Part 7

I cannot suppress a smile when I see how the nightmare with which I have been oppressed now takes possession of my gaoler. But my malicious joy is promptly punished. I have a terrible nervous attack. My heart seems to stop beating, and I hear two words, which I have noted in my diary. An unknown voice calls out, "Luthardt: Druggist." Druggist! Are they slowly poisoning me with alkaloids such as hyoscyamin, hashish, digitalis, and stramonin, which cause delirium?

I don't know, but from that time my suspicion is doubled. They do not dare to murder me, but they are trying to drive me mad by artificial means, in order to make me disappear in an asylum. Appearances are stronger and stronger against the doctor. I find out that he has discovered my process of making gold, and that perhaps he knew it before I did. Everything which he says contradicts itself the next moment, and when confronted by a liar my imagination takes the bit between its teeth and rushes beyond all reasonable bounds.

On the morning of the 8th of August I go for a walk before the town. On the high road a telegraph post is humming: I step up to it, lay my ear on it, and listen as if bewitched. At the foot of the post there lies by chance a horse-shoe. I pick it up and carry it away as an omen of good luck.

_August_ 10_th_.--The behaviour of the doctor during the last few days has disquieted me more than ever. By his strange aspect I see that he has struggled with himself; his face is pale; his eyes seem dead. During the whole day he sings or whistles; a letter which he has received has excited him much.

In the afternoon he comes home with bloody hands from an operation, and brings a two months' old fœtus with him. He looks like a butcher, and talks in a hateful way: "Let them kill the weak, and protect the strong! Down with pity, for it degrades men." I hear him with alarm, and secretly watch him, after we have wished each other good-night on the threshold which divides our rooms. First of all, he goes in the garden, but I cannot hear what he does. Then he steps into the verandah adjoining my sleeping-room and stops there. He busies himself with some fairly heavy object, and winds up a piece of clock-work which, however, belongs to no clock. Half-undressed, I await, standing motionless, the result of these mysterious preparations.

Then once more the well-known electric fluid streams through the wall on my bed, seeks my breast, and under it, my heart. The tension increases: I seize my clothes, slip through the window, and do not dress till I am outside the house. There I am again in the street, on the pavement, my last refuge and only friend behind me! I wander onward without a definite aim; but when I come to myself I go direct to the chief physician of the town. I have to ring and wait, and prepare what to say so as not to injure my friend.

At last the doctor appears. I excuse myself for paying such an untimely visit on the plea of sleeplessness, palpitations, and want of confidence in my own doctor, who, I said, treated me as a hypochondriac and would not listen to me. The doctor invites me inside, as though he had been expecting me, asks me to take a seat, and offers me a cigar and a glass of wine. I breathe freely at finding myself once more treated as a respectable man, and not a wretched idiot. We chat for two hours, and the doctor turns out to be a theosophist to whom I can tell everything, without compromising myself. At last about midnight I rise in order to find an hotel; the doctor, however, advises me to return home.

"Never! he is capable of murdering me!"

"But if I accompany you?"

"Then, indeed, we should meet the enemy's fire together. But he would never forgive me!"

"All the same, let us venture."

So I return to the house. The door is shut, and I knock. When my friend enters after a minute, it is I who am seized with compassion, he, the surgeon, who is accustomed to witness suffering without emotion, he, the advocate of deliberate murder, is an object of pity indeed. He is pale as death, trembles, stammers, and at the sight of the doctor standing behind me seems on the point of collapse, so that I feel more panic-struck than ever. Is it conceivable that this man intended a murder and now feared detection? No, it is not; I reject the thought; it is wicked. After insignificant and on my part really ridiculous remarks, we go to our bedrooms.

