She could not tell why, but she was suddenly seized with anxiety for Daniel; for him and for no one else. She felt that unless she went back something dreadful would happen to him. She rushed up the steps to the attic room, and knocked at his door; there was not a sound. She opened the door and went in, but everything was dark. In the darkness, however, standing out against the white background from the light of the snow, she saw his body. He was sitting at the piano; he had his arms on the lid, his head between his hands. Eleanore hastened up to him, and, with a tone of sweet sadness in what she said, threw her arms around his neck.
Daniel took her on his lap, pressed her head to his bosom, and laughed with open month and shining teeth but without making a sound. He often laughed that way now.
XIII
He laughed that way at the intrigues that were being forged against him by his bitterest enemy, Fräulein Varini, and which resulted in his meeting with distrust and opposition in everything he undertook at the City Theatre.
He laughed that way at the anonymous letters, filled with insulting remarks, which were being sent him by his fellow citizens, and which he read with naïve curiosity merely to see how far human nastiness and bestial hate could go.
He laughed that way when he received the letter from Baroness von Auffenberg informing him that she was forced to discontinue her lessons and recitals. She said that her constitution had been weakened, and that she was going to close her town house and spend the winter at her country place at Hersbruck. Daniel heard however that she spent a great deal of her time in town, and that she had arranged for an elaborate cycle of musicales, a thing she had never dared to do under his administration. Andreas Döderlein had been engaged as her musical adviser: now she could rave and go into ecstasies and hypnotise her impotent soul in the mephitic air of artificial aroma just as much as she pleased.
And he laughed that way at the weekly attacks upon him and his art that appeared in the Fränkischer Herold, copies of which were delivered at his front door with the regularity of the sun. The attacks consisted of sly, caustic sneers, secrets that had been ferreted out with dog-like keenness, gigantic broadsides based on hearsay evidence, and perfidious suspicions lodged against Daniel Nothafft, the artist, and Daniel Nothafft, the man.
The articles never failed to mention the Goose Man. Daniel asked to have the allusion explained. The Goose Man was elevated to the rank and dignity of an original humourist. “What is the latest concerning the Goose Man?” became a standing head-line. Or the reader’s eye would fall on the following notice: “The Goose Man is again attracting the attention of all friends of music. He has had the ingenious audacity to make the opera ‘Stradella’ more enjoyable by the interpolation of a funeral march of his own make. The ever-submissive domestic birds which he carries under his arms have rewarded him for his efforts in this connection by the cackling of their abundant and affectionate gratitude.”
The birthplace of these inimitable achievements in the field of journalistic wit was the reserved table at the Crocodile. If ever in the history of the world men have laughed real honest tears it was at the writing of such news bearing on the life and conduct of the Goose Man. The editor-in-chief, Weibezahl, was the recording secretary at these intellectual Olympiads, and Herr Carovius was the protagonist. He had access to reliable sources, as newspaper men say, and every evening he surprised the round table with new delicacies for Weibezahl’s columns.
Daniel was ignorant of what was going on. But the Goose Man, the expression as well as the figure, became interwoven with his thoughts, and acquired, somehow and somewhere in the course of time, a transfigured meaning.