The Goose Man Part 51

Daniel stopped, stood perfectly still, and looked at her in a mood of solicitous reflection.

IV

During a rehearsal of "Traviata," Daniel flew into a rage at Fraulein Varini: "Listen, pay attention to your intonation, and keep in time.

It's enough to make a man lose his mind! What are you squeaking up at the gallery for? You're supposed to be singing a song, and not whining for a little bit of cheap applause."

The lady stepped out to the foot-lights with heaving bosom. Her offended dignity created something like the spread tail of a peac.o.c.k about her hips: "How dare you?" she exclaimed: "I give you your choice: You can apologise or leave this place. Whatever you do, you are going to become acquainted with the power I have."

Daniel folded his arms, let his eyes roam over the members of the orchestra, and said: "Good-bye, gentlemen. Since it is the director's place to choose between me and this lady, there is no doubt whatever but that my term of usefulness in this position is up. And moreover, in an inst.i.tution where meat is more valuable than music, I feel that I am quite superfluous."

The other singers had come running out from the wings, and were standing crowded together on the stage looking down at the orchestra.

When Daniel laid down his baton and walked away, every member of the orchestra rose as one man to his feet. It was a voluntary and almost overwhelming expression of speechless admiration. Though they had never loved this man, though they had regarded him as an evil, alien kill-joy, who interfered with their easy-going habits as musicians in that town, they nevertheless respected his energy, admired the n.o.bility of his intentions, and at least had a vague idea of his genius.

Fraulein Varini went into hysterics. The director was called in. He promised Fraulein Varini immediate redress, and wrote a letter to Daniel requesting that he offer an apology.

Daniel replied in a brief note that he had no thought of changing his plans as announced when he left the building. He remarked that it was quite impossible for him to get along with Fraulein Varini, that either he or she would have to quit, and that since she intended to remain he must consider his resignation as submitted and accepted.

That evening, as he was sitting at the table with Eleanore, he told her, after a long silence and in very few words, what had happened. Her response to him was a look of astonishment; that was all.

"Oh, it was the only thing I could do," said Daniel, without looking up from his plate; "I was so heartily sick of the whole business."

"What are you going to live on, you and your child?" asked Eleanore.

His eye became even darker and harsher: "You know, G.o.d who makes the lilies grow in the fields ... I can't quote that old proverb exactly, my familiarity with the Bible is nothing to boast of."

That was all they said. The window was open; there was a mysterious pulsing in the earth; the warm air had a disagreeable taste, somewhat like that of sweet oil.

When the clock in the tower struck ten, Eleanore got up and said good-night.

"Good-night!" replied Daniel, with bowed head.

V

That is the way it was now every evening between the two; for during the day they scarcely saw each other.

Daniel would sit perfectly still for hours at a time and brood.

He could not forget. He could not forget the burning, smoking border of the dress; nor the shoes that had some street mud on them; nor the face with the pinched upper lip, the dishevelled hair, the nervously knitted brow.

Under the linen in the clothes press he had found the silver buckle he had given her. "Why did she hide it there?" he asked himself. The condition of her soul when she opened the press and put the buckle in it became vivid, real; it became blended with his own soul, a part of his own being.

Then he discovered the harp without the strings. He took it to his room; and when he looked at it, he had the feeling that he was looking at a face without flesh.

"Am I too melancholy, too heavy for you?" This was the question that came to him from the irrevocable past. And that other statement: "I will be your mother made young again." And that other one, too: "I, too, am a living creature."

He recalled some old letters she had written him and which he had carefully preserved. He read them over with the care and caution he would have exercised in studying an agreement, the disregard or fulfilment of which was a matter of life and death. And there were bits of old embroidery from her girlhood which he acquired in order to lock them up and keep them as if they were sacred relics.

She stood out in his mind and his soul more vividly with each pa.s.sing hour. If he remembered how she sat and listened when he played or discussed his works, he felt something clutching at his throat. He recalled how she crept up to him once and pressed her forehead against his lips: this picture was enshrouded in the awe of an unfathomable mystery.

It was not a sense of guilt that bound him to his deceased wife. Nor was it contrition or self-reproach or the longing that finds expression in the realisation of acc.u.mulated neglect. His fancy warded off all thought of death; in its creative defiance it invested the dead woman with a reality she never possessed while making her pilgrimage in bodily form over this earth.

