Doctor Faustus (80 page)

It did not look as though those interpolations had reached our host at all. His thoughts, whenever he paused in his address, obviously made him inaccessible to them.

“But only mark,” he resumed, “heartily respected loving friends, that you have to do with a god-forsaken and despairing man, whose carcass belongeth not in consecrate earth, among Christians dead in the faith, but on the horse-dung with the cadavers of dead animals. On the bier, I say to you beforehand, you will always find it lying on its face, and though you turn it five times you will ever find it on its face. For long before I dallied with the poison butterfly, my froward soul in high mind and arrogance was on the way to Satan though my goal stood in doubt; and from youth up I worked towards him, as you must know, indeed, that man is made for hell or blessedness, made and foredestined, and I was born for hell. So did I feed my arrogance with sugar, studying divinity at Halla Academie, yet not for the service of God but the other, and my study of divinity was secretly already the beginning of the bond and the disguised move not Biblewards, but to him, to him the great religiosus. For who can hold that will away, and ‘twas but a short step from the divinity school over to Leipzig and to music, that I solely and entirely then busied myself with figuris, characteribus, formis con-jurationum, and what other so ever are the names of invocations and magic.

“So my desperate heart hath trifled all away. I had I suppose a good toward wit and gifts gratiously given me from above which I could have used in all honour and modesty, but felt ail-too well: it is the time when uprightly and in pious sober wise, naught of work is to be wrought and art grown unpossible without the divel’s help and fires of hell under the cauldron… Yea verily, dear mates, that art is stuck and grown too heavy and scorneth itselfe and God’s poor man knoweth no longer where to turn in his sore plight, that is belike the fault in the times. But an one invite the divel as guest, to pass beyond all this and get to the breakthrough, he chargeth his soul and taketh the guilt of the time upon his own shoulders, so that he is damned. For it hath been said ‘Be sober, and watch!’ But that is not the affair of some; rather, instead of shrewdly concerning themselves with what is needful upon earth that it may be better there, and discreetly doing it, that among men such order shall be stablished that again for the beautiful work living soil and true harmony be prepared, man playeth the truant and breaketh out in hellish drunkenness; so giveth he his soul thereto and cometh among the carrion.

“So, courteous and beloved brothers and sisters, have I borne me, and let nigromantia, carmina, incantatio, veneficium, and what names so ever be all my aim and striving. And I soon came to the speech of that one, the make-bate, the losel, in the Italian room, have held much parley with him, and he had much to tell me of the quality, fundament, and substance of hell. Sold me time too, four and twenty years, boundless to the eye, and promised too great things and much fire under the cauldron, to the end that not withstanding I should be capable of the work although it were too hard and my head too shrewd and mocking thereto. Only certes I should suffer the knives of pain therefor, even in the time, as the little seamaid suffered them in her legs, which was my sister and sweet bride, and named Hyphialta. For he brought her me to my bed as my bed-sister that I gan woo her and loved her ever more, whether she came to me with the fishes tail or with legs. Oftentimes indeed she came with the tail, for the pains she suffered as with knives in the legs outweighed her lust, and I had much feeling for the wise wherein her tender body went over so sweetly into the scaly tail. But higher was my delight even so in the pure human form and so for my part I had greater lust when she came to me in legs.”

There was a stir in the room. Somebody was leaving, the old Schlaginhaufen pair it was: they got up from our table and looking neither right nor left, on tiptoe, the husband guiding his spouse by the elbow passed through the seated groups and out at the door. Not two minutes went by before the noise and the throbbing of their engine were heard, starting up in the yard. They were driving away.

Many of the audience were upset by this, for now they had lost their means of conveyance to the station. But there was no perceptible inclination among the guests to follow the Schlaginhaufens’ example. They all sat spellbound, and when quiet was restored outside, zur Hohe raised his voice again in his dogmatic “Beautiful! Ah, indeed yes, it is beautiful.”

