Doctor Faustus
Page 26
At the Schlaginhaufens’ Rüdiger had also introduced Adrian, who then, a monosyllabic stranger, met the titled stars of the artist world, the Wagner heroine Tanya Orlanda, Felix Mottl, ladies from the Bavarian court, the “descendant of Schiller,” Herr von Gleichen-Russwurm, who wrote books on cultural history; also other writers who wrote nothing at all but made themselves socially interesting as specialists in the art of conversation, superficially and without tangible results. However, it was here that Adrian made the acquaintance of Jeanette Scheurl, a woman of peculiar charm and sincerity, a good ten years older than he, daughter of a deceased Bavarian government official. Her mother was a Parisian, a paralysed old lady, confined to her chair but full of mental energy, who had never given herself the trouble of learning German. She had no need to, since French was by good fortune generally the mode and hers so to speak ran on wheels, gaining her both living and position. Mme Scheurl lived near the Botanical Gardens with her three daughters, of whom Jeanette was the eldest; their quarters were small, the atmosphere entirely Parisian. In her little salon she gave extraordinarily popular musk cal teas, where the exemplary organs of the court singers male and female filled the little rooms to bursting, and the blue coaches from the court often stood in front of the house.
Jeanette was a writer of novels. Grown up between two languages, she wrote ladylike and original studies of society in a charmingly incorrect idiom peculiar to herself alone. They did not lack psychological or melodic charm and were definitely a literary achievement. She noticed Adrian at once, and took to him; he, in his turn, felt at home in her presence and conversation. She was aristocratically ugly and good form, with a face like a sheep, where the high-born and the low-born met, just as in her speech her French was mingled with Bavarian dialect. She was extraordinarily intelligent and at the same time enveloped in the naively inquiring innocence of the spinster no longer young. Her mind had something fluttering and quaintly confused about it, at which she herself laughed more heartily than anyone else—though by no means in the fashion of Leo Zink, who laughed at himself as a parlour trick, whereas she did the same out of sheer lightness of heart and sense of fun. She was very musical, a pianist, a Chopin enthusiast, a writer on Schubert; on friendly terms with more than one bearer of a great name in the contemporary world of music. Her first conversation with Adrian had been a gratifying exchange upon the subject of Mozart’s polyphony and his relation to Bach. He was and remained her attached friend for many years.
But no one will suppose that the city he had chosen to live in really took him to her bosom or ever made him her own. The beauty of the grandiose village under the melting blue of the Alpine sky, with the mountain stream rushing and rippling through it: that might please his eye; the self-indulgent comfort of its ways, the suggestion it had of all-the-year-round carnival freedom, might make even his life easier. But its spirit—sit venia verbo!—its atmosphere, a little mad and quite harmless; the decorative appeal to the senses, the holiday and artistic mood of this self-satisfied Capua: all that was of course foreign to the soul of a deep, stern nature like his. It was indeed the fitting and proper target for that look of his I had so long observed: veiled and cold and musingly remote, followed by the smile and averted face.
The Munich I speak of is the Munich of the late Regency, with only four years between it and the war, whose issue was to turn its pleasantness to morbidness and produce in it one sad and grotesque manifestation after another; this capital city of beautiful vistas, where political problems confined themselves to a capricious opposition between a half-separatist folk-Catholicism and the lively liberalism professed by the supporters of the Reich; Munich, with its parade concerts in the Feldherrenhalle, its art shops, its palaces of decorative crafts, its recurring exhibitions, its Bauern-balls in carnival time, its seasonal “Marzbrau” carouses and week-long monster fair on the “Oktoberwiese,” where a stout and lusty folkishness, now long since corrupted by modern mass methods, celebrated its saturnalia; Munich, with its residuary Wagnerism, its esoteric coteries performing their aesthetic devotions behind the Siegestor; its Bohemia, well bedded down in public approval and fundamentally easy-going. Adrian looked on at all that, moved in it, tasted of it, during the nine months that he spent at this time in Oberbayern—an autumn, a winter, and a spring. At the artist festivals that he attended with Schildknapp in the illusory twilight of artistically decorated ballrooms he met members of the Rodde circle, the young actors, the Knoterichs, Dr. Kranich, Zink and Spengler, the daughters of the house. He sat at a table with Inez and Clarissa, Rüdiger, Spengler, and Kranich, perhaps Jeanette Scheurl. And Schwerdtfeger, in peasant dress or in the Florentine quattrocento which set off his handsome legs and made him look like Botticelli’s youth in the red cap, would come up, dissolved in festival mirth, all intellectual elevation quite forgot, and in order to be “nice” invite the Rodde girls to dance. “Nice” was his favourite word; he insisted on having everything happen “nicely” and on leaving out all that was not “nice.” He had many obligations and pending flirtations in the room, but it would not have seemed “nice” to him to neglect entirely the ladies of the Rambergstrasse, with whom he was on a brotherly footing. This compulsion to be “nice” was so visible in his business-like approach that Clarissa said pertly: “Good heavens, Rudolf, if you didn’t put on the air of a knight rescuing a damsel in distress! I assure you we have danced enough, we do not need you at all.”
