by Thomas Mann
The affair at the Schlaginhaufens’ was not a dinner but a nine-o’clock evening company with a buffet in the dining-room next the salon. The picture had changed considerably since the war. There was no Baron Riedesel to represent the claims of the “graceful” in art: that piano-playing cavalry officer had disappeared through history’s trapdoor. Herr von Gleichen-Russwurm, the descendant of the poet Schiller, was not there either. He had been convicted of attempted conspiracy to defraud and been retired from the world to a sort of voluntary arrest on his Bavarian estate. His scheme had been consummately ingenious, as well as sheerly crazy and incredible besides. The Baron had insured a piece of jewellery for a sum higher than its value, and had then ostensibly sent it, carefully packed, to be reset by a jeweller in another city. When the packet arrived, there was nothing found in it but a dead mouse. This mouse had most incompetently failed to perform the task expected of it by the sender. Obviously the idea had been to have it gnaw through the wrappings and get away, leaving the conclusion to be drawn that the parcel had somehow got a hole in it through which the valuable piece had fallen out and got lost. The insurance would then have been due. But the wretched little animal had died without making the hole that was to have explained the absence of the jewel. And the inventor of this ingenious knavery was most comically exposed. Possibly he had got the idea from some book on the history of culture and fallen victim to his own erudition. Or again, the confusion in moral standards prevailing at the time may have been responsible for his freakish inspiration.
Our hostess, nee von Plausig, had had by now to resign herself to the loss of many things, among them the idea of bringing art and aristocracy together in her salon. The presence of some former ladies of the court, talking French with Jeanette Scheurl, reminded one of old times. Otherwise, mingling among the stars of the theatre one saw this or that deputy of the Catholic People’s party and a few higher and not so high functionaries of the new state. Some of these were people of family, such as a certain Herr von Stengel, indefatigably jolly and ready for anything. But there were other elements, anathema in word and deed to the “liberalistic” republic, whose intention to avenge the German “shame,” their conviction that they represented a coming world, was written large on their brows.
Well, it is always like that: an observer might have found that I spent more time with Marie Godeau and her good Tantchen than Adrian did, who doubtless was there on her account. He had greeted her at once with obvious pleasure, but after that spent most of his time with his dear Jeanette and the Social-Democratic member, a serious and knowledgeable admirer of Bach. My own conduct was natural after all that Adrian had confided to me, quite aside from the attractiveness of the object. Rudi Schwerdtfeger was there too; Tante Isabeau was enchanted to see him again. He made her laugh—and Marie smile—as he had in Zurich, but did not interrupt a sedate conversation we had about Paris and Munich events in the world of art, also political and European ones, relations between France and Germany; just at the end for a few minutes Adrian joined our group, standing. He always had to catch the eleven-o’clock train to Waldshut, and his stay that evening had lasted scarcely an hour and a half. The rest of us remained a little longer.
This was, as I said, on Saturday evening. Some days later, on a Thursday, I heard from him by telephone.
CHAPTER XL
He called me up in Freising and said he wanted to ask a favour of me. His voice was level and subdued, indicating headache. He had the feeling, he said, that one should do the honours of Munich a bit for the ladies in Pension Gisela. The idea was to offer them an excursion into the country, just now at its best in this beautiful winter weather. He made no claim to have originated the plan, it had come from Rudi Schwerdtfeger. But he had taken it up and thought it over. They had been considering Fiissen and Neu-Schwanstein. But perhaps Oberammergau would be even better, with a sledge from there to Ettal; he personally was fond of the cloister, and they might drive by way of Linderhof, also a curiosity worth seeing. What did I think?
I said I thought the idea and also the choice of Ettal were excellent.
“Of course you must both come with us,” he said, “you and your wife. We’ll make it a Saturday—so far as I know you have no classes on Saturday this semester. Let us say a week from the day after tomorrow unless there is too big a thaw. I have told Schildknapp already; he is mad about that sort of tiling and wants to go on skis and be drawn by the sledge.”
I said I thought all that was capital.