* * * * *

There occur in life such terrible incidents that the mind refuses to retain the memory of them for a moment, but the impression remains and becomes irresistibly alive again. Thus there comes to my mind something which took place in the doctor's waiting-room during my night visit. He went to fetch wine; left alone I contemplated a cupboard with carved panels of walnut or alderwood, I forget which. As usual, the veins in the wood formed figures in my imagination. Among them I saw in lively presentment a head with a goat's beard, and immediately turned my back upon it. It was Pan in person, as depicted by the ancients and as metamorphosed later into the Devil of the Middle Ages. I content myself by noting the fact; the owner of the cupboard, the doctor, would be doing occult sciences a great service if he would allow the panel to be photographed. In the _Initiation_ for November, 1896, Dr. Marc Haven has treated of this phenomenon, which is common in all the kingdoms of nature, and I recommend the reader to regard attentively the face on the shell of the tortoise.

* * * * *

After this adventure, open hostility breaks out between my friend and me. He gives me to understand that I am an idler, and that my presence is superfluous. To this I rejoin that I must wait for the arrival of important letters, but that I am ready at any time to go to an hotel. He now plays the rôle of the injured party. As a matter of fact, I cannot leave for want of money. For the rest, I anticipate that a turning-point in my destiny is at hand. My health is now restored again; I sleep quietly and work diligently. The wrath of Providence seems to have spent itself, for my exertions are crowned with success in all quarters. If I take a book at haphazard out of the doctor's library, it always gives the explanation I was looking for. Thus I find in an old chemical treatise the secret of my process for making gold, and I can now prove by metallurgic calculations and analogies that I have made gold, and that gold has always been obtained when one has gone to work in the same way. An essay on matter which I have written and sent to a French review is immediately published. I show the article to the doctor, who betrays his annoyance, since he cannot deny the fact. Then I say to myself, "How can that man be my friend, who is vexed at my _success_?"

_August_ 12_th_.--I buy an album at the book-shop. It is a kind of note-book with a gilt leather cover. The design on it attracts my attention, and constitutes, strange as it may sound, a kind of prophecy, the interpretation of which will appear in the sequel. It is as follows: On the left is the waxing moon in the first quarter, surrounded by a branch in blossom; three horses' heads (trijugum) project from the moon; above is a branch of laurel; beneath three pillars; on the right hand, a bell out of which flowers appear; a wheel like a sun, etc.

_August_ 13_th_.--The day announced by the clock on the Boulevard St. Michel has arrived. I wait for something to happen, but in vain; none the less. I am certain that somewhere something is happening, the result of which I shall hear in a short time.

_August_ 14_th_.--On the street I pick up a leaf out of an old office calendar; in large type there is printed on it "August 13th" (the same date which was on the clock). Underneath in smaller type is a sentence, "Do nothing secretly which thou canst not do also openly."

_August_ 15_th_.--A letter from my wife. She bewails my lot; she still loves me, and with our child is waiting for a change in the melancholy situation. Her parents, who formerly hated me, are full of sympathy for my sufferings, and what is more, they invite me to visit my little angel of a daughter, who lives with her grandparents in the country. That calls me back to life. My child, my daughter is more than my wife. Only to think of embracing the harmless, innocent creature, whom I wished to injure,[1] to ask her forgiveness, to brighten her life by little paternal attentions, after having longed for years to show the love which has been repressed! I live again, wake up as if out of a long bad dream, and revere the stern will of the Lord, whose hard but wise hand has smitten me. "Blessed is he whom God chastens." Blessed, for he does not trouble about others.

While it is still uncertain whether I shall meet my wife on the Danube, a matter to which, because of an undefined grudge against her, I am quite indifferent, I prepare for my pilgrimage, perfectly aware that it is a penance, and that new mortifications await me.

After thirty days of misery, at last the doors of my torture-chamber open. I part from my friend--my executioner--without bitterness. He has only been the scourge in the hand of Providence. Behold, blessed is the man whom the Lord chasteneth.

[1] See above, page 38.

