The Goose Man Part 57

While Daniel was alone with Eleanore for a few minutes, he asked her in an indignant tone: "How did you ever come to get that vicious woman?"

Eleanore replied in a gentle and unsuspecting tone: "She came to me one day, and asked to be called in when the child was born. She said she was awfully fond of you, and that you had once lived in her house. Well, I thought, what difference does it make who comes, so I engaged her, and there she is."

It was only with the greatest difficulty that she finished saying what was on her mind. Her face, white as a sheet, was pinched with an expression of terrific pain. She reached for Daniel's hand, and held it so tightly that he became rigid with anxiety.

When she began to groan, Daniel turned away and pressed his fists together. Frau Hadebusch came in with a tub of hot water: "This is no place for men," she exclaimed with a kindly twisting of her face, took Daniel by the shoulder, and pushed him out the door.

Little Agnes was standing in the hall. "Father," she said.

"Put that child to bed!" said Daniel, turning to Philippina.

Jordan came out of the kitchen. He held an earthen bowl of soup in his hand. It had been saved for him, and all he had to do was to hold it over the fire and heat it up. He went up to Daniel, and said, as his chin quivered: "May G.o.d protect her, and be merciful to her!"

"Quit that kind of talk, Father," said Daniel impatiently. "G.o.d rules with reservations that make me insane."

"Won't you say good-night to little Agnes?" asked Philippina in a rude, rough tone from the other room.

He went in; the child looked at him timidly. The more it grew, the greater his own shyness became in its presence. And the constant a.s.sociation of Eleanore with the child had always been a source of worry to him. There was one thing of which he was mortally certain: he could not see Eleanore in bodily form and precisely as she was, when Agnes, with her Gertrude eyes and her arched Eleanore mouth, was present in the room with Eleanore. He felt that Eleanore had been transformed into the sister of Agnes, that she was still only a sister. And this he felt was something fatal.

Both of the sisters looked at him out of Agnes's big childish eyes; in her they were both melted and moulded into a single being. A presageful horror crept over him. Sisters! The word had a solemn sound in his ears; it seemed full of mysterious meaning; it took on mythical greatness.

"Sleep, baby, sleep, outside are two sheep, a black one and a white one ..." sang Philippina in her imbecile way. It was astonis.h.i.+ng the amount of malevolence there was in her sing-song.

Daniel could not stand it in the house; he went out on the street, and wandered around until midnight. If he made up his mind to go home, the thought occurred to him at once that Frau Hadebusch would prevent him from going into Eleanore's room. He felt like lying down on the pavement and waiting until some one came and told him how Eleanore was getting along.

XVIII

It struck one just as he came home. The maid from the first floor and the maid from the second were standing on the stairs. They had not been able to sleep; they had heard the cries of the young woman from their rooms, had come out, joined each other, listened, trembled, and whispered.

Daniel heard one of them say: "The Kapellmeister should send for the doctor."

The other sobbed and replied: "Yes, but a doctor can't work miracles."

"Lord, Lord," they cried, as a nerve-racking cry from Eleanore rang through the bleak house.

Daniel sprang up the steps. "Run for Dr. Muller just as fast as your feet can carry you," said Daniel to Philippina, who was then standing in the kitchen in her bare feet with her hair hanging down her back. Daniel was breathing heavily; Philippina was making some tea. Daniel then hastened into Eleanore's room; Frau Hadebusch tried to keep him out, but he pushed her to one side, gritted his teeth, and threw himself on the floor by Eleanore's bed.

She raised her head; she was a pale as death; the perspiration was pouring down over her face. "You shouldn't be here, Daniel, you shouldn't see me," she said with much effort, but her tone was so commanding and final that Daniel got up and slowly left the room. He was seized with a strange, violent anger. He went out into the kitchen and drank a gla.s.s of water, and then hurled the gla.s.s on the floor: it broke into a hundred pieces.

Frau Hadebusch had followed him; she looked very much discouraged. When he noticed the frame of mind she was in, he became dizzy; he had to sit down in order to keep from falling. "Ah, the doctor will come," he said in a brusque tone.

"My G.o.d, it makes you sick at the stomach to see how women suffer to-day," said the old lady in her shrillest, one-tooth voice; it was quite plain that she was pleased to know that the doctor was coming. The present case had got her into serious trouble, and she wanted to get out of it. "The devil to these women who are so delicately built," she had said about an hour ago to the grinning Philippina.

