Part 130

“The grass rises again, the desert conceals him,” said the stranger. He wore an old-fashioned suit, a droll sort of cap, and Hessian boots. “I ought to know him,” thought Daniel to himself, and began to meditate with cloudy mind.

“This is like murder, unheard-of murder,” cried Benda’s soul; “how can he bear it? What will he do?”

“What is there to do?” asked Daniel, expressing Benda’s silent thought in audible words, and looking askew, as he walked back and forth, at the stranger who went slowly through the room over to the window in the corner. “What can human fancy find reasonable or possible after all that has happened? Nothing! Merely pine away; pine away in insanity.”

“Oho,” said the stranger, “that is a trifle strong.”

“If he would only keep quiet,” thought Daniel, tortured. “I presume you know what has happened with the woman whom I called my wife,” he continued. “That I threw myself away on this vain, soulless spirit of a mirror is irrelevant. Greater men than I have walked into such nets and become entangled, ensnared. I have never cherished the delusion that I was immune to all the mockery of this earth. I believed, however, that I could scent out truth and falsehood, and differentiate the one from the other, just as the hand can tell by the feel the wet from the dry. But the connection of the one with the other, and the horrible necessity of this connection, I do not understand.”

“You have been served just right,” remarked the intruder with the Hessian boots. He had sat down on a chair in the corner, and looked quite friendly.

“Why?” roared Daniel, stopping.

Benda, astounded, rose to his feet. “Speak out, Daniel,” he said affectionately, “unburden your soul!”

“If I only could, Friedrich, if I only could! If my tongue would only move! Or if there were some one who felt with me and could speak for me!”

“Try it; the first word is often like a spark and starts a flame.”

Daniel was silent. The intruder said deliberatively: “That goes deep down to the recesses of the heart and up high to the things that are immortal.”

Daniel looked over at him sharply, and saw that it was the Goose Man.

All effort to get Daniel to talk was in vain. Along toward midnight, Benda took leave of him. Agnes unlocked the door for him; he said to her: “Look after him; he has no one else now.”

Daniel lay on the sofa with his hands crossed behind his head, and stared at the ceiling. His eyes were hot; at times he trembled and shook.

“It isn’t very sociable here,” said the Goose Man, “the air is full of tobacco smoke, and there is a draft coming in from that dark room.”

Daniel got up, closed the door, and lay down again.

The metallic exterior of the Goose Man seemed to become flexible, somewhat as when a frozen body thaws out. “You have gone through a great deal,” he continued thoughtfully. “That any one who wishes to create must also experience is clear. Experience is his mother’s milk, his realm of roots; it is where the saps flow together, from which his forms and figures are developed. But there is experience and experience, and between the two there is a world of difference.”

“Superfluous profundity,” murmured Daniel, plainly annoyed. “To live is to have experience.” He took council with himself in the attempt to devise a means by which he might get rid of the importunate chatterer.

The Goose Man again struck up his gentle laugh. He replied: “Many live, and yet do not live; suffer, and yet do not suffer. In what does guilt lie? What does it consist of? In not feeling; in not doing. The first thing for some men to do is to eradicate completely the false notions they have of what constitutes greatness. For what is greatness after all? It is nothing in the world but the fulfilment of an unending circle of petty duties, small obligations.”

“There is a fundamental difference between the creator and all other men,” remarked Daniel, at once excited and troubled by the conversation and the turn it was taking.

“Do you appeal to, depend on, refer to music in this present case?” asked the Goose Man, his good-natured look becoming more or less disdainful.

“In music every creation is more closely related to an unconditional exterior than is true of anything else that man gives to man,” answered Daniel. “The musical genius stands nearer God than any other genius.”

The Goose Man nodded. “But his fall begins one step from God’s throne, and is a high and deep one. Do you know what you are? And do you really know what you are not?”

Daniel pressed his hand to his heart: “Have you ever known me to fight for evanescent laurels? Have I ever tried to feed the human race, which is a race of minors, on surrogates? Have I ever imitated the flights of Heaven with St. Vitus dance, confusing the one with the other? Have I not always acted in accord with the best, the inmost knowledge I had, and in obedience to my conscience? Was I ever a liar?”

“No, no, no!” cried the Goose Man, by way of appeasing Daniel’s unrest. He took off his cap, and laid it on his knee. “You were always sincere. There can be no doubt about it, your heart was always in your profession. All life has streamed into your soul, and you have lived in the ivory tower. Your soul was well protected, well protected from the very beginning. It was in a position similar to that created by a swimmer who rubs his body with grease before plunging into the water. You have suffered; the poison of the Nessus shirt you have worn has burned your skin, and the pain you have thereby suffered has been transformed into sweet sounds. So they all are, the creators, invulnerable and inaccessible. That is the way you picture them to yourself. Is it not true? Monsters who take up the cross of the world, and yet, grief-laden though they be, grow beyond their own fate. Such is your lot; and so do you look to-day in your forty-second year.”

Daniel was not prepared for this tone of bitterness; he turned his face to the corner where the Goose Man was sitting. “I do not understand you,” he said slowly. The pitiable crying of little Gottfried could be heard from the room opening out on the court, and then Agnes’s quieting lullaby.

“If you only had not lived in the ivory tower!” cried the Goose Man. “If you only had been more sensitive and not so well protected! If you had only lived, lived, lived, really and truly, and near to life, like a naked man in a thicket of thorns! Life would have got the best of you, but your love would have been real, the hate you have experienced real, your misfortunes real, the lies, ridicule, and betrayal all real, and the shadows of those who have died from you would have taken on reality. And the poison of the Nessus shirt would not merely have burned your skin; it would have penetrated to your very blood, it would have found its way to the deepest, most secret recesses of your heart. Your work would have been carried on and out, not in a struggle against your darkness and your limited torments of soul, a slave before men and unblessed of God. Eliminate from your mind now, forever and completely, the delusion that you have borne the sufferings of the world! You have merely borne your own sufferings, loving-loveless, altruistic-egoist, monster, man without a country that you are!”

“Who are you? What are you trying to say?” asked Daniel, automatically, falteringly, with pale lips.