The Goose Man
one desire was to serve him. That is, she wished to serve him at a
distance, seeing that he could not endure her presence. She implored him
to grant her this poor privilege, not merely for his own sake, but for
the sake of humanity as well.
Daniel threw the letter in the stove. In the night he woke up with a
burning desire for delicate contact with an untouched woman. He dreamed
of a smile on the face of a seventeen-year-old girl innocently playing
around him--and shuddered at himself and the thought of himself.
Shortly after this he went to Dresden, where he had some work to do in
the Royal library.
People came to him anxious to place themselves at his service. Many
signs told him that Regina Sussmann was making fervent propaganda for
him.
One day he received a letter from a musical society in Magdeburg, asking
him to give a concert there. He hesitated for a long while, and then
agreed to accede to their wish. Outwardly it could not be called an
unusually successful evening, but his auditors felt his power. People
with the thinnest smattering of music forgot themselves and became
infatuated with his arms and his eyes. An uncertain, undetermined
happiness which he brought to the hearts of real musicians carried him
further along on his career. For two successive winters he directed
concerts in the provincial towns of North Germany. He was the first to
accustom the people to strictly classical programmes. It is rare that
the first in any enterprise of this kind reaps the gratitude of those
who pay to hear him. Had he not desisted with such Puritanical severity
from feeding the people on popular songs, opera selections, and
favourite melodies, his activity would have been much better rewarded.
As it was, his name was mentioned with respect, but he passed through
the streets unacclaimed.
Regina Sussmann was always on hand when he gave a concert. He knew it,
even if he did not see her. At times he caught sight of her sitting in
the front row. She never approached him. Articles redolent with
adulation appeared in the papers about him: it was manifest that she had
been influential in having them written. Once he met her on the steps of
a hotel. She stopped and cast her eyes to the ground; she was pale. He
passed by her. Again he was filled with longing to come into intimate
contact with an untouched woman. Was his heart already hungry, as she
had predicted? He bit his lips, and worked throughout the whole night.
He felt that he was being fearfully endangered by the prosy insipidity
of the age and the world he was living in. But could he not escape the
terrors of such without having recourse to a woman? The shadows receded,
enveloped in sorrow, Gertrude and Eleanore, wrapped in the embrace of
sisters.
"Don't!" they cried. He saw at once that his provincial concerts were
leading him to false goals, enflaming false ambitions, robbing him of
his strength. He no longer found it possible to endure the sight of
brilliantly lighted halls, and the over-dressed people who came empty
and left untransformed. It all seemed to him like a lie. He desisted; he
threw it all overboard just as the temptation was strongest, just as the
Berlin Philharmonic invited him to give a concert of his own works in
its hall.
He had suddenly disappeared. In less than three months his name had
become a saga.
VI
He spent the summer, autumn, and winter of 1893 wandering around. Now he
was in a remote Thuringian village, now in some town in the Rhoen region,
now in the mountains of Saxony, now in a fishing village on the Baltic.
Throughout the day he worked on his manuscripts, in the evening he
composed. No one except the members of the firm of Philander and Sons
knew where he was. He did not dare hide himself from the people who were
sending him the cheque at the end of the month.
He gradually became so unaccustomed to talking that it was only with
difficulty that he could ask a hotel-keeper about the price of his room.
This unrelieved silence chiselled his lips into ghastly sharpness.
He never heard from his mother or his children. He seemed to have
forgotten that there were human beings living who thought of him with
affection and anxiety.
The only messages he received from the world were letters that were
forwarded to him at intervals of from four to five weeks by the musical
firm in Mayence. These letters were written by Regina Sussmann, though
they were not signed in her name: the signature at the close of each one
was "The Swallow." She addressed Daniel by the familiar _Du_, and not by
the more conventional and polite _Sie_.
She told him of her life, wrote of the books she had read, the people
she had met, and gave him her views on music. Her communications became
in time indispensable to him; he was touched by her fidelity; he was
pleased that she did not use her own name. She had a remarkable finesse
and power of expression, and however ungenuine and artificial she may
have appealed to him in personal association, everything she wrote
seemed to him to be natural and convincing. She never expressed a wish
that he do something impossible and never uttered a complaint. On the
other hand, there was a passion of the intelligence about her that was
quite new to him; she was unlike the women he had known. And there was a
fervour and certainty in her appreciation of his being before which he
bowed as at the sound of a higher voice.
Though he never answered her letters, he looked forward to receiving
them, and became impatient if one were overdue. He often thought of the
swallow when he would step to the window on a dark night. He thought of
her as an all-seeing spirit that hovered in the air. The swallow--that
was fraught with meaning--the restless, delicate, swift-flying swallow.
And in his mind's eye he saw the swallow that hovered over AEgydius Place
when Eberhard came to take him up to the room with the withered flowers.