Philippina came back with the announcement that Dr. Muller was on a vacation: "Well, is he the only physician in the city, you dumb ox?"

howled Daniel, "go get Dr. Dingolfinger; he lives here close by: right over there by the Peller House. But wait a minute! You stay here; I'll go get him."

Dr. Dingolfinger was a Jewish physician, a rather old man, and Daniel had to ring and ring to get him out of his bed. But finally he heard the bell, got up, and followed Daniel across the square. Daniel had left the lantern burning at the front gate, and with it he lighted the doctor through the court and up the stairs.

Then he sat down on the bench in the kitchen; how long he sat there he did not know; he bent his body forward and buried his head in his hands.

The screams became worse and worse: they were no longer the cries of Eleanore but of some unsouled, dehumanised being. Daniel heard them all; he could think of nothing, he could feel nothing but that voice. At times the terrible cry ran through his heart: Sisters! Sisters!

Frau Hadebusch came out several times to get hot water. The yellow tooth in her lower jaw stuck out like a cracked, lecherous remainder and reminder of her past life. Once Dr. Dingolfinger himself came out, rummaged around in his leather case, which he had left in the hall, looked at Daniel, and said: "It is going to come out all right; it will all be over in a short while." At that Philippina poked at the fire, and put on fresh coals. She looked at Daniel out of one corner of her eye, and went on her way. From time to time old Jordan rapped on the wall to have Philippina come up and tell him how things were going.

It must have been about four o'clock in the morning; the gloomy, grey stones in the walls of the court yard were already being covered with rosy tints from the East. There was a cry so fearful, so like that of a voice from the wilds of the heart, that Daniel sprang to his feet and stood trembling in every limb.

Then it became quiet, mysteriously, uncannily quiet.

XIX

He sat down again; after a while his eyes closed, and he fell asleep.

He must have slept about half an hour when he was wakened by the sound of footsteps.

Standing around him were the physician, Frau Hadebusch, and Philippina.

The doctor said something at which Daniel shook his head. It sounded like: "Unfortunately I cannot keep the sad news from you." Daniel did not understand him; he drew his lips apart, and thought: "The idea of dreaming such disordered stuff!"

"Mother and child are both dead," said the old physician, with tears in his eyes. "Both dead. It was a boy. Science was powerless; nature was hostile and the stronger of the two."

"So delicately built," murmured Frau Hadebusch, in a tone of disapproval, "as delicate as the stem of a plant."

When Daniel at last realised that he was not dreaming, that these were in bitter truth Philippina's glistening eyes and Frau Hadebusch's goatish tooth and Dr. Dingolfinger's silvery beard, and that these were actual words that were being spoken to him, he fell over and became unconscious.

XX

Pain, grief, despair, such terms do not describe his condition.

He knew nothing about himself; he had no thoughts; he lay on the sofa in the living room day and night, ate nothing, said nothing, and never moved.

When they carried the empty coffin into the death chamber, he burrowed his face into the corner of the sofa. Old Jordan tottered through the room to take a last look at his dead daughter. "He has sinned," Jordan sobbed, "sinned against G.o.d in Heaven."

In the hall some people were whispering. Martha Rubsam and her husband had come in. Martha was crying. Her slender figure with her pale face appeared in the doorway; she looked around for Daniel.

"Don't you want to see your Eleanore before the coffin is closed?" asked Philippina in a hollow voice.

He never moved; the twitchings of his face were terrible to behold.

Beside him on the table was some cold food; also some bread and apples.

They carried the coffin out. He felt that where his heart once was there was now a dark, empty s.p.a.ce. The church bell rang, the rain splashed against the window panes.

During the second night he felt his soul suddenly become incoherent, lax. This was followed by a brief flaring up within him, whereupon his eyes were filled with hot, burning tears. He resigned himself to the situation without audible display of grief; he felt all of a sudden that he had now for the first time in his life really sensed the beauty of the pure triad in the major key.

Another day pa.s.sed by. He could hear old Jordan walking about in the room above him, ceaselessly and with heavy tread. He felt cold; Philippina came in; he asked her to get him a blanket. Philippina was most eager to be of service to him. The door bell rang; Philippina opened.

Before her stood a lady and a gentleman. There was something so refined about them that Philippina did not dare raise any objections when they quietly came in and went straight to the living room: the door had not been closed, and they could see Daniel lying on the sofa.