Part 120

Philippina got up: “Yes, it is my money,” she confessed with reluctance, and looked at Dorothea hostilely.

“It must be a whole lot. Look out, or some one will steal it from you. You will have to sleep on your stomach.”

Daniel came down from his study, and heard Dorothea laughing. Grief was gnawing at his heart; he passed hastily by the door.

One evening, as Philippina came into the hall from the street, she saw a man coming up to her in the dark; he called her by name. She thought she recognised his voice, and on looking at him more closely saw that it was her father.

She had not spoken to him for ten years. She had seen him from time to time at a distance, but she had always made it a point to be going in another direction as soon as she saw him; she avoided him, absolutely.

“What’s the news?” she asked in a friendly tone.

Jason Philip cleared his throat, and tried to get out of the light in the hall and back into the shadow: he wished to conceal his shabby clothes from his daughter.

“Now, listen,” he began with affected naturalness, “you might inquire about your parents once in a while. The few steps over to our house wouldn’t make you break your legs. Honour thy father and thy mother, you know. Your mother deserves any kindness you can show her. As for me, well, I have dressed you down at times, but only when you needed it. You were a mischievous monkey, and you know it.”

He laughed; but there was the fire of fear in his eyes. Philippina was the embodiment of silence.

“As I was saying,” Jason Philip continued hastily, as if to prevent any inimical memories of his daughter from coming to his mind, “you might pay a little attention to your parents once in a while: Can’t you lend me ten marks? I have got to meet a bill to-morrow morning, and I haven’t got a pfennig. The boys, you know, I mean your brothers, are conducting themselves splendidly. They give me something the first of each month, and they do it regularly. But I don’t like to go to them about this piddling business to-morrow. I thought that as you were right here in the neighbourhood, I could come over and see you about it.”

Jason Philip was lying. His sons gave him no help whatsoever. Willibald was living in Breslau, where he had a poorly paid position as a bookkeeper and was just barely making ends meet. Markus was good for nothing, and head over heels in debt.

Philippina thought the matter over for a moment, and then told her father to wait. She went upstairs. Jason Philip waited at the door, whistling softly. Many years had passed by since he first attacked the civil powers, urged on by a rebellion of noble thoughts in his soul. Many years had passed by since he had made his peace with these same civil powers. Nevertheless, he continued to whistle the “Marseillaise.”

Philippina came waddling down the steps, dragged herself over to the door, and gave her father a five-mark piece. “There,” she bellowed, “I haven’t any more myself.”

But Jason Philip was satisfied with half the amount he had asked for. He was now equipped for an onslaught on the nearest café with its corned beef, sausages, and new beer.

From this time on he came around to the house on Ægydius Place quite frequently. He would stand in the hall, look around for Philippina, and if he found her, beg her for money. The amounts Philippina gave him became smaller and smaller. Finally she took to giving him ten pfennigs when he came.

XII

It frequently happened that Daniel would not answer when any one asked him a question. His ear lost the words, his eye the pictures, signs, faces, gestures. He was in his own way; he was a torment to himself.

Something drew him there and then here. He would leave the house, and then be taken with a longing to return. He noticed that people were laughing at him; laughing at him behind his back. He read mockery in the eyes of his pupils; the maids in the house tittered when he passed by.

What did they know? What were they concealing? Perhaps his soul could have told what they knew and what they concealed; but he was unwilling to drag it all out into the realm of known, nameable things.

As if an invisible slanderer were at his side, unwilling to leave him, leave him in peace, his despair increased. “What have you done, Daniel!” a voice within him cried, “what have you done!” The shades of the sisters, arm in arm, arose before him.

The feeling of having made a mistake, a mistake that could never be rectified, burned like fire within him. His work, so nearly completed, had suddenly died away.

For the sake of his symphony, he forced himself into a quiet frame of mind at night, made room for faint-hearted hopes, and lulled his presentient soul into peace.

The thing that troubled him worst of all was the way Philippina looked at him.

Since the birth of the child he had been living in Eleanore’s room. Old Jordan was consideration itself: he went around in his stocking feet so as not to disturb him.

One night Daniel took the candle, and went downstairs to Dorothea’s room. She woke up, screamed, looked at him bewildered, recognised him, became indignant, and then laughed mockingly and sensually.

He sat down on the side of her bed, and took her right hand between his two. But he had a disagreeable sensation on feeling her hand in his, and looked at her fingers. They were not finely formed: they were thicker at the ends than in the middle; they could not remain quiet; they twitched constantly.

“This can’t keep up, Dorothea,” he said in a kindly tone, “you are ruining your own life and mine too. Why do you have all these people around you? Is the pleasure you derive from associating with them so great that it benumbs your conscience? I have no idea what you are doing. Tell me about it. The household affairs are in a wretched condition; everything is in disorder. And that cigar smoke out in the living room! I opened a window. And your child! It has no mother. Look at its little face, and see how pale and sickly it looks!”

“Well, I can’t help it; Philippina puts poppy in the milk so that it will sleep longer,” Dorothea answered, after the fashion of guilty women: of the various reproaches Daniel had cast at her, she seized upon the one of which she felt the least guilty. But after this, Daniel had no more to say.