Part 3

I will not weary the reader with trifles. Suffice it to say, that after more or less vexatious wanderings, we did at last reach a pile of such stones. But there was witchcraft at work; I could show the antiquarian nothing, because he saw nothing, and I myself, as though dazzled, could not now distinguish in the shapes of the stones anything resembling living creatures. But on the next day, when I went to the place alone, I found a whole menagerie.

The account of this adventure may close with a note regarding the character of these remains of pre-Adamite sculpture. The occultists attribute their origin to men of the Tertiary period, and place them in the same category as the colossal stone image found in the Easter Islands and in the desert of Gobi. Olaus Magnus mentions them also, and has found them in great numbers on the coast of Braviken in East Gothland. Swedenborg attributes to them a symbolical significance, and regards them as artistic products of the silver age.

* * * * *

To judge by what takes place in the narrow circle in which I live, the Powers do not allow me to chose my acquaintances, and still less to despise any one, whoever it may be. Like everyone else, I have sympathies and partialities for certain kinds of people. At present I seek for those seriously disposed, to whom I can impart my thoughts without being exposed to unpleasant and insulting jests. Providence has sent me a friend whom I prize highly on account of the pure atmosphere which surrounds him. Like a spoilt child I begin to despise the other uncultivated and uninspired souls, who occasionally find pleasure in coarseness.

But just as I return, I found my friend has gone away. I cannot meet the others anywhere, and in my isolation I am compelled to humble myself to the utmost by begging for the society of insignificant persons, who, as a rule, have nothing to do with the society in which I move. After a number of experiences in this direction I make my old discovery again, that the difference between man and man is not so great as one supposes. As a matter of fact I have found real gentlemen among the lower classes, and how many saints and heroes may I not have unconsciously classed with those I despised! On the other hand, people lay stress on the proverb, "Evil companionship corrupts good manners"; but which is evil society, and which is the good? It might be supposed, as I have done, that a mission to preach was laid upon me, if I settled down in a strange town, without knowing why, but what is my business here? To preach morality? My conscience answers me "Yes; by thy example." But now no one takes me for an example, and what would be the use if I tried to preach to young men who have not sinned as much as I have?

Besides, the period of the prophets seems to have come to an end. The Powers want to have nothing more to do with priests, but have taken the direct government of souls upon themselves, and one need not go far to find examples of this.

One of our poets has recently been summoned before a court because of a collection of poems, some of which were considered injurious to morality. He has been acquitted by the jury, but can find no rest. In one of his poems he has challenged the Eternal to a wrestle, even though (he said) it should have to be decided in hell. It seems as though the challenge had been accepted, and the young man were compelled, like a broken reed, to sue for mercy. One evening, while he sits in a merry circle of friends, some power, unknown to the exact sciences, snatches the cigar from his mouth so that it falls to the ground. A little surprised, he picks up the cigar again, as though nothing had happened. But the same thing happens three times. Then the sceptic becomes as pale as death, and quits the place in silence, while his friends sit mute with astonishment.

But when he reached home the rash man found a new surprise awaiting him. Without any visible cause, both his hands like those of a masseur began to chafe or rather to knead his whole body, which too much drinking had made unnecessarily obese. This involuntary massage continued without interruption for fourteen days, yet at the end of this time the wrestler feels himself sufficiently strengthened to enter the arena again. He hires an hotel and invites his friends to a Belshazzar's feast, which is to last three days. He means to show the world how Nietzsche's superman can control the evil spirits of wine. They drink through the whole of the first day till night falls, and with it falls the champion. But before he gives up the battle for lost the demons of wine take possession of the soul of this superman and fill him with such uncontrollable madness that he flings his guests out of the doors and windows, and so the feast ends. Whereupon the host is taken to an asylum.

Thus the adventure was related to me, and I am sorry to have repeated it without the tears which one owes to misfortune. But the accused has gained a defender for his case, a young doctor, who offers to assist him in his conflict with the Eternal. Is it rash to connect these two facts? The doctor pleads the blasphemer's cause, and the doctor breaks his leg. Was it a mere chance that frightened his horse so that he shied and upset the carriage? I only ask the question. And how did it happen that the doctor, after he had been confined to his bed for several months, got up with a "sprung thigh sinew," that his formerly clear and firm look had a strange and wild expression, like that of a man who is no longer master of himself?

Is it necessary for me to answer? In case one should say "Yes," I continue the narrative to the end. This doctor, a good fellow, intelligent and honest, came to me one day towards the end of summer, and confided to me that he was plagued with sleeplessness, and that a strange irritation woke him at night, and allowed him no rest till he got up. If he obstinately remained lying in bed he began to have palpitations.

"Well?" he concluded, awaiting my answer with manifest impatience.

"It was just the same with me," I replied.

"And how did you get cured?"

