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CHAPTER V

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The chapter just finished is also, for my taste, much too extended. It would seem only too advisable to inquire how the reader’s patience is holding out. To myself, of course every word I write is of burning interest; but what care must I take not to see this as a guarantee of the sympathy of the detached reader! And certainly I must not forget that I am writing for posterity; not for the moment, nor for readers who as yet know nothing of Leverkühn and so cannot long to know more about him. What I do is to prepare these pages for a time when the conditions for public interest will be quite different, and certainly much more favourable; when curiosity about the details of so thrilling an existence, however well or ill presented, will be more eager and less fastidious.

That time will come. Our prison, so wide and yet so narrow, so suffocatingly full of foul air, will some day open. I mean when the war now raging will have found, one way or the other, its end—and how I shudder at this “one way or the other,” both or myself and for the awful impasse into which fate has crowded the German soul! For I have in mind only one of the two alternatives: only with this one do I reckon, counting upon it against my conscience as a German citizen. The never-ending public instruction has impressed on us in all its horrors the crushing consequences of a German defeat; we cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world. And yet there is something else—some of us fear it at moments which seem to us criminal, but others quite frankly and steadily—something we fear more than German defeat, and that is German victory. I scarcely dare ask myself to which of these groups I belong. Perhaps to still a third, in which one yearns indeed, steadily and consciously, for defeat, yet also with perpetual torments of conscience. My wishes and hopes must oppose the triumph of German arms, because in it the work of my friend would be buried, a ban would rest upon it for perhaps a hundred years, it would be forgotten, would miss its own age and only in a later one receive historic honour. That is the special motivation of my criminal attitude; I share it with a scattered number of men who can easily be counted on the fingers of my two hands. But my mental state is only a variant of that which, aside from cases of ordinary self-interest or extraordinary stupidity, has become the destiny of a whole people; and this destiny I am inclined to consider in the light of a unique and peculiar tragedy, even while I realize that it has been before now laid on other nations, for the sake of their own and the general future, to wish for the downfall of their state. But considering the decency of the German character, its confidingness, its need for loyalty and devotion, I would fain believe than in our case the dilemma will come to a unique conclusion as well; and I cannot but cherish a deep and strong resentment against the men who have reduced so good a people to a state of mind which I believe bears far harder on it than it would on any other, estranging it beyond healing from itself. I have only to imagine that my own sons, through some unlucky chance, became acquainted with the contents of these pages and in Spartan denial of every gentler feeling denounced me to the secret police—to be able to measure, yes, actually with a sort of patriotic pride, the abysmal nature of this conflict.

I am entirely aware that with the above paragraph I have again regrettably overweighted this chapter, which I had quite intended to keep short. I would not even suppress my suspicion, held on psychological grounds, that I actually seek digressions and circumlocutions, or at least welcome with alacrity any occasion for such, because I am afraid of what is coming. I lay before the reader a testimony to my good faith in that I give space to the theory that I make difficulties because I secretly shrink from the task which, urged by love and duty, I have undertaken. But nothing, not even my own weakness, shall prevent me from continuing to perform it—and I herewith resume my narrative, with the remark that it was by our singing of rounds with the stable-girl that, so far as I know, Adrian was first brought into contact with the sphere of music. Of course I know that as he grew older he went with his parents to Sunday service in the village church at Oberweiler, where a young music student from Weissenfels used to prelude on the little organ and accompany the singing of the congregation, even attending its departure with timid improvisations. But I was almost never with them, since we usually went to Buchel only after morning church and I can but say that I never heard from Adrian a word to indicate that his young mind was any way moved by the offerings of that youthful adept; or—that being scarcely likely—that the phenomenon of music itself had ever struck him. So far as I can see, even at that time and for years afterwards he gave it no attention and kept concealed from himself that he had anything to do with the world of sound. I see in that a mental reserve; but a physiological explanation is also possible, for actually it was at about his fourteenth year, at the time of beginning puberty, and so at the end of the period of childhood, in the house of his uncle at Kaisersaschern, that he began of his own motion to experiment on the piano. And it was at this time that the inherited migraine began to give him bad days.

