Doctor Faustus (74 page)

So much for the moment as a description of Nepo Schneidewein, or Echo as everybody, following his example, straightway called him. It is written by one not present when he came, and only as clumsy words can approximate the scene. How many writers before me have bemoaned the inadequacy of language to arrive at visualization or to produce an exact portrait of an individual! The word is made for praise and homage; to the word it is given to astonish, to admire, and to bless; it may characterize a phenomenon through the emotion it arouses; but it cannot conjure up or reproduce. Instead of attempting the impossible I shall probably do more for my adorable little subject by confessing that today, after fully seventeen years, tears come in my eyes when I think of him, while at the same time the thought of him fills me with an odd, ethereal, not quite sublunary lifting of the heart.

The replies he made, with that bewitching play of gesture, to questions about his mother, his journey, his stay in the great city of Munich, had as I said a pronounced Swiss accent and much dialect, rendered in the silvery timbre of his voice: “
huesli
” for house, “
a bitzli
” for a little bit. He lilted to say “well”: “Well, it was lovely.” Fragments of grown-up language came too: if he had not remembered something, he said it had “slipped his mind.” And finally he said: “Well, nothing more of news”—obviously because he wanted to break up the group; for the words fell from his honey-sweet lips: “Echo thinks best to not be outdoors any more. Better go in the huesli and see the uncle.” And he put out his hand to his sister to take him in. But just then Adrian, who had been resting and putting himself to rights, came out to welcome his niece.

“And so this,” said he, after he had greeted the young girl and exclaimed over her likeness to her mother, “is the new member of the family?”

He held Nepomuk’s hand, gazed into the starry eyes, and soon was lost in the sweet depths of that azure upturned smile.

“Well, well!” was all he said, nodding slowly at the girl and then turning back to gaze again. His emotion could escape nobody, certainly not the child. So when Echo addressed his uncle for the first time, his words, instead of sounding forward, seemed to be placating and making light of something, loyally reducing it to simple and friendly terms: “Well, you are glad I did come, yes?” Everyone laughed, Adrian too.

“I should say so,” he answered. “And I hope you are glad too, to make our acquaintance.”

“It is most pleasant meeting all,” the child said quaintly.

The others would have burst out laughing again, but Adrian shook his head at them with his finger on his lips.

“The child,” he said softly, “must not be bewildered by our laughter. And there is no ground for laughter, do you think, Mother Schweigestill?” turning to her.

“Not a speck,” said she in an exaggeratedly firm voice, and put the corner of her apron to her eye.

“So let us go in,” he decided, and took Nepomuk’s hand again to lead him. “Of course you have a little refreshment for our guests.”

Accordingly, in the Nike salon, Rosa Schneidewein was served with coffee and the little one with milk and cake. His uncle sat with him at the table and watched him as he ate, daintily. Adrian talked with his niece the while, but did not hear much that she said, so taken up he was with looking at the elf and just as much with controlling his feelings, not to betray them and make them a burden. His concern was unnecessary, for Echo seemed no longer to mark mere silent admiration or enraptured looks; while it would have been a sin to miss that sweet lifting of the eyes in thanks for handing the jam or a piece of cake.

At length the little man uttered the single word: ” ‘Nuff.” It was, his sister explained, what he had always said from a tiny child, when he had done; it meant “Echo has had enough.” When Mother Schweigestill would have pressed him to take something more, he said with a certain superior reasonableness: “Echo would be best without it.”

