by Thomas Mann
Adrian mentioned that he himself was country-bred, though he had lived now for some time in towns. He inquired how much land there was and learned that there was about forty acres of ploughed land and meadow, with a wood http://forum.nllib.com/lot as well. The low building with the chestnut trees on the vacant space opposite the courtyard also belonged to the property. Once it had been occupied by lay brothers, now it was nearly always empty and scarcely furnished enough to live in. Summer before last a Munich painter and his wife had rented it; he wanted to make landscapes of the neighbourhood, the Waldshut moors and so on, and had done some pretty views, though rather gloomy, being painted in a dull light. Three of them had been hung in the Glaspalast, she had seen them there herself, and Herr Director Stiglmayer of the Bavarian Exchange Bank had bought one. The gentlemen were painters themselves?
She very likely mentioned the tenants in order to raise the subject and find out with whom she had to deal. When she heard that no, they were a writer and a musician, she lifted her brows respectfully and said that was more unusual and interesting. Painters were thick as blackberries. The gentlemen had seemed serious people to her, whereas painters were mostly a loose lot, without much feeling for the serious things of life—she did not mean the practical side, earning money and that, no, when she said serious she meant the dark side of life, its hardships and troubles, but she did not mean to be unfair to artists: her lodgers, for instance, had been an exception to that kind of light-headed gentry, he being a quiet, reserved sort of man, rather low-spirited if anything—and his pictures had looked like that too, the atmosphere of the moors, and the lonely woods and meadows, yes, it was perhaps surprising that Director Stiglmayer should have bought one, the gloomiest of all, of course he was a financial man but maybe he had a streak of melancholy himself.
She sat with them, bolt upright, her brown hair, only touched with grey, drawn smoothly away from the parting, so that you saw the white skin; in her checked apron, an oval brooch at the opening of her frock, her well-shaped, capable little hands with the plain wedding ring folded together on the table.
She liked artists, she said. Her language, seasoned with dialect, with halt and fei and gelleri’s ja, was yet not coarse. Artists were people of understanding, she thought, and understanding was the best and most important thing in life, the way artists were so lively depended on that, she would say, at bottom, there was a lively and a serious kind of understanding, and it had never come out yet which one was better, maybe the best of all was still another one, a quiet kind of understandingness, anyhow artists, of course, had to live in the towns, because that was where the culture was, that they spent their time on, but actually they belonged more with peasant folk, who lived in the middle of nature and so nearer to understanding, much more than with townspeople, because these had had their understanding stunted, or else they had smothered it up for the sake of being regular and that came to the same thing, but she did not want to be unfair to the townsfolk either, there were always exceptions, maybe one didn’t always know, and Director Stiglmayer, just to mention him again, when he bought the gloomy painting had shown he was a man of understanding, and not only artistic either.
Hereupon she offered her guests coffee and pound-cake; but Schildknapp and Adrian preferred to spend what time they had left looking at the house and grounds, if she would be so good as to show them.
“Willingly,” said she; “only too bad my Maxl” (that was Herr Schweigestill) “is out on the farm with Gereon, that’s our son, they wanted to try a new manure-spreader Gereon bought, so the gentlemen will have to make do with me.”
They would not call that making-do, they answered, and went with her through the massively built old house. They looked at the house-place in front, where the prevailing odour of pipe tobacco was strongest; farther back was the Abbot’s room, very pleasing, not very large, and rather earlier in style than the exterior architecture of the house, nearer 1600 than 1700; wainscoted, with carpetless wooden floor and stamped-leather hangings below the beamed ceiling. There were pictures of saints on the walls of the flat-arched window embrasures, and leaded windowpanes that had squares of painted glass let into them. There was a niche in the wall, with a copper water-kettle and basin, and a cupboard with wrought-iron bolts and locks. There was a corner bench with leather cushions, and a heavy oak table not far from the window, built like a chest, with deep drawers under the polished top and a sunken middle part where a carved reading-desk stood. Above it there hung down from the beamed ceiling a huge chandelier with the remains of wax candles still sticking in it, a piece of Renaissance decoration with horns, shovel-antlers, and other fantastic shapes sticking out irregularly on all sides.
