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Since the foregoing section has swollen out of all conscience, I shall do well to begin a new one, for it is my purpose now to do honour to the image of the mistress of Buchel, Adrian’s dear mother. Gratitude for a happy childhood, in which the good things she gave us to eat played no small part, may add lustre to my picture of her. But truly in all my life I have never seen a more attractive woman than Elsbeth Leverkühn. The reverence with which I speak of her simple, intellectually altogether unassuming person flows from my conviction that the genius of the son owed very much to his mother’s vigour and bloom.

Jonathan Leverkühn’s fine old-German head was always a joy to my eyes; but they rested with no less delight on his wife’s figure, so altogether pleasant it was, so individual and well proportioned. She was born near Apolda, and her type was that brunette one which is sometimes found among us, even in regions where there is no definite ground to suspect Roman blood. The darkness of her colouring, the black hair, the black eyes with their quiet, friendly gaze, might have made me take her for an Italian were it not for a certain sturdiness in the facial structure. It was a rather short oval, this face, with somewhat pointed chin, a not very regular nose, slightly flat and a little tilted, and a tranquil mouth, neither voluptuous nor severe. The hair half covered the ears, and as I grew up it was slowly silvering; it was drawn tightly back, as smooth as glass, and the parting above the brow laid bare the whiteness of the skin beneath. Even so, not always, and so probably unintentionally, some loose strands hung charmingly down in front of the ears. The braid, in our childhood still a massive one, was twined peasant-fashion round the back of the head and on feast-days it might be wound with a gay embroidered ribbon.

City clothes were as little to her liking as to her husband’s: the ladylike did not suit her. On the other hand, the costume of the region, in which we knew her, became her to a marvel: the heavy home-made skirt and a sort of trimmed bodice with a square opening leaving bare the rather short, sturdy neck and the upper part of the breast, where hung a simple gold ornament. The capable brown hands with the wedding ring on the right one were neither coarse nor fastidiously cared for; they had, I would say, something so humanly right and responsible about them that one enjoyed the sight of them, as well as the shapely feet, which stepped out firmly, neither too large nor too small, in the easy, low-heeled shoes and the green or grey woollen stockings which spanned the neat ankles. All this was pleasant indeed. But the finest thing about her was her voice, in register a warm mezzo-soprano, and in speaking, though with a slight Thuringian inflexion, quite extraordinarily winning. I do not say flattering, because the word seems to imply intention. The vocal charm was due to an inherently musical temperament, which, however, remained latent, for Elsbeth never troubled about music, never so to speak “professed” it. She might quite casually strum a few chords on the old guitar that decorated the living-room wall; she might hum this or that snatch of song. But she never committed herself, never actually sang, although I would wager that there was excellent raw material there.

In any case, I have never heard anyone speak more beautifully, though what she said was always of the simplest and most matter-of-fact. And this native, instinctive taste, this harmony, was from the first hour Adrian’s lullaby. To me that means something, it helps to explain the incredible ear which is revealed in his work—even though the objection lies to hand that his brother George enjoyed the same advantage without any influence upon his later life. George looked more like his father too, while Adrian physically resembled the mother—though again there is a discrepancy, for it was Adrian, not George, who inherited the tendency to migraine. But the general habit of my deceased friend, and even many particular traits: the brunette skin, the shape of eye, mouth, and chin, all that came from the mother’s side. The likeness was plain as long as he was smooth-shaven, before he grew the heavy beard. That was only in his latter years; it altered his looks very much. The pitch-black of the mother’s eyes had mingled with the father’s azure blue to a shadowy blue-grey-green iris with little metallic sprinkles and a rust-coloured ring round the pupils. To me it was a moral certainty that the contrast between the eyes of the two parents, the blending of hers into his, was what formed his taste in this respect or rather made it waver. For never, all his life long, could he decide which, the black or the blue, he liked better. Yet always it was the extreme that drew him: the very blue, or else the pitch-black gleam between the lashes.

