The Goose Man. Jakob Wassermann

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СКАЧАТЬ to find out who it was. Perhaps it was the man who had been with her the night before; perhaps it was another.

      She had neither curiosity nor hope. Her soul had dissolved like a piece of salt in water. When she returned home on the third day she found Zephyr lying by the coal-scuttle dead. She knelt down, touched the cold fur, wrinkled her brow, shook her bracelet, and went out.

      It was getting along toward night, and the air was heavy with mist. She went first through lighted streets, and then turned into others that were not lighted. She passed through avenues of leafless trees, and walked across silent squares. The snow made walking difficult. When it was too deep, she was obliged to stop every now and then and take a deep breath.

      She reached the river at a point where the shore was quite flat and the water shallow. Without thinking for a moment, without a moment’s hesitation, just as if she were blind, or as if she saw a bridge where there was none, she walked in.

      First she felt the water trickling into her shoes. Then she could feel her legs getting wet, as her clothes, soft, slippery, and ice-cold, clung to her body. Now her breast was under the water, and now her neck. She sank down, glided away, took one deep breath, smiled, and as she smiled she lost consciousness.

      The next day her body was washed up on the shore some distance beyond the city. It was taken to the morgue of the Rochus Cemetery.

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      Schwalbe, the sculptor, was attending a funeral. His nephew had died, and was being buried in the same cemetery.

      As he passed by the morgue he caught sight of the body of a girl. After the child had been buried he went back to the morgue. A few people were standing near the body, one of whom said, “She was a singer down at the Academy.”

      Schwalbe was struck by the pure and beautiful expression on the girl’s face. He studied it long and with no little emotion. Then he went to the superintendent, and asked if he might take a death mask. The permission was given him, and in a few hours he returned with the necessary implements.

      When he removed the mask from the face, he held something truly wonderful in his hands. It showed the features of a sixteen-year-old girl, a face full at once of sweetness and melancholy, and, most charming of all, an angelic smile on the curved lips of this mouth of sorrow. It resembled the work of a renowned artist, so much so that the sculptor was suddenly seized with a burning desire to regain his lost art.

      He was nevertheless obliged within a week to sell the mask to the caster by whom he was employed in Pfannenschmied Street. Schwalbe needed ready money. The caster hung the mask by the door at the entrance to his shop.

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      At the end of December Daniel found himself with not a cent of cash, so that he was obliged to sell his sole remaining treasure, the score of the Bach mass in B-minor. Spindler had presented it to him when he left, and now he had to take it to the second-hand dealer and part with it for a mere pittance.

      Unless he cared to lie in bed the whole day, he was obliged to walk the streets in order to keep warm. His poverty made it out of the question for him to go to any of the cafés, and so he was excluded from association with the brethren of the Vale of Tears. He had moreover taken a violent dislike to them.

      One evening he was standing out in front of the Church of Ægydius, listening to the organ that some one was playing. The icy wind blew through his thin clothing. When the concert was over he went down to the square, and leaned up against the wall of one of the houses. He was tremendously lonesome; he was lonely beyond words.

      Just then two men came along who wished to enter the very house against the wall of which he leaned. He was cold. One of these men was Benjamin Dorn, the other was Jordan. Benjamin Dorn spoke to him; Jordan stood by in silence, apparently quite appreciative of the condition in which the young man found himself, as he stood there in the cold and made unfriendly replies to the questions that were put to him. Jordan invited Daniel up to his room. Daniel, chilled to the very marrow of his bones, and able to visualise nothing but a warm stove, accepted the invitation.

      Thus Daniel came in contact with Jordan’s family. He had three children: Gertrude, aged nineteen, Eleanore, aged sixteen, and Benno, fifteen years old and still a student at the gymnasium. His wife was dead.

      Gertrude was said to be a pietist. She went to church every day, and had an inclination toward the Catholic religion, a fact which gave Jordan, as an inveterate Protestant, no little worry. During the day she looked after the house; but as soon as she had everything in order, she would take her place by the quilting frame and work on crowns of thorns, hearts run through with swords, and languishing angels for a mission. There she would sit, hour after hour, with bowed head and knit.

      The first time Daniel saw her she had on a Nile green dress, fastened about her hips with a girdle of scales, while her wavy brown hair hung loose over her shoulders. It was in this make-up that he always saw her when he thought of her years after: Nile green dress, bowed head, sitting at the quilting frame, and quite unaware of his presence, a picture of unamiability, conscious or affected.

      Eleanore was entirely different. She was like a lamp carried through a dark room.

      For some time she had been employed in the offices of the Prudentia, for she wished to make her own living. So far as it was humanly possible to determine from her casual remarks, she thoroughly enjoyed her work. She liked to make out receipts for premiums, lick stamps, copy letters, and see so many people come in and go out. Stout old Diruf and lanky Zittel did everything they could to keep her interested, and if, despite their efforts, it was seen that a morose mood was invading her otherwise cheerful disposition, they took her out to the merry-go-round, and in a short time her wonted buoyancy had returned.

      She seemed like a child, and yet she was every inch a woman. She insisted on wearing her little felt cap at a jaunty angle on her blond hair. When she entered the room, the atmosphere in it underwent a change; it was easier to breathe; it was fresher. People somehow disapproved of the fact that her eyes were so radiantly blue, and that her two rows of perfect white teeth were constantly shining from out between her soft, peach-like lips. They said she was light-hearted; they said she was a butterfly. Benjamin Dorn was of the opinion that she was a creature possessed of the devil of sensuality and finding her completest satisfaction in earthly finery and frippery. For some time there had been an affair of an intimate nature between her and Baron von Auffenberg. Just what it was no one knew precisely; the facts were not obtainable. But Benjamin Dorn, experienced ferreter that he was, could not see two people of different sexes together without imagining that he was an accomplice in the hereditary sin of human kind. And one day he caught Eleanore alone in the company of Baron von Auffenberg. From that day on she was, in his estimation, a lost soul.

      The fact concerning Eleanore was this: life never came very close to her. It comes right up to other people, strangles them, or drags them along with it. It kept its distance from Eleanore, for she lived in a glass case. If she had sorrow of any kind, if some painfully indeterminable sensation was gnawing at her soul, if the vulgarity and banality of a base and disjointed world came her way, the glass case in which she lived simply became more spacious than ever, and the things or thoughts that swarmed around it more and more incomprehensible.

      One can always laugh СКАЧАТЬ