He wrote to Philippina: "Decorate my graves. Buy two wreaths, and lay
them on the graves."
"You must mount to the clouds, Daniel, otherwise you are lost," was one
passage in one of the letters from the Swallow. Another, much longer,
ran: "As soon as you feel one loneliness creeping over you, you must
hasten into another, an unknown one. If your path seems blocked, you
must storm the hedges before you. If an arm surrounds you, you must tear
yourself loose, even though it cost blood and tears. You must leave men
behind and move above them; you dare not become a citizen; you dare not
allow yourself to be taken up with things that are dear to you; you must
have no companion, neither man nor maid. Time must hover over you cold
and quiet. Let your heart be encased in bronze, for music is a flame
that breaks through and consumes all there is in the man who created it,
except the stuff the gods have forged about their chosen son."
Why should the picture of this red-haired Jewess, from whom Daniel had
fled in terror, not have vanished? There was a Muse such as poets dream
of! "Jewess, wonderful Jewess," thought Daniel, and this
word--Jewess--took on for him a meaning, a power, and a prophetic flight
all its own.
"The work, Daniel Nothafft, the work," wrote this second Rahel in
another letter, "the rape of Prometheus, when are you going to lay it at
the feet of impoverished humanity? The age is like wine that tastes of
the earth; your work must be the filter. The age is like an epileptic
body convulsed with agonies; your work must be the healing hand that
one lays on the diseased brow. When will you finally give, O
parsimonious mortal? when ripen, tree? when flood the valley, stream?"
But the tree was in no hurry to cast off the ripened fruit; the stream
found that the way to the sea was long and tortuous; it had to break
through mountains and wash away the rocks. Oh, those nights of torment
when an existing form crashed and fell to the earth in pieces! Oh, those
hundreds of laborious nights in which there was no sleep, nothing but
the excited raging of many voices! Those grey mornings on which the sun
shone on tattered leaves and a distorted face, a face full of suffering
that was always old and yet new! And those moonlight nights, when some
one moved along singing, not as one sings with joy, but as the heretics
who sat on the martyr benches of the Inquisition! Then there were the
rainy nights, the stormy nights, the nights when it snowed, and when he
chased after the phantom of a melody that was already half his own, and
half an incorporeal thing wandering around in boundless space under the
stars.
Each landscape became a pale vision: bush and grass and flower, like
spun yarn seen in a fever, the people who passed by, and the clouds
fibrillated above the forests were of one and the same constituency.
Nothing was tangible; the palate lost its sense of taste, the finger its
sense of touch. Bad weather was welcome; it subdued the noises, made men
quieter. Cursed be the mill that clappers, the carpenter who drives the
nails, the teamster who calls to his jaded pair, the laughter of
children, the croaking of frogs, the twittering of birds! An insensate
man looks down upon the scene, one who is deaf and dumb, one who would
snatch all clothing and decorations from the world, to the end that
neither colour nor splendour of any description may divert his eye, one
who mounts to heaven at night to steal the eternal fire, and who burrows
in the graves of the dead by day--an outcast.
In the beginning of spring, he started on the third movement, an andante
with variations. It expressed the gruesome peace that hovered over
Eleanore's slumbering face one night before her death. The springs
within him were all suddenly dried up; he could not tell why his hand
was paralysed, his fancy immobile.
One evening he returned from a long journey to Arnstein, a little place
in Lower Franconia, where he had then pitched his tent. He was living in
the house of a seamstress, a poor widow, and as he came into the room he
noticed her ten-year-old daughter standing by the open box in which he
had kept the mask of Zingarella. Out of a perfectly harmless curiosity
the child had removed the lid, and was standing bewitched at the
unexpected sight.
When Daniel's eyes fell on her, she was frightened; her body shook with
fear; she tried to run away. "No, no, stay!" cried Daniel. He felt the
emaciated body, the timidly quivering figure, and a distant memory sunk
its claws deep into his breast. The mouth of the mask seemed to speak;
the cheeks and forehead shone with a brilliant whiteness. And as he
turned his eyes away there was a little elf dancing over him; and this
little elf aroused a guilty unrest in his heart.
VII
Philippina would not permit little Agnes to play with other children.
One day the child went out on to the square, and stood and watched some
other children playing a game known as "Tailor, lend me the scissors."
She was much pleased at the sight of them, as they ran from tree to tree
and laughed. She would have been only too happy to join them, but no one
thought of asking the pale, shy little creature to take part.
Philippina, seeing her, rushed out like a fury, and cried in her very
meanest voice: "You come back here in the house, or I'll maul you until
your teeth will rattle in your mouth for three days to come!"
Philippina also disliked to have Jordan pay any attention to Agnes. If
he did not notice that he was making her angry by talking with the
child, she would begin to sing, first gently, and then more and more
loudly. If this did not drive the old man away, she would unload some
terrific abuse on him, and keep at it until he would get up, sigh, and