Frau Elsbeth’s influence on the hands at Buchel—not very numerous save at harvest-time, and then the neighbours came in to help—was of the very best; if I am right, her authority among them was greater than her husband’s. I can still see the figures of some of them; for instance, that of Thomas, the ostler, who used to fetch us from Weissenfels and bring us back: a one-eyed, extraordinarily long and bony man, with a slight hump, on which he used to let little Adrian ride; it was, the Meister often told me later, a most practical and comfortable seat. And I recall the cow-girl Hanne, whose bosoms flapped as she walked and whose bare feet were always caked with dung. She and the boy Adrian had a close friendship, on grounds still to be gone into in detail. Then there was the dairywoman Frau Luder, a widow in a cap. Her face was set in an expression of exaggerated dignity, probably due to her renown as a mistress of the art of making liqueurs and caraway cheese. It was she, if not Elsbeth herself, who took us to the cow-stalls, where the milkmaid crouched on her stool, and under her fingers there ran into our glasses the lukewarm foaming milk, smelling of the good and useful animal that gave it.

All this detail, these memories of our country world of childhood in its simple setting of wood and meadow, pond and hill—I would not dwell upon them but that just they formed the early surroundings of Adrian up to his tenth year. This was his parental home, his native heath, the scene where he and I so often came together. It was the time in which our du was rooted, the time when he too must have called me by my Christian name. I hear it no more, but it is unthinkable that at six or eight years he should not have called me Serenus or simply Seren just as I called him Adri. The date cannot be fixed, but it must certainly have been in our early school-days that he ceased to bestow it on me and used only my last name instead, though it would have seemed to me impossibly harsh to do the same. Thus it was—though I would not have it look as though I wanted to complain. Yet it seemed to me worth mention that I called him Adrian; he on the other hand, when he did not altogether avoid all address, called me Zeitblom.—Let us not dwell on the odd circumstance, which became second nature to me, but drop it and return to Buchel.

His friend, and mine too, was the yard dog, Suso. The bearer of this singular name was a rather mangy setter. When one brought her her food she used to grin across her whole face, but she was by no means good-natured to strangers, and led the unnatural life of a dog chained all day to its kennel and only let free to roam the court at night. Together Adrian and I looked into the filthy huddle in the pigsty and recalled the old wives’ tales we had heard about these muddy sucklings with the furtive white-eyelashed little blue eyes and the fat bodies so like in colour to human flesh: how these animals did sometimes actually devour small children. We forced our vocal chords to imitate the throaty grunt of their language and watched the rosy snouts of the litter at the dugs of the sow. Together we laughed at the hens behind the wire of the chicken-house: they accompanied their fatuous activities by a dignified gabbling, breaking out only now and then into hysterical squawks. We visited the beehives behind the house, but kept our distance, knowing already the throbbing pain caused by these busy creatures when one of them blundered against your nose and defended itself with its sting.

I remember the kitchen garden and the currant bushes whose laden stems we drew through our lips; the meadow sorrel we nibbled; certain wild-flowers from whose throats we sucked the drop of fine nectar; the acorns we chewed, lying on our backs in the wood; the purple, sun-warmed blackberries we ate from the way-side bushes to quench our childish thirst with their sharp juice. We were children—ah, it is not on my own account but on his that I am moved as I look back, at the thought of his fate, and how from that vale of innocence he was to mount up to inhospitable, yes, awful heights. It was the life of an artist; and because it was given to me, a simple man, to see it all so close by, all the feelings of my soul for human lot and fate were concentrated about this unique specimen of humanity. Thanks to my friendship with Adrian, it stands to me for the pattern of how destiny shapes the soul, for the classic, amazing instance of that which we call becoming, development, evolution—and actually it may be just that. For though the artist may all his life remain closer, not to say truer, to his childhood than the man trained for practical life, although one may say that he, unlike the latter, abides in the dreamy, purely human and playful childlike state, yet his path out of his simple, unaffected beginnings to the undivined later stages of his course is endlessly farther, wilder, more shattering to watch than that of the ordinary citizen. With the latter, too, the thought that he was once a child is not nearly so full of tears.

I beg the reader to put down entirely to my own account the feelings here expressed and not ascribe them to Leverkühn. I am an old-fashioned man who has stuck by certain romantic notions dear to me, one of which is the highly subjectivizing contrast I feel between the nature of the artist and that of the ordinary man. Adrian—if he had found it worth the trouble—would have coldly contradicted such a view. He had extremely neutral views about art and artists; he reacted so witheringly to the “romantic tripe” which the world in its folly had been pleased to utter on the subject that he even disliked the words “art” and “artist,” as he showed in his face when he heard them. It was the same with the word “inspiration.” It had to be avoided in his company and “imagination” used, if necessary, instead. He hated the word, he jeered at it—and when I think of that hatred and those jeers, I cannot help lifting my hand from the blotter over my page, to cover my eyes. For his hatred and mockery were too tormented to be a merely objective reaction to the intellectual movements of the time. Though they were objective too; I recall that once, even as a student, he said to me that the nineteenth century must have been an uncommonly pleasant epoch, since it had never been harder for humanity to tear itself away from the opinions and habits of the previous period than it was for the generation now living.

