Doctor Faustus (49 page)

All together I did not allow my sympathy for Germany’s necessity, her moral isolation and public proscription, which, so it seemed to me, was only the expression of the general fear of her strength and advantage in preparedness (I did admit that we reckoned the strength and the advantage as a harsh consolation in our outlawed state)—all together, I say, I did not allow my patriotic emotion, which was so much harder to explain than that of the others, to be dampened by the cold water thrown on our national traits. Indeed, I gave it words, walking up and down the room, while Schildknapp in the deep easy-chair smoked his shag pipe, and Adrian stood, the most of the time, in front of his old-German work-table with the sunken centre and the reading-and writing-desk set on it. For oddly enough he wrote on a slanting surface, like Erasmus in Holbein’s portrait. A few books lay on the table: a little volume of Kleist, with the book-mark at the essay on marionettes; the indispensable volume of Shakespeare sonnets and another book with some of the plays—
Twelfth Night
I think,
Much Ado about Nothing
, and I believe
Two Gentlemen of Verona
. His work in hand lay there too: sheets, drafts, beginnings, notes, sketches in various stages of incompletion; often only the top line of the violin part or the woodwind was filled out and quite below the progression of the bass, but between them simply white space, elsewhere the harmonic connection and the instrumental grouping were already made clear by the jotting down of the other orchestral parts. With his cigarette between his lips he would step up to the desk to look at his work, just as a chess-player measures on the chequered field the progress of a game, to which musical composition bears so suggestive a resemblance. We were all so comfortable together that he might even take a pencil and enter a clarinet or horn figure somewhere if he thought well of it.

We knew nothing precise about what was occupying him, now that that music of the cosmos had appeared in print from Schott’s Sons in Mainz, under the same arrangements as the Brentano songs. Actually it was the suite of dramatic grotesques, whose themes, so we heard, he had taken from the old history and anecdote book, the
Gesta Romanorum
. He was trying these, without yet knowing whether anything would come of it or if he would continue. In any case, the characters were not to be men but puppets (hence the Kleist). As for the
Marvels of the Universe
, there was to have been a foreign performance of that solemn and arrogant work had not the war brought the plan to nothing. We had spoken of it at table. The Lübeck performances of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, even unsuccessful as they had proved, together with the mere existence of the Brentano cycle, had made some impression, and Adrian’s name had begun in the inner circles of the art to have a certain esoteric and tentative fame—even this hardly at all in Germany and decidedly not in Munich. But there were other, more perceptive regions. A few weeks earlier he had had a letter from a Monsieur Monteux, director of the Russian ballet in Paris, former member of the Colonne orchestra, wherein this experimentally-minded director had announced his intention of producing the
Marvels of the Universe
, together with some orchestral parts of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
as a concert pure and simple. He had in mind the Theatre des Champs-Elysees for the performance, and invited Adrian to come to Paris, probably in order to rehearse and conduct his own works. We had not asked our friend whether he would, under favourable conditions, accept. In any case, the circumstances were now such that there could be no further talk of it.

I still see myself walking up and down the carpet and boards of the old wainscoted room, with its overpowering chandelier, its wall cupboards with their wrought-iron hinges, the flat leather cushions on the corner bench, and the deep embrasures of the windows; walking up and down and holding forth at large about Germany; more for myself and certainly more for Schildknapp than for Adrian, from whom I expected no interest. Used to teaching and to talking, and, when I get warmed up, no bad talker, I do not dislike listening to myself and take a certain pleasure in my command over words. Not without lively gesture I challenged Rüdiger to set down what I said to the wartime journalism which so annoyed him. Surely one might be permitted a little psychological participation in the national and even touching traits which our otherwise multiform German character was evincing in this historic hour. In the last analysis, what we were dealing with was the psychology of the breakthrough.

