The Goose Man
She would take a pear, and think herself, so to speak, into the very
heart of this bit of fruit, just as if it were possible to find
protection, shelter in so small a space. Or she would take a piece of
coloured glass, hold it in her hand, and look at the world of reality
about her, hoping that the commonplace would in this way be made to seem
more beautiful. Or she looked into the burning fire, and studied, with a
smile on her face, the romantic tongues of flames. Or she had a longing
to look at old pictures: she went to the Germanic Museum, and spent an
entire morning there, standing before a Crucifixion, a Last Supper, her
eye and her heart filled with flowing emotion.
Her love for flowers became stronger than ever, and she began to study
them. The most of them she picked herself; those that grew only in
gardens she bought from the florists, paying very little for them. After
she had made several purchases, they refused to take any more money from
her; they gave her just as many flowers as she wanted. She took them
home, and made bouquets out of them.
One evening she was frightened by Philippina, who came rushing up to her
just as she was arranging her flowers and told her that little Agnes had
a high fever. Eleanore went out and got the doctor, who immediately
reassured her. As she returned, her astonishment was intense and
unusual. Reaching the door, her eyes fell on the flowers: they seemed
wonderfully beautiful to her; the harmony and play of their colours was
so striking that she involuntarily looked around in the illusion that a
stranger had called during her absence, brought the flowers, and
arranged them in their artistic bouquets.
In the meantime poverty was haunting the house in very tangible form.
Neither the butcher nor the baker was willing any longer to deliver
goods on credit. It was quite impossible for Eleanore to support five
people with her clerical work, to say nothing of keeping them in clothes
and paying the rent. However hard she might work, the most she could do
was to get enough money for the barest necessities. Her cares multiplied
day by day.
She had always been an implacable foe of debts; she would not make them.
But after all, the people could not starve, and so she had to contract
debts now. Bitter humiliations were unavoidable; she looked into the
future with untempered dread. She racked her brain trying to devise
plans, deplored her weakness and the gaps in her training, bemoaned the
neglect both she and Daniel were suffering, and was quite disturbed to
see that Philippina's heart was filled with joy at the thought that the
destitution of the household with its accompanying mental anguish was
rapidly increasing.
Twice a day the druggist sent in his bill; finally he came in person. It
was along toward evening when he rang. Philippina treated him so
impolitely that he became impudent, and made such a noise that the
people on the lower floors came out into the hall and leaned over the
railing of the stairs. Eleanore ran down and stood before the man with
folded hands. Jordan also left his room and looked on, sighing.
Others came in and started trouble. Philippina came up to Eleanore, and,
with a smile on her face as if she were going to tell of some great good
fortune that had come to the family, said: "There's another down there,
Eleanore; come down and give him a piece of your mind, or I'm thinking
he's going to call the police."
After quiet had been restored, Philippina began to rage and rant:
"Daniel's a dunderhead. He could live like a Kaiser if he'd mix with the
right people. I know a woman who is lousy with money, and she's going to
git a lot more; but Daniel, the poor bloke, ain't got a ghost of an idea
as to how to work people." She laughed furiously; or, in order to
ventilate her spiteful rage, she picked up some object and smashed it to
pieces on the floor.
Eleanore did not hear what she had said. Her hope was gone. Daniel had
been out of work for three months: who could explain his strange
inactivity? The rent would be due in a short while, and then what?
One morning she went to Daniel's room and said: "Daniel, we are out of
money."
He was sitting at the table reading; he looked at her as if he had to
think for a while who she was: "Just have patience," he said, "you are
not going to starve."
"I am doing all that I possibly can, Daniel," continued Eleanore; "but
tell me, please, how are you planning to keep the house going? I see no
way out. Tell me, Daniel, tell me, please, what you are going to do."
"A musician must be poor, Eleanore," replied Daniel, and looked at her
with eyes that seemed to be frozen.
"But he has got to live, I should think."
"You can't live from husks alone, and I am not going to work my head off
for husks."
"Daniel, oh Daniel, where is your mind? And where is your heart?" cried
Eleanore in despair.
"Where I should have been long ago," he replied, without the shadow of a
ray of hope. He got up, and turning his face away from Eleanore, said in
a half-audible voice: "Let's have no argument, no cogency, no urgency.
Not now! Not now when I am creeping along on the earth with such light
as is left me, trying to grope my way out of the hole. A man doesn't
give up the ghost so quickly as all that, Eleanore. The stomach is a
very elastic piece of skin."
He went into the other room, sat down at the piano, and struck a
slow-moving bass chord.
Eleanore turned to the wall, and buried her feverish brow in her hands.
VII
It was not in Eleanore's nature to submit to a misfortune without first
having made every possible effort to evade it.
