The Goose Man. Jakob Wassermann
Читать онлайн книгу.
really he did not like the boy. “Our excellent Gottfried does not seem to have trained him carefully,” he remarked once, when Daniel showed some childish recalcitrance. “The boy needs a strong hand.”
Daniel heard these words, and looked scornfully into his uncle’s face.
Sunday afternoon, when the coffee had been served, the Schimmelweis couple was ready to leave. But Daniel was not to be found. The wife of the inn-keeper called out across the road that she had seen him follow the organist to church. Marian ran to the church to fetch him. After a while she returned, and said to Jason Philip, who was waiting: “He’s crouching in the organ loft, and I can’t get him to move.”
“Can’t get him to move?” Jason Philip started up, and his little red cheeks gleamed with rage. “What does that mean? How can you tolerate that?” And he himself proceeded to the church to get the disobedient child.
As he was mounting the organ-loft he met the organist, who laughed and said: “I suppose you’re looking for Daniel? He’s still staring at the organ, as though my bit of playing had bewitched him.”
“I’ll drive the witch-craft out of him,” Jason Philip snarled.
Daniel was crouching on the floor behind the organ, and did not stir at his uncle’s call. He was so absorbed that the expression of his eyes made his uncle wonder whether the boy was really sane. He grasped Daniel’s shoulder, and spoke in a tone of violent command: “Come home with me this minute!”
Daniel looked up, awoke from his dream, and became aware of the indignant hiss of that alien voice. He tore himself away, and declared insolently that he would stay where he was. That enraged Jason Philip utterly, and he tried again to lay hands on the boy in order to drag him down by force. Daniel leapt back, and cried with a quivering voice: “Don’t touch me!”
Perhaps it was the silence of the nave that had an admonishing and terrifying effect on Jason Philip. Perhaps the extraordinary malignity and passion in the little fellow’s face caused him to desist. At all events he turned around and went without another word.
“The stage-coach is waiting. We’ll be late!” his wife called out to him.
He turned a sinister face to Marian. “You’re bringing up a fine product, I must say. You’ll have your own troubles with him.”
Marian’s eyes fell. She was not unprepared for the reproach. She was herself frightened at the boy’s savage obduracy, his self-centred insistence on his imaginings, his hardness and impatience and contempt of all restraint. It seemed to her as though fate had inspired the soul of her child with something of the foolish and torturing hatred which she had nursed during her pregnancy.
V
Jason Philip Schimmelweis left the dark basement on the square, rented a shop near the bridge by the museum, and set up as a bookseller. Thus his old ambition was realised at last.
He hired a shop-assistant, and Theresa sat all day at the till and learned to keep books.
When she asked her husband what was the source of his capital, he answered that a friend who had great confidence in his ability had advanced him the money at a low rate of interest. He added that he had been pledged not to divulge the name of his friend.
Theresa did not believe him. Her mind was full of dark forebodings. She brooded incessantly and grew to be watchful and suspicious. In secret she tried to ferret out the identity of this nameless friend, but came upon no trace. Now and then she tried to cross-question Jason Philip. On such occasions he would snarl at her malignantly. There was no talk of the return of the money or of the payment of interest on it, nor did the books show an entry of any sort. To rid herself of the anxieties that accompanied her through the years, it would have been necessary for Theresa to believe in helpful fairies. And she did not believe in them.
Nature had given her neither gaiety nor gentleness; under the pressure of this insoluble mystery she became ill-tempered as a wife and moody as a mother.
When there were no customers in the shop she would pick up books quite at random and read in them. Sometimes it was a novel dealing with crime, sometimes a garrulous tract dealing with secret vices. Such things were needed to attract a public that regarded the buying of books as a sinful waste. Without special pleasure, and with a morose sort of thirst for information, she read revelations of court life and the printed betrayals of all kinds of spies, adventurers, and rogues. Quite unconsciously she came to judge the world to which she had no real access according to these books which offered her as truth the issues of sick and pestilential minds.
But as the years went on, and prosperity raised Jason Philip definitely into the merchant class, he abandoned the shadier side of his business. He was a man who knew his age and who unfurled his sails when he was sure of a favourable wind. He entrusted his ship more and more to the ever swelling current of the political parties of the proletariat, and hoped to find his profit where, in a half-hearted way, his convictions lay. He exhibited a rebel’s front to the middle-classes, and held out a hand of unctuous fellowship to the toiler. He knew how to make his way! Many an insignificant shop-keeper had been known to exchange his musty rooms for a villa in the suburbs, to furnish it pretentiously, and to send his sons on trips abroad.
In these days, too, the old imperial city awoke from its romantic slumber. Once the sublime churches, the lovely curves of the bridges, and the quaint gables of the houses had formed an artistic whole. Now they became mere remnants. Castle and walls and mighty towers were ruins of an age of dreams now fortunately past. Iron rails were laid on the streets and rusty chains with strangely shaped lanterns were removed from the opening of narrow streets. Factories and smoke-stacks surrounded the venerable and picturesque city as an iron frame might surround the work of some old master.
“Modern man has got to have light and air,” said Jason Philip Schimmelweis, and clinked the coins in his trousers pocket.
VI
Daniel attended the gymnasium at Ansbach. He was to complete the course of studies that would entitle him to the reduction of his military service to one year and then enter business. This had been agreed upon between Jason Philip and Marian.
The boy’s zeal for study was small. His teachers shook their heads. Their considerable experience of the world had never yet offered them a being so constituted. He listened more eagerly to the lowing of a herd of cows and to the twittering of the sparrows than to the best founded principles of grammatical science. Some of them thought him dull, others malicious. He passed from class to class with difficulty and solely by virtue of a marvellous faculty of guessing. At especially critical moments he was saved through the help and advocacy of the music-master Spindler.
The families who gave the poor student his meals complained of his bad manners. The wife of Judge Hahn forbade him the house on account of his boorish answers. “Beggars must not be choosers,” she had called out after him.
Spindler was a man who asserted quite correctly that he had been meant for better things than wearing himself out in a provincial town. His white locks framed a face ennobled by the melancholy that speaks of lost ideals and illusions.
One summer morning Spindler had risen with the sun and gone for a long walk in the country. When he reached the first barn of the village of Dautenwinden he saw a company of strolling musicians, who had played dance music the evening before and far into the night, and who were now shaking from their hair and garments the straw and chaff amid which they had slept. Above them, under the open gable of the barn, Daniel Nothafft was lying in the straw. With an absorbed and devout expression he was seeking to elicit a melody from a flute which one of the musicians had loaned him.