“In a nation like ours,” I set forth, “the psychological is always the primary and actually motivating; the political action is of the second order of importance: reflex, expression, instrument. What the breakthrough to world power, to which fate summons us, means at bottom, is the breakthrough to the world—out of an isolation of which we are painfully conscious, and which no vigorous reticulation into world economy has been able to break down since the founding of the Reich. The bitter thing is that the practical manifestation is an outbreak of war, though its true interpretation is longing, a thirst for unification.”

“God bless your studies,” I heard Adrian say here in a low voice, with a half-laugh. He had not even glanced up from his notes as he quoted the old student tag.

I remained standing and looked at him; he paid no heed. “You mean,” I retorted, “that I am talking nonsense?”

“Pardon,” he hastily returned. “I lapsed into student lingo, because your oratio reminded me so much of our straw-threshing disputes of anno so-and-so-what were the fellows’ names? I notice I begin to forget them” (he was twenty-nine at the time). “Deutschmeyer? Dungersleben?”

“You mean the redoubtable Deutschlin,” I said; “and there was one called Dungersheim. A Hubmeyer and Teutleben there were too. You have never had a memory for names. They were good, serious chaps.”

“Certainly, of course. And look here, there was a Schappeler, and a socialist named Arzt. What do you say now? You did not even belong to their faculty. But today I seem to hear them when I hear you. Straw-threshing—by which I only mean once a student, always a student. Academic life keeps one young and critical.”

“You did belong to their faculty,” said I, “and yet you were at bottom more a guest than I. Of course, Adri. I was only a student, and you may well be right, I am one still. But so much the better if the academic keeps one young, if it preserves loyalty to the spirit, to free thought, to the higher interpretation of the crude event—“

“Are we talking about loyalty?” he asked. “I understood that Kaisersaschern would like to become a world capital. That is not very loyal.”

“Get along with you,” I cried, “you understood nothing of the sort and you understand very well what I meant about the German breakthrough to the world.”

“It would not help much if I did understand, for at present, anyhow, the crude event will just make our shut-inness and shut-offness more complete, however far your military swarm into Europe. You see: I cannot go to Paris, you go there instead of me. Good too! Between ourselves, I would not have gone anyhow. You help me out of an embarrassment—“

“The war will be short,” I said in a suppressed voice, for his words affected me painfully. “It cannot last long. We pay for the swift breakthrough with a wrong, an acknowledged one, which we declare ourselves ready to make good. We must take it on ourselves… “

“And will know how to carry it with dignity,” he broke in. “Germany has broad shoulders. And who denies that a real breakthrough is worth what the tame world calls a crime? I hope you don’t suppose that I think small of the idea which it pleases you to chew over, in your straw. There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How does one break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly? The whole situation is dominated by the question. Here too,” said he, and twitched the little red marker in the volume of Kleist on the table—“here too it treats of the breakthrough, in the capital essay on marionettes, and it is called straight out ‘the last chapter of the history of the world.’ But it is talking only about the aesthetic, charm, free grace, which actually is reserved to the automaton and the god; that is, to the unconscious or an endless consciousness, whereas every reflection lying between nothing and infinity kills grace. The consciousness must, this writer thinks, have gone through an infinity in order that grace find itself again therein; and Adam must eat a second time from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence.”

“How glad I am,” I put in, “that you have just read that! It is gloriously thought, and you are quite right to bring it into connection with the breakthrough. But do not say that it is speaking only of aesthetics, do not say
only!
One does wrong to see in aesthetics a separate and narrow field of the humane. It is much more than that, it is at bottom everything, it attracts or repels, the poet attaches to the word ‘grace’ the very widest possible meaning. Aesthetic release or the lack of it is a matter of one’s fate, dealing out happiness or unhappiness, companionship or hopeless if proud isolation on earth. And one does not need to be a philologian to know that what is odious is also what is hated. Craving to break through from bondage, to cease being sealed up in the odious—tell me that I am straw-threshing again; but I feel, I have always felt and will assert against strongly held opposition, that this German is
kat exochen
, profoundly German, the very definition of Germanism, of a psychology threatened with envelopment, the poison of isolation, provincial boorishness, neurosis, implicit Satanism… “