She wrote for from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, with the result that
she had finished all that was asked of her long before her time was
really up.
Then she looked around for a better paying position; it was in vain.
Women had never been paid well, she had no recommendations, no personal
connections, nothing on which she could depend or to which she might
refer.
Finally it occurred to her that she might make some money out of her
flowers. She went to the florist at St. Lorenz Place, taking with her a
garland of carnations and mignonettes she had made the day before. She
told the florist she knew a great deal about flowers and had had
considerable experience in handling them.
The man laughed at her, and told her he could find no sale for that kind
of things, and that, even if he could, he would have to ask so little
for them that it would not pay her to make them. Eleanore took her
flowers back home; she was profoundly discouraged. She saw herself how
perishable flowers were; these withered that same evening. Nothing could
be expected from that source.
She had not noticed that, as she left the florist shop, a man on the
other side of the street had stopped and looked at her. He was a haggard
young individual with a pale, peevish expression on his face, a man with
a chin the unimpressiveness of which was hidden behind a Vandyke beard.
He stood for a long while and looked at Eleanore as she walked down the
street. There could be no doubt but that something in her general
bearing and her face had drawn his attention to her; had awakened in him
a feeling that was nobler than mere curiosity or the satisfaction an
idler derives from gaping.
The young man finally began to move; he walked rather stiffly across the
square and entered the florist's shop. A few minutes later the florist,
a man past middle age, with the typical toper's nose, threw open his
door and removed his cap, actions which in addition to his fawning bow
were unmistakable proof to the merchants on either side of him that it
was no ordinary sale he had just made. The young man went his way,
ambling along in shiftless indifference to where he was or the time of
day.
The next morning the florist's errand boy came to Eleanore, and told her
that his chief had something very important to say to her, and that she
should come at once. Eleanore followed the call without delay. As she
entered the shop, the florist greeted her with unusual politeness, and
told her that a man who took a special fancy to the kind of flowers she
had shown him the day before had been there and placed an order for two
such bouquets, or even three, a week at twenty marks each. He advised
her to exercise all diligence in making the flowers and said that when
such a rain of good fortune descended upon one it was wise to let other
things take care of themselves. The only condition the florist imposed
on her was absolute silence. The customer did not wish his name to be
known, nor did he wish to be seen. He remarked casually that there was
manifestly some whim or crotchet back of the man's action, such as is so
frequently the case with aristocratic people.
Who was happier than Eleanore! She never bothered herself for a minute
about the illogical and legendary element in the offer of a man who only
a day before had appeared so shrewd and cautious. She drank in every
word of the florist's detailed statement, and merely believed that in
this city, among its inhabitants, there was an eccentric fellow who was
willing to pay such a princely price for her flowers simply because he
liked flowers and was pleased with the way she put them up. Though she
had not been spoiled by fortune, the transformation that had suddenly
taken place in her circumstances awakened in her not the slightest
suspicion or surprise. She was too happy to be distrustful, too grateful
to become inquisitive. Her thoughts were on Daniel, who, she felt, was
saved. The whole way home she smiled to herself as if lost in dreams.
Evening after evening she sat with the flowers she had gathered in the
forenoon from the forests, the meadows, and the gardens out by the city
fortress, where an old gardener went with her and picked out the
choicest specimens for her. He had a crippled son who fell in love with
Eleanore and always stood in the door and smiled at her when she came.
He promised he would get her flowers from the green house during the
winter.
The butcher was paid, the baker was paid; the druggist was paid, and so
was the rent. Philippina shook her head, and swore there was something
wrong. She was convinced that it would all come out some day, even if
you had to scratch the dung hill to get at the secret. She told the
people about a ghost that carried on every night up in the attic; and
once when the moon was shining she came running into the room and swore
that a bony finger had rapped on the window.
Eleanore bound roses and gilliflowers, tulips and pansies, mosses,
ferns, and what-not into beautiful tapestried pictures, or wound them
into wreaths and garlands. She gave herself up to this novel occupation
with the sacrificial love of a woman of her type; and at times she
became dizzy from so much fragrance. But this mattered not. She arranged
her flowers; and then she would lean out of the window, and sing gently
into the night.
Daniel was ignorant of what she was doing; he had not troubled himself
about the distressing poverty of past weeks; he did not concern himself
now with their abundance; where it came from he never asked.
VIII
Eberhard von Auffenberg had returned to the city shortly after the death
of Gertrude Nothafft. The last large sum he had received from Herr
Carovius, now nearly a year ago, he had almost used up. He found Herr
Carovius quite changed in his attitude toward him. Herr Carovius
declared that he was bankrupt, that he could not get any more money for
him. Instead of complaining or boasting, or flattering his princely
friend, or trying to incite him to activity of some kind, as he had been