The Goose Man
"What do you mean?" she repeated, embarrassed and indignant. "I should
think that my violin is more than a pastime."
Daniel got up, walked over to her, took the bow gently from her hands,
seized it by both ends, and broke it in two.
Dorothea screamed, and looked at him in hopeless consternation.
With great earnestness Daniel replied: "If the music I hear is not of
unique superiority, it sounds in my ears like something that has been
hashed over a thousand times. My wife must consider herself quite above
a reasonably melodious dilettantism."
Tears rushed to Dorothea's eyes. Again she was unable to grasp the
meaning of it all. She even imagined that Daniel was making a conscious
effort to be cruel to her.
For her violin playing had been a means of pleasing--pleasing herself,
the world. It had been a means of rising in the world, of compelling
admiration in others and blinding others. This was the only
consideration that made her submit to the stern discipline her father
imposed upon her. She possessed ambition, but she sold herself to praise
without regard for the praiser. And whatever an agreement of unknown
origin demanded in the way of feeling, she fancied she could satisfy it
by keeping her mind on her own wishes, pleasures, and delights while
playing.
Daniel put his arms around her and kissed her. She broke away from him
in petulance, and went over to the window. "You might have told me that
I do not play well enough for you," she exclaimed angrily and sobbed;
"there was no need for you to break my bow. I never play. It never
occurred to me to bother you by playing." She wept like a spoiled child.
It cost Daniel a good deal of persuasion to pacify her. Finally he saw
that there was no use to talk to her; he sighed and said nothing more.
After a while he took her pocket handkerchief, and dried the tears from
her eyes, laughing as he did so. "What was really in my mind was that
party at Frau Feistelmann's. I did not want you to go. For I do not put
much faith in that kind of entertainment. They do not enrich you, though
they do incite all kinds of desires. But because I have treated you
harshly, you may go. Possibly it will make you forget your troubles, you
little fool."
"Oh, I thank you for your offer; but I don't want to go," replied
Dorothea snappishly, and left the room.
IV
Yet Dorothea said the next day at the dinner table that she was going to
accept the invitation. It would be much easier just to go and have it
over with, she remarked, than to stay away and explain her absence. She
said this in a way that would lead you to believe that it had cost her
much effort to come to her decision.
"Certainly, go!" said Daniel. "I have already advised you to do it
myself."
She had had a dark blue velvet dress made, and she wanted to wear it for
the first time on this occasion.
Toward five o'clock Daniel went to his bedroom. He saw Dorothea standing
before the mirror in her new dress. It was a tall, narrow mirror on a
console. Dorothea had received it from her father as a wedding present.
"What is the matter with her?" thought Daniel, on noticing her complete
lack of excitement. She was as if lost in the reflection of herself in
the mirror. There was something rigid, drawn, transported about her
eyes. She did not see that Daniel was standing in the room. When she
raised her arm and turned her head, it was to enjoy these gestures in
the mirror.
"Dorothea!" said Daniel gently.
She started, looked at him thoughtfully, and smiled a heady smile.
Daniel was anxious, apprehensive.
V
"I am related to Daniel, and we must address each other by the familiar
_Du_," said Philippina to Dorothea. Daniel's wife agreed.
Every morning when Dorothea came into the kitchen Philippina would say:
"Well, what did you dream?"
"I dreamt I was at the station and it was wartime, and some gipsies came
along and carried me off," said Dorothea on one occasion.
"Station means an unexpected visit; war means discord with various
personalities; and gipsies mean that you are going to have to do with
some flippant people." All this Philippina rattled off in the High
German of her secret code.
Philippina was also an adept in geomancy. Dorothea would often sit by
her side, and ask her whether this fellow or that fellow were in love
with her, whether this girl loved that fellow and the other girl
another, and so on through the whole table of local infatuations.
Philippina would make a number of dots on a sheet of paper, fill in the
numbers, hold the list up to the light, and divulge the answer of the
oracle.
In a very short while the two were one heart, one soul. Dorothea could
always count on Philippina's laughter of approval when she fell into one
of her moods of excessive friskiness. And if Agnes failed to show the
proper amount of interest, Philippina would poke her in the ribs and
exclaim: "You little rascallion, has the cat got your tongue?"
Agnes would then sneak off in mournful silence to her school books, and
sit for hours over the simplest kind of a problem in the whole
arithmetic. Dorothea would occasionally bring her a piece of taffy. She
would wrap it up, put it in her pocket, and give it the next day to a
schoolmate from whose note book she had copied her sums in subtraction.
Herr Seelenfromm stopped Philippina on the street, and said to her:
"Well, how are you getting along? How is the young wife making out?"
"Oi, oi, we're living on the fat of the land, I say," Philippina
replied, stretching her mouth from ear to ear. "Chicken every day, cake
too, wine always on hand, and one guest merely opens the door on
another."
"Nothafft must have made a pile of money," remarked Herr Seelenfromm in
amazement.