The visitors praised the Abbot’s room warmly. Schildknapp, with a reflective head-shake, even thought that one ought to settle down and live here; but Frau Schweigestill had her doubts whether it would not be too lonely for a writer, too far from life and culture. And she led her guests up the stairs to the upper storey, to show them a few of the numerous bedrooms, in a row on a whitewashed, musty corridor. They were furnished with bedsteads and chests in the style of the painted one below, and only a few were supplied with the towering feather beds in peasant style. “What a lot of rooms!” they exclaimed. Yes, they were mostly empty, replied the hostess. One or two might be occupied temporarily. For two years, until last autumn, a Baroness von Handschuchsheim had lived here and wandered about through the house: a lady of rank, whose ideas, as Frau Schweigestill expressed it, had not been able to fit in with those of the rest of the world so that she had sought refuge here from the conflict. She, Frau Else Schweigestill, had got on very well with her and liked to talk with her; had sometimes even succeeded in making her laugh at her own outlandish notions. But unfortunately it had been impossible either to do away with these or to prevent them from gaining ground; in the end the dear Baroness had had to be placed in professional care.
Frau Schweigestill came to the end of this tale as they went back down the stair again and out into the courtyard to have a glimpse of the stables. Another time, she said, before that, one of the many sleeping-rooms had been occupied by a Fraulein from the best social circles who had here brought her child into the world-talking with artists she could call things, though not people, by their right names—the girl’s father was a judge of the high court, up in Bayreuth, and had got himself an electric automobile and that had been the beginning of all the trouble, for he had hired a chauffeur too, to drive him to his office, and this young man, not a bit out of the common run, only very smart in his braided livery, had made the girl lose her head altogether, she had got with child by him, and when that was plain to see there had been outbreaks of rage and despair, hand-wringing and hair-tearing, cursing, wailing, berating on the part of the parents, such as one would not have dreamt possible, of understanding there had been none, either of an artistic or a natural kind, nothing but a crazy fear for their social reputation, like people in towns have, and the girl had regularly writhed on the floor before her parents, beseeching and sobbing while they shook their fists, and in the end mother and daughter fainted at the very same minute, but the high judge found his way here one day and talked with her, Frau Schweigestill, a little man with a pointed grey beard and gold eyeglasses, quite bowed with affliction and they had made up that the girl be brought to bed here secretly, and afterwards, under the pretext of anaemia, should stop on for a while. And when the high official had turned to go, he had turned round again and with tears behind his gold glasses had pressed her hand again with the words: “Thank you, thank you, for your understanding and goodness,” but he meant understanding for the bowed-down parents, not for the girl.
She came, then, a poor thing, with her mouth always open and her eyebrows up, and while she awaited her hour she confided a good deal in Frau Schweigestill. She was entirely reasonable about her own guilt and did not pretend that she had been seduced—on the contrary, Carl, the chauffeur, had even said: “It’s no good, Fraulein, bette
r not,” but it had been stronger than she was, and she had always been ready to pay with death, and would do, and being ready for death, so it seemed to her, made up for the whole thing, and she had been very brave when her time came, and her child, a girl, was brought into the world with the help of good Dr. Kürbis, the district physician, to whom it was all one how a child came, if everything was otherwise in order and no transverse Dositions, but the girl had remained very weak, despite good nursing and the country air, she had never stopped holding her mouth open and her eyebrows up, and her cheeks seemed hollower than ever and after a while her little high-up father came to fetch her away and at the sight of her, tears came in his eyes behind the gold eyeglasses. The infant was sent to the Grey Sisters in Bamberg, but the mother was from then on only a very grey sister herself, with a canary-bird and a tortoise which her parents gave her out of pity, and she had just withered away in her room in a consumption, which the seeds of had probably always been in her. Finally they sent her to Davos, but that seemed to have been the finishing touch, for she died there almost at once, just as she had wished and wanted it, and if she had been right in her idea that everything had been evened up by the readiness for death, then she was quits and had got what she was after.