It was not until now that she really took on form and shape for Daniel.

And this is the marvellous and the criminal feature of the musician.

Things and people are not his while they are his. He lives with shadows; it is only what he has lost that is his in living form. Dissociated from the moment, he reaches out for the moment that is gone; he longs for yesterday and storms to-morrow with una.s.similative impatience. What he has in his hands is withered; what lies behind him is in flower. His thinking is a winter between two springs: the true one that is gone, and the one that is to come of which he dreams, but when it arrives he fails to take it to himself. He does not see; he has seen. He does not love; he has loved. He is not happy; he was happy. Dead, lifeless eyes open in the grave; and the living eyes that look into the grave, see all things, understand all things, and glorify all things, feel as if they are being deceived by death and its duration throughout eternity.

Gertrude was transformed into a melody; everything she had done or said was a melody. Her silence was awakened, her mute hours were made eloquent. Once he had seen her and Eleanore, the one in a brown dress, the other in a blue, minor and major, the two poles of his universe. Now the major arose like the night, spread out over the lonely earth, and enveloped all things in mourning. Grief fed on pictures that had once been daily, commonplace occurrences, but which were illumined at present by the brightness of visions.

He saw her as she lay in bed with the two braids of hair on either side of her face, her face itself looking like a wax figure in an old black frame. He could see her as she carried a dish into the room, threaded a needle, put a gla.s.s to her lips to drink, or laced up her shoe. He could see the expression in her eye when she cautioned, besought, was amazed, or smiled. How incomparably star-like this eye had all of a sudden become! It was always lifted up, always bright with inner meaning, always fixed on him. In the vision of this eye he found one evening along toward sunset the motif of a sonata in B minor. A gesture he remembered-it was the time Eleanore stood before the mirror with the myrtle wreath on her head-gave the impulse to the stirring _presto_ in the first movement of a quartette. The twenty-second Psalm, beginning "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" he sketched on awakening from a dream in which Gertrude had appeared before him in perfect repose, as pale as death, her chin resting on her hand.

But it could not be said that he worked. The music he wrote under these conditions simply gushed forth, so to speak, during fits of fever. When the mood came over him, he would scribble the notes on whatever lay nearest him; his haste seemed to betray a sense of guilt. He stole from himself; tones appealed to him as so many crimes. When the gripping melody of the twenty-second Psalm arose in his mind, he trembled from head to foot, and left the house as if lashed by Furies, though it was in the dead of night. The recurring ba.s.s figure of the _presto_ sounded to him as though it were a gruesome, awed voice stammering out the fatal words: "Man, hold your breath, Man, hold your breath!" And he did hold his breath, full of unresting discomfort, while his inspiration hacked its way through the ice-locked region into which a pa.s.sionate spell that was becoming more and more a part of his nature had driven it.

He saw humanity forsaking him; he watched the waves of isolation widening and deepening around him. Since he felt that time did not challenge him to effort of any kind, he took to despising time. It came to the point where he regarded his creations as something that never were intended for the world; he never spoke about them or cherished the remotest desire that men hear of them. The more completely he kept them in secret hiding, the more real they appeared to him. The thought that a man could write a piece of music and sell it for money appealed to him as on a par with the thought of disposing for so much cash of his mother or his sweetheart, of his child or one of his own limbs.

He came on this account to cherish a feeling of superb disgust for shrewd dealers who were carried along on the wings of fashion. He took a dislike to anything that was famous; for fame smelled of and tasted to him like money. He shuddered at the mere thought of the chaos that arises from opinions and judgments; the disputes as to the merits of different schools and tendencies made him ill; he could not stand the perambulating virtuosos of all zones and nations, the feathers they manage to make fly, the noise they evoke, the truths they proclaim, the lies they wade about in and make a splash. He stood aghast at the mention of a concert hall or a theatre; he flew into a reasoned rage when he heard a neighbour playing a piano; he despised the false devotion of the ma.s.ses, and scorned their impotent, imbecile transports.

All their music smelled of and tasted to him like money.

