Doctor Faustus (18 page)

I have never forgotten this revolting tale, so characteristic of the tone of Schleppfuss’s course, nor have I ever been able to be quite cool about it. Among us, between Adrian and me, as well as in discussions in Winfried it was much talked about; but neither in him, who was always taciturn about his teachers and what they said, nor in his theological fellow-students did I succeed in rousing the amount of indignation which would have satisfied my own anger at the anecdote, especially against Klopfgeissel. Even today in my thoughts I address him breathing vengeance and call him a prize ass in every sense of the word. Why did the donkey have to tell? Why had he to test himself on other women when he had the one he loved, loved obviously so much that it made him cold and “impotent” with others? What does “impotent” mean in this connection, when with the one he loved he had all the potency of love? Love is certainly a kind of noble selectiveness of sexuality, and if it is natural that sexual activity should decline in the absence of love, yet it is nothing less than unnatural if it does so in the presence and face of love. In any case, Barbel had fixed and “restricted” her Heinz—not by means of any devil’s hocus-pocus but by the charm she had for him and the will by which she held him as by a spell against other temptations. That this protection in its strength and influence on the youth’s nature was psychologically reinforced by the magic salve and the girl’s belief in it, I am prepared to accept, though it does seem to me simpler and more correct to look at the matter from his side and to make the selective feeling given by his love responsible for the inhibition over which he was so stupidly upset. But this point of view too includes the recognition of a certain natural wonderworking of the spiritual, its power to affect and modify the organic and corporeal in a decisive way—and this so to speak magic side of the thing it was, of course, that Schleppfuss purposely emphasized in his comments on the Klopfgeissel case.

He did it in a quasi-humanistic sense, in order to magnify the lofty idea which those supposedly sinister centuries had had of the choice constitution of the human body. They had considered il nobler than all other earthly combinations of matter, and in its power of variation through the spiritual had seen the expression of its aristocracy, its high rank in the hierarchy of bodies. It got cold or hot through fear or anger, thin with affliction; blossomed in joy; a mere feeling of disgust could produce a physiological reaction like that of bad food, the mere sight of a dish of strawberries could make the skin of an allergic person break out; yes. sickness and death could follow purely mental operations. But it was only a step—though a necessary one—from this insight into the power of the mind to alter its own and accompanying physical matter, to the conviction, supported by ample human experience, that mind, whether wilfully or not, was able, that is by magic, to alter another person’s physical substance. In other words, the reality of magic, of daemonic influence and bewitchment, was corroborated; and phenomena such as the evil eye, a complex of experience concentrated in the saga of the death-dealing eye of the basilisk, were rescued from the realm of so-called superstition. It would have been culpable inhumanity to deny that an impure soul could produce by a mere look, whether deliberate or not, physically harmful effects in others, for instance in little children, whose tender substance was especially susceptible to the poison of such an eye.

Thus Schleppfuss in his exclusive course—exclusive because it was both intellectual and questionable. Questionable: a capita] word, I have always ascribed a high philological value to it. It challenges one both to go in to and to avoid; anyhow to a very cautious going—in; and it stands in the double light of the remarkable and the disreputable, either in a thing—or in a man.

In our bow to Schleppfuss when we met him in the street or in the corridors of the university we expressed all the respect with which the high intellectual plane of his lectures inspired us hour by hour; but he on his side took off his hat with a still deeper flourish than ours and said: “Your humble servant.”

CHAPTER XIV

M
ystic numbers are not much in my line; I had been concerned to see that they fascinated Adrian, whose interest in them had been for a long time clearly though silently in evidence. But I feel a certain involuntary approval of the fact that the number thirteen, so generally considered unlucky, stands at the head of the foregoing chapter. I am almost tempted to think that there is more than chance at work here. But seriously speaking, it was chance after all; for the reason that this whole complex of Halle University life, just as in the earlier case of the Kretschmar lectures, does form a natural unity, and it was only out of consideration for the reader, who justly expects divisions and caesuras and places where he can draw breath, that I divided into several chapters matter which in the author’s real and candid opinion has no claim to such articulation. If I had the say, we should still be in Chapter XI, and only my tendency to compromise has got Dr. Schleppfuss his number XIII. I wish him joy of it; yes, I would willingly have given the unlucky numeral to the whole corpus of memories of our student years at Halle; for as I said before, the air of that town, the theological air, did not suit me, and my guest visits to Adrian’s courses were a sacrifice which, with mixed feelings, I made to our friendship.

