Doctor Faustus (71 page)

I am certain that Schwerdtfeger, so far as he knew himself, went to Marie Godeau with the best and most correct intentions. But it is no less certain that these intentions had never from the first been very firm on their feet. They were endangered from within, prone to relax, to melt, to change their character. His vanity had been flattered by what Adrian had been at pains to impress upon him about his personal significance for the life and humanity of his great friend; he had accepted the interpretation, so skilfully instilled, that his present mission arose out of this significance. But jealousy worked against those first feelings. He resented the fact that Adrian, after the conquest he had made of him, had changed his mind; that he, Rudolf, now counted for nothing except as a tool and instrument. I believe that in his secret heart he now felt free, in other words not bound to repay with good faith the other’s disloyalty and egotism. This is fairly clear to me. And it is clear, too, that to go wooing for another man is an intriguing enterprise, particularly for a fanatical male coquette, whose morale must have been prone to relax in the anticipation of a flirtation even if only a vicarious one.

Does anyone doubt that I could tell what happened between Rudolf and Marie Godeau, just as I knew the whole course of the dialogue between him and Adrian in Pfeiffering? Does anyone doubt that I was “there”? I think not. But I also think that a precise account is no longer useful or desirable. Its issue, heavy with fate, however delightful it looked at first to others if not to me, was not, we must assume, the fruit of only one interview. A second was necessary and inevitable after the way in which Marie dismissed him the first time. It was Tante Isabeau whom Rudolf met when he entered the little vestibule of the pension. He inquired after her niece and asked if he might have a few words of private conversation with her, in the interest of a third party. The old lady directed him to the living-and working-room with a mischievous smile which betrayed her disbelief in the existence of the third party. He entered and was greeted by Marie with surprise and pleasure; she was about to inform her aunt when he told her, to her increasing if obviously not unpleasant astonishment, that her aunt knew he was here and would come in after he had spoken with herself on a weighty and wonderful theme. What did she reply? Something jesting and commonplace, of course. “I am certainly most curious,” or the like. And asked the gentleman to sit down comfortably for his recital.

He seated himself in an easy-chair beside her drawing-board. Nobody could say he broke his word. He kept it, honourably. He spoke to her of Adrian, of his importance and greatness, of which the public would only slowly become aware; of
his
, Rudolf’s admiration, his devotion to the extraordinary man. He talked of Zurich, and of the meeting at the Schlaginhaufens’, of the day in the mountains. He revealed to her that his friend loved her—but how does one reveal to a woman that another man loves her? Do you bend over her, gaze into her eyes, take in an appealing grasp the hand that you profess to hope you may lay in another’s? I do not know. I had had to convey only an invitation to an excursion, not an offer of marriage. All I know is that she hastily drew back her hand, either from his or only from her lap, where it had been lying; that a blush overspread the southern paleness of her face and the laughter disappeared from her eyes. She did not understand, she was really not sure she understood. She inquired if she had understood aright: was Rudolf proposing to her for Dr. Leverkühn? Yes, he said, he was; actuated by friendship and a sense of duty. Adrian, in his scrupulous delicacy, had asked him to represent him and he felt he could not refuse. Her distinctly cool, distinctly mocking comment, that it was certainly very kind of him, was not calculated to relieve his embarrassment. The extraordinary nature of his situation and role only now struck him, mingled with the thought that something not very complimentary to her was involved in it. Her manner expressed sheer surprise and umbrage—and that both startled and secretly pleased him. He struggled for a while, stammering, to justify himself. She did not know, he said, how hard it was to refuse a man like that. And he had felt to some extent responsible for the turn Adrian’s life had taken, because it had been he who had moved him to the Swiss journey and thus brought about the meeting with Marie. Yes, it was strange: the violin concerto was dedicated to him, but in the end it had been the medium of the composer’s meeting with her. He begged her to understand that his sense of responsibility had largely contributed to his readiness to perform this service for Adrian.

Here there was another quick withdrawal of the hand which he had tried to take as he pleaded with her. She answered that he need not trouble himself further, it was not important that she should understand the role he had assumed, She regretted to be obliged to shatter his friendly hopes, but though she was of course not unimpressed by the personality of his principal, the reverence she felt for the great man had nothing to do with any feelings that could form the basis of a union for which he had argued with so much eloquence. The acquaintance with Dr. Leverkühn had been a source of pleasure and an honour as well; but unfortunately the answer that she must now give would probably make further meetings too painful. She sincerely regretted being obliged to take the view that Dr. Leverkühn’s messenger and representative was also necessarily affected by this change in the situation. Certainly after what had happened it would be better and less embarrassing if they did not meet again. And now she must bid him a friendly farewell: “Adieu, monsieur!”

