”

Daniel bit his lips: “Oh woman, what...?” That was all.

He sat down in silence on the edge of her bed. Gertrude looked at him in the same tense, anxious way in which she had studied him a few moments earlier. He sank down beside her, and fell asleep with his head on her breast.

She kept on holding his hand. She looked into his pale, narrow face and at his angular brow, the skin of which could be seen to twitch every now and then under the loose flowing hair that hung over it. The oil in the lamp was getting low, the wick had begun to smell. She was afraid however to put it out lest she might waken Daniel. She looked on in silence as the light became dimmer and dimmer and finally went out, leaving only the red glow of the wick. This too died away in time, and it became dark.

XII

For some time Eleanore had noticed that the baker’s boy, instead of carefully putting the rolls in the sack each morning as had always been his custom, threw them through the lattice on to the ground.

The newspaper boy stopped speaking to her; the postman smiled scornfully; and even the beggar, at least she thought so, asked for his alms in a tone of impudence.

One day she was passing through Schmausen Street; a woman was leaning out of the window. Seeing Eleanore coming, she called back into the room, whereupon a young man and three half-grown girls rushed to the window, began making remarks to each other, and gaped at her with looks that made her turn deathly pale.

Another time Daniel brought her a free ticket to a concert. She went, and as soon as she reached the hall she was struck by the discourteous and indecent manner in which the bystanders looked at her. A well-dressed woman moved away from her. Some men kept walking around her, grinning at her. She found it intolerable, and went home.

Exercise in the open had often driven away the cares that chanced to be weighing upon her: she went skating. As soon as the people saw her, they began to whisper among themselves. She did not bother about them or their remarks; she cut her beautiful figures on the ice as if she were quite alone. A group of young girls pointed at her with their fingers. She went up to them with pride glistening in her eyes, and they all ran away. Those who had formerly paid homage to her avoided her now. Her soul rebelled within her; meeting with so much unexpected and cowardly vulgarity enflamed her sensibilities and ennobled her self-respect.

One day in December she crossed the Wine Market, and started to pass through a narrow street that led to the Halle Gate. Standing at the entrance to the alley were a number of men engaged in conversation. She recognised Alfons Diruf among them. She thought they would step to one side and let her pass, but not one of them moved. They gaped at her in unmitigated shamelessness. She could have turned about and taken another street, but that defiance on the part of those men made her insist upon her rights to go the way she had originally decided upon. Impressed, apparently, by the flaming blue of her eyes, the scoundrels at last condescended to shift their lazy frames to one side. They formed an espalier through which she had to walk. But worse than this were the lewd looks that she knew were following her, and the laughter that greeted her ears. It was the type of laughter ordinarily heard at night when one passes a low dive, in which the scum of human society has gathered to amuse itself by the telling of salacious stories.

She often had the feeling, particularly after dark, that some one was following her. Once she looked around, and a man was behind her. He wore a havelock; he turned quickly into a gate. A few days later she had a similar experience, but this time she was frightened worse than ever, for she thought it was Herr Carovius.

One evening as she was leaving the house she saw the same figure standing by the church on the other side of the street. As she hesitated and wondered whether she should go on, another person joined the first. She thought it was Philippina. The two began to talk, but Eleanore could not make out who they were; it was snowing, and there was no street lamp nearby.

She could not tell why, but she was suddenly seized with anxiety for Daniel; for him and for no one else. She felt that unless she went back something dreadful would happen to him. She rushed up the steps to the attic room, and knocked at his door; there was not a sound. She opened the door and went in, but everything was dark. In the darkness, however, standing out against the white background from the light of the snow, she saw his body. He was sitting at the piano; he had his arms on the lid, his head between his hands. Eleanore hastened up to him, and, with a tone of sweet sadness in what she said, threw her arms around his neck.

Daniel took her on his lap, pressed her head to his bosom, and laughed with open month and shining teeth but without making a sound. He often laughed that way now.

