Chapter 26

He sat down in silence on the edge of her bed. Gertrude looked at him in the same tense, anxious way in which she had studied him a few moments earlier. He sank down beside her, and fell asleep with his head on her breast.

She kept on holding his hand. She looked into his pale, narrow face and at his angular brow, the skin of which could be seen to twitch every now and then under the loose flowing hair that hung over it. The oil in the lamp was getting low, the wick had begun to smell. She was afraid however to put it out lest she might waken Daniel. She looked on in silence as the light became dimmer and dimmer and finally went out, leaving only the red glow of the wick. This too died away in time, and it became dark.

XII

For some time Eleanore had noticed that the baker’s boy, instead of carefully putting the rolls in the sack each morning as had always been his custom, threw them through the lattice on to the ground.

The newspaper boy stopped speaking to her; the postman smiled scornfully; and even the beggar, at least she thought so, asked for his alms in a tone of impudence.

One day she was passing through Schmausen Street; a woman was leaning out of the window. Seeing Eleanore coming, she called back into the room, whereupon a young man and three half-grown girls rushed to the window, began making remarks to each other, and gaped at her with looks that made her turn deathly pale.

Another time Daniel brought her a free ticket to a concert. She went, and as soon as she reached the hall she was struck by the discourteous and indecent manner in which the bystanders looked at her. A well-dressed woman moved away from her. Some men kept walking around her, grinning at her. She found it intolerable, and went home.

Exercise in the open had often driven away the cares that chanced to be weighing upon her: she went skating. As soon as the people saw her, they began to whisper among themselves. She did not bother about them or their remarks; she cut her beautiful figures on the ice as if she were quite alone. A group of young girls pointed at her with their fingers. She went up to them with pride glistening in her eyes, and they all ran away. Those who had formerly paid homage to her avoided her now. Her soul rebelled within her; meeting with so much unexpected and cowardly vulgarity enflamed her sensibilities and ennobled her self-respect.

One day in December she crossed the Wine Market, and started to pass through a narrow street that led to the Halle Gate. Standing at the entrance to the alley were a number of men engaged in conversation. She recognised Alfons Diruf among them. She thought they would step to one side and let her pass, but not one of them moved. They gaped at her in unmitigated shamelessness. She could have turned about and taken another street, but that defiance on the part of those men made her insist upon her rights to go the way she had originally decided upon. Impressed, apparently, by the flaming blue of her eyes, the scoundrels at last condescended to shift their lazy frames to one side. They formed an espalier through which she had to walk. But worse than this were the lewd looks that she knew were following her, and the laughter that greeted her ears. It was the type of laughter ordinarily heard at night when one passes a low dive, in which the scum of human society has gathered to amuse itself by the telling of salacious stories.

She often had the feeling, particularly after dark, that some one was following her. Once she looked around, and a man was behind her. He wore a havelock; he turned quickly into a gate. A few days later she had a similar experience, but this time she was frightened worse than ever, for she thought it was Herr Carovius.

One evening as she was leaving the house she saw the same figure standing by the church on the other side of the street. As she hesitated and wondered whether she should go on, another person joined the first. She thought it was Philippina. The two began to talk, but Eleanore could not make out who they were; it was snowing, and there was no street lamp nearby.

She could not tell why, but she was suddenly seized with anxiety for Daniel; for him and for no one else. She felt that unless she went back something dreadful would happen to him. She rushed up the steps to the attic room, and knocked at his door; there was not a sound. She opened the door and went in, but everything was dark. In the darkness, however, standing out against the white background from the light of the snow, she saw his body. He was sitting at the piano; he had his arms on the lid, his head between his hands. Eleanore hastened up to him, and, with a tone of sweet sadness in what she said, threw her arms around his neck.

Daniel took her on his lap, pressed her head to his bosom, and laughed with open month and shining teeth but without making a sound. He often laughed that way now.

