The Goose Man Part 36

"There is no milk there," said Eleanore to Daniel, as she entered the living room. He stopped suddenly, and looked at her as if he had awakened from a fleeting dream: "I'll run down to Tetzel Street and get a half a litre," said Eleanore. "I'll leave the hall door open, so that Gertrude will not be frightened when I come in."

She had already hastened out; but all of a sudden she turned around, and said with joyful grat.i.tude, her blue eyes swimming in the tears of a full soul: "You dear man."

His face took on a scowl.

There was a fearful regularity in his walking back and forth. The chains of the hanging lamp shook. The flame sent forth a thin column of smoke; he did not notice it. "How long will she be gone?" he thought in his unconscious, drunken impatience. He felt terribly deserted.

He stepped out into the hall, and listened. There hovered before him in the darkness the face of Philippina. She showed the same scornful immobility that she showed when her father struck her in the face. He stepped to the railing, and sat down on the top step; a fit at once of weakness and aimless defiance came over him. He buried his face in his hands; he could still hear Theresa saying, "All that nice money."

There were shadows everywhere; there was nothing but night and shadows.

Eleanore, light-hearted and light-footed, returned at last. When she saw him, she stopped. He arose, and stretched out his arms as if to take the milk bottle. That is the way she interpreted his gesture, and handed it to him in surprise. He, however, set it down on the landing beside him.

The light from the living room shone on it and made it look sparkling white. Then he drew Eleanore to him, threw his arms around her, and kissed her on the mouth.

Merely a creature of man, only a woman, nothing but heart and breath, all longing and forgetting, forgetting for just one moment, finding herself for a moment, knowing her own self for a moment-she pressed close up to him. But her hands were folded between her breast and his, and thus separated their bodies.

Then she broke away from him, wrung her hands, looked up at him, pressed close up to him again, wrung her hands again-it was all done in absolute silence and with an almost terrible grace and loveliness.

Everything was now entirely different from what it had been, or what she had formerly imagined it to be; there were depths to everything now. She lost herself; she ceased to exist for a moment; darkness enveloped her much-disciplined heart; she entered upon a second existence, an existence that had no similarity with the first.

To this existence she was now bound; she had succ.u.mbed to it: the law of nature had gone into effect. But the gla.s.s case had been shattered; it was in pieces. She stood there unprotected, even exposed, so to speak, to men, no longer immune to their glances, an accessible prey to their touch.

She went into the kitchen, and heated the milk. Daniel returned to the living room. His veins were burning, his heart was hammering. He had no sense of appreciation of the time that had pa.s.sed. When Eleanore came into the room, he began to tremble.

She came up to him, and spoke to him in pa.s.sionate sadness: "Have you heard about Gertrude? Don't you know, really? She is with child-your wife."

"I did not know it," whispered Daniel. "Did she tell you?"

"Yes, just now."

TRES FACIUNT COLLEGIUM

I

The habitues of the reserved table at the Crocodile were all reasonably well informed of the events that had recently taken place in the homes of Inspector Jordan and Jason Philip Schimmelweis. Details were mentioned that would make it seem probable that the cracks in the walls and the key-holes of both houses had been entertaining eavesdroppers.

Some refused to believe that Jason Philip had made rest.i.tution for the money young Jordan had embezzled. For, said Degen, the baker, Schimmelweis is a hard-fisted fellow, and whoever would try to get money out of him would have to be in the possession of extraordinary shrewdness.

"But he has already paid it," said Grundlich, the watchmaker. He knew he had; he knew that the wife of the bookseller had gone over to Nothafft's on Tuesday afternoon; that she had a heap of silver in a bag; and that when she came back home she took to bed, and had been ill ever since.

Kitzler, the a.s.sistant postmaster, felt there was something wrong here; and if there was not, you would simply have to a.s.sume that Nothafft, the musician, was a dangerous citizen, who had somehow managed to place the breast of his uncle _vis-a-vis_ a revolver.

"And you know, Nothafft is to be made Kapellmeister at the City Theatre," remarked the editor Weibezahl, the latest member of the round table. "His appointment is to be made public in a few days."

"What! Kapellmeister! You don't say so! That will make Andreas Doderlein the saddest man in ten states."

Herr Carovius, whose mouth was just then hanging on his beer gla.s.s, laughed so heartily that the beer went down his Sunday throat; he was seized with a coughing spell. Herr Korn slapped him on the back.

It was a shame that such a bad actor as Nothafft had to be endured in the midst of people who lived peaceful and law-abiding lives. This lament came from Herr Kleinlein, who had been circuit judge now for some time. He was anxious to know whether all the tales that were circulating concerning Nothafft were true.

Well, he was told, a great many things are said about Nothafft, but it is difficult to get at the truth. They appealed to the apothecary Pflaum, on the ground that his a.s.sistant knew the musician and might be able to give them some definite information.

Herr Pflaum took on an air as if he knew a great deal but was under obligations not to tell. Yes, yes, he said rather perfunctorily, he had heard that some one had said that Nothafft was running a pretty questionable domestic establishment; that he had a rather unsavoury past; and that there was some talk about his neglecting his wife.

The deuce you say! Why, they were married only a short while ago. Yes, but there was a rumour to the effect that there was a woman in the case.

