The Goose Man
But Dorothea began to ask questions. It was all too general and
therefore unsatisfactory. "What was there in Eschenbach? Why did you go
there?" she asked boldly.
He was in error concerning the hot desire that burned in her eyes to
know about Eschenbach. Her question made him feel good; he believed that
he was on the scent of warm-heartedness; he thought he had found a soul
that was eager to help through knowledge. He was seized with the desire
of the mature man to fashion an untouched soul in harmony with the
picture of his dreams. "My mother used to live there," he replied
hesitatingly, "she has died."
"Yes--and?" breathed Dorothea. She saw that that was not all.
He felt that this uncompromising reticence was not right; he felt a
sense of guilt. With still greater hesitation--and immediate
repentance--he added: "A child of mine also lived there; she was eleven
years old. She has disappeared; no one knows where she is."
Dorothea folded her hands, "A child? And disappeared? Simply vanished?"
she whispered excitedly.
Herr Carovius looked like a man sitting on a hot iron. "Eleven years
old?" he asked, hungry for sensation, "why--that was, then--before the
time ..."
"Yes, it was before the time," said Daniel gloomily and by way of
confirmation. He had betrayed himself, and was angry at himself for
having done so. He became silent; it was impossible to get him to say
another word.
Herr Carovius noticed how Dorothea hung on Daniel's eyes. A tormenting
suspicion arose in him. "Yesterday out on St. Joseph's Place, I was
talking with one of your admirers, the fellow who shatters the wings of
the stage with his ranting," he began with malice aforethought. "The
blade had the nerve to say to me: 'You'd better hurry up and get
Dorothea Doederlein a husband, or people will talk their tongues loose in
their throats.'"
"That is not true," cried Dorothea indignantly, blushing to the roots of
her hair. "He didn't say that."
Herr Carovius laughed malevolently. "Well, if it is not true, it is
pretty well put together," he said with his usual bleat.
When Daniel left, Dorothea accompanied him to the outside door.
"It's a pity," murmured Daniel, "a pity!"
"Why a pity? I am free. There isn't a soul in the world who has any
claim on me." She looked at him with the courage of a real woman.
"There are remarks that are just like grease spots," he replied.
"Well, who can keep from the dirt these days?" she asked, almost wild
with excitement.
Daniel let his eyes rest on her as though she were some material object.
He said slowly and seriously: "Keep your hands and your eyes off of me,
Dorothea. I will bring you no happiness."
Her lips opened, thirsty. "I should like to take a walk with you some
time," she whispered, and her features trembled with an ecstasy which he
was dupe enough to believe was meant for him; in reality Dorothea was
thinking of the adventurer and the disclosure of the secret.
"Many years ago," said Daniel, "you will scarcely recall it, I protected
you here in this very same gateway from a big dog. Do you remember?"
"No! Or do I? Wait a minute! Yes, I remember, that is, quite
indistinctly. You did that?" Dorothea seized his hands with gratitude.
"Fine! Then we will go walking to-morrow morning. Where? Oh, it doesn't
make much difference," said Daniel.
"But you must tell me everything, you hear? everything." Dorothea was as
insistent as she had been in the room a short while ago; and she was
more impetuous and impatient.
They agreed upon the place where they would meet.
XIV
At first they took short walks in remote parts of the city; then they
took longer ones. On Mid-Summer Day they strolled out to Kraftshof and
the grove of the Pegnitz shepherds. Daniel made unconscious effort to
avoid the places where he had once walked with Eleanore.
There came moments when Dorothea's exuberance made him pensive and sad;
he felt the weight of his forty years; they were inclined to make him
hypochondriacal. Was it the vengeance of fate that made him slow up when
they came to a hill, while Dorothea ran on ahead and waited for him,
laughing?
She did not see the flowers, the trees, the animals, or the clouds. But
when she saw people a change came over her: she would become more
active; or she would mobilise her resources; or she seemed to strike up
a spiritual liaison with them. It might be only a peasant boy on an
errand or a vagabond going nowhere; she would shake her hips and laugh
one note higher.
"Her youth has gone to her head, like wine," Daniel thought to himself.
Once she took a box of chocolate bon-bons along. Having had enough of
them herself and seeing that Daniel did not care for them, she threw
what was left away. Daniel reproached her for her wastefulness. "Why
drag it along?" she asked with perfect lack of embarrassment, "when you
have enough of a thing you throw it away." She showed her white teeth,
and took in one deep breath of fresh air after another.
Daniel studied her. "She is invulnerable," he said to himself; "her
power to wish is invincible, her fulness of life complete." He felt that
she bore a certain resemblance to his Eva; that she was one of those
elves of light in whose cheerfulness there is occasionally a touch of
the terrible. He decided then and there not to let mischievous chance
have its own way: he was going to put out his hand when he felt it was
advisable.
"When are you going to begin to tell me the stories?" she asked: "I
must, I must know all about you," she added with much warmth of
expression. "There are days and nights when I cannot rest. Tell me! Tell
me!"
