Doctor Faustus (61 page)

That is Adrian Leverkühn. Utterly. That is the music he represents; and that correspondence is its profound significance, calculation raised to mystery. Thus love with painful discrimination has taught me to see this music, though in accordance with my own simple nature I would perhaps have been glad to see it otherwise.

CHAPTER XXXV

T
he new numeral stands at the head of a chapter that will report a death, a human catastrophe in the circle round my friend. And yet, my God, what chapter, what sentence, what word that I have written has not been pervaded by the catastrophic, when that has become the air we breathe! What word did not shake, as only too often the hand that wrote it, with the vibrations not alone of the catastrophe towards which my story strives but simultaneously of that cataclysm in whose sign the world—at least the bourgeois, the human world—stands today?

Here we shall be dealing with a private, human disaster, scarcely noted by the public. To it many factors contributed: masculine rascality, feminine frailty, feminine pride and professional unsuccess. It is twenty-two years since, almost before my eyes, Clarissa Rodde the actress, sister of the just as obviously doomed Inez, went to her death: at the end of the winter season of 1921-2, in the month of May, at Pfeiffering in her mother’s house and with scant consideration for that mother’s feelings, with rash and resolute hand she took her life, using the poison that she had long kept in readiness for the moment when her pride could no longer endure to live.

I will relate in few words the events which led to the frightful deed, so shattering to us all though at bottom we could hardly condemn it, together with the circumstances under which it was committed. I have already mentioned that her Munich teacher’s warnings had proved all too well founded: Clarissa’s artistic career had not in the course of years risen from lowly provincial beginnings to more respectable and dignified heights. From Elbing in East Prussia she went to Pforzheim in Baden—in other words she advanced not at all or very little, the larger theatres of the Reich gave her not a thought. She was a failure or at least lacking any genuine success, for the simple reason, so hard for the person concerned to grasp, that her natural talent was not equal to her ambition. No genuine theatre blood gave body to her knowledge or her hopes or won for her the minds and hearts of the contrarious public. She lacked the primitive basis, that which in all art is the decisive thing but most of all in the art of the actor—whether that be to the honour or the dishonour of art and in particular the art of the stage.

There was another factor which added to Clarissa’s emotional confusion. As I had long before observed with regret, she did not make a clear distinction between her stage life and her real one. Possibly just because she was no true actress, she played actress even outside the theatre. The personal and physical nature of stage art led her to make up in private life with rouge and cosmetics, exaggerated hairdressing and extravagant hats: an entirely unnecessary and mistaken self-dramatization which affected her friends painfully, invited criticism from the conventional, and encouraged the licentious. All this without wish or intention on her part, for Clarissa was the most mockingly aloof, chaste, and high-minded creature imaginable, though her armour of arrogance may well have been a defence mechanism against the demands of her own femininity. If so, she was the blood sister of Inez Institoris, the beloved—or
ci-devant
beloved—of Rudi Schwerdtfeger.

In any case, to that well-preserved sixty-year-old man who wanted to make her his mistress, there succeeded this or that un-chronicled trifler with less solid prospects, or one or another favourable critic who might have been useful to her but being repulsed revenged himself by pouring public scorn on her performance. And finally fate overtook her and put to shame her contemptuous way of looking down her nose. It was a defeat the more lamentable in that the conqueror of her maidenhood was not at all worthy of his triumph and was not even so deemed by Clarissa herself. He was a pseudo-Mephistopheles, a Pforzheim petticoat-chaser, back-stage hanger-on and provincial roue, by profession a criminal lawyer. He was equipped for conquest with nothing but a cheap and cynical eloquence, fine linen, and much black hair on his hands. One evening after the play, probably a little the worse for wine, the prickly but at bottom shy, inexperienced, and defenceless creature yielded to his practised technique of seduction and afterwards was prey to the most scathing self-contempt. For the betrayer had indeed been able to capture her senses for the moment but she actually felt for him only the hatred his triumph aroused, together with a certain astonishment that she, Clarissa Rodde, could have been thus betrayed. She scornfully rejected his further addresses; but she was frightened lest he might betray their relation—in fact he was already threatening to do so as a means of bringing pressure.