XIII

He laughed that way at the intrigues that were being forged against him by his bitterest enemy, Fräulein Varini, and which resulted in his meeting with distrust and opposition in everything he undertook at the City Theatre.

He laughed that way at the anonymous letters, filled with insulting remarks, which were being sent him by his fellow citizens, and which he read with naïve curiosity merely to see how far human nastiness and bestial hate could go.

He laughed that way when he received the letter from Baroness von Auffenberg informing him that she was forced to discontinue her lessons and recitals. She said that her constitution had been weakened, and that she was going to close her town house and spend the winter at her country place at Hersbruck. Daniel heard however that she spent a great deal of her time in town, and that she had arranged for an elaborate cycle of _musicales_, a thing she had never dared to do under his administration. Andreas Döderlein had been engaged as her musical adviser: now she could rave and go into ecstasies and hypnotise her impotent soul in the mephitic air of artificial aroma just as much as she pleased.

And he laughed that way at the weekly attacks upon him and his art that appeared in the _Fränkischer Herold_, copies of which were delivered at his front door with the regularity of the sun. The attacks consisted of sly, caustic sneers, secrets that had been ferreted out with dog-like keenness, gigantic broadsides based on hearsay evidence, and perfidious suspicions lodged against Daniel Nothafft, the artist, and Daniel Nothafft, the man.

The articles never failed to mention the Goose Man. Daniel asked to have the allusion explained. The Goose Man was elevated to the rank and dignity of an original humourist. “What is the latest concerning the Goose Man?” became a standing head-line. Or the reader’s eye would fall on the following notice: “The Goose Man is again attracting the attention of all friends of music. He has had the ingenious audacity to make the opera ‘Stradella’ more enjoyable by the interpolation of a funeral march of his own make. The ever-submissive domestic birds which he carries under his arms have rewarded him for his efforts in this connection by the cackling of their abundant and affectionate gratitude.”

The birthplace of these inimitable achievements in the field of journalistic wit was the reserved table at the Crocodile. If ever in the history of the world men have laughed real honest tears it was at the writing of such news bearing on the life and conduct of the Goose Man. The editor-in-chief, Weibezahl, was the recording secretary at these intellectual Olympiads, and Herr Carovius was the protagonist. He had access to reliable sources, as newspaper men say, and every evening he surprised the round table with new delicacies for Weibezahl’s columns.

Daniel was ignorant of what was going on. But the Goose Man, the expression as well as the figure, became interwoven with his thoughts, and acquired, somehow and somewhere in the course of time, a transfigured meaning.

XIV

One day Frau Kirschner wrote to Daniel telling him that she did not wish to have anything more to do with him; she demanded in the same letter that he pay back the money she had advanced him. He could not raise it: the City Theatre had already made him a loan, he had no friends, and M. Rivière, the only person on earth who might have been able to come to his rescue, had gone back to France.

Matters took their usual course: A lawyer notified Daniel, giving him so many days grace; when these had elapsed and no payment had been made, a summons was served on him; the sheriff came in, and in default of any other object of value he pawned the piano.

Daniel’s objections were quite ineffectual: a few days more and the piano would be put up at auction.

One gloomy morning in January Philippina entered his room.

“Say, Daniel,” she began, “would you like to have some money from me?”

Daniel turned his head slowly and looked at her in amazement.

“I have lots of it,” she continued with her hoarse voice, her glassy eyes glittering underneath her bangs. “I have been saving it a pfennig at a time ever since I was a child. I can give you the money you owe the Councillor’s wife. Sling it at her, the old hag! Say to me: ‘Please Philippina, give me the money,’ and you’ll find it on the table.”

“Are you crazy?” asked Daniel, “get out of here just as quickly as your feet can carry you!” He felt distinctly creepy in her presence.

Philippina, beside herself with rage, seized his hand. Before he could do a thing she bit him just below the little finger. The wound was quite deep. He groaned, shook her off, and pushed her back. She looked at him triumphantly, but her face had turned yellow.

