Short Fiction

Foreword

This edition of Thomas Mann’s Short Fiction was produced from various translations. “Bashan and I” was translated by Hermann George Scheffauer and originally published in 1923. “Tristan,” “Tonio Kröger,” and “Death in Venice” were translated by Kenneth Burke and originally published in 1924. “Disorder and Early Sorrow” was translated by Hermann George Scheffauer and originally published in 1926. “Little Herr Friedemann,” “Little Louise,” “Tobias Mindernickel,” “The Wardrobe,” “The Path to the Cemetery,” “The Infant Prodigy,” “At the Prophet’s,” and “How Jappe Fought Do Escobar” were also translated by Hermann George Scheffauer and originally published in 1928. “Mario and the Magician” was translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter and originally published in 1930.

Little Herr Friedemann

It was the fault of the wet-nurse. What was the good of Frau Consul Friedemann’s giving her an earnest talking-to, when her suspicions were first aroused, and bidding her suppress that vice of hers? What was the good of giving her a daily glass of claret in addition to the nourishing beer? It was suddenly evident that this young woman also went so far as to drink the spirits intended for the cooking-stove, and before a substitute for her had arrived, before one could discharge her, the disaster had happened. One day when the mother and her three half-grown daughters returned from a walk, little Johannes, about a month old, lay on the floor, whimpering lightly yet frightfully, just as he had fallen from the swaddling-table, while the wet-nurse stood staring stupidly.

The doctor, who tested the limbs of the contorted and jerking little body with firm, solicitous fingers, made a very, very serious face; the three girls stood sobbing in a corner and Frau Friedemann prayed aloud in the terror of her heart.

Even before the birth of the child the poor woman had been forced to undergo having her husband, the consul for the Netherlands, swept from her side by an illness as sudden as it was violent, and she was still too broken in spirit to be capable of hoping that little Johannes might be preserved to her. But after two days the physician, with an encouraging pressure of the hand, told her that an immediate danger was no longer to be feared; the slight concussion of the brain had, first of all, entirely disappeared, as one might see by the mere look of the eyes, which no longer had the same fixity as at the beginning. Of course, one would have to wait to know how, after all, the thing would develop—and, to be sure, to hope for the best, to hope for the best.

The grey house with the gables in which Johannes Friedemann grew up stood near the northern gates of the old mercantile city, a city of medium size. Through the house door one entered a roomy vestibule, paved with stone tiles, from which a staircase with white-painted banister led to the upper stories. The wallpaper of the living-room in the first story revealed faded landscapes, and stiff-backed furniture stood ranged around the heavy mahogany table with the dark-red cover of plush.

Here he often sat during his childhood, at the window, in front of which beautiful flowers were always growing—sat on a little stool at the feet of his mother and listened to some wonderful story while he regarded the smooth, grey parting of her hair and her kind, gentle face and breathed the slight fragrance that always emanated from her. Or perhaps he would ask to see the picture of his father, a pleasant-looking gentleman with grey side-whiskers. He was in heaven, said his mother, and was awaiting them all there.

Behind the house there was a small garden, in which they spent a good part of the day during the summer, in spite of the sweetish vapours which were almost always being wafted across it from a neighbouring sugar-refinery. An old, gnarled walnut-tree grew there, and often little Johannes sat in its shade on a low wooden stool and cracked nuts, while Frau Friedemann and the three sisters, who were now grown up, sat together in a tent of grey canvas. The eyes of the mother often lifted themselves from her embroidery and wandered across to the child with pathetic tenderness.

He was not a beautiful child, little Johannes; and as he sat there on his stool with his pointed pigeon-breast, his hunched-up back, and his all too long, skinny arms, and cracked nuts with a great zest, he offered a most remarkable spectacle. His hands and feet, however, were small and delicate, and he had large, light-brown eyes, like those of a doe, a soft, well-cut mouth, and fine, light-brown hair. Although his head sat so lamentably between his shoulders, yet he was almost to be called beautiful.

