Doctor Faustus (41 page)

“Courage you’ve got! My respects,” said Frau Else when Adrian came back to the gate. “Most folks are feart of the beast and when he takes on, like now, one don’t blame them, the young schoolmaster from the village who used to come to the children, oh, my, he was a poor body, he said every time: ‘That dog, Frau Schweigestill, I’m just feart of him.’ “

“Yes, yes,” laughed Adrian, nodding, and they went into the house, into the pipe-tobacco air, and up to the upper storey, along the white, damp-smelling walls, where the goodwife showed him his bedroom with the gay clothes-press and the high-piled white bed. They had added something extra, a green reclining-chair with a knitted rug for the feet on the pine floor. Gereon and Waltpurgis brought up the bags.

Here and on the way downstairs they talked about arrangements for the guest’s comfort, continuing in the Abbot’s room, that characteristically patriarchal chamber, of which Adrian had long since mentally taken possession: about the large jug of hot water in the morning, the strong early-morning coffee, the times for meals; Adrian was not to take them with the family, they had not expected that, their hours being too early for him. At half past one and at eight he was to be served, preferably in the big front room (the peasant salon with the Nike and the square piano), Frau Schweigestill thought. It was always at his disposal. And she promised him light diet, milk, eggs, toast, vegetable soup, a good red beefsteak with spinach at midday, and afterwards a medium-sized omelet, with apple sauce—in short, things that were nourishing and agreeable to a delicate stomach like his.

“The stummick, my lord, it ain’t mostly the stummick at all, eh, it’s the head, the pernickety, overstrained head, it works on the stummick, even when it ain’t nothing wrong with it, like the way it is with seasickness and sick headache aha, he sometimes has it pretty bad?” She thought so already, from his looking so hard at the blinds and curtains in the bedroom; darkness, lying in the dark, night, black, especially no light in the eyes, that was the right thing, as long as the misery went on, and very strong tea, real sour with lemon. Frau Schweigestill was not unacquainted with migraine—that is, she had never had it herself but her Maxl had suffered from it periodically when he was younger, in time it had gone away. She would hear no apologies from the guest on the score of his infirmity, or his having smuggled a chronic patient into the house, so to speak; she said only: “Oh, get along with you!” Something of the sort, she thought, one would have guessed, for when anyone like him from over there where culture is going on came out to Pfeiffering like that, he would have his reasons for it, and obviously it was a case that had a claim on the understanding, Herr Leverkühn! But he’d come to the right address for understanding, if not for culture, eh?—and so on and so on, good woman that she was.

Between her and Adrian, as they stood or walked about, arrangements were made, which, surprisingly perhaps to both of them, were to regulate his outward existence for nineteen years. The village carpenter was called in to measure the space beside the doors in the Abbot’s room for shelves to hold Adrian’s books, not higher than the old panelling under the leather hangings; also the chandelier with the stumps of wax candles was wired for electricity. Various other changes came about through time, in the room that was destined to see the birth of so many masterpieces to this day largely withheld from public knowledge and admiration. A carpet almost covering the floor, only too necessary in winter, soon hid the worn boards; and to the corner bench, the only seat in the room besides the Savonarola chair in front of the work-table, there was added after a few days without any fastidious regard for style, which was not in Adrian’s line, a very deep reading and easy-chair covered with grey velvet, from Bernheimer’s in Munich, a commendable piece, which together with its separate stool, a tabouret with a cushion, deserved the name of chaise-longue; it took the place of a divan, and did its owner almost two decades of service.

The purchases—the carpet and chair from the furnishing shop in the Maximiliansplatz—I mention partly with the aim of making it clear that there was convenient opportunity for communication with the city by numerous trains, some of them fast ones which took less than an hour. So that Adrian did not, as Frau Schweigestill’s way of talking would lead one to think, bury himself in solitude by settling in Pfeiffering, cut off from “culture.” Even when he visited an evening entertainment, an academy concert or the Zapfenstosser orchestra, an opera performance or an evening company—and that too did happen—there was an eleven-o’clock train for him to travel home in. Of course he could not then count on being fetched from the station with the Schweigestill cart; in such cases he arranged beforehand with a Waldshut livery, or even, to his great satisfaction, returned on foot, on clear winter nights, by the road along the pond to the sleeping courtyard of the Schweigestill house. On these occasions he gave a sign to Kaschperl—Suso, at this hour free of his chain, that he might not rouse the house. He did this with a little metal pipe tuned by means of a screw, whose higher notes were of such an extreme vibration that the human ear could scarcely hear them from close by. On the other hand they had a very strong effect and at a surprising distance on the quite differently constituted ear-drum of the dog, and Kaschperl kept mum as a mouse when the mysterious sound, heard by no one else, came to him through the night.