They visited the stables, looked at the horses and the pigsties while their hostess was talking about the girl she had sheltered. They went to look at the chickens and the bees behind the house, and then the guests asked what they owed her and Avere told nothing at all. They thanked her for everything and rode back to Waldshut to take their train. That the day had not been wasted and that Pfeiffering was a remarkable spot, to that they both heartily agreed.
Adrian kept the picture in his mind; but for a long time it did not determine his decisions. He wanted to go away, but farther away than an hour’s journey towards the mountains. Of the music of Love’s Labour’s Lost he had written the piano sketch of the expository scenes; but then he had got stuck, the parodistic artificiality of the style was hard to keep up, needing as it did a supply of whimsicality constantly fresh and sustained. He felt a desire for more distant air, for surroundings of greater unfamiliarity. Unrest possessed him. He was tired of the family pension in Rambergstrasse; its privacy had been an uncertain quantity, people could always intrude on it. “I am looking,” he wrote to me, “I keep asking round about and hankering for news of a place buried from and untroubled by the world, where I could hold speech alone, with my life, my destiny… ” Strange, ominous words! Must not my hand tremble, must I not feel cold in the pit of my stomach, at thought of the meeting, the holding speech, the compact for which he, consciously or unconsciously, sought a theatre? It was Italy on which he decided; whither he, at an unusual time for a tourist, the beginning of June and the summer, set off. He had persuaded Rüdiger Schildknapp to go with him.
CHAPTER XXIV
In the long vacation of 1912 and still from Kaisersaschern, I, with my young bride, visited Adrian and Schildknapp in the nest they had found in the Sabine Hills. It was the second summer the friends had spent there. They had wintered in Rome, and in May, as the heat strengthened, they had again sought the mountains and the same hospitable house where, in a sojourn lasting three months, they had learned to feel at home the year before.
The place was Palestrina, birthplace of the composer; ancient Praeneste, and as Penestrino citadel of the Colonna princes, mentioned by Dante in the twenty-seventh canto of the Inferno: a picturesque hillside settlement, reached from the church below by a lane of shallow steps, overhung by houses and not even of the cleanest. A sort of little black pig ran about on the steps, and one of the pack-mules that passed up and down with its projecting load might push the unwary pedestrian to the wall. The street continued on above the village as a mountain road, past a Capuchin friary, up to the top of the hill and the acropolis, only surviving in a few ruins and the remnant of an ancient theatre. Helene and I climbed up several times to these dignified relics during our visit, whereas Adrian, who “did not want to see anything,” had never in all those months got further than the shady garden of the Capuchin convent, his favourite spot.
The Manardi house, where Adrian and Rüdiger lodged, was probably the most imposing in the place, and although the family were six in number, they easily took us in as well. It was on the lane, a sober, solid edifice, almost like a palazzo or castello, which I judged to be from about the second third of the seventeenth century, with spare decorative mouldings under the flat, slightly profiled tiled roof; it had small windows and a door decorated in early baroque style, but boarded up, with the actual door-opening cut into the boarding and furnished with a tinkling little bell. Extensive quarters had been vacated for our friends on the ground floor, consisting chiefly of a two-windowed living-room as large as a salon, with stone floors like all the rest of the house. It was shaded, cool, a little dark, and very simply furnished, with wicker chairs and horsehair sofas, and in fact so large that two people could carry on their work there separated by considerable space, neither disturbing the other. Adjoining were the roomy bedchambers, also very sparsely furnished, a third one being opened for us.
