The Quest (periodical)/Volume 13/The Four Moon Brethren
The Four Moon Brethren.
Gustav Meyrink.
Who I am is easy to tell. From my twenty-fifth to my sixtieth year I was valet de chambre to his lordship Count du Ghazal. Before that I had been employed as under-gardener, tending the flowers in the monastery of Apanua, where I had also lived the monotonous dull days of my early youth. I was taught reading and writing by the kindness of the Abbot. I was a foundling and had been adopted after my confirmation by the old head gardener of the Abbey; since then I have had the right to call myself Meyrink.
As far as I can think back in memory, I have always had the feeling as though I wore an iron ring round my head, encircling my brain and hindering the development of what is commonly called phantasy. I should say that one of my inner senses is wanting, but in compensation my eyes and ears are as keen as those of a savage.
If I close my eyes, I can see even to-day with almost oppressive lucidity the black sharp outlines of the cypresses silhouetted against the crumbling walls of the old Abbey. I see the worn bricks in the pavement of the cloisters, one by one, so that I could count them. Yet all this remains cold and mute for me; it does not tell me anything, though things are said to speak to others, as I have often read. I state with full candour and quite openly what is amiss with me, for I would lay claim to absolute trustworthiness. I am moved by the hope that what I write down here may meet the eyes of those who know more than I do, and who may enlighten and instruct me, if they can and dare do so, concerning the whole sequence of unsolvable riddles that have followed the course of my life.
If, contrary to all reasonable expectation, this mémoire should come to the knowledge of the twc friends of my late second master—Magister Peter Wirtzigh (deceased and buried at Wernstein on the Inn in the year of the Great War, 1914)—that is to say, to the knowledge of the two honourable gentlemen and doctors Chrysophron Zagreus and Sacrobosco Haselmayer, called also 'the red Tanjur'—these reverend gentlemen may be just enough to remember that it cannot be simply garrulity or curiosity which induces me to publish a matter which the two gentlemen have kept secret for a whole generation. An old man of seventy years like myself should have outgrown all such childish folly. May they rather credit me with pressing motives of a spiritual nature, among them certainly not least the anxious fear of my heart to become after the death of my body an 'engine' (these two gentlemen will certainly understand what I mean by this).
But now to my story.
The first words addressed to me by Count du Chazal, when he engaged me were: "Has ever a woman in any way come into thy life?" As I could say 'No' with a good conscience he seemed visibly satisfied.
These words I feel now burning me as fire; I don't know why. The same question, every syllable of it repeated, was asked me thirty-five years later by my second employer, Magister Peter Wirtzigh, when I entered his service: "Has ever a woman in any way come into thy life?" Even then I could also confidently answer in the negative; I could do so even to this day. But for an anxious moment in giving the answer I fancied myself a lifeless engine, not a human being.
Whenever I worry now over the matter, a dire suspicion creeps into my brain. I cannot say in so many words what I am thinking on these occasions, but are there not plants too that never develop properly, that shrivel up and remain of a waxen yellow colour, simply because the poisonous shumach-tree grows near and secretly sucks at their roots?
The first months I felt very uncomfortable in the solitary castle occupied only by Count du Ghazal, his old housekeeper, Petronella, and myself, and literally choked-up with weird old-fashioned instruments, clocks and telescopes; especially as his lordship himself had so many odd habits.
For instance, although I was allowed to help him when dressing, he never permitted me to do so when he took off his clothes. If I offered to help him he always pretended he wished still to read for some time longer. But in reality—at least this is what I am driven to conclude—he roamed about in the dark; for often in the morning his boots were thickly covered with mud and mire, even when he had not set a foot out of doors the day before.
His appearance too did not make me feel at home. Small and slender, his body did not well suit his head. In spite of being well-built the Count made the impression upon me for a long time of being hunchbacked, though I could not exactly account to myself for the reason of this impression. His profile was sharply out and, owing to his thin protruding chin and pointed gray beard curving forward, formed an oddly sickle-like outline. He must have possessed also remarkable vitality, for he did not seem to grow older in any perceptible measure through all the long years I served him; at most the peculiar sickle moon-like shape of his features seemed to grow sharper and thinner in the course of time.
In the village curious gossiping went round about him. The peasants said he did not get wet in the rain, and so on, and that whenever he passed their cottages in the long sleeping hours of the night, all the clocks would stop.