Meanwhile decent human prospects had opened to the girl in her disillusioned and nervous state. Among her social connections she had made the acquaintance of a young Alsatian business man who sometimes came over from Strasbourg to Pforzheim and had fallen desperately in love with the proud and stately blonde. Clarissa was not at this time entirely without an engagement; having remained for another season at the Pforzheim theatre, though only in secondary and unrewarding parts. Even so, the re-engagement was due to the sympathy and mediation of an elderly dramatist, who while sceptical as to her acting abilities esteemed her general intellectual and human worth, which was so greatly, even disadvantageously superior to the average among the little stage folk. Perhaps, who knows, this man even loved her, but was too much resigned to the disappointments and disillusionments of life to summon up courage to declare his inclination.

At the beginning of the new season, then, Clarissa met the young man who promised to rescue her from her unsuccessful career and to offer her as his wife a peaceful and secure, yes, well-furnished existence in a sphere strange to her, indeed, but socially not alien to her own origins. With unmistakable joy and hope, with gratitude, yes, with a tenderness rooted in her gratitude, she wrote to her sister and even to her mother of Henri’s wooing and also about the disapproval of his family. He was about the same age as Clarissa, his mother’s darling, his father’s business partner, and altogether the light of his family’s eyes. He put his case to them with ardour and strength of purpose; but it would have taken more than that to overcome all at once the prejudice of his bourgeois clan against an itinerant actress and a boche into the bargain. Henri understood his family’s concern for refinement and good taste, their fear that he might be getting entangled. It was not so easy to convince them that he would by no means be doing so in bringing Clarissa home; the best way would be for him to present her personally to his loving parents, jealous brothers and sisters, and prejudiced aunts, and towards this goal he had been working for weeks, that they might consent and arrange an interview. In regular letters and repeated trips to Pforzheim he reported progress to his betrothed.

Clarissa was confident of success. Her social equality, only clouded by the profession she was ready to renounce, must become plain to Henri’s anxious clan at a personal meeting. In her letters and during a visit she made to Munich she took for granted her coming official betrothal and the future she anticipated. That future, to be sure, looked quite different from the earlier dreams of this uprooted child of patrician stock, striving towards intellectual and artistic goals. But now it was her haven, her happiness: a bourgeois happiness, which obviously looked more acceptable because it possessed the charm of novelty; the foreign nationality was a new frame into which she would be transplanted. In fancy she heard her future children prattling in French.

Then the spectre of her past rose up to blast her hopes. It was a stupid, cynical, ignoble spectre but bold and ruthless; and it put her to shame, it drove the poor soul into a corner and brought her to her death. That villain learned in the law, to whom in a weak moment she had surrendered, used his single conquest to enforce her. Henri’s family, Henri himself should learn of their relation if she did not yield to him again. From all that we later learned, there must have been desperate scenes between the murderer and his victim. In vain the girl implored him—on her knees at last—to spare her, to release her, not to make her pay for her peace with the betrayal of the man who loved her, whose love she returned. Precisely this confession roused the wretch to cruelty. He made no bones of saying that in giving herself to him now, she was buying peace only for the moment, buying the trip to Strasbourg, the betrothal. He would never release her: to pay himself for his present silence he would compel her to his will whenever he chose. He would speak out as soon as she denied her debt. She would be forced to live in adultery: a just punishment for her philistinism, for what the wretch called her cowardly retreat into bourgeois society. If all that went wrong, if even without his treachery her little bridegroom learned the truth, then there still remained the last resort, the out-crowing drug which for so long she had kept in that objet d’art, the book with the death’s-head on the lid. Not for nothing had she felt superior to life and made macabre mock of it by her possession of the Hippocratic drug—a mock that was more in character than the bourgeois peace treaty with life for which she had been preparing.

