Doctor Faustus (55 page)

Leverkühn, to whom I conveyed these Impressions of mine, was unusually ailing at this time, in a way that had something humiliating in its torments. It was as though he were pinched and plagued with hot pincers, without being in immediate danger of his life. That, however, seemed to have arrived at its nadir, so that he was just prolonging it by dragging on from one day to the next. He had been attacked by a stomach ailment, not yielding to any dietary measures, beginning with violent headache, lasting several days and recurring in a few more; with hours, yes, whole days of retching from an empty stomach, sheer misery, undignified, niggling, humiliating, ending in utter exhaustion and persistent sensitivity to light after the attack had passed. There was no thought that the condition might be due to psychological causes, the tribulations of the time, the national defeat with its desolating consequences. In his rustic, not to say cloistered retreat, far from the city, these things scarcely touched him, though he was kept posted on them, not through the newspapers, which he never read, but by his so sympathetic and yet so unruffled housekeeper, Frau Else Schweigestill. The events, which certainly for a man of insight were not a sudden shock but the coming to pass of the long expected, could produce in him scarcely a shoulder-shrug, and he found my efforts to see in the evil the good which it might conceal, to be in the same vein as the comment which I had made at the war’s beginning—and that makes me think of that cold, incredulous “God bless your studies!” with which he then answered me.

And still! Little as it was possible to connect his worsening health in any temperamental way with the national misfortune, yet my tendency to see the one in the light of the other and find symbolic parallels in them, this inclination, which after all might be due simply to the fact that they were happening at the same time, was not diminished by his remoteness from outward things, however much I might conceal the thought and refrain from bringing it up even indirectly.

Adrian had not asked for a physician, because he wanted to interpret his sufferings as familiar and hereditary, as merely an acute intensification of his father’s migraine. It was Frau Schweigestill who at last insisted on calling in Dr. Kurbis, the Waldshut district physician, the same who had once delivered the Fraulein from Bayreuth. The good man would not hear of migraine, since the often excessive pains were not one-sided as is the case with migraine but consisted in a raging torment in and above both eyes, and moreover were considered by the physician to be a secondary symptom. His diagnosis, stated with all reserve, was of something like a stomach ulcer, and while he prepared the patient for a possible haemorrhage, which did not occur, he prescribed a solution of nitrate of silver to be taken internally. When this did not answer he went over to strong doses of quinine, twice daily, and that did in fact give temporary relief. But at intervals of two weeks, and then for two whole days, the attacks, very like violent seasickness, came back; and Kurbis’s diagnosis began to waver or rather he settled on a different one: he decided that my friend’s sufferings were definitely to be ascribed to a chronic catarrh of the stomach with considerable dilatation on the right side, together with circulatory stoppages which decreased the flow of blood to the brain. He now prescribed Karlsbad effervescent salts and a diet of the smallest possible volume, so that the fare consisted of almost nothing but tender meat. He prohibited liquids, soup and vegetables, flour and bread. This treatment was directed towards the desperately violent acidity from which the patient suffered, and which Kurbis was inclined to ascribe at least in part to nervous causes—that is, to a central influence, the brain, which here for the first time began to play a role in his diagnostic speculations. More and more, after the dilatation of the stomach had been cured without diminishing the headaches and nausea, he shifted his explanation of the symptoms to the brain, confirmed therein by the emphatic demand of the patient to be spared the light. Even when he was out of bed he spent entire half-days in a densely dark room. One sunny morning had been enough to fatigue his nerves so much that he thirsted after darkness and enjoyed it like a beneficent element. I myself have spent many hours of the day talking with him in the Abbot’s room, where it was so dark that only after the eyes got used to it could one see the outlines of the furniture and a pallid gleam upon the walls.