I never troubled about such idle talk. I also believe it is not a very wonderful thing, if similarly at times all the metal objects in the castle—knives, scissors, and the like—became magnetic for some days, so as to attract steel pens, nails and similar objects. At least so his lordship readily explained these matters to me, when once I ventured to ask him about them. The place, said he, was built on volcanic soil; besides such incidents were connected with the full moon. Altogether the Count had an extraordinarily high opinion of the moon; so I conclude from the following occurrences.
I must preface by saying that every summer, exactly on the 21st of July, but always only for twenty-four hours, we received the visit of an uncommonly strange guest—the same Dr. Haselmayer of whom I shall have to say much more later on.
When his lordship spoke of him, he always called him 'the red Tanjur.' Why, I have never been able to understand, for the honourable doctor was not only not red-haired at all, but had not a single hair on his head, and no eye-brows or eye-lashes either. Even at that time he made the impression upon me of being an old man—maybe because of the odd, extremely old-fashioned costume he used to wear all the year round: a lustreless moss-green cloth tall hat, narrowing almost to a point towards the top, a Dutch velvet waistcoat, buckle-shoes and black silk knee-breeches on his disquietingly short thin shanks. Perhaps this was why he looked so, so . . . 'defunct,' for otherwise his high, soft childish voice and wonderfully finely drawn girlish lips contradicted the idea of old age. On the other hand there probably never were such extinct eyes as his seemed to be in the whole world.
While not wishing to fail in due respect, I must add that he was hydrocephalous. Moreover his head seemed frightfully soft—as soft as a peeled boiled egg—and that not only as to his quite round pale face but also as to his skull. At least, whenever he put his hat on, there instantly rose up all round it under the brim a kind of anæmic swelling, and when he took it off a considerable time always elapsed before his head happily regained its former shape.
From the first minute of Dr. Haselmayer's arrival until his departure, he and his lordship the Count used to talk of the moon without break or interruption even for eating or drinking or sleeping, and that with a puzzling earnestness which I failed to understand. Their hobby went so far that, whenever the time of the full-moon fell on the 21st of July, they invariably went out at nightfall to the small, marshy lake of the castle, and would stare for hours at the reflection of the silvery disk in the dark water.
Once, while passing by them, as I occasionally did, I even noticed that both gentlemen threw pale fragments—probably crumbs of white bread—into the little lake. As Dr. Haselmayer observed I had seen them do it, he said quickly: "We are only feeding the moon—pardon, I meant the swan." But there was no swan either near or far in the neighbourhood; nor were there any fish.
What I was forced to overhear that night seemed to be mysteriously connected with the incident. Therefore I took great pains to impress every word on my memory and wrote it all down immediately afterwards.
On another occasion I was lying awake in my bedroom when I heard in the adjoining library, which was never entered at other times, his lordship's voice making the following elaborate speech:
"After what we have just observed in the water, my dear and highly esteemed Doctor, I should be very much mistaken indeed if all should not be perfectly in order for our cause. Evidently the old Rosicrucian sentence 'post centum viginti annos patebo' (that is 'in a hundred and twenty years I shall be revealed') is to be explained entirely according to our expectations. Indeed this is what I should call a joyful secular recurrence of the great solstitium. We can confidently state that already in the last quarter of the past 19th century mechanics have been quickly and surely gaining an ever increasing ascendancy over mankind. But if things continue at this pace, as we have every right to expect, in the 20th century men will scarcely have time left to catch a glimpse of daylight because of all the trouble of cleaning, polishing, keeping in repair and eventually renewing the many and manifold and always multiplying machines.
"Even to-day we might rightly say that machinery has become a worthy twin of the late golden calf. For a man who tortures his child to death, gets no more than a fortnight's prison, while he who damages an old street roller, may be locked up for three years."
"True; but the production of such mechanical devices is assuredly a good deal more expensive," grimly objected the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer.
"Generally it is, most certainly," politely admitted Monseigneur du Chazal. "But that is surely not the sole reason. In my opinion the essential matter seems to be that man too—taking things as they are—is nothing but a half-finished thing, destined itself one day to become a clock-work. You can see that from the visible fact that already certain by no means unessential instincts of his—e. g. the choosing of a right mate in order to improve the race—have degenerated into automatism. Small wonder then if he sees in machinery his true descendant and heir, and a changeling in his bodily offspring. Imagine how readily and gladly people would rush into matrimony, if only women would give birth to motor-cycles or machine-guns instead of children. Indeed in the Golden Age, when men were less developed, they believed only what they could 'think'; then came gradually the period when they believed only what they could devour. But now they are climbing to the summit of perfection: that means, they admit the reality only of what they can—sell!
