Doctor Faustus (36 page)

I: “And for whom do I take you?”

He (politely reproachful): “Tut, tut! Do not lain it thus, as though you had not been long since expecting me! You wit aswel as I that our relation demands a dispicion. If I am—and that I ween you do now admit—then I can be but One. Or do you mean, what I hyght? But you can still recall all the scurrile nicknames from the schoole, from your first studies, when you had not put the Good Boke out of the door and under the bench. You have them all at your fingers’ ends, you may elect one—I have scant others, they are well-nigh all nicknames, with the which people, so to speke, chuck me under the chin: that comes from my good sound German popularity. A man is gratified by popularity, I trow, even when he has not sought it out and at bottom is convinced that it rests on false understanding. It is always flattering, always does a bodye good. Choose one yourself, if you would call me by name, although you commonly do not call people by name at all; for lack of interest you do not know what they hight. But choose any one you list among the pet names the peasants give me. Only one I cannot and will not abide because it is distinctly a malicious slander and fits me not a whit. Whosoever calls me
Dicis et non facts
is in the wrong box. It too may even be a finger chucking my chin, but it is a calumny. I do ywisse what I say, keep my promise to a tittle; that is precisely my business principle, more or less as the Jews are the most reliable dealers, and when it comes to deceit, well, it is a common saying that it was always I, who believe in good faith and right-wiseness, who am beguiled.”

I: “
Dicis et non es
. Ye would forsoothe sit there against me on the sofa and speak outwardly to me in good Kumpfish, in old-German snatches? Ye would visit me deliberately here in Italy of all places, where you are entirely out of your sphere and not on the peasant tongue at all? What an absurd want of style! In Kaisersaschern I could have suffered it. At Wittenberg or on the Wartburg, even in Leipzig you would have been credible to me. But not here under this pagan and Catholic sky!”

He (shaking his head and pained clucking with his tongue): “Teh, tch, tch! always this same distrust, this same lack of self-confidence! If you had the courage to say unto yourself: ‘Where I am, there is Kaisersaschern’—well and good, the thing would be in frame, the Herr aestheticus would needs make moan no more over lack of style. Cocksblood! You would have the right to speak like that, yet you just haven’t the courage or you act as though you lacked it. Self-belittlement, my friend—and you underestimate me too, if you limit me thuswise and try to make a German provincial of me. I am in fact German, German to the core, yet even so in an older, better way, to wit cosmopolitan from my heart. Wouldst deny me away, wouldst refuse to consider the old German romantic wander-urge and yearning after the fair land of Italy! German I am, but that I should once in good Dureresque style freeze and shiver after the sun, that Your Excellency will not grant me—not even when quite aside from the sun, I have delicate and urgent business here, with a fine, well-created human being… “

Here an unspeakable disgust came over me, so that I shuddered violently. But there was no real difference between the grounds of my shudder; it might be at one and the same time for cold, too; the draught from him had got abruptly stronger, so that it went through my overcoat and pierced me to my marrow. Angrily I ask: “Cannot you away with this nuisance, this icy draught?”

He: “Alas, no, I regret not to be able to gratify you. But the fact is, I am cold. How otherwise could I hold out and find it possible to dwell where I dwell?”

I (involuntarily): “You mean in the brenning pit of fier?”

He (laughs as though tickled): “Capital! Said in the good robust and merry German way. It has indeed many other pretty names, scholarly, pathetical, the Herr Doctor ex-Theologus knows them all, as career, exitium, confutatio, pernicies, condemnatio, and so on. But there is no remedy, the familiar German, the comic ones are still my favourites. However, let us for the nonce leave that place and the nature of it. I see by your face, you are at the point of asking about it; but that is far off, not in the least a brenning question—you will forgive me the bourd, that it is not brenning! There is time for it, plenteous, boundless time—time is the actual thing, the best we give, and our gift the houre-glasse—it is so fine, the little neck, through which the red sand runs, a threadlike trickle, does not minish at all to the eye in the upper cavitie, save at the very end; then it does seem to speed and to have gone fast. But that is so far away, the narrow part, it is not worth talking or thinking about. Albeit inasmuch as the glass is set and the sand has begun to run; for this reason, my good man, I would fain come to an understanding with you.”

I (full scornfully): “Extraordinarily Diirerish. You love it. First ‘how will I shiver after the sun’; and then the houre-glasse of the
Melancolia
. Is the magic square coming too? I am prepared for everything, can get used to everything. Get used to your shamelessness, your theeing and thouing and trusty fereing, which soothly always go particularly against the wood. After all I say ‘thou’ only to myself, which of likelihood explains why you do. According to you I am speaking with black Kaspar, which is one of the names, and so Kaspar and Samiel are one and the same.”