“Listen, Daniel,” she said in a begging, beseeching tone, “don’t be so ugly! Don’t be so mean toward me! Don’t be so jealous!”

The wench’s infamous smile, her hair hanging down over her eyes, her big red hands, the snow-flakes on her short cloak, the border on her fiery red dress below her cloak, and the poison green ribbon on her hat—this ensemble of ugliness filled Daniel with the loathing he might have experienced had he stood face to face with the most detestable picture he had ever seen from the world of human beings. But as he turned his head, a feeling of sympathy came over him; he suspected that the girl was bound to him by bonds that did not reach him until after they had taken their course through the dark channels of some subterranean labyrinth. What she had done filled him with dismay; but as a revelation of character it surprised him and set him to thinking.

He went over to the washing table to put his bleeding hand in the water. Philippina took a fresh handkerchief from the cabinet, and handed it to him as a bandage. He looked at her with piercing eyes, and said: “What kind of a person are you? What sort of a devil is in you, anyway? Be careful, Jason Philip’s daughter, be careful!”

Since there was a tone of kindness in these words, the muscles of Philippina’s face moved in a mysterious way. Her features were distorted as if by a grin, and yet she was not grinning. She drew a leather purse from her cloak pocket, opened it, and took out two one-hundred-mark notes and a gold coin. They had been wrapped in paper. She unfolded the paper and the notes, laid them, together with the coin, on the table, and handed Daniel a written statement.

He read it: “I, the undersigned, Daniel Nothafft, promise to pay to Philippina Schimmelweis two hundred and twenty marks at five per cent interest, for value received.”

“With that you c’n pay the sheriff and git yourself out of this mess,” said Philippina, in a most urgent tone. “You can’t give piano lessons on a rolling pin, and that music box of yours is after all the tool you make your living by. Sign that, and you will be in peace.”

“Where did you get the money?” asked Daniel. “How did you ever come by so much money? Tell me the truth.” All of a sudden he remembered Theresa’s words: “All that nice money, all that nice money!”

Philippina began to chew her finger nails. “That’s none of your business,” she said gruffly, “it ain’t been stolen. Moreover, I c’n tell you,” she said, as she felt that his distrust was taking on a threatening aspect, “mother give it to me on the sly. She didn’t want me to be without a penny if anything happened. For my father—he would like to see me strung up. She give it to me, I say, on the side, and she made me swear before the cross that I would never let any one know about it.”

This tale of horror made Daniel shake his head; he had his doubts. He felt she was lying, and yet there was a mysterious force back of her statement and in her eyes. He was undecided; he thought it over. His livelihood was at stake. Weeks, months might pass by before he could get another piano. Philippina’s readiness to help him was a riddle to him, everything she said was repulsive and banal; but after all she was willing to help in a most substantial way, and he was in such difficulties that voices of admonition simply had to be drowned out.

“It is nothing but money,” he thought contemptuously, and sat down to put his name to the note.

Philippina drew up her shoulders, and never once breathed until he had signed the note and handed it over to her in silence. Then she looked at him imploringly, and said: “Now Daniel, you must never again treat me like you would a scurvy cat.”

XV

There had been an unusual amount of talk this year about the parade on Shrove Tuesday. On the afternoon of that day the whole city was on its feet.

Daniel was on his way home; he had reached the corner of Theresa Street when he ran into the crowd. He stopped out of idle curiosity. The first division of the parade came up: it consisted of three heralds in gaudy mediæval costumes, and back of them were three councillors on horseback.

Next in the procession was a condemned witch on a wheelbarrow. Her face had been hideously painted, and in her hand she swung a huge whiskey bottle. She was followed by a group of Chinese, each with a long pigtail, and they by a troupe of dancing Kameruns.