"In doing this they expect as a matter of course—for it is written in the fourth commandment 'thou shalt honour thy father and mother'—that the machines they procreate and anoint with the finest oils while they themselves remain content with margarine, will repay them a thousandfold for the pains of production and shower the blessings of every kind of happiness upon them. They only forget completely that machines too may prove ungrateful children.
"In their crass credulity they let themselves be lulled to sleep by the illusion that machines are but lifeless things, unable to react against their creators, things that can be thrown away when one has got sick of them. Lord, what idiots! Have you ever observed a big gun, most reverend Sir? Would you ever think even that an inanimate thing? I tell you, not even a General is so lovingly cared for. A General may catch a cold, and nobody will worry about it. But big guns are wrapped up in stout coverings that they may not get rheumatic—or rusty, which is the same thing—and they are provided with hats, that it may not rain down their muzzles.
"Of course you could object that a cannon will not roar if it is not stuffed with powder and before the signal to fire is given. But does an operatic tenor begin to roar before his cue is given? And does he go off if he has not been filled before sufficiently with musical notes? I tell you, in the whole world's expanse there is not a single really dead thing."
"But our own sweet home the moon," suavely piped Dr. Haselmayer—"isn't she an extinct astral body; isn't she dead?"
"She is not dead," Monseigneur informed him. "She is but the face of death. She is but—how shall I call it?—the collecting-lens which, like a magic lantern, concentrates the life-giving rays of that damned insolent sun for an inverted work, projecting by her witchcraft all kinds of magic imagery out of the brains of the living into the seeming reality, thereby causing the venomous fluid of death and decay to breathe and germinate in manifold shape and effect. How extraordinarily curious—don't you think so too?—that nevertheless men actually prefer the moon to all other stars? Even their poets, who are superstitiously credited with seers' powers, sing their songs to her with ecstatic sighs and upturned eyes. And not one of them feels his lips grow pale for horror at the thought that for millions and millions of years, month after month, this bloodless cosmic corpse turns round our earth. The very dogs have more sense—especially the black ones! They at least put their tails between their legs and howl when they see the moon!"
"Did you not write me quite recently, Monseigneur and Master, that machines were the direct creatures of the moon?" asked Dr. Haselmayer. "How then am I to understand that?"
"You have misunderstood me," interrupted the Count. "The moon has only impregnated the brains of, men with ideas through her venomous breath, and machines are the visible births engendered in this way.
"The sun has implanted into mortal souls the wish to grow richer in delights and finally the curse on man, to produce in the sweat of his brow transitory works and to break them up again. But the moon, the secret source of earthly shapes, has overcast all for them with a deluding glamour, so that they have run astray into a wrong imagination and projected into outward reality—into the tangible world—what they ought to have contemplated inwardly.
"As a consequence machines have become visible titan-bodies, born out of the brains of degenerate heroes.
"And even as 'to conceive' and 'to create' something is nothing else but to cause one's soul to assume the shape of what one 'seeth' or 'createth' and to unite one's self with it, even so are men henceforth driven helplessly on the way to transforming themselves magically into machines, until at last they will stand here naked as a never slowing-down, ceaselessly pounding, heaving and groaning piece of clock-work—as that which they always wanted to invent—a joyless perpetuum mobile.
"We, however, we Brethren of the Moon, shall then be the heirs of 'Eternal Being'—of the one unchangeable consciousness that saith, not 'I live,' but 'I am,' that knoweth 'Even when the all breaketh—I remain.'
"How else could it be—if shapes were not simply dreams—that we can at will change at any time one body for another, that we should be able to appear among men in a human form, among spectres as a shade and among thoughts as an idea,—all this through the power of the secret of how to divest ourselves of our shape as if it were a toy picked up in a dream? Even as a man who is half asleep, may suddenly become conscious of his dreaming, thereby putting the illusive conception of time into a new present. And thus he gives another more desirable direction to the off-flow of his dream, as if jumping with both feet at once into a new body, seeing that the body is in reality nothing but a contraction of the all-pervading ether laden with the illusion of tangible solidity."
