MARGET announced a party, and invited forty people; the date for it was seven days away. This was a fine opportunity. Marget’s house stood by itself, and it could be easily watched. All the week it was watched night and day. Marget’s household went out and in as usual, but they carried nothing in their hands, and neither they nor others brought anything to the house. This was ascertained. Evidently rations for forty people were not being fetched. If they were furnished any sustenance it would have to be made on the premises. It was true that Marget went out with a basket every evening, but the spies ascertained that she always brought it back empty. The guests arrived at noon and filled the place. Father Adolf followed; also, after a little, the astrologer, without invitation. The spies had informed him that neither at the back nor the front had any parcels been brought in. He entered, and found the eating and drinking going on finely, and everything progressing in a lively and festive way. He glanced around and perceived that many of the cooked delicacies and all of the native and foreign fruits All the house made room for him; Marget politely seated him; Ursula ordered Gottfried to bring a special table for him. Then she decked it and furnished it, and asked for his orders. “Bring me what you will,” he said. The two servants brought supplies from the pantry, together with white wine and red—a bottle of each. The astrologer, who very likely had never seen such delicacies before, poured out a beaker of red wine, drank it off, poured another, then began to eat with a grand appetite. I was not expecting Satan, for it was more than a week since I had seen or heard of him, but now he came in—I knew it by the feel, though people were in the way and I could not see him. I heard him apologizing for intruding; and he was going away, but Marget urged him to stay, The astrologer had drunk his second beaker; he poured out a third. He set the bottle down, and by accident overturned it. He seized it before much was spilled, and held it up to the light, saying, “What a pity—it is royal wine.” Then his face lighted with joy or triumph, or something, and he said, “Quick! Bring a bowl.” It was brought—a four-quart one. He took up that two-pint bottle and began to pour; went on pouring, the red liquor gurgling and gushing into the white bowl and rising higher and higher up its sides, everybody staring and holding their breath—and presently the bowl was full to the brim. “Look at the bottle,” he said, holding it up; “it is full yet!” I glanced at Satan, and in that moment he vanished. Then Father Adolf rose up, flushed and excited, crossed himself, and began to thunder in his great voice, “This house is bewitched and accursed!” People began to cry and shriek and crowd toward the door. “I summon this detected household to—” His words were cut off short. His face became red, then purple, but he could not utter another sound. Then I saw Satan, a transparent film, melt into the astrologer’s body; then the astrologer put up his hand, and apparently in his own voice said, “Wait—remain where you are.” All stopped where they stood. “Bring a funnel!” Ursula brought it, trembling and scared, and he stuck it in the bottle and took up the great bowl and began to pour the wine back, the people gazing and dazed with astonishment, for they knew the bottle was already full before he began. He emptied the whole of the bowl into the bottle, then smiled out over the room, chuckled, and said, indifferently: “It is nothing—anybody can do it! With my powers I can even do much more.” A frightened cry burst out everywhere, “Oh, my God, he is possessed!” and there was a tumultuous rush for the Marget was pale, and crying; Meidling looked kind of petrified; Ursula the same; but Gottfried was the worst—he couldn’t stand, he was so weak and scared. For he was of a witch family, you know, and it would be bad for him to be suspected. Agnes came loafing in, looking pious and unaware, and wanted to rub up against Ursula and be petted, but Ursula was afraid of her and shrank away from her, but pretending she was not meaning any incivility, for she knew very well it wouldn’t answer to have strained relations with that kind of a cat. But we boys took Agnes and petted her, for Satan would not have befriended her if he had not had a good opinion of her, and that was indorsement enough for us. He seemed to trust anything that hadn’t the Moral Sense. Outside, the guests, panic-stricken, scattered in every direction and fled in a pitiable state of terror; and such a tumult as they made with their running and sobbing and shrieking and shouting that soon all the village came flocking from their houses to see what had happened, and they thronged the street and shouldered and jostled one another in excitement and fright; and then Father Adolf When the astrologer reached the market-square he went straight to a juggler, fantastically dressed, who was keeping three brass balls in the air, and took them from him and faced around upon the approaching crowd and said: “This poor clown is ignorant of his art. Come forward and see an expert perform.” So saying, he tossed the balls up one after another and set them whirling in a slender bright oval in the air, and added another, then another and another, and soon—no one seeing whence he got them—adding, adding, adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his hands moving so swiftly that they were just a web or a blur and not distinguishable as hands; and such as counted said there were now a hundred balls in the air. The spinning great The people murmured, for the astrologer was old, and always before had been halting of movement and at times even lame, but he was nimble enough now and went on with his antics in the liveliest manner. Finally he sprang lightly down and walked away, and passed up the road and around the corner and disappeared. Then that great, pale, silent, solid crowd drew a deep breath and looked into one another’s faces as if they said: “Was it real? Did you We boys followed behind our fathers, and listened, catching all we could of what they said; and when they sat down in our house and continued their talk they still had us for company. They were in a sad mood, for it was certain, they said, that disaster for the village must follow this awful visitation of witches and devils. Then my father remembered that Father Adolf had been struck dumb at the moment of his denunciation. “They have not ventured to lay their hands upon an anointed servant of God before,” he said: “and how they could have dared it this time I cannot make out, for he wore his crucifix. Isn’t it so?” “Yes,” said the others, “we saw it.” “It is serious, friends, it is very serious. Always before, we had a protection. It has failed.” The others shook, as with a sort of chill, and muttered those words over—“It has failed.” “God has forsaken us.” “It is true,” said Seppi Wohlmeyer’s father; “there is nowhere to look for help.” “The people will realize this,” said Nikolaus’s father, He sighed, and “True, neighbor,” said my father; “all of us will suffer—all in repute, many in estate. And, good God!