Was it cowardice, or did I obey an inner voice when I answered, "I took sulphonal."

His face assumed an expression of disappointment, but I could do nothing for him.

IV

MIRACLES

After three months of very severe winter weather, the first signs of spring begin to be visible. One's frozen senses begin to thaw, and the seeds sown under the snow begin to germinate. So much has happened, and instead of rejecting undeniable facts as fortuitous coincidences, I observe and collect them, and draw my inferences. At first I laugh at my own superstition, but later on I cease to smile, and do not know what to believe. Miracles happen, and that every day, but they do not happen to order.

One day before noon I cross the market place, which is empty for the moment. As I have long suffered from "agoraphobia," I dread empty spaces, and cross it with scarcely concealed anxiety. Just now, when I am tired by work, and extremely nervous, the aspect of the deserted market place makes a very painful impression on me, so that I experience a desire to make myself invisible in order to escape curious eyes. I lower my head, fasten my eyes on the pavement, and feel as though I had compressed myself within myself, closed my senses, cut off communication with the outer world, and ceased to feel the influence of my surroundings. Almost unconsciously I have crossed over the market place. The next moment in the street two well-known voices call after me. I remain standing.

"Which way did you come?"

"Over the market place."

"No! How could you? We stood waiting here to meet you and to have dinner together."

"I assure you----"

"Oh; then you made yourself invisible?"

"Nothing is impossible."

"For you, at any rate. They tell the most incredible stories about you."

"I suspected something of the kind, as I have been seen near the Danube, when I was in Paris."

This was really the case, but at this time I believed there were visions without any substratum of reality, and I let drop the remark, merely as a happy idea.

The same day I take my evening meal alone, in the smaller dining-room of the inn. A man, whom I do not know, comes in, apparently to look for some one. He does not seem to notice me although he looks at all the tables, and, believing himself alone in the room, he begins to swear and talk aloud with himself. In order to apprise him of the presence of some one I knock with my fork against a glass. The stranger starts and seems surprised to see some one; he becomes suddenly silent, and hastens away.

From that time I begin to ponder the subject of dematerialisation which the occultists believe in. And proofs follow rapidly. A week later, my attention was aroused by another strange occurrence. It was a Wednesday, when the dining-room of the inn is generally full because of the weekly market. In order to avoid the crowd and the discomfort, my usual table companion has ordered a special room, and, as he has come earlier than myself, he waits for me in the hall, and bids me go upstairs. But in order to save time, we agree to engage the tea-table in the dining-room. Unwillingly I march in behind my friend, because I abominate the drunken farmers and their bad language. Meanwhile we come through the crowd to the tea-table, where there was only one very quiet individual. After we had taken something without exchanging a single word, we retired to our private room, I following him. When we reached the door, my friend seemed astonished to see me.

"Hullo! Where did you come from?"

"From the tea-table, of course."

"I never saw you; I thought you had remained up here."

"Never saw me! Why, our hands crossed over the dishes. Can I then make myself invisible?"

"Well, it is funny anyhow."

When I delve in my memory, I bring now forgotten incidents to light, which were hitherto valueless to a sceptic whose mind had been sterilised by the study of the exact sciences. Thus I remember the morning of my first wedding day. It was a winter Sunday, peculiarly quiet and unnaturally solemn for me who was preparing to quit an impure bachelor life and to settle down by the domestic hearth with the woman I loved. I felt I should like to take my breakfast, the last in my bachelor life, quite alone, and with this object I went down to an underground café in a low street. It was a basement-room lit with gas. After ordering breakfast, I noticed that I was being watched by a number of men who were sitting, obviously in a state of intoxication, round their bottles, since the previous evening. They looked spectrally pale, uncouth, shabby; they were hoarse-voiced and disgusting, after a night spent in debauchery. Among the company I recognised two friends of my youth, who had so come down in the world that they had neither house nor home nor occupation, notorious good-for-nothings, not far from committing some crime. It was not pride which made me shrink from renewing the acquaintanceship; it was the fear of a relapse in the mire, the dislike of finding myself placed back in my past,--for I had gone through a similar stage. At last, when the comparatively soberest of them, chosen as an envoy, stood up in order to approach my table, I was seized with terror. Firmly resolved to deny my identity if necessary, I fix my eyes on my assailant, and without my knowing how it happened he remained standing for a moment before my table, and then with a silly expression, which I can never forget, he makes an apology and returns to his place. He had been prepared to swear that it was I, and yet he did not recognise me.

Then they began to discuss my alibi.

"It is he certainly."

"Yes, the Devil take me, it is!" I quit the place filled with shame at myself and pity for the poor fellows, but in the depth of my heart glad at having escaped such a hateful existence.

Escaped!