"Magnifice dictum" enthusiastically exclaimed Dr. Haselmayer with his sweet girlish voice. "But why really should not we let the mortals participate in this bliss of transfiguration? Would that be so very bad?"
"Bad!" his lordship broke in at the top of his voice. "Incalculable, terrible! Imagine: man endowed with the power to tap out 'Kultur' through the whole cosmos!
"What do you think, most reverend Sir, the moon would be like in a fortnight? Velodromes in every crater-circle and round them fields irrigated with sewage-water! Provided they had not first of all dragged in dramatic 'art,' and thereby once for all soured the ground against any possibility of future vegetation!
"Or do you perhaps long to see the planets connected by telephone during exchange business hours? Or do you fancy the double stars in the Milky Way being obliged to produce legal marriage-certificates?
"No, no, my dear Sir, for a while the universe will still have to put up with the old jog-trot way.
"But let us turn to a more agreeable subject, my dear Doctor. By the by, it's high time for you to wane, I should have said to depart. Well, till we meet again at Magister Wirtzigh's in August, 1914! That's the date of the beginning of the great finish, and we shall certainly not fail to celebrate this catastrophe for mankind in a worthy manner, shall we?"
Already before the last words of Monseigneur were uttered, I had hurried into my livery so as to help the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer with his packing and escort him to his carriage. A moment later I stood in the hall.
But what a sight awaited me there!—his lordship coming out of the library alone, in his arms the Dutch waistcoat, buckle-shoes, silk breeches and tall hat of the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer. The latter had vanished without leaving the slightest trace! Monseigneur entered his bedroom without deigning so much as to look at me, and quietly shut the door behind him.
As a well-trained servant I considered it my duty to be surprised at nothing my master chose to do. Yet I could not help shaking my head, and it took me a considerable time before I could drop off to sleep again. **** I must now skip many, many years. They passed monotonously and are recorded in my memory like so many dusty and turned leaves, yellow and fragmentary, from an old book with motley and exaggerated events in it, which I seem to have sometime read but scarcely understood in a dull feverish state of mind with half-exhausted memory.
One thing only I know quite clearly. In the spring of 1914 his lordship suddenly said to me: "I shall have to start soon on a journey—to . . . Mauritius"—looking at me with lurking suspicion—"and I wish you to enter the service of my friend, a certain Magister Wirtzigh, at Weinstein on the Inn. Have you understood, Gustav? Besides I shall not stand any objections."
I bowed without a word.
One fine morning without any previous preparations Monseigneur left the castle. At least I had to infer this from the fact that I saw him no more, and that in his stead a strange gentleman lay in the four-poster in which the Count used to sleep.
This gentleman was, as I learned later on in Weinstein, the Rev. Magister Peter Wirtzigh.
On arriving at the Rev. Magister's place, from which you could look straight down on to the foaming stream of the Inn, I immediately busied myself with unpacking the boxes and trunks we had brought with us, and stowing away the contents into chests and drawers. Among them was an extraordinarily ancient lamp in the shape of a transparent Japanese idol squatting cross-legged. The head consisted of a milky glass ball, and inside the lamp was a snake worked by clockwork and holding up the wick in its jaws. I was just about to open a high Gothic press to put it away when to my great horror I saw hanging in the press the dangling corpse of the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer. In my terror I almost let the lamp fall to the ground; but fortunately in the nick of time I realized that it was only the clothes and tall hat of the Rev. Doctor which had tricked me into fancying I was seeing his dead body.
Nevertheless the incident made a deep impression and left me with a foreboding of the approach of some threatening fatality which I could not get rid of, though the following months had nothing exciting about them.
The Rev. Magister Wirtzigh was, it is true, invariably kind and friendly to me. Yet he resembled Dr. Haselmayer in so many respects that I could not help remembering the incident of the press. His face was round like that of the Rev. Doctor's, only very dark, nearly like a negro's, for he had suffered for many years the incurable result of a wearisome bilious disease, black jaundice. If you stood a few paces from him and if the room was not very well lighted, you could often hardly distinguish his features, and the short, scarcely a finger wide, silvery white beard that grew under his chin up to his ears, showed up then against his dark face like a dully-shimmering uncanny iridescence.
