Doctor Faustus (52 page)

Doubtless that was also the natural opinion of Adrian. But it pleased him to deny it, and I was very much mistaken if I looked at that as a contradiction of his arrogance. More likely it was an effort to condescend, springing from the same arrogance. If only there had not been that trembling in his voice when he spoke of the need of art to be redeemed, of art being
per du
with humanity! That was feeling: despite everything it tempted me to give his hand a stolen pressure. But I did not do so; instead I kept an eye on Rudi Schwerdtfeger lest he again be moved to embrace him.

CHAPTER XXXII

I
nez Rodde’s marriage to Professor Dr. Helmut Institoris took place at the beginning of the war, when the country was still in good condition and strong in hope, and I myself still in the field, in the spring of 1915. It went off with all the proper bourgeois flourishes: ceremonies civil and religious and a wedding dinner in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, after which the young pair left for Dresden and the Saxon Switzerland. Such was the outcome of a long probation on both sides, which had evidently led to the conclusion that they were suited to each other. The reader will note the irony which I, truly without malice, express in the word “evidently,” for such a condition either did not exist or else had existed from the beginning, and no development had occurred in the relations between the two since Helmut had first approached the daughter of the deceased Senator. What on both sides spoke for the union did so at the moment of betrothal and marriage no more and no less than it had in the beginning, and nothing new had been added. But the classic adage: “Look before you leap” had been formally complied with, and the very length of the test, added to the pressure due to the war, seemed finally to demand a positive solution. Indeed, it had ripened in haste several other unsettled affairs. Inez’s consent, however, which she—on psychological or shall I say material grounds, that is to say for common-sense reasons-had always been more or less ready to give, had been the readier because Clarissa, toward the end of the previous year, had left Munich and entered on her first engagement in Celle on the Aller, so that her sister was left alone with a mother of whose bohemian leanings, tame as they were, she disapproved. The Frau Senator, of course, felt a joyous satisfaction with the good bourgeois settlement her child was making, to which she had materially contributed by the entertaining she did and the social activities of her home. At her own expense she had thereby served the easy-going “south-German” love of life, which was her way of making up for what she had lost, and had her fading charms paid court to by the men she invited, Knoterich, Kranich, Zink and Spengler, the young dramatic students, and so on. Yes, I do not go too far, perhaps in the end only just far enough, when I say that even with Rudi Schwerdtfeger she was on a jesting, teasing travesty of a mother-and-son footing. Uncommonly often when she talked with him her familiar affected cooing laugh could be heard. But after all I have intimated or rather expressed about Inez’s inner life, I can leave it to the reader to imagine the mingled distaste and embarrassment that she felt at the sight of her mother’s philandering. It has happened in my presence that during such a scene she left the drawing-room with flushed cheeks and shut herself in her room, at whose door after a quarter of an hour, as she had probably hoped and expected, Rudolf knocked to ask why she had gone away. Surely he knew the answer to his question; as surely it could not be put in words. He would tell her how much her presence was missed and coax her in all the tender notes in his voice, including of course the brotherly ones, to come back. He would not rest until she promised—perhaps not with him, she would not quite do that, but a little while after him—to return to the company.

I may be pardoned for adding this supplement, which impressed itself on my memory, though it had been comfortably dropped out of Frau Senator Rodde’s now that Inez’s betrothal and marriage were accomplished fact. She had provided the wedding with due pomp and circumstance, and in the absence of any considerable dowry had not failed to supply a proper equipment of linen and silver. She even parted with various pieces of furniture from former days, such as carved chests and this or that gilt “occasional chair,” to contribute to the furnishings of the imposing new home which the young pair had rented in Prinzregentenstrasse, two flights up, looking out on the English Garden. Yes, as though to prove to herself and others that her social undertakings and all the lively evenings in her drawing-room had really only served to further her daughters’ prospects of happiness and settlement in life, she now expressed a distinct wish to retire, an inclination to withdraw from the world. She no longer entertained, and a year after Inez’s marriage she gave up her apartment in the Rambergstrasse and put her widowed existence upon an altered footing. She moved out to Pfeiffering, where almost without Adrian being aware of it she took up her residence in the low building on the square opposite the Schweigestill courtyard, with the chestnuts in front of it, where formerly the painter of the melancholy landscapes of the Waldshut moors had had his quarters.