I too was just on the point of opening my mouth, to beg our friend to make an end of the introduction and play to us from the work itself, when he, unaffected by the incident, continued his address: “Thereupon did Hyphialta get with child and accounted me a little son, to whom with my whole soul I clung, a hallowed little lad, lovelier than is ever born, and as though come hither from afar and of old stamp. But since the child was flesh and blood and it was ordained that I might love no human being, he slew it, merciless, and used thereto mine own proper eyes. For you must know that when a soul is drawn violently to evil, its gaze is venomous and like to a basilisk, and chiefly for children. So this little son full of sweet sayings went from me hence, in Augst-month, though I had thought anon such tenderness might be let. I had well thought before that I, as devil’s disciple, might love in flesh and blood what was not female, but he wooed me for my thou in boundless confidence, until I graunted it. Hence I must slay him too, and sent him to his death by force and order. For the magisterulus had marked that I was minded to marry me and was exceeding wroth, sith in the wedded state he saw apostasy from him, and a trick for atonement. So he forced me to use precisely this intent, that I coldly murdered the trusting one and will have confessed it today and here before you all, that I sit before you also as murtherer.”

Another group of guests left the room at this point: little Helmut Institoris got up in silent protest, white, his underlip drawn across his teeth. So did his friends the academy portraitist Nottebohm, and his markedly bourgeois high-chested wife, whom we used to call “the maternal bosom.” They all went out in silence. But outside they had probably not held their tongues; for shortly afterwards Frau Schweigestill came quietly in, in her apron, with her smooth grey head, and stood near the door, with folded hands. She listened as Adrian said: “But whatever sinner was I, ye friends, a murtherer, enemy to man, given to divelish concubinage, yet aside from all that I have ever busied myself as a worker and did never arrest” (again he seemed to bethink and correct himself, but went back to “arrest” again), “arrest nor rist, but toiled and moiled and produced hard things, according to the word of the apostle: ‘Who seeks hard things, to him it is hard.’ For as God doth nothing great through us, without our unction, so neither the other. Only the shame and the intellectual mockery and what in the time was against the work, that he kept aside, the residue I had to do myself, even also after strange infusions. For there was oftentimes heard by me all manner of instrument: an organ or positive, more delectable then harpes, lutes, fiddles, trombones, clarigolds, citerns, waights, anomes, cornets, and hornpipes, four of each, that I had thought myself in heaven had I not known differently. Much of it I wrote down. Often too, certain children were with me in the room, boys and girls who sang to me a motet from sheets of notes, smiled a funny little knowing smile, and exchanged their glances. They were most pretty children. Sometimes their hair was lifted as though from hot air and they smoothed it again with their pretty hands, that were dimpled and had little rubies on them. Out of their nostrils curled sometimes little yellow worms, crawled down to their breasts and disappeared—“

These words were the signal for another group of listeners to leave the room: the scholars Unruhe, Vogler, and Holzschuher, one of whom I saw press the base of his palms to his temples as he went out. But Sixtus Kridwiss, at whose house they held their discussions, kept his place, looking much excited. Even after these had gone, there remained some twenty persons, though many of them had risen and seemed ready to flee. Leo Zink had his eyebrows raised in malicious anticipation, saying “Jessas, na!” just as he did when he was pronouncing on somebody’s painting. A little troop of women had gathered round Leverkühn as though to protect him: Kunigunde Rosenstiel, Meta Nackedey, Jeanette Scheurl—these three. Else Schweigestill held aloof.

And we heard:

“So the Evil One hath strengthened his words in good faith through four-and-twenty years and all is finished up till the last, with murther and lechery have I brought it to fullness and perhaps through Grace good can come of what was create in evil, I know not. Mayhap to God it seemeth I sought the hard and laboured might and main, perhaps, perhaps it will be to my credit that I applied myself and obstinately finished all—but I cannot say and have not courage to hope for it. My sin is greater than that it can be forgiven me, and I have raised it to its height, for my head speculated that the contrite unbelief in the possibility of Grace and pardon might be the most intriguing of all for the Everlasting Goodness, where yet I see that such impudent calculation makes compassion unpossible. Yet basing upon that I went further in speculation and reckoned that this last depravity must be the uttermost spur for Goodness to display its everlastingness. And so then, that I carried on an atrocious competition with the Goodness above, which were more inexhaustible, it or my speculation—so ye see that I am damned, and there is no pity for me for that I destroy all and every beforehand by speculation.

“But since my time is at an end, which aforetime I bought with my soul, I have summoned you to me before my end, courteous and loving brethren and sisters, to the end that my ghostly departure may not be hidden from you. I beseech you hereupon, ye would hold me in kindly remembrance, also others whom perchance to invite I forgat, with friendly commendations to salute and not to misdeam anything done by me. All this bespoke and beknown, will I now to take leave to play you a little out of the construction which I heard from the lovely instrument of Satan and which in part the knowing children sang to me.”