Who could it be? Ahem! Well-ah, it would be a good idea to be cautious about mentioning names. Good Lord, why cautious? Why not straight out with the information any one chanced to be fortunate enough to have? Is it not a question of protecting one's own wife and daughters?

And so this slanderous babble rattled on. There was something unfathomable in their hatred of the musician. They were just as agreed on this point as they would have been if Daniel had broken open their strong boxes, smashed their windows, and betrayed their honour and dignity to public ridicule.

They did not know what they should do about him. They pa.s.sed by him as one would pa.s.s by a bomb that might or might not explode.

II

When Herr Carovius was alone, he picked up the paper, and read the account of a mine explosion in Silesia. The number of killed satisfied him. The description of the women as they stood at the top of the shaft, wept, wrung their hands, and called out the names of their husbands, filled him with the same agreeable sensation that he experienced when he listened to the melancholy finale of a Chopin nocturne.

But he could not forget the expression on Herr Pflaum's face when he told how Nothafft was neglecting his wife. It had been the expression that comes out, so to speak, from between the curtains of a sleeping room: something was up, make no mistake, something was going on.

For quite a while Herr Carovius had harboured the suspicion that there was something wrong. Twice he had met Daniel and Eleanore walking along the street in the twilight, talking to each other in a very mysterious way. Things were going on behind Herr Carovius's back which he could not afford to overlook.

Since the day Eleanore had disentangled the cord of his nose gla.s.ses from the b.u.t.ton of his top coat, the picture of the young girl had been indelibly stamped on his mind. He could still see the beautiful curvature of her young bosom as she raised her arm.

A year and a half after this incident, Herr Carovius was going through some old papers. He chanced upon an unfinished letter which Eberhard von Auffenberg had written to Eleanore but had never posted. Eberhard had come to Nuremberg at the time to transact some business connected with the negotiation of a new loan; he had left his hotel, and Herr Carovius had had to wait for him a long while. This time he had spent in looking over the unsealed doc.u.ments of the incautious young Baron.

Then it was that he discovered the letter. What words! And oh, the pa.s.sion! Herr Carovius would never have believed that the reserved misanthrope was capable of such a display of emotion. He felt that Eberhard had disclosed to him the most secret chambers of his heart. He was terrified at the voluptuousness revealed to him by the unveiling of the mystery of his soul. They are human beings after all, those members of the n.o.bility, he exclaimed with a feeling of personal triumph. They throw themselves away; they meet some slippery imp, and fall; they lose control of themselves as soon as they hear a skirt rustle.

But what concerned the Baron in this case concerned also Herr Carovius.

A pa.s.sion that had taken possession of the Baron had to be guarded, studied, and eventually shared by Herr Carovius himself.

Herr Carovius's loneliness had gradually robbed him of his equanimity.

Suppressed impulses were stifling his mind with the luxuriant growths of a vivid and vicious imagination. The adventures into which he had voluntarily plunged in order to make sure of his control over Eberhard had almost ruined him. The net he had spread for the helplessly fluttering bird now held him himself entangled in its meshes. The world to him was a body full of wounds on which he was battening his Neronic l.u.s.ts. But it was at the same time a tapestry, with bright coloured pictures which could be made living and real by a magic formula, and this formula he had not yet been able to discover.

At the insinuations of the apothecary his fancy took on new life: he was not a man in whose soul old emotions died out; his l.u.s.ts never became extinct. Lying on the sofa, taking his midday siesta, he would picture the figure of Eleanore dancing around him in diminutive form.

When he sat at the piano and played an _etude_, he imagined he saw Daniel standing beside him criticising his technique-and doing it with much show of arrogance. When he went out of evenings, he saw Nothafft displayed on all the signs, while every _demi-monde_ bore Eleanore's features.

It seemed to him in time that Eleanore Jordan was his property; that he had a right to her. His life, he felt, was full of lamentable privations: other people had everything, he had nothing. Others committed crimes; all he could do was to make note of the crimes. And no man could become either satiated or rich from merely taking the criminal incidents of other people's lives into account.

At midnight he put on his sleeping gown, took a seat before the mirror, and read until break of day a novel in which a man fifty years old has a secret and successful love affair with a young woman. As he read this novel he knew that something was going on. And he knew that out there in a certain house on aegydius Place something was also going on. Make no mistake, something was up.

He saw trysts on unlighted stairways. He saw people coming to mutual understandings by a certain pressure of the hand and adulterous signals.

That is the way they did it; that is the way Benda and Marguerite had done it. His old hate was revived. He transferred his hate, but also his hope, to music. Through music he was to build a bridge to Daniel and Eleanore. He wanted to give them the advantage of his insight, his tricks, his experience, simply in order that he might be on hand when they committed the gruesome deed; so that he might not be cut off from them by an impenetrable wall and be tortured in consequence by an incorporeal jealousy; he wanted to be one with them, to feast his eye and reach forth his empty, senescent hand.

"I am," he said to himself, "of the same flesh and blood as that man; in me too there is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I have, to be sure," he said to himself, "despised women, for they are despicable. But let some woman come forward and show me that she is fit for anything more than to increase by two or three the number of idiots with which the world is already overcrowded, and I will do penance, whole and complete, and then offer her my services as a knight."