The Goose Man
"Yes, just now."
TRES FACIUNT COLLEGIUM
I
The habitues of the reserved table at the Crocodile were all reasonably
well informed of the events that had recently taken place in the homes
of Inspector Jordan and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. Details were
mentioned that would make it seem probable that the cracks in the walls
and the key-holes of both houses had been entertaining eavesdroppers.
Some refused to believe that Jason Philip had made restitution for the
money young Jordan had embezzled. For, said Degen, the baker,
Schimmelweis is a hard-fisted fellow, and whoever would try to get money
out of him would have to be in the possession of extraordinary
shrewdness.
"But he has already paid it," said Gruendlich, the watchmaker. He knew he
had; he knew that the wife of the bookseller had gone over to Nothafft's
on Tuesday afternoon; that she had a heap of silver in a bag; and that
when she came back home she took to bed, and had been ill ever since.
Kitzler, the assistant postmaster, felt there was something wrong here;
and if there was not, you would simply have to assume that Nothafft, the
musician, was a dangerous citizen, who had somehow managed to place the
breast of his uncle _vis-a-vis_ a revolver.
"And you know, Nothafft is to be made Kapellmeister at the City
Theatre," remarked the editor Weibezahl, the latest member of the round
table. "His appointment is to be made public in a few days."
"What! Kapellmeister! You don't say so! That will make Andreas Doederlein
the saddest man in ten states."
Herr Carovius, whose mouth was just then hanging on his beer glass,
laughed so heartily that the beer went down his Sunday throat; he was
seized with a coughing spell. Herr Korn slapped him on the back.
It was a shame that such a bad actor as Nothafft had to be endured in
the midst of people who lived peaceful and law-abiding lives. This
lament came from Herr Kleinlein, who had been circuit judge now for
some time. He was anxious to know whether all the tales that were
circulating concerning Nothafft were true.
Well, he was told, a great many things are said about Nothafft, but it
is difficult to get at the truth. They appealed to the apothecary
Pflaum, on the ground that his assistant knew the musician and might be
able to give them some definite information.
Herr Pflaum took on an air as if he knew a great deal but was under
obligations not to tell. Yes, yes, he said rather perfunctorily, he had
heard that some one had said that Nothafft was running a pretty
questionable domestic establishment; that he had a rather unsavoury
past; and that there was some talk about his neglecting his wife.
The deuce you say! Why, they were married only a short while ago. Yes,
but there was a rumour to the effect that there was a woman in the case.
Who could it be? Ahem! Well-ah, it would be a good idea to be cautious
about mentioning names. Good Lord, why cautious? Why not straight out
with the information any one chanced to be fortunate enough to have? Is
it not a question of protecting one's own wife and daughters?
And so this slanderous babble rattled on. There was something
unfathomable in their hatred of the musician. They were just as agreed
on this point as they would have been if Daniel had broken open their
strong boxes, smashed their windows, and betrayed their honour and
dignity to public ridicule.
They did not know what they should do about him. They passed by him as
one would pass by a bomb that might or might not explode.
II
When Herr Carovius was alone, he picked up the paper, and read the
account of a mine explosion in Silesia. The number of killed satisfied
him. The description of the women as they stood at the top of the shaft,
wept, wrung their hands, and called out the names of their husbands,
filled him with the same agreeable sensation that he experienced when he
listened to the melancholy finale of a Chopin nocturne.
But he could not forget the expression on Herr Pflaum's face when he
told how Nothafft was neglecting his wife. It had been the expression
that comes out, so to speak, from between the curtains of a sleeping
room: something was up, make no mistake, something was going on.
For quite a while Herr Carovius had harboured the suspicion that there
was something wrong. Twice he had met Daniel and Eleanore walking along
the street in the twilight, talking to each other in a very mysterious
way. Things were going on behind Herr Carovius's back which he could not
afford to overlook.
Since the day Eleanore had disentangled the cord of his nose glasses
from the button of his top coat, the picture of the young girl had been
indelibly stamped on his mind. He could still see the beautiful
curvature of her young bosom as she raised her arm.
A year and a half after this incident, Herr Carovius was going through
some old papers. He chanced upon an unfinished letter which Eberhard von
Auffenberg had written to Eleanore but had never posted. Eberhard had
come to Nuremberg at the time to transact some business connected with
the negotiation of a new loan; he had left his hotel, and Herr Carovius
had had to wait for him a long while. This time he had spent in looking
over the unsealed documents of the incautious young Baron.
Then it was that he discovered the letter. What words! And oh, the
passion! Herr Carovius would never have believed that the reserved
misanthrope was capable of such a display of emotion. He felt that
Eberhard had disclosed to him the most secret chambers of his heart. He
was terrified at the voluptuousness revealed to him by the unveiling of
the mystery of his soul. They are human beings after all, those members
of the nobility, he exclaimed with a feeling of personal triumph. They
throw themselves away; they meet some slippery imp, and fall; they lose
control of themselves as soon as they hear a skirt rustle.