He rubbed his eyes with his little fists, a sign that he was sleepy. They put him to bed, and while he slept Adrian talked with Sister Rosa in his workroom. She was to stay only till the third day, her duties in Langensalza summoned her home. When she left, Nepomuk wept a little, but then promised to be “good” until she came to fetch him. My God, how he kept his word! How incapable he was of not keeping it! He brought something like a state of bliss, a constant heart-warming gaiety and tenderness not only to the farm but to the village as well, and even as far as Waldshut. For the Schweigestills, mother and daughter, eager to be seen with him, confident of the same rapturous reception everywhere, took him with them to the apothecary, the shoemaker, the general store, in order that everybody might hear him “speak his piece,” with bewitching play of gesture and impressive, deliberate enunciation: about Pauline who was bur-r-nt up, out of Slovenly Peter, or Jochen, who did come home from play so dir-rty that Mrs. Duck and Mr. Drake were amazed and even Mr. Pig was perrfectly dazed. The Pfeiffering pastor heard him recite his prayer, with folded hands held out before his face—a strange old prayer it was, beginning “Naught availeth for timely Death.” And the pastor, in his emotion, could only say: “Ah, thou dear child of God, thou little blessed one!” stroking his hair with a white priestly hand and presenting him with a coloured picture of the Lamb of God. The schoolmaster felt “a new man” after talking with him. At market and in the street every third person asked Fraul’n Clementine or Mother Schweigestill what was this had dropped down from heaven. People stared and nudged each other: “Just look, just look!” or else, not very differently from the pastor: “Ah, dear little one, little blessed one!” Women, in most cases, showed a tendency to kneel down in front of Nepomuk.

When I was next at the farm, two weeks had already passed since he came; he had settled in and was well known to the neighbourhood. I saw him first at a distance: Adrian showed him to me round the corner of the house, sitting on the ground in the kitchen garden at the back, between a strawberry and a vegetable bed, one little leg stretched out, the other half drawn up, his hair falling in strands on his forehead. He was looking, it seemed with somewhat detached approval, at a picture-book his uncle had given him, holding it on his knee, with the right hand at the margin. But the little left hand and arm, with which he turned the page, unconsciously continuing the turning motion remained in the air in an incredibly graceful posture beside the book, the small hand open. To me it seemed I had never seen a child so ravishingly posed. I could not even in fancy conceive my own affording such a sight; to myself I thought that thus must the little angels up above turn the pages of their heavenly choir-books.

We went up to him, that I might make the acquaintance of the wonder-child. I did so with pedagogic restraint, with a view to reducing the situation to the everyday, and determined not to be sentimental. I put on a strict face, frowned, pitched my voice low, and spoke to him in the proper brisk and patronizing way: “Well, my son? Being a good lad, eh? And what are we up to here?” But even as I spoke I seemed to myself unspeakably fatuous; and even worse, he saw it too, apparently shared my view, and felt ashamed on my account. He hung his head, drawing down his mouth as one does to keep from laughing; it so upset me that I said nothing more for some time. He was not yet of an age when a lad is expected to stand up and be respectful to his elders; he deserved, if any creature ever did, the tender consideration and indulgence we grant to those not long on this earth, unpractised and strange to its ways. He said we should “sitty down” and so we did, with the manikin between us in the grass, and looked at his picture-book with him. It was probably among the most acceptable of the children’s books in the shop, with pictures in English taste, a sort of Kate Greenaway style and not at all bad rhymes. Nepomuk (I called him that, not Echo; the latter I was idiot enough to find “sentimental”) knew almost all of them by heart, and “read” them to us, following the lines with his finger, of course always in the wrong place.

The strange thing is that today I know those verses by heart myself, only because I heard them once—or it may have been more than once—recited in that little voice of his, with its enchanting intonation. How well I still know the one about the organ-grinders who met at a street corner, one of whom had a grudge against the other so that neither would budge from the spot. I could recite to any child—though not nearly so well as Echo did—what the neighbours had to bear from the hullabaloo those hurdy-gurdies kept up. The mice did keep a. fasting feast, the rats they ran away. It ends:

And only one, a puppy-dog,

Listened till silence fell;

And when he got back to his home

That dog felt far from well.

You would have to see the little lad’s troubled head-shake and hear his voice fall as he recounted the indisposition of the little dog. You would have to see the minuscule grandezza of his bearing as he imitated the two quaint little gentlemen meeting each other on the beach:

Good morning, m’sieur! No bathing, I fear!

This for several reasons: first because the water is so wet and only forty-three degrees, but also “three guests from Sweden” are there:

A swordfish, a sawfish and shark Swimming close in you can mark.