When he was seven years old, he was sent to school, and now the years went by swiftly and uniformly. Day by day, with that comically dignified manner of walking which is often a characteristic of the deformed, he would wander between the gabled houses and the shops to the old schoolhouse with the Gothic vaults; and when he had done his work at home, he would perhaps read in his books, with the lovely, coloured pictures on the covers, or occupy himself in the garden, while the sisters would tend house for the ailing mother. They also went to parties, for the Friedemanns belonged to the first families of the town; but the girls had unfortunately not yet married, for their fortune was not very large and they were rather plain-looking.

Johannes, to be sure, also received an invitation now and then from his companions of the same age, but he had no great pleasure in associating with them. He could not take part in their games, and as they always maintained a shy restraint towards him, comradeship was impossible.

There came the time when in the schoolyard he would often hear them talk of certain experiences; he would listen with wide and attentive eyes as they spoke of their ardour for this or that little girl, and would remain silent. These things, which obviously absorbed the others so completely, belonged to those for which he was not suited, like gymnastics and ball-throwing. Often this made him a bit sad; but, after all, he had always been accustomed to stand by himself and not to partake of the interests of the others.

In spite of this it happened—he was sixteen years old at the time—that he conceived a sudden inclination for a girl of the same age. She was the sister of one of his classmates, a blond, wayward, merry creature, and he had become acquainted with her at her brother’s. He was seized by a strange awkwardness in her presence, and the self-conscious and artificially friendly manner with which she, too, treated him filled him with deep sadness.

One summer afternoon as he was walking alone upon the ramparts that lay beyond the town gates, he heard a whispering behind a bush of jasmine and peered cautiously between the branches. On the bench which stood there sat that identical girl and beside her a tall, red-haired boy whom he knew very well; he had his arm about her waist and was pressing upon her lips a kiss, which she returned, tittering. When Johannes Friedemann had seen this, he turned on his heels and went softly away.

His head sat deeper than ever between his shoulders, his hands trembled, and a sharp, insistent pain mounted from his breast into his throat. But he choked it down and carried himself resolutely erect, as well as he could. “Very well,” he said to himself, “that is the end of that. I’ll never again trouble myself about all this. It brings joy and happiness to others, but to me always only pain and sorrow. I am done with it. It is all over for me. Never again.”

This resolution did him good. He renounced, renounced forever. He went home and took up a book or played the violin, as he had learned to do in spite of his deformed breast.

When he was seventeen, he left school, in order to enter business life, as was the universal custom in that world of his. He obtained a position as an apprentice in the great lumber firm of Schlievogt and Company, down along the river. He was treated with consideration; he, on his part, was friendly and obliging; and so the time passed peacefully and all was in good order. In his twenty-first year his mother died after a long illness.

This was a great sorrow for Johannes Friedemann, a sorrow which he retained for a long time. He enjoyed this sorrow, he abandoned himself to it, just as one abandons oneself to a great happiness; he cultivated it with a thousand childhood memories and exploited it as his first deep experience.

Is not life in itself something good, whether or not it takes that form which one calls “happy”? Johannes Friedemann felt that and he loved life. No one can realize with what circumspection he, who had renounced the greatest happiness which life can offer us, knew how to enjoy the pleasures which lay open to him. A walk in springtime through the park that surrounded the town, the perfume of a flower, the song of a bird—might one not be thankful for such things?

And that a cultivated mind belongs to the capacity for enjoyment—yes, that a cultivated mind is always only the same thing as the capacity for enjoyment—that, too, he understood; and he cultivated himself. He loved music and went to all the concerts given in the town. Gradually he himself began to play the violin passably well, though he looked queer enough while playing, and he rejoiced in every soft and beautiful tone that he succeeded in producing. By constant reading he had also acquired a literary taste, which, no doubt, he shared with no one else in that town. He was well informed as to the latest books both at home and in foreign lands; he knew how to savour the rhythmic charm of a poem, knew how to let the intimate spirit of an exquisitely written short story work on him—oh! one might almost say that he was an epicurean.