To ours? I might better say to mine; for he did not in the least lay stress on my keeping at his side when we went to hear Kumpf or Schleppfuss; or think that I might be neglecting my own program. I did it of my own free will, only out of the imperative desire to hear what he heard, know what he learned, to “
keep track
” of him—for that always seemed to me highly necessary, though at the same time futile. A peculiarly painful combination that: necessity and futility. I was clear in my own mind that this was a life which one might indeed watch over, but not change, not influence; and my urge to keep a constant eye on my friend, not to stir from his side, had about it something like a premonition of the fact that it would one day be my task to set down an account of the impressions that moulded his early life. Certainly so much is clear, that I did not go into the matters dealt with above just in order to explain why I was not particularly comfortable in Halle. My reason was the same as that which made me so explicit on the subject of Wendell Kretschmar’s Kaisersaschern lectures: namely, because I do and must stress the importance of making the reader a witness of Adrian’s experiences in the world of intellect and spirit.

On the same ground I invite him to accompany us young sons of the Muses on the excursions we made in company, in the better times of the year, from Halle. As Adrian’s childhood intimate, and of course because, although not a theologian, I seemed to display a decided interest in the field of religious study, I was welcomed into the guest circle of the Christian Society Winfried and permitted to share in the excursions made by the group in order to enjoy the beauty of God’s green creation.

They took place more frequently than we shared them. For I need hardly say that Adrian was no very zealous participant and his membership was more a matter of form than or punctual performance of activities. Out of courtesy and to show his good will towards the organization, he had let himself be persuaded; but under various pretexts, mostly on account of his headaches, he stopped away this or that time from the gatherings which took the place of the student “beer evenings.” Even after a year or more he had got so little upon the “
frere et cochon
” footing with the seventy members that he did not manage to call them all by their right names or address them “in the singular.” But he was respected among them. The shouts that greeted him when, I must almost say on rare occasions, he appeared at a session in the smoke-filled private room in Mutze’s tavern, did contain a little fun at the expense of his supposed misanthropy; but they expressed genuine pleasure as well. For the group esteemed the part he played in their theological and philosophical debates, to which, without leading them, he would often throw in a remark and give an interesting turn. They were particularly pleased with his musical gift, which was useful because he could accompany the customary glee’s better than the others who tried it, with more animation and a fuller tone. Also he would oblige the assembly with a solo, a toccata of Bach, a movement of Beethoven or Schumann, at the instance of the leader, Baworinski, a tall dark lean person, with drooping lids and mouth puckered as though to whistle. Sometimes Adrian would even sit down unasked in the society’s room at the piano, whose dull flat tone was strongly reminiscent of the inadequate instrument on which Wendell Kretschmar had imparted his knowledge to us in the hall of the Common Weal, and lose himself in free, experimental play. This especially happened before the beginning of a sitting, whilst the company were gathering. He had a way, I shall never forget it, of coming in, casually greeting the company, and then, sometimes without taking off his hat and coat, his face drawn with concentration, going straight to the piano, as though that alone were his goal. With a strong attack, bringing out the transition notes, with lifted brows, he would try chords, preparations, and resolutions which he may have excogitated on the way. But this rushing at the piano as though for refuge: it looked as though the place and its occupants frightened him; as though he sought shelter—actually within himself—from a bewildering strangeness into which he had come.

Then if he went on playing, dwelling on a fixed idea, changing and loosely shaping it, some one of those standing round, perhaps little Probst, a typical student, blond, with half-long, oily hair, would ask: “What is that?”

“Nothing,” answered the player, with a short shake of the head, more like the gesture with which one shakes off a fly.

“How can it be nothing,” the other answered back, “since you are playing it?”

