The Goose Man
Philippina's face turned ashen pale; she gritted her teeth. "Your
father, he's loafing around somewhere in the country," replied
Philippina, and blew out one of the candles that had burned down and was
ready to set the twig on fire. "He's done with women, it seems, but you
can't tell. He strums the music box and smears good white paper full of
crow-feet and pot-hooks. A person can rot, and little does he worry."
Whereat she set the child on the floor, hastened over to the window,
opened it, and put her head out as if she were on the point of choking
with the heat.
She leaned out over the snow-covered window sill.
"I'm getting cold," said Agnes; but Philippina never heard her.
VIII
Daniel wrote to Eberhard and Sylvia asking them if he might visit them.
He thought: "There are friends; perhaps I need friends again."
He received a note in a strange, secretarial hand informing him that the
Baroness was indeed very sorry but she could not receive him at
Siegmundshof: she was in child-bed. She sent her best greetings, and
told him that the newest born was getting along splendidly, as well as
his brother who was now three years old.
"Everywhere I turn, children are growing up," thought Daniel, and packed
his trunk and started south as slowly as he could go, so slowly indeed
that it seemed as if he were approaching a goal he was afraid to reach
and yet had to.
He arrived in Nuremberg one evening in April. As he entered the room,
Philippina struck her hands together with a loud bang, and stood as if
rooted to the floor.
Agnes looked at her father shyly. She had grown slim and tall far beyond
her age.
Old Jordan came down. "You don't look well, Daniel," he said, and seemed
never to let go of his hand. "Let us hope that you are going to stay
home now."
"I don't know," replied Daniel, staring absent-mindedly around the
walls. "I don't know."
On the third day he was seized with a quite unusual sense of fear and
anxiety. He felt that he had made a mistake; that he had lost his way;
that something was driving him to another place. He went into the
kitchen. Philippina was cooking potato noodles in lard; they smelt good.
"I am going to Eschenbach," he said, to his own astonishment, for the
decision to do so had come with the assertion.
Philippina jerked the pan from the stove; the flames leaped up. "You can
go to Hell, so far as I'm concerned," she said in a furious rage. With
the light from the fire flaring up through the open top of the stove and
reflected in her face, she looked like a veritable witch.
Daniel gazed at her questioningly. "What is the matter with Agnes?" he
asked after a while. "The child seems to try to avoid me."
"You'll find out what's the matter with her," said Philippina
spitefully, and placed the pan on the stove again. "She don't swallow
people whole."
Daniel left the kitchen.
"He is going over to see his bastard, the damned scoundrel," murmured
Philippina. She crouched down on the kitchen stool, and gazed into
space.
The potato noodles burned up.
IX
Daniel entered his mother's little house in Eschenbach late at night. As
soon as he saw her, he knew that some misfortune had taken place.
Eva was gone. She had disappeared one evening four weeks ago. A troupe
of rope dancers had given an exhibition in the city, and it was
generally suspected that they had abducted the child. The people of
Eschenbach were still convinced of their suspicion after the police had
rounded up the dancers without finding a trace of the child.
A general alarm had been sent out, and investigations were being made
even at the time of Daniel's arrival. But they were in vain; it was
impossible to find the slightest clue. To the authorities, indeed to
every one, the case was a hopeless riddle.
They made a thorough search of the forests; the canals were drained;
vagabonds were cross-questioned. It was all in vain; Eva had apparently
been spirited away in some mysterious fashion. Then the Mayor received
an anonymous letter that read as follows: "The child you are looking for
is in safe keeping. She was not forced to do what she has done; of her
own free will and out of love for her art she went off with the people
with whom she is at present. She sends her grandmother the tenderest of
greetings, and hopes to see her some time again, after she has attained
to what she now has in mind."
To this Eva had added in a handwriting which Marian Nothafft could be
reasonably certain was her own: "This is true. Good-bye, grandmother!"
The people who mourned with Marian the loss of the child were convinced
that if Eva had really written these words herself, she had been forced
to do it by the kidnappers.
The letter bore the postmark of a city in the Rhenish Palatinate. A
telegram brought the reply that a company of jugglers had been there a
short while ago, but that they had already gone. It was impossible to
say in what direction, but it was most likely that they had gone to
France.
Marian was completely broken up. She no longer had any interest in life.
She did not even manifest joy or pleasure at seeing Daniel.
Daniel in turn felt that the brightest star had fallen from his heaven.
As soon as he had really grasped the full meaning of the tragedy, he
went quietly into the attic room, threw himself across the bed of his
lost daughter, and wept. "Man, man, are you weeping at last?" a voice
seemed to call out to him.
Of evenings he would sit with his mother, and they would both brood over
the loss. Once Marian began to speak; she talked of Eva. She had always
been made uneasy by the child's love for mimicry and shows of any kind.
