The Goose Man Part 54

"Come wind and blow my fire hot, so that my soup be not forgot,"

whispered Philippina with a gloomy face.

Eleanore left the kitchen and went upstairs. Her heart was full of longing; it was in truth almost bursting with longing.

XI

It was at the beginning of October that Daniel for the first time visited Eberhard in his doll house up by the castle.

They had met each other in the Peter Vischer on the evening agreed upon, but there was a special party there that evening, a sort of a clam-bake; the place was crowded; the noise was disagreeable, so that they left much earlier than they had intended.

They walked along in silence until they reached the Town Hall, when Eberhard said: "Won't you come up and sit awhile with me?" Daniel nodded.

Eberhard lighted the six candles of a chandelier in his diminutive room.

Seeing that Daniel was surprised, he said: "There is nothing I hate worse than gas or oil. That is light; gas and oil merely give off illuminated stench."

For a while there was complete silence in the room; Daniel had stretched out on the sofa.

"Illuminated stench," he repeated with a smile of satisfaction. "That is not bad; it is the new age in which we are living. I believe they call it _fin de siecle_. The day when things flourish is gone; everything has to be manufactured now. Men have become Americans, gruesomely sobered by the intoxication of doing a big business; women have lost their nicety of instinct; the cities have become colossal steam engines; everybody, young and old, is on his belly adoring the so-called wonders of science, just as if it really meant anything to humanity that a loafer in Paris can sip his morning coffee and crunch his rolls while reading that the Pope spent a restful night, or that a gun has been invented which will send a bullet through fourteen people one after another, whereas the best record up to the present had been only seven to a shot. Who can create anything, who can draw anything from his soul under such conditions? It is madness, it is immoral discipline."

"Oh, I don't know; I think a man can draw something from within his soul," said the Baron, in whose face a bored, peeved expression gave way to one of suspense. "It is possible, for example, to conjure the invisible spirit into visibility."

Daniel, who had not yet suspected that the Baron was, in a way, speaking from another country and in a strange tongue, continued: "The whole supply of interest and enthusiasm at the disposal of the nation has been used up. The venerable creations of days gone by still have nominal value; that is, they are still gaped at and praised, but creative, reproductive, and moulding power they no longer have. Otherwise hocus-pocus alone prospers, and he who does forgive it is not forgiven.

But life is short; I feel it every day; and if you do not attend to the plant, it soon withers and dies."

"It is not only hocus-pocus," replied Eberhard, who was now completely transformed, though he did not grasp the painful indignation of the musician. "You see, I have a.s.sociated but very little with men. My refuge has been the realm of departed and invisible spirits who take on visible form only when a believing soul makes an unaffected appeal to them. It was my task to de-sensualise and de-materialise myself; then the spirits took on shape and form."

Daniel straightened up, and saw how pale the Baron had become. It seemed to him that they were both quite close together, and at the same time poles removed from each other. He could not refrain however from taking up the thread of his thought. "Yes, yes," he exclaimed with the same short, jerky laugh that accompanied the beginning of the conversation, "my little spirits also demand faith, credulity, and whine and cry for form and shape. You have expressed yourself in an admirable way, Baron."

"And have you given up in final resignation with regard to your spirits?" asked Eberhard, in a serious tone.

"Resignation? To what? Of what? Do you imagine that is necessary in my case? I am the counterpart of Cronos. My children devour me; they devour my living body. I conjure up spirits and endow them with flesh and blood, and in return for what I do they convert me into a shadow. They are rebellious fellows, I tell you, quite without mercy. I am supposed to arouse a citizenry on their behalf that is petrified with indifference. The very thing, or things, that offend and disgust me, I am supposed to take up and carry about on an unenc.u.mbered shoulder. I am supposed to be their prost.i.tute and offer them my body at a price. I am supposed to be their retail grocer and haggle in their behalf. There is something inspiring about a struggle, and when the enemy is worthy of one's steel there is a distinct pleasure in entering the fray. But my little spirits want to be pampered and have a lot of attention paid them. The hate, consequently, that is being dammed up within me is possibly nothing but rage at my fruitless wooing. No, mine is not an honest hate, because I long to get at every ragged beggar who will have nothing to do with my spirits, because my entire life consists in pleading for an audience with people who do not care to listen, and sc.r.a.ping together pennies of love from people who cannot love, because two or three are not enough for me, because I must have thousands and am nothing if I don't have thousands, and pine away in anguish and distress if I cannot imagine that the whole world is keeping step with my pace and keeping in time with the swing of my baton. I can despise Mushroom Mike who lies down by his wife at night drunk as a fool, and to whom the name of Beethoven is an empty sound; Jason Philip Schimmelweis makes me laugh when he looks me in the face and says, I don't give a d.a.m.n for all your art. And yet there is humanity in such people, and so long as this is true I must have them; I must convince them, even if my heart is torn from my breast in the attempt. Would you call this life? This digging-up of corpses from the graves, and breathing the breath of life into them so that they may dance? And doing it with the consciousness that this moment is the only one? I am; I exist; here is the table, there are the wax candles, and over there sits a man; and when I have stopped talking everything is different, everything is as if a year had pa.s.sed by, and everything is irrevocable. Show me a way to humanity, to men, and then I will believe in G.o.d."

