Strange News
from Another Star

AND OTHER TALES

HERMANN HESSE

TRANSLATED BY DENVER LINDLEY

Translation copyright © 1972
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

THIRD PRINTING, I973

Translated from the German, Marchen,

Copyright S. Fischer Verlag, 1919;
Copyright 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin

All rights reserved

Library of Congress catalog card number: 70—179791

Published simultaneously in Canada

by Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto

Printed in the United States of America

Augustus

A young woman living in Mostackerstrasse had lost
her husband through an accident shortly after their
marriage, and she now sat poor and abandoned in her
little room, waiting for the child who was destined to be
fatherless. And because she was so utterly alone, her
thoughts dwelt constantly on the expected child, and there
was nothing beautiful and splendid and enviable that she
did not plan and wish and dream for the little one. A stone
house with plate-glass windows and a fountain in the
garden seemed to her just barely good enough for him,
and as for his career, he had to become at least a professor
or a king.

Next door to poor Frau Elisabeth lived an old man, a
little gray fellow who seldom walked abroad and, when he
did so, wore a tasseled cap and carried an old-fashioned
green umbrella with whalebone ribs. Children were afraid
of him and grownups said to one another that he probably
had good reason to live in so retired a fashion. Often he
would not be seen by anyone for a long time, but some-
times in the evening a delicate music, as though from a
great number of tiny, fragile instruments, would drift out
of his dilapidated little house. Then the children passing
by would ask their mothers whether angels were singing
inside, or perhaps fairies, but their mothers knew nothing

about such things and would say: "No, no, that must be a

music box."

This little man, who was known to his neighbors as
Herr Binsswanger, had an odd kind of friendship with
Frau Elisabeth. As a matter of fact, they never spoke to
each other, but little old Herr Binsswanger bowed in the
most friendly fashion every time he went past her
window, and she nodded gratefully in return and liked
him, and both thought: If things should sometime go very
ill with me, then I shall certainly go for help to my neigh-
bor's house. And when it began to grow dark and Frau
Elisabeth sat alone at her window and sorrowed for her
dead beloved or thought about her little child and fell to
dreaming, then Herr Binsswanger would gently open his
