by Thomas Mann
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.
Else and Clementine Schweigestill told me that Nepomuk was the best, most biddable, untroublesome child they had ever seen—which agreed with the stories of his earliest days. Actually I have known him to weep when he hurt himself, but never howl or roar or blubber as unruly children do. It would have been unthinkable. If he were forbidden, as for instance at an inconvenient time, to go with the stable-boy to the horses, or with Waltpurgis into the cow-stalls, he would assent to the verdict quite readily and even say: “In a little while, maybe tomorrow or next day,” in a tone meant to console the grown-ups who, certainly against their will, had denied the request. Yes, he would even pat the disappointed one as though to say: “Don’t take it to heart! Next time you won’t have to refuse, maybe you can let me.”
It was the same when he could not go to Adrian in the Abbot’s room. He was much drawn to his uncle, even in the first two weeks; by the time I got there it was plain that he clung especially to Adrian and wanted to be with him. Of course this was partly because it was the unusual, a treat, while the society of the women was a commonplace. Yet how could it have escaped him that this man, his mother’s brother, occupied among the rustics of Pfeiffering a unique, honoured, even rather intimidating place? And their respectful bearing must also make the boy eager to be with his uncle. But one cannot say that Adrian met the little boy halfway. Whole days might go by and he would not see him, would deny himself the undoubtedly beloved sight. Then again they would spend long hours together; taking walks hand in hand as far as the little one could go, strolling in friendly silence or chatting in Echo’s little language, through the countryside lush with the season in which he had come and sweet with scents of lilac, alder-bush, and jasmine. The light-footed lad would be before him in the narrow lanes between walls of corn already ripening yellow for the harvest, their blades, with nodding ears as high as himself, mounting out of the mould.
Out of the earth, I might better say, for the little one said it, expressing his joy that heaven gave the “firsty earff” a drink last night.
“A drink, Echo?” asked his uncle, letting pass the rest of the child’s metaphorical language. “You mean the rain?”
“Yes, the rain,” his little companion agreed more explicitly; but he would not go further into the matter.
“Imagine, he talks about the earth being thirsty, and uses a figure of speech like that,” Adrian related to me next time, in wonder. “Isn’t that a bit strange? Yes,” he nodded, with a certain amazed recognition, “he is pretty far along.”
When he was obliged to go into the city, Adrian brought the boy all sorts of presents: various animals, a jack-in-the-box, a toy railway with lights that switched on and off as it roared round the curves; a magic casket in which the greatest treasure was a glass filled with red wine which did not run out when the glass was turned upside down. Echo liked these things, of course, but when he had played with them he soon said: ” ‘Nuff,” and much preferred to have his uncle show and explain some object of grown-up use-always the same and always new, for a child’s persistence and appetite for repetition are great in matters of entertainment. The carved ivory paper-knife; the globe turning on its axis, with broken land-masses, deep bays, strange-shaped inland seas, and vast blue-dyed oceans; the clock on the chimney-piece that struck the hours, whose weights one could wind up with a crank out of the well into which they had sunk; those were some of the wonders which the little boy coveted to examine, when the slender figure stood at the door and the little voice inquired: “Are you look cross because I do come?”
“No, Echo, not very cross. But the weights are only halfway down.”
In this case it might be the music-box he asked for. It was my contribution, I had brought it to him: a small brown box to be wound up underneath. The roller, provided with metal tongues, turned along the tuned teeth of a comb and played, at first briskly and daintily, then slowly running down, three well-harmonized, demure little tinkling melodies, to which Echo listened always with the same rapt attention, the same unforgettable mixture of delight, surprise, and dreamy musing.
His uncle’s manuscripts too, those runes strewn over the staves, adorned with little stems and tails, connected by slurs and strokes, some blank, some filled in with black; he liked to look at them too and have it explained what all those marks were about—just between ourselves, they were about him, and I should like to know whether he divined that, whether it could be read in his eyes that he gathered it from the master’s explanations. This child, sooner than any of us, was privileged to get an “insight” into the drafts of the score of Ariel’s songs, on which Adrian was privately at work. He had combined the first, full of ghostly “dispersed” voices of nature, the “Come unto these yellow sands,” with the second, pure loveliness: “Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” into a single song for soprano, celeste, muted violin, an oboe, a bass clarinet, and the flageolet notes of the harp. And truly he who hears these “gently spiriting” sounds or even hears them by reading alone, with his spirit’s ear, may well ask with Ferdinand: “Where should this music be? F th’ air or th’ earth?” For
he who made it has caught in its gossamer, whispering web not only the hovering childlike-pure, bewildering light swiftness of “my dainty Ariel,” but the whole elfin world from the hills, brooks, and groves which in Prospero’s description as weak masters and demi-puppets by moonshine for their pastime midnight mushrooms make and the green sour ringlets whereof the ewe not bites. Echo always asked to see once more the place in the notes where the dog says “Bow-wow” and chanticleer cries “Cock-a-diddle-dow.” And Adrian told him about the wicked witch Sycorax and her little slave, whom she, because he was a spirit too delicate to obey her earthy and abhorred commands, confined in a cloven pine, in which plight he spent a dozen painful years, until the good master of spells came and freed him. Nepomuk wanted to know how old the little spirit was when he was imprisoned and then how old when he was freed, after twelve years. But his uncle said that the spirit had no age, that he was the same after as before imprisonment, the same child of air—with which Echo seemed content.
The Master of the Abbot’s room told him other stories, as well as he could remember them: Rumpelstiltskin, Falada and Rapun-zel and the Singing, Soaring Lark; for the stories the little one had to sit on his uncle’s knee, sidewise, sometimes putting one arm round his neck. “Well, that does sound most nice,” he would say when a tale was done; but often he went to sleep with his head on the story-teller’s breast. Then his uncle sat without moving, his chin resting lightly on the hair of the sleeping child, until one of the women came and fetched him away.
As I said, for days they might keep the child from him, because he was busy, or perhaps a headache shut him away in silence and darkness.