But what concerned the Baron in this case concerned also Herr Carovius.
A passion that had taken possession of the Baron had to be guarded,
studied, and eventually shared by Herr Carovius himself.
Herr Carovius's loneliness had gradually robbed him of his equanimity.
Suppressed impulses were stifling his mind with the luxuriant growths of
a vivid and vicious imagination. The adventures into which he had
voluntarily plunged in order to make sure of his control over Eberhard
had almost ruined him. The net he had spread for the helplessly
fluttering bird now held him himself entangled in its meshes. The world
to him was a body full of wounds on which he was battening his Neronic
lusts. But it was at the same time a tapestry, with bright coloured
pictures which could be made living and real by a magic formula, and
this formula he had not yet been able to discover.
At the insinuations of the apothecary his fancy took on new life: he
was not a man in whose soul old emotions died out; his lusts never
became extinct. Lying on the sofa, taking his midday siesta, he would
picture the figure of Eleanore dancing around him in diminutive form.
When he sat at the piano and played an _etude_, he imagined he saw
Daniel standing beside him criticising his technique--and doing it with
much show of arrogance. When he went out of evenings, he saw Nothafft
displayed on all the signs, while every _demi-monde_ bore Eleanore's
features.
It seemed to him in time that Eleanore Jordan was his property; that he
had a right to her. His life, he felt, was full of lamentable
privations: other people had everything, he had nothing. Others
committed crimes; all he could do was to make note of the crimes. And no
man could become either satiated or rich from merely taking the criminal
incidents of other people's lives into account.
At midnight he put on his sleeping gown, took a seat before the mirror,
and read until break of day a novel in which a man fifty years old has a
secret and successful love affair with a young woman. As he read this
novel he knew that something was going on. And he knew that out there in
a certain house on AEgydius Place something was also going on. Make no
mistake, something was up.
He saw trysts on unlighted stairways. He saw people coming to mutual
understandings by a certain pressure of the hand and adulterous signals.
That is the way they did it; that is the way Benda and Marguerite had
done it. His old hate was revived. He transferred his hate, but also his
hope, to music. Through music he was to build a bridge to Daniel and
Eleanore. He wanted to give them the advantage of his insight, his
tricks, his experience, simply in order that he might be on hand when
they committed the gruesome deed; so that he might not be cut off from
them by an impenetrable wall and be tortured in consequence by an
incorporeal jealousy; he wanted to be one with them, to feast his eye
and reach forth his empty, senescent hand.
"I am," he said to himself, "of the same flesh and blood as that man; in
me too there is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I have, to be sure," he said to
himself, "despised women, for they are despicable. But let some woman
come forward and show me that she is fit for anything more than to
increase by two or three the number of idiots with which the world is
already overcrowded, and I will do penance, whole and complete, and then
offer her my services as a knight."
He no longer slept or ate; nor could he do anything that was in any way
rational. In a belated sexual outburst, a second puberty, his
imagination became inflamed by a picture which he adorned with all the
perfections of both soul and body.
He heard that one of Daniel's works was to be played before invited
guests at the home of Baroness von Auffenberg. He wired to Eberhard, and
asked him to get him an invitation. The reply was a negative one. In his
rage he could have murdered the messenger boy. He then wrote to Daniel,
and, boasting of what he had already done for him, begged Daniel to see
to it that he was among the guests at the recital. He received a printed
card from the Baroness, on which she had expressed the hope that she
might be able to greet him on a certain day.
He was in the seventh heaven. He decided to pay Daniel a visit, and to
thank him for his kindness.
III
"The only thing to do is to leave the city, to go far, far away from
here," thought Eleanore, on that evening that was so different from any
other evening of her life.
While she was combing her hair, she was tempted to take the scissors and
cut it off just to make herself ugly. In the night she went to the
window to look for the stars. If it only had not happened, if it only
were a dream, a voice within her cried.
As soon as it turned grey in the morning, she got up. She hastened
through the deserted streets, just as she had done yesterday, out to the
suburbs. But everything was different. Tree and bush looked down upon
her with stern reproachfulness. The mists hung low; but the hazy grey
cold of the early morning was like a bath to her. Later the sun broke
through; primroses glistened with gold on the meadow. If it could only
have been a dream, she thought in silence.
When she came home, her father had already received the news about the
money: it had been paid to Diruf; Daniel had taken it to him.
Jordan remained in his room the whole day. And on the following day he
kept to himself except while at dinner. He sat at the table with bowed
head; he had nothing to say. Eleanore went to his door from time to time
to see if she could hear him. There was not a sound; the house sang with
solitude.
Jordan had requested the landlord to sublet the house before his lease
had expired: he felt that it was too large and expensive for him in the