"Yes, he must. Nobody works at our house. The wife's pocket-book at
least is always crammed."
The sky was blue, the sun was bright, spring had come.
VI
Andreas Doederlein always took Sunday dinner with his children. He loved
a juicy leg of pork, a salad garnished with greens and eggs, and a tart
drowned in sugar. Old Jordan, who was privileged to sit at the table,
let the individual morsels dissolve on his tongue. He had never had such
delicacies placed before him in his life. At times he would cast a
glance of utter astonishment at Daniel.
He very rarely took part in the conversation. As soon as the dishes had
been removed, he would get up and quietly go to his room.
"A very remarkable old man," said Andreas Doederlein one Sunday, as he
sat tipped back on his chair, picking his teeth.
"Ah, we have our troubles with him," said Dorothea abusively, "he is an
incorrigible pot-watcher. He comes to the kitchen ten times a day,
sticks his nose up in the air, asks what we are going to have for
dinner, and then goes out and stands in the hall, with the result that
our guests come and stumble over him."
Andreas Doederlein emitted a growl of lament.
"How are your finances, my son?" he asked, turning to Daniel with an air
of marked affability. "Would you not like to bolster up your income by
taking a position in the conservatory? You would have time for it; your
work as organist at St. AEgydius does not take up all your time. Herold
is going to be retired, you know. He is seventy-five and no longer able
to meet the requirements. All that we will have to do will be for me to
give you my backing. Three thousand marks a year, allocation to your
widow after ten years of service, extra fees--I should think you would
regard that as a most enticing offer. Or don't you?"
Dorothea ran up to her father in a spirit of unrestrained jubilation,
threw her arms around his bulky body, and kissed him on his flabby
cheek.
"No thanks to me, my child," said the Olympian; "to stand by you two is
of course my duty."
"What sort of a swollen stranger is that, anyhow?" thought Daniel to
himself. "What does he want of me? Why does he come into my house and
sit down at my table? Why is he so familiar with me? Why does he blow
his breath on me?" Daniel was silent.
"I understand, my dear son, that you would abandon your leisure hours
only with the greatest reluctance," continued Doederlein with concealed
sarcasm, "but after all, who can live precisely as he would like to
live? Who can follow his own inclinations entirely? The everyday feature
of human existence is powerful. Icarus must fall to the earth. With your
wife anticipating a happy event, you cannot, of course, hesitate in the
face of such an offer."
Daniel cast an angry look at Dorothea.
"I will think it over," said Daniel, got up, and left the room.
"It is unpleasant for him," complained Dorothea; "he values his leisure
above everything else in the world. But I will do all in my power to
bring him around, Father. And you keep at him. He will resist and
object. I know him."
Thus it was brought to light that Daniel was no longer a mysterious and
unfathomable individual in her estimation. She had found him out; she
had divined him, in her way to be sure. He was much simpler than she had
imagined, and at times she was really a bit angry at him for not
arousing her curiosity more than he did. What she had fancied as highly
interesting, thrilling, intoxicating, had proved to be quite simple and
ordinary. The charm was gone, never to return. Her sole diversion lay in
her attempts to get complete control over him through the skilful
manipulation of her senses and her priceless youth.
Daniel felt that she was disappointed; he had been afraid of this all
along. His anxiety increased with time, for it was evident that
everything he said or did disappointed her. His anxiety caused him to be
indulgent, where he had formerly been unbending. The difference in their
ages made him patient and tractable. He feared he could not show her the
love that she in her freshness and natural, unconsumed robustness
desired. On this account he denied himself many things which he formerly
could not have got along without, and put up with, many things that
would have been intolerable to him as a younger man.
It needed only a single hour at night to make him promise to accept the
position old Herold was leaving. He, as parsimonious with words as in
the expression of feelings, succumbed to her cat-like cuddling. He
capitulated in the face of her unpitying ridicule, and surrendered all
to the prurient agility of a young body. Dark powers there are that set
up dependencies between man and woman. When they rule, things do not
work out in accordance with set calculation or inborn character. It
takes but a single hour of the night to bend the most sacred truth of
life into a lie.
VII
In the course of time Daniel had to provide for an increase in his
annual salary. Dorothea had made a great many innovations that cost
money. She had bought a dressing table, a number of cabinets, and a
bath tub. The lamps, dishes, bed covers, and curtains she found
old-fashioned, and simply went out and bought new ones.
Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to go shopping. Then the bills
came in, and Daniel shook his head. He begged her to be more saving, but
she would fall on his neck, and beseech and beseech until he acceded to
every single one of her wishes.
She rarely came home with empty hands. It may have been only little
things that she bought, a manikin of porcelain with a tile hat and an
umbrella, or a pagoda with a wag-head, or even merely a mouse-trap--but
they all cost money.
Philippina would be called in; Philippina was to admire the purchases.
And she would say with apparent delight: "Now ain't that sweet!" Or,
"Now that's fine; we needed a mouse-trap so bad! There was a mouse on