I broke off. He eyed me, and I believe the colour left his cheeks. The look he cast on me was the look, the familiar one that made me almost equally unhappy, no matter whether myself or another was its object: wordless, veiled, coldly remote to the point of offensiveness, followed by the smile with closed lips and sneeringly dilating nostrils—and then the turning away. He moved away from the table, not toward Schildknapp, but to the window niche, where he had hung a saint’s picture on the panelling. Rüdiger talked away. In his opinion, he said, I was to be congratulated on going straight into the field, and actually on horseback. One should ride into the field or else not go at all. And he patted the neck of an imaginary nag. We laughed, and our parting when I left for the train was easy and cheerful. Good that it was not sentimental, it would have seemed tasteless. But Adrian’s look I carried with me to war—perhaps it was that, and not the typhus infection from lice, which brought me home so soon, back to his side.

CHAPTER XXXI

“
Y
ou go there instead of me,” Adrian had said. And we did not get to Paris. Shall I confess that, privately and apart from the historical point of view, I felt a deep, intimately personal shame? Weeks long we had sent home terse, affectedly laconic dispatches, dressing our triumphs in cold matter-of-fact. Liege had long since fallen, we had won the battle for Lorraine. In accordance with the fixed master-plan we had swung with five armies across the Meuse, had taken Brussels, Namur, carried the day at Charleroi and Longwy, won a second series of battles at Sedan, Rethel, Saint-Quentin, and occupied Reims. We advanced as though on wings. It was just as we had dreamed: by the favour of the god of war, at destiny’s nod, we were borne as on pinions. To gaze without flinching at the flames we kindled, could not help kindling, was incumbent upon our manhood, it was the supreme challenge to our heroic courage. I can still see vividly the picture of a gaunt Gaulish wife, standing on a height round which our battery was moving; at its foot a village lay shattered and smoking. “I am the last!” she cried, with a gesture of tragic power, such as is given to no German woman to make. “
Je suis la derniere!
” Raising her fists, she hurled her curses down on our heads, repeating three times: “
Mechants! Mechants! Mechants!
”

We looked the other way. We had to win, and ours was the hard trade of triumph. That I felt wretched enough myself sitting my horse, plagued with coughing and the racking pain in my limbs due to wet nights under canvas, actually afforded me a certain consolation.

Yet many more villages we shot up, still borne on victory’s pinions. Then came the incomprehensible, the apparently senseless thing: the order to retreat. How should we have understood it? We belonged to the army group Hausen, south of Chalons-sur-Marne, streaming on to Paris, as the von Kluck group were doing at other points. We were ignorant that somewhere, after a five-day battle, the French had crushed von Billow’s right wing-reason enough for the anxious cautiousness of a supreme commander who had been elevated to his rank on account of his uncle, to order a general withdrawal. We passed some of the villages that we had left smoking in our rear, and the hill where the tragic woman had stood. She was not there.

The wings were trustless. It should not have been. It had not been a war to be won in one swift onslaught. But as little as those at home did we understand what that meant. We did not understand the frantic jubilation of the world over the result of the battle of the Marne; over the fact that the short war on which our salvation hung had turned into a long one, which we could not stand. Our defeat was now only a matter of time, and of cost to the foe. We could have laid our weapons down and forced our leaders to an immediate peace, if only we had understood. But even among them probably only one here and there dared to think of it. After all, they had scarcely realized that the age of localized war had gone by and that every campaign to which we felt ourselves driven must end in a world conflagration. In such a one the advantage of the inner line, the fanatical devotion of the troops, the high state of preparedness, and a firmly based, strong authoritarian state had held out the chance of a lightning triumph. If this failed—and it stood written that it must fail—then, whatever we might still for years accomplish, we were lost in principle and before we began: this time, next time, always.