The Goose Man. Jakob Wassermann
grinning beside the stove.
Herr Francke was a town traveller for a cigar house, and was regarded as a good deal of a Don Juan by the female servants of the neighbourhood. Benjamin Dorn was a clerk in the Prudentia Life Insurance Company, belonged to a Methodist congregation, and was respected by all the respectable on account of his Christian walk and conversation.
These gentlemen examined the document thoroughly and with frowns. Herr Francke gave it as his opinion that a musician who never made music could scarcely be regarded as one.
“He’s probably pawned his bass violin or bugle or whatever he was taught,” he said contemptuously; “perhaps he can only beat a drum. Well, I can do that too if I have one.”
“Yes, you’ve got to have a drum to be a drummer,” Benjamin Dorn remarked. “The question, however, is whether such a calling is in harmony with the principles of Christian modesty.” He laid his finger on his nose, and added: “It is a question which, with all proper humility, all proper humility, you understand, I would answer in the negative.”
“He hasn’t any relatives and no acquaintances at all,” Frau Hadebusch wailed, and her voice sounded like the scraping of carrots on a grater; “and no employment and no prospects and no boots or clothes but what he’s got on. In all my life I haven’t had no such lodger.”
The blank fluttered to the floor, whence the weak-minded Hadebusch Jr. picked it up, rolled it in the shape of a bag, and applied that bag, trumpet-like, to his lips, a procedure which caused the document in question to be gradually soaked through and thus withdrawn from its official uses. Frau Hadebusch was too little concerned over the police regulations to take further thought of her duties as the keeper of a lodging house.
Herr Francke drew from his pocket a pack of greasy cards and began to shuffle them. Frau Hadebusch giggled and it sounded like a witch rustling in the fire. The Methodist conquered his pious scruples, and placed his pfennigs on the table; the town-traveller turned up his sleeves as though he were about to wring a hen’s neck.
Before very long there arose a dissonant controversy, since Herr Francke’s relations with the goddess of fortune were strained and violent. The old brush-maker poked his head in at the door and cursed; the weak-minded boy blew dreamily on his paper trumpet; and the company that had been so peacefully at one separated in violence and rage.
II
Daniel wandered up to the castle, along the walls, over the bridges and planks.
It was his youth that caused him so to love the night that he forgot all men and seemed to himself to be alone on earth. It was his youth that delivered him up to things with such passion that he was able to weave the ghostly flowers of melodies about all that is visible—melodies that were so delicate, so eloquent, and so winged that no pen could ever record them. They vanished and died whenever he sought to capture them.
But it was also his youth that fired his eyes with hatred when he saw the comfort of lit windows, and filled his heart with bitterness against the satisfied, the indifferent, the strangers, the eternal strangers who had no consciousness of him.
He was so small and so great: small in the eyes of the world, great in his own estimation. When the tones burst from him like sparks from an anvil, he was a god. When he stood in the dark court behind the City Theatre waiting for the final chorus of “Fidelio” to penetrate the wall and reach his grateful ears, he was an outcast. Fountains of music rustled all about him. He looked into the eyes of the children and there was melody; he gazed up at the stars and there was harmony. He finally came to the point where there was no limit. His day was a waste place, his brain a parched field in the rain, his thoughts were birds of passage, his dreams a super-life.
He lived on bread and fruit, treating himself only every third day to a warm meal in the inn at the sign of the White Tower. There he would sit and listen at times, unobserved, to the quite remarkable conversation of some young fellows. This awakened in him a longing for intercourse with congenial companions. But when the brethren of the Vale of Tears finally took him into their circle, he was like a Robinson Crusoe or a Selkirk who had been abducted from his island.
III
Benjamin Dorn was a compassionate individual. The desire to save a lost soul filled him with the courage to pay Daniel Nothafft a visit. He hobbled up the creaky steps with his club-foot, and knocked timidly at the door.
“Can I be of service to you, Sir, in a Christian way?” he asked, after he had blown his nose.
Daniel looked at him in amazement.
“You know, I could help you in an unselfish, Christian way, to get a position. There is a great deal of work to be done down at the Prudentia. If I were to recommend you to Herr Zittel it certainly would not be in vain. Herr Zittel is head of the clerical department. I also stand in with Herr Diruf, and he is general agent. I come in contact nearly every day with Inspector Jordan, and Herr Jordan is a man of exceptional culture. His daughter Gertrude attended my Sunday-school class. She has received and still enjoys divine favour. If you were to entrust your case to me, you would be entering upon a righteous, wholesome career. I am always looking out for some one. To tell the truth, and not wishing to appear immodest, I was born that way.”
The man looked like a patchwork of qualmishness, tribulation, and unctuous piety, and his coat collar was badly frayed.
“That’s all right,” replied Daniel; “don’t you see that I am getting along quite well?”
The pious life-insurance agent sighed and brushed a drop from the tip of his nose with the back of his hand. “My dear Sir,” said he, “take to heart the words of Solomon: Pride goeth before a fall, but the humble in spirit obtain honour.”
“Yes, I’ll take that to heart,” said Daniel drily, and bent still lower over the score on which he was working.
Benjamin Dorn sighed again, and limped out of the room. With his thumbs pointing straight to high heaven above, he said to Frau Hadebusch: “You know, Frau Hadebusch, I simply can’t help it. I must lighten my heart in a Christian way. What do you think?”
“Good heavens, what’s he doing? What’s he up to now?” sighed the old lady, as she shoved her broom under her arm.
“As true as I stand here, the table is all covered with papers, and the papers are all covered with some kind of mysterious signs.”
Alarmed at the very thought of having a lodger up in the attic who was practising black magic, Frau Hadebusch sent her husband down to the district policeman. This enlightened official declared that the brush-maker was a gossip. Vexed at this unanticipated description of himself, the brush-maker went straightway to the inn at the sign of the Horse and got drunk, so drunk that Benjamin Dorn had to take him home. It was a beautiful moonlit night.
IV
Not far from Hadebusch’s was a little café known as The Paradise. Everything in it was diminutive, the proprietor, the waitress, the tables, the chairs and the portions. There the brethren from the Vale of Tears assembled to drag the gods down into the dust and destroy the universe in general.
Daniel wended his way thither. He knew the liliputian room and the starved faces. He was personally acquainted with the painter who never painted, the writer who never wrote, the student who never studied, and the inventor who never invented anything. He knew all about the sculptor who squandered such talents as he may have had in tinkering