In my opinion the wretch, aside from satisfying his lust, had aimed at her death. His abnormal vanity demanded a female corpse on his path, he itched to have a human being die and perish, if not precisely for him, yet on his account. Alas, that Clarissa had to gratify him! She saw the situation clearly, just as I see it, as we all had to see it. Once again she yielded, to gain a present peace, and was thereby more than ever in his power. She probably thought that once accepted by the family, once married to Henri and safe in another country, she would find ways and means to defy her oppressor. It was not to be. Obviously her tormentor had made up his mind not to let matters go as far as marriage. An anonymous letter referring in the third person to Clarissa’s lover did its work with Henri and his Strasbourg family. He sent it to her that she might, if possible, deny it. His accompanying letter did not precisely display an unshakable faith and love.

Clarissa received the registered letter in Pfeiffering, where after the close of the Pforzheim theatre season she was spending a few weeks with her mother in the cottage under the chestnut trees. It was early afternoon. The Frau Senator saw her daughter hurrying back from a walk she had taken alone, after the midday meal. They met on the little open place in front of the house and Clarissa brushed past her mother with a blank, dazed look and fugitive smile, into her own room, where with a swift and violent movement she turned the key in the door. Next door the old lady presently heard her daughter at the wash-hand-stand, gargling her throat—we know now that it was to cool the fearful corrosive action of the acid. Then there was a silence—long and uncanny. After twenty minutes the Frau Senator knocked and called Clarissa’s name. Repeatedly and urgently she called but no answer came. The frightened woman, with her scanty hair awry over her brow, her partly toothless gums, ran across to the main building and in half-choked words told Frau Schweigestill; that experienced soul followed her with a manservant. After repeated knocking and calling they forced the door. Clarissa lay with open eyes on the sofa at the foot of the bed, a piece from the seventies or eighties of the last century, with a back and side arm; I knew it from the Rambergstrasse. She had retreated there when death came upon her while she gargled her throat.

“Not anythin’ to do, dear Frau Senator,” said Frau Schweigestill, one finger on her cheek, shaking her head, at sight of the half-sitting, half-lying figure. The same only too convincing sight met my eyes when I hurried over from Freising, having been informed by our landlady on the telephone. I took the wailing mother in my arms, a distressed and consolatory family friend; we stood beside the body together with Frau Schweigestill and Adrian. Dark blue spots of congested blood on Clarissa’s lovely hands and on her face indicated death by quick suffocation, the abrupt paralysis of the organs of breathing by a dose of cyanide large enough to kill a regiment. On the table, empty, the screws taken out of the bottom, was that bronze container, the book with the name Hippocrates in Greek letters, and the skull upon it.

There was a hasty pencilled note to her betrothed, with the words: “
Je t’aime. Une fois je t’ai trompé, mais je t’aime.
”

The young man came to the funeral, the arrangements for which fell to my lot. He was heart-broken—or rather he was desolé, which of course quite wrongly does not sound quite so serious, somehow a little more like a phrase. I would not cast doubt on the pain with which he cried out: “Ah, monsieur, I loved her enough to pardon her. Everything might have been well—and now—
comme ca!
”

Yes, “comme ca!” It really might all have been otherwise if he had not been such a son of his family and if Clarissa had had in him a more responsible support.

That night we wrote, Adrian, Frau Schweigestill, and I, while the Frau Senator in the deepest grief sat by the rigid husk of her child, the public announcement of the death. It had to be signed by Clarissa’s nearest relatives, and we were to give it an unmistakably palliating tone. We agreed on a formula which said that the deceased had died after grave and incurable affliction. This was read by the Munich dean on whom I called to get consent for the church service so intensely desired by the Frau Senator. I did not begin too diplomatically, for I naively admitted in confidence that Clarissa had preferred death to a life of dishonour. The man of God, a sturdy cleric of true Lutheran type, would not listen to me. Frankly, it took me some time to understand that on the one hand, indeed, the Church did not wish to see herself put on one side; but on the other she was not ready to give her parting blessing to a declared suicide, however honourable a one. In short, the sturdy cleric wanted nothing else than that I should tell him a lie. So then I came round with almost ridiculous promptness, described the event as incomprehensible; allowed that a mistake, a wrong bottle was quite possible, yes, probable. Whereupon the fat-head showed himself flattered by the weight we attached to the services of his firm and declared himself ready to conduct the funeral.