Part 83

It was bad enough to have to accept with filial obedience the society of the speechless old father who spent his days and nights in his own mysterious way, striving without peace of any kind to reach an unknown goal. This made it hard for Eleanore. It was spooky in the rooms upstairs, and equally spooky in the ones downstairs. Eleanore dreaded the coming winter. At times she felt that her own voice had an unreal sound, and that her most commonplace remark echoed with the gloom of unhappy premonitions.

She sought refuge in the old pictures of her longings—southern landscapes with groves and statues and a sea of supernatural blue. But she was too mature to find enduring satisfaction in empty dreams; she preferred, and felt it were better, to forget her grief in the distractions of hard work. It was not until the pen fell from her hand, weighed down with distress at the thought of so many unadorned and unrelieved hours, that something drew her back into the realm of spirits and visions. And then it was that she sought support, that she endeavoured to get a footing, in the world of actual objects round about her.

She would take a pear, and think herself, so to speak, into the very heart of this bit of fruit, just as if it were possible to find protection, shelter in so small a space. Or she would take a piece of coloured glass, hold it in her hand, and look at the world of reality about her, hoping that the commonplace would in this way be made to seem more beautiful. Or she looked into the burning fire, and studied, with a smile on her face, the romantic tongues of flames. Or she had a longing to look at old pictures: she went to the Germanic Museum, and spent an entire morning there, standing before a Crucifixion, a Last Supper, her eye and her heart filled with flowing emotion.

Her love for flowers became stronger than ever, and she began to study them. The most of them she picked herself; those that grew only in gardens she bought from the florists, paying very little for them. After she had made several purchases, they refused to take any more money from her; they gave her just as many flowers as she wanted. She took them home, and made bouquets out of them.

One evening she was frightened by Philippina, who came rushing up to her just as she was arranging her flowers and told her that little Agnes had a high fever. Eleanore went out and got the doctor, who immediately reassured her. As she returned, her astonishment was intense and unusual. Reaching the door, her eyes fell on the flowers: they seemed wonderfully beautiful to her; the harmony and play of their colours was so striking that she involuntarily looked around in the illusion that a stranger had called during her absence, brought the flowers, and arranged them in their artistic bouquets.

In the meantime poverty was haunting the house in very tangible form. Neither the butcher nor the baker was willing any longer to deliver goods on credit. It was quite impossible for Eleanore to support five people with her clerical work, to say nothing of keeping them in clothes and paying the rent. However hard she might work, the most she could do was to get enough money for the barest necessities. Her cares multiplied day by day.

She had always been an implacable foe of debts; she would not make them. But after all, the people could not starve, and so she had to contract debts now. Bitter humiliations were unavoidable; she looked into the future with untempered dread. She racked her brain trying to devise plans, deplored her weakness and the gaps in her training, bemoaned the neglect both she and Daniel were suffering, and was quite disturbed to see that Philippina’s heart was filled with joy at the thought that the destitution of the household with its accompanying mental anguish was rapidly increasing.

Twice a day the druggist sent in his bill; finally he came in person. It was along toward evening when he rang. Philippina treated him so impolitely that he became impudent, and made such a noise that the people on the lower floors came out into the hall and leaned over the railing of the stairs. Eleanore ran down and stood before the man with folded hands. Jordan also left his room and looked on, sighing.

Others came in and started trouble. Philippina came up to Eleanore, and, with a smile on her face as if she were going to tell of some great good fortune that had come to the family, said: “There’s another down there, Eleanore; come down and give him a piece of your mind, or I’m thinking he’s going to call the police.”

After quiet had been restored, Philippina began to rage and rant: “Daniel’s a dunderhead. He could live like a Kaiser if he’d mix with the right people. I know a woman who is lousy with money, and she’s going to git a lot more; but Daniel, the poor bloke, ain’t got a ghost of an idea as to how to work people.” She laughed furiously; or, in order to ventilate her spiteful rage, she picked up some object and smashed it to pieces on the floor.

Eleanore did not hear what she had said. Her hope was gone. Daniel had been out of work for three months: who could explain his strange inactivity? The rent would be due in a short while, and then what?

One morning she went to Daniel’s room and said: “Daniel, we are out of money.”

He was sitting at the table reading; he looked at her as if he had to think for a while who she was: “Just have patience,” he said, “you are not going to starve.”

“I am doing all that I possibly can, Daniel,” continued Eleanore; “but tell me, please, how are you planning to keep the house going? I see no way out. Tell me, Daniel, tell me, please, what you are going to do.”

“A musician must be poor, Eleanore,” replied Daniel, and looked at her with eyes that seemed to be frozen.

“But he has got to live, I should think.”

“You can’t live from husks alone, and I am not going to work my head off for husks.”

“Daniel, oh Daniel, where is your mind? And where is your heart?” cried Eleanore in despair.

“Where I should have been long ago,” he replied, without the shadow of a ray of hope. He got up, and turning his face away from Eleanore, said in a half-audible voice: “Let’s have no argument, no cogency, no urgency. Not now! Not now when I am creeping along on the earth with such light as is left me, trying to grope my way out of the hole. A man doesn’t give up the ghost so quickly as all that, Eleanore. The stomach is a very elastic piece of skin.”

He went into the other room, sat down at the piano, and struck a slow-moving bass chord.

Eleanore turned to the wall, and buried her feverish brow in her hands.

VII

It was not in Eleanore’s nature to submit to a misfortune without first having made every possible effort to evade it.

She wrote for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that she had finished all that was asked of her long before her time was really up.

Then she looked around for a better paying position; it was in vain. Women had never been paid well, she had no recommendations, no personal connections, nothing on which she could depend or to which she might refer.

Finally it occurred to her that she might make some money out of her flowers. She went to the florist at St. Lorenz Place, taking with her a garland of carnations and mignonettes she had made the day before. She told the florist she knew a great deal about flowers and had had considerable experience in handling them.

The man laughed at her, and told her he could find no sale for that kind of things, and that, even if he could, he would have to ask so little for them that it would not pay her to make them. Eleanore took her flowers back home; she was profoundly discouraged. She saw herself how perishable flowers were; these withered that same evening. Nothing could be expected from that source.

She had not noticed that, as she left the florist shop, a man on the other side of the street had stopped and looked at her. He was a haggard young individual with a pale, peevish expression on his face, a man with a chin the unimpressiveness of which was hidden behind a Vandyke beard.