The Goose Man
"How heavy you are," he said.
"Too heavy for you?" she asked with wide-opened eyes. He shrugged his
shoulders.
Then she slipped out of his embrace, sprang to her feet, and ran with
remarkable swiftness a distance that was twice as long as the one he had
staked off; she did not fall; she did not want to fall; she dared not.
Breathing heavily and pale as a corpse, she waited until he came up. But
he had no tenderness for her now; he merely scolded. Arm in arm they
walked on. Gertrude felt for his hand; he gave it to her, and she
pressed it to her bosom.
Daniel was terrified as he looked into her face, and saw her thoughts
written there as if in letters of fire: We belong to each other for time
and eternity.
That was her confession of faith.
VII
She lay wide awake until late at night. She heard him go into the
kitchen and get a drink of water and then return to his room. He had
forbidden her to come to the door and ask whether he was not going to
bed soon: she was not to do this, it made no difference how late it was.
Then he lay beside her, his head on his arm, and looked at her with eyes
that had lost their earthly, temporal glow. Man, where are your eyes
anyway, she would have liked to exclaim. And yet she knew where they
were; she knew, too, that it is dangerous to disturb a somnambulist by
calling to him.
One night he had found it impossible to do his work. He sat down on the
edge of the bed and stared into the light of the lamp for an hour or so,
hating himself. Gertrude saw how he raged at himself; how he really fed,
nourished his lack of confidence in himself. But she could not say
anything.
A publisher had returned one of his manuscripts with a courteous but
depressing conventional rejection slip. Daniel spoke disparagingly of
his talents; he had lost hope in his future; he was bitter at the world;
he felt that he was condemned to a life of unceasing obscurity.
The only thing she could do was look at him; merely look at him.
He became tired of having her look at him; a fresh, vigorous remark
would have served his purpose much better, he thought.
She measured her work and his not in terms of reward; she did not seek
for connection of any kind between privation and hope; nor did she
measure Daniel's love in terms of tender expressions and embraces. She
waited for him with much patience. In time her patience irritated him.
"A little bit more activity and insistence would not hurt you," he said
one day, and thrust her timid, beseeching hands from him.
He saw himself cared for: He had a home, a person who prepared his
meals, washed his clothes, and faithfully attended to his other
household needs. He should have been grateful. He was, too, but he could
not show it. He was grateful when he was alone, but in Gertrude's
presence his gratitude turned to defiance. If he was away from home, he
thought with pleasure of his return; he pictured Gertrude's joy at
seeing him again. But when he was with her, he indulged in silent
criticism, and wanted to have everything about her different.
The judge's wife on the first floor complained that Gertrude did not
speak to her. "Be kind to your neighbours," he remarked with the air of
a professional scold. The next Sunday they took a walk, on which they
met the judge's wife. Gertrude spoke to her: "Well, you don't need to
fall on her neck," he mumbled. She thought for a long while of how she
might speak to people without offending them and without annoying
Daniel. She was embarrassed; she was afraid of Daniel's criticism.
On such days she would put too much salt in the soup, everything went
wrong, and in her diligent attempt to be punctual she lost much time.
She was fearfully worried when he got up from the table and went to his
room without saying a word. She would sit perfectly still and listen;
she was frightened when he went to the piano to try a motif. When he
again entered her room, she looked into his face with the tenseness of a
soul in utter anguish. Then it suddenly came about that he would sit
down by her side and caress her. He told her all about his life, his
home, his father, his mother. If she could only have heard each of his
words twice! If she could only have drunk in the expression in his eyes!
They were filled with peace; his nervous hands lay in quiet on his knees
when he spoke to her in this way on these subjects. His twitching,
angular face, weather-beaten by the storms of life, took on an expression
of sorrow that was most becoming to it.
When she had a headache or was tired, he expressed his anxiety for her
in touching tones. He would go about the house on tiptoes, and close the
doors with infinite care. If a dog barked on the street, he rushed to
the window and looked out, enraged at the beast. When she retired, he
would help her undress, and bring her whatever she needed.
It was also strange that he disliked the idea of leaving her alone.
There was something child-like in his restlessness when he was at home
and she was out. He pictured her surrounded by grievous dangers; he
would have liked to lock her up and hold her a captive, so as to be sure
that she was quite safe. This made her all the weaker and more dependent
upon him, while he was like a man who presses what he has to his heart,
plagued with the thought that by some mischance it might escape, and
yet clings to it also lest he be disturbed by the thought of another
more precious possession he loved long since and lost a while.
Once he came to Gertrude while she was playing the harp, threw his arms
about her, looked into her face with a wild, gloomy expression, and
stammered: "I love you, I love you, I do." It was the first time he had
spoken these eternal words. She grew pale, first from joy and then from
fear; for there was more of hatred than of love in his voice.