The procession moved on in the following order: a giant carrying twenty-seven quart beer mugs; a woman’s orchestra consisting exclusively of old women; a wagon from one of the peasant districts bearing the inscription, “Adorers of Taxes”; a smoking club with the Swedish match merchant; a wagon with a replica of the Spittler Gate made of beer kegs; the so-called guard against sparks; a nurse with a grown child in diapers and Hussar boots; the seven Swabians on velocipedes; a cabriolet with a gaily dressed English family; a conveyance carrying authors. There were two inscriptions on it: “The And So Forths” and “The Et Ceterists.”

At the end of the procession was a wagon with a skilful imitation of the Goose Man. It had been made out of old boards, hoops, clay, old rags, and iron. The Goose Man himself wore an open velvet doublet and short velvet trousers, from the pockets of which protruded rolls of banknotes. Instead of a cap he had a rusty pan on his head, and on his feet was a pair of worn patent leather shoes. Under each arm he carried a goose. The geese had been made of dough. Their heads were not the heads of geese but of women artificially painted and with so-called taws, or marbles, for their eyes. The face at the Goose Man’s left looked melancholy, the one at his right was cheerful.

This was the centre of attraction; it was surrounded by the largest crowds. Every time it came within sight of a fresh group of on-lookers there was a tremendous shouting and waving of flags. This was true even where it was plain that the people did not appreciate the significance of it. Pulchinellos brandished their wooden swords, Indian chieftains danced around it screaming their mighty war-whoops, a Mephistopheles turned somersaults, knights mounted on stilts saluted, and children with wax masks shrieked until it was impossible to hear one’s own voice.

Daniel had watched the performance with relative indifference. He had regarded it merely as a display of commonplace ability to amuse the people. Then came the wagon with the imitation of the Goose Man. On it stood Schwalbe the sculptor, gloriously drunk. Beside him stood Kropotkin the painter in his shirt sleeves, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was cold. A fearfully fat youth—a future school officer, so far as could be determined from his looks—had hit upon the happy idea of pasting the title of the _Fränkischer Herold_ to the Goose Man’s hat. This took the initiated by storm.

Kropotkin recognised Daniel. He called to him, threw him kisses, had one of the wooden swords given him, and went through the motion of directing an orchestra. The fat boy hurled a handful of pretzels at the spot on the sidewalk where Daniel was standing; a trombone began to bray; the Englishman first stuck his head out of his cabriolet, and then got out and hopped over to Daniel, carrying a pole draped with women’s clothes, including a feather hat and a veil. A new keg of beer was tapped on the Gambrinus wagon, while the people in the houses rushed to the windows and roared.

“You have forgotten the railing,” cried Daniel in a loud voice to the people on the Goose Man wagon.

“What did he say?” they asked, and looked at each other in astonishment. The on-lookers were filled with curious silence: many of them gazed at Daniel, bewildered.

“You forgot the railing,” he repeated, with glistening eyes, “you have forgotten the iron railing. Without his protection the poor Goose Man is to be sure your buffoon, your zany, your clown.”

He laughed quietly, and, with opened mouth and shining teeth, quickly withdrew from the innumerable gapers. Having reached a deserted alley, he began to sing with a frenzied expression on his face: “Whom thou dost not desert, oh Genius, him wilt thou raise up with wings of fire. He will wander on as if with feet of flowers across Deucalion’s seas of slime, killing Python, light-footed, famed Pythius Apollo.”

XVI

A few weeks later a real singer came to Daniel. She sang several of the songs he had written. He had thought they were completely forgotten by everybody. Her art was not merely perfect; it was wonderful.

It was a very mysterious visit the singer paid him. One afternoon during a fearful snow storm the bell rang; and when Gertrude opened the door, she saw a woman wearing a heavy black veil standing before her, who said she wished to speak to Kapellmeister Nothafft. Gertrude took her up to Daniel’s room. The stranger told Daniel she had been wishing to make his acquaintance for a long time, and, now on her way to Italy, she had been detained in the city for a few days by the illness of a near friend. This, she said, she regarded as a hint from fate itself. She had come to extend him her greetings, and particularly to thank him for his songs, a copy of which a friend had been good enough to present to her at a time when she was living under the weight of a great sorrow.