He had bought the biographies of the great masters. From them he familiarised himself with their distress and poverty; he read of the petty att.i.tudes and fatuous mediocrity that stood deaf and dumb in the presence of immortal genius. But one day he chanced to read that Mozart's body had been buried in a pauper's grave. He hurled the book from him with an oath that he would never again touch a work of that sort. The mordant smoke of misanthropy blew into the fire of idolisation; he did not wish to see any one; he left the city, and found peace only after he had reached a lonely, unfrequented place in the forest, where he felt he was out of the reach of human feet and safe from the eyes of men.

At night he would walk rapidly through the streets; his head was always bowed. If he became tired, he betook himself to some unknown cafe where he was sure he would not meet any of his acquaintances. If some one whom he knew met him on the street, he did not speak; if any one spoke to him, he was blatant and bizarre in his replies, and hastened off as rapidly as he could, with some caustic bit of intended wit on his loosened tongue.

To enter the room where Philippina and the child were required much effort; at first he was able to do it only with p.r.o.nounced aversion.

Later he came somehow to be touched by the form and actions of the child: he would come in a few times each day for a minute or two only, take it up in his arms, have it poke its tiny hands into his face or even jerk at his nose gla.s.ses; he listened with undivided interest to its baby talk. Philippina would stand in the corner in the meanwhile, with her eyes on the floor and her mouth closed. He became painfully aware of his obligations to her because of her inexplicable fidelity to him, and knew that he would never be able to reward her for her unique and faithful a.s.sistance. He was grieved at the same time to see the child so motherless, so utterly without the attention that enn.o.bles. The child's bright eyes, its outstretched arms hurt him: he feared the feelings slumbering even then in its breast, and was driven away by the thought of what might happen in the future.

One morning in August he arose with the sun, went to the kitchen and got his own breakfast, took his walking stick, and left the house. He wanted to go to Eschenbach on foot.

He walked the entire day, making only very short stops for rest. At noon the heat became intense; he asked a peasant, who chanced to drive up in his hay wagon, if he might ride a little. He had no definite end in view, no plan. Something drew him on; what it was he did not know.

When he finally reached the little town it was late at night; the moon was shining. There was not a soul on the street. The windows of his mother's house were all dark. He climbed up the steps, and sat down as close to the front door as was physically possible. He imagined he could hear his mother and the child she had in her care breathing.

It seemed so strange to him that his mother knew nothing of his presence. If she had known he was there, she would have unlocked the door and looked at him in astonishment. And if he had not felt like talking, he would have been obliged to lay his head in her lap and weep.

Nothing else was possible; he could not speak. And yet the fear lest he talk, lest he be forced to tell everything, took such firm hold on him that he decided to start back home without letting his mother know that he had been there and without having seen either her or the child. The peculiar restlessness that had driven him away from his home and impelled him to go on this unusual journey was silenced as soon as he sat in the shadow of his mother's little house.

But he was so tired that he soon fell asleep. He dreamed that the child and the old lady were standing before him, that the former had a great bunch of grapes in her hand and the latter a shovel and was shovelling up the earth, her face revealing a soul of sorrows. Eva seemed to him to be much more beautiful than she had been a year ago; he felt drawn to the child by an uncontrollable power and a painful love that stood in a most unusual relation to what his mother was doing. The longer his mother shovelled in the earth the heavier his heart became, but he could not say anything; he felt as if a glorious song were pouring forth from his soul, a song such as he had never heard in his life. Enraptured by its beauty, he woke up. At first he thought he could still hear it, but it was only the splashing of the water in the Wolfram fountain.

The moon was high in the heavens. Daniel went over to the fountain just as the night watchman came along, blew his trumpet and sang: "Listen, all men, I wish to tell that it has struck two from the town-hall bell."

The watchman noticed the lonely man standing by the fountain, was startled at first, but then continued on his rounds, repeating from time to time the words of his official song.

Often as a child Daniel had read the inscription on the base of the Wolfram figure. Now he read the words, irradiated by the light of the moon, and they had a totally different meaning:

Water gives to the trees their life, And makes with fertile vigour rife All creatures of the world.

By water all our eyes are purled; It washes clean man's very soul And makes it like an angel, whole.

Simple words, but Daniel read them in the light of a full experience, dipped his hands in the basin, and rubbed them over his eyes drunk with sleep; then casting one more glance at his mother's house, he turned in the direction of the road leading away from the town.

Out in the fields it was too damp for him to lie down to rest. Near an isolated farm house he found a hay rick, went up to it, and lay down.