XIII

He laughed that way at the intrigues that were being forged against him by his bitterest enemy, FrÄulein Varini, and which resulted in his meeting with distrust and opposition in everything he undertook at the City Theatre.

He laughed that way at the anonymous letters, filled with insulting remarks, which were being sent him by his fellow citizens, and which he read with naÏve curiosity merely to see how far human nastiness and bestial hate could go.

He laughed that way when he received the letter from Baroness von Auffenberg informing him that she was forced to discontinue her lessons and recitals. She said that her constitution had been weakened, and that she was going to close her town house and spend the winter at her country place at Hersbruck. Daniel heard however that she spent a great deal of her time in town, and that she had arranged for an elaborate cycle of musicales, a thing she had never dared to do under his administration. Andreas DÖderlein had been engaged as her musical adviser: now she could rave and go into ecstasies and hypnotise her impotent soul in the mephitic air of artificial aroma just as much as she pleased.

And he laughed that way at the weekly attacks upon him and his art that appeared in the FrÄnkischer Herold, copies of which were delivered at his front door with the regularity of the sun. The attacks consisted of sly, caustic sneers, secrets that had been ferreted out with dog-like keenness, gigantic broadsides based on hearsay evidence, and perfidious suspicions lodged against Daniel Nothafft, the artist, and Daniel Nothafft, the man.

The articles never failed to mention the Goose Man. Daniel asked to have the allusion explained. The Goose Man was elevated to the rank and dignity of an original humourist. “What is the latest concerning the Goose Man?” became a standing head-line. Or the reader’s eye would fall on the following notice: “The Goose Man is again attracting the attention of all friends of music. He has had the ingenious audacity to make the opera ‘Stradella’ more enjoyable by the interpolation of a funeral march of his own make. The ever-submissive domestic birds which he carries under his arms have rewarded him for his efforts in this connection by the cackling of their abundant and affectionate gratitude.”

The birthplace of these inimitable achievements in the field of journalistic wit was the reserved table at the Crocodile. If ever in the history of the world men have laughed real honest tears it was at the writing of such news bearing on the life and conduct of the Goose Man. The editor-in-chief, Weibezahl, was the recording secretary at these intellectual Olympiads, and Herr Carovius was the protagonist. He had access to reliable sources, as newspaper men say, and every evening he surprised the round table with new delicacies for Weibezahl’s columns.

Daniel was ignorant of what was going on. But the Goose Man, the expression as well as the figure, became interwoven with his thoughts, and acquired, somehow and somewhere in the course of time, a transfigured meaning.

XIV

One day Frau Kirschner wrote to Daniel telling him that she did not wish to have anything more to do with him; she demanded in the same letter that he pay back the money she had advanced him. He could not raise it: the City Theatre had already made him a loan, he had no friends, and M. RiviÈre, the only person on earth who might have been able to come to his rescue, had gone back to France.

Matters took their usual course: A lawyer notified Daniel, giving him so many days grace; when these had elapsed and no payment had been made, a summons was served on him; the sheriff came in, and in default of any other object of value he pawned the piano.

Daniel’s objections were quite ineffectual: a few days more and the piano would be put up at auction.

One gloomy morning in January Philippina entered his room.

“Say, Daniel,” she began, “would you like to have some money from me?”

Daniel turned his head slowly and looked at her in amazement.

“I have lots of it,” she continued with her hoarse voice, her glassy eyes glittering underneath her bangs. “I have been saving it a pfennig at a time ever since I was a child. I can give you the money you owe the Councillor’s wife. Sling it at her, the old hag! Say to me: ‘Please Philippina, give me the money,’ and you’ll find it on the table.”

“Are you crazy?” asked Daniel, “get out of here just as quickly as your feet can carry you!” He felt distinctly creepy in her presence.

Philippina, beside herself with rage, seized his hand. Before he could do a thing she bit him just below the little finger. The wound was quite deep. He groaned, shook her off, and pushed her back. She looked at him triumphantly, but her face had turned yellow.

