I was not quite sure where that was, but did not ask further, for I was occupied in helping Miss Hallam, and wished to be with her as much as I could before she left.
The day of parting came, as come it must. Miss Hallam was gone. I had cried, and she had maintained the grim silence which was her only way of expressing emotion.
She was going back home to Skernford, to blindness, now known to be inevitable, to her saddened, joyless life. I was going to remain in Elberthal—for what? When I look back I ask myself—was I not as blind as she, in truth? In the afternoon of the day of Miss Hallam’s departure, I left Frau Steinmann’s house. Clara promised to come and see me sometimes. Frau Steinmann kissed me, and called me liebes Kind. I got into the cab and directed the driver to go to Wehrhahn, 39. He drove me along one or two streets into the one known as the Schadowstrasse, a long, wide street, in which stood the Tonhalle. A little past that building, round a corner, and he stopped, on the same side of the road.
“Not here!” said I, putting my head out of the window when I saw the window of the curiosity shop exactly opposite. “Not here!”
“Wehrhahn, 39, Fräulein?”
“Yes.”
“This is it.”
I stared around. Yes—on the wall stood in plainly to be read white letters, “Wehrhahn,” and on the door of the house, 39. Yielding to a conviction that it was to be, I murmured “Kismet,” and descended from my chariot. The woman of the house received me civilly. “The young lady for whom the Herr Direktor had taken lodgings? Schon! Please to come this way, Fräulein. The room was on the third étage.” I followed her upstairs—steep, dark, narrow stairs, like those of the opposite house. The room was a bare-looking, tolerably large one. There was a little closet of a bedroom opening from it—a scrap of carpet upon the floor, and open windows letting in the air. The woman chatted good-naturedly enough.
“So! I hope the room will suit, Fräulein. It is truly not to be called richly furnished, but one doesn’t need that when one is a Sing-student. I have had many in my time—ladies and gentlemen too—pupils of Herr von Francius often. Na! what if they did make a great noise? I have no children—thank the good God! and one gets used to the screaming just as one gets used to everything else.” Here she called me to the window.
“You might have worse prospects than this, Fräulein, and worse neighbors than those over the way. See! there is the old furniture shop where so many of the Herren Maler go, and then there there is Herr Duntze, the landscape painter, and Herr Knoop who paints Genrebilder and does not make much by it—so a picture of a child with a raveled skein of wool, or a little girl making ear-rings for herself with bunches of cherries—for my part I don’t see much in them, and wonder that there are people who will lay down good hard thalers for them. Then there is Herr Courvoisier, the musiker—but perhaps you know who he is.”