Apart from the moral aspect of the question the strange fact remains, that one can so alter one's physiognomy as to be irrecognisable by an old acquaintance whom one meets and I salutes all through the year in the street.

* * * * *

In earlier times I used to go hunting alone, without a dog and often without a rifle. I wandered about at haphazard (it was in Denmark), and once as I was standing in a glade a fox jumped up suddenly beside me. He looked me in the face, in full sunlight, at a distance of about twenty steps. I stood motionless, and the fox continued to search the ground hunting for mice. I stooped to pick up a stone. Then it was his turn to make himself invisible, for he vanished in an instant without my seeing how he did so. When I searched the ground, I found there no trace of a fox-hole, and not even a bush behind which he might have hidden. He had vanished without the help of his legs.

Here and there in the marshy meadows on the banks of the Danube herons often build their nests, and they are extremely shy birds.

In spite of that, I could often surprise them without hiding myself. As long as I kept motionless, I could stand and watch them. Sometimes they even flew close over my head. No one would believe me when I related this, least of all sportsmen, and I concluded therefore that the matter was something above the ordinary.

When I told this to my friend the theosophist in Lund, he remembered an occurrence to which he could never find the key. A workman whom he knew visited him, saying that he had found an antique work of art for sale, and asked him for an advance of five crowns. After the man had received the commission to buy it he had disappeared, and could be found nowhere for three whole months. One Sunday evening the theosophist and his wife were going down a back street, when he saw the man a little before him on the same pavement. "Now I have the fellow!" he exclaimed. He let go of his wife's arm, and hastened his steps, when suddenly the other disappeared, as if he had evaporated. As usual in such cases, the theosophist believed he was the victim of a delusion. At the same time there was no one else in the street, so that the possibility of a mistaken identity was excluded.

Such is the bare fact. To explain the inexplicable is a contradiction in terms. There was there no open door nor window nor cellar hole into which the man might have slipped and hidden himself. When it is said that some human beings have the power to divert the visible light-rays from their proper direction, that is to say, to alter the quantity of refraction,--does this heap of words explain the problem, the stress of which lies in the Why and the Wherefore?

The only supposition left is, that it was a miracle! Let it pass for such till we obtain further information, and, while we wait, let us collect data, and not attempt to refute them.

V

MY INCREDULOUS FRIEND'S TROUBLES

I feel greatly embarrassed in narrating my friend's adventure, but I have begged his pardon beforehand, and he knows how unselfish my aims are. Besides, as he has related his troubles to everyone who would listen to them, without having deposed to the facts under a seal of secrecy, I have only to play the rôle of an impartial chronicler, and if I am looked at askance on account of that it is I who pay the penalty.

My friend is an atheist and materialist, but enjoys the life which he despises, and fears death, which he does not know. At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, when he offered me a refuge in his house, he treated me with friendly brotherliness, and tended me like a sick person, that is to say, with the considerate sympathy of an intelligent free-thinker who understands mental disorders, and the indulgent treatment which they require.

But even a freethinker may have his dark hours of depression, the cause of which he knows not. Late one evening, when the room was in twilight, and the lamps, though kindled, did not illuminate the corners where the shadows fell, my friend confided to me, in answer to my expressions of gratitude, that the obligation lay on his side. For he had, he said, a short while ago lost his best friend by death. Since then he was troubled by uneasy dreams, in which there always mixed the image of his departed friend.

"You also?" I exclaimed.

"I also! But you understand that I am only speaking of dreams such as one has at night."

"Yes, certainly."

"Sleeplessness, nightmares, and so forth. You know what it is to be ridden by a nightmare, which is a disorder of the chest caused by disturbed digestion following on excesses. Have you never had it?"

"Yes, indeed. One eats crabs for supper, and then one has it! Have you tried sulphonal for it?"

"Yes. But as to trusting doctors--you know yourself already, perhaps?"

"I should think so! I know them thoroughly. But let us speak of your dead friend. Does he appear to you in a disturbing way,--I mean in dreams?"

"I need hardly tell you it isn't he who appears before me. It is his corpse, and I am sorry to say he died under strange circumstances. Only think! A young talented man who had made a very promising début in literature must die of an obscure disease, tuberculosis miliaris, which caused his body to so decompose that it looked like a heap of millet."

"And now his body appears to you?"

"You don't understand what I mean. Let us drop the subject."

* * * * *

With his health shaken and his moods as varying as April weather, my friend seems to suffer from an acute degree of nervousness. When I part from him in February, he will never go alone to his house after sunset.

Then he has an important pecuniary loss. There is some talk of instituting legal proceedings, and we fear that he may commit suicide, judging by expressions which he has let fall from time to time. Although recently engaged to be married, he regards the future in the most gloomy light. But instead of resisting his troubles, he takes a journey in order to distract his mind, and on his return invites his friends to a dinner to celebrate the occasion. But in the middle of the festival he has an attack of indisposition and is ordered to bed.

