The Goose Man
are certain noises which I still have to correct. The illusion is
stronger when you are some distance away."
He crouched down behind the doll, did something at its back, and the
buzzing of wheels became audible. The old man then stepped out to the
front of the doll, and said: "Now, my little girl, let's hear what you
can do!"
An uncanny, hoarse, somewhat cooing voice rang out from the body of the
doll. It sounded like the vibrations of metallic strings accompanied by
the low tones of a water whistle. If you closed your eyes, you could at
least imagine you were hearing a song sung by some one in the distance.
But if you looked at the thing closely with its lifeless, mask-like
kindly, waxen face, and heard the shrill, muffled sounds, without either
articulation or rhythm, coming from within, it took on a ghostly aspect.
Herr Carovius in fact felt a cold chill creep down his back.
When the machine ran down, the doll's eyelids and lips closed. Jordan
was looking at Herr Carovius in great suspense. "Well, what do you think
of it?" he asked. "Be quite frank; I can stand any amount of criticism."
Herr Carovius had great difficulty to keep from bursting out laughing.
His mouth and chin itched. Suddenly, however, scorn and contempt left
him; he fell into a disagreeably serious frame of mind, and a softness,
a mildness such as he had not felt since time immemorial stole over his
heart. He said: "That is a perfectly splendid invention! Perfectly
splendid! Though it does need some improvement."
Jordan nodded zealously and with joyous approval. He was on the point of
going into a detailed description of the mechanism and its artistic
construction, when the two men heard a strange noise in the adjoining
room. They stopped and listened. They could hear some one moving the
furniture; there were steps back and forth; they heard a hammering and
pounding as if some one were trying to open a box. This was followed by
a sound that resembled the falling of paper on the floor; it lasted for
some time, bunch apparently following bunch. Listen! Some one is talking
in an abusive voice! What's that? A gruesome, sing-song voice repeating
unintelligible words: "I-oi! huh, huh! I-oi, huh-huh!" There is a sound
as if of crackling fire. The flames cannot be seen; but they can be
heard!
Old Jordan jerked the door open, and cried like a child.
Philippina was standing in the midst of a pile of burning papers. She
had forced Daniel's trunk open, thrown every one of his scores on the
floor, and set them on fire. She was a fearful object to behold. Her
hair hung down loose and straggly over her shoulders, she was swinging
her arms as if she were working a pump-handle, and from her mouth poured
forth a volley of loud, babbling, gurgling tones that bore not the
faintest resemblance to anything human. Her face, lightened by the
flames, was coloured with the trace of fearful voluptuousness. Herr
Carovius and old Jordan stood in the doorway as if paralysed. Seeing
them, she began to hop about, and stretched out her upraised arms to the
flames, which were leaping higher and higher.
Herr Carovius, awakening from his torpidity, saw that it was high time
to make some effort to escape. Shielding his face with his hands, he
fled as fast as his feet could carry him to the hall door and down the
steps. Tears were gushing down Jordan's cheeks; fear had made it
impossible for him to reflect. He ran back into his room, opened the
window, and called out to the people on the square. Then he chanced to
think of his beloved doll. He rushed up to it and took it under his arm.
But when he tried to leave the room, the smoke blew into his face,
benumbing and burning him. He staggered, reached the top of the stairs,
made a misstep, fell headlong down the steps, still holding the doll in
convulsive embrace, twitched a few times, and then lay lifeless on the
hall floor.
Heart failure had put an end to his life.
Dorothea, who had been in the house packing her things, hastened,
luggage in hand, past the corpse. Her face was ashen; she never looked
at the dead body of Inspector Jordan. She was soon lost in the crowd of
excited people. She had vanished.
IX
The police had at last separated Daniel and the American in Frau
Hadebusch's house. Daniel fell on a chair, and gazed stupidly into
space. Frau Hadebusch brought him some water. The American put on his
clothes, while the spectators looked on and laughed.
The two men were then taken to the police station, where the lieutenant
in charge took such depositions as were necessary for court action.
Daniel saw a gas lamp, a quill pen, several grinning faces, his own
bloody hand, and nothing more. The American was held in order to protect
him from further attacks; Daniel was released. He heard the young man
tell his story in a mangled German and with a voice that was nearly
choked with rage, but did not absorb anything he said.
He heard a dog bark, a wagon rattle, a bell strike; he heard people
talking, murmuring, crying; he heard the scraping of feet. But it all
sounded to him like noises that were reaching his ears through the walls
of a prison. He went on his way; his gait was unsteady.
As he reached the Church of Our Lady, Daniel turned to the right toward
the Market Place, and saw the Goose Man standing before him.
"Go home," the Goose Man seemed to say with a sad voice. "Go home!"
"Who are you? what do you wish of me?" A voice within him asked. But
then it seemed that the figure had become invisible, and that it could
not be seen again until it was far off in the distance, where it was
being shone upon by a bright light.