It is remarkable what charm this modest yet picturesque corner of the earth possessed for every sort of distinguished resignation or bruised humanity. Perhaps the explanation lay in the character of the proprietors and especially in that of the stout-hearted landlady Frau Else Schweigestill and her power of “understanding.” She was amazingly clear-sighted, and she displayed her gift in occasional talk with Adrian, as when she told him that the Frau Senator was moving in across the road. “It’s pretty plain to see,” she said in her peasant singsong, “easy as an’thing, I see it with half an eye, Herr Leverkühn, eh!—she got out of conceit with city folk’s doings and lady and gentleman manners and ways, because she feels her age and she’s singin’ small, it takes different people different ways, I mean, eh, some don’t care a hoot, they brazen it out and they look good too, they just get more restless and roguish, eh, and put on false fronts and make ringlets of their white hairs maybe and so on and so forth, real peart, and don’t do any more like they used to, and act audacious and it often takes the men more than you’d think, eh, but with some that don’t go, and don’t do, so when their cheeks fall in and their necks get scrawny like a hen and nothin’ to do for the teeth when you laugh, so they can’t hold out, and grieve at their looks in the glass and act like a sick cat and hide away, and when ‘taint the neck and the teeth, then it’s the hair, eh, and with this one it’s the hair’s the worst, I could tell right off, otherways it’s not so bad, none of it, but the hair, it’s goin’ on top, eh, so the part’s gone to rack and ruin and she can’t do an’thin’ any more with the tongs, and so she’s struck all of a heap, for it’s a great pain, believe me, and so she just gives up the ghost eh, and moves out in the country, to Schweigestills’, and that’s all ‘tis.”

Thus the mother, with her smoothly drawn hair, just lightly silvered, with the parting in the middle showing the white skin. Adrian, as I said, was little affected by the advent of the lodger over the way, who, when she first visited the house, was brought by their landlady to greet him. Then out of respect for his work she matched his reserve with her own and only once just at first had him for tea with her, in the two simple whitewashed low-ceiled rooms on the ground floor, behind the chestnut trees, furnished quaintly enough with the elegant bourgeois relics of her former household, the candelabra, the stuffed easy-chairs, the Golden Horn in its heavy frame, the grand piano with the brocaded scarf. From then on, meeting in the village or on their walks, they simply exchanged friendly greetings or stopped a few minutes to chat about the sad state of the country and the growing food shortages in the cities. Out here one suffered much less, so that the retirement of the Frau Senator had a practical justification and even became a genuine interest, for it enabled her to provide her daughters and also former friends of the house, like the Knoterichs, with supplies from Pfeiffering: eggs, butter, flour, sausages, and so on. During the worst years she made quite a business out of packing and posting provisions. The Knoterichs had taken over Inez Rodde, now rich and settled and well wadded against life, into their own social circle from the little group who had attended her mother’s evenings. They also invited the numismatist Dr. Kranich, Schildknapp, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and myself; but not Zink and Spengler, nor the little theatre people who had been Clarissa’s colleagues. Instead their other guests were from university circles, or older and younger teachers of the two academies and their wives. With the Spanish-exotic Frau Knoterich, Natalie, Inez was on friendly or even intimate terms, this although the really attractive woman had the reputation, pretty well confirmed, of being a morphine addict; a rumour that was justified by my observation of the speaking brilliance of her eyes at the beginning of an evening and her occasional disappearance in order to refresh her gradually waning spirits. I saw that Inez, who set such store by patrician dignity and conservative propriety, who indeed had only married to gratify those tastes, chose to go about with Natalie rather than with the staid spouses of her husband’s colleagues, the typical German professors’ wives. She even visited and received Natalie alone. And thus was revealed to me anew the split in her nature; the fact that despite her nostalgia for it, the bourgeois life had no real viability for her.

That she did not love her husband, that rather limited teacher of aesthetics, wrapped in his dreams of beauty and brutality, I could not doubt. It was a conscious love of respectability that she devoted to him, and so much is true, that she upheld with consummate distinction, refined yet more by her expression of delicate and fastidious roguishness, her husband’s station in life. Her meticulous conduct of his household and his social activities might even be called pedantic; and she achieved it under economic conditions which year by year made it harder and harder to sustain the standards of bourgeois correctness. To aid her in the care of the handsome and expensive apartment with its Persian rugs and shining parquetry floors she had two well-trained maidservants, dressed very
comme il faut
in little caps and starched apron-strings. One of them served her as lady’s maid. To ring for this Sophie was her passion. She did it all the time, to enjoy the aristocratic service and assure herself of the protection and care she had bought with her marriage. It was Sophie who had to pack the numberless trunks and boxes she took with her when she went to the country with Institoris, to Tegernsee or Berchtesgaden, if only for a few days. These mountains of luggage with which she weighed herself down at every smallest excursion out of her nest were to me likewise symbolic of her need of protection and her fear of life.

