Читать книгу The Goose Man - Jakob Wassermann - Страница 17

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Daniel had rented a room of the brush-maker Hadebusch and his wife, who lived on Jacob’s Square behind the church.

It was March, and a sudden cold had set in; and Frau Hadebusch had a superstitious fear of coal, which she characterised as Devil’s dung. At the back of the yard was the wood pile, and logs were brought in with which to feed the oven fires. But wood was dear, and had Daniel fed his little iron stove in the garret with such costly food, his monthly bill would have reached a fabulous height. He paid seven marks a month for his room and counted every penny so as not to shorten the period of his liberty by any needless expenditure.

So he sat freezing over his books and scores until the first warmth of spring stole in through the windows. The books he borrowed from the library at the King’s Gate, and paid six pfennigs a volume. Achim von Arnim and Jean Paul were his guides in those days: the one adorned the world of the senses for him, the other that of the soul.

On the police department’s identification blank Daniel had called himself a musician. Frau Hadebusch brought the paper into her living room, which, like all the rooms of the house, seemed built for dwarfs and reeked of limewater and lye. It was at the day’s end, and in the room were assembled Herr Francke and Herr Benjamin Dorn, who lodged on the second floor, and Frau Hadebusch’s son, who was weak-minded and crouched grinning beside the stove.

Herr Francke was a town traveller for a cigar house, and was regarded as a good deal of a Don Juan by the female servants of the neighbourhood. Benjamin Dorn was a clerk in the Prudentia Life Insurance Company, belonged to a Methodist congregation, and was respected by all the respectable on account of his Christian walk and conversation.

These gentlemen examined the document thoroughly and with frowns. Herr Francke gave it as his opinion that a musician who never made music could scarcely be regarded as one.

“He’s probably pawned his bass violin or bugle or whatever he was taught,” he said contemptuously; “perhaps he can only beat a drum. Well, I can do that too if I have one.”

“Yes, you’ve got to have a drum to be a drummer,” Benjamin Dorn remarked. “The question, however, is whether such a calling is in harmony with the principles of Christian modesty.” He laid his finger on his nose, and added: “It is a question which, with all proper humility, all proper humility, you understand, I would answer in the negative.”

“He hasn’t any relatives and no acquaintances at all,” Frau Hadebusch wailed, and her voice sounded like the scraping of carrots on a grater; “and no employment and no prospects and no boots or clothes but what he’s got on. In all my life I haven’t had no such lodger.”

The blank fluttered to the floor, whence the weak-minded Hadebusch Jr. picked it up, rolled it in the shape of a bag, and applied that bag, trumpet-like, to his lips, a procedure which caused the document in question to be gradually soaked through and thus withdrawn from its official uses. Frau Hadebusch was too little concerned over the police regulations to take further thought of her duties as the keeper of a lodging house.

Herr Francke drew from his pocket a pack of greasy cards and began to shuffle them. Frau Hadebusch giggled and it sounded like a witch rustling in the fire. The Methodist conquered his pious scruples, and placed his pfennigs on the table; the town-traveller turned up his sleeves as though he were about to wring a hen’s neck.

Before very long there arose a dissonant controversy, since Herr Francke’s relations with the goddess of fortune were strained and violent. The old brush-maker poked his head in at the door and cursed; the weak-minded boy blew dreamily on his paper trumpet; and the company that had been so peacefully at one separated in violence and rage.