Part 112

It would not go. He sighed. He sat before the instrument, and stared at the paper like a schoolboy who has a problem to solve but has forgotten the rule. He seemed to lament the loss of his artistic ability. He felt so hollow. The notes grinned at him; they mocked him. His thoughts turned involuntarily to the miller. He improvised for a while. Dorothea stuck her head in the door and sang: “Rhinegold, Rhinegold, pu-re gold.”

He was enraged; he got up, slammed the lid of the piano, took his hat and top coat, left the house, and went out to see his friend in the suburbs.

When he returned that night, he saw Dorothea standing in the door with a man. It was the actor, Edmund Hahn. They were carrying on a heated conversation in whispers. The man was holding Dorothea by the arm, but when Döderlein became visible from the unlighted street, he uttered an ugly oath and quickly disappeared.

Dorothea looked her father straight, and impudently, in the face, and followed him into the dark house.

When they were upstairs and had lighted the lamp, Döderlein turned to her, and asked her threateningly: “What do you mean by these immodest associations? Tell me! I want an answer!”

“I don’t want to marry your flour sack. That’s my answer,” said Dorothea, with a defiant toss of her head.

“Well, we’ll see,” said Döderlein, pale with rage and ploughing through his hair with his fingers, “we’ll see. Get out of here! I have no desire to lose my well-earned sleep on account of such an ungrateful hussy. We’ll take up the subject again to-morrow morning.”

The next morning Dorothea hastened to Herr Carovius. “Uncle,” she stammered, “he wants to marry me to that flour sack.”

“Yes? Well, I suppose I’ll have to visit that second-rate musician in his studio again and give him a piece of my mind. In the meantime be calm, my child, be calm,” said he, stroking her brown hair, “Old Carovius is still alive.”

Dorothea nestled up to him, and smiled: “What would you say, Uncle,” she began with a knavish and at the same time unusually attentive expression in her face, “if I were to marry Daniel Nothafft? You like him,” she continued in a flattering tone, and held him fast by the shoulder when he started back, “you like him, I know you do. I must marry somebody; for I do not wish to be an old maid, and I can’t stand Father any longer.”

Herr Carovius tore himself loose from her. “To the insane asylum with you!” he cried. “I would rather see you go to bed with that meal sack. Is the Devil in you, you prostitute? If your skin itches, scratch it, so far as I am concerned, but take a stable boy to do it, as Empress Katherine of blessed memory did. Buy fine dresses, bedizen yourself with tom-foolery of all shades and colours, go to dances and lap up champagne, make music or throw your damn fiddle on the dung heap, do anything you want to do, I’ll pay for it; but that green-eyed phantast, that lunk-headed rat-catcher, that woman-eater and music-box bird, no, no! Never! Send him humping down the stairs and out the front door! For God’s sake and the sake of all the saints, don’t marry him! Don’t, I say. If you do, it’s all off between you and me.”

There was such a look of hate and fear in Herr Carovius’s face that Dorothea was almost frightened. His hair was as towsled as the twigs of an abandoned bird’s nest; water was dripping from the corners of his mouth; his eyes were inflamed; his glasses were on the tip of his nose.

Nothing could have made Dorothea more pleased with the story Daniel had told her than Herr Carovius’s ravings. Her eyes were opened wide, her mouth was thirsty. If she had hesitated at times before, she did so no more. She loved money; greed was a part of her make-up from the hour she was born. But if Herr Carovius had laid the whole of his treasures at her feet, and said to her, “You may have them if you will renounce Daniel Nothafft,” she would have replied, “Your money, my Daniel.”

Something terribly strange and strong drew her to the man she had just heard so volubly cursed. That sensual prickling was of a more dangerous violence and warmth in his presence than in that of any other man she had ever known; and she had known a number. To her he was a riddle and a mystery; she wanted to solve the one and clear up the other. He had possessed so many women, indubitably more than he had confessed to her; and she wished now to possess him. He was so quiet, so clever, so resolute: she wanted his quietness, his cleverness, his resoluteness. She wanted everything he had, his charm, his magic, his power over men, all that he displayed and all that he concealed.

She thought of him constantly; she thought in truth of no one else, and nothing else. Her thoughts fluttered about his picture, shyly, greedily, and as playfully as a kitten. He had managed to bring will power and unity into her senses. She wanted to have him.

The rain beat against the window. Terrified at Dorothea’s thoughtfulness, Herr Carovius pressed his hands to his cheeks. “I see, I see, you want to leave me all alone,” he said in a tone that sounded like the howling of a dog in the middle of the night. “You want to deceive me, to surrender me to the enemy, to leave me nothing, nothing but the privilege of sitting here and staring at my four walls. I see, I see.”

“Be still, Uncle, nothing is going to happen. It is all a huge joke,” said Dorothea with feigned good humour and kind intentions. She walked to the door slowly, looking back every now and then with a smile on her face.

XVII

It was early in the morning when Dorothea rang Daniel’s bell. Philippina opened the door, but she did not wish to let Dorothea in. She forced an entrance, however, and, standing in the door, she inspected Philippina with the eye of arrogance, always a clear-sighted organ.

“Look out, Philippin’, there’s something rotten here,” murmured Philippina to herself.

Daniel was at work. He got up and looked at Dorothea, who carefully closed the door.

“Here I am, Daniel,” she said, and breathed a sigh of relief, like a swimmer who has just reached the land.

“What is it all about?” asked Daniel, seemingly ill inclined to become excited.

“I have done what you wanted me to do, Daniel: I have broken away from them. I cannot tolerate Father a minute longer. Where should I go if not to you?”

Daniel went up to her, and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Girl, girl!” he said as if to warn her. He felt uneasy.

They looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed like an eternity. Daniel was apparently trying to peer into the innermost recesses of her soul. Dorothea’s eyes sparkled with daring; she did not lower her lids. Suddenly, as if moved from within, Daniel bent over and kissed her on the forehead.

“You know who I am,” he said, and walked back and forth in the room. “You know how I have lived and how I am living at present. I am a guilty man, and a lonely man. My nature craves tenderness, but is unable to give tenderness in return. My lot is a hard one, and whoever decides to share it with me must be able to bear her part of this hardness. I am frequently my own enemy and the enemy of those who mean well by me. I am not a humourist, and make a poor impression in society. I can be gruff, offensive, spiteful, irreconcilable, and revengeful. I am ugly, poor, and no longer young. Are you not afraid of your twenty-three years, Dorothea?”

Dorothea shook her head vigorously.