It was curiosity, but it was also a power exerted by my friend, whose cool, reserved person, shy despite his haughtiness, was far from unattractive, that brought people out to visit him in his retreat. I will give Schildknapp the precedence which he did actually possess: of course he was the first to come, to see how Adrian did in the place they had found out together. After that, especially in the summer-time, he often spent the week-end in Pfeiffering. Zink and Spengler came on their bicycles, for Adrian, on his shopping tours in town, had paid his respects to the Roddes in Rambergstrasse and the two painters had heard from the daughters of Adrian’s return and his present address. Probably Spengler’s was the initiative in the visit, for Zink, more gifted and active as a painter than the other, but much less fine as a human being, had no instinctive sympathy for Adrian and was certainly only present as Spengler’s inseparable: flattering, in the Austrian manner, with kiss-the-hand and disingenuous “Marvellous, marvellous!” at everything he saw, while at bottom unfriendly. His clownishness, the farcical effects he could produce with his long nose and the closelying eyes which had such an absurdly hypnotic effect on women, made no play with Adrian, however grateful the latter always was for being amused. Vanity detracts from wit; the knavish Zink had a tiresome mania of attending to every word, to see whether he could not get a
double entendre
out of it, and this, as he probably saw, did not precisely enchant Adrian.

Spengler, blinking, a dimple in his cheek, laughed, or bleated, heartily at such little contretemps. The sexual interested him in a literary sense, sex and esprit lying with him very close together—which in itself is not so far wrong. His culture—we know indeed, his feeling for what was subtle, witty, discriminating—was founded on his accidental and unhappy relation to the sphere of sex, the physical fixation on it, which was sheer bad luck, and not further characteristic of his temperament or his sexuality. He smiled and prattled, in the language of that now vanished cultural and aesthetic epoch, about events in the world of artists and bibliophiles; retailed Munich gossip and dwelt very drolly on a story of how the Grand Duke of Weimar and the dramatic poet Richard Voss, travelling together in the Abruzzi, were set upon by genuine bandits—of course engaged by Voss. To Adrian, Spengler made clever politenesses about the Brentano song cycle, which he had bought and studied at the piano. He delivered himself at that time of the remark that occupation with these songs ended by spoiling one, quite definitely and almost dangerously. Afterwards one could hardly find pleasure in anything in that field. Said other quite good things about being spoiled, of which the needy artist himself was in the greatest danger, it seemed: it might be disastrous for him. For with every finished work he made life harder for himself, and in the end impossible. Spoilt by the extraordinary, his taste ruined for anything else, he must at last deteriorate through despair of executing the impossible. The problem for the highly gifted artist was how, despite his always increasing fastidiousness, his spreading disgust, he could still keep within the limits of the possible.

Thus the witty Spengler—solely on the basis of his specific fixation, as his blinking and bleating showed. The next guests were Jeanette Scheurl and Rudi Schwerdtfeger, who came to tea to see how Adrian did.

