Chapter 8

As the time approached for Dorothea’s confinement she very rarely left the house. She would lie in bed until about eleven o’clock, when she would get up, dress, comb her hair, go through her wardrobe, and write letters.

She carried on a most elaborate correspondence; those who received her letters praised her amusing style.

After luncheon she would go back to bed; and late in the afternoon her visitors came in, not merely women but all sorts of young men. It often happened that Daniel did not even know the names of the people. He would withdraw to the room Eleanore had formerly occupied, and from which he could hear laughter and loud talk resounding through the hall.

By evening Dorothea was tired. She would sit in the rocking chair and read the newspaper, or the Wiener Mode, generally not in the best of humour.

Daniel confidently believed that all this would change for the better as soon as the child had been born; he believed that the feeling of a mother and the duties of a mother would have a broadening and subduing effect on her.

Late in the autumn Dorothea gave birth to a boy, who was baptised Gottfried. She could not do enough by way of showing her affection for the child; her transports were expressed in the most childish terms; her display of tenderness was almost excessive.

For six days she nursed the child herself. Then the novelty wore off, friends told her it would ruin her shape to keep it up, and she quit. “It makes you stout,” she said to Philippina, “and cow’s milk is just as good, if not better.”

Philippina opened her mouth and eyes as wide as she could when she saw Dorothea standing before the mirror, stripped to the hips, studying the symmetry of her body with a seriousness that no one had ever noticed in her before.

Dorothea became coldly indifferent toward her child; it seemed that she had entirely forgotten that she was a mother. The baby slept in the room with Philippina and Agnes, both of whom cared for it. Its mother was otherwise engaged.

As if to make up for lost time and to indemnify herself for the suffering and general inconvenience to which she had been put in the last few months, Dorothea rushed with mad greediness into new pleasures and strange diversions. Soon however she found herself embarrassed from a lack of funds. Daniel told her, kindly but firmly, that the salaries he was drawing as organist and teacher were just barely enough to keep the house going, and that he was curtailing his own personal needs as much as possible so that there would be no cause to discontinue or diminish the home comforts they had latterly been enjoying. “We are not peasants,” he said, “and that we are not living from the mercy of chance is a flaw in me rather than in my favour.”

“You old pinch-penny!” said Dorothea. Ugly wrinkles appeared on her brow. “If you had not made me disgusted with my art, I might have been able to make a little money too,” she added.

He looked down at the floor in complete silence. She however began thinking about ways and means of getting her hands on money. “Uncle Carovius might help me,” she thought. She took to visiting her father more frequently, and every time she came she would stand out in the hall for a while hoping to see Herr Carovius. One day he appeared. She wanted to speak to him, smile at him, win him over. But one look from that face, filled with petrified and ineradicable rage, showed her that any attempt to approach the old man and get him in a friendly frame of mind would be fruitless.

On the way home she chanced to meet the actor Edmund Hahn. She had not seen him since she had been married. The actor seemed tremendously pleased to see her. They walked along together, engaged in a zealous conversation, talking at first loudly and then gently.