“Listen, Daniel,” she said in a begging, beseeching tone, “don’t be so ugly! Don’t be so mean toward me! Don’t be so jealous!”

The wench’s infamous smile, her hair hanging down over her eyes, her big red hands, the snow-flakes on her short cloak, the border on her fiery red dress below her cloak, and the poison green ribbon on her hat—this ensemble of ugliness filled Daniel with the loathing he might have experienced had he stood face to face with the most detestable picture he had ever seen from the world of human beings. But as he turned his head, a feeling of sympathy came over him; he suspected that the girl was bound to him by bonds that did not reach him until after they had taken their course through the dark channels of some subterranean labyrinth. What she had done filled him with dismay; but as a revelation of character it surprised him and set him to thinking.

He went over to the washing table to put his bleeding hand in the water. Philippina took a fresh handkerchief from the cabinet, and handed it to him as a bandage. He looked at her with piercing eyes, and said: “What kind of a person are you? What sort of a devil is in you, anyway? Be careful, Jason Philip’s daughter, be careful!”

Since there was a tone of kindness in these words, the muscles of Philippina’s face moved in a mysterious way. Her features were distorted as if by a grin, and yet she was not grinning. She drew a leather purse from her cloak pocket, opened it, and took out two one-hundred-mark notes and a gold coin. They had been wrapped in paper. She unfolded the paper and the notes, laid them, together with the coin, on the table, and handed Daniel a written statement.

He read it: “I, the undersigned, Daniel Nothafft, promise to pay to Philippina Schimmelweis two hundred and twenty marks at five per cent interest, for value received.”

“With that you c’n pay the sheriff and git yourself out of this mess,” said Philippina, in a most urgent tone. “You can’t give piano lessons on a rolling pin, and that music box of yours is after all the tool you make your living by. Sign that, and you will be in peace.”

“Where did you get the money?” asked Daniel. “How did you ever come by so much money? Tell me the truth.” All of a sudden he remembered Theresa’s words: “All that nice money, all that nice money!”

Philippina began to chew her finger nails. “That’s none of your business,” she said gruffly, “it ain’t been stolen. Moreover, I c’n tell you,” she said, as she felt that his distrust was taking on a threatening aspect, “mother give it to me on the sly. She didn’t want me to be without a penny if anything happened. For my father—he would like to see me strung up. She give it to me, I say, on the side, and she made me swear before the cross that I would never let any one know about it.”

This tale of horror made Daniel shake his head; he had his doubts. He felt she was lying, and yet there was a mysterious force back of her statement and in her eyes. He was undecided; he thought it over. His livelihood was at stake. Weeks, months might pass by before he could get another piano. Philippina’s readiness to help him was a riddle to him, everything she said was repulsive and banal; but after all she was willing to help in a most substantial way, and he was in such difficulties that voices of admonition simply had to be drowned out.

“It is nothing but money,” he thought contemptuously, and sat down to put his name to the note.

Philippina drew up her shoulders, and never once breathed until he had signed the note and handed it over to her in silence. Then she looked at him imploringly, and said: “Now Daniel, you must never again treat me like you would a scurvy cat.”

XV

There had been an unusual amount of talk this year about the parade on Shrove Tuesday. On the afternoon of that day the whole city was on its feet.

Daniel was on his way home; he had reached the corner of Theresa Street when he ran into the crowd. He stopped out of idle curiosity. The first division of the parade came up: it consisted of three heralds in gaudy mediÆval costumes, and back of them were three councillors on horseback.

Next in the procession was a condemned witch on a wheelbarrow. Her face had been hideously painted, and in her hand she swung a huge whiskey bottle. She was followed by a group of Chinese, each with a long pigtail, and they by a troupe of dancing Kameruns.

