The Goose Man
he bear it? What will he do?"
"What is there to do?" asked Daniel, expressing Benda's silent thought
in audible words, and looking askew, as he walked back and forth, at the
stranger who went slowly through the room over to the window in the
corner. "What can human fancy find reasonable or possible after all that
has happened? Nothing! Merely pine away; pine away in insanity."
"Oho," said the stranger, "that is a trifle strong."
"If he would only keep quiet," thought Daniel, tortured. "I presume you
know what has happened with the woman whom I called my wife," he
continued. "That I threw myself away on this vain, soulless spirit of a
mirror is irrelevant. Greater men than I have walked into such nets and
become entangled, ensnared. I have never cherished the delusion that I
was immune to all the mockery of this earth. I believed, however, that I
could scent out truth and falsehood, and differentiate the one from the
other, just as the hand can tell by the feel the wet from the dry. But
the connection of the one with the other, and the horrible necessity of
this connection, I do not understand."
"You have been served just right," remarked the intruder with the
Hessian boots. He had sat down on a chair in the corner, and looked
quite friendly.
"Why?" roared Daniel, stopping.
Benda, astounded, rose to his feet. "Speak out, Daniel," he said
affectionately, "unburden your soul!"
"If I only could, Friedrich, if I only could! If my tongue would only
move! Or if there were some one who felt with me and could speak for
me!"
"Try it; the first word is often like a spark and starts a flame."
Daniel was silent. The intruder said deliberatively: "That goes deep
down to the recesses of the heart and up high to the things that are
immortal."
Daniel looked over at him sharply, and saw that it was the Goose Man.
II
All effort to get Daniel to talk was in vain. Along toward midnight,
Benda took leave of him. Agnes unlocked the door for him; he said to
her: "Look after him; he has no one else now."
Daniel lay on the sofa with his hands crossed behind his head, and
stared at the ceiling. His eyes were hot; at times he trembled and
shook.
"It isn't very sociable here," said the Goose Man, "the air is full of
tobacco smoke, and there is a draft coming in from that dark room."
Daniel got up, closed the door, and lay down again.
The metallic exterior of the Goose Man seemed to become flexible,
somewhat as when a frozen body thaws out. "You have gone through a great
deal," he continued thoughtfully. "That any one who wishes to create
must also experience is clear. Experience is his mother's milk, his
realm of roots; it is where the saps flow together, from which his forms
and figures are developed. But there is experience and experience, and
between the two there is a world of difference."
"Superfluous profundity," murmured Daniel, plainly annoyed. "To live is
to have experience." He took council with himself in the attempt to
devise a means by which he might get rid of the importunate chatterer.
The Goose Man again struck up his gentle laugh. He replied: "Many live,
and yet do not live; suffer, and yet do not suffer. In what does guilt
lie? What does it consist of? In not feeling; in not doing. The first
thing for some men to do is to eradicate completely the false notions
they have of what constitutes greatness. For what is greatness after
all? It is nothing in the world but the fulfilment of an unending circle
of petty duties, small obligations."
"There is a fundamental difference between the creator and all other
men," remarked Daniel, at once excited and troubled by the conversation
and the turn it was taking.
"Do you appeal to, depend on, refer to music in this present case?"
asked the Goose Man, his good-natured look becoming more or less
disdainful.
"In music every creation is more closely related to an unconditional
exterior than is true of anything else that man gives to man," answered
Daniel. "The musical genius stands nearer God than any other genius."
The Goose Man nodded. "But his fall begins one step from God's throne,
and is a high and deep one. Do you know what you are? And do you really
know what you are not?"
Daniel pressed his hand to his heart: "Have you ever known me to fight
for evanescent laurels? Have I ever tried to feed the human race, which
is a race of minors, on surrogates? Have I ever imitated the flights of
Heaven with St. Vitus dance, confusing the one with the other? Have I
not always acted in accord with the best, the inmost knowledge I had,
and in obedience to my conscience? Was I ever a liar?"
"No, no, no!" cried the Goose Man, by way of appeasing Daniel's unrest.
He took off his cap, and laid it on his knee. "You were always sincere.
There can be no doubt about it, your heart was always in your
profession. All life has streamed into your soul, and you have lived in
the ivory tower. Your soul was well protected, well protected from the
very beginning. It was in a position similar to that created by a
swimmer who rubs his body with grease before plunging into the water.
You have suffered; the poison of the Nessus shirt you have worn has
burned your skin, and the pain you have thereby suffered has been
transformed into sweet sounds. So they all are, the creators,
invulnerable and inaccessible. That is the way you picture them to
yourself. Is it not true? Monsters who take up the cross of the world,
and yet, grief-laden though they be, grow beyond their own fate. Such is
your lot; and so do you look to-day in your forty-second year."
Daniel was not prepared for this tone of bitterness; he turned his face
to the corner where the Goose Man was sitting. "I do not understand
you," he said slowly. The pitiable crying of little Gottfried could be
heard from the room opening out on the court, and then Agnes's quieting
lullaby.
