The Goose Man
because she was silently considering how long her sister's visit would
last and to what expense it would put her.
She did not mention Daniel, and her silence condemned him more
completely than her husband's acrimonious speeches. She held firmly an
almost religious doctrine of the complete obedience which children owe
their parents, and doubted Marian's power to punish properly a breach of
this sacred law.
When Marian was left alone, she sat down by the window of the little
room, and gazed sadly down at the river. Without any curl of waves the
yellow water glided by and washed the walls of the houses on the other
bank. She had a view of the Museum Bridge and another bridge, and the
crowding of people on the bridges disquieted her.
She walked through the streets, and stopped at the head of the Museum
Bridge. She thought that every human being who lived in the town must
pass by here sooner or later. Her attentive glance searched all faces,
and where one escaped, she followed the figure as it melted into the
dark. But as it grew later the people were fewer and fewer.
At night she would lie awake, and listen to the dull echo of the feet of
the last passerby. Next day from morning to twilight she would wander up
and down the streets. What she saw weighed on her heart. The city people
seemed to her like dumb animals, tormented and angry. The narrow streets
stopped her breath; the hubbub deadened her senses.
But she was never tired of seeking.
On the fifth day she did not come home until ten o'clock. Theresa, who
had gone to bed, sent her a plate of lentil soup. While she was avidly
eating the soup she heard steps in the hall and a knock at the door.
Jason Philip entered. "Come along at once," was all he said. But she
understood. With trembling fingers she threw a shawl across her
shoulders, since the October nights were growing cool, and followed him
in silence.
They went up hill to Adler Street, turned into it and then into a
narrow, dark little alley at the right. A lantern hung above a door and
on a green glass pane were inscribed the words: "The Vale of Tears." A
greenish light suffused the stone stairs that led to the cellar, the
kegs and the desolate room filled with chairs and benches. A sourish
smell of wine arose from the place.
Beside the entrance there was a barred window. Beside it Jason Philip
stopped, and beckoned Marian to join him.
At the long tables below them sat a queer crowd. They were young men,
but such as one never finds in ordinary houses and only very rarely in
the streets. Want seemed to have driven them to huddle here, and the
night to have lured them from their hiding places--shipwrecked creatures
they seemed who had fled to a cavern on some deserted shore. They had
absurdly gay cravats and sad, pallid faces, and the greenish light made
them look altogether like corpses. It was long since a barber had
touched their hair or a tailor their garb.
A little aside from these sat two old fellows, habitual topers, not in
the best circumstances themselves, yet rather astonished at this dreary
Stygian crew. For they themselves at least received their weekly wage of
a Saturday night, while those others had obviously for years not worked
at all.
But in a dusky corner sat one at a piano and struck the keys with a
strange might. He had no score before him, but played from memory. The
instrument moaned; the strings hummed pitifully; the pedals creaked; but
the man who played was so bewitched by his music that he cared little
for the inadequacy of its communication. Wild as the tumult of the
playing sounded, the shrill and raging chords, the wild clamour of the
treble, the driven triplets and seething tremolos of the bass, yet the
deep emotion of the player, the ecstasy and world-estranged madness in
which he was, lent the scene a melancholy and a solemnity which would
have had its effect even without the greenish cellar and the cavernous
pallor of the listeners.
Marian had at once recognised the pianist as Daniel. She had to hold
fast to the bars of the window and lean her knees against the
wainscoting. It was not for nothing that Jason Philip was known as a
thorough wag. The comparison to Daniel in the lion's den was too much
for him. He whispered the words to Marian. But since the window was open
and the music had first risen and then, at this moment, paused, his
words penetrated to the people below, and several heads turned toward
him. Marian was thoughtless. She believed that the piece had ended.
Faintly and fearfully she cried: "Daniel!"
Daniel leaped up, stared at her, saw Jason Philip's mocking face,
hastened to the door, the steps, and was beside them.
He stood in the doorway, and his lips began to form words. The unhappy
boy, she thought, and it seemed to her as though power would be given
her to press back to his heart the words she trembled to hear.
It was in vain. The words were uttered. He did not wish to see his
mother any more; he was content to live alone and for himself and to be
free. He needed no one. He needed only to be free.
Jason Philip hurled a glance of contempt at the blasphemous wretch, and
drew Marian away with him. To the very corner of the alley they were
accompanied by the excited voices of the people in the Vale of Tears.
Next morning Marian returned to Eschenbach.
FOES, BROTHERS, A FRIEND AND A MASK
I
Daniel had rented a room of the brush-maker Hadebusch and his wife, who
lived on Jacob's Square behind the church.
It was March, and a sudden cold had set in; and Frau Hadebusch had a
superstitious fear of coal, which she characterised as Devil's dung. At
the back of the yard was the wood pile, and logs were brought in with
which to feed the oven fires. But wood was dear, and had Daniel fed his
little iron stove in the garret with such costly food, his monthly bill
would have reached a fabulous height. He paid seven marks a month for
his room and counted every penny so as not to shorten the period of his
liberty by any needless expenditure.