The Baron's head swam; his brain felt close; it seemed to be sultry, stuffy in his skull. He could not help but think of certain exciting meetings where the people had sat in the dark in trembling expectancy and then suddenly heard a voice from beyond the tomb at the sound of which the marrow froze in their bones. He hardly dared look at the place where Daniel was sitting. The words of the musician caused him infinite pain: there lay in them a greediness, a shamelessness, and a gruesomeness that filled him with terror.

He could almost have asked: And Eleanore? And Eleanore?

But however much he felt repelled, owing to his training, a.s.sociation, and general views of life, there was nevertheless something about the whole situation before which he bowed. He could not have said precisely what it was, but it seemed to be a compromise between fear and convulsion.

As he was pondering over it all, he heard a rattling at the window. He looked up, and saw the face of Herr Carovius pressed so tightly against the pane that his nose was as flat as a pancake, while his gla.s.ses looked like two opalescent grease spots on the water.

Daniel also looked up; he too saw the face of Herr Carovius, then distorted with wrath and filled with threats. He looked at the Baron in amazement; the latter got up and said: "You will have to pardon the annoyance; I forgot to draw the blinds."

With that he went to the window, and pulled down the dark shade over the face of Herr Carovius.

XII

That same night, just as Daniel was crossing the hall of his apartment, he detected a strong scent of flowers. He had smelt them before, but they had never seemed to be so fragrant as at present. Because of the season of the year, the sensation was all the more p.r.o.nounced and unusual.

He sniffed around for a while, and then saw that the door to Eleanore's room was open: her light was s.h.i.+ning out on the stairs.

When Daniel was not at home of an evening, Eleanore always kept her door open so that she could hear when he came in. Daniel was unaware of this; he had never seen the light on any previous night.

He thought for a moment, then locked the door, and went up the stairs.

But Eleanore must have heard his approaching footsteps; for she stepped hastily out into the vestibule, and said with evident embarra.s.sment: "Please stay downstairs, Daniel; Father is asleep. If you wish I will come down to the living room."

She did not wait for his answer, but went into her room, got the table lamp, and followed Daniel to the living room. Daniel closed the window, and shook as if he were cold; for it was a cool night, and there was no fire in the stove.

"What is this I smell?" he asked. "Have you so many flowers up in your room?"

"Yes, I have some flowers," replied Eleanore, and blushed.

He looked at her rather sharply, but was disinclined to make any further inquiry, or he was not interested in knowing what this all meant. He walked around the room with his hands in his pockets.

Eleanore had sat down on a chair; she never once took her eyes off Daniel.

"Listen, Daniel," she said suddenly, and the violin tone of her voice lifted him from his mute and heavy meditations, "I know now what Father is doing."

"Well, what is the old man doing?" asked Daniel distractedly.

"He is working at a doll, Daniel."

"At a doll? Are you trying to poke fun at me?"

Eleanore, whose cheeks had turned pale, began to tell her story: "Yesterday afternoon, Father took advantage of the beautiful weather, and went on a walk for the first time in a long while. During his absence, I went to his room to straighten it up a little. I noticed that the door to the large cabinet was not closed as usual, but was standing ajar. He probably forgot to lock it. I did not suspect anything, and knew that there was no harm in what I was going to do, so I opened the door, and what did I see? A big doll, about the size of a four-year-old child, a wax figure with big eyes and long, yellow hair. But there were no clothes on it: the lower part of the back and the front from the neck to the legs had been removed. Inside, there where a person's heart and entrails are, was a network of wheels and screws and little tubes and wires, all made of real metal."

"That is strange, really strange. Well?"

"He is making something," continued Eleanore, "that much is clear. But if I could tell you how I felt when I saw the thing! I never felt so sad in my life. I have shown him so little love, just as Fate has been so unlovely to him. And everything-the air and the light and the people and how one feels towards the people and how they feel towards you, all seemed to me to be so hopelessly without love that I could not help it: I just sat down before that doll and cried. The poor man! The poor old man!"

"Strange, really strange," repeated Daniel.

After a while, as if conscious of his guilt, he took a seat by the table. Eleanore however got up, went to the window, and leaned her forehead against the gla.s.s.

"Come here to me, Eleanore," said Daniel in a changed tone of voice.

She came. He took her hand and looked into her face. "How in the world have you been keeping the house going all this time?" he asked, viewing the situation in the light of his guilty conscience.

Eleanore let her eyes fall to the floor. "I have done my writing, and I have had considerable success with the flowers. I have even been able to save a little money. Don't look at me like that, Daniel. It was nothing wonderful I did; you have no reason to feel especially grateful to me."

He drew her down on his knees, and threw his arms around her shoulders.

"You probably think I have forgotten you," he said sorrowfully, and looked up, "that I have forgotten my Eleanore. Forget my Eleanore? My spirit sister? No, no, dear heart, you have known for a long while that we have begun our common pilgrimage-for life, for death."

Eleanore lay in his arms; her face was perfectly white; her body was rigid; her eyes were closed.

Daniel kissed her eyes: "You must hold me, keep me, even when it seems that I have left you," he murmured.

Then he carried her in his arms through the door into his room.