Jeanette and Schwerdtfeger sometimes played together, for the guests of old Mme Scheurl as well as privately, and they had planned the trip to Pfeiffering, and Rudi had done the telephoning. Whether he proposed it or whether it was Jeanette I do not know. They argued over it in Adrian’s presence and each put on the other the merit of the attention they paid him. Jeanette’s droll impulsiveness speaks for her initiative; on the other hand, it was very consistent with Rudi’s amazing familiarity. He seemed to be of opinion that two years ago he had been
per du
with Adrian, whereas after all that had only been in carnival time, and even then entirely on Rudi’s side. Now he blithely took it up again and desisted, with entire unconcern, only when Adrian for the second or third time refused to respond. The unconcealed merriment of Fraulein Scheurl at this repulse of his devotion moved him not at all. No trace of confusion showed in his blue eyes, which could burrow with such penetrating naivete into the eyes of anyone who was making clever, learned, or cultured remarks. Even today I think of Schwerdtfeger and ask myself whether he actually understood how solitary Adrian was, thus how needy and exposed to temptation; whether he wanted to try his charms—to put it crudely, to get round him. Beyond a doubt he was born for conquest; but I should be afraid of doing him wrong were I to see him from this side alone. He was also a good fellow and an artist, and the fact that Adrian and he were later actually per du and called each other by their first names I should like not to regard as a cheap triumph of Schwerdtfeger’s mania for pleasing people, but rather to refer it to his honestly recognizing the value of this extraordinary human being. I should like to think he was truly drawn to Adrian, and that his own feeling was the source of the unerring and staggering self-confidence which finally made conquest of coldness and melancholy. A fatal triumph! But I have fallen into my old, bad habit and got ahead of my story.

In her broad-brimmed hat, with a thin veil stretched across her nose, Jeanette Scheurl played Mozart on the square piano in the Schweigestills’ peasant “big room,” and Rudi Schwerdtfeger whistled with such artistry that one laughed for sheer pleasure. I heard him later at the Roddes’ and Schlaginhaufens’, and got him to tell me how, as quite a little lad, before he had violin lessons, he had begun to develop this technique and never stopped whistling the music he heard, or practising what he learned. His performance was brilliant, professional, fit for any cabaret, almost more impressive than his violin-playing; he must have been organically just right for it. The cantilena was wonderfully pleasing, more like a violin than a flute, the phrasing masterly, the little notes, staccato or legato, coming out with delicious precision, never or almost never faltering. In short, it was really capital, and not the least diverting thing about it was the combination of whistling ‘prentice and serious artist which it presented. One involuntarily smiled as one applauded; Schwerdtfeger himself laughed like a boy, wriggling his shoulder in his jacket and making his little grimace with the corner of his mouth.

These, then, were Adrian’s first guests in Pfeiffering. And soon I came myself and on fine Sundays strolled at his side round the pond and up the Rohmbühel. Only that one winter, after his return from Italy, did I live at any distance from him, for at Easter 1913 I had got my position at the Freising academy, our family’s Catholic connection being useful in this respect. I left Kaisersaschern and settled with wife and child at the edge of the Isar, in this dignified city, seat of a bishopric for hundreds of years, where with the exception of some months during the war I have passed my own life in convenient touch with the capital and also with my friend, and shared, in love and solicitude, the stresses and the tragedy of his.

CHAPTER XXVII

B
assoonist Griepenkerl had done a good and grateful piece of work on the score of
Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Just about the first words Adrian said to me when we met concerned the all but flawless copy and his joy over it. He also showed me a letter that the man had written to him in the midst of his exacting labours, wherein he expressed with intelligence a sort of anxious enthusiasm for the object of his pains. He could not, so he told its author, express how it took his breath away with its boldness, the novelty of its ideas. Not enough could he admire the fine subtlety of the workmanship, the versatile rhythms, the technique of instrumentation, by which an often considerable complication of parts was made perfectly clear; above all, the rich fantasy of the composition, showing itself in the manifold variations of a given theme. He instanced the beautiful and withal half-humorous music that belongs to the figure of Rosaline, or rather expresses Biron’s desperate feeling for her, in the middle part of the tripartite bourree in the last act, this witty revival of the old French dance; it must, he said, be characterized as brilliant and deft in the highest sense of the words. He added that this bourree was not a little characteristic of the demode archaic element of social conventionality which so charmingly but also so challengingly contrasted with the “modern,” the free and more than free, the rebel parts, disdaining tonal connection, of the work. He feared indeed that these parts of the score, in all their unfamiliarity and rebellious heresy, would be better received than the strict and traditional. Here it often amounted to a rigidity, a more academic than artistic speculation in notes, a mosaic scarcely any longer effective musically, seeming rather more to be read than to be heard—and so on.