VIII
He felt that association with congenial men would help him over many a
dark hour. But when he set out to look for these men, the city became a
desert and a waste place.
Herr Seelenfromm came to his house now and then. Daniel could not endure
the timid man who admired him so profoundly, and who, in the bottom of
his heart, had an equal amount of respect for Gertrude. The young
architect who had been employed at the St. Sebaldus Church while it was
being renovated, and who loved music, had won Daniel's esteem. But he
had a repulsive habit of smacking his tongue when he talked. Daniel and
he discussed the habit, and parted the worst of enemies. His association
with a certain Frenchman by the name of Riviere was of longer duration.
Riviere was spending some time in the city, looking up material for a
life of Caspar Hauser. He had made his acquaintance at the Baroness von
Auffenberg's, and taken a liking to him because he reminded him of
Friedrich Benda.
M. Riviere loved to hear Daniel improvise on the piano. He knew so
little German that he merely smiled at Daniel's caustic remarks; and if
he became violently enraged, M. Riviere merely stared at his mouth. He
had a wart on his cheek, and wore a straw hat summer and winter. He
cooked his own meals, for it was an obsession of his that people wanted
to poison him because he was writing a life of Caspar Hauser.
When Herr Seelenfromm and M. Riviere came in of a Sunday evening, Daniel
would reach for a volume of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Clemens Brentano, and
read from them until he was hoarse. He tried in this way to find peace
in a strange world; for he did not wish to weep at the sight of human
beings who seemed perfectly at ease.
Gertrude looked at him, and put this question to herself: How is it
that a man to whom music is life and the paradise of his heart can allow
himself to be so enveloped in sorrow, so beclouded by gloom? She
understood the smarting pains in which he composed; she had a vague idea
of the labyrinthine complications of his inner fate; these she grasped.
But her own soul was filled with joyless compassion; she wished with all
her power to plant greater faith and more happiness in his heart.
She meditated on the best means of carrying on her spiritual campaign.
It occurred to her that he had had more of both faith and happiness at
the time he was going with Eleanore. She saw Eleanore now in a quite
different light. She recalled that Eleanore was not merely her sister
but the creator of her happiness. Nor was she unmindful of the fact that
through the transformation of her being, love and enlightenment had
arisen to take the place of her former suspicion and ignorance.
She ascribed to Eleanore all those powers in which she had formerly been
lacking: general superiority and stimulating vigour; an ability to play
that lent charm to drudgery and made the hard things of life easy;
brightness in conversation and delicacy of touch. In her lonely
broodings she came to the conclusion that Eleanore was the only one who
could help her. She went straightway to her father's house to find out
why Eleanore so rarely came to see her.
"I don't like to come; Daniel is so unkind to me," said Eleanore.
Gertrude replied that he was unkind to everybody, including her herself,
and that she must not pay any attention to this; for she knew full well
that Daniel liked her--and perhaps he himself was offended because she
never called.
Eleanore thought it all over, and from then on visited her sister more
frequently. But if it did not look as though Daniel did everything in
his power to avoid her, this much was certain: he never said a word to
her more than human decency required, and was an expert at finding
reasons why he had to leave the room when she was there. Eleanore was
gainfully conscious of this; it hurt her.
IX
One morning Gertrude returned from the market, carrying a heavy basket
full of things she had bought. As she came in the front door she heard
Daniel playing. She noticed at once that he was not improvising; that he
was playing a set piece, the tones of which were quite unfamiliar to
her.
As she came up the steps, the basket no longer seemed like a burden.
She went quietly into the living room and listened. Something drew her
closer and closer to the piano. Daniel had not noticed that she had
entered the room and sat down. He was wholly lost in what he was doing;
he never took his rapt and wondering eyes from the music before him.
It was his draft of the "Harzreise im Winter." For a year and a half,
since the time he had composed it in Ansbach, he had never again thought
of it; it had lain untouched. Suddenly the fire of creation had flamed
up in him; he could once more bind the incoherent, and make what had
been merely implied or indicated take definite shape.
He would play a movement again and again, trying to connect it with what
went before or came after; he would take his pencil and write in a few
notes here or there; then he would try it again, and smile to himself in
a strange, confused, and yet enchanted way, when he saw that the motif
was complete, perfect. Gertrude was drawn still closer to him. In her
awe-struck admiration she crouched on the floor beside him. She would
have liked to creep into the piano, and give her soul the opportunity it
sought to express itself in the tones that came from the strings. When
Daniel had finished, she pressed her head to his hips, and reached her
hot hands up to him.
Daniel was terrified; for he recalled instantaneously another occasion
on which another woman had done precisely the same thing. His eye
involuntarily fell on the mask of Zingarella. He was not conscious of
the connection; there was no visible bridge between the two incidents;
Gertrude's face was too unlike that of its momentary prototype. But with