He wanted to make this much clear, he went on. The plan, as he had said, was originally Schwerdtfeger’s, but I would probably understand his, Adrian’s, wish that they should not get that impression in Pension Gisela. He would not like to have Rudolf invite them, but rather laid stress on doing it himself, though even so not too directly. Would I be so good as to wangle the thing for him in such a way that before my next visit to Pfeiffering, in other words the next day but one, I called upon the ladies in their pension and in a sense as his messenger, if only by inference, brought them the invitation?
“You would be obliging me very much by this friendly service,” he ended, with a curious formality.
I began to put some questions in my turn, but then suppressed them and simply promised him to carry out his wish, assuring him that I was very much pleased with the enterprise, for him and for all of us. So I was. I had already seriously asked myself how the intentions he had confided to me were to be furthered and things set going. It did not seem advisable just to leave to chance further occasions for meeting with the woman of his choice. The situation did not afford a very wide margin, it had to be helped out, there was need of initiative—and here it was. Was the idea really Schwerdtfeger’s, or had Adrian merely put it off on him out of shyness at assuming quite contrary to his nature the role of a lover, and suddenly taking thought for social affairs and sleighing-parties? All this seemed to me so much beneath his dignity that I wished he had told the truth rather than made the fiddler responsible for the idea; yet I could not quite suppress the question whether our pixy platonist might not have had a hand in the enterprise.
But as for questions, after all I had but one: why did Adrian—if he wanted to let Marie know that he was making plans in order to see her—not address himself to her direct, ring her up, even go to Munich, call on the ladies and put his plans before them? I did not know then that what was involved was a tendency, an idea, in a way a sort of rehearsal for something to come later; a pattern, I mean, of sending to the beloved—for that is what I must call her—and leaving it to someone else to speak to her.
The first time it was I to whom he entrusted the message, and I readily performed my office. Then it was that I saw Marie in the white smock she wore over the collarless plaid blouse, and very well it became her. I found her at her drawing-board, a flat, heavy piece of wood set up at a slant, with an electric light fastened to it. She rose to greet me. We sat perhaps twenty minutes in the little sitting-room. Both ladies proved receptive to the attention shown them, and welcomed with enthusiasm the plan for an excursion, of which I only said that I had not originated it—after dropping the remark that I was on the way to my friend Leverkühn. They said that without such gallant escorts they might probably never have seen anything of the famous environment of Munich or the Bavarian Alps. The day was fixed on, the time of meeting. I was able to bring Adrian a gratifying report; I made it quite circumstantial, weaving into it praises of Marie’s appearance in her working smock. He thanked me in the words, spoken so far as I could hear without humour: “Well, you see, it is a good thing after all to have reliable friends.”
The railway line to the village of the Passion Play is for most of the distance the same as the Garmisch-Partenkirchen line, only branching off at the end. It goes through Waldshut and Pfeiffering. Adrian lived halfway to our goal, so it was only the rest of us, Schwerdtfeger, Schildknapp, the guests from Paris, and my wife and myself who forgathered at about ten in the morning at the station in Munich. Withou
t Adrian we covered the first hour through the flat and frozen countryside, beguiling the time with sandwiches and red wine brought by my wife. Schildknapp made us all laugh by his exaggerated eagerness to get as much as the rest: “Don’t make the long fellow come short,” he clamoured in English, using a nickname he went by among us. His natural, unconcealed, and amusingly parodied fear of not getting enough to eat was irresistibly comic; with goggling eyes he chewed a tongue sandwich in imitation of a starving man. All these jests were unmistakably for Mile Godeau’s benefit; he liked her, of course, as much as the rest of us did. She was wearing a most becoming olive-green winter costume, trimmed with bands of brown fur. A sort of suggestibility in my nature, simply because I knew what was toward, tempted me to revel again and again in the sight of her eyes, the pitch-black, coal-black, merry gleam between the darkness of her lashes.
When Adrian joined us, greeted with shouts by our high-spirited group, I got a sudden start—if that is the right word for my feelings, and truly there was something startling about them. We were sitting at close quarters, not in a compartment but in an open section of a second-class coach of a through train. Thus Adrian had under his own eyes the whole range of blue and black and like-coloured ones: attraction and indifference, stimulation and equability, there they all were and would remain for the whole day, which thus stood in a way in the sign of this constellation, perhaps ought to stand in it, that the initiated might recognize therein the real idea of the excursion.