“He is improvising,” explained the tall Baworinski sensibly.

“Improvising!” cried Probst, honestly startled, and peered with his pale blue eyes at Adrian’s forehead as though he expected it to be glowing with fever.

Everybody burst out laughing, Adrian as well, letting his closed hands rest on the keyboard and bowing his head over them.

“Oh, Probst, what an ass you are!” said Baworinski. “He is making up, can’t you understand? He just thought of that this very minute.”

“How can he think up so many notes right and left at once,” Probst defended himself, “and how can he say ‘It is nothing’ of something he is actually playing? One surely cannot play what is not?”

“Oh, yes,” said Baworinski mildly. “One can play what does not yet exist.”

I can still hear a certain Deutschlin, Konrad Deutschlin, a robust fellow with hair hanging in strings on his forehead, adding: “And everything was once nothing, my good Probst, and then became something.”

“I can assure you,” said Adrian, “that it really was nothing, in every sense of the word.”

He had been bent over with laughter, but now he lifted his head and you could see by his face that it was no easy matter; that he felt exposed. I recall that there now ensued a lengthy discussion on the creative element, led by Deutschlin and by no means uninteresting. The limitations were debated, which this conception had to tolerate, by virtue of culture, tradition, imitation, convention, pattern. Finally the human and creative element was theologically recognized, as a far, reflected splendour of divinely existent power; as an echo of the first almighty summons to being, and the productive inspiration as in any case coming from above.

Moreover, and quite in passing, it was pleasant to me that I too, admitted from the profane faculty, could contribute when asked to the entertainment with my viol d’amore. For music was important in this circle, if only in a certain way, rather vaguely and as it were on principle: it was thought of as an art coming from God, one had to have “relations” with it, romantic and devout, like one’s relations with nature. Music, nature, and joyous worship, these were closely related and prescribed ideas in the Winfried. When I referred to “sons of the Muses,” the phrase, which to some perhaps would seem hardly suitable for students of theology, none the less found its justification in this combination of feeling, in the free and relaxed spirit, the clear-eyed contemplation of the beautiful, which characterized these tours into the heart of nature, to which I now return.

Two or three times in the course of our four terms at Halle they were undertaken
in corpore
, and Baworinski summoned up all the seventy members of Winfried. Adrian and I never joined these mass enterprises. But single groups, more intimately connected, also made similar excursions and these we repeatedly joined, in company with a few of the better sort. There was our leader himself; the sturdy Deutschlin; then a certain Dungersheim, Carl von Teutleben, and some others, named respectively Hubmeyer, Matthaeus Arzt, and Schappeler. I recall their names and to some extent their faces; it were superfluous to describe them.

The neighbourhood of Halle is a sandy plain, admittedly without charm. But a train conveys you in a few hours up the Saale into lovely Thuringia, and there, mostly at Naumburg or Apolda (the region where Adrian’s mother was born), we left the train and set out with rucksacks and capes, on shanks’s mare, in all-day marches, eating in village inns or sometimes camping at the edge of a wood and spending the night in the hayloft of a peasant’s yard, waking in the grey dawn to wash and refresh ourselves at the long trough of a running spring. Such an interim form of living, the entry of city folk, brain workers, into the primitive countryside and back to mother earth, with the knowledge, after all, that we must—or might—soon return to our usual and “natural” sphere of middle-class comfort: such voluntary screwing down and simplification has easily, almost necessarily something artificial, patronizing, dilettante about it; of this we were humorously aware, and knew too that it was the cause of the good-natured, teasing grin with which many a peasant measured us on our request for his hayloft. But the kindly permission we got was due to our youth; for youth, one may say, makes the only proper bridge between the bourgeois and the state of nature; it is a pre-bourgeois state from which all student romance derives, the truly romantic period of life. To this formula the ever intellectually lively Deutschlin reduced the subject when we discussed it in our loft before falling asleep, by the wan light of the stable lantern in the corner. We dealt with the matter of our present mode of existence; and Deutschlin protested that it was poor taste for youth to explain youth: a form of life that discusses and examines itself thereby dissolves as form, and only direct and unconscious being has true existence.