He stood up, pale as death.

“This man,” in the stillness one heard the voice of Dr. Kranich, wheezing yet clearly articulate: “This man is mad. There has been for a long time no doubt of it, and it is most regrettable that in our circle the profession of alienist is not represented. I, as a numismatist, feel myself entirely incompetent in this situation.”

With that he too went away.

Leverkühn, surrounded by the women, Schildknapp, Helene, and myself, had sat down at the brown square piano and flattened the pages of the score with his right hand. We saw tears run down his cheeks and fall on the keyboard, wetting it, as he attacked the keys in a strongly dissonant chord. At the same time he opened his mouth as though to sing, but only a wail which will ring for ever in my ears broke from his lips. He spread out his arms, bending over the instrument and seeming about to embrace it, when suddenly, as though smitten by a blow, he fell sidewise from his seat and to the floor.

Frau Schweigestill, though she had stood farther off, was by him sooner than the rest of us, who, I know not why, wavered a second before we moved. She lifted the head of the unconscious man and holding him in her motherly arms she cried to those still in the room, standing anigh and gaping: “Let me see the backs of ye, all and sundry! City folk all, with not a smitch of understanding, and there’s need of that here! Talked about th’everlasting mercy, poor soul, I don’t know if it goes ‘s far’s that, but human understanding, believe me, that doos!”

EPILOGUE

I
t is finished. An old man, bent, well-nigh broken by the horrors of the times in which he wrote and those which were the burden of his writing, looks with dubious satisfaction on the high stack of teeming paper which is the work of his industry, the product of these years filled to running over with past memories and present events. A task has been mastered, for which by nature I was not the man, to which I was not born, but rather called by love and loyalty—and by my status as eyewitness. What these can accomplish, what devotion can do, that has been done—I must needs be content.

When I began writing down these memories, the biography of Adrian Leverkühn, there existed with reference to its author as much as to the art of its subject not the faintest prospect of its publication. But now that the monstrous national perversion which then held the Continent, and more than the Continent, in its grip, has celebrated its orgies down to the bitter end; now that its prime movers have had themselves poisoned by their physicians, drenched with petrol and set on fire, that nothing of them might remain—now, I say, it might be possible to think of the publication of my labour of love. But those evil men willed that Germany be destroyed down to the ground; and one dares not hope it could very soon be capable of any sort of cultural activity, even the printing of a book. In actual fact I have sometimes pondered ways and means of sending these pages to America, in order that they might first be laid before the public in an English translation. To me it seems as though this might not run quite counter to the wishes of my departed friend. True, there comes the thought of the essentially foreign impression my book must make in that cultural climate and coupled with it the dismaying prospect that its translation into English must turn out, at least in some all too radically German parts, to be an impossibility.

What I further foresee is the feeling of emptiness which will be my lot when after a brief report on the closing scenes of the great composer’s life I shall have rendered my account and drawn it to a close. The work on it, harrowing and consuming as it has been, I shall miss. As the regular performance of a task it kept me busy and filled the years which would have been still harder to bear in idleness. I now look about me for an activity which could in future replace it. And at first I look in vain. It is true, the barriers that eleven years ago kept me from practising my profession have now fallen to the guns of history. Germany is free, in so far as one may apply the word to a land prostrate and proscribed. It may be that soon nothing will stand in the way of my return to my teaching. Monsignor Hinterpfortner has already taken occasion to refer to the possibility. Shall I once more impress upon the hearts of my top-form pupils in the humanities the cultural ideas in which reverence for the deities of the depths blends with the civilized cult of Olympic reason and clarity, to make for a unity in uprightness? But ah, I fear that in this savage decade a generation of youth has grown up which understands my language as little as I theirs. I fear the youth of my land has become too strange to me for me to be their teacher still. And more: Germany herself, the unhappy nation, is strange to me, utterly strange and that because, convinced of her awful end, I drew back from her sins and hid from them in my seclusion. Must I not ask myself whether or not I did right? And again: did I actually do it? I have clung to one man, one suffering, significant human being, clung unto death; and I have depicted his life, which never ceased to fill me with love and grief. To me it seems as though this loyalty might atone for my having fled in horror from my country’s guilt.