The family dining-room and the much larger kitchen, in which friends from the village were entertained, lay in the upper storey. The kitchen had a vast and gloomy chimney, hung with fabulous ladles and carving-knives and forks which might have belonged to an ogre; while the shelves were full of copper utensils, skillets, bowls, platters, tureens, and mortars. Here Signora Manardi reigned, called Nella by her family—I believe her name was Peronella. She was a stately Roman matron, with arched upper lip, not very dark, the good eyes and hair were only chestnut brown, with at most a faint silver network on the smooth head. Her figure was full and well-proportioned, the impression she made both capable and rustically simple, as one saw her small work-hardened hands, the double widow’s ring on the right one, poised on the firm strong hips, bound by their stiff apron-strings.
She had but one daughter from her marriage, Amelia, a girl of thirteen or fourteen years, inclined to weak-headedness. Amelia had a habit, at table, of moving spoons or forks to and fro in front of her eyes and repeating with a questioning intonation some word that had stuck in her mind. A little time previously an aristocratic Russian family had lodged with the Manardis, whose head, a count or prince, had been a seer of ghosts and from time to time had given the family unquiet nights, by shooting at wandering spirits who visited him in his chamber. All this naturally enough made an impression on Amelia; it was the reason why she often and insistently questioned her spoons: “Spiriti, spiriti?” But she could remember lesser matters as well; for instance it had happened that a German tourist had once made the mistake of saying: “La melona,” the word being feminine in German though masculine in Italian; and now the child would sit wagging her head, following with her forlorn look the movement of her spoons and murmuring “La melona, la melona?” Signora Peronella and her brothers paid no heed or did not hear; such things were an everyday matter to them and only if the guest seemed put off would they smile at him, less in excuse than almost tenderly, as though the child had done something winning.
Helene and I soon got used to Amelia’s uncanny murmurs; as for Adrian and Schildknapp, they were no longer conscious of them.
The housewife’s brothers, of whom I spoke, were two, one older and one younger than herself: Ercolano Manardi, lawyer, mostly called Vavvocato for short, yet with some satisfaction too, he being the pride of the otherwise unlettered and rustic family, a man of sixty with bristling grey moustaches and a hoarse, complaining voice, which began with an effort like a donkey’s bray; and Sor Alfonso, the younger, perhaps in the middle of his forties, intimately addressed by his family as Alfo, a farmer. Often, returning from our afternoon walk in the campagna, we saw him coming home from his fields on his little long-ears, his feet almost on the ground, under a sunshade, with blue glasses on his nose. The lawyer apparently no longer practised his profession, he only read the newspaper, read it indeed all the
time; on hot days he permitted himself to do it sitting in his room in his drawers, with the door open. He drew down upon himself the disapproval of Sor Alfo, who found that the man of law—”quest’uomo” he called him in this connection—took too much upon himself. Loudly, behind his brother’s back he censured this provocative licence and would not be talked round by his sister’s soothing words, to the effect that the advocate was a full-blooded man, in danger of a heat stroke, which made light clothing a necessity to him. Then “quest’uomo” should at least keep the door shut, retorted Alfo, instead of exposing himself in so neglige a state to the eyes of his family and the distinti forestieri. A higher education did not justify such offensive slackness. It was clear that a certain animosity was being expressed by the conta-dino against the educated member of the family, under a well-chosen pretext indeed—although, or even because, Sor Alfo in the depths of his heart shared the family admiration for the lawyer, whom they considered the next thing to a statesman. But the politics of the brothers were in many matters far asunder, for the advocate was of a conservative and devout cast, Alfonso on the other hand a free-thinker, libero pensatore, and a critical mind, hostile to Church, monarchy, and government, which he painted as permeated with scandalous corruption. “A capito, che sacco di birbaccione” (did you understand what a pack of rascals they are?), he would close his indictment, much more articulately than the advocate, who after a few gasping protests would retire behind his newspaper.