Part 58

He stepped out into the hall, and listened. There hovered before him in the darkness the face of Philippina. She showed the same scornful immobility that she showed when her father struck her in the face. He stepped to the railing, and sat down on the top step; a fit at once of weakness and aimless defiance came over him. He buried his face in his hands; he could still hear Theresa saying, “All that nice money.”

There were shadows everywhere; there was nothing but night and shadows.

Eleanore, light-hearted and light-footed, returned at last. When she saw him, she stopped. He arose, and stretched out his arms as if to take the milk bottle. That is the way she interpreted his gesture, and handed it to him in surprise. He, however, set it down on the landing beside him. The light from the living room shone on it and made it look sparkling white. Then he drew Eleanore to him, threw his arms around her, and kissed her on the mouth.

Merely a creature of man, only a woman, nothing but heart and breath, all longing and forgetting, forgetting for just one moment, finding herself for a moment, knowing her own self for a moment—she pressed close up to him. But her hands were folded between her breast and his, and thus separated their bodies.

Then she broke away from him, wrung her hands, looked up at him, pressed close up to him again, wrung her hands again—it was all done in absolute silence and with an almost terrible grace and loveliness.

Everything was now entirely different from what it had been, or what she had formerly imagined it to be; there were depths to everything now. She lost herself; she ceased to exist for a moment; darkness enveloped her much-disciplined heart; she entered upon a second existence, an existence that had no similarity with the first.

To this existence she was now bound; she had succumbed to it: the law of nature had gone into effect. But the glass case had been shattered; it was in pieces. She stood there unprotected, even exposed, so to speak, to men, no longer immune to their glances, an accessible prey to their touch.

She went into the kitchen, and heated the milk. Daniel returned to the living room. His veins were burning, his heart was hammering. He had no sense of appreciation of the time that had passed. When Eleanore came into the room, he began to tremble.

She came up to him, and spoke to him in passionate sadness: “Have you heard about Gertrude? Don’t you know, really? She is with child—your wife.”

“I did not know it,” whispered Daniel. “Did she tell you?”

“Yes, just now.”

TRES FACIUNT COLLEGIUM

The habitués of the reserved table at the Crocodile were all reasonably well informed of the events that had recently taken place in the homes of Inspector Jordan and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. Details were mentioned that would make it seem probable that the cracks in the walls and the key-holes of both houses had been entertaining eavesdroppers.

Some refused to believe that Jason Philip had made restitution for the money young Jordan had embezzled. For, said Degen, the baker, Schimmelweis is a hard-fisted fellow, and whoever would try to get money out of him would have to be in the possession of extraordinary shrewdness.

“But he has already paid it,” said Gründlich, the watchmaker. He knew he had; he knew that the wife of the bookseller had gone over to Nothafft’s on Tuesday afternoon; that she had a heap of silver in a bag; and that when she came back home she took to bed, and had been ill ever since.

Kitzler, the assistant postmaster, felt there was something wrong here; and if there was not, you would simply have to assume that Nothafft, the musician, was a dangerous citizen, who had somehow managed to place the breast of his uncle vis-à-vis a revolver.

“And you know, Nothafft is to be made Kapellmeister at the City Theatre,” remarked the editor Weibezahl, the latest member of the round table. “His appointment is to be made public in a few days.”

“What! Kapellmeister! You don’t say so! That will make Andreas Döderlein the saddest man in ten states.”

Herr Carovius, whose mouth was just then hanging on his beer glass, laughed so heartily that the beer went down his Sunday throat; he was seized with a coughing spell. Herr Korn slapped him on the back.

It was a shame that such a bad actor as Nothafft had to be endured in the midst of people who lived peaceful and law-abiding lives. This lament came from Herr Kleinlein, who had been circuit judge now for some time. He was anxious to know whether all the tales that were circulating concerning Nothafft were true.

Well, he was told, a great many things are said about Nothafft, but it is difficult to get at the truth. They appealed to the apothecary Pflaum, on the ground that his assistant knew the musician and might be able to give them some definite information.

Herr Pflaum took on an air as if he knew a great deal but was under obligations not to tell. Yes, yes, he said rather perfunctorily, he had heard that some one had said that Nothafft was running a pretty questionable domestic establishment; that he had a rather unsavoury past; and that there was some talk about his neglecting his wife.

The deuce you say! Why, they were married only a short while ago. Yes, but there was a rumour to the effect that there was a woman in the case. Who could it be? Ahem! Well-ah, it would be a good idea to be cautious about mentioning names. Good Lord, why cautious? Why not straight out with the information any one chanced to be fortunate enough to have? Is it not a question of protecting one’s own wife and daughters?

And so this slanderous babble rattled on. There was something unfathomable in their hatred of the musician. They were just as agreed on this point as they would have been if Daniel had broken open their strong boxes, smashed their windows, and betrayed their honour and dignity to public ridicule.

They did not know what they should do about him. They passed by him as one would pass by a bomb that might or might not explode.

When Herr Carovius was alone, he picked up the paper, and read the account of a mine explosion in Silesia. The number of killed satisfied him. The description of the women as they stood at the top of the shaft, wept, wrung their hands, and called out the names of their husbands, filled him with the same agreeable sensation that he experienced when he listened to the melancholy finale of a Chopin nocturne.

But he could not forget the expression on Herr Pflaum’s face when he told how Nothafft was neglecting his wife. It had been the expression that comes out, so to speak, from between the curtains of a sleeping room: something was up, make no mistake, something was going on.

For quite a while Herr Carovius had harboured the suspicion that there was something wrong. Twice he had met Daniel and Eleanore walking along the street in the twilight, talking to each other in a very mysterious way. Things were going on behind Herr Carovius’s back which he could not afford to overlook.