Part 88

Hardly had Philippina heard that Daniel and Eleanore were to get married in February when she disappeared; she did not leave a trace of her whereabouts behind her. Little Agnes cried in vain for her “Pina.” Six days after Philippina had left, she came back just as mysteriously as she had gone away. She was desperately gloomy; her hair was towsled, her clothes were wrinkled, there were no soles on her shoes; she was as speechless as a clod, and remained so for weeks.

No one knew, nor has any one ever found out, what she did during those six days or where she had been.

Eleanore insisted on a church wedding; this caused Daniel a great deal of worry; it made him run many a vexatious errand. But he consented to do as Eleanore had asked; for he did not wish to deprive her of any pleasure she might imagine such a ceremony would give her. Eleanore made her own white dress and her veil. Gisela Degen, a younger sister of Martha Rübsam, and Elsa Schneider, the daughter of the rector of the Church of St. Ægydius, were to be her bridesmaids. Marian Nothafft and Eva were also to come over from Eschenbach; Eleanore had already sent them the money for the tickets.

“Help me with my sewing, Philippina,” said Eleanore one evening, and handed her silent house companion the veil, the border of which had to be made.

Philippina took her seat opposite Eleanore, and began to sew; she was silent. In the meanwhile, little Agnes, tottering about on the floor, fell and began to cry in a most pitiable fashion. Eleanore hastened over and picked the child up. Just then she heard a sound as if cloth were being torn. She looked around, and saw that the veil had an ugly rip in it: “You wicked thing! What do you mean, Philippina?” she exclaimed.

“I didn’t do it; it tore itself,” growled Philippina, taking every precaution to see that Eleanore might not catch her cowardly eye.

“You just leave that alone! Keep your hands off of it! You will sew evil thoughts into my veil,” replied Eleanore, filled with forebodings.

Philippina got up. “Well, it’s torn anyway, the veil,” she said in a defiant tone; “if harm is to come it will come; you can’t keep it off by sending me away.” Philippina left the room.

The injury to the veil was not as great as Eleanore had feared. It was a relatively easy matter to cut off the torn piece entirely, and still use the remainder.

But from that hour Eleanore was filled with sadness: her face might be compared to a beautiful landscape on which the first fog of autumn has settled. It is probable that the tearing of her veil had nothing to do with her depression: there was not a shimmer of superstition in her. Perhaps it was merely happiness and fulfilment: it may be that she felt the end had come, that happiness and fulfilment leave nothing more to be desired, that life from then on would be nothing but a hum-drum existence which does not give but only takes.

Perhaps her mind was darkened and weighed down with grief because of the life within her body; for that which is to come sends out its rays of melancholy just as well as that which has come and gone. What was there to hinder a pure soul from having an inner premonition of the fate that was in store for it? Why should this soul not learn in its dreams of the inevitable that was not so far ahead?

It was impossible to notice any change in Eleanore; her eyes were bright; she seemed peaceful. She would often sit before the mask of Zingarella; she hung it with fresh flowers every day: to her the mask was a mysterious picture of all that her own being, her own life, embraced.

Marian Nothafft came to the wedding alone. Just as in the case of Daniel’s wedding to Gertrude, she had left the child with a neighbour. She told Daniel and Eleanore that she could not think of taking the child out on such a journey in the dead of winter. She mentioned Eva’s name or talked about her only in a half audible, subdued voice, a tender smile playing gently about her lips.

Among those present at the wedding in the Ægydius Church were Judge and Frau Rübsam, Councillor Bock, Impresario Dörmaul, Philippina Schimmelweis, Marian Nothafft, and Inspector Jordan. On the very last bench sat Herr Carovius; underneath one of the pillars, unseen by most of the people in the church, stood Baron Eberhard von Auffenberg.

Philippina walked along in an ugly, crouched, cowering fashion by the side of Jordan; had it not been that she was constantly chewing her finger nails, one would have thought she was asleep.

As the bridal couple was marching up to the altar, the sun broke out, and shone through the windows of the old church. The effect was touching; for just then Eleanore raised her head, stroked her veil back from her forehead, and caught the full light of the sun in her radiant face.

Old Jordan had laid his forehead on the prayer-desk; his back was quivering.

XIV

Late at night and in senseless excitement—for he was thinking of a bridal bed that filled him with the most intense pangs of jealousy—Herr Carovius sat in his room playing Chopin’s étude of the revolution. He would begin it again and again; he struck the keys with ever-increasing violence; the time in which he played the étude became wilder and wilder; the swing of his gestures became more and more eloquent; and his face became more and more threatening.

He was squaring accounts with the woman he had been unable to bring before his Neronic tribunal in bodily form; and all the pent-up hatred in his heart for the musician Nothafft he was emptying into the music of another man. The envy of the man doomed to limit his display of talent to the appreciation of what another had created laid violent hands on the creator; the impotence of the taster was infuriated at the cook. It was as if a flunked and floored comedian had gone out into the woods to declaim his part with nothing but the echo of his own voice to answer back.

His hatred of things in general, of the customs of human society, of order and prosperity, of state and family, of love and marriage, of man and woman, had burst out into lurid flames. It was rare that a man had so cut, slashed, and vilified himself as did this depatriated citizen while playing the piano. He converted music into an orgy, a debauch, a debasing crime.

“Enough!” he bellowed, as he closed with an ear-splitting discord. He shut the piano with a vituperative bang, and threw himself into a rickety leather chair.

What his inner eye saw mocks at language and defies human speech. He was in that house over there; it lay in his power to murder his rival; he could abuse the woman who had been denied him by the wily tricks of circumstances; he chastised her; he dragged her from her bed of pleasure by the hair. He feasted on her sense of shame and on the angry twitchings of the musician, tied, bound, and gagged. He spared them no word of calumniation. The whole city stood before his court, and listened to the sentence he passed. Everybody stood in awe of him.

Thus it is that the citizen of the moral stature of Herr Carovius satisfies his thirst for revenge. Thus does the Nero of our time punish the crimes mankind commits against him in that it creates pleasures and enjoyments of which he is not in a position to partake.

But because he felt more abandoned to-day than ever, and more fearful in his abandonment, and because he felt so keenly the injustice done him by the man on whom he had hung for years with dog-like fidelity, and who avoided him to-day as one avoids an old dog that is no longer fit for anything, he decided in the depths of his embittered soul to avenge himself, and to do it by a means that would be quite different from playing the piano in accordance with the rules of his own perverted fancy.

With this decision in mind he sought sleep—at last.

Jordan was now living all alone in the two attic rooms. He had asked of his own will that he be permitted to take over the clerical work Eleanore had been doing, and her employers had agreed to this arrangement. He was consequently enabled to pay the rent and a little on his board.

Daniel and Eleanore slept in the corner room in the front. Daniel moved his piano into the living room, and did all his work there. Philippina and Agnes remained in the room next to the kitchen.