The oppressive anxiety which held me spell-bound, vanished only when in August the news of the outbreak of a terrible world-war fell on all like a thunderbolt.
I remembered immediately what years ago I had heard my master Count du Ghazal say about an impending catastrophe for mankind; and perhaps this was the reason why I could not get myself to join whole-heartedly in the cursing of the hostile powers by the villagers. Indeed it seemed to me that behind all these events there stood as their real cause the dark influence of certain hateful powers of nature playing with mankind as it were with a marionette.
Magister Wirtzigh remained absolutely unmoved, just like a man who had long foreseen what was to come.
Not till the 4th of September did a slight restlessness come over him. He opened a door, which had till then been closed to me, and led me into a blue vaulted chamber with only one round window in the ceiling. Exactly underneath, so that the light fell directly upon it, stood a round table of black quartz with a bowl-like cavity in the middle. Round it stood carved and gilded chairs.
"This basin here," said the Rev. Magister, "you are to fill this evening before the moon rises with clear cold water from the well. I am expecting visitors from . . . Mauritius. When you hear me call, take the Japanese snake-lamp—I hope the wick will not do more than glimmer," he added half to himself—"and stand over there with it in that niche like holding a torch."
Night had long fallen; the clock struck 11, then 12, and I was still waiting and waiting to be called.
Nobody could have entered the house. I knew for certain I should have noticed it; for the door was shut and it always creaked loudly when being opened. But there had been no sound up to now.
Dead silence lay all round me, so that little by little the buzzing of the blood in my ears had become a thundering surf.
At last I heard the voice of the Rev. Magister calling my name—faintly as if from far off. It was as if the voice came out of my own heart.
The glimmering lamp in hand, nearly dazed by an inexplicable drowsiness which I had never before experienced, I groped my way through the dark rooms into the vaulted chamber and placed myself in the niche.
In the lamp the clockwork was faintly ticking, and I saw through the reddish belly of the idol the wick glowing between the snake's jaws as it slowly moved round and seemed to rise almost imperceptibly in spirals.
The full moon must have been standing vertically above the aperture in the vaulted roof, for in the water filling the basin of the stone table there swam her reflection as a motionless disk of yellowish greenshining silver.
For long I thought the gilded chairs were empty. But by and by I began to distinguish in three of them the figures of men sitting; and when they hesitatingly moved their faces I recognized in the north the Rev. Magister Wirtzigh, in the east an unknown person called Dr. Chrysophron Zagreus, as I gathered from their subsequent conversation, and in the south, with a wreath of poppies on his bald pate, Dr. Sacrobosco Haselmeyer.
Only the chair in the west was empty.
By and by my hearing also must have been awakened, for words were coming to me, partly in Latin, which I did not understand, partly, however, in the German language.
I saw the stranger bend forward and kiss the Rev. Dr. Haselmeyer's forehead, and I heard him say: 'Beloved Bride!' A long sentence followed, but too low for it to reach my consciousness.
Then, suddenly, the Rev. Magister Wirtzigh was in the middle of the following apocalyptic utterance:
"And before the throne was a sea of glass like unto crystal, and in the midst of the throne and round the throne four beasts, full of eyes before and behind. . . . And there came forth another horse, which was yellow, and he who sat upon the horse was called Death, and Hell followed at his heels. Unto whom power was given to take away peace from the earth, so that they should strangle each other; and unto him was given a great sword."
"Given a great sword," echoed the Rev. Dr. Zagreus, when his eye chanced to fall upon me. Thereupon he paused and asked the others in a whisper whether I could be trusted.
"He has long since become a lifeless piece of clock-work in my hands," the Rev. Magister assured him. "Our ritual prescribes that one who has died to this earth, should hold the torch, when we meet in council. He is like a corpse, carries his soul in his hand and believes it is a smouldering lamp."
Fierce scorn sounded in his words, and a sudden terror paralyzed my blood when I realized that in truth I could not move a limb and had become as rigid as a corpse.
Again the Rev. Dr. Zagreus began to speak: "Nay, the 'Song of Songs' of Hate is aroar through the world. I have seen with my own eyes him who sits upon the yellow horse and behind him in its thousands the army of machines, our friends and allies. Long have they had power of their own, but ever men remain still blind and think themselves masters and lords over them.
