Doctor Faustus (69 page)

It was after all a stereotyped pleasantry, as Schildknapp jealously muttered in my ear; but charming and dramatic too, in short “nice,” in perfect Rudi Schwerdtfeger style. We stayed longer than we meant, the other guests having left, over our coffee and gentian brandy. We even had a little dance ourselves, on the glass floor: Schildknapp and Schwerdtfeger dancing by turns with Mile Godeau and my good Helene, God knows what sort of dance, under the benevolent eye of the three who refrained. The sledge was waiting outside, a roomy one with a pair of horses and well provided with fur rugs. I took the place next the coachman and Schildknapp made good his threat of being dragged on skis behind us—the driver had brought a pair. The other five found comfortable quarters in the body of the vehicle. It was the most happily planned part of the program, aside from the fact that Rüdiger’s virile enterprise miscarried. Standing in the icy wind, dragged over all the bumps in the road, showered with snow, he caught cold in his most sensitive place and fell victim to one of his intestinal catarrhs, which kept him in bed for days. Of course this misfortune was only revealed afterwards. I, for my part, love to be borne along snugly wrapped and warm, to the subdued chiming of the bells, through the pure, sharp, frosty air; so it seemed to me that everybody else felt the same. To know that behind me Adrian and Marie were sitting looking into each other’s eyes made my heart beat with a mixture of curiosity, joy, concern, and fervent hope.

Linderhof, the small rococo castle of Ludwig II, lies among woods and mountains in a remote solitude of splendid beauty. Never was there a more fairy-tale retreat for a misanthropic monarch. But despite all the enthusiasm induced by the magic of the locality, we felt put off by the taste which that prince displayed in his ceaseless itch to build, in reality an expression of the compulsion to glorify his regal estate. We stopped at Linderhof and guided by the castellan went through the sumptuous overladen little rooms which formed the “living-apartments” of the fantastic abode. There the mad monarch spent his days, consumed with the idea of his own majesty; von Bulow played to him, and he listened to the beguiling voice of Kainz. In the castles of princes the largest room is usually the throne-room. Here there is none. Instead there is the bedchamber, of a size very striking compared with the smallness of the living-rooms. The state bed, raised solemnly on a dais and looking rather short on account of its exaggerated width, is flanked like a bier with gold candelabra.

With due and proper interest, if with some private head-shaking, we took it all in and then under a brightening sky continued on our way to Kloster Ettal, which has a solid architectural reputation on account of its Benedictine Abbey and baroque church. I recall that as we drove and later while we took our evening meal in the cleanly hotel opposite the cloister we talked at length about the “unhappy” King (why, really, unhappy?) into whose eccentric sphere we had penetrated. The discussion was intermitted only by a visit to the church; it was in the main a controversy between Rudi Schwerdtfeger and me over the so-called madness, the incapacity for reigning, the dethronement and legal restraint of Ludwig. To Rudi’s great astonishment I pronounced all that unjustifiable, a brutal piece of philistinism, and in addition a political move in the interest of the succession.

Rudi took his stand on the interpretation, not so much popular as bourgeois and official, that the King was “completely crackers” as he put it. It had been absolutely necessary for the sake of the country to turn him over to psychiatrists and keepers and set up a mentally sound regency. He, Rudolf, did not understand why there should be any question about it. In the way he had when some point of view was completely new to him, he bored his blue eyes into my right and my left in turn as I spoke and his lip curled angrily. I must say that I surprised even myself by the eloquence which the subject aroused in me, although before that day I had scarcely given it a thought. I found that unconsciously I had formed quite decided opinions. Insanity, I explained, was an ambiguous conception, used quite arbitrarily by the average man, on the basis of criteria very much open to question. Very early, and in close correspondence with his own averageness, the philistine established his personal standards of “reasonable” behaviour. What went beyond those norms was insanity. But a sovereign King, surrounded by devotion, dispensed from criticism and responsibility, licensed, in support of his dignity, to live in a style forbidden to the wealthiest private man, could give way to such fantastic tastes and tendencies; to the gratification of such baffling passions and desires, such nervous attractions and repulsions, that a haughty and consummate exploitation of them might very easily look like madness. To what mortal below this regal elevation would it be given to create for himself, as Ludwig had done, gilded solitudes in chosen sites of glorious natural beauty! These castles, certainly, were monuments of royal misanthropy. But if we are hardly justified in considering it a symptom of mental aberration when a man of average equipment avoids his fellows, why then should it be allowable to do so when the same taste is able to gratify itself on a regal scale?

