Part 74 (1/2)
Andreas Doderlein emitted a growl of lament.
”How are your finances, my son?” he asked, turning to Daniel with an air of marked affability. ”Would you not like to bolster up your income by taking a position in the conservatory? You would have time for it; your work as organist at St. aegydius does not take up all your time. Herold is going to be retired, you know. He is seventy-five and no longer able to meet the requirements. All that we will have to do will be for me to give you my backing. Three thousand marks a year, allocation to your widow after ten years of service, extra fees-I should think you would regard that as a most enticing offer. Or don't you?”
Dorothea ran up to her father in a spirit of unrestrained jubilation, threw her arms around his bulky body, and kissed him on his flabby cheek.
”No thanks to me, my child,” said the Olympian; ”to stand by you two is of course my duty.”
”What sort of a swollen stranger is that, anyhow?” thought Daniel to himself. ”What does he want of me? Why does he come into my house and sit down at my table? Why is he so familiar with me? Why does he blow his breath on me?” Daniel was silent.
”I understand, my dear son, that you would abandon your leisure hours only with the greatest reluctance,” continued Doderlein with concealed sarcasm, ”but after all, who can live precisely as he would like to live? Who can follow his own inclinations entirely? The everyday feature of human existence is powerful. Icarus must fall to the earth. With your wife antic.i.p.ating a happy event, you cannot, of course, hesitate in the face of such an offer.”
Daniel cast an angry look at Dorothea.
”I will think it over,” said Daniel, got up, and left the room.
”It is unpleasant for him,” complained Dorothea; ”he values his leisure above everything else in the world. But I will do all in my power to bring him around, Father. And you keep at him. He will resist and object. I know him.”
Thus it was brought to light that Daniel was no longer a mysterious and unfathomable individual in her estimation. She had found him out; she had divined him, in her way to be sure. He was much simpler than she had imagined, and at times she was really a bit angry at him for not arousing her curiosity more than he did. What she had fancied as highly interesting, thrilling, intoxicating, had proved to be quite simple and ordinary. The charm was gone, never to return. Her sole diversion lay in her attempts to get complete control over him through the skilful manipulation of her senses and her priceless youth.
Daniel felt that she was disappointed; he had been afraid of this all along. His anxiety increased with time, for it was evident that everything he said or did disappointed her. His anxiety caused him to be indulgent, where he had formerly been unbending. The difference in their ages made him patient and tractable. He feared he could not show her the love that she in her freshness and natural, unconsumed robustness desired. On this account he denied himself many things which he formerly could not have got along without, and put up with, many things that would have been intolerable to him as a younger man.
It needed only a single hour at night to make him promise to accept the position old Herold was leaving. He, as parsimonious with words as in the expression of feelings, succ.u.mbed to her cat-like cuddling. He capitulated in the face of her unpitying ridicule, and surrendered all to the prurient agility of a young body. Dark powers there are that set up dependencies between man and woman. When they rule, things do not work out in accordance with set calculation or inborn character. It takes but a single hour of the night to bend the most sacred truth of life into a lie.
VII
In the course of time Daniel had to provide for an increase in his annual salary. Dorothea had made a great many innovations that cost money. She had bought a dressing table, a number of cabinets, and a bath tub. The lamps, dishes, bed covers, and curtains she found old-fas.h.i.+oned, and simply went out and bought new ones.
Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to go shopping. Then the bills came in, and Daniel shook his head. He begged her to be more saving, but she would fall on his neck, and beseech and beseech until he acceded to every single one of her wishes.
She rarely came home with empty hands. It may have been only little things that she bought, a manikin of porcelain with a tile hat and an umbrella, or a paG.o.da with a wag-head, or even merely a mouse-trap-but they all cost money.
Philippina would be called in; Philippina was to admire the purchases.
And she would say with apparent delight: ”Now ain't that sweet!” Or, ”Now that's fine; we needed a mouse-trap so bad! There was a mouse on the clothes rack just yesterday, cross my heart, Daniel.”
As to hats, dresses, stockings, shoes, laces, and blouses-when it came to these Dorothea was a stranger to such concepts as measure or modesty.
She wanted to compete with the wives of the rich people whose parties she attended, and next to whom she sat in the pastry shop or at the theatre.
She was given free tickets to the theatre and the concerts. But once when she had told Daniel that the director had sent her a ticket, he learned from Philippina that she had bought the ticket and paid for it with her own money. He did not call her to account, but he could not get the thought out of his mind that she had believed she had deceived him.
He did not accompany her on her pleasure jaunts; he wanted to work and not double even the smallest expenditure by going with her. Dorothea had become accustomed to this. She looked upon his apathy toward the theatre and his dislike of social distractions as a caprice, a crotchet on his part. She never considered what he had gone through in the way of theatricals and concerts; she had completely forgotten what he had confessed to her in a decisive hour.
When she came home late in the evening with burning cheeks and glowing eyes, Daniel did not have the courage to give her the advice he felt she so sorely needed. ”Why s.n.a.t.c.h her from her heaven?” he thought. ”She will become demure and quiet in time; her wild l.u.s.t for pleasure will fade and disappear.”
He was afraid of her pouting mien, her tears, her perplexed looks, her defiant running about. But he lacked the words to express himself. He knew how ineffectual warning and reproach might be and were. Empty talking back and forth he could not stand, while if he made a really human remark it found no response. She did not appreciate what he said; she misunderstood, misinterpreted everything. She laughed, shrugged her shoulders, pouted, called him an old grouch, or cooed like a dove. She did not look at him with real eyes; there was no flow of soul in what she did.
Gloom filled his heart.
The waste in the household affairs became worse and worse from week to week. Daniel would have felt like a corner grocer if he had never let her know how much he had saved, or had given her less than she asked for. And so his money was soon all gone. Dorothea troubled herself very little about the economic side of their married life. She told Philippina what to do, and fell into a rage if her orders were not promptly obeyed.