"Driverless locomotives, loaded with chunks of rock, rage on in mad fury, precipitate themselves upon them and bury hundreds and thousands beneath the weight of their iron bodies.
"The nitrogen of the air coagulates into terrible explosives. Nature herself hurries in breathless haste to offer her most valuable treasures to exterminate, neck and crop, the white monster who has furrowed her face with scars for millions of years.
"Steel creepers, with sharp horrid thorns, grow out of the ground, catch legs and tear bodies. In silent glee semaphores wag to one another and again hundreds of thousands of the hateful brood are destroyed. Hidden behind trees and hills giant howitzers lie in ambush, necks outstretched to the sky, with chunks of ore between their teeth, till treacherous wind-mills tap out to them insidious signals to spit forth death and destruction.
"Electric vipers hiss beneath the ground. Lo! a tiny greenish spark, and an earthquake uproars and instantly changes the landscape into a fiery general grave.
"With the shining eyes of beasts of prey searchlights peer through the darkness. More, more, still more! Where are they? See, there they come stumbling along in their grey shrouds—endless rows of them—with bleeding feet and dead eyes, staggering from exhaustion, half asleep, lungs panting, knees giving way under them. But quickly drums begin to roll with their rhythmic fanatical fakir's tattoo and whip the furies of a Berserker rage into intoxicated brains. Then howling, irresistible, amok-running madness explodes, until the lead-storm has nothing to hurt but corpses.
"From West and from East, from America and from Asia, they stream on to the war-dance, the brown monsters, their round mouths filled with murder-lust.
"Steel sharks lurk round the coasts, stifling in their bellies those who have given them life.
"But even the home-stayers, the seemingly lukewarm ones who have been so long neither hot nor cold—those who have previously procreated only tools of peace—are awakened and contribute their share to the great massacre. Restlessly they spew their glowing breath up to the skies day and night, and out of their bodies flow swords and cartridges, bayonets and projectiles. Not a single one of them wants to lie down and sleep.
"Ever new giant vultures hurry to get fledged, to circle above the last hiding-places of men; and thousands of restless iron spiders run to and fro, to weave shimmering silver-white wings for them."
For a moment the flow of words ceased and I saw that Count du Ghazal was suddenly present. He stood behind the chair in the west, leaning with his arms crossed over its back; his face was pale and haggard. Then Dr. Zagreus with an impressive gesture continued:
"And is it not a ghostly resurrection? What had long ago decayed into rock-oil and lain quiet in mountain-caves, the blood and fat of antediluvian dragons, begins to stir and would become alive again. Boiled and distilled in pot-bellied cauldrons it flows as petrol into the heart-valves of new phantastic air-monsters and makes them pulsate. Petrol and dragon's blood!—who can any longer see a difference between them? It is like a demon-prelude to the Last Day."
"Do not speak of the Last Day," hastily interposed the Count.—I felt an undefined fear vibrate in his voice.—"It sounds like an omen."
The gentlemen rose in astonishment: "An omen?"
"We intended to meet to-day as for a . . . feast," began his lordship, after for some time endeavouring to find the right word. "But my feet have been delayed to the present hour in . . . Mauritius."—I understood vaguely that the word must have a hidden meaning and that the Count could not mean a land.—"I have long been in doubt whether what I perceived in the reflection breathed up from the earth to the moon is true. I fear, yes I fear—and my flesh grows cold with horror when I think of it—that in a short time something untoward may happen and snatch from us the longed-for victory. What is the good of my guessing? There may be a secret reason in the present war, that the World-spirit wants to keep the people asunder, so that they may stand separate as the limbs of a future body? What does it help me if I do not know the last intention? The influences you cannot see are always the most powerful. For I tell you: Something invisible is growing and growing, and I cannot find its root.
"I have interpreted the celestial signs which do not deceive. Yes, even the demons of the deep are preparing to fight; and soon the skin of the earth will twitch like that of a horse tormented with flies. Already the princes of darkness, whose names are inscribed in the Book of Hate, have hurled again a stone—a comet—from the abyss of cosmic space, and this time against the earth, as they have often cast such a throw before against the sun, though it has missed its aim and flown back, as the boomerang returns to the hand of the Australian hunter when it has failed to hit the victim.
"But to what purpose, I ask myself, is this great display of power, when the final doom of mankind through the army of machines seems sealed and decided?