VII

BEATRICE

In Berlin, I drive from the Stettin to the Anhalt Station. The half-hour's drive becomes a real way of thorns for me, so many are the memories which painfully revive in me. At first we pass through the street in which my friend Popoffsky, as an unknown, but yet misunderstood, man fought his first battles with poverty and passion. Now his wife and child are both dead; they died in this house on the left; and our friendship has turned into bitter hatred.

Here, on the right, are the restaurants frequented by artists and authors, the scenes of so many intellectual and erotic orgies. Here is the Cantina Italiana, where I used to meet with my fiancée three years ago, and where the first honorarium I received from Italy was spent in Chianti. There is the Schiffbauerdamm with the Pension Fulda, which we lived in when a young married pair. Here is my theatre, my book-seller, my tailor, my chemist.

What unhappy instinct leads the cabman to drive me through this _via dolorosa_ full of buried memories, which at this late hour of the night rise again like ghosts? Why does he choose just the street in which is the restaurant, the "Black Pig," well known as a favourite resort of Heine and E.T.A. Hoffmann? The restaurant keeper himself stands on the steps under the grotesque sign-board. He looks at me without recognition. For a second the candelabrum within darts coloured rays through the numerous bottles in the window, and makes me live again a year of my life which abounded in grief and joy, friendship and love. At the same time, I feel keenly that it is all over, and must be buried to make place for something new.

I spent the night in Berlin. The next morning a deep rose-red flush in the East greeted me over the roofs. I remember having seen this rosy colour in Malmö on the evening of my departure. I leave Berlin, my second home, where I have spent my "second spring," that is, my last. At the Anhalt Station, full of these memories, I give up all hope of the renewal of a spring and a love which can never return.

After a night in Tabor, whither the rosy glow followed me, I travel through the Bohemian mountains to the Danube. There the railway ends, and I traverse the Danube plain, which extends to Grein, in a carriage. We pass between orchards of apple and pear trees, cornfields and green meadows. At last, on a hill on the other side of the river, I discover the little church in which I never was, but which I know well as the central point of the landscape which extends before the house where my child was born. It is now two years since that unforgettable month of May. I pass through villages and convents; along the road there rise innumerable penitential chapels, hills crowned with crucifixes, votive pictures, monuments, reminding one of accidents and sudden deaths by lightning, and in other ways. At the end of my pilgrimage there certainly await me the twelve stations of the Cross. Every hundred paces the Crucified meets me with His crown of thorns, and instils into me courage to bear scourging and crucifixion. I painfully convince myself beforehand, that _she_, as I might have known, will not be there. Now, since my wife can no more divert the domestic storm, I must expect tit-for-tat from the old parents, whom I left under unpleasant circumstances, though against my will. I come accordingly for the sake of peace to be punished, and when I have passed the last village and the last crucifix, my feelings are something like those of a condemned man awaiting execution.

* * * * *

I had left an infant six weeks old, and I found a little girl of two and a half. She turned on me a searching look, but not one of dislike, as though she wished to find out whether I had come for her own or her mother's sake. After she had assured herself of the former, she let herself be embraced, and put her little arms round my neck. I am in a mood like Faust's when he exclaims, "the earth has me again," but more tender and purer. I am delighted in taking the little one on my arm, and feeling her heart beat against mine. Love for a child turns a man into a woman; it is sexless and heavenly, as Swedenborg says. This is the beginning of my education for heaven. But I have not yet done penance enough.

Briefly put, the situation is as follows: My wife is staying with her married sister, for her grandmother, who is in possession of the family property, has vowed that our marriage shall be dissolved, so intensely does she hate me, on account of my ingratitude and other matters. So I with my child remain as a welcome guest of my mother-in-law, and contentedly accept the hospitality offered me, under present circumstances, for an indefinite time. My mother-in-law, with the placable and submissive mind of a deeply religious woman, has forgiven me all.

_September_ 1_st_.--I occupy the room in which my wife has spent her two years of separation. Here she has suffered, while I suffered in Paris. Poor, poor woman! Are we so severely punished, because we have trifled with love?