As soon as I hear of it, on the second day of his illness, I go to him. A corpse-like odour pervades the house. The patient has grown black in the face, so that he can be scarcely recognised. He lies stretched out on the bed, and is watched by a friend and a nurse, whose hands he does not let go of for a moment. My coming startles him, weakened as he is by his continuous sufferings.

Later on, when he is somewhat better, he tells me that he has had a vision of five devils in the shape of red apes with black eyes, which crept up, sat on the edge of his bed, and moved their tails up and down.

When he has recovered his strength and put his pecuniary affairs in order, he tells his dream to every one who will listen, and they are much amused at it.

From time to time he expresses his astonishment that destiny, which has hitherto favoured him, now begins to persecute him so that nothing will succeed and everything goes wrong. Amid these gloomy reflections, with intervals of cheerfulness, the unhappy man, who seems to have fallen into disfavour with the Powers, receives a fresh and crushing blow. A tradesman, who belonged to his set, has drowned himself, leaving debts, so that my friend who had gone surety for him for a considerable sum is still further embarrassed.

His troubles now recommence in earnest. The body of the dead man appears in his kitchen, and he persuades a young doctor to pass the nights with him in order to drive away the phantoms. But the invisible powers are regardless of everything, and one night my friend wakes up to see the whole room full of mice. Fully convinced of their reality, he takes a stick and strikes at them till they disappear. That was an attack of delirium, but an attack shared by two, for in the morning his friend, who occupied the adjoining room, says that he heard the squeaking of mice from my friend's room. How are we to explain a hallucination which is seen by one and heard by another?

When this adventure is related in sunshine and broad daylight, it is laughed at. Thereupon my friend begins to give a detailed description of the body of the suicide which had appeared to him, and he accompanies it with deliberately cynical remarks, "Cannot you imagine that it was quite black, and that the white maggots----"

As an eye-witness, I can testify that in the same moment that he uttered these words he turned pale, stood up from the table, and with a gesture of disgust pointed to something on his plate. It was a white maggot crawling along a sardine.

The next day my friend is obliged to break off his evening meal because he finds a piece of chicken surrounded by white maggots. He cannot eat although he is ravenously hungry, and becomes alarmed, but only for a moment.

"What does it mean? What does it mean?" he says.

"One should not speak ill of the dead. They revenge themselves."

"The dead? But they are dead!"

"Exactly. And therefore they are more alive than the living."

My friend had, as a matter of fact, accustomed himself to speak openly of the weaknesses of the deceased, who, in spite of all, had been a good friend to him.

Some days later, as we sat at table in the verandah of a garden-restaurant, one of the guests exclaimed, "Look at that rat! What a big fellow!"

No one had seen it, and they laughed at the visionary.

"Wait a minute!" he said, "you will soon see. It is there under the planks!"

A minute passed, and a cat came from under the planks. "I think we have had enough of rats," my friend exclaimed, apparently much disturbed.

After some time has elapsed, one evening I hear a knock at my door after I have gone to bed. I open it, and find myself face to face with my friend, who looks disturbed and excited. He asks to be allowed to stay and rest on a sofa, because there is a woman who screams the whole night in the house where he lives.

"Is it a real woman, or a spectre?"

"Oh, it is a woman with cancer, who only wants to be able to die. It is enough to drive one mad. If I don't end my days in an asylum, it will be strange."

There is only a short sofa, and to see the tall man stretched out on such a thing, and two chairs placed by it, is as though one saw a slave on the rack. Hunted out of his pleasant house, and his comfortable bed, deprived of the simple pleasure of being able to undress himself, he rouses my sympathy and I offer him my bed as a sign of my gratitude. But he refuses. He asks to have the lamp lit, and the light falls straight on the unfortunate man's face. He fears the dark and I promise to sit up and watch. He lies and murmurs to himself till sleep has pity on him. "There is no doubt it is a sick woman, but still it is strange."

For two whole weeks he is obliged to seek rest on other people's sofas. "This is really hell!" he exclaims.

"Just what I think" is my answer.

Another time when the "white woman" has appeared to him in the night he himself suggests the possibility that it may be a punishment. True to my rôle, I confine myself to a sceptical silence. I pass over others of his adventures and come to the story of the Madonna and the telepathic vision he had of some one at the moment he died. It is quite short. On the occasion of an excursion into the country my friend found himself in a little company gathered on the shore of a lake. In an access of cheerfulness and forgetfulness of his painful experiences he made the following suggestion,--

"This, on my faith, is the proper scene for a revelation of the Blessed Virgin! It would be a good speculation to set up a shrine for pilgrimages."

At the same moment he turned pale, and to the great astonishment of his companions he exclaimed almost in an ecstasy,--

"Just now he has died."

"Who?"