The Goose Man

by Jakob Wassermann

Since the day Eleanore had disentangled the cord of his nose glasses from the button 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 documents of the incautious young Baron.

Then it was that he discovered the letter. What words! And oh, the passion! 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 nobility, 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 passion 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 lusts. 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 lusts 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 étude, 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 Ægydius 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.