He implored her: “Marie!” But she merely expressed her amazement at his use of her first name and repeated her farewell—the sound of her voice rings clearly in my ears: “Adieu, monsieur!”

He went, his tail between his legs—to all appearance, that is. Inwardly he was blissful. Adrian’s plan of marrying had turned out to be the nonsensical idea it had been from the first, and she had taken it very ill indeed that he had been willing to espouse it. She had been enchantingly angry. He did not hasten to let Adrian know the result of his visit, overjoyed as he was to have saved his own face by the honest admission that he was not himself indifferent to her. What he did now was to sit down and compose a letter to Mile Godeau. He said that he could not submit to her “Adieu, monsieur”; for the sake of his life and reason he must see her again, and put to her in person the question which he here wrote down with his whole heart and soul: did she not understand that a man, out of veneration for another man, could sacrifice his own feelings and act regardless of them, making himself a selfless advocate of the other’s desire? And could she not further understand that the suppressed, the loyally controlled feelings must burst forth, freely, exultantly, so soon as the other man proved to have no prospects of success? He begged her pardon for the treason, which he had committed against nobody but himself. He could not regret it, but he was overjoyed that there was no longer any disloyalty involved if he told her that—he loved her.

In that style. Not unclever. Winged by his genius for flirtation, and, as I fully believe, all unconscious that in substituting his own wooing for Adrian’s, his declaration of love remained bound up with an offer of marriage which of his own motion, considering his nature, would never have entered his flirtatious head. Tante Isabeau read the letter aloud to Marie, who had been unwilling to accept it. Rudolf received no reply. But two days later he had himself announced to Tante by the housemaid at Pension Gisela and was not refused entrance. Marie was out. After his first visit, as the old lady with sly reproof betrayed to him, she had wept a few tears on her Tante’s breast. Which in my view was an invention of Tante’s. She emphasized her niece’s pride. Marie’s was a proud nature but full of deep feeling, she said. Definite hope of another meeting she could not give him. But she would say this much, that she herself would spare no pains to represent to her niece the uprightness of his conduct.

In another two days he was there again. Mme Ferblantier—this was Tante’s name, she was a widow—went in to her niece. She remained some time; at last she came out and with an encouraging twinkle ushered him in. Of course he had brought flowers.

What else is there to say? I am too old and sad to relish describing a scene whose details can be of moment to no one. Rudolf repeated his wooing, only this time not for Adrian but himself. Of course the feather-headed youth was as suited to the married state as I am to the role of Don Juan. But it is idle to speculate on the chances for future happiness of a union doomed to no future at all, destined to be brought to naught by a violent blow from the hand of fate. Marie had dared to love the breaker of hearts, the fiddler with the “little tone,” whose artistic gifts and certain success had been vouched for to her by so weighty an authority. She confided in herself to hold and bind him, in her power to domesticate the wild-fowl she had caught. She gave him her hands, received his kiss, and it was not four-and-twenty hours before the glad news had gone the rounds of our circle that Rudi was caught, that Konzertmeister Schwerdtfeger and Marie Godeau were an engaged pair. We also heard that he would not renew his contract with the Zapfenstosser orchestra but marry in Paris and there devote his services to a new musical group just being organized, called the Orchestre Symphonique.

No doubt he was very welcome there, and just as certainly the arrangements to release him went forward slowly in Munich, where there was reluctance to let him go. However, his presence at the next concert—it was the first after that one to which he had come back at the last minute from Pfeiffering—was interpreted as a sort of farewell performance. The conductor, Dr. Edschmidt, had chosen for the evening an especially house-filling program, Berlioz and Wagner, and as they say, all Munich was there. Familiar faces looked from the rows of seats, and when I stood up I had to bow repeatedly: there were the Schlaginhaufens and their social circle, the Radbruchs with Schildknapp, Jeanette Scheurl, Mmes Zwitscher and Binder-Majurescu, and the rest, all of whom had certainly come with the thought uppermost in their minds of seeing Benedict the married man, in other words Rudi Schwerdtfeger, up there, left front, at his music-stand. His betrothed was not present; we heard that she had returned to Paris. I bowed to Inez Institoris. She was alone, or rather with the Knoterichs and without her husband, who was unmusical and would be spending the evening at the Allotria. She sat rather far back, in a frock so simple as to look almost poverty-stricken; her head thrust forward on its slanting stalk, her eyebrows raised, the mouth pursed in that look of not quite innocent mischief. As she returned my greeting I could not help the irritating impression that she was forever smiling in malicious triumph over that evening in her living-room and her exploitation of my long-suffering sympathy.

