Читать книгу The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann - Страница 8

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How often indeed in telling this tale about the bad children have I had to think on another brother-sister pair: on our master, divus Benedictus, son of Euprobus, and his dear Scholastica, how they lived so sweetly and saintly together in the valley of Sublacus until Satan by basest guile drove them thence. For he brought seven passingly beautiful hetairas to them in the cloister, whereby some of his pupils (not all, but a goodly number) yielded to sensual lusts. Then of course the brother and sister fled, and betook themselves, accompanied by three ravens, upon a toilsome wandering; bearing all out in love with each other, converting all the heathen whom they still found, flinging down altars to false gods, and the saint himself amid Scholastica’s applause destroying the last temple of lyre-playing Apollo. For my part I call that Christian love of brother and sister inseparable and angelic. And I have to tell of such a sinful love! Should I not rather in all pious detail recount the tale of Benedict and Scholastica? No, of my own free choice I rather elected this one, because the other witnesses only to saintliness, but this one to God’s immeasurable and incalculable loving-kindness. And I confess myself guilty of a weakness—not for the sin (the heavens forfend!), but for the sinners, yes, I venture to believe that our master too, though he fled the valley of Sublacus on account of its pollution, would not have withheld from them some pity. For together with his dear sister he might undertake a painful pilgrimage, but my young sinner (and I well see that it was inevitable) must part from his fellow sinner—when they both from infancy all too passionately clung to each other, and evil lust had only knitted them closer together, which should not increase my sympathy, yet it does—and quite alone with his squire Anaclet betake himself upon that godly pilgrimage into the unknown, a travel so beset by travail and loured on by dangiers that his return was a matter God-given and unknowable.

They were deadly pale and trembled in all their limbs when they took leave of each other. ‘Ade, farewell!’ They spoke and dared not even kiss each other. Had they not first sinned with each other, then they might have kissed, but then indeed had Wiligis not had to travel. He said:

‘The little one, our third brother-sister, I would fain have seen with my own eyes. I cannot help imagining it as enchanting.’

‘God knows,’ she replied to him, ‘what our good angel, the Baron Eisengrein, will decide about it, when we come to cross that bridge.—One thing, Willo, I promise: I will never belong to another man than you. Probably I may not, but above everything I will not.’

Before that, of course, had come the meeting of the land barons on the Burg Beaurepaire and the Duke’s speech to them as planned. There had, he said, however young he was, so many a sin gathered upon his head that a journey to the Holy Sepulchre was highly needful to his soul, and for the term of his absence, be it short or long, they were to take the oath of fealty to his sister, that she should be their liege lady. But he commended her to the hand of his gouvernail, the Baron Eisengrein, to the loyalty of this best of men he commended her that he should be her aid and she rule over the land from his waterburg.

Now in the matter of the oath of fealty things were not quite so smooth and simple, because there had been some winking and inkling about how it stood between the maiden and her brother and some gentlemen were not blithe to consent to the proposal and take the maid for liege lady. But Eisengrein let it privily be known that everybody who refused to grant the Duke’s wish he would challenge to a joust with long lances and short swords, and not accept surety from anyone. And as he had a body like iron and had never been thrust from his horse, so they reconsidered the idea and took the oath. But he led his ward down through the land to his citadel on the sea, with men-at-arms before and behind, and Sibylla, wan, widowed, and reft, swayed in a soft carrying-chair between two horses while the Baron Eisengrein rode beside her, armed, right menacingly looking about him with his knightly fist boldly doubled on his thigh.

That God had sent her this stout, shrewd protector, for that one must thank Him, so much suffering was still before her and so wretched she now already was. Poor soul! I am a monk and have set my heart on nothing on this earth; I am so to speak strong against good and ill and, girt with the cingulum, offer no weak spot to fate. Just on that account has the spirit of story-telling chosen me as its vessel, that I take upon me the distresses of such poor things and bring their pale anguish to honour in the telling, however much it may lack in itself alone. The parting was far too hard for the brother-sister pair. They were, with the sickle-sign on their brows and one carrying the child of the other, not equal to the parting. Pale was the maid, partly from the child, but partly and particularly because her heart was gone out of her breast, being with the traveller. And his in turn was with her, however urgently he needed it himself, to thrust through the world with Anaclet at his side, among robbers, wild beasts, quicksands, and forests ill reputed, rolling rock and raging waters, to reach the port of Massilia, where they thought to charter a ship for the Holy Land. For both the youth and the maid it was more wretched in spirit than can ever fall to my lot, girt round as I am. But a little the better of the two, that I must admit, was it for my maid; for she was to give birth, and so in a sense looked life in the face, but he only death.

