Chapter 72MabronkMABRONK
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
How much simpler life would be if one were warned before every folly one is on the point of committing! Warned, that is, in such a way that one really did leave it undone. For the very quiet warning in the subconscious is one that nobody ever follows, or better said, that I never followed.
Because so much else speaks more strongly in me — let us say, for once: the wicked appetite for adventure.
So Mabronk had arrived safely! Still without a passport. The pomp of his costume he had of course to put off when he wanted to work; he wrapped himself in old overcoats of the departed Johanna, which he discovered in a corner of the cellar. This made him a good deal less imposing, not to say a little ridiculous, like a lean black mouse in an under-, or rather here an over-coat. His bed I had set up for him near the central heating in the cellar. This place was by a long way more civilised than his clay cave in the Village rouge.
The first days he was radiant, everything pleased him. He was very handy too, and conversed with the gardener (whom he was shortly to replace) and with Frau Podzuweit, the good so-called head gardener's wife, in sign language. As she often brought him chocolate, he called her Madame Chacoulla (the Arabic word for chocolate). Everybody took pleasure in him. Herr and Frau Zappe soon became his particular friends and slipped him all manner of delicacies. He dictated to me an enthusiastic letter to his mother (he always got others to do his writing, although he was one of the most vigorous correspondents I have ever come across). Everything seemed to be developing splendidly.
Inge and Helga sent him their greetings in every letter and looked forward to him. He worked nimbly and willingly in the garden. But after a fortnight he grew impatient that he still knew no German and that I went on speaking French with him. (I had promised him German lessons for the winter, we were only at the beginning of June.) His afternoon sleep, the “khef,” the Arab one, which he would not let anybody take from him (in the garden house, on travelling baskets), grew longer and longer, and he groaned repeatedly in it. His appetite fell off too, and he grew yellower every day.
Inge had been sent by her adoptive parents to a boarding house at Dresden, where I visited her often. They were very refreshing days for me, in which the heart of the growing girl (she was just eighteen1) opened itself to me more and more. In doing so I saw ever more clearly how little this plant suited the soil of Schloss J. And also, of course, what a strangely rigid, closed and yet at bottom infinitely loving nature slumbered in the child of genius. These journeys drew me somewhat away from the Tempio and from any closer watching of Mabronk's inner life.
In the second month he grew very impatient that he still had no news from “home,” and began to rhapsodise about his mother and his wife, whom he had earlier always described to me as his worst tormentors.
I was negotiating with the firm of Gutmann, the concert bureau2, about the lecture tour in East Germany planned for October by Miss Hearn and myself. The firm demanded a payment of 33200 marks in order to be able to book the halls firmly. As Miss Hearn refused, they were willing to be satisfied with half. These 1600 marks I paid, after much hesitation and reflection and most unwillingly, in the first days of July. Now the limited company and its chief, Herr J., were extremely assiduous, promised the very greatest success, and Herr J. proposed to me a great musical summer festival in the park and the exhibition hall. The proposal came very conveniently, since I had Tempio festivals every summer in any case, and Mabronk could besides be shown at it to a larger public for the first time.
He was to sell photographs, postcards and books in his full parade rig. For simpler occasions I had had a livery fitted for him, of which he was far prouder than of his Arab dress.
Signor Francesco Franchetti, my friend from Tozer, had come to Berlin about a fortnight before with his desert pictures3, because he wanted to arrange an exhibition of them here. He was often my guest, and each of his visits was Mabronk's delight, because he could speak Arabic with him. It was the time of the berry harvest; Frau Podzuweit had picked the berries, and Franchetti and I sat stripping them, while at the far end of the park Mabronk brought the whole Sahara back to life for us on his shepherd's flute. It was an idyll as though made for eternity — who would have thought that it would be torn apart so soon.
Magnificent preparations were made for the musical Tempio festival, a buffet set up as well, first for tea and cakes, later for meat salad and fish. Beer barrels were rolled in. Mabronk had always refused any beer offered him; he cared nothing for it, he said, he never drank.
Over the festival, at which about three hundred people had appeared — the musical part had gone brilliantly, a lottery of pictures followed it — the late summer evening slowly sank down, the weather had been glorious. The coloured lanterns in the bushes and arbours glowed up.