As for Schwerdtfeger, well knowing how many curious eyes he would meet, he scarcely during the whole evening looked down into the parterre. At the times when he might have done so, he listened to his instrument or turned over the score.

The last number was the overture to the
Meistersinger
, played with breadth and elan. The crashing applause, loud enough anyhow, rose still higher as Ferdinand Edschmidt motioned to the orchestra to stand up, and put out his hand gratefully to his Konzertmeister. By then I was already in the aisle, intent on my overcoat, which was handed out before there was a crowd round the garde-robe. I intended to walk for at least a part of my way home; that is, to my stop in Schwabing. But in front of the building I met a gentleman of the Kridwiss group, the Diirer expert, Professor Gilgen Holzschuher, who had also been at the concert. He involved me in a conversation which began with a criticism of the evening’s program: this combination of Berlioz and Wagner, of foreign virtuosity and German mastery, was tasteless, and also it only ill concealed a political tendency. All too much it looked like pacifism and German-French rapprochement; this Edschmidt was known to be a republican and nationally unreliable. The thought had spoilt his whole evening. Unfortunately, everything today was politics, there was no longer any intellectual clarity. To restore it we must above all have at the head of our great orchestras men of unquestionably German views.

I did not tell him that it was he himself who was making politics of everything, and that the word “German” is today by no means synonymous with intellectual clarity, being, as it is, a party cry. I only suggested that a great deal of virtuosity, foreign or not, was after all a component of Wagner’s internationally so well-tolerated art—and then charitably distracted his mind by speaking of an article on problems of proportion in Gothic architecture, which he had recently written for the periodical Art and Artists. The politenesses I expressed about it rendered him quite happy, pliable and unpolitical; I utilized this bettered mood to bid him goodbye and turn right as he turned left in front of the hall.

I went by way of the upper Turkenstrasse, reached the Ludwigstrasse, and walked along the silent Monumental-Chaussce (asphalted now, years ago), on the left side, in the direction of the Siegestor. The evening was cloudy and very mild, and my overcoat began to feel oppressive, so I stopped at the Theresienstrasse halt to pick up a tram to Schwabing. I don’t know why it took so long for one to come, but there are always many blocks in the traffic. At last number ten appeared, quite conveniently for me; I can still see and hear it approaching from the Feldherrnhalle. These Munich trams, painted in the Bavarian light-blue, are heavily built and either for that reason or some characteristic of the subsoil make considerable noise. Electric sparks flashed under the wheels of the vehicle and even more on top of the contact with the pole, where they sent out hissing showers of cold flame.

The car stopped, I got on in front and went inside. Close to the sliding door was an empty seat, obviously just vacated. The tram was full, two gentlemen stood clinging to straps at the rear door. Most of the passengers were home-goers from the concert. Among them, in the middle of the opposite bench, sat Schwerdtfeger, with his violin-case between his knees. Under his overcoat he wore a white cache-nez over his dress tie, but as usual was bareheaded. Of course he had seen me come in, but he avoided my eye. He looked young and charming, with his unruly waving blond locks, his colour heightened by his recent honourable exertions; by contrast the blue eyes seemed a little swollen. But even that became him, as did the curling lips that could whistle in so masterly a fashion. I am not a quick observer, only by degrees was I aware of other people I knew. I exchanged a greeting with Dr. Kranich, who sat on Schwerdtfeger’s side of the tram, at some distance from him, near the rear door. Bending forward by chance, I was aware to my surprise of Inez Institoris, on the same bench with myself, several seats away, towards the middle of the tram, diagonally opposite to Rudi Schwerdtfeger. I say to my surprise, for certainly this was not her way home. But a few seats farther on I saw her friend Frau Binder-Majurescu, who lived far out in Schwabing, beyond the “Grossen Wirt,” so I assumed that Inez was going to drink tea with her.