Philippina Schimmelweis came to help Eleanore with the moving. At first
Eleanore was quite surprised; then she became accustomed to having her
around and found her most helpful. Jordan took no interest in anything
that was going on. The last of all his hope seemed to be shattered by
the fact that he was to move.
Philippina gradually fell into the habit of coming every day and working
for a few hours either for Eleanore or for Gertrude, so long as the
latter had anything to do in the kitchen. They became used to seeing
her, and put up with her. She tried to make as little noise as possible;
she had the mien of a person who is filling an important but
unappreciated office.
She made a study of the house; she knew the rooms by heart. She
preferred to come along toward sunset or a little later. One day she
told Eleanore she had seen a mysterious-looking person out on the hall
steps. Eleanore took a candle and went out, but she could not see any
one. Philippina insisted nevertheless that she had seen a man in a green
doublet, and that he had made a face at her.
She was particularly attracted by the rooms in the attic. She told the
neighbours that there was an owl up there. As a result of this the
children of that section began to fear the entire house, while the
chancellor's wife, who lived on the ground floor, became so nervous that
she gave up her apartment.
There was no outside door or entrance hall of any kind to Jordan's new
quarters. You went direct from the stairway into the room where Eleanore
worked and slept. Adjoining this was her father's room. People still
called him the Inspector, although he no longer had such a position.
He sat in his narrow, cramped room the whole day. One wall was out of
plumb. The windows he kept closed. When Eleanore brought him his
breakfast or called him to luncheon, which she had cooked in the tiny
box of a kitchen and then served in her own little room, he was
invariably sitting at the table before a stack of papers, mostly old
bills and letters. The arrangement of these he never changed.
Once she entered his room without knocking. He sprang up, closed a
drawer as quickly as he could, locked it, put the key in his pocket,
and tried to smile in an innocent way. Eleanore's heart almost stopped
beating.
He never went out until it was dark, and on his return he could be seen
carrying a package under his arm. This he took with him to his room.
At first Eleanore was always uneasy when she had to leave. She requested
Philippina to be very careful and see to it that no stranger entered the
house. Philippina had a box full of ribbons in Eleanore's cabinet. She
set a chair against the door leading into Jordan's room; and when her
hands were tired from rummaging around in the ribbons and her eyes weary
from looking at all the flashy colours, she pressed her ear to the door
to see if she could find out what the old man was doing.
At times she heard him talking. It seemed as if he were talking with
some one. His voice had an exhortatory but tender tone in it. Philippina
trembled with fear. Once she even pressed the latch; she wanted to open
the door as quietly as possible, so that she might peep in and see what
was really going on. But to her vexation, the door was bolted on the
other side.
For Gertrude she did small jobs and ran little errands: she would go to
the baker or the grocer for her. Gertrude became less and less active;
it was exceedingly difficult for her to climb the stairs. Philippina
took the place of a maid. The only kind of work she refused to do was
work that would soil her clothes. Gertrude's shyness irritated her; one
day she said in a snappy tone: "You are pretty proud, ain't you? You
don't like me, do you?" Gertrude looked at her in amazement, and made no
reply; she did not know what to say.
Whenever Philippina heard Daniel coming, she hid herself. But if he
chanced to catch sight of her, he merely shrugged his shoulders at the
"frame," as he contemptuously called her. It seemed to him that it would
be neither wise nor safe to mistreat her. He felt that it was the better
part of valour to look with favour on her inexplicable diligence, and
let it go at that.
Once he even so completely overcame himself that he gave her his hand;
but he drew it back immediately: he felt that he had never touched
anything so slimy in his life; he thought he had taken hold of a frog.
Philippina acted as if she had not noticed what he had done. But
scarcely had he gone into his room, when she turned to Gertrude with a
diabolic glimmer in her eyes, and, making full use of her vulgar voice,
said: "Whew! Daniel's kind, ain't he? No wonder people can't stand him!"
When she saw that Gertrude knit her brow at this exclamation, she
wheeled about on the heels of her clumsy shoes, and screamed as if the
devil were after her: "Oi, oi, Gertrude, Gertrude, oi, oi, the meat's
burning! The meat's burning."
It was a false alarm. The meat was sizzling quite peacefully in the pan.