So he sat freezing over his books and scores until the first warmth of
spring stole in through the windows. The books he borrowed from the
library at the King's Gate, and paid six pfennigs a volume. Achim von
Arnim and Jean Paul were his guides in those days: the one adorned the
world of the senses for him, the other that of the soul.
On the police department's identification blank Daniel had called
himself a musician. Frau Hadebusch brought the paper into her living
room, which, like all the rooms of the house, seemed built for dwarfs
and reeked of limewater and lye. It was at the day's end, and in the
room were assembled Herr Francke and Herr Benjamin Dorn, who lodged on
the second floor, and Frau Hadebusch's son, who was weak-minded and
crouched grinning beside the stove.
Herr Francke was a town traveller for a cigar house, and was regarded as
a good deal of a Don Juan by the female servants of the neighbourhood.
Benjamin Dorn was a clerk in the Prudentia Life Insurance Company,
belonged to a Methodist congregation, and was respected by all the
respectable on account of his Christian walk and conversation.
These gentlemen examined the document thoroughly and with frowns. Herr
Francke gave it as his opinion that a musician who never made music
could scarcely be regarded as one.
"He's probably pawned his bass violin or bugle or whatever he was
taught," he said contemptuously; "perhaps he can only beat a drum. Well,
I can do that too if I have one."
"Yes, you've got to have a drum to be a drummer," Benjamin Dorn
remarked. "The question, however, is whether such a calling is in
harmony with the principles of Christian modesty." He laid his finger on
his nose, and added: "It is a question which, with all proper humility,
all proper humility, you understand, I would answer in the negative."
"He hasn't any relatives and no acquaintances at all," Frau Hadebusch
wailed, and her voice sounded like the scraping of carrots on a grater;
"and no employment and no prospects and no boots or clothes but what
he's got on. In all my life I haven't had no such lodger."
The blank fluttered to the floor, whence the weak-minded Hadebusch Jr.
picked it up, rolled it in the shape of a bag, and applied that bag,
trumpet-like, to his lips, a procedure which caused the document in
question to be gradually soaked through and thus withdrawn from its
official uses. Frau Hadebusch was too little concerned over the police
regulations to take further thought of her duties as the keeper of a
lodging house.
Herr Francke drew from his pocket a pack of greasy cards and began to
shuffle them. Frau Hadebusch giggled and it sounded like a witch
rustling in the fire. The Methodist conquered his pious scruples, and
placed his pfennigs on the table; the town-traveller turned up his
sleeves as though he were about to wring a hen's neck.
Before very long there arose a dissonant controversy, since Herr
Francke's relations with the goddess of fortune were strained and
violent. The old brush-maker poked his head in at the door and cursed;
the weak-minded boy blew dreamily on his paper trumpet; and the company
that had been so peacefully at one separated in violence and rage.
II
Daniel wandered up to the castle, along the walls, over the bridges and
planks.
It was his youth that caused him so to love the night that he forgot all
men and seemed to himself to be alone on earth. It was his youth that
delivered him up to things with such passion that he was able to weave
the ghostly flowers of melodies about all that is visible--melodies that
were so delicate, so eloquent, and so winged that no pen could ever
record them. They vanished and died whenever he sought to capture them.
But it was also his youth that fired his eyes with hatred when he saw
the comfort of lit windows, and filled his heart with bitterness against
the satisfied, the indifferent, the strangers, the eternal strangers who
had no consciousness of him.
He was so small and so great: small in the eyes of the world, great in
his own estimation. When the tones burst from him like sparks from an
anvil, he was a god. When he stood in the dark court behind the City
Theatre waiting for the final chorus of "Fidelio" to penetrate the wall
and reach his grateful ears, he was an outcast. Fountains of music
rustled all about him. He looked into the eyes of the children and there
was melody; he gazed up at the stars and there was harmony. He finally
came to the point where there was no limit. His day was a waste place,
his brain a parched field in the rain, his thoughts were birds of
passage, his dreams a super-life.
He lived on bread and fruit, treating himself only every third day to a
warm meal in the inn at the sign of the White Tower. There he would sit
and listen at times, unobserved, to the quite remarkable conversation of
some young fellows. This awakened in him a longing for intercourse with
congenial companions. But when the brethren of the Vale of Tears finally
took him into their circle, he was like a Robinson Crusoe or a Selkirk
who had been abducted from his island.
III
Benjamin Dorn was a compassionate individual. The desire to save a lost
soul filled him with the courage to pay Daniel Nothafft a visit. He
hobbled up the creaky steps with his club-foot, and knocked timidly at
the door.
"Can I be of service to you, Sir, in a Christian way?" he asked, after
he had blown his nose.
Daniel looked at him in amazement.
"You know, I could help you in an unselfish, Christian way, to get a
position. There is a great deal of work to be done down at the