"If you only had not lived in the ivory tower!" cried the Goose Man. "If
you only had been more sensitive and not so well protected! If you had
only lived, lived, lived, really and truly, and near to life, like a
naked man in a thicket of thorns! Life would have got the best of you,
but your love would have been real, the hate you have experienced real,
your misfortunes real, the lies, ridicule, and betrayal all real, and
the shadows of those who have died from you would have taken on reality.
And the poison of the Nessus shirt would not merely have burned your
skin; it would have penetrated to your very blood, it would have found
its way to the deepest, most secret recesses of your heart. Your work
would have been carried on and out, not in a struggle against your
darkness and your limited torments of soul, a slave before men and
unblessed of God. Eliminate from your mind now, forever and completely,
the delusion that you have borne the sufferings of the world! You have
merely borne your own sufferings, loving-loveless, altruistic-egoist,
monster, man without a country that you are!"
"Who are you? What are you trying to say?" asked Daniel, automatically,
falteringly, with pale lips.
"Oh, don't you see who I am? I am the Goose Man," came the reply, spoken
with a loyal and devoted bow. "The Goose Man, lonesome there behind the
iron fence, lonesome there on the water at the fountain, and yet
situated in the middle of the Market. An insignificant being, tangible
and intelligible to every one who passes by, though a certain degree of
monumentality has been ascribed to me in all these years. But I pay no
attention to this ascription of greatness; I laugh at it. I give the
Market, where the people come and haggle over the price of potatoes and
apples, a certain degree of dignity. That is all. They see me as I stand
there, always upright, under the open sky; and despite my distinguished
position, they have all come to look upon me as a cousin. For a time
they gave me a nickname: they called me by your name. But they had no
right to do this; none at all, it seems to me. I have looked out for my
geese; no one can say a thing against me."
The Goose Man laughed a quiet, inoffensive laugh; and when Daniel turned
his face to the corner, the chair was empty, the strange guest had
vanished.
III
But he came back. And when Daniel's mind and body were both completely
broken down and he was obliged to remain in bed, his visits became
regular. He sat next to Benda, for Benda had taken to calling on Daniel
now every day and staying with him until late at night. But Daniel grew
quieter and quieter. Sometimes he would make no reply at all to Benda's
remarks or questions.
The Goose Man came in behind Dr. Dingolfinger and stood on tiptoes, as
curious as curious could be, and looked over his arm when he wrote out
his prescriptions. The Goose Man was a little fellow: he hardly reached
up to the doctor's hips.
He hopped around Agnes when she cooked the soup and expressed his
sympathy for her; she looked so pale. Though only thirteen years old,
there was the worried look of a mature woman in her face; she would cast
her eyes around the room as if trying to catch a glance of human love in
the eyes of another person; her looks were timid and stealthy. "Some one
should be caring for her too," said the Goose Man, shaking his head,
"some one should be making a good, warm soup for her."
Though it would be unfair to say that the Goose Man was offensively
concerned, he seemed to be interested in everything that was going on in
the house. When the officials of the fire department came to
cross-question Daniel about the fire, he became angry and gruff, and did
not wish to let them in. "Give the poor man some rest, some peace, after
all these years of suffering," he implored, "give him time to collect
himself and to meditate on what has taken place." And in fact the
members of the fire department left as soon as possible; they did not
stay long.
The Goose Man was always in a cheerful humour, always ready for a good
joke. At times he would whistle softly, and smooth out the wrinkles in
his doublet. There was a certain amount of rustic shyness about him, but
his affability, his good manners, and his child-like cheerfulness
removed any unpleasant impression this rusticity might otherwise have
made. He generally spoke the dialect of Nuremberg, though when with
Daniel he never spoke anything but the most correct and chosen High
German. His natural, acquired culture and the wealth of his vocabulary
were really amazing.
Ten times a day at least he would scamper into the room where little
Gottfried was sleeping and express his admiration for the pretty child.
"How you are to be envied to have such a living creature crawling and
sprawling around in your home!" he said to Daniel. And in course of time
Daniel actually came to have a new affection for the child.
As soon as the Goose Man felt perfectly at home in Daniel's house, he
took to bringing his two geese along with him. He would place them very
circumspectly in a corner of the room. One evening he was sitting
playing with them, when the bell rang. Andreas Doederlein stormed in, and
demanded that some one tell him where his daughter was.
"Upon my word and honour! An old acquaintance of mine!" said the Goose
Man, laughing and blinking. "I see him nowadays in the cafe much more
frequently than is good for his health."
"I must urgently request you to control yourself," said Benda, turning
to Andreas Doederlein, and pointed to the bed in which Daniel was lying.
"My daughter is not a bad woman. Let people overburdened with credulity
believe that she is bad," cried Doederlein, with the expression and in
the tone and gesture of the royal Lear, and shook his Olympian locks.