He learned to comprehend that all things are worthy of enjoyment and that it is almost foolish to distinguish between happy and unhappy experiences. He accepted willingly all his feelings and moods and cultivated them, the sombre as well as the gay, and no less the wishes unfulfilled—his longings. He loved them for their own sakes and told himself that the best was lost through fulfilment. Is not the sweet, poignant, vague yearning and hoping of quiet evenings in spring more enjoyable than all the fulfilment which summer is able to bring?—Yes, he was an epicurean, was little Herr Friedemann!

Surely the people who greeted him on the streets in that compassionate, friendly manner to which he had become accustomed of old, did not know this. They did not know that this unfortunate cripple who marched through the streets full of droll dignity in his light-coloured overcoat and polished silk hat—he was, strangely enough, a bit vain—tenderly loved the life which flowed gently past him, void of great passion, but filled with a quiet and tender happiness which he knew how to create for himself.

The chief hobby of Herr Friedemann, however, his actual passion, was the theatre. He possessed an uncommonly strong dramatic sensibility, and before powerful stage effects, or at the climax of a tragedy, his whole little body might begin to tremble. He had his special seat in the dress-circle of the municipal theatre, where he was to be seen regularly, and now and then his three sisters accompanied him. Since the death of their mother they kept house for him and themselves in the old home, which they owned in common.

Unluckily they were still not married; but they had long ago reached an age—at which one becomes resigned, for Friederike, the oldest, was seventeen years older than Herr Friedemann. She and her sister Henriette were a trifle too tall and thin, while Pfiffi, the youngest, seemed far too short and stout. The last-named, moreover, had a droll trick of shaking herself at every word and then accumulating moisture in the corners of her mouth.

Little Herr Friedemann did not bother much about the three girls; but they kept faithfully together and were constantly of one mind. Especially when some engagement in their circle of acquaintances was announced, they would unanimously declare that this was really most delightful.

Their brother continued to live with them, even after he had left the timber firm of Schlievogt and Company and had gone into business by himself. He took over some small enterprise, an agency or the like, something that did not demand too much work. He used a few rooms on the ground-floor of the house, so that he only needed to climb the stairs to meals, for now and then he suffered a bit from asthma.

On his thirtieth birthday, a bright, warm June day, he sat in the grey garden-tent after lunch, with a new bolster, which Henriette had worked for him, behind his neck, a good cigar in his mouth, and a good book in his hand. Now and again he would put the book aside and listen to the joyous twittering of the sparrows which sat in the old nut-tree and gaze at the neat gravel-path that led to the house, and at the lawn, with the bright flowerbeds.

Little Herr Friedemann did not wear a beard, and his face had practically not changed at all; only the features had become a bit more pointed. His fine, light-brown hair he wore parted smoothly on the side.

Once as he let the book sink to his knees and blinked his eyes towards the blue, sunny heavens, he said to himself: “It’s now thirty years. Now there will be perhaps another ten or even twenty. God knows. They will come quietly and silently and go by like those that are past, and I shall await them in tranquillity of soul.”

In July of the same year that change in the post of commandant of the district took place which set that entire world agog. The portly, jovial gentleman who had occupied this post for long years had been a great favourite in social circles, and his departure was viewed with regret. God knows to what circumstance it was due that now Herr von Rinnlingen should have come here from the capital.

The exchange, moreover, did not seem to be a bad one, for the new Lieutenant-Colonel, who was married, but childless, rented a very roomy villa in the southern suburbs, and this led people to believe that he was planning receptions and the like. At all events the rumour that he was extraordinarily affluent was substantiated by the fact that he brought four servants, five saddle- and carriage-horses, a landau, and a light trap with him.