He uttered so drolly this confidential warning, had such a large-eyed way of enumerating the three undesirable guests, and fell into a key so mingled of horror and satisfaction at the news that they were swimming close in, that we both burst out laughing. He looked into our faces, observing our merriment with roguish curiosity, mine in particular, I thought—probably he wanted to see whether my uncalled—for schoolmaster solemnity was being thawed out.

Good heavens, it certainly was! After my first foolish attempts I did not return to it, except that I always addressed this little ambassador from childhood and fairyland as Nepomuk, speaking in a firm voice and only calling him Echo when I mentioned him to his uncle, who like the women had taken up the name. The reader will understand that the pedagogue in me felt somewhat disturbed or even embarrassed at this incontestably adorable loveliness, which yet was a prey to time, destined to mature and partake of the earthly lot. In no long space the smiling azure of these eyes would lose their other-world purity. This face, this angelic air, as it were an explicit aura of childlikeness; the lightly cleft chin, the charming mouth, which when he smiled showed the gleaming milk teeth; the lips that then became somewhat fuller than in repose, and at their corners showed two softly curving lines coming from the fine little nose and setting off his mouth and chin from his cheeks: this face, I say, would become the face of a more or less ordinary boy, whom one would have to treat practically and prosaically and who would have no reason to greet a pedagogic approach with any of the ironic understanding betrayed by Nepomuk. And yet there was something here—that elfin mockery seemed to express a consciousness of it—which put it out of one’s power to believe in time and time’s common work, or its action upon this pure and precious being. Such was the impression it gave of its extraordinary completeness in itself; the conviction it inspired that this was a manifestation of “the child” on earth; the feeling that it had “come down to us” as, I say it again, an envoy and message-bearer; all this lulled the reason in dreams beyond the claims of logic and tinged with the hues of our Christian theology. It could not deny inevitable growth; but it took refuge in the sphere of the mythical and timeless, the simultaneous and abiding, wherein the Saviour’s form as a grown man is no contradiction to the Babe in the Mother’s arms which He also is; which He always is, always before His worshipping saints lifting His little hand in the sign of the Cross.

What extravagance, what fanaticism, it will be said! But I can do no more than give account of my own experience, and I must confess that the slightly other-worldly existence of this child always produced in me a sense of my own clumsiness. But I should have patterned myself—and tried to do so—on Adrian, who was no schoolman but an artist and took things as they came, apparently without thought of their proneness to change. In other words, he gave to impermanent becoming the character of being; he believed in the image: a tranquillizing belief, so at least it seemed to me, which, adjusted to the image, would not let its composure be disturbed no matter how unearthly that image might be. Echo, the fairy princeling, had come; very well, one must treat him according to his kind, and that was all. Such seemed to be Adrian’s position. Of course he was far removed from the frowning brow or any avuncular “That’s a good lad.” But on the other hand, he left the “little angel” ecstasies to simpler folk. He behaved to the little one with a delicacy and warmth, smiling or serious as occasion called it out; without flattery or fawning, even without tenderness. It is a fact that I never saw him caress the child, scarcely even smooth his hair. Only he liked to walk with him in the fields, hand in hand.

But however he behaved, he could not deceive me: I saw that his little nephew’s appearance had made a bright spot in his life, that he loved him from the first day on. No mistaking the fact that the sweet, light, elfin charm, working as it were without a trace despite the child’s serious, old-fashioned language, occupied and filled his days, although he had the boy with him only at certain times. The child’s care of course fell on the women; and as mother and daughter had much else to do, he often played by himself in some safe spot. Owing to the measles he still needed as much sleep as quite small children do, and slept during the day in addition to the usual afternoon nap, dropping off wherever he happened to be. “Night!” he would say, just as when he went to bed. It fact “Night!” was his goodbye on all occasions, when he or anyone else went away. It was the companion-piece to the ” ‘Nuff” he always said when he had had enough. He would offer his little hand, too, when he said “Night” before he fell asleep in the grass or as he sat in his chair. I once found Adrian in the back garden sitting on a very narrow bench made of three boards nailed together, watching Echo asleep at his feet. “He gave me his hand first,” he announced when he looked up and saw me. He had not heard me approach.