During the evening meal the following incident happens. In order to help my little daughter, who cannot yet help herself, I touch her hand quite gently and kindly. The child utters a cry, draws her hand back, and casts at me a glance full of alarm. When her grandmother asks what is the matter, she answers, "He hurts me." In my confusion I am unable to utter a word. How many persons have I deliberately hurt, and hurt still, though without intending it. At night I dream of an eagle which tears at my hand for some unknown crime.

In the morning my daughter visits me; her manner is gentle and coaxing. She drinks coffee with me, and remains standing by my writing-table while I show her pictures. We are already good friends, and my mother-in-law is glad that she has someone to help her in educating the little one. In the evening I accompany her going to bed, and hear her prayers. She is a Catholic, and when she bids me pray and make the sign of the cross, I remain silent, for I am a Protestant.

_September_ 2_nd_.--Everything is in confusion. My mother-in-law's mother, who lives not far from here on the bank of the stream, intends to have an expulsion order made out against me. She wants me to go at once, and threatens if I disobey to disinherit her daughter. My mother-in-law's sister, a good woman, who is separated from her husband, invites me to stay with her in the neighbouring village till the storm has blown over. She comes herself to fetch me. From the top of a hill about a mile off, one looks into a circular valley, like the crater of a volcano, out of which rise many smaller hills covered with pines. In the middle of this crater lies the village with its church, and above, on a precipitous height, a castle built in the mediæval style; between, lie fields and meadows watered by a stream which rushes into a ravine below the castle.

This peculiar and unique landscape makes a strange impression on me, and the thought arises: "I must have seen it somewhere before, but where, where?"

In the zinc bath in the Hôtel Orfila, traced out in oxide of iron! Without question, it is the same landscape!

My aunt goes down with me into the village, where she owns a three-storeyed house. The capacious edifice also contains a baker's and butcher's shop, and a restaurant. It has a lightning-conductor, because the store was a year ago struck by lightning. When my good aunt, who is as rigidly religious as her sister, conducts me to the room assigned for my use, I remain fixed on the threshold as if arrested by a vision. The walls are painted a rose-colour, which reminds me of the flush of the dawns which accompanied me on my journey. The curtains are also rose-coloured, and the windows so full of flowers that the daylight is subdued by them. Everything is spotlessly clean, and the bed with its canopy supported by four pillars is like that of a maiden. The whole room with its appurtenances is a poem, and speaks of a soul which only half lives upon earth. The Crucified is not there, but the Blessed Virgin is, and a vessel of holy water guards the entrance against evil spirits.

A feeling of shame seizes me, and I fear to sully the ideal of a pure heart which has erected this temple to the Virgin over the grave of her only love, who has been dead ten years, and in confusion I attempt to decline the kindly offer. But the good lady insists: "It will do you good, if you sacrifice your earthly love to the love of God, and of your child. Believe me, this thornless love will preserve your peace of mind and cheerfulness of spirit, and under the protection of the Virgin you will sleep quietly."

I kiss her hand as a sign of gratitude for her sacrifice, and consent with a feeling of humility of which I had not thought myself capable. The powers seem to be gracious to me, and to have arranged the sufferings they have ordained for my improvement. Still, for some reason or other, I wish to sleep another night in Saxen, and put off my change of residence till the next day. So I return with my aunt to my child. Looking at the house from the street, I discover that the lightning-conductor is fastened exactly above my bed.

What an infernal coincidence! It makes me think again that I am the subject of a personal persecution. I also notice that my window commands a pleasant prospect, looking out as it does on a poorhouse occupied by released criminals and sick people, among whom several are dying. A sorry spectacle truly, to have continually before one's eyes!