The procession moved on in the following order: a giant carrying twenty-seven quart beer mugs; a woman’s orchestra consisting exclusively of old women; a wagon from one of the peasant districts bearing the inscription, “Adorers of Taxes”; a smoking club with the Swedish match merchant; a wagon with a replica of the Spittler Gate made of beer kegs; the so-called guard against sparks; a nurse with a grown child in diapers and Hussar boots; the seven Swabians on velocipedes; a cabriolet with a gaily dressed English family; a conveyance carrying authors. There were two inscriptions on it: “The And So Forths” and “The Et Ceterists.”

At the end of the procession was a wagon with a skilful imitation of the Goose Man. It had been made out of old boards, hoops, clay, old rags, and iron. The Goose Man himself wore an open velvet doublet and short velvet trousers, from the pockets of which protruded rolls of banknotes. Instead of a cap he had a rusty pan on his head, and on his feet was a pair of worn patent leather shoes. Under each arm he carried a goose. The geese had been made of dough. Their heads were not the heads of geese but of women artificially painted and with so-called taws, or marbles, for their eyes. The face at the Goose Man’s left looked melancholy, the one at his right was cheerful.

This was the centre of attraction; it was surrounded by the largest crowds. Every time it came within sight of a fresh group of on-lookers there was a tremendous shouting and waving of flags. This was true even where it was plain that the people did not appreciate the significance of it. Pulchinellos brandished their wooden swords, Indian chieftains danced around it screaming their mighty war-whoops, a Mephistopheles turned somersaults, knights mounted on stilts saluted, and children with wax masks shrieked until it was impossible to hear one’s own voice.

Daniel had watched the performance with relative indifference. He had regarded it merely as a display of commonplace ability to amuse the people. Then came the wagon with the imitation of the Goose Man. On it stood Schwalbe the sculptor, gloriously drunk. Beside him stood Kropotkin the painter in his shirt sleeves, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was cold. A fearfully fat youth—a future school officer, so far as could be determined from his looks—had hit upon the happy idea of pasting the title of the FrÄnkischer Herold to the Goose Man’s hat. This took the initiated by storm.

Kropotkin recognised Daniel. He called to him, threw him kisses, had one of the wooden swords given him, and went through the motion of directing an orchestra. The fat boy hurled a handful of pretzels at the spot on the sidewalk where Daniel was standing; a trombone began to bray; the Englishman first stuck his head out of his cabriolet, and then got out and hopped over to Daniel, carrying a pole draped with women’s clothes, including a feather hat and a veil. A new keg of beer was tapped on the Gambrinus wagon, while the people in the houses rushed to the windows and roared.

“You have forgotten the railing,” cried Daniel in a loud voice to the people on the Goose Man wagon.

“What did he say?” they asked, and looked at each other in astonishment. The on-lookers were filled with curious silence: many of them gazed at Daniel, bewildered.

“You forgot the railing,” he repeated, with glistening eyes, “you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, your clown.”

He laughed quietly, and, with opened mouth and shining teeth, quickly withdrew from the innumerable gapers. Having reached a deserted alley, he began to sing with a frenzied expression on his face: “Whom thou dost not desert, oh Genius, him wilt thou raise up with wings of fire. He will wander on as if with feet of flowers across Deucalion’s seas of slime, killing Python, light-footed, famed Pythius Apollo.”

XVI

A few weeks later a real singer came to Daniel. She sang several of the songs he had written. He had thought they were completely forgotten by everybody. Her art was not merely perfect; it was wonderful.

It was a very mysterious visit the singer paid him. One afternoon during a fearful snow storm the bell rang; and when Gertrude opened the door, she saw a woman wearing a heavy black veil standing before her, who said she wished to speak to Kapellmeister Nothafft. Gertrude took her up to Daniel’s room. The stranger told Daniel she had been wishing to make his acquaintance for a long time, and, now on her way to Italy, she had been detained in the city for a few days by the illness of a near friend. This, she said, she regarded as a hint from fate itself. She had come to extend him her greetings, and particularly to thank him for his songs, a copy of which a friend had been good enough to present to her at a time when she was living under the weight of a great sorrow.