I must describe a little more particularly the immaculate eight-roomed apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse. It had two drawing-rooms, one of which, more intimately furnished, served as family living-room; a spacious dining-room in carved oak, and a gentlemen’s den and smoking-room supplied with leather-upholstered comfort. The sleeping-room of the married pair had twin beds with a semblance of a tester in polished yellow pear-wood above them. On the toilette-table the glittering bottles, the silver tools were ranged in rows according to size. All this was a pattern, one which still survived for some years into the period of disintegration: a pattern establishment of German bourgeois culture, not least by virtue of the “good books” you found everywhere in living-and reception-rooms. The collection, on grounds partly representative, partly psychological, avoided the exciting and disturbing. It was dignified and cultured, with the histories of Leopold von Ranke, the works of Gregorovius, art histories, German and French classics—in short, the solid and conservative—as its foundation. With the years the apartment grew more beautiful, or at least fuller and more elaborate; for Dr. Institoris knew this or that Munich artist of the more conservative Glaspalast school. His taste in art, despite all his theoretic espousal of the gorgeous and barbaric, was decidedly tame. In particular there was a certain Nottebohm, a native of Hamburg, married, hollow-cheeked, with a pointed beard; a droll man, clever at frightfully funny imitations of actors, animals, musical instruments, and professors, a patron of the now declining carnival festival, as a portraitist clever at the social technique of catching subjects and as an artist, I may say, possessing a glossy and inferior painting style. Institoris, accustomed to professional familiarity with masterpieces, either did not distinguish between them and deft mediocrity, or else he thought his commissions were a due of friendship, or else he asked nothing better than the refined and inoffensive for the adornment of his walls. Therein doubtless he was supported by his wife, if not on grounds of taste, then as a matter of feeling. So they both had themselves done for good money by Nottebohm, very like and not at all speaking portraits, each alone and both together; and later, when children came, the funny man made a life-size family group of all the Institorises, a collection of wooden dolls, on the respectable canvas of which a great deal of highly varnished oil paint had been expended. All these adorned the reception-rooms, in rich frames, provided with their own individual electric lighting above and below.

When children came, I said. For children did come; and with what address, what persistent, one might almost say heroic ignoring of circumstances less and less favourable to the patrician and bourgeois were they cared for and brought up—for a world, one might say, as it had been and not as it was to become. At the end of 1915 Inez presented her husband with a small daughter, named Lucrezia, begot in the polished yellow bedstead with the tester, next to the symmetrically ranged silver implements on the toilette-table. Inez declared at once that she intended to make of her a perfectly brought-up young girl,
une jeune file accomplie
, she said in her Karlsruhe French. Two years later came twins, also female; they were christened Aennchen and Riekchen, with the same correct pomp and ceremony, at home, with chocolate, port wine, and dragees. The christening basin was silver, with a garland of flowers. All three were fair, charmingly pampered, lisping little beings, concerned about their frocks and sashes, obviously under pressure from the mother’s perfection-compulsion. They were sensitive-plants grown in the shade, pathetically taken up with themselves. They spent their early days in costly bassinets with silk curtains, and were taken out to drive in little go-carts of the most elegant construction, with rubber wheels, under the lime trees of the Prinzregentenstrasse. They had a wet-nurse from “the people,” decked out in the traditional costume and ribbons Like a lamb for the sacrifice. Inez did not nurse her children herself, the family doctor having advised against it. Later a Fraulein, a trained kindergarten teacher, took charge of them. The light, bright room where they grew up, where their little beds stood, where Inez visited them whenever the claims of the household and her own person permitted, had a frieze of fairy-stories round the walls, fabulous dwarf furniture, a gay linoleum-covered floor, and a world of well-ordered toys, teddy-bears, lambs on wheels, jumping-jacks, Kathe Kruse dolls, railway trains, on shelves along the walls—in short, it was the very pattern of a children’s paradise, correct in every detail.