Читать книгу The Goose Man - Jakob Wassermann - Страница 30

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Herr Carovius was a regular customer at the Crocodile Inn; a table was always reserved for him. Around it there assembled every noon the following companions: Solicitor of the Treasury Korn, assistant magistrate Hesselberger, assistant postmaster Kitzler, apothecary Pflaum, jeweller Gründlich, and baker Degen. Judge Kleinlein also joined them occasionally as a guest of honour.

They gossiped about their neighbours, their acquaintances, their friends, and their colleagues. What they said ran the whole gamut of human emotions from an innocent anecdote up to venomous calumny. Not a single event was immune from malicious backstairs comment. Reputations were sullied without discrimination; objections were taken to the conduct of every living soul; every family was shown to have its skeleton in the closet.

When the luncheon was finished, the men all withdrew and went about their business, with the exception of Herr Carovius. He remained to read the papers. For him it was one of the most important hours of the day. Having feasted his ears with friends in private, he now turned to a study of the follies, transgressions, and tragedies that make up everyday life.

He read three papers every day: one was a local sheet, one a great Berlin daily, and the third a paper published in Hamburg. He never deviated; it was these three, week in and week out. And he read them from beginning to end; politics, special articles, and advertisements were of equal concern to him. In this way he familiarised himself with the advance of civilisation, the changes civic life was undergoing, and the general status of the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat.

Nothing escaped him. He was as much interested in the murder of a peasant in a Pommeranian village as he was in the loss of a pearl necklace on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. He read with equal concentration of the sinking of a steamer in the South Sea and the wedding of a member of the Royal Family in Westminster Abbey. He could work up just as much enthusiasm over the latest fashions as he could over the massacring of enslaved Armenians by the Turks. If he read with care and reflection of the death of a leading citizen, he pursued the same course with regard to the reprehending of a relatively harmless vagabond.

It is only fair to remark, however, that his real sympathy was with those events that have to be entered on the calamitous side of life’s ledger. This was due to a bizarre kink in his philosophy: he studied the world primarily from the point of view of its wars, earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, cyclones, and public and private tragedies in the lives of men. Happy and reassuring events, such as the birth of a healthy child, the conferring of an order of distinction, heroic deeds, the winning of a prize in the lottery, the publication of a good book, or the announcement of a legitimate and successful speculation made no impression on him. At times they even annoyed him. He kept his mind, in other words, riveted on the evils, sorrows, woes, and tribulations that come to pass either on this earth or in the starry firmament above, and that were somehow brought to his attention.

His brain was a storehouse of fearful and ferocious happenings; it was a catalogue, an inventory of disease, seduction, theft, robbery, larceny, assassination, murder, catastrophe, pest, incest, suicide, duel, bankruptcy, and the never failing family quarrel.

If he chanced to enrich his collection by the addition of some especially curious or unheard-of incident, he took out his pocket diary, noted the date, and then wrote: “In Amberg a preacher had a hemorrhage while delivering his morning sermon.” Or: “In Cochin China a tiger killed and ate fourteen children, and then, forcing its way into the bungalow of a settler, bit off the head of a woman as she was sleeping peacefully by the side of her husband.” Or: “In Copenhagen a former actress, now ninety years old, mounted a huge vegetable basket on the market place, and recited Lady Macbeth’s monologue. Her unconventional behaviour attracted such a large crowd of passersby that several people were crushed to death in the excitement.”

This done, he would go home, happy as a man can be. To idlers standing in the doorways or servants looking out the windows he would extend the greetings of the day, and that with really conspicuous cordiality.

If a fire broke out in the city, he was present. As his eyes peered into the flames, they seemed intoxicated, obsessed, seized with uncanniness. He would hum a tune of some sort, look into the anxious faces of those immediately concerned, busy himself with whatever had been salvaged, and attempt to force his gratuitous advice on the fire chief.

If a prominent citizen died, he never failed to attend the funeral, and, where possible, to join the procession on the way to the cemetery. He would stand by the grave with bowed head, and take in every word of the funeral discourse. But his lips twitched in a peculiar fashion, as if he felt that he were understood, and flattered.

And in truth all this did flatter him. The defeat, distress, and death of other people, the betrayals that take place in any community, the highhanded injustice of those in power, the oppression of the poor, the violence that was done to right and righteousness, and the sufferings which had to be borne by thousands day after day, all this flattered him; it interested him; it lulled him into a comfortable feeling of personal security.

But then he sat down at his piano at home, and played an adagio of Beethoven or an impromptu by Schubert, his eyes with fine frenzy rolling in the meantime. And when the mighty chorus in a Bach oratorio resounded, he became pale with ecstasy. At the hearing of a good song well sung he could shed copious tears.

He idolised music.

He was a provincial with unfettered instincts. He was an agitator with a tendency to conservatism. He was a Nero without servants, without power, and without land. He was a musician from despair and out of vanity. He was a Nero in our own day.

He was the Nero of our day living in three rooms. He was a lonely bachelor and a bookworm. He exchanged his views with the corner grocer; he discussed city ordinances with the night watchman; he was a tyrant through and through and a hangman at heart; he indulged in eavesdropping at the shrine of fate, and in this way concocted the most improbable of combinations and wanton deeds of violence; he was constantly on the lookout for misfortune, litigation, and shame; he rejoiced at every failure, and was delighted with oppression, whether at home or abroad. He hung with unqualified joy on the imagined ruins of imaginary disaster, and took equal pleasure in the actual debacles of life as it was lived about him. And alongside of this innate and at times unexpressed gruesomeness and bloodthirstiness, he was filled with a torturing passion for music. This was Herr Carovius. Such was his life.