Part 63

There was no outside door or entrance hall of any kind to Jordan’s new quarters. You went direct from the stairway into the room where Eleanore worked and slept. Adjoining this was her father’s room. People still called him the Inspector, although he no longer had such a position.

He sat in his narrow, cramped room the whole day. One wall was out of plumb. The windows he kept closed. When Eleanore brought him his breakfast or called him to luncheon, which she had cooked in the tiny box of a kitchen and then served in her own little room, he was invariably sitting at the table before a stack of papers, mostly old bills and letters. The arrangement of these he never changed.

Once she entered his room without knocking. He sprang up, closed a drawer as quickly as he could, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and tried to smile in an innocent way. Eleanore’s heart almost stopped beating.

He never went out until it was dark, and on his return he could be seen carrying a package under his arm. This he took with him to his room.

At first Eleanore was always uneasy when she had to leave. She requested Philippina to be very careful and see to it that no stranger entered the house. Philippina had a box full of ribbons in Eleanore’s cabinet. She set a chair against the door leading into Jordan’s room; and when her hands were tired from rummaging around in the ribbons and her eyes weary from looking at all the flashy colours, she pressed her ear to the door to see if she could find out what the old man was doing.

At times she heard him talking. It seemed as if he were talking with some one. His voice had an exhortatory but tender tone in it. Philippina trembled with fear. Once she even pressed the latch; she wanted to open the door as quietly as possible, so that she might peep in and see what was really going on. But to her vexation, the door was bolted on the other side.

For Gertrude she did small jobs and ran little errands: she would go to the baker or the grocer for her. Gertrude became less and less active; it was exceedingly difficult for her to climb the stairs. Philippina took the place of a maid. The only kind of work she refused to do was work that would soil her clothes. Gertrude’s shyness irritated her; one day she said in a snappy tone: “You are pretty proud, ain’t you? You don’t like me, do you?” Gertrude looked at her in amazement, and made no reply; she did not know what to say.

Whenever Philippina heard Daniel coming, she hid herself. But if he chanced to catch sight of her, he merely shrugged his shoulders at the “frame,” as he contemptuously called her. It seemed to him that it would be neither wise nor safe to mistreat her. He felt that it was the better part of valour to look with favour on her inexplicable diligence, and let it go at that.

Once he even so completely overcame himself that he gave her his hand; but he drew it back immediately: he felt that he had never touched anything so slimy in his life; he thought he had taken hold of a frog. Philippina acted as if she had not noticed what he had done. But scarcely had he gone into his room, when she turned to Gertrude with a diabolic glimmer in her eyes, and, making full use of her vulgar voice, said: “Whew! Daniel’s kind, ain’t he? No wonder people can’t stand him!”

When she saw that Gertrude knit her brow at this exclamation, she wheeled about on the heels of her clumsy shoes, and screamed as if the devil were after her: “Oi, oi, Gertrude, Gertrude, oi, oi, the meat’s burning! The meat’s burning.”

It was a false alarm. The meat was sizzling quite peacefully in the pan.

Late in the afternoon of a stormy day in June Daniel came home from the last rehearsal of the “Harzreise,” tired and out of humour. The rehearsals had been held in a small room in Weyrauth’s Garden. He had quarrelled with all the musicians and with all the singers, male and female.

As he reached Ægydius Place a shudder suddenly ran through his body. He was forced to cover his eyes with his hands and stand still for a moment; he thought he would die from longing for a precious virginal possession which he had been so foolish as to trifle away.

He went up the steps, passed by his own apartment, and climbed on up to the apartment of Inspector Jordan and his daughter Eleanore.

His eye fell on the board partition surrounding the stove and the copper cooking utensils that hung on the wall. There sat Eleanore, her arm resting on the window sill, her head on her hand: she was meditating—meditating and gaining new strength as she did so. Her face was turned toward the steep fall of a roof, the century-old frame-work, grey walls, darkened window panes and dilapidated wooden galleries, above which lay stillness and a rectangular patch of sky that was then covered with clouds.