She spoke with an accent that had a Northern note in it, but easily and fluently; she gave the impression of a woman who had seen a great deal of the world and had profited by her travels. Daniel asked her with whom he had the pleasure of speaking, but she smiled, and asked permission to conceal her name for the present. She said that it really did not make much difference, and that it might be more agreeable to him later to think that an unknown woman had come to him to express her appreciation than to recall that FrÄulein So-and-So had been there: she hoped that her very anonymity would make a more lasting impression on his memory than could be made by a woman of whom he knew only what everybody knows.

The mingling of the jocose and the serious, of the mind and the heart, in the words of the stranger pleased Daniel. Though his replies were curt and cool, it was plain that she was affording him much pleasure: she was reminding him of the fact that his creations had not after all sunk into an echoless abyss. In course of time, the conversation turned again to the songs; she said she would like very much to sing some of them for him. Daniel was pleased. He got the score, sat down at the piano, and the enigmatic woman began to sing. At the very first note Daniel was enraptured; he had never heard such a voice: so soft, so pure, so emotional, so unlike the conventional product of the conservatory. As soon as she had finished the first song, he looked up at her in unaffected embarrassment, and murmured: “Who are you, anyhow? Who are you?”

“No investigations or cross-questioning, please,” replied the singer, and, blushing at the praise Daniel was bestowing on her by his very behaviour, she laughed and said, “The next song, please, that one by Eichendorff!”

Gertrude, who had not wished to remain longer than was necessary because of the unkempt impression she knew she made, had hastened down to the kitchen. And now Eleanore came in, after having knocked at the door with all imaginable timidity. She had heard the strange voice, had rushed out into the hall, and, unable to restrain her curiosity any longer, had come in to see the singer.

Daniel nodded to her with radiant eyes, the stranger greeted her cordially though calmly, and then began to sing the next song; after this she took up the third, and so on until she had sung the complete cycle of six. Old Jordan was standing behind the door; he had his hands pressed to his face and was listening; he was much moved.

“Well, I must be going,” said the strange woman, after she had finished the last song. She shook hands with Daniel, and said: “It has been a beautiful hour.”

“It has been one of the most beautiful hours I have ever experienced,” said Daniel.

“Farewell!”

“Farewell!”

The strange woman went away, leaving behind her not a trace of anything other than the memory of a joy that grew more fabulous as the storm-tossed years rolled by. Daniel never saw her again, and never heard from her again.

XVII

While the woman was singing, Gertrude had been standing down in the hall listening. She knew every note of every song; every melody in the accompaniment seemed to her like an old, familiar picture. She was also aware that an artist by the grace of God had been in the house.

But how strange it was that she should find nothing unusual in the incident. She felt that a living stream in her bosom had dried up, leaving nothing but sand and stones in its bed. This inability to feel, this being dead to all sensations, took the form of excruciating pangs of conscience.

“My God, my God, what has happened to me?” she sighed, and wrung her hands.

That evening she went to the Church of Our Lady, and prayed for a long while. Her prayer did not appease her, however; she came back home more disquieted than ever.

The door of the living room was open: Daniel and Eleanore were sitting by the lamp, reading together from a book. The baby began to move; Eleanore had left the door open so that she might be able to hear the child when it woke up. Gertrude took the child in her arms, quieted it, and returned to the door leading into the living room. Daniel and Eleanore had turned their backs to the door, and were so absorbed in their reading that they were not aware of Gertrude’s presence.

A light suddenly came into Gertrude’s heart: she became conscious of her guilt—the guilt she had been trying in vain to fathom now for so many cruel weeks.

She did not have enough of the power of love; therein lay her guilt. She had assumed an obligation that was quite beyond her power to fulfil: she had entered into marriage without having the requisite strength of heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philippina had vanished.