Part 69

Daniel and Eleanore had reached a stage of mutual silence; it was not the first time, however, and it was as disagreeable now as it had been then. They would meet on the steps, and pass each other with a mere nod. If Eleanore came in to see Gertrude, Daniel withdrew.

Once Eleanore called when Gertrude was not at home. Daniel was stubborn; nor could Eleanore manage to make a single rational remark. He did not like her looks; he suspected her paleness and outward, enforced cheerfulness. “It is an undignified state of affairs, Eleanore,” he exclaimed, “we must make an end of it.”

Make an end of it? Yes—but how? This was the thought that came at once to Eleanore’s mind. Every day the chain that bound her to him became stronger.

Daniel was also tortured by the sight of Gertrude. He felt that she was watching him and that she was worried about him. More than that, the event was approaching that surrounded her with an atmosphere of suffering and made forbearance obligatory. Her features, though haggard and distorted, bore nevertheless an expression of mysterious transfiguration.

After Gertrude had noticed for some time that Daniel was being estranged from his work and that he had lost interest in everything, she decided to have a talk with Eleanore. She did it without preparation or tenderness.

“Can’t you see that you are ruining him?” she cried.

“You want me to be ruined, do you?” asked Eleanore, in surprised dismay. She had appreciated at once and without difficulty the complete range of Gertrude’s renunciation.

“What difference does it make about you?” replied Gertrude harshly; “what are you getting excited about?”

This question made Eleanore’s ideas of order and duty quake and totter. She looked at her sister with incredulous eyes and in perfect silence. It was not the happy, gentle Gertrude that had spoken, but the Gertrude of months ago, the lonely, loveless Gertrude.

What difference does it make about you? Why are you getting excited? That was equivalent to saying: Make short work of your life, and don’t draw out the episode in his life any longer than you have to.

Eleanore took courage to carry out the plan she had had in mind for a long while and in which she placed her last hope.

One evening she went to Daniel and said: “I should like to go with you to Eschenbach, Daniel, and visit your mother.”

“Why do you wish to do that?” he asked in amazement. He and his mother did not write to each other: that was due first of all to their natures, and secondly to the condition in which each was now living. But he knew that Eleanore received an occasional letter from Eschenbach which she answered without consulting him. This had never seemed strange to him until now.

A few days later she repeated her wish; Daniel granted it. They decided upon the following Sunday for the excursion.

A warm, languid October sun shone over the land; the forests presented a gorgeous array of autumnal foliage; the fields lay stretched in barren rows; along the hills of Franconia floated clouds that looked like down driven by the wind.

They had taken the train as far as Triesdorf; from there they went on to Merckendorf by stage coach. The rest of the distance they walked. Daniel pointed to a flock of geese that were trotting around on the shore of an abandoned pond, and said: “That is our national bird; his cackle is our music. But it doesn’t sound so bad.”

A peasant woman passed by, and made the sign of the cross before the picture of a saint: “It is strange that everything has suddenly become Catholic,” said Eleanore.

Daniel nodded, and replied that when his father moved to Eschenbach a few other Protestant families were living there, all of whom joined in Protestant worship. Later, he said, most of them emigrated, leaving his mother as the only Protestant, so far as he knew, in the neighbourhood. But, Daniel remarked in the course of conversation, his mother had never had any unpleasant experience on this account, and he himself had frequently gone to church, primarily of course to hear the organ, though no one had ever taken offence at this. “There is a totally different type of people here,” he added, “people who lay greater stress on externals than we do, and yet are more secretive.”

Eleanore looked at the church tower whose Spanish-green roof rose from the valley. After a long silence she said: “I wonder whether it will be a boy or a girl, Gertrude’s baby? Oh, a girl, of course. Some day it will be in the world, and will look at me with eyes, with real eyes. How strange that a child of yours should look at me!”

“What is there strange about that? Many children are born, many look at some one.”

“What are you going to call it?” asked Eleanore.

“If it is blond and has blue eyes like yours, I am going to call it Eva.”

“Eva!” cried Eleanore, “no, that won’t do.” She herself had chosen the name of Eva for the child of the maid at the Rüdigers’. That he should now want to call Gertrude’s child by the same name seemed so strange to her.

“Why not Eva?” he asked. “There is something back of this objection on your part. Women always have something up their sleeve. Out with it! Why do you object to Eva?”

Eleanore smiled, and shook her head. She would have liked to make a clean confession to him, but she was not certain how he would take it: she was afraid he would turn back, enraged at her cunning. Once the child had been born and lay there before him, it would captivate him, and she knew it.

They had stopped and were looking out over the sunlit plains. “How alone we are!” said Daniel.

“Everything is easier here,” said Eleanore thoughtfully. “If one could only forget where one comes from, it would be easy to be happy.”

III