“Good evening,” said Daniel, as he stepped out of the darkness into the dimly lighted room. “What are you doing, Eleanore, what are you thinking about?”

Eleanore shuddered: “Ah, is it you, Daniel? You show yourself after a long while? And ask what I am thinking about? What curiosity! Do you want to come into my room?”

“No, no, sit perfectly still,” he replied, and prevented her from getting up by touching her on the shoulder. “Is your father at home?”

She nodded. He drew a narrow bench from which he had removed the coffee mill and a strainer up to the serving table, and sat down as far as possible from Eleanore, though even so they were as close together as if they were sitting opposite each other in a cab.

“How are you making out?” she asked with embarrassment, and without the remotest display of warmth.

“You know that I am beating a perforated drum, Eleanore.” After a pause he added: “But whatever people may do or fail to do, between us two there must be a clear understanding: Are you going to Paris?”

She dropped her head in silence. “Well, I could go; there is nothing to prevent me,” she said, softly and with hesitation. “But you see how it is. I am no longer as I used to be. Formerly I could scarcely picture the happiness I would derive from having some one there in whom I could confide and who would be interested in me. I would not have hesitated for a moment. But now? If I go, what becomes clear from my going? And if I stay here, what will be clear? I have already told you, Daniel, that I don’t understand you. How terrible it is to have to say that! What do you want now? How is all this going to come out?”

“Eleanore, do you recall Benda’s last letter? You yourself brought it to me, and after that I was a different person. He wrote to me in that letter just as if he had never heard of Gertrude, and said that I should not pass you by. He wrote that we two were destined for each other, and neither for any one else in the world. Of course you recall how I acted after reading the letter. And even before that: Do you remember the day of the wedding when you put the myrtle wreath on? Why, I knew then that I had lost everything, that my real treasure had vanished. And even before that: Do you recall that I found that Fräulein Sylvia von Erfft had your complexion, your figure, your hair, and your hands? And even before that: When you went walking with Benda in the woods, I walked along behind, and took so much pleasure in watching you walk, but I didn’t know it. And when you came into the room there in the Long Row, and caressed the mask and sat down at the piano and leaned your head against the wood, don’t you recall how indispensable you were to me, to my soul? The only trouble is, I didn’t know it; I didn’t know it.”

“Well, there is nothing to be done about all that: that is a by-gone story,” said Eleanore, holding her breath, while a blush of emotion flitted across her face only to give way to a terrible paleness.

“Do you believe that I am a person to be content with what is past? Every one, Eleanore, owes himself his share of happiness, and he can get it if he simply makes up his mind to it. It is not until he has neglected it, abandoned it, and passed it by, that his fate makes a slave out of him.”

“That is just what I do not understand,” said Eleanore, and looked into his face with a more cheerful sense of freedom. “It wounds my heart to see you waging a losing battle against self-deception and ugly defiance. We two cannot think of committing a base deed, Daniel. It is impossible, isn’t it?”

Daniel, plainly excited, bent over nearer to her: “Do you know where I am standing?” he asked, while the blue veins in his temples swelled and hammered: “Well, I’ll tell you. I am standing on a marble slab above an abyss. To the right and left of this abyss are nothing but blood-thirsty wolves. There is no choice left to me except either to leap down into the abyss, or to allow myself to be torn to pieces by the wolves. When such a being as you comes gliding along through the air, a winged creature like you, that can rescue me and pull me up after it, is there any ground for doubt as to what should be done?”

Eleanore folded her arms across her bosom, and half closed her eyes: “Ah no, Daniel,” she said in a kindly way, “you are exaggerating, really. You see everything too white and too black: A winged creature, I? Where, pray, are my wings? And wolves? All these silly little people—wolves? Oh no, Daniel. And blood-thirsty? Listen, Daniel, that is going quite too far; don’t you think so yourself?”