—” “What is it?” “That can come—to finish us!” “Name it—um Gottes Willen!” “The Interdict!” It smote like a thunderclap, and they were like to swoon with the terror of it. Then the dread of this calamity roused their energies, and they stopped brooding and began to consider ways to avert it. They discussed this, that, and the other way, and talked till the afternoon was far spent, then confessed that at present they could arrive at no decision. So they parted sorrowfully, with oppressed hearts which were filled with bodings. While they were saying their parting words I slipped out and set my course for Marget’s house to see what was happening there. I met many people, but none of them greeted me. It ought to have been surprising, but it was not, for they were so distraught with fear and dread that they were not in their right minds, I think; they were At Marget’s it was like a funeral. She and Wilhelm sat together on the sofa, but said nothing, and not even holding hands. Both were steeped in gloom, and Marget’s eyes were red from the crying she had been doing. She said: “I have been begging him to go, and come no more, and so save himself alive. I cannot bear to be his murderer. This house is bewitched, and no inmate will escape the fire. But he will not go, and he will be lost with the rest.” Wilhelm said he would not go; if there was danger for her, his place was by her, and there he would remain. Then she began to cry again, and it was all so mournful that I wished I had stayed away. There was a knock, now, and Satan came in, fresh and cheery and beautiful, and brought that winy atmosphere of his and changed the whole thing. He never said a word about what had been happening, nor about the awful fears which were freezing the blood in the hearts of the community, but began to talk and rattle on about all manner of gay and pleasant things; and next about music—an artful stroke which cleared away the remnant of Marget’s depression and brought her spirits and her interests broad awake. She had not heard any one talk so well and so knowingly on I fell asleep to pleasant music that night—the patter of rain upon the panes and the dull growling of distant thunder. Away in the night Satan came and roused me and said: “Come with me. Where shall we go?” “Anywhere—so it is with you.” Then there was a fierce glare of sunlight, and he said, “This is China.” That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with vanity and gladness to think I had come so far—so much, much farther than anybody else in our village, including Bartel Sperling, who had such a great opinion of his travels. We buzzed around over that empire for more than half an hour, and saw the whole of it. It was wonderful, the spectacles we saw; and some were beautiful, others too horrible to think. For instance—However, I may go into that by and by, and also why Satan chose China for this excursion instead of another place; it would interrupt my tale to do it now. Finally we stopped flitting and lit. We sat upon a mountain commanding a vast landscape of mountain-range and gorge and valley and plain and river, with cities and villages slumbering in the sunlight, and a glimpse of blue sea on the farther verge. It was a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to the eye and restful to the spirit. If we could only make a change like that whenever we wanted to, the world would be easier to live in than it is, for change of scene shifts the mind’s burdens to the other shoulder and banishes old, shop-worn wearinesses from mind and body both. We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and persuade him to lead a better life. I told him about all those things he had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop making people unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that he ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of a thing before launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he would not make so much trouble. He was not hurt by this plain speech; he only looked amused and surprised, and said: “What? I do random things? Indeed, I never do. I stop and consider possible consequences? Where is the need? I know what the consequences are going to be—always.” “Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?” “Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it. “Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible that they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal, immeasurable. They have no intellect.” “No intellect?” “Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will see and understand. Men have nothing in common with me—there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin’s head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him—caring whether he is happy or isn’t, or whether he is wealthy or poor, or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider—he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider an ill turn; “The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant. “Man’s mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a result—such as it is. My mind creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires—and in a moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids, colors—anything, everything—out of the airy nothing which is called Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before you—created. “I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess—anything—and it is there. This is the immortal mind—nothing is beyond its reach. Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the volume. Nothing goes on in “Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out that the elephant could like the spider—supposing he can see it—but he could not love it. His love is for his own kind—for his equals. An angel’s love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of man—infinitely beyond it! But it is limited to his own august order. If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the villagers.” He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position. “I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill. They are always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot see into the future. What I am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn “Does God order the career?” “Foreordain it? No. The man’s circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument’s sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn’t go. That man’s career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a “As the conquering of a continent, for instance?” “Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a link—the thing has never happened! Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its proper place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do. You see, now, that a man will never drop a link in his chain. He It seemed so dismal! “He is a prisoner for life,” I said sorrowfully, “and cannot get free.” “No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first childish act. But I can free him.” I looked up wistfully. “I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers.” I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop. “I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa Brandt?” “Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely that she is not like any other child. She says she will be the pride of the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now.” “I shall change her future.” “Make it better?” I asked. “Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus.” I was glad, this time, and said, “I don’t need to ask about his case; you will be sure to do generously by him.” “It is my intention.” Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky’s in my imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me to get ready to listen again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not happen. He proceeded with his subject: “Nicky’s appointed life is sixty-two years.” “That’s grand!” I said. “Lisa’s, thirty-six. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives and those ages. Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake out of his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that he should turn over and go to sleep again. But I have appointed that he shall get up and close the window first. That trifle will change his career entirely. He will rise in the morning two minutes later than the chain of his life had appointed him to rise. By consequence, thenceforth nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with the details of the old chain.” He took out his watch and sat looking at it a few moments, then said: “Nikolaus has risen to close the window. His life is changed, his new career has begun. There will be consequences.” It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny. “But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now. For instance, Nikolaus would save “Oh, Satan! oh, dear Satan!” I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes, “save them! Don’t let it happen. I can’t bear to lose Nikolaus, he is my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa’s poor mother!” I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved. He made me sit down again, and told me I must hear him out. “I have changed Nikolaus’s life, and this has changed Lisa’s. If I had not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from his drenching; one of your race’s fantastic and desolating scarlet fevers would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years he would lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying night and day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life back?” “Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is.” “It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life and done him so good a service. He had a billion possible careers, but not one of them was worth I wondered what poor little Lisa’s early death would save her from. He answered the thought: “From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then from nineteen years’ pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die; her mother would save her life if she could. Am I not kinder than her mother?” “Yes—oh, indeed yes; and wiser.” “Father Peter’s case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted, through unassailable proofs of his innocence.” “Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?” “Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the rest of his life will be happy.” “I can believe it. To restore his good name will have that effect.” “His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I In my mind—and modestly—I asked for particulars, but Satan paid no attention to my thought. Next, my mind wandered to the astrologer, and I wondered where he might be. “In the moon,” said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was a chuckle. “I’ve got him on the cold side of it, too. He doesn’t know where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good enough for him, a good place for his star studies. I shall need him presently; then I shall bring him back and possess him again. He has a long and cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that, for I have no feeling against him and am quite willing to do him a kindness. I think I shall get him burned.” He had such strange notions of kindness! But angels are made so, and do not know any better. Their ways are not like our ways; and, besides, human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks. It seems to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could have dumped him in Germany just as well, where he would be handy. “Far away?” said Satan. “To me no place is far away; distance does not exist for me. The sun is less than a hundred million miles from here, and the light that is I held out my hand and said, “The light lies upon it; think it into a glass of wine, Satan.” He did it. I drank the wine. “Break the glass,” he said. I broke it. “There—you see it is real. The villagers thought the brass balls were magic stuff and as perishable as smoke. They were afraid to touch them. You are a curious lot—your race. But come along; I have business. I will put you to bed.” Said and done. Then he was gone; but his voice came back to me through the rain and darkness saying, “Yes, tell Seppi, but no other.” It was the answer to my thought. |