"And then the scales fall from my eyes; but I am still blind and can only grope my way.
"Do you not too feel how the imponderable, which death cannot catch, surges to a stream compared with which the oceans are as a pail of swill?
"What is the enigmatic power that sweeps away overnight everything small and makes a beggar's heart as wide as an apostle's? I have seen a poor schoolmistress adopt an orphan without any ado—and then fear seized me.
"Where is the power of machinery if mothers rejoice instead of tearing their hair when their sons fall? And may it not be a prophetic hieroglyph which nobody can decipher at present, when in the shops may be seen a picture of a crucifix in the Vosges from which the wood has been shot away while the Son of Man . . . remains standing?
"We hear the wings of the Angel of Death humming over the lands. But are you sure it is not the wings of another and not those of Death we hear? Of one of those who can say 'I' to every stone, to every flower and to every animal within and without space and time?
"Nothing can be lost, they say. Whose hand then gathers all that enthusiasm which is liberated everywhere like a new power of nature? And what birth is to come forth from it, and who will be the heir?
"Shall there again come forward one whose steps no one may hinder—as it has always happened from time to time in the millennial course? The thought does not leave me."
"Let him come! But if he comes again this time too in clothes of flesh and blood," said the Rev. Magister Wirtzigh scornfully, "they will quickly nail him down—with jests. No one has yet triumphed over grinning laughter!"
"But he may come without shape," murmured Dr. Chrysophron Zagreus to himself, "even as a short time ago spooks came overnight upon the animals, so that horses suddenly could calculate and dogs could read and write. What if he should break forth out of men themselves like unto a flame?"
"Then must we cheat light through light in man," cried Monseigneur du Ghazal. "We must dwell henceforth in their brains as a new false glow of an illusory, sober intelligence until they mistake the moon for the sun. We must teach them to distrust everything that is light." ***** What more his lordship said I cannot remember. I found that suddenly I could move again, and the glass-like, crystallized state that had held me hitherto spell-bound slowly began to leave me. A voice within me seemed to whisper that I ought to be afraid; but I could not manage to feel anything.
Nevertheless, as if to protect myself, I stretched out my arm with the lamp in front of me.
It may be that a draught of air caught the light or that the snake had reached the hollow in the head of the idol so that the glimmering wick could now flare out as a flame. I know not. I only remember that suddenly a dazzling light burst upon my senses. Again I heard my name being called, and then something heavy fell to the ground with a dull thud.
It must have been my own body; for when I opened my eyes for a moment before losing consciousness, I saw myself lying on the ground with the full-moon shining overhead. But the room seemed empty and table and gentlemen had disappeared. **** For many weeks I lay in a deep stupor. When at length I had slowly recovered consciousness I learned—from whom, I have forgotten—that the Rev. Magister Wirtzigh had meanwhile died and appointed me heir to all his property.
But as I have probably to lie in bed for a considerable time still, I have full leisure to think over what has happened and to write down everything.
Only at times during the night a strange feeling overcomes me, as if there was an empty abyss in my breast, infinite to east, south, west and north, and high in the centre the moon floating, waxing to a brilliant disk, then waning, then becoming black, and then again recurring as a thin sickle. And every time her phases are the faces of the four gentlemen, as they sat last round the round stone table.
When morning dawns, the old housekeeper Petronella will often come to my bedside and say: "Well, how are you, Reverend Sir, . . . Reverend Magister Wirtzigh?" For she wants to persuade me that there never was a Count du Ghazal, since that family became extinct in 1430, as the pastor knows for certain. I am said to have been a somnambule who had fallen from the roof in an attack of lunacy and had for years imagined himself to be his own valet. Of course neither Dr. Zagreus nor Dr. Sacrobosco Haselmeyer will she admit to exist.
"The red Tanjur," she always concludes threateningly, "well, that does exist. It lies over there by the stove and is a Chinese magic charm, as far as I can learn. But one sees what comes of a Christian body's reading such stuff."
I remain silent and never contradict her, for I know what I know. But when the old lady has left the room, I get up surreptitiously to make sure. I open the Gothic press and convince myself of the reality of everything.
Yes, of course, there stands the snake-lamp and below it there they hang—the green tall hat, the waistcoat and the silk breeches of the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer.
Starnberg, 1917.
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Gustav Meyrink. |
(Authorized Translation by R. E. and G. R. S. M.)