He: “Off you go again!”

I: “Samiel. It giveth a man to laugh. Where then is your C-minor fortissimo of stringed tremoli, wood and trombones, ingenious bug to fright children, the romantic public, coming out of the F-sharp minor of the Glen as you out of your abyss—I wonder I hear it not!”

He: “Let that be. We have many a lovelier instrument and you shall hear them. We shall play for you, when you be ripe to hear. Everything is a matter of ripeness and of dear time. Just that I would speak of with you. But Samiel—that’s a folish form. I am all for that is of the folk: but Samiel, too foolish, Johann Ballhorn from Lubeck corrected it. Sammael it is. And what signifies Sammael?”

I (defiant, do not answer).

He: “What, ne’er a word but mum? I like the discreet way in which you leave me to put it in German. It means angel of death.”

I (between my teeth, which will not stay properly closed): “Yes, distinctly, that is what you look like! Just like unto an angel, exactly. Do you know how you look? Common is not the word for it. Like some shameless scum, a lewd losel, a make-bate, that is how you look, how you have found good to visit me—and no angel!”

He (looking down at himself, with his arms stretched out): “How then, how then? How do I look? No, it is really good that you ask me if I wot how I look, for by my troth I wot not. Or wist not, you called it to my attention. Be sure, I reck nothing at all to my outward appearance, I leave it so to say to itself. It is sheer chance how I look, or rather, it comes out like that, it happeth like that according to the circumstances, without my taking heed. Adaptation, mimicry, you know it, of course. Mummery and jugglery of mother Nature, who always has her tongue in her cheek. But you won’t, my good fere, refer the adaptation, about which I know just as much and as little as the leaf butterfly, to yourself, and take it ill of me. You must admit that from the other side it has something suitable about it—on that side where you got it from, and indeed forewarned, from the side of your pretty song with the letter symbol—oh, really ingeniously done, and almost as though by inspiration:

When once thou gavest to me At night the cooling draught, With poison didst undo me

 … … … … .

Then on the wound the serpent Fastened and firmly sucked—

Really gifted. That is what we recognized betimes and why from early on we had an eye on you—we saw that your case was quite definitely worth the trouble, that it was a case of the most favourable situation, whereof with only a little of our fire lighted under it, only a little heating, elation, intoxication, something brilliant could be brought out. Did not Bismarck say something about the Germans needing half a bottle of champagne to arrive at their normal height? Meseems he said something of the sort.

And that of right. Gifted but halt is the German-gifted enough to be angry with his paralysis, and to overcome it by hand-overhead illumination. You, my good man, well knew what you needed, and took the right road when you made your journey and salva venia summoned your French beloved to you.”

“Hold thy tongue!”

“Hold thy tongue? We are coming on. We wax warm. At last you drop the polite plural number and say ‘thou,’ as it should be between people who are in league and contract for time and eternity.”

“Will ye hold your tongue still?”

“Still? But we have been still for nigh five years and must after all sometime hold parley and advise over the whole and over the interesting situation wherein you find yourself. This is naturally a thing to keep wry about, but after all not at the length—when the houre-glasse is set, the red sand has begun to run through the fine-fine neck-ah, but only just begun! It is still almost nothing, what lies underneath, by comparison with all there is on top; we give time, plenteous time, abundant time by the eye, the end whereof we do not need to consider, not for a long time yet, nor need to trouble yet awhile even of the point of time where you could begin to take heed to the ending, where it might come to ‘
Respice finem?
Sithence it is a variable point, left to caprice and temper, and nobody knows where it should begin, and how nigh to the end one should lay it out. This is a good bourd and capital arrangement: the uncertainty and the free choice of the moment when the time is come to heed the eynde, overcasts in mist and jest the view of the appointed limit.”

“Fables, fantasies!”

“Get along, one cannot please you, even against my psychology you are harsh—albeit you yourself on your Mount Zion at home called psychology a nice, neutral middle point and psychologists the most truth-loving people. I fable not a whit when I speak of the given time and the appointed end; I speak entirely to the point. Wheresoever the houre-glasse is set up and time fixed, unthinkable yet measured time and a fixed end, there we are in the field, there we are in clover. Time we sell—let us say XXIV years—can we see to the end of that? Is it a good solid amount? Therewith a man can live at rack and manger like a lord and astonish the world as a great nigromancer with much divel’s work; the lenger it goes on, the more forget all paralysis and in highly illuminated state rise out of himselfe, yet never transcend but remain the same, though raised to his proper stature by the half-bottle of champagne. In drunken bliss he savours all the rapture of an almost unbearable draught, till he may with more or less of right be convinced that a like infusion has not been in a thousand years and in certain abandoned moments may simply hold himself a god. How will such an one come to think about the point of time when it is become time to give heed to the end! Only, the end is ours, at the end he is ours, that has to be agreed on, and not merely silently, how silent so ever it be else, but from man to man and expressly.”

