The Goose Man
receipt, have you?" he asked with wide-opened eyes. "Ahem! You have
found the receipt that I've been looking for for years ...?"
Theresa nodded. She took out a hairpin, and stuck it in a crust of
bread. Jason Philip got up, clasped his hands behind his back, and began
to walk back and forth. Just then Rieke came in and began to clear off
the table. She went about her business in a slow but noisy fashion. She
made things rattle, even if she could not make them hum. When she was
through, Jason Philip, his hands pressed to his hips, his elbows
protruding, planted himself before Theresa.
"I suppose you think I am going to let you browbeat me," he began.
"Well, my dear woman, you're mistaken. Listen! Are you angry at me
because I have created for you and your children a dignified existence?
Do you take it amiss of me for having kept your sister from going to the
poor-house? You act as though I had won that much money at the county
fair, or had squandered an equal amount at the same place. The truth is,
Gottfried Nothafft entrusted me with three thousand taler. That's what
he did; that's the truth. It was his intention to keep the whole affair
from the chatter of women. And he willed that I should use this
hard-earned capital in a productive way, and not give it to the culprit
who would waste it in debauchery and worse if possible."
"Ill-gotten goods seldom prosper," said Theresa, without looking up.
"Things may go along all right for ten years, and that seems like a long
time, but the vengeance of Heaven comes in the eleventh, as it has
already come in the case of little Marcus."
"Theresa--you're talking like a mad woman," said Jason Philip at the top
of his voice. With that he picked up a chair, and threw it on the floor
so violently that every cup, spoon, and plate in the room shook.
Theresa turned her peasant face toward him without the shadow of a trace
of fear. He was a trifle alarmed: "You'll have to be responsible, if you
can, for any misfortune that visits us in the future." She spoke these
words with a deep voice.
"Do you think I am a bandit?" said Jason Philip. "Do you think I want to
pocket the money? Don't you think that I am capable of anything better
or higher than that? Or is ambition of any sort quite beyond your powers
of comprehension?"
"Well, what ambitions do you have?" asked Theresa in a tone of
sullenness, her eyes in the meantime blinking.
"Listen," Jason Philip continued, as he sat down on the chair he had so
violently abused a minute before, and assumed the air of a teacher:
"The culprit has got to submit, and that with good grace. He has got to
fall on his knees before me. And he'll come to it. I have made some
inquiries; I am on his tracks; and I know that he has just about reached
the end of his rope. He'll come, depend upon it he'll come around, and
when he does he will whine. Then I am going to take him into the
business. In this way we will see whether it is humanly possible to make
a useful man out of him. If I can, and if he sticks, I'll call him into
the office, tell him the whole story, make everything as clear as day to
him, and then offer to take him in as a partner in the firm. You have
got to admit that he will be a made man if he becomes my partner. He
will have sense enough himself to see this, and as sure as you are
living, he will first kiss my hand and then eat out of it for the
kindness I have shown him. And once this has all been put through, I
will bind him to us more firmly than ever by having him marry
Philippina."
A wry smile disfigured Theresa's face. "I see, so, so," she said in a
sing-song tone. "You will have him marry Philippina. I take it that you
feel that she will be hard to marry, and that the man who does marry her
will have his hands full. Well, that's not a bad idea."
"In this way," continued Jason Philip, without detecting the scorn in
Theresa's words, "the account between the culprit and myself will be
settled. He will become a decent member of society, the money will
remain in the family, and Philippina will be cared for."
"And suppose he does not come; suppose he does not fall on his knees;
suppose you have made a miscalculation. What then?" Whether Jason Philip
himself believed what he had said Theresa could not determine. Nor had
she the slightest desire to enlighten herself on this point. She did not
look him in the face, but contented herself with letting her eyes rest
on his hands.
"Well--there will be time then to change my plans," said Jason Philip,
in a tone of peeved vexation. "Leave it to me. I have turned the whole
situation over in my mind; I have omitted not the slightest detail. I
know men, and I have never made a mistake in judging them. _Mahlzeit!_"
With that he went out.
Theresa remained seated for a while, her arms folded across her breast.
Then she got up, and walked over to the door that opened on to the
court. Suddenly she stopped as if rooted to the sill: she caught sight
of Philippina, who was then sitting by the window mending a pair of
socks. On her face there was an expression of naivete that may be
harmless in itself, but it was enough to arouse suspicion.
"What's the matter with you, why didn't you go to school?" asked Theresa
uneasily.
"I couldn't; I had a headache," said Philippina curtly, and broke the
thread as she gave a hasty jerk at the needle. Her dishevelled hair hung
down over her forehead and quite concealed her face.
Theresa was silent. Her gloom-laden eyes rested on the diligent fingers
of Philippina. It was easy to suspect that the girl had heard everything
Jason Philip had said, for he had such a loud voice. She could have done
this without going to the trouble of listening at the door. Theresa was
minded to give the girl a talking-to; but she controlled herself, and
quietly withdrew.