I referred above to the pond which lay only ten minutes away from the house, surrounded by pasture. It was called the Cow Trough, probably because of its oblong shape and because the cows came there to drink. The water, why I do not know, was unusually cold, so that we could only bathe in it in the afternoon when the sun had stood on it a long time. As for the hill, it was a favourite walk of half an hour: a height called, certainly from old days and most inappropriately, Mount Zion. In the winter it was good for coasting, but I was seldom there. In summer, with the community bench beneath the oak trees crowning its summit, it was an airy site with a good view, and I often enjoyed it with the Leverkühn family before supper on Sunday afternoons.

And now I feel constrained to comment as follows: the house and its surroundings in which Adrian later as a mature man settled down when he took up permanent quarters with the Schweigestills at Pfeiffering near Waldshut in Oberbayern—indeed, the whole setting—were a most extraordinary likeness and reproduction of his childhood home; in other words, the scene of his later days bore a curious resemblance to that of his early ones. Not only did the environs of Pfeiffering (or Pfeffering, for the spelling varies) have a hill with a community bench, though it was not called Mount Zion, but the Rohmbühel; not only was there a pond, at somewhat the same distance from the house as the Cow Trough, here called the Klammer pond, the water of which was strikingly cold. No, for even the house, the courtyard, and the family itself were all very like the Buchel setting. In the yard was a tree also rather in the way and preserved for sentimental reasons—not a lime tree, but an elm. True, characteristic differences existed between the structure of the Schweigestill house and that of Adrian’s parents, for the former was an old cloister, with thick walls, deep-vaulted casements, and rather dank passages. But the odour of pipe tobacco pervaded the air of the lower rooms as it did at Buchel; and the owner and his wife, Herr and Frau Schweigestill, were a father and a mother too; that is, they were a long-faced, rather laconic, quiet, and contemplative farmer and his no longer young wife, who had certainly put on flesh but was well-proportioned, lively, energetic, and capable, with hair smoothed tightly back and shapely hands and feet. They had a grown son and heir, Gereon (not George), a young man very progressive in agricultural matters, always thinking about new machinery, and a later-born daughter named Clementine. The yard dog in Pfeiffering could laugh, even though he was not called Suso, but Kaschperl—at least originally. For the boarder had his own ideas about this “originally” and I was a witness of the process by which under his influence the name Kaschperl became slowly a memory and the dog himself answered better to Suso. There was no second son, which rather strengthened the case than otherwise, for who would this second son have been?

I never spoke to Adrian about this whole singular and very obvious parallel. I did not do so in the beginning, and later I no longer wanted to. I never cared for the phenomenon. This choice of a place to live, reproducing the earliest one, this burying oneself in one’s earliest, outlived childhood, or at least in the outer circumstances of the same—it might indicate attachment, but in any case it is psychologically disturbing. In Leverkühn it was the more so since I never observed that his ties with the parental home were particularly close or emotional, and he severed them early without observable pain. Was that artificial “return” simply a whim? I cannot think so. Instead it reminds me of a man of my acquaintance who, though outwardly robust and even bearded, was so highly strung that when he was ill—and he inclined to illnesses—he wished to be treated only by a child-specialist. Moreover the doctor to whom he went was so small in person that a practice for grown people would obviously not have been suitable and he could only have become a physician for children. I ought to say at once that I am aware of digressing in telling this anecdote about the man with the child-specialist, in so far as neither of them will appear in this narrative. If that is an error, and while without doubt it was an error to yield to the temptation to bring in Pfeiffering and the Schweigestills before their time, I would implore the reader to attribute such irregularities to the excitement which has possessed me since I began this biography, and to tell the truth not only as I write. I have been working now for several days on these pages; but though I try to keep my sentences balanced and find fitting expression for my thoughts, the reader must not imagine that I do not feel myself in a state of permanent excitement, which even expresses itself in a shakiness in my handwriting, usually so firm. I even believe, not only that those who read me will in the long run understand this nervous perturbation, but also that they themselves will in time not be strange to it.

