Part 118

She rarely came home with empty hands. It may have been only little things that she bought, a manikin of porcelain with a tile hat and an umbrella, or a pagoda with a wag-head, or even merely a mouse-trap—but they all cost money.

Philippina would be called in; Philippina was to admire the purchases. And she would say with apparent delight: “Now ain’t that sweet!” Or, “Now that’s fine; we needed a mouse-trap so bad! There was a mouse on the clothes rack just yesterday, cross my heart, Daniel.”

As to hats, dresses, stockings, shoes, laces, and blouses—when it came to these Dorothea was a stranger to such concepts as measure or modesty. She wanted to compete with the wives of the rich people whose parties she attended, and next to whom she sat in the pastry shop or at the theatre.

She was given free tickets to the theatre and the concerts. But once when she had told Daniel that the director had sent her a ticket, he learned from Philippina that she had bought the ticket and paid for it with her own money. He did not call her to account, but he could not get the thought out of his mind that she had believed she had deceived him.

He did not accompany her on her pleasure jaunts; he wanted to work and not double even the smallest expenditure by going with her. Dorothea had become accustomed to this. She looked upon his apathy toward the theatre and his dislike of social distractions as a caprice, a crotchet on his part. She never considered what he had gone through in the way of theatricals and concerts; she had completely forgotten what he had confessed to her in a decisive hour.

When she came home late in the evening with burning cheeks and glowing eyes, Daniel did not have the courage to give her the advice he felt she so sorely needed. “Why snatch her from her heaven?” he thought. “She will become demure and quiet in time; her wild lust for pleasure will fade and disappear.”

He was afraid of her pouting mien, her tears, her perplexed looks, her defiant running about. But he lacked the words to express himself. He knew how ineffectual warning and reproach might be and were. Empty talking back and forth he could not stand, while if he made a really human remark it found no response. She did not appreciate what he said; she misunderstood, misinterpreted everything. She laughed, shrugged her shoulders, pouted, called him an old grouch, or cooed like a dove. She did not look at him with real eyes; there was no flow of soul in what she did.

Gloom filled his heart.

The waste in the household affairs became worse and worse from week to week. Daniel would have felt like a corner grocer if he had never let her know how much he had saved, or had given her less than she asked for. And so his money was soon all gone. Dorothea troubled herself very little about the economic side of their married life. She told Philippina what to do, and fell into a rage if her orders were not promptly obeyed.

“It’s too dull for her here. My God, such a young woman!” said Philippina to Daniel with simulated regret. “She wants to have a good time; she wants to enjoy her life. And you can’t blame her.”

Philippina was the mistress of the house. She went to the market, paid the bills, superintended the cook and the washwoman, and rejoiced with exceeding great and fiendish joy when she saw how rapidly everything was going downhill, downhill irresistibly and as sure as your life.

VIII

As the time approached for Dorothea’s confinement she very rarely left the house. She would lie in bed until about eleven o’clock, when she would get up, dress, comb her hair, go through her wardrobe, and write letters.

She carried on a most elaborate correspondence; those who received her letters praised her amusing style.

After luncheon she would go back to bed; and late in the afternoon her visitors came in, not merely women but all sorts of young men. It often happened that Daniel did not even know the names of the people. He would withdraw to the room Eleanore had formerly occupied, and from which he could hear laughter and loud talk resounding through the hall.

By evening Dorothea was tired. She would sit in the rocking chair and read the newspaper, or the Wiener Mode, generally not in the best of humour.

Daniel confidently believed that all this would change for the better as soon as the child had been born; he believed that the feeling of a mother and the duties of a mother would have a broadening and subduing effect on her.

Late in the autumn Dorothea gave birth to a boy, who was baptised Gottfried. She could not do enough by way of showing her affection for the child; her transports were expressed in the most childish terms; her display of tenderness was almost excessive.

For six days she nursed the child herself. Then the novelty wore off, friends told her it would ruin her shape to keep it up, and she quit. “It makes you stout,” she said to Philippina, “and cow’s milk is just as good, if not better.”

Philippina opened her mouth and eyes as wide as she could when she saw Dorothea standing before the mirror, stripped to the hips, studying the symmetry of her body with a seriousness that no one had ever noticed in her before.

Dorothea became coldly indifferent toward her child; it seemed that she had entirely forgotten that she was a mother. The baby slept in the room with Philippina and Agnes, both of whom cared for it. Its mother was otherwise engaged.

As if to make up for lost time and to indemnify herself for the suffering and general inconvenience to which she had been put in the last few months, Dorothea rushed with mad greediness into new pleasures and strange diversions. Soon however she found herself embarrassed from a lack of funds. Daniel told her, kindly but firmly, that the salaries he was drawing as organist and teacher were just barely enough to keep the house going, and that he was curtailing his own personal needs as much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. “We are not peasants,” he said, “and that we are not living from the mercy of chance is a flaw in me rather than in my favour.”

“You old pinch-penny!” said Dorothea. Ugly wrinkles appeared on her brow. “If you had not made me disgusted with my art, I might have been able to make a little money too,” she added.

He looked down at the floor in complete silence. She however began thinking about ways and means of getting her hands on money. “Uncle Carovius might help me,” she thought. She took to visiting her father more frequently, and every time she came she would stand out in the hall for a while hoping to see Herr Carovius. One day he appeared. She wanted to speak to him, smile at him, win him over. But one look from that face, filled with petrified and ineradicable rage, showed her that any attempt to approach the old man and get him in a friendly frame of mind would be fruitless.

On the way home she chanced to meet the actor Edmund Hahn. She had not seen him since she had been married. The actor seemed tremendously pleased to see her. They walked along together, engaged in a zealous conversation, talking at first loudly and then gently.

The day Dorothea got married, Herr Carovius had gone to his lawyer to have the will he had drawn up the night before attested to. He had bequeathed his entire fortune, including his home and the furniture, to an institution to be erected after his death for the benefit of orphans of noble birth. Baron Eberhard von Auffenberg had been named as first director of the institution and sole executor of his will.

Herr Carovius refused to have anything more to do with music. He had a leather cover made for his long, narrow grand piano, and enshrouded in this, the instrument resembled a stuffed animal. He looked back on his passion for music as one of the aberrations of his youth, though he realised that he was chastising his spirit till it hurt when he took this attitude.

The method he employed to keep from having nothing to do was characteristic of the man: he went through all the books of his library looking for typographical errors. He spent hours every day at this work; he read the scientific treatises and the volumes of pure literature with his attention fixed on individual letters. When, after infinite search, he discovered a word that had been misspelled, or a grammatical slip, he felt like a fisherman who, after waiting long and patiently, finally sees a fish dangling on the hook.