But six learned professional alienists had established the insanity of the King and declared the necessity for his internment.

Those compliant alienists had done what they did because they were called on to do it. Without ever seeing Ludwig, without having examined him even according to their own methods, without ever having spoken a word to him. A conversation with him about music and poetry would just as well have convinced those idiots of his madness. On the basis of their verdict this man was deprived of the right to dispose of his own person, which doubtless departed from the normal, though it by no means followed that he was mad. They degraded him to the status of a patient, shut him up in his castle by the lake, unscrewed the door-knobs and barred the windows. He had not put up with it, he had sought freedom or death and in death had taken his doctor-jailer with him: that was evidence of his sense of dignity, but no convincing proof of the diagnosis of madness. Nor did the bearing of his entourage speak for it, they having been ready to fight on his behalf; nor the fanatical love of the peasants, eager to die for their “Kini.” When they had seen him driving through his mountains, at night, alone, wrapped in furs, in a golden sledge with outriders, in the gleam of torches, they had seen no madman, but a King after their own rude romantic hearts. And if he had succeeded in swimming across the lake, as he had obviously meant to do, they would have come to his rescue on the other side with pitchforks and flails against all the medicos and politicians in the world.

But his frantic extravagance was a definite sign of an unbalanced mind; it had become intolerable; and his powerlessness to govern had followed upon his unwillingness to govern: he had merely dreamed his kingship, refusing to exercise it in any normal form. In such a way no state can survive.

“Oh, nonsense, Rudolf. A normally constructed minister-president can govern a modern federated state even if the king is too sensitive to stand the sight of his and his colleagues’ faces. Bavaria would not have been ruined even if they had gone on letting Ludwig indulge his solitary hobbies, and the extravagance of a king meant nothing, it was just words, a pretext and swindle. The money stayed in the country and stonemasons and gold-beaters got rich on his fairy palaces. More than that, the estates had paid for themselves over and over, with the entrance fees drawn from the romantic curiosity of two hemispheres. We ourselves had today contributed to turn the madness into good business… Why, I don’t understand you, Rudolf,” I cried. “You open you? mouth in astonishment at my apologia, but I am the one who has the right to be surprised at you and not to understand how you, precisely you—I mean as an artist, and anyhow, just you…”

I sought for words to explain why I was surprised, and found none. My eloquence faltered; and all the time I had the feeling that it was an impropriety for me to hold forth like that in Adrian’s presence. He should have spoken. And yet perhaps it was better that I did it; for my mind misgave me lest he be capable of agreeing with Schwerdtfeger. I had to prevent that by speaking myself, in his proper spirit. I thought Marie Godeau also was taking my action in that sense, regarding me, whom he had sent to her about the day’s excursion, as his mouthpiece. For she looked at him while I was working myself up, as though she were listening to him and not to me. For his part, indeed, he had an enigmatic smile on his lips, a smile that was far from confirming me as his representative.

“What is truth?” he said at last. And Rüdiger Schildknapp chimed in at once, asserting that truth had various aspects, of which in the present case the medical and practical were perhaps not the highest ones, yet even so could not quite be brushed aside.

In the naturalistic view of truth, he added, the dull and the melancholy were remarkably enough united. That was not to be taken as an attack on “our Rudolf,” who certainly was not melancholic; but it might pass as a characterization of a whole epoch, the nineteenth century, which had exhibited a distinct tendency to both dullness and gloom. Adrian laughed—not, of course, out of surprise. In his presence one had always the feeling that all the ideas and points of view made vocal round about him were present in himself; that he, ironically listening, left it to the individual human constitutions to express and represent them. The hope was expressed that the young twentieth century might develop a more elevated and intellectually a more cheerful temper. Then the conversation split up and exhausted itself in disjointed speculation on the signs, if any, that this might come to pass. Fatigue began to set in, following on all our activity in the wintry mountain air. The time-table too put in its word, we summoned our driver, and under a brilliantly starry sky drove to the little station and waited on the platform for the Munich train.

