Chapter 8

Daniel wrote to Eberhard and Sylvia asking them if he might visit them. He thought: “There are friends; perhaps I need friends again.”

He received a note in a strange, secretarial hand informing him that the Baroness was indeed very sorry but she could not receive him at Siegmundshof: she was in child-bed. She sent her best greetings, and told him that the newest born was getting along splendidly, as well as his brother who was now three years old.

“Everywhere I turn, children are growing up,” thought Daniel, and packed his trunk and started south as slowly as he could go, so slowly indeed that it seemed as if he were approaching a goal he was afraid to reach and yet had to.

He arrived in Nuremberg one evening in April. As he entered the room, Philippina struck her hands together with a loud bang, and stood as if rooted to the floor.

Agnes looked at her father shyly. She had grown slim and tall far beyond her age.

Old Jordan came down. “You don’t look well, Daniel,” he said, and seemed never to let go of his hand. “Let us hope that you are going to stay home now.”

“I don’t know,” replied Daniel, staring absent-mindedly around the walls. “I don’t know.”

On the third day he was seized with a quite unusual sense of fear and anxiety. He felt that he had made a mistake; that he had lost his way; that something was driving him to another place. He went into the kitchen. Philippina was cooking potato noodles in lard; they smelt good.

“I am going to Eschenbach,” he said, to his own astonishment, for the decision to do so had come with the assertion.

Philippina jerked the pan from the stove; the flames leaped up. “You can go to Hell, so far as I’m concerned,” she said in a furious rage. With the light from the fire flaring up through the open top of the stove and reflected in her face, she looked like a veritable witch.

Daniel gazed at her questioningly. “What is the matter with Agnes?” he asked after a while. “The child seems to try to avoid me.”

“You’ll find out what’s the matter with her,” said Philippina spitefully, and placed the pan on the stove again. “She don’t swallow people whole.”

Daniel left the kitchen.

“He is going over to see his bastard, the damned scoundrel,” murmured Philippina. She crouched down on the kitchen stool, and gazed into space.

The potato noodles burned up.