About this time ice-caps and morning cold showers for the head were prescribed, and they did better than the other means, though only as palliatives, whose ameliorating effects did not justify one in speaking of a cure. The unnatural condition was not removed, the attacks recurred intermittently, and the afflicted one declared he could stand them if it were not for the permanent and constant pain in the head, above the eyes, and that indescribable, paralysis-like feeling all over from the top of the head to the tips of the toes, which seemed to affect the organs of speech as well. The sufferer’s words dragged, perhaps unconsciously, and he moved his lips so idly that what he said was badly articulated. I think it was rather that he did not care, for it did not prevent him from talking; and I sometimes even got the impression that he exploited the impediment and took pleasure in saying things in a not quite articulate way, only half meant to be understood, speaking as though out of a dream, for which he found this kind of communication suitable. He talked to me about the little seamaid in Andersen’s fairy-tale, which he uncommonly loved and admired; not least the really capital picture of the horrid kingdom of the sea-witch, behind the raging whirlpools, in the wood of polyps, whither the yearning child ventured in order to gain human legs instead of her fish’s tail; and through the love of the dark-eyed prince (while she herself had eyes “blue as the depths of sea”) perhaps to win, like human beings, an immortal soul. He played with the comparison between the knife-sharp pains which the beautiful dumb one found herself ready to bear every step she took on her lovely new white pins and what he himself had ceaselessly to endure. He called her his sister in affliction and made intimate, humorous, and objective comments on her behaviour, her wilfulness, and her sentimental infatuation for the two-legged world of men.

“It begins,” he said, “with the cult of the marble statue that had got down to the bottom of the sea, the boy, who is obviously by Thorwaldsen, and her illegitimate taste for it. Her grandmother should have taken the thing away from her instead of letting her plant a rose-red mourning wreath in the blue sand. They had let her go through too much, too early, after that the yearning and the hysterical overestimation of the upper world and the immortal soul cannot be controlled. An immortal soul—but why? A perfectly absurd wish; it is much more soothing to know that after death one will be the foam on the sea, as Nature wills. A proper nixie would have taken this empty-headed prince, who did not know how to value her and who married someone else before her face and eyes, led him to the marble steps of his palace, drawn him into the water, and tenderly drowned him instead of making her fate depend as she did on his stupidity. Probably he would have loved her much more passionately with the fish-tail she was born with than with those extremely painful legs… “

And with an objectivity that could only be in jest, but with drawn brows and reluctantly moving, half-articulating lips, he spoke of the aesthetic advantages of the nixie’s shape over that of the forked human kind, of the charm of the lines with which the feminine form flowed from the hips into the smooth-scaled, strong, and supple fish-tail, so well adapted for steering and darting. He rejected all idea of a monstrosity, whatever attaches in the popular mind to mythological combinations of the human and the animal; and declared that he did not find admissible mythological fictions of that kind. The sea-wife had a perfectly complete and charming organic reality, beauty and inevitability; you saw that at once, when she became so pathetically declassee after she had bought herself legs, which nobody thanked her for. Here we unquestionably had a perfectly natural phenomenon, nature herself was guilty of it,
if
she was guilty of it, which he did not believe, in fact he knew better—and so on.

I still hear him speaking, or murmuring, with a sinister humour which I answered as lightly; with some misgiving as usual in my heart, along with silent admiration for the whimsical relish he knew how to extract from the pressure obviously resting on him. It was this that made me agree to his rejecting the proposal which Dr. Kurbis at that time in duty bound put before him: he recommended or asked consideration for a consultation with a higher medical authority; but Adrian avoided it, would have none of it. He had, he said, in the first place full confidence in Kiirbis; but also he was convinced that he, more or less alone, out of his own nature and powers, would have to get rid of the evil. This corresponded with my own feeling. I should have been more inclined to a change of air, a sojourn at a cure, which the doctor also suggested, without, as we might have expected, being able to persuade the patient. Much too much was he dependent on his elected and habitual frame of house and courtyard, church-tower, pond, and hill; too much on his ancient study, his velvet chair, to let himself in for exchanging all this, even for four weeks, for the abomination of a resort existence, with table d’hote, promenade, and band. Above all, he pleaded for consideration for Frau Schweigestill, whom he would not wish to offend by preferring some outside, public care and service to hers. He felt, he said, far and away better provided for here, in her understanding, humanly wise and motherly care. Really one might ask where else he could have what he had here, with her who brought him according to the new regimen every four hours something to eat: at eight o’clock an
egg
, cocoa, and rusk, at twelve a little steak or cutlet, at four soup, meat, and vegetable, at eight o’clock cold joint and tea. This diet was beneficial. It guarded against the fever attending the digestion of hearty meals.