Long ago, she said, when Eva was only eight years old, a company of
comedians had come to the village, and Eva had taken a passionate
interest in them. She would run around the tent in which they played,
from early in the morning until late in the evening. She had made the
acquaintance of some of them at the time, and one of them took her along
to a performance. Whenever the circus came to town, it was impossible to
keep her in the house. "At times I thought to myself, there must be
gipsy blood in her veins," said Marian sadly, "but she was such a good
and obedient child."
Another time she told the following story. One Sunday in spring she took
a walk with Eva. It had grown late, night had come on, and on the return
journey they had to go through the forest. Marian became tired, and sat
down on the stump of a tree to rest. The moon was shining, and there was
a clearing in the forest where they had stopped. All of a sudden Eva
sprang up and began to dance. "It was marvellous the way she danced,"
said Marian, at the close of her story. "The girl's slender, delicate
little figure seemed to glide around on the moss in the moonlight of its
own accord. It was marvellous, but my heart grew heavy, and I thought to
myself at the time, she is not going to be with me much longer."
Daniel was silent. "Oh, enchanting and enchanted creature!" he thought,
"heredity and destiny!"
He remained with his mother for three weeks. Then he began to feel
cramped and uneasy. The house and the town both seemed so small to him.
He left and went to Vienna, where the custodian of the Imperial
Institute had some invaluable manuscripts for him.
Six weeks later he received a letter that had followed him all over
south Europe informing him of the death of his mother. The school
teacher at Eschenbach had written the letter, saying, among other
things, that the aged woman had died during the night, suddenly and
peacefully.
A second letter followed, requesting him to state what disposition
should be made of his mother's property. He was asked whether the house
was to be put on the market. A neighbour, the green-grocer, had
expressed his willingness to look after Daniel's interests.
Daniel wrote in reply that they should do whatever seemed best. There
was a heavy mortgage on the house, and the amount that could reasonably
be asked for it was not large.
He retired to a desolate and waste place.
X
While living in little towns and villages on the Danube, Daniel
completed the third movement of the Promethean symphony. When he awoke
as if from a delirious fever, it was autumn.
One morning in October he heard a saint playing the organ. It was in the
Church of St. Florian near Enns. The great artist had lived in former
years in the monastery, and now had the habit of coming back once in a
while to hold communion with his God. In his rapture, Daniel felt as if
his own crowned brother were at the organ. He sat in a corner and
listened, meekly and with overwhelming delight. Then when a man passed
by him, a stooped, haggard, odd-looking old fellow with a wrinkled face
and dressed in shabby clothes, he was terror-stricken at the reality,
the corporeality of genius: he wondered whether he himself were not a
ghost.
The Swallow wrote: "There is only one who can redeem us: the musician.
The day of founders of religion, builders of states, military heroes,
and discoverers is gone. The poets have only words, and our ears have
grown tired of words, words, words. They have only pictures and figures,
and our eyes are tired beholding. The soul's last consolation is to be
found in music; of this I am certain. If there is any one thing that can
make restitution for the lost illusions of religious faith, provide us
with wings, transform us, and save us from the abyss to which we are
rushing with savage senses, it is music. Where are you, O redeemer? You
are wandering about over the earth, the poorest, the most abandoned, the
guiltiest of men. When are you going to pay your debts, Daniel
Nothafft?"
Daniel spent seven months in Ravenna, Ferrara, Florence, and Pisa. He
was looking for some manuscripts by Frescobaldi, Borghesi, and Ercole
Pasquini. Having found the most important ones he could regard his
collection as complete.
Men seemed to him like puppets, landscapes like paintings on glass. He
longed for forests; his dreams became disordered.
From Genoa he wandered on foot through Lombardy and across the Alps. He
slept on hard beds in order to keep his hot blood in check, and lived on
bread and cheese. His attacks of weakness, sometimes of complete
exhaustion, did not worry him at first; he paid no attention to them.
But in Augsburg he swooned, falling headlong on the street. He was taken
to a hospital, where he lay for three months with typhus. From his
window he could see the tall chimneys of factories and an endless
procession of wandering clouds. It had become winter; the ground was
covered with snow.
Two years after his last visit he again entered the house on AEgydius
Place. When Philippina saw him, so pale and emaciated, she uttered a cry
of horror.
Agnes had grown still taller, thinner, and more serious. At times when
she looked at her father he felt like crying out to her in anger: "What
do you mean by your everlasting questions?" But he never said a word of
this kind to her.
When Philippina saw that Daniel had returned as lonesome and
uncommunicative as he was when he went away, she took it upon herself to
display a great deal of gentleness, kindness, sympathy in his presence.
Old Jordan was living the same life he had been living for years.
Everything in fact was just the same; it seemed that the household was
run according to a prescribed routine. It seemed as if Daniel had been
away, not six years, but six days.
He did not feel strong yet, but he worked day and night. The fourth
movement of the symphony gave promise of being a miracle of polyphony.
Daniel felt primeval existence, the original of all longing, the basic