The homeward journey was a quiet one, if only out of respect for the slumbering Tantchen. Schildknapp now and then made a low-voiced remark to Mlle Godeau. I reassured myself, in conversation with Schwerdtfeger, that he had taken nothing amiss. Adrian talked commonplaces with Helene. Against all expectation and to my unspoken gratification and amusement, he did not leave us in Waldshut, but insisted on accompanying our Paris guests back to Munich and their pension. The rest of us said goodbye at the station and went our ways, while he escorted aunt and niece in a taxi to their pension—a chivalrous act which in my eyes had the meaning that he spent the last moments of the declining day only in the company of the black eyes.

The usual eleven-o’clock train bore him back to his modest retreat, where from afar off he announced his coming by the high notes of his pipe to the watchful and prowling Kaschperl-Suso.

CHAPTER XLI

M
y sympathetic readers and friends: let me go on with my tale. Over Germany destruction thickens. Rats grown fat on corpses house in the rubble of our cities; the thunder of the Russian cannon rolls on towards Berlin; the crossing of the Rhine was child’s play to the Anglo-Saxons; our own will seems to have united with the enemy’s to make it that. “An end is come, the end is come, it watcheth for thee, behold it is come. The morning is come unto thee, O thou that dwellest in the land.” But let me go on. What happened between Adrian and Rudi Schwerdtfeger only two days after that so memorable excursion, what happened and how it happened—I know, let the objection be ten times raised that I could not know it because I was not there. No, I was not there. But today it is psychological fact that I was there, for whoever has lived a story like this, lived it through, as I have lived this one, that frightful intimacy makes him an eye-and ear-witness even to its hidden phases.

Adrian phoned and asked the companion of his Hungarian journey to come to him at Pfeiffering. He must come as soon as possible, for the matter was pressing. Rudolf was always compliant. He received the summons at ten in the morning—during Adrian’s working hours, in itself an unusual event—and by four in the afternoon the violinist was on the spot. He was to play that evening at a subscription concert by the Zapfenstosser orchestra—Adrian had never once thought of it.

“You ordered me,” Rudolf said, “what’s up?”

“I’ll tell you at once,” answered Adrian. “But the great thing is that you are here. I am glad to see you, even more than usual. Remember that!”

“A golden frame for whatever you have to say,” responded Rudi, with a wonderfully flowery turn of phrase.

Adrian suggested that they should take a walk, one talked better walking. Schwerdtfeger agreed with pleasure, only regretting that he had not much time, he had to be at the station for the six-o’clock train, so as not to be late for his concert. Adrian struck his forehead and begged pardon for his forgetfulness. Perhaps Rudi would find it more understandable when he heard what he had to say.

It was thawing. The snow where it had been shovelled was melting and settling; the paths were beginning to be slushy; the friends wore their overshoes. Rudolf had not even taken off his short fur jacket, and Adrian had put on his camel’s-hair ulster. They walked towards the Klammerweiher and round its banks. Adrian asked what the evening program was to be. “Again Brahms’s First as piece de resistance—again the ‘Tenth Symphony’? Well, you should be pleased: you have some good things in the adagio.” Then he related that as a lad beginning piano, long before he knew anything about Brahms, he had invented a motif almost identical with the highly romantic horn theme in the last movement, though without the rhythmical trick of the dotted quaver following the semiquaver, but melodically in the same spirit.

“Interesting,” said Schwerdtfeger.

“Well, and our Saturday excursion?” Had he enjoyed himself? Did he think the others had?

“Could not have gone off better,” declared Rudolf. He was sure that everybody remembered the day with pleasure, except probably Schildknapp, who had overdone himself and was now ill in bed. “He is always too ambitious when ladies are present.” Anyhow, he, Rudolf, had no reason to be sympathetic, for Rüdiger had been rather rude to him.