Now upon the Sieur Eisengrein’s waterburg, in the flatland, close to the clattering seas, Sibylla was received so well and graciously and pleasantly with as much discretion and if I may say it so much professional understanding of her state as one can well imagine. The Sieur Eisengrein, that is, had well known to whom he was bringing the sweet sinner: I mean, to his wife, Dame Eisengrein, a matron whom I must praise in her own way as much as her lord. For something quite especial and therewith exemplary she had: if he presented such an exceptionally firm and sturdy masculine picture, so she was feminine through and through, by nature and nurture, with her whole soul turned to feminine concerns—yes, except for God (she was very pious and wore a large jet cross on her mountainous bosom) she was interested in nothing at all but what has to do with women’s life, in the most pious, most physical sense of the word, and thus in particular in female burdens and needs and sacred fertility rich in pain; in arrested menses, gravid bodies, chokings, strange cravings, childbed, solemn shrieks and writhings, tapping movements in the belly, labour pains, birth and afterbirth, and sighs of bliss, and hot cloths, and bathing of the mucus-covered fruit, to be stroked smartly with rods and held by the feet upside down if it did not at once show life by screaming.

All this was Dame Eisengrein’s passion; there could not be enough of it for her in the castle among those who lived there; also among the women of the flax farms and the villages went the lady of the castle, to stand by them in her wisdom at their hour. Six times had she herself been a mother. Four of her children had died very young, at which (and this surprises me) her affliction was much less than had been her joy in bringing them forth. On the bringing forth, so it seemed to me, was set all her store. Of her grown sons one had fallen in struggle and strife, another lived wedded within his own walls. So she was past conceiving. Thus she lived, alone with her husband, and thought sadly of the time when she might move in the heavy, honourable state of wifehood, the white hand laid piously on the swelling belly. High was her bosom, no more her body, and so much the more devotedly did the fruitfulness of others interest the brave soul; so soon as she knew of it her blunket-blue eyes (she was a maid from Suabia) would fill with a warm glow and a rosy red enkindle both her good downy cheeks. For some time had that pleasure been denied her, yes, for many moons; so she was not a little stirred up by Sibylla’s coming and the private revelations which her husband made to her about the maiden. How her piety reconciled itself with the improper and quite monstrous situation of her guest, I know not. Probably any maternity, in whatever erring way it had come to pass, was a holy blessing and an act of God, a challenge to her solidarity with everything feminine and her almost greedy joy in standing by.

Like a mother, only still more fervid and full of zeal, Dame Eisengrein took on the piteous one, shut her off straightway from the whole castle and all its inhabitants in a remote chamber, where she lacked for nothing and where she became the dame’s dear prisoner, who visited her quite alone, fed and provided her, listened and felt and sought to console the pale and ever more gravid one when she wept for her errant lord, the only and alone beloved.

‘Ah, Mother Eisengrein, whither went my beloved, my only one, my brother? How shall I ever grasp that we are parted in this world? I shall not endure it and cannot get used to it. Do I double my sin and strengthen my damnation the more that I weep for him? Ah, the seed of his body and life I bear and carry beneath my heart, that his embraces gave me! The little owls cried, Hanegiff lay in his blood, and bloody too was it in the bed. But how passing sweet it was when he was with me, when I had his lovely shoulder at my lips and he made me not to wife but yet to woman.’

‘Let be,’ said the lady-in-waiting, ‘and let him go. When they have made us women and given us our own, then they are of no more use and all the rest is just women’s matters. Let us be glad that we are now among ourselves, we women! We shall have a splendid childbed and are not far from the time when I shall put you in a hot bath, it relaxes and does good. From the first pains on, and let it be only so little, I will no longer leave your side, but sleep, if must be, in the straight chair here wakeful by your bed, until you are really in hard labour. Just wait, that will be very fine and is at bottom much finer than a lytel embracing.’

But Sibylla too had a bad dream, which of course she had to tell the lady of the castle. She dreamed she gave birth to a dragon who cruelly tore her womb. Then he flew away, which caused her great mental anguish, but came back again and gave her even greater pain by squeezing back into the torn womb.

‘So one sees from that, child, you are afraid, and nothing else. A dragon, forsooth? Splendidly we shall come down with a fine straight child and I would it would be a girl-child. No fear! I will have it already and make it free and if it will not straightway cry I will cuff it.’