The Goose Man
intolerable to sit around, hour after hour, doing nothing but waiting
for the return of her father. At every sound that could be heard in the
house, Gertrude pricked up her ears in eager expectancy.
Daniel stood by the window, and looked out across the deserted square
into the dull red glow of the setting sun.
It struck seven, then half past seven, eight, and Eleanore had not
returned. Daniel began to pace back and forth through the room; he was
nervous. If his foot chanced to strike against a chair, Gertrude
shuddered.
Shortly after eight, steps were heard outside. The key rattled in the
front gate, the room door opened, and in came Eleanore--and Philippina
Schimmelweis.
VII
Everybody looked at Philippina; even Jordan himself honoured her with a
faint glance. Daniel and Gertrude were amazed. Daniel did not recognise
his cousin; he knew nothing about her; he had seen her but once, and
then he was a mere child. He did not know who this repulsive-looking
individual was, and demanded that Eleanore give him an explanation. As
he did this, he raised his eyebrows.
Eleanore was the only one Philippina looked at in a kindly way; in
Philippina's own face there was an expression of curiosity.
Philippina's whole bearing had something of the monstrous about it. Even
her dress was picturesque, adventuresome. Her great brown straw hat,
with the ribbon sticking straight up in the air, was shoved on to the
back of her head so as not to spoil the effect of the fashionable bangs
that hung down over her forehead. Her loud, checkered dress was strapped
about her waist with a cloth belt so tightly that the contour of her fat
body was made to look positively ridiculous: she resembled a gigantic
hour glass. In her rough-cut features there was an element of lurking
malevolence.
After a few minutes of painful stillness she walked up to Daniel, and
plucked him by the coat-sleeve: "Eh, you don't know who I am?" she
asked, and her squinty eyes shone on him with enigmatic savagery: "I am
Philippina; you know, Philippina Schimmelweis."
Daniel stepped back from her: "Well, what of it?" he asked, wrinkling
his brow.
She followed him, took him by the coat-sleeve again, and led him over
into one corner: "Listen, Daniel," she stammered, "my father--he must
give you all the money you need. For years ago your father gave him all
the money he had, and told him to keep it for you. Do you understand? I
happened to hear about it one time when my father was talking about it
to my mother. It was a good seven years ago, but I made a note of it. My
father spent the money on himself; he thinks he can keep it. Go to him,
and tell him what you want; tell him how much you want, and then go help
these people here. But you must not give me away; if you do they'll kill
me. Do you understand? You won't say a word about it, will you?"
"Is that true?" Daniel managed to say in reply, as a feeling of
unspeakable anger struggled with one of indescribable disgust.
"It is true, Daniel, every word of it; 'pon my soul and honour," replied
Philippina; "just go, and you'll see that I have told you the truth."
During the conversation of the two, of which she could hardly hear a
single syllable, Eleanore never took her eyes off them.
VIII
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 Schuett 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 role 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.
IX
At times she thought she could simply go to him and stay with him. At
times she felt that he would come and get her. One thing or the other
had to take place, she thought.
One Sunday afternoon--it chanced to be her eighteenth birthday--a junior
agent of Jason Philip, a fellow by the name of Pfefferkorn, came to the
house, and in the course of the conversation remarked rather casually
that the elder of the Jordan sisters was engaged to the musician
Nothafft, that the engagement had been kept secret for a while, but that
the wedding was to take place in the immediate future.
"By the way, I hear that the musician is your nephew," said Pfefferkorn
at the close of his report.
Jason Philip cast a gloomy look into space, while Theresa, then sipping
her chicory coffee, set her cup on the table, and looked at the man with
scornful contempt.
Philippina broke out in a laughter that went through them like a knife.
Then she ran from the room, and banged the door behind her. "She seems a
bit deranged," murmured Jason Philip angrily.
Then came that June night on which she did not come home at all. Jason
Philip raged and howled when she returned the next morning; but she was
silent. He locked her up in the cellar for sixteen hours; but she was
silent.
After this she did not leave the house for months at a time; she did not