In Saxen I pack my things and prepare for departure. I part with sorrow from my child, who has become so dear to me. The cruelty of the old woman, who has succeeded in separating me from wife and child, enrages me. Angrily I shake my fist against a painting of her which hangs over my bed, and utter an imprecation against her. Two hours later a terrible storm breaks over the village. One lightning flash succeeds another, the rain pours in torrents, the sky is pitch dark.

The next day I am in Klam, where the rose-coloured room awaits me. Over my aunt's house there hangs a cloud in the shape of a dragon. They tell me that a house quite close by has been struck by lightning, and that the torrents of rain have injured haystacks and carried away bridges.

On the 10th of September a cyclone has devastated Paris, and that under most extraordinary circumstances. Without any warning, it suddenly rises behind St. Sulpice in the Jardin de Luxembourg, grazes the Théâtre du Châlet and the police station, and disappears behind the St. Louis hospital, after it has torn up iron gratings for fifty yards round. Regarding this cyclone and the one in the Jardin des Plantes, my theosophical friend asks me, "What is a cyclone? Is it an ebullition of hatred, the eruption of some passion, the effluence of some spirit?"

It must be a coincidence, or rather, more than a coincidence, that in a letter which crosses his, I have asked him as one initiated in the occult doctrines of the Hindus, "Can the philosophers of Hindustan cause cyclones?"

I began to suspect the adepts in magic of persecuting me on account of my gold-making or my obstinacy, and of wishing to bring me in complete subjection to their society. In the _German Mythology_ of Rydberg and in _Wärend och Widarne_ of Hilten-Cavallius, I had read that witches were in the habit of appearing in a storm or in short and violent gusts of wind. I mention this to show my mental condition before I fell in with Swedenborg's teaching.

* * * * *

The sanctuary shines in white and rose, and the saint will soon join his disciple, who summons him from their common fatherland in order to revive the memory of the man who was more highly equipped with spiritual gifts than any born of woman in these modern times. France sent Anskar[1] in the early middle ages to baptise Sweden; a thousand years later Sweden sent Swedenborg to re-baptise France by means of his disciple Saint-Martin. The Martinist orders, who know the rôle they have to play in the founding of a new France, will not undervalue the purport of these words, and still less the significance of the above-mentioned millennium.

[1] French missionary (801-865 A.D.).

VIII

SWEDENBORG

My mother-in-law and my aunt completely resemble each other in character, tastes, and inclinations, and each sees in the other her counterpart. On the first evening of my stay I narrate to them my mysterious adventures, doubts, and sufferings. They both exclaim, with a certain look of satisfaction in their faces, "You are where we have already been." Both starting from a neutral point of view as regards religion had begun to study occultism. From that moment onwards they suffered from sleepless nights, mysterious accidents accompanied by terrible fears, and at last, attacks of madness. The invisible furies pursue their prey up to the very gates of the city of refuge--religion. But before they have got so far the protecting angel reveals himself--and that is Swedenborg. The good ladies wrongly suppose that I have a thorough acquaintance with the writings of my fellow-countrymen. Astonished at my ignorance, they give me, with a certain air of reserve, however, an old volume in German, saying, "Take it, read, and don't be afraid."

"Afraid? Why should I be?" I answer.

Returning to the rose-coloured room, I open the book at haphazard and read. The reader may conceive my astonishment when my eyes fall on the description of one of Swedenborg's hells which exactly reproduces the landscape of Klam, as I saw it in the zinc bath. The crater-shaped valley, the pine-crowned hill, the ravine with the stream, the heaps of dung, the pig-sty--they are all there.

Hell? But I have been brought up in the profoundest contempt of the doctrine of hell, as one consigned to the rubbish-heap of out-worn ideas. And yet I cannot deny the fact--and that is the novelty in this exposition of the doctrine of so-called eternal punishment--we are already in hell. Earth, earth is hell? the dungeon appointed by a superior power, in which I cannot move a step without injuring the happiness of others, and in which others cannot remain happy without hurting me. Thus Swedenborg depicts hell, and perhaps without knowing it, earthly life, at the same time.