“Need!” he replied, with pretended anger, in his rather guttural voice. “And the needs of my heart are not to count at all?”
“Not a brass farthing,” said she. “Anyhow, I am too big for you.”
But she would go off with him even so, proudly tilting her insufficient chin, with no hollow under the full lip. Or it was Inez he had asked, who with pinched lips and drooping head followed him to the dance. But he was “nice” not alone to the sisters. He kept guard over his forgetfulness. Suddenly, especially if someone had declined to dance, he might became serious and sit down at the table with Adrian and Baptist Spengler. The latter was always in a domino, and drinking red wine. Blinking, a dimple in his cheek above the thick moustaches, he would be citing the Goncourt diaries or the letters of Abbe Galiani, and Schwerdtfeger, positively furious with attention, would sit and bore his gaze into the speaker’s face. Or he would talk with Adrian about the program of the next Zapfenstosser concert; or demand, as though there were no more pressing interest or obligations anywhere, that Adrian explain and enlarge upon something that he had lately said at the Roddes’ about music, about the state of the opera, or the like. He would devote himself to Adrian, take his arm and stroll with him at the edge of the crowd, round the hall, addressing him with the carnival du, heedless that the other did not respond. Jeanette Scheurl told me later that when Adrian once returned to the table after such a stroll, Inez Rodde said to him: “You shouldn’t give him the pleasure. He wants everything.”
“Perhaps Herr Leverkühn wants everything too,” remarked Clarissa, supporting her chin on her hand.
Adrian shrugged his shoulders.
“What he wants,” he responded, “is that I should write a violin concerto for him with which he can be heard in the provinces.”
“Don’t do it,” Clarissa said again. “You wouldn’t think of anything but prettinesses if you considered him while you were doing it.”
“You have too high an opinion of my flexibility,” he retorted, and had Baptist Spengler’s bleating laugh on his side.
But enough of Adrian’s participation in the Munich joy of life. Trips into the environs, justly celebrated if somewhat spoiled by mass resort, he had made with Schildknapp, mostly on the latter’s initiative. Even in the glittering winter they spent days in Ettal, Oberammergau, Mittenwald; and when spring came, these excursions increased, to the famous lakes and the theatrical castles built by the nation’s madman. Often they went on bicycles (for Adrian loved them as a means of independent travel) at random into the greening country, lodging at
night humbly or pretentiously, just as it fell out. I am reminded of the fact because it was thus that Adrian made acquaintance with the place that he later chose as the permanent setting of his life: Pfeiffering near Waldshut and the Schweigestill farm.
The little town of Waldshut, devoid of interest or charm, lies on the Garmisch-Partenkirchen line, an hour from Munich. The next station, only ten minutes farther on, is Pfeiffering or Pfeffering, where the through trains do not stop. They leave to one side the onion-shaped dome of Pfeiffering church, rising out of a landscape which at this point is in no way remarkable. Adrian and Rüdiger visited the place by mere chance. They did not even spend the night at Schweigestill’s, for both had to work next morning and must take the train back from Waldshut to Munich. They had eaten their midday meal in the little square at Waldshut, and as the time-table left them some hours to spare, they rode along the tree-lined highway to Pfeiffering, pushed their bicycles through the village, inquired of a child the name of the near-by pond, and heard that it was called the Klammer; cast a glance at the tree-crowned height, the Rohmbühel, and asked for a glass of lemonade from a barefoot girl under the gate of the manor-house, which was adorned with ecclesiastical arms. They asked less from thirst than because the massive and characteristic peasant baroque structure attracted their attention. The yard dog on his chain bayed loudly, and the girl shouted at him: “Kaschperl, hush your noise!”
I do not know how far Adrian took notice at that time; or whether it was only afterwards, gradually and from memory, that he recognized certain correspondences, transposed, as it were, into another but not far removed key. I incline to the belief that the discovery at first remained unconscious and only later, perhaps as in a dream, came to him as a surprise. At least he did not utter a syllable to Schildknapp, nor did he ever mention to me the singular correspondence. Of course I may be mistaken. Pond and hill, the gigantic old tree in the courtyard—an elm, as a matter of fact—with its round green bench, and still other details might have attracted him at his first glance; it may be no dream was needed to open his eyes. That he said nothing is of course no proof at all.
It was Frau Else Schweigestill who advanced towards the travellers with dignified tread, met them at the gate, gave a friendly ear to their wants, and made lemonade in tall glasses with long spoons. She served it in the best room, left of the entry, a sort of peasant hall, with a vaulted ceiling, a huge table, window embrasures which showed the thickness of the walls, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace in plaster above the tall, gaily painted press. There was a dark brown piano as well. The room was not used by the family, Frau Schweigestill explained as she sat down with her guests. They sat of evenings in a smaller room diagonally opposite, near the house door. The building had much extra space; farther along on this side was another sightly room, the so-called Abbot’s chamber, probably thus named because it had served as a study to the head of the Augustine Order of monks, who had once presided over the place. So it had formerly been a cloister; but for three generations Schweigestills had been settled here.