Part 111

She came closer to him; her eyes were filled with tears. “Don’t be angry at me,” she said again, “poor Dorothea can’t help it. She is not responsible for it.”

“But how did you come to do it?” asked Daniel. “I can’t see how it was possible. Weren’t you disgusted to the very bottom of your soul? How could you go about under God’s free heavens with such hyenas? Why, girl, the very thought of it fills me with scepticism about everything.”

“What should I have done, Daniel?” she said, calling him by his baptismal name for the first time. She spoke with a felicitous mixture of submissiveness and boldness that touched and at the same time enchanted him. “What should I have done? They come and talk to you, and spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven’t got anybody else in the world to talk to.” Such was her defence, effective even if more voluble than coherent.

They walked on. They were passing through a valley in the forest. On either side were tall pine trees, the crowns of which were lighted by the evening sun.

“You can’t play with Fate, Dorothea,” said Daniel. “It does not permit smudging or muddling, if we are to stand the test. It keeps a faultless ledger; the entries it makes on both sides are the embodiment of accuracy. Debts that we contract must always be paid, somehow, somewhere.”

Dorothea felt that he was getting started; that the great, good story was about to come. She stopped, spread her shawl on the ground, and took a graceful position on it, all eyes and ears. Daniel threw himself on the moss beside her.

And he told his story—into the moss where little insects were creeping around. He never raised either his eye or his voice. At times Dorothea had to bend over to hear him.

He told about Gertrude, her torpor, her awakening, her love, her resignation. He told about Eleanore; told how he had loved her without knowing it. He told how Eleanore, out of an excess of passion and suffering, became his, how Gertrude wandered about dazed, unhappy, lost, until she finally took her life: “Then we went up to the attic, and found it on fire and her lifeless body hanging from the rafter.”

He told how Gertrude had lived on as a shadow by the side of Eleanore, and how Eleanore became a flower girl, and how Philippina the inexplicable, and still inexplicable, had come into his family, and how Gertrude’s child lived there like an unfed foundling, and how the other child, the child he had had by the maid, had found such a warm spot in his heart.

He told of his meeting the two sisters, their speaking and their remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his experiences with the Dörmaul opera company, the light thrown on his drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him, his separation from him, the brush-maker’s house on St. James’s Place, the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle Erfft, the old father of the two sisters and his strange doings—all of this he described in the tone of a man awakening from a deep sleep. There was a confidence in what he said and the way he said it that mayhap terrified the hovering spirits of the evening, though it did not fill Dorothea’s eyes, then glistening like polished metal, with a more intimate or cordial light.

When he looked up he felt he saw two sombre figures standing on the edge of the forest; he felt he saw the two sisters, and that they were casting mournful, reproachful glances at him.

He got up. “And all that,” he concluded, “all that has been drunk up, like rain by the parched earth, by a work on which I have been labouring for the past seven years. For seven years. Two more years, and I will give it to the world, provided this unsteady globe has not fallen into the sun by that time.”

Dorothea had a confused, haphazard idea as to the type of man that was standing before her. She was seized with a prickling desire for him such as she had thus far never experienced. She began to love him, in her way. Something impelled her to seek shelter by him, near him, somewhat as a bird flies under the crown of a tree at the approach of a storm. Daniel interpreted the timidity with which she put her arm in his as a sign of gratitude.

And in this mood he took her back to the city.

It was in this pulsing, urging, joyful mood that Daniel worked at and completed the fifth movement of his symphony, a scherzo of grand proportions, beginning with a clarinet figure that symbolised laughing sans-souci. All the possibilities of joy developed from this simple motif. Nor was retrospection or consolation lacking. If the main themes, mindful of their former pre-eminence, seemed inclined to widen the bed of their stream, they were appeased and forced back into their original channel by artistic and capriciously alternating means. Once all three themes flowed along together, gaining strength apparently through their union, rose to a wonderful fugue, and seemed to be just on the point of gaining the victory when the whole orchestra, above the chord in D sevenths, was seized by the waltz melody, those melancholy sister-strains were taken up by the violins, and fled, dirge-like, to their unknown abodes. Just before the jubilant crescendo of the finale, a bassoon solo held one of them fast on its distant, grief-stricken heights.

Daniel sketched the sixth movement in the following fourteen nights.

He was fully aware of the fact that he had never been able to work this way before. When a man accomplishes the extraordinary, he knows it. It seizes him like a disease, and fills him like a profound dream.

At times he felt as though he must tell some one about it, even if it were only Herr Carovius. But once the flame had died down, he could not help but laugh at the temptation to which he had felt himself subjected. “Patience,” he thought, feeling more assured than ever, “patience, patience!”

Since his work on the manuscripts was completed and his connection with the firm of Philander and Sons dissolved, he began to look around for another position. He had saved in the course of the last few years four thousand marks, but he wished to keep this sum intact.

He learned that the position of organist at the Church of St. Ægydius was vacant; he went to the pastor, who recommended him to his superiors. It was decided that he should play something before the church consistory. This he did one morning in October. The trial proved eminently successful to his exacting auditors.

He was appointed organist at St. Ægydius’s at a salary of twelve hundred marks a year. When he played on Sundays and holidays, the people came into the church just to hear him.

XVI

Among the suitors for the hand of Dorothea on whom Andreas Döderlein looked with special favour was the mill owner, a man by the name of Weisskopf. Herr Weisskopf was passionately fond of music. He had greatly admired Dorothea when she gave her concert, and had sent her a laurel wreath.

One day Herr Weisskopf came in and took dinner with the Döderleins. When he left, Döderlein said to his daughter: “My dear Dorothea, from this day on you may consider yourself betrothed. This admirable man desires to have you as his lawfully wedded wife. It is a great good fortune; the man is as rich as Crœsus.”

Instead of making a reply, Dorothea laughed heartily. But she knew that the time had come when something had to be done. Her mobile face twitched with scorn, fear, and desire.

“Think it over; sleep on it. I have promised Herr Weisskopf to let him know to-morrow,” said Döderlein, black-browed.

A week before this, Andreas Döderlein, confidently expecting that Herr Weisskopf would ask for the hand of his daughter, had borrowed a thousand marks from him. The miller had loaned him the money believing that he was thereby securing a promissory note on Dorothea. Döderlein had placed himself under obligations, and was consequently determined to carry out his plans with regard to the marriage of his daughter.

But Dorothea’s behaviour made it safe to predict that objections would be raised on her part. Döderlein was in trouble; he sought distraction. Sixteen years ago he had begun an opus entitled “All Souls: a Symphonic Picture.” Five pages of the score had been written, and since then he had never undertaken creative work. He rummaged around in his desk, found the score, went to the piano, and tried to take up the thread where he had lost it sixteen years ago. He tried to imagine the intervening time merely as a pause, an afternoon siesta.