People were running across AEgydius Place; some of them were crying
"Fire!" Daniel turned the corner; he could see his house. Flames were
leaping up behind his window. He pressed his hands to his temples, and,
with eyes wide open and filled with terror, he forced his way through
the crowd up to his house. "For God's sake, for Heaven's sake!" he
cried, "save my trunk!"
Many looked at him. A figure appeared at the window; many arms were
pointed at it. "The woman! Look, look, the woman!" came a cry from the
crowd. And then again: "She has set the house on fire! She has swung the
torch and started the fire!"
Daniel rushed into his house. Firemen overtook him. There he saw in the
hall, lighted by the lanterns being carried back and forth so swiftly,
and placed in the corner with no more care or consideration than was
possible under such circumstances, the dead body of old Jordan. His
body, and close beside it, as if in supernatural mockery of all things
human, the doll, the Swiss maid with the machine in her stomach. Sighing
and sobbing, he fell down; his forehead touched the dead hand of the old
man.
As if in a dream he heard the hissing of the hoses, the commands, the
hurried running back and forth of the firemen. Then he felt as if a
shadow, a figure from the lower world, suddenly rose before him. A
clenched fist, he thought, opened and hurled shreds of paper into his
face. When he looked up he could see nothing but the firemen rushing
around him. The shadow, the figure, had pushed its way in among them,
and in the confusion no one had paid any attention to it.
With an absent-minded gesture, Daniel reached out and picked up the
paper that was lying nearest him. It had fallen on the face of the doll.
He unfolded it and saw, written in his own hand, the music to the
"Harzreise im Winter." Under the notes were the words:
But aside, who is it?
His path in the bushes is lost,
Behind him rustle
The thickets together,
The grass rises again,
The desert conceals him.
The melody and rhythm that interpreted the words were of a grandiose
gloominess, like a song of shades pursued in the night, across the sea.
Daniel recalled the hour he had written this music; he recalled the
expression on Gertrude's face the time he played it for her. Eleanore
was there, too, wearing a white dress, with a myrtle wreath in her hair.
The tones dissolved the web of infinite time. "But aside, who is it?"
came forth like a great, deep dirge. In the question there was something
prophetically great. He covered his face and wept; he felt as if his
heart would break.
The dead man and the doll were lying there, motionless, lifeless.
In half an hour the fire was under control. The two attic rooms had been
burned out completely. Further than this no damage had been done.
Philippina had vanished without a trace. Since no one had seen her leave
the house, the first theory was that she had been burned to death. But
investigation proved this assumption to be incorrect. The police looked
for her everywhere, but in vain; she was not to be found. A few people
who had known her rather intimately insisted that she had been burned up
so completely that there was nothing left of her but a little pile of
black ashes.
However this may be, and whatever the truth may be, Philippina never
again entered the house. No one ever again saw or heard a thing of her.
BUT ASIDE, WHO IS IT?
I
Late in the evening Benda came. He had been tolerably well informed of
everything that had taken place. In the hall he met Agnes. Though
generally quite monosyllabic, Agnes was now inclined to be extremely
communicative, but she could merely confirm what he had already heard.
She went up to the top floor with him, and he stood there for a long
while looking at the burnt rooms. There were two firemen on guard duty.
"All of his music has been burnt up," said Agnes. Benda thought he would
hardly be able to talk with his old friend again after this tragedy. But
he at once felt ashamed of his timidity, and went down to see him.
It was again quiet throughout the entire house.
Daniel had lighted a candle in the living room. Finding it too dark with
only one candle, he lighted another.
He paced back and forth. The room seemed too small for him: he opened
the door leading into Dorothea's room, and walked back and forth through
it too. On entering the dark room, his lips would move; he would murmur
something. When he returned to the lighted room, he would stand for a
second or two and stare at the candles.
His features seemed to show traces of human suffering such as no man had
borne before; it could hardly have been greater. He did not seem to
notice Benda when he came in.
"Everything gone? Everything destroyed?" asked Benda, after he had
watched Daniel walk back and forth for nearly a quarter of an hour.
"One grave after the other," murmured Daniel, in a voice that no longer
seemed to be his own. He raised his head as if surprised at the sound of
what he himself had said. He felt that a stranger had come into the room
without letting himself be heard.
"And the last work, the great work of which you told me, the fruit of so
many years, has it also been destroyed?" asked Benda.
"Everything," replied Daniel distractedly, "everything I have created
in the way of music from the time I first had reason to believe in
myself. The sonatas, the songs, the quartette, the psalm, the
'Harzreise,' 'Wanderers Sturmlied,' and the symphony, everything down to
the last page and the last note."
Yes, there was a stranger there; you could hear him laughing quietly to
himself. "Why do you laugh?" asked Daniel sternly, and adjusted his
glasses.
Benda, terrified, said: "I did not laugh."
"The grass rises again, the desert conceals him," said the stranger. He
wore an old-fashioned suit, a droll sort of cap, and Hessian boots. "I
ought to know him," thought Daniel to himself, and began to meditate
with cloudy mind.
"This is like murder, unheard-of murder," cried Benda's soul; "how can