The Nackedey and Kunigunde Rosenstiel came by turns to Pfeiffering. They brought flowers, preserves, peppermint lozenges, and whatever else the market shortages allowed. Not always, in fact only seldom were they admitted, which put neither of them off. Kunigunde consoled herself with particularly well-turned letters in the purest, most stately German. This consolation, true, the Nackedey lacked.

I was always glad to see Rüdiger Schildknapp, with his Adrian-eyes, at my friend’s retreat. His presence had a soothing and cheering effect; would it had oftener been vouchsafed! But Adrian’s illness was just one of those serious cases which always seemed to paralyse Rüdiger’s obligingness; we know how the feeling of being urgently desired made him jib and refuse. He did not lack excuses, I mean rationalizations of this odd psychological trait: wrapped up in his literary bread-winning, this confounded translation, he could really scarcely get away, and besides, his own health was suffering under the bad food conditions. He often had intestinal catarrh and when he appeared in Pfeiffering—for he did come now and again—he wore a flannel body-belt, also a damp bandage in a gutta-percha sheath, a source of bitter wit and Anglo-Saxon jokes for him and thus a diversion for Adrian, who could raise himself with no one so well as with Rüdiger above the torments of the body into the free air of jest and laughter.

Frau Senator Rodde came too, of course, from time to time, crossing the road from her over-furnished retreat to inquire of Frau Schweigestill about Adrian’s health if she could not see him herself. If he could receive her, or if they met out of doors, she told him about her daughters, and when she smiled kept her lips closed over a gap in her front teeth, for here too, in addition to the hair, there were losses which made her shun society. Clarissa, she said, loved her profession and did not falter in pursuit of it, despite a certain coldness on the part of the public, carping critics, and the impertinent cruelty of this or that producer who tried to distract her by calling “Tempo, tempo!” from the wings when she was about to enjoy a solo scene. The first engagement in Celle had come to an end and the next one had not carried her much further: she was playing the juvenile lead in remote East Prussian Elbing. But she had prospects of an engagement in the west, in Pforzheim, whence it was but a step to the stage of Karlsruhe or Stuttgart. The main thing, in this profession, was not to get stuck in the provinces, but to be attached betimes to an important state theatre or a private one in a metropolis. Clarissa hoped to succeed. But from her letters, at least those to her sister, it appeared that her success was of a more personal, that is erotic, kind rather than an artistic one. Many were the snares to which she saw herself exposed; repulsing them took much of her energy and mocking coolness. To Inez, though not to her mother directly, she announced that a rich warehouse-owner, a well-preserved man with a white beard, wanted to make her his mistress and set her up extravagantly with an apartment, a car, and clothes—when she could silence the regisseur’s impudent “Tempo!” and make the critics fall in line. But she was much too proud to establish her life on such foundations. It was her personality, not her person, that was important to her. The rich man was turned down and Clarissa went on fighting her way in Elbing.

About her daughter Institoris in Munich Frau Rodde talked in less detail: her life was not so lively or eventful, more normal and secure—regarded superficially, and Frau Rodde obviously wanted to regard it thus. I mean she represented Inez’s marriage as happy, which was certainly a large order of sentimental superficiality. The twins had just been born, and the Frau Senator spoke with simple feeling of the event, of the three spoilt little darlings, whom she visited from time to time in their ideal nursery. Expressly and with pride she praised her older daughter for the unbending willpower with which she kept her housekeeping up to the mark despite all contrary circumstances. You could not tell whether the Frau Senator really did not know what the birds on the house-tops talked about, the Schwerdtfeger affair, or whether she only pretended. Adrian, as the reader knows, knew of it from me. But one day he received Rudolf’s confession—a singular business indeed.