The most unpleasant feature of all, however, was the interminable round of visits from the women: custom had decreed that they should not be turned away. The wife of the director of the theatre came in; Martha Rübsam came in, and so did the wife of Councillor Kirschner, and the wives of the butcher, baker, preacher, and physician. And of course the wife of the apothecary called. No one of them failed to pour out an abundance of gratuitous advice or go into ecstasies over the beauty of the baby. Once Daniel came in just as such an assemblage was in the sick room. He looked first at one, then at another, threw back his head, and left without saying a word.
Herr Seelenfromm and M. Rivière were likewise not frightened by the distance; they called. Eleanore met them in the hall, and got rid of them by the usual method. And one day even Herr Carovius came around to inquire how mother and child were doing. Philippina received him; and Philippina was having a hard time of it at present: she was not allowed to enter Gertrude’s room; Gertrude would have nothing to do with her; she refused to see her.
So that she might not get too far behind with her work—for it meant her daily bread—Eleanore pushed the table up to the window, and despite the poor light, kept on writing. In the evening she would sit by the lamp and write, although she was so tired that she could hardly keep her eyes open.
After three days, Gertrude had no milk for the baby; it had to be fed with a bottle. It would cry for hours without stopping. And as soon as it was quiet, its clothes had to be washed or its bath prepared, or Gertrude wanted something, or one of the pestiferous visitors came in. Eleanore had to lay her work aside; in the evening she would fall across the bed and sleep with painful soundness for an hour or two. If the baby did not wake her by its hungry howling, the bad air did. Her head ached. Yet she concealed her weakness, her longing, her oppression. Not even Daniel noticed that there was anything wrong with her.
She had very little opportunity to talk with him. And yet there was probably not another pair of eyes in the whole world that could be so eloquent and communicative with admonition, promise, request, and cordial resignation. One evening they met each other at the kitchen door: “Eleanore, I am stifling,” he whispered to her.
She laid her hands on his shoulder, and looked at him in silence.
“Come with me,” he urged with a stupid air. “Come with me! Let’s run off.”
Eleanore smiled and thought to herself: “The demands of his soul are always a few leagues in advance of the humanly possible.”
The next morning he stormed into the room. Eleanore was only half dressed. With an expression of wrath flitting across her face she reached for a towel and draped it about her shoulders. He sat down on Gertrude’s bed, and let loose a torrent of words: “I am going to set Goethe’s ‘Wanderers Sturmlied’ to music! I am planning to make it a companion piece to the ‘Harzreise’ and publish the two in a cycle. I have not slept the whole night. The main motif is glorious.” He began to hum it over in a falsetto voice: “‘Oh, mortal man, if genius does not forsake thee, neither rain nor storm can breathe upon thy heart!’ How do you like that?”