I forgot to mention that there was in the Schweigestill courtyard, Adrian’s later home, and certainly not surprisingly, a stable-girl, with bosoms that shook as she ran and bare feet caked with dung; she looked as much like Hanne of Buchel as one stable-girl does look like another, and in the reproduction was named Waltpurgis. Here, however, I am not speaking of her but of her prototype Hanne, with whom little Adrian stood on a friendly footing because she loved to sing and used to do little exercises with us children. Oddly enough, though Elsbeth Leverkühn, with her lovely voice, refrained, in a sort of chaste reserve, from song, this creature smelling of her animals made free with it, and sang to us lustily, of evenings on the bench under the linden tree. She had a strident voice, but a good ear; and she sang all sorts of popular tunes, songs of the army and the street; they were mostly either gruesome or mawkish and we soon made tunes and words our own. When we sang with her, she accompanied us in thirds, and from there went down to the lower fifth and lower sixth and left us in the treble, while she ostentatiously and predominantly sang the second. And probably to fix our attention and make us properly value the harmonic enjoyment, she used to stretch her mouth and laugh just like Suso the dog when we brought her her food.

By we I mean Adrian, myself, and George, who was already thirteen when his brother and I were eight and ten years old. Little sister Ursel was too small to take part in these exercises, and moreover, of us four probably one was superfluous in the kind of vocal music to which Hanne elevated our lusty shoutings. She taught us, that is, to sing rounds—of course, the ones that children know best: O, wie wohl ist mir am Abend, Es tönen die Lieder, and the one about the cuckoo and the ass; and those twilight hours in which we enjoyed them remain in my memory—or rather the memory of them later took on a heightened significance because it was they, so far as I know, that first brought my friend into contact with a “music” somewhat more artistically organized than that of mere unison songs. Here was a succession of interweaving voices and imitative entries, to which one was roused by a poke in the ribs from the stable-girl Hanne when the song was already in progress; when the tune had got to a certain point but was not yet at the end. The melodic components presented themselves in different layers, but no jangle or confusion ensued, for the imitation of the first phrase by the second singer fitted itself very pleasantly point for point to the continuation sung by the first. But if this first part—in the case of the piece O, wie wohl ist mir am Abend—had reached the repeated “Glocken läuten” and begun the illustrative “Ding-dang-dong,” it now formed the bass not only to “Wenn zur Ruh’,” which the second voice was just then singing, but also to the beginning “O, wie wohl,” with which, consequent on a fresh nudge in the ribs, the third singer entered, only to be relieved, when he had reached the second stage of the melody, by the first starting again at the beginning, having surrendered to the second as the fundamental bass the descriptive “Ding-dang-dong”—and so on. The fourth singer inevitably coincided with one of the others, but he tried to enliven the doubling by roaring an octave below, or else he began before the first voice, so to speak before the dawn with the fundamental bell-figure and indefatigably and cheerfully carried on with it or the fa, la, la that gaily plays round the earlier stages of the melody during the whole duration of the song.

In this way we were always separate from each other in time, but the melodic presence of each kept together pleasantly with that of the others and what we produced made a graceful web, a body of sound such as unison singing did not; a texture in whose polyphony we delighted without inquiring after its nature and cause. Even the eight- or nine-year-old Adrian probably did not notice. Or did the short laugh, more mocking than surprised, which he gave when the last “Ding-dong” faded on the air and which I came later to know so well—did it mean that he saw through the device of these little songs, which quite simply consists in that the beginning of the melody subsequently forms the second voice and that the third can serve both as bass? None of us was aware that here, led by a stable-girl, we were moving on a plane of musical culture already relatively very high, in a realm of imitative polyphony, which the fifteenth century had had to discover in order to give us pleasure. But when I think back at Adrian’s laugh, I find in retrospect that it did have in it something of knowledge and mocking initiate sense. He kept it as he grew up; I often heard it, sitting with him in theatre or concert-hall, when he was struck by some artful trick, some ingenious device within the musical structure, noticed only by the few; or by some fine psychological allusion in the dialogue of a drama. In the beginning it was unsuitable for his years, being just as a grown person would have laughed: a slight expulsion of air from nose and mouth, with a toss of the head at the same time, short, cool, yes, contemptuous, or at most as though he would say: “Good, that; droll, curious, amusing!” But his eyes were taking it in, their gaze was afar and strange, and their darkness, metal-sprinkled, had put on a deeper shade.