Chapter 8

Since the day Philippina had made her little brother Markus a cripple for life, she had been an outcast in the home of her parents.

To be sure, she had had no great abundance of kindness and cheerfulness before the accident took place. But since that time the barbarous castigation of her father had beclouded and besmirched her very soul. From her twelfth year on, her mind was ruled exclusively by hate.

Hatred aroused her; it gave birth to thoughts and plans in her; it endowed her with strength of will and audacity; and it matured her before her time.

She hated her father, her mother, her brothers.

She hated the house with all its rooms; she hated the bed in which she slept, the table at which she ate. She hated the people who came to see her parents, the customers who came into the shop, the loafers who gathered about the window, the tall lanky Zwanziger, the books and the magazines.

But the day she overheard her father and mother talking about that money, a second power had joined the ranks of hate in her benighted, abandoned soul. With her brain on fire she stood behind the door, and heard that she was to be married to Daniel. This remark had filled the then thirteen-year-old girl with all the savage instincts of a bound and fettered woman, with all the crabbedness of an unimaginative person of her standing.

In her father’s remark she did not see merely a more or less carefully outlined plan; she heard a message from Fate itself; and from that time on she lived with an idea that brought light and purpose into her daily existence.

Shortly after his arrival in Nuremberg, she saw Daniel for the first time as he was standing by a booth in the market place on Schütt Island. Her father had pointed him out to her. She knew that he wished to become a musician; this made no special impression on her. She knew that he was having a hard time of it; this filled her neither with sympathy nor regret. When she later on saw him in the concert hall, he was already her promised spouse; he belonged to her. To capture him, to get him into her power, it made no difference how, was her unchanging aspiration, in which there was a bizarre mixture of bestiality and insanity.

The thieving, which she decided upon at once and practised with perfect regularity, netted her in the course of time a handsome sum. She did not become bolder and bolder as she continued her evil practices, but, unlike thieves generally, she grew to be more and more cautious. She acquired in time remarkable skill at showing an outwardly honest face. Indeed she became such an adept at dissimulation that the suspicion of even Jason Philip, aroused as it had been during the course of a careful investigation, was dispelled by her behaviour.

Her plan was to gain a goodly measure of independence through the money she had stolen. For she always felt convinced that the day would come when her parents would debar her from their home. She was convinced that her father and mother were merely waiting for some plausible excuse to rid themselves of her for good and all.

Moreover, she had two pronounced passions: one for candy and one for flashy ribbons.

The candy she always bought in the evening. She would slip into the shop of Herr Degen, and, with her greedy eyes opened as wide as possible, buy twenty pfennigs’ worth of sweets, at which she would nibble until she went to bed.

The ribbons she sewed together into sashes, which she wore on her hat or around her neck or on her dress. The gaudier the colour the better she liked it. If her mother asked her where she got the ribbons she was forced to lie. Although she had no girl friends, as a matter of fact no friends of any kind, she would say that this or that girl had given them to her. When her wealth became too conspicuous, she would leave the house and not tie her sashes about her until she had reached some unlighted gateway or dark corner.

She never dared go to the attic more than once a week; she did this when her brothers were at school and her parents in the shop. The fear lest some one find her out and take her stolen riches from her made her more and more uneasy, lending to her face an expression of virulent distrust.

She would go up the thirteen steps from the landing to the attic with trembling feet. The fact that there were exactly thirteen was the first thing that awakened her superstition. As the months crept on, she resigned to this superstition with the abandon of an inveterate voluptuary. If she chanced to put her left foot first on the bottom step and not to notice it until she was half way up, she would turn around, come down, and relinquish the pleasure of seeing her treasures for the rest of that week.

She was afraid of ghosts, witches, and magicians; if a cat ran across the street in front of her, she turned as white as chalk.

Theresa did not keep a maid; Philippina helped in the kitchen; this ruined her complexion, and made her skin rough and horny. Frequently she got out of washing dishes by simply running away. On these occasions Theresa would create such an uproar that the neighbours would come to the window and look out. Philippina avenged herself by purposely ruining the sheets, towels, and shirts that lay in the clothes basket. When in this mood and at this business, she made use of a regular oath that she herself had formulated: it consisted of sentences that sounded most impressive, though they had no meaning.

She cherished the odd delusion that it lay in her power to bring misfortune to other people. The time Jason Philip complained of poor business she felt an infernal sense of satisfaction. His change of political views had driven away his old customers, and the new ones had no confidence in him. He had to go in for the publication of dubious works, if he wished to do any business at all. The result of this was that when people passed by the Schimmelweis bookshop, they stopped before the window, looked at his latest output, and smiled contemptuously. The workman’s insurance no longer paid as it used to, for the credit of the Prudentia and its agents had suffered a violent setback.

The rise and fall in bourgeois life follows a well established law. In a single day the honesty and diligence of one man, the tricks and frauds of another, grow stale, antiquated. Thus Jordan’s affairs started on the down grade, and Jason Philip’s likewise.

Philippina ascribed their failure to the quiet influence of her destructive work. Every bit of misfortune in the life of her father loosened by that much the chain that prevented her from complete freedom of movement. In her most infamous hours she would dream of the hunger and distress, bankruptcy and despair of her people. Once this state of affairs had been realised, she would no longer have to play the rôle of Cinderella; she would no longer have to be the first one up in the morning; she would no longer have to chop wood, and polish her brothers’ boots: she would have a fair field and no favours in her campaign to capture Daniel.