Chapter 7

Herr Carovius had been paid. The consortium of silent backers had been dissolved.

Never in the history of finance had there been a satisfied creditor who was so unhappy as Herr Carovius. He was without a goal, and the sign posts had been destroyed. He had received his money; so far so good. His share of the profit was something over sixty thousand marks. But what was this in comparison with the great noise? What comparison was there between living in ease and the gorgeous sight of falling stars? What attraction could the world offer him after this hopeful affair, which had begun as a tragedy, and had increased in interest and suspense until one was justified in believing that all the contradictory forces in human nature were going to collide with one mighty bang, when, in reality, the whole incident flattened out into an ordinary drama of emotion, with the curtain going down on reconciliation all around?

But this was not the sole reason why Herr Carovius, up until this time a most elastic figure, one of those imperturbable bachelors for whom no hurdle was too high, suddenly felt that he was growing old. His soul was filled with unrest; he was seeing bad omens; he feared there was going to be a change in the weather.

He felt an inner hunger, and yet he somehow lacked appetite for his kind of things. “Down and out, lost and no good,” he sighed within. But those who had got rich at his expense could not possibly succeed. This much he knew.

He began to lose his hair; he became rheumatic. As soon as the thermometer began to fall he shivered; if it rained he stayed at home. He began to study medicine, all by himself. He took up the various remedies of our remote ancestors. He read the works of Paracelsus, and declared that all those who had written on medicine since Paracelsus were quacks and poison-mixers.

His ideas with regard to music became also more and more strange and bizarre. He had discovered an old Nuremberg composer by the name of Staden. His opera entitled “Seelewig”—the first of all German operas, by the way—he insisted was the very zenith of musical art, eminently superior to Mozart and Bach. He played arias and melodies from “Seelewig” to Dorothea.

“Now, when you can get that,” he exclaimed, “when you come to the point where I can see from your playing what is in it and at the bottom of it, Heaven and Hell in one stroke of the bow, then, you little jackanapes, I’m going to make you my heiress.”

That was precisely what Dorothea had been longing to hear; it confirmed her calculations and crowned her dreams. To hear these words roll from her uncle’s tongue had been her ambition; and she had spared no pains to arrive at her goal.

Herr Carovius was not spoiled. Since the days his sister had kept house for him, no woman had ever concerned herself about him in the least. But at that time he was young; and he had wheedled himself into believing that the women were merely waiting for him, that all he had to do was to beckon to them with his finger and they would come rushing up to him in battalions. But because he had dreaded the idea of making an unhappy selection, and by reason of the expense of the enterprise, he had neglected to give the necessary signal, and hence had been so generous as to leave them in complete possession of their freedom.

He never knew until now that the soft, little hand of a woman could bring out effects as if they had come from the touch of a magic wand. “What a pleasant little phiz Döderlein’s offspring has,” he thought. And if Dorothea, who had made him believe that she was visiting him on the sly, though her father had given his consent long ago, chanced to remain away for a few days, he would become wild with rage, and go into the kitchen and chop wood merely to enjoy the sensation of destroying something.

Moreover, the music lessons Dorothea was taking at Herr Carovius’s expense gave the girl a new conception of her art, and awakened in her a measure of wholesome ambition. Satisfied as he was with her docility and her progress, Herr Carovius referred to her at times as the coming female Paganini, and pictured himself in the rôle of a demoniacal impresario.

But the thing about Dorothea that struck him most forcibly and filled him with such astonishment was her relation to mirrors.

A mirror exercised a tremendous influence on her. If she passed by one, her face became coloured with a charming blush of desire; if she stood before one and saw her picture reflected in it, she was filled, first with sexual unrest, and then with retreating uncertainty. In the brightness of her eyes there was always a longing for the mirror. Her gait and her gestures seemed to have duties imposed on them by the mirror; it seemed to be their task to prepare surprises. Her whole body seemed to live in common with a spectral mirror sister, and to catch sight of this beloved sister was her first wish, fulfilment of which she effected as often as possible.