That was the truth. In order to penetrate his life history, which she
pictured to herself as full of passionate, checkered events, she had
done everything that he had demanded of her.
Daniel refused; he was silent; he was afraid he would darken the girl's
pure mind, jeopardise her unsuspecting innocence. He was afraid to
conjure up the shadows.
One day she was talking along in her easy way, and while so doing she
tripped herself up. She had begun to tell him about the men she had been
going with; and before she knew what she was doing, she had fallen into
the tone she used when she talked with her Uncle Carovius. Becoming
suddenly aware of her indiscretion, she stopped, embarrassed. Daniel's
serious questions caused her to make some confessions she would
otherwise never have thought of making. She told a goodly number of
rather murky and ugly stories, and it was very hard for her to act as
though she were innocent or the victim of circumstances. At last, unable
longer to escape from the net she had woven, she made a clean breast of
her whole life, painted it all in the gaudiest colours, and then waited
in breathless--but agreeable--suspense to see what effect it would have
on Daniel.
Daniel was silent for a while; then he made a motion with his
outstretched hand as if he were cutting something in two: "Away from
them, Dorothea, or away from me!"
Dorothea bowed her head, and then looked at him timidly from head to
foot. The decisiveness with which he spoke was something new to her,
though it was by no means offensive. A voluptuous shudder ran through
her limbs. "Yes," she whispered girlishly, "I am going to put an end to
it. I never realised what it all meant. But don't be angry, will you?
No, you won't, will you?"
She came closer to him; her eyes were filled with tears. "Don't be angry
at me," she said again, "poor Dorothea can't help it. She is not
responsible for it."
"But how did you come to do it?" asked Daniel. "I can't see how it was
possible. Weren't you disgusted to the very bottom of your soul? How
could you go about under God's free heavens with such hyenas? Why,
girl, the very thought of it fills me with scepticism about everything."
"What should I have done, Daniel?" she said, calling him by his
baptismal name for the first time. She spoke with a felicitous mixture
of submissiveness and boldness that touched and at the same time
enchanted him. "What should I have done? They come and talk to you, and
spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and
your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven't got anybody
else in the world to talk to." Such was her defence, effective even if
more voluble than coherent.
They walked on. They were passing through a valley in the forest. On
either side were tall pine trees, the crowns of which were lighted by
the evening sun.
"You can't play with Fate, Dorothea," said Daniel. "It does not permit
smudging or muddling, if we are to stand the test. It keeps a faultless
ledger; the entries it makes on both sides are the embodiment of
accuracy. Debts that we contract must always be paid, somehow,
somewhere."
Dorothea felt that he was getting started; that the great, good story
was about to come. She stopped, spread her shawl on the ground, and took
a graceful position on it, all eyes and ears. Daniel threw himself on
the moss beside her.
And he told his story--into the moss where little insects were creeping
around. He never raised either his eye or his voice. At times Dorothea
had to bend over to hear him.
He told about Gertrude, her torpor, her awakening, her love, her
resignation. He told about Eleanore; told how he had loved her without
knowing it. He told how Eleanore, out of an excess of passion and
suffering, became his, how Gertrude wandered about dazed, unhappy, lost,
until she finally took her life: "Then we went up to the attic, and
found it on fire and her lifeless body hanging from the rafter."
He told how Gertrude had lived on as a shadow by the side of Eleanore,
and how Eleanore became a flower girl, and how Philippina the
inexplicable, and still inexplicable, had come into his family, and how
Gertrude's child lived there like an unfed foundling, and how the other
child, the child he had had by the maid, had found such a warm spot in
his heart.
He told of his meeting the two sisters, their speaking and their
remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about
from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his
experiences with the Doermaul opera company, the light thrown on his
drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him,
his separation from him, the brush-maker's house on St. James's Place,
the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle
Erfft, the old father of the two sisters and his strange doings--all of
this he described in the tone of a man awakening from a deep sleep.
There was a confidence in what he said and the way he said it that
mayhap terrified the hovering spirits of the evening, though it did not
fill Dorothea's eyes, then glistening like polished metal, with a more
intimate or cordial light.
When he looked up he felt he saw two sombre figures standing on the edge
of the forest; he felt he saw the two sisters, and that they were
casting mournful, reproachful glances at him.
He got up. "And all that," he concluded, "all that has been drunk up,
like rain by the parched earth, by a work on which I have been labouring
for the past seven years. For seven years. Two more years, and I will
give it to the world, provided this unsteady globe has not fallen into
the sun by that time."
Dorothea had a confused, haphazard idea as to the type of man that was
standing before her. She was seized with a prickling desire for him such
as she had thus far never experienced. She began to love him, in her
way. Something impelled her to seek shelter by him, near him, somewhat
as a bird flies under the crown of a tree at the approach of a storm.
Daniel interpreted the timidity with which she put her arm in his as a
sign of gratitude.