“Like a fairy tale,” Franchetti whispered to me, “but what is the matter with Mabronk? He is so excited. Young ladies gave him beer to drink, and now he drinks without stopping.” I now heard him ranting loudly in French.
“I will take him with me as far as the station,” Franchetti whispered, “so that he gets away from here.” And he went and took Mabronk off with him.
But Mabronk did not come back. It grew late and later, all the guests had long since taken their leave.
“Whatever is the matter with Mabronk? I shall go and look for him,” said the gardener. Frau Podzuweit stayed with me, it was two in the morning.
After a while we heard an excited voice making a row outside. It came nearer and nearer.
The gardener had the swaying Mabronk by the arm. Then he suddenly came at me: “I know you now, you want to kill me. You hired the murderers in Birmingham.4 I recognised them again today in the crowd. But I shall defend myself. It will cost you dear!”
And he drew his dagger. The gardener threw himself at him and led him to his bed. Whereupon he sank down at once and fell asleep.
After a while Frau Podzuweit came and signed to me to follow her.
She showed me Mabronk as he slept, the long drawn dagger-knife in his hand. It looked ghastly. Neither of us closed an eye that night.
The next morning Mabronk was dark and sullen. He brooded rigidly in front of him and refused food and drink. To my long and affectionate speech of admonition he answered only: “Je sais ce que je sais.” “I know what I know.”
There was a great deal to clear away after the festival. Tempio and park were as though turned upside down. Signor Franchetti appeared in the afternoon and declared that he would stay the night in the Tempio and would not leave until Mabronk was out of it, for until then my life was not safe. He had been talking so wildly, that I had hired murderers against him, that I should pay dearly for it. I should simply try to get him away by fair means. We both drove at once to the French consulate and set out the position; that after two months I could not possibly pay for the journey back, which I had guaranteed him by contract only after four years had run5.
When we came back, the loaded revolver beside my bed was missing. Franchetti now undertook to persuade Mabronk by fair means to give it up. And at that moment Herr Zappe arrived, white as a corpse; the Bedouin had just been with him, had shown him the revolver and told him that with it he would first shoot me, since I had ordered murderers against him, and then himself — Zappe might scratch him a grave on his own ground.
Zappe now persuaded him to come over to his house, but to hand the revolver over to him. He then fetched all Mabronk's belongings; at Zappe's he began to eat again — I had been trying to poison him, he maintained over there — then he gave up the pistol and barricaded himself in the cellar. There he camped for two days — behaved like a man possessed if he so much as saw me at a distance. At last Zappe went with a letter from me and with Mabronk to the French consulate. In it I had declared that I held the consulate responsible for all possible consequences.
So they paid him travel money there as far as Düsseldorf and gave him a further recommendation to the consulate in that city, which was to forward him on to Paris. Herr Zappe took the ticket for him and put him into the train himself.
The Mabronk affair was concluded, three weeks before the outbreak of the World War6. Freed as though from a nightmare and truly escaped from danger to my life, I breathed again. Psychiatrists thought7 the poor man had been an advanced periodic drinker, in whom the changed way of life had brought on delirium tremens. Something of the same kind had probably overtaken him at Birmingham in its day. The landlord of the hotel at El Kantara had after all given him the best of testimonials. But the dear philistines had one more opportunity to throw up their hands over my innocence.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑she was just eighteen — Exact, and it dates the visits: Ingeborg was born on 14 May 1896, so she turned eighteen a fortnight before Mabronk reached the Tempio. The memoir is careless with dates almost everywhere, and here it is not. The parish record this project holds gives Inge's birth as 14 May 1896 in Fiesole, and eben achtzehn — just eighteen — places these Dresden journeys in the early summer of 1914, running alongside the eight weeks of the Mabronk affair. It also quietly settles the sequence of the last summer before the war: her elder daughter's boarding school in Dresden, the Tempio garden, the concert agency, and a man going mad in the cellar, all in the same six weeks. (The adoption, earlier in this memoir)