I: “So you would sell me time?”

He: “Time? Simple time? No, my dear fere, that is not devyll’s ware. For that we should not earn the reward, namely that the end belongs to us. What manner of time, that is the heart of the matter! Great time, mad time, quite bedivelled time, in which the fun waxes fast and furious, with heaven-high leaping and springing—and again, of course, a bit miserable, very miserable indeed, I not only admit that, I even emphasize it, with pride, for it is sitting and fit, such is artist—way and artist-nature. That, as is well knowen, is given at all times to excess on both sides and is in quite normal way a bit excessive. Alway the pendulum swings very wide to and fro between high spirits and melancholia, that is usual, is so to speak still according to moderate bourgeois Nuer-remberg way, in comparison with that which we purvey. For we purvey the uttermost in this direction; we purvey towering flights and illuminations, experiences of upliftings and unfetterings, of freedom, certainty, facility, feeling of power and triumph, that our man does not trust his wits—counting in besides the colossal admiration for the made thing, which could soon bring him to renounce every outside, foreign admiration—the thrills of self-veneration, yes, of exquisite horror of himself, in which he appears to himself like an inspired mouthpiece, as a godlike monster. And correspondingly deep, honourably deep, doth he sink in between-time, not only into void and desolation and unfruitful melancholy but also into pains and sicknesse—familiar incidentally, which had alway been there, which belong to his character, yet which are only most honorably enhanced by the illumination and the well-knowen ‘sack of heyre.’ Those are pains which a man gladly pays, with pleasure and pride, for what he has so much enjoyed, pains which he knows from the fairy-tale, the pains which the little seamaid, as from sharp knives, had in her beautiful human legs she got herself instead of her tail. You know Andersen’s Little Seamaid? She would be a sweetheart for you! Just say the word and I will bring her to your couch.”

I: “If you could just keep quiet, prating jackanapes that you are!”

He: “How now! Need you always make a rude answer? Always you expect me to be still. But silence is not my motto, I do not belong to the Schweigestill family. And Mother Else, anyhow, has prattled in all proper discretion no end to you about her odd occasional guests. Neither am I come hither for the sake of silence to a pagan foreign land; but rather for express confirmation between us two and a firm contract upon payment against completion. I tell you, we have been silent more than four years—and now everything is taking the finest, most exquisite, most promising course, and the bell is now half cast. Shall I tell you how it stands and what is afoot?”

I: “It well appeareth I must listen.”

He: “Wouldst like to besides, and art well content that thou canst hear. I trow forsooth you are on edge to hear and would grumble and growl an I kept it back, and that of right too. It is such a snug, familiar world wherein we are together, thou and I—we are right at home therein, pure Kaisersaschern, good old German air, from anno MD or thereabouts, shortly before Dr. Martinus came, who stood on such stout and sturdy footing with me and threw the roll, no, I mean the ink-pot at me, long before the thirty years’ frolic. Bethink thee what lively movement of the people was with you in Germany’s midst, on the Rhine and all over, how full of agitation and unrest, anxiety, presentiments; what press of pilgrims to the Sacred Blood at Niklashausen in the Tauberthal, what children’s crusades, bleeding of the Host, famine, Peasants’ League, war, the pest at Cologne, meteors, comets, and great omens, nuns with the stigmata, miraculous crosses on men’s garments, and that amazing standard of the maiden’s shift with the Cross, whereunder to march against the Turk! Good time, divellishly German time! Don’t you feel all warm and snug at the memory? There the right planets come together in the sign of the Scorpion, as Master Diirer has eruditely drawn in the medical broadsheet, there came the tender little ones, the swarms of animated corkscrews, the loving guests from the West Indies into the German lands, the flagellants-ah, now you listen! As though I spake of the marching guild of penitents, the Flagellants, who flailed for their own and all other sins. But I mean those flagellates, the invisible tiny ones, the kind that have scourges, like our pale Venus, the spirochasta pallida, that is the true sort. But th’art right, it sounds so comfortingly like the depths of Middle Ages and the
flagellum hareticorum fascinariorum
. Yea, verily, as fascinarii they may well shew themselves, our devotees, in the better cases, as in yours. They are moreover quite civilized and domesticated long since, and in old countries where they have been so many hundred years at home, they do not play such merry pranks and coarse preposterous jokes as erstwhile, with running sore and plague and worm-eaten nose. Baptist Spengler the painter does not look as though he, his body wrapped up in hair, would have to shake the warning rattle withersoever he went.”