His brother George’s future was conditioned by his position as heir, and he had always felt in complete harmony with it. What should become of the second son was for the parents an open question, which must be decided according to the tastes and capacities he might show; and it was remarkable how early the idea was fixed in his family’s head and in all of ours that Adrian was to be a scholar. What sort of scholar remained long in doubt; but the whole bearing of the lad, his way of expressing himself, his clear definition, even his look, his facial expression, never left a doubt, in the mind of my father for instance, that this scion of the Leverkühn stock was called to “something higher”; that he would be the first scholar of his line.

The decisive confirmation of this idea came from the ease, one might say the superior facility, with which Adrian absorbed the instruction of the elementary school. He received it in the paternal home, for Jonathan Leverkühn did not send his children to the village school, and the chief factor in this decision was, I believe, not so much social ambition as the earnest wish to give them a more careful education than they could get from instruction in common with the cottage children of Oberweiler. The schoolmaster, a still young and sensitive man, who never ceased to be afraid of the dog Suso, came over to Buchel afternoons when he had finished his official duties, in winter fetched by Thomas in the sleigh. By the time he took young Adrian in hand he had already given the thirteen-year-old George all the necessary foundation for his further training as agronomist. But now he, schoolmaster Michelson, was the very first to declare, loudly and with a certain vehemence, that the boy must “in God’s name,” go to high school and the university, for such a learning head and lightning brain he, Michelson, had never seen, and it would be a thousand pities if one did not do everything to open to this young scholar the way to the heights of knowledge. Thus or something like it, certainly rather like a seminarist, did he express himself, speaking indeed of ingenium, of course in part to show off with the word, which sounded droll enough applied to such childish achievements. Yet obviously it came from an awed and astonished heart.

I was never present at these lesson-hours and know only by hearsay about them; but I can easily imagine that the behaviour of my young Adrian must sometimes have been a little hard on a preceptor himself young, and accustomed to drive his learning with whip and spurs into dull and puzzled or rebellious heads. “If you know it all already,” I once heard him say to the boy, “then I can go home.” Of course it was not true that the pupil “knew it all already.” But his manner did suggest the thought, simply because here was a case of that swift, strangely sovereign and anticipatory grasp and assimilation, as sure as easy, which soon dried up the master’s praise, for he felt that such a head meant a danger to the modesty of the heart and betrayed it easily to arrogance. From the alphabet to syntax and grammar, from the progression of numbers and the first rules to the rule of three and simple sums in proportion, from the memorizing of little poems (and there was no memorizing, the verses were straightway and with the utmost precision grasped and possessed) to the written setting down of his own train of thought on themes out of the geography—it was always the same: Adrian gave it his ear, then turned round with an air that seemed to say: “Yes, good, so much is clear, all right, go on!” To the pedagogic temperament there is something revolting about that. Certainly the young schoolmaster was tempted again and again to cry: “What is the matter with you? Take some pains!” But why, when obviously there was no need to take pains?

As I said, I was never present at the lessons; but I am compelled to conclude that my friend received the scientific data purveyed by Herr Michelson fundamentally with the same mien, so hard to characterize, with which under the lime tree he had accepted the fact that if a horizontal melody of nine bars is divided into three sections of three bars each, they will still produce a harmonically fitting texture. His teacher knew some Latin; he instructed Adrian in it and then announced that the lad—he was now ten years old—was ready if not for the fifth, then certainly for the fourth form. His work was done.

Thus Adrian left his parents’ house at Easter 1895 and came to town to attend our Boniface gymnasium, the school of the Brethren of the Common Life. His uncle, Nikolaus Leverkühn, his father’s brother, a respected citizen of Kaisersaschern, declared himself ready to receive the lad into his house.