Philippina looked straight through her as she left. But she did not
interrupt her work, and in a short while she could be heard humming a
tune to herself. There was a challenge in her voice.
VII
Daniel's money was about at an end. The new sources on which he had
hoped to be able to draw were nowhere to be discovered. He defiantly
closed the doors against care; and when fear showed its gloomy face, he
shut up shop, and went out to drown his sorrows with the brethren of the
Vale of Tears.
Schwalbe, the sculptor, had made the acquaintance of Zingarella, then
engaged in singing lascivious couplets at the Academy, and invited the
fellows to join him.
The Academy was a theatre of the lowest description. Smoking was, of
course, permitted. When they arrived the performance was over. People
were still sitting at many of the tables. Reeking as the auditorium was
with the stench of stale beer, it left the impression of a dark, dank
cavern.
With an indifference that seemed to argue that Zingarella made no
distinction between chairs and people, she took her seat between the
sculptor and the writer. She laughed, and yet it was not laughter; she
spoke, and her words were empty; she stretched out her hands, and the
gesture was lifeless. She fixed her eyes on no one; she merely gazed
about. She had a habit of shaking her bracelet in a way that aroused
sympathy. And after making a lewd remark she would turn her head to one
side, and thereby stagger even the most hardened frequenter of this
sort of places. Her complexion had been ruined by rouge, but underneath
the skin there was something that glimmered like water under thin ice.
The former winsomeness of her lips was still traceable in the sorrowed
curves of her now ravaged mouth.
At times her restless eyes, seeking whom they might entangle, were fixed
on Daniel, then sitting quite alone at the lower end of the table. In
order to avoid the unpleasant sensation associated with the thought of
going up to such a distinguished-looking person and making herself known
to him, she would have been grateful had some one picked her up and
thrown her bodily at his feet. There was an element of strangeness about
him. Zingarella saw that he had had nothing to do with women of her
kind. This tortured her; she gnashed her teeth.
Daniel did not sense her hatred. As he looked into her face, marked with
a life of transgression and already claimed by fate, he built up in his
own soul a picture of inimitable chastity. He tried to see the playmate
of a god. The curtain decorated with the distorted face of a harlequin,
the acrobat and the dog trainer at the adjacent table, who were
quarrelling over their money, the four half-grown gamblers directly
behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench
with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer
who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and
incessantly on perpetual motion--to all of this he paid not the
slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in
the bottom of the sea. He got up and left.
But as he saw the snow-covered streets before him and was unable to
decide whether he should go home or not, Zingarella stepped up to him.
"Come, be quick, before they see that we are together," she whispered.
And thus they walked along like two fugitives, whose information
concerning each other stops short with the certainty that both are poor
and wretched and are making their way through a snow storm.
"What is your name?" asked Daniel.
"My name is Anna Siebert."
The clock in the St. Lorenz Church struck three. The one up in the tower
of St. Sebaldus corroborated this reckoning by also striking three and
in much deeper tones.
They came to an old house, and after floundering through a long, dark,
ill-smelling passage way, entered a room in the basement. Anna Siebert
lighted a lamp that had a red chimney. Gaudy garments of the soubrette
hung on the wall. A big, grey cat lay on the table cover and purred.
Anna Siebert took the cat in her arms and caressed it. Its name was
Zephyr. It accompanied her wherever she went.
Daniel threw himself on a chair and looked at the lamp. Zingarella,
standing before the mirror, stroked the cat. Gazing distractedly into
space, she remarked that the manager had discharged her because the
public was no longer satisfied with her work.
"Is this what you call the public?" asked Daniel, who never once took
his eyes from the lamp, just as Anna Siebert kept hers rigidly fixed on
the desolate distances of the mirror. "These fathers of families who
side-step every now and then, these counter-jumpers, the mere looks of
whom is enough to snatch your clothing from your body, this human filth
at the sight of which God must conceal His face in shame--this is what
you call the public?"
"Well, however that may be," Anna Siebert continued in a colourless
voice, "the manager rushed into my dressing room, threw the contract at
my feet, and said I had swindled him. How on earth could I have swindled
him? I am no prima donna and my agent had told him so. You can't expect
a Patti on twenty marks a week. In Elberfeld I got twenty-five, and a
year ago in Zuerich I even drew sixty. Now he comes to me and says he
doesn't need to pay me anything. What am I to live off of? And you've
got to live, haven't you, Zephyr," said Anna as she picked up the cat,
pressed its warm fur to her cheek, and repeated, "You've got to live."
She let her arms fall to her sides, the cat sprang on the floor, hunched
up its back, wagged its tail, and purred. She then went up to Daniel,
fell on her knees, and laid her head on his side. "I have reached the
end," she murmured in a scarcely audible voice, "I am at the end of all
things."
The snow beat against the window panes. With an expression on his face
as though his own thoughts were murdering each other, Daniel looked into