GUSTAVE
ASCHENBACH - or von Aschenbach, as he had been known
officially since his fiftieth birthday - had set out alone from his house in
Prince Regent Street, Munich, for an extended walk. It was a spring afternoon in that year of
grace 19---, when Europe sat upon the anxious seat beneath a menace that hung
over its head for months. Aschenbach had sought the open soon after tea. He was overwrought by a morning of hard,
nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact his uttermost in the way
of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the
May had begun, and after weeks of cold and
wet a mock summer had set in. The
English Gardens, though in tenderest leaf, felt as
sultry as in August and were full of vehicles and pedestrians near the
city. But towards Aumeister
the paths were solitary and still, and Aschenbach
strolled thither, stopping awhile to watch the lively crowds in the restaurant
garden with its fringe of carriages and cabs.
Thence he took his homeward way outside the park and across the sunset
fields. By the time he reached the North
Cemetery, however, he felt tired, and a storm was brewing above Föhring; so he waited at the stopping-place for a train to
carry him back to the city.
He found the neighbourhood quite
empty. Not a wagon in sight, either on
the paved Ungerstrasse, with its gleaming tramlines
stretching off towards Schwabing, nor on the Föhring highway.
Nothing stirred behind the hedge in the stonemason's yard, where
crosses, monuments, and commemorative tablets made a supernumerary and
untenanted graveyard opposite the real one.
The mortuary chapel, a structure in Byzantine style, stood facing it,
silent in the gleam of the ebbing day.
Its façade was adorned with Greek crosses and tinted hieratic designs,
and displayed a symmetrically arranged selection of scriptural texts in gilded
letters, all of them with a bearing upon the future life, such as: 'They are
entering into the House of the Lord' and 'May the Light Everlasting shine upon
them.' Aschenbach
beguiled some minutes of his waiting with reading these formulas and letting
his mind's eye lose itself in their mystical meaning. He was brought back to reality by the sight of
a man standing in the portico, above the two apocalyptic beasts that guarded
the staircase, and something not quite usual in the man's appearance gave his
thoughts a fresh turn.
Whether he had come out of the hall
through the bronze doors or mounted unnoticed from outside, it was impossible
to tell. Aschenbach
casually inclined to the first idea. He
was of medium height, thin, beardless, and strikingly snub-nosed; he belonged
to the red-haired type and possessed its milky, freckled skin. He was obviously not Bavarian; and the broad,
straight-brimmed straw hat he had on even made him look distinctly exotic. True, he had the indigenous rucksack buckled
on his back, wore a belted suit of yellowish woollen stuff, apparently frieze,
and carried a grey mackintosh cape across his left forearm, which was propped
against his waist. In his right hand,
slantwise to the ground, he held an iron-shod stick, and braced himself against
its crook, with his legs crossed. His
chin was up, so that the Adam's apple looked very bald in the lean neck rising
from the loose shirt: and he stood there sharply peering up into space out of
colourless, red-lashed eyes, while two pronounced perpendicular furrows showed
on his forehead in curious contrast to his little turned-up nose. Perhaps his heightened and heightening
position helped out the impression Aschenbach
received. At any rate, standing there as
though at survey, the man had a bold and domineering, even a ruthless, air, and
his lips completed the picture by seeming to curl back, either by reason of
some deformity or else because he grimaced, being blinded by the sun in his
face; they laid bare the long, white, glistening teeth to the gums.
Aschenbach's
gaze, though unawares, had very likely been inquisitive and tactless; for he
became suddenly conscious that the stranger was returning it, and indeed so
directly, with such hostility, such plain intent to force the withdrawal of the
other's eyes, that Aschenbach felt an unpleasant
twinge, and turning his back began to walk along the hedge, hastily resolving
to give the man no further heed. He had
forgotten him the next minute. Yet
whether the pilgrim air the stranger wore kindled his fantasy or whether some
other physical or psychical influence came into play, he could not tell; but he
felt the most surprising consciousness of a widening of inward barriers, a kind
of vaulting unrest, a youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes - a feeling
so lively and so new, or at least so long outgrown and forgot, that he stood
there rooted to the spot, his eyes on the ground and his hands clasped behind
him, exploring these sentiments of his, their bearing and scope.
True, what he felt was no more than a
longing to travel; yet coming upon him with such suddenness and passion as to
resemble a seizure, almost a hallucination.
Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since
morning, imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw.
He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky,
steaming, monstrous, rank - a kind of primeval
wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. Hairy palm-trunks rose near and far out of
lush brakes of fern, out of buttons of crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick
with incredible bloom. There were trees,
misshapen as a dream, that dropped their naked roots
straight through the air into the ground or into water that was stagnant and
shadowy and glassy-green, where mammoth milk-white blossoms floated, and
strange high-shouldered birds with curious bills stood gazing sidewise without
sound or stir. Among the knotted joints
of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger gleamed - and he felt his
heart throb with terror, yet with a longing inexplicable. Then the vision vanished. Aschenbach, shaking
his head, took up his march once more along the hedge of the stonemason's yard.
He had, at least ever since he commanded
means to get about the world at will, regarded travel as a necessary evil, to be
endured now and again willy-nilly for the sake of one's health. Too busy with the tasks imposed upon him by
his own ego and the European soul, too laden with the care and duty to create,
too preoccupied to be an amateur of the gay outer world, he had been content to
know as much of the earth's surface as he could without stirring far outside
his own sphere - had, indeed, never even been tempted to leave Europe. Now more than ever, since his life was on the
wane, since he could no longer brush aside as fanciful his artist fear of not
having done, of not being finished before the works ran down, he had confined
himself to close range, had hardly stepped outside the charming city which he
had made his home and the rude country house he had built in the mountains,
whither he went to spend the rainy summers.
And so the new impulse which thus late and
suddenly swept over him was speedily made to conform to the pattern of
self-discipline he had followed from his youth up. He had meant to bring his work, for which he
lived, to a certain point before leaving for the country,
and the thought of a leisurely ramble across the globe, which should take him
away from his desk for months, was too fantastic and upsetting to be seriously
entertained. Yet the source of the
unexpected contagion was known to him only too well. This yearning for new and distant scenes,
this craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness - they were, he admitted to
himself, an impulse towards flight, flight from the spot which was the daily
theatre of a rigid, cold, and passionate service. That service he loved,
had even almost come to love the enervating daily struggle between a proud,
tenacious, well-tried will and this growing fatigue, which no-one must suspect,
nor the finished product by any faintest sign that his inspiration could ever
flag or misfire. On the other hand, it
seemed the part of common sense not to span the bow too far, not to suppress
summarily a need that so unequivocally asserted itself. He thought of his work, and the place where
yesterday and again today he had been forced to lay it down, since it would not
yield either to patient effort or a swift coup de main. Again and again he had tried to break or
untie the knot - only to retire at last from the attack with a shiver of
repugnance. Yet the difficulty was
actually not a great one; what sapped his strength was distaste for the task,
betrayed by a fastidiousness he could not longer satisfy. In his youth, indeed, the nature and inmost
essence of the literary gift had been, to him, this very scrupulosity; for it
had bridled and tempered his sensibilities, knowing full well that feeling is
prone to be content with easy gains and blithe half-perfection. So now, perhaps, feeling, thus tyrannized,
avenged itself by leaving him, refusing from now on to carry and wing his art,
and taking away with it all the ecstasy he had known in form and
expression. Not that he was doing bad
work. So much, at least, the years had
brought him, that at any moment he might feel tranquilly assured of
mastery. But he got no joy of it - not
though a nation paid it homage. To him
it seemed his work had ceased to be marked by that fiery play of fancy which is
the product of joy, and more, and more potently, than any intrinsic content,
forms in turn the joy of the receiving world.
He dreaded the summer in the country, alone with the maid who prepared
his food and the man who served him; dreaded to see the familiar mountain peaks
and walls that would shut him up again with his heavy discontent. What he needed was a break, an interim
existence, a means of passing time, other air and a new stock of blood, to make
the summer tolerable and productive.
Good, then, he would go on a journey.
Not far - not all the way to the tigers.
A night in a wagon-lit, three or four weeks of lotus-eating at
some of the gay world's playgrounds in the lovely south....
So ran his thoughts, while the clang of
the electric tram drew nearer down the Ungerstrasse;
and as he mounted the platform he decided to devote the evening to a study of
maps and railway guides. Once in, he
bethought him to look back after the man in the straw hat, the companion of
this brief interval which had after all been so fruitful. But he was not in his former place, nor in
the tram itself, nor yet at the next stop; in short, his
whereabouts remained a mystery.