- ↑the firm of Gutmann, the concert bureau — Emil Gutmann's concert agency, the best-known in Germany — and by the spring of 1914 in public financial trouble, which is what she is walking into. Emil Gutmann (1877–1938) was the impresario who staged the première of Mahler's Eighth Symphony at Munich in 1910 and invented the name Symphony of a Thousand to sell the tickets. He moved the agency from Munich to Berlin in 1912. The standard account of him records reports of the Berlin bureau's financial difficulties from April 1914 — three months before she handed it sixteen hundred marks — and the firm dissolved at the outbreak of war, as the next chapter describes, taking her money with it. This project has not gone back to the German press of April 1914 to read those reports at first hand, so the sequence is corroboration and not proof. Her Herr J. is the firm's chief, masked to an initial in the way she masks everyone who costs her money; the firm itself she names. (Emil Gutmann)
- ↑had come to Berlin about a fortnight before with his desert pictures — The painter she met at Tozeur is in Berlin in the summer of 1914, trying to get an exhibition of his Tunisian work. It is a dated fact about him that no account of his career known here records. Francesco Franchetti of Livorno had been painting in North Africa since 1909 and dating his orientalist work from 1913 — the winter she met him at Tozeur. This puts him in Berlin at the end of June 1914 with those very canvases, staying often at the Tempio, and the next chapter says how it ended: he found no dealer who would take them up, and left. So the memoir supplies both a German exhibition attempt and its failure, for a painter whose catalogue biographies this project has read and which mention neither. Any Berlin gallery correspondence of June and July 1914 would confirm it. It also explains why he is on the spot for everything that follows: he is a house guest, and the only person in Berlin who can talk to Mabronk. (Livorno)
- ↑You hired the murderers in Birmingham. — The story he told her at El Kantara, coming back at her with herself inside it — and she had recorded it then in the subjunctive, as his and not hers. In chapter 65, in the parenthesis where she first describes him, he had been a year in Birmingham but there, he said, his master had wanted to murder him. She marked it then as testimony she was not vouching for, and hired him anyway. Eight weeks later, drunk for the first time in his life at a garden party of three hundred people, he identifies her as the master and says he recognised the murderers in the crowd. Whatever happened in Birmingham, he had carried it with him for years, across the Mediterranean and into a Berlin cellar. The chapter reports the accusation as fact and never returns to the question of what was behind it. (Where he first told her about Birmingham)
- ↑which I had guaranteed him by contract only after four years had run — So there was a written contract, with a four-year term and a return passage at the end of it — the only terms of employment stated anywhere in the memoir. It changes the shape of the arrangement. He was not taken on as a picturesque experiment for a season: he had signed for four years, and the fare home was to be hers at the end of them, not before. That is why she goes to the consulate rather than simply buying him a ticket, and why the consulate rather than she ends up paying — she is standing on the contract while asking to be let out of it after eight weeks. Nothing else in this project's record shows the document, and no copy has been sought. Where it might be: her estate papers, and the registry of the French consulate general in Berlin for July 1914. (The bargain, as she made it at Biskra)
- ↑three weeks before the outbreak of the World War — So the festival and the collapse fall in the second week of July 1914, and Mabronk was put on the train about the eleventh — while the note from Vienna to Belgrade was still being drafted. It is the closest the memoir comes to dating the last summer. The payment to the concert agency is in the first days of July, the festival follows the proposal that came with it, the two nights and two days of the crisis follow the festival, and the affair is over three weeks before the first of August. All of it happens inside a fortnight that the rest of Europe remembers for something else entirely, and she does not mention the assassination at Sarajevo, which had happened while Franchetti was stripping currants in her garden. (The July Crisis)
- ↑Psychiatrists thought — The diagnosis is reported at second hand, in the subjunctive, and it is the only medical opinion in the chapter — that he was an advanced periodic drinker whose delirium tremens was set off by the change of life. She had written eight weeks earlier that he refused all beer and never drank, so the diagnosis and her own account of him do not sit together, and she does not try to make them. What she does add is a defence of her own judgement — the landlord at El Kantara had given him the best of testimonials — and a defence of him: der Arme, the poor man. Nothing here can settle what happened. What the chapter records for certain is that a man was brought four thousand kilometres to be a doorkeeper in a costume, given a cellar by the boiler, made drunk by the guests at a party where he was on show, and put on a train by a neighbour a fortnight later. Whose he then was, and where he went, this project does not know.