Chapter 1

Late in the evening Benda came. He had been tolerably well informed of everything that had taken place. In the hall he met Agnes. Though generally quite monosyllabic, Agnes was now inclined to be extremely communicative, but she could merely confirm what he had already heard.

She went up to the top floor with him, and he stood there for a long while looking at the burnt rooms. There were two firemen on guard duty. “All of his music has been burnt up,” said Agnes. Benda thought he would hardly be able to talk with his old friend again after this tragedy. But he at once felt ashamed of his timidity, and went down to see him.

It was again quiet throughout the entire house.

Daniel had lighted a candle in the living room. Finding it too dark with only one candle, he lighted another.

He paced back and forth. The room seemed too small for him: he opened the door leading into Dorothea’s room, and walked back and forth through it too. On entering the dark room, his lips would move; he would murmur something. When he returned to the lighted room, he would stand for a second or two and stare at the candles.

His features seemed to show traces of human suffering such as no man had borne before; it could hardly have been greater. He did not seem to notice Benda when he came in.

“Everything gone? Everything destroyed?” asked Benda, after he had watched Daniel walk back and forth for nearly a quarter of an hour.

“One grave after the other,” murmured Daniel, in a voice that no longer seemed to be his own. He raised his head as if surprised at the sound of what he himself had said. He felt that a stranger had come into the room without letting himself be heard.

“And the last work, the great work of which you told me, the fruit of so many years, has it also been destroyed?” asked Benda.

“Everything,” replied Daniel distractedly, “everything I have created in the way of music from the time I first had reason to believe in myself. The sonatas, the songs, the quartette, the psalm, the ‘Harzreise,’ ‘Wanderers Sturmlied,’ and the symphony, everything down to the last page and the last note.”

Yes, there was a stranger there; you could hear him laughing quietly to himself. “Why do you laugh?” asked Daniel sternly, and adjusted his glasses.

Benda, terrified, said: “I did not laugh.”

“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.