There was a natural fitness in the fact that after Adrian joined us the landscape began to rise and the mountain scenery under snow, though still at some distance, to come into view. Schildknapp distinguished himself by knowing the names of this or that ridge or wall. The Bavarian Alps boast no august or awe-inspiring giants. Yet in their pure white dress they afforded a scene of glorious winter splendour, mounting bold and austere between wooded gorge and wide expanse as we wound among them. The day, however, was cloudy, inclined to frost and snow, and was to clear only towards evening. Our attention even in the midst of conversation was mostly given to the view. Marie led the talk to their common experience in Zurich, the evening in the Tonhalle and the violin concerto. I looked at Adrian talking with her. He had sat down on the opposite bench; she was between Schildknapp and Schwerdtfeger, while Tantchen chattered good-naturedly with Helene and me. I could see that he had to guard himself as he gazed at her face, her black eyes. With his blue ones Rudolf looked on, watched Adrian’s absorption, and then saw how he checked himself and turned away. Did he feel recompensed by the praises that Adrian was singing in his behalf? Marie had modestly refrained from any expression of opinion about the music; so they spoke only of the performance, and Adrian emphatically declared that even with the soloist himself sitting opposite, he could not refrain from calling his playing masterly, consummate, simply incomparable. He added a few cordial, even glowing words about Rudi’s artistic development in general and his undoubtedly great future.
The man thus spoken of seemed to disclaim the praise; he said: “Now, now!” and “Tu’ di fei halten,” and protested that the Master was exaggerating frightfully; but he was red with pleasure. Not a doubt but he was overjoyed to have himself praised to the skies in Marie’s hearing; but his delight in the fact that it was Adrian who extolled him was just as manifest, and his gratitude expressed itself in admiration of Adrian’s way of speaking. Marie had heard and read about the part performance of the Apocalypse in Prague, and she asked about the work. Adrian put her off.
“Let us,” he said, “not speak of these pious peccadilloes!” Rudi was enchanted.
“Pious peccadilloes!” he repeated, in ecstasy. “Did you hear that? The way he talks! How he knows how to use words! He is masterly, our Master!”
And he pressed Adrian’s knee. He was one of those people who always have to touch and feel—the arm, the shoulder, the elbow. He did it even to me, and also to women, most of whom did not dislike it.
In Oberammergau our little party walked about through the spick and span village, admiring the quaint peasant houses with their rich ornament of carven balconies and ridge-poles; distinguishing those of the Apostles, the Saviour, and the Mother of God. While they climbed the nearby Calvarienberg I left them for a little while to find a livery stable I knew and engage a sledge. I joined them for dinner at an inn that had a glass dance-floor lighted from beneath and surrounded by little tables. During the theatre season it was doubtless crowded with foreigners; now, to our satisfaction, it was almost empty. There were only two groups of other guests: at one table an invalidish gentleman with a nursing sister in attendance, at the other a party of young folk come out for the winter sports. From a platform an orchestra of five instruments dispensed light music; they displeased no one by the long intervals they made between the pieces. What they played was trivial and they played even that badly and haltingly. After our roast fowl Rudi Schwerdtfeger could stand it no longer and made up his mind to let his light shine, as it says in the Good Book. He took the violinist’s fiddle away from him, and after turning it round in his hands and seeing where it came from, he improvised magnificently on it, weaving in, to the amusement of our party, some snatches from the cadenza of “his” concerto. The orchestra stood open-mouthed. Then he asked the pianist, a weary-eyed youth who had certainly dreamed of something higher than his present occupation, if he could accompany Dvorak’s Humoresque, and on the mediocre fiddle played the popular piece, with its many grace notes, charming glides, and pretty double stopping; so pertly and brilliantly that he won loud applause from everybody in the place, ourselves and the neighbouring tables, the amazed musicians, and the two waiters as well.
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 exagger
ated 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?
