Chapter 9

Herr Carovius and death were intimate friends. Whenever death had an errand to run, it always knocked on Herr Carovius’s door, as if to find a person who approved of its deeds and who had a just appreciation of them, for there were so many of the other kind.

But when Herr Carovius heard that Eleanore Nothafft had died, he felt that his old friend had gone a bit too far. He was touched. He was seized with griping pains in the abdominal region, and locked himself up for the period of one whole day in his court room. There he was taken down with catalepsy; his face went through a horrible transformation: it came to look as if all the wickedness, hopelessness, and despair of the man who had never become reconciled to life through love had been concentrated in it and petrified.

His forebodings had come true.

Eleanore’s funeral took place on a rainy June day. Herr Carovius, dressed in his shabby old yellow raincoat with its big pockets, was present. There were also many others present. Every face was touched with grief; every eye was filled with tears, like the earth round about. Those who had not known her had at least heard of her. They had known that she had been there in some capacity, just as one hears of some unusual phenomenon among the celestial bodies, and that she was gone; that she was no more to be seen. For one moment at least all these people were changed into deep, seeing, feeling beings; for one moment they laid aside their fruitless activities, their petty misdeeds, desires, anxieties, and vanities, and became conscious of the fact that the truth, purity, love, and loveliness of this earth had been decreased.

Herr Carovius went home and made a lime-blossom tea; such a tea had often helped him when he had not felt well.

The rain dripped down on the kitchen window sill. Herr Carovius said to himself: “That is my last funeral.”

Along in the evening Dorothea came in and after her Philippina Schimmelweis. Herr Carovius had paid her many a penny for her services as a spy, and now she wanted to hear what he had to say to this last and greatest of misfortunes. His infatuated interest in everything Eleanore did had been a source of unmitigated pleasure to her, though she had been exceedingly cautious never to let him see how she felt about it all. On the contrary, she never failed to affect a hypocritical seriousness in the face of all his questions, orders, instructions, and caustic observations. She had egged him on; she had flattered him; she had used every opportunity to fan the flames of his ridiculous hopes. Owing to this the confidence between the two had grown to considerable proportion; the man’s senile madness, born of his love for Eleanore, had even aroused Philippina’s lewd lasciviousness.

She said she would have to be going home; the child was asleep; and though she had locked the front door, you could never tell what was going to happen over there. “My God,” she said, “things take place in that house that are never heard of in any other home.”

The presence of Dorothea disturbed and annoyed her. She sat down on the kitchen bench, and looked at the young girl with poison in her eyes. Dorothea on the other hand found it painfully difficult to conceal her disgust at the mere sight of Philippina: her ugliness defied descriptive adjectives. Dorothea never took her eyes off the creature who sat there talking in a screeching voice, and who, as if her normal unattractiveness were not enough, had her head bandaged.

The fact is that Philippina had the toothache; for this reason her face was wrapped in a loud, checkered cloth, while out from underneath her hat stuck two little tassels.

She told the story of Eleanore’s death with much satisfaction to herself, and with that delight in the tragic in which she revelled by instinct. “And now,” she said, “old Jordan sits over there in his attic rooms and sobs, and Daniel goes moping about, refusing to eat any food and looking at you with eyes that would fill you with fear even if everything else was as it should be.”

This is the point to which Daniel has brought things, she showed in her gratuitous report, in which there was an attempt to chide him for his waywardness: He has put two women under the ground, has a helpless child in the house, is out of a job, is not making a cent. Now what could this kind of doings lead to? Judge Rübsam’s wife had paid the funeral expenses. Why, you know, Daniel didn’t even know what they were talking about when the bill came in, and old Jordan, he didn’t have twenty marks to his name. She swore she wasn’t going to stand for it much longer, and if Daniel didn’t quit his piano-strumming—he wasn’t getting a cent for it—she was going to know a thing or two.

Quite contrary to his established custom, Herr Carovius failed to show the slightest interest in her gabble; at least he made no concessions to her. Nor did he fuss and fume; he gazed into space, and seemed to be thinking about many serious things all at the same time. His silence made Philippina raging mad. She jumped up and left without saying good-bye to him, slamming first the room door and then the hall door behind her.

Dorothea was standing by the piano rummaging around in some note books. Her thoughts were on what she had just been hearing.

She remembered Daniel Nothafft quite well. She knew that there was an irreconcilable feud between him and her father. She had seen him; people had pointed out the man with the angry looking eyes to her on the street. She had felt at the time as if she had already talked with him, though she could not say when or where. She had a vague idea as to what people said about him, and she knew that he was looked upon in the city as the adversary of evil himself.

Her breast was filled with an aimless longing. Her blood began to run warm, the fusty milieu in which she just then chanced to be cleared up and began to bestir itself. She took her violin and began to play a Hungarian dance, while an enlivening smile flitted across her face, and her eyes shone with the audacity of an ambitious and temperamental girl.

Herr Carovius raised his head: “Tempo!” he exclaimed, “Tempo!” and began to beat time with his hands and stamp the floor with his feet.

Dorothea smiled, shook her head, and played more and more rapidly.

“Tempo,” howled Herr Carovius. “Tempo!”

The barking of a sad dog was wafted into the room from the court below. It was Cæsar: he was on his last legs.