She spoke with an accent that had a Northern note in it, but easily and fluently; she gave the impression of a woman who had seen a great deal of the world and had profited by her travels. Daniel asked her with whom he had the pleasure of speaking, but she smiled, and asked permission to conceal her name for the present. She said that it really did not make much difference, and that it might be more agreeable to him later to think that an unknown woman had come to him to express her appreciation than to recall that Fräulein So-and-So had been there: she hoped that her very anonymity would make a more lasting impression on his memory than could be made by a woman of whom he knew only what everybody knows.

The mingling of the jocose and the serious, of the mind and the heart, in the words of the stranger pleased Daniel. Though his replies were curt and cool, it was plain that she was affording him much pleasure: she was reminding him of the fact that his creations had not after all sunk into an echoless abyss. In course of time, the conversation turned again to the songs; she said she would like very much to sing some of them for him. Daniel was pleased. He got the score, sat down at the piano, and the enigmatic woman began to sing. At the very first note Daniel was enraptured; he had never heard such a voice: so soft, so pure, so emotional, so unlike the conventional product of the conservatory. As soon as she had finished the first song, he looked up at her in unaffected embarrassment, and murmured: “Who are you, anyhow? Who are you?”

“No investigations or cross-questioning, please,” replied the singer, and, blushing at the praise Daniel was bestowing on her by his very behaviour, she laughed and said, “The next song, please, that one by Eichendorff!”

Gertrude, who had not wished to remain longer than was necessary because of the unkempt impression she knew she made, had hastened down to the kitchen. And now Eleanore came in, after having knocked at the door with all imaginable timidity. She had heard the strange voice, had rushed out into the hall, and, unable to restrain her curiosity any longer, had come in to see the singer.

Daniel nodded to her with radiant eyes, the stranger greeted her cordially though calmly, and then began to sing the next song; after this she took up the third, and so on until she had sung the complete cycle of six. Old Jordan was standing behind the door; he had his hands pressed to his face and was listening; he was much moved.

“Well, I must be going,” said the strange woman, after she had finished the last song. She shook hands with Daniel, and said: “It has been a beautiful hour.”

“It has been one of the most beautiful hours I have ever experienced,” said Daniel.

“Farewell!”

“Farewell!”

The strange woman went away, leaving behind her not a trace of anything other than the memory of a joy that grew more fabulous as the storm-tossed years rolled by. Daniel never saw her again, and never heard from her again.

XVII

While the woman was singing, Gertrude had been standing down in the hall listening. She knew every note of every song; every melody in the accompaniment seemed to her like an old, familiar picture. She was also aware that an artist by the grace of God had been in the house.

But how strange it was that she should find nothing unusual in the incident. She felt that a living stream in her bosom had dried up, leaving nothing but sand and stones in its bed. This inability to feel, this being dead to all sensations, took the form of excruciating pangs of conscience.

“My God, my God, what has happened to me?” she sighed, and wrung her hands.

That evening she went to the Church of Our Lady, and prayed for a long while. Her prayer did not appease her, however; she came back home more disquieted than ever.

The door of the living room was open: Daniel and Eleanore were sitting by the lamp, reading together from a book. The baby began to move; Eleanore had left the door open so that she might be able to hear the child when it woke up. Gertrude took the child in her arms, quieted it, and returned to the door leading into the living room. Daniel and Eleanore had turned their backs to the door, and were so absorbed in their reading that they were not aware of Gertrude’s presence.

A light suddenly came into Gertrude’s heart: she became conscious of her guilt—the guilt she had been trying in vain to fathom now for so many cruel weeks.

She did not have enough of the power of love; therein lay her guilt. She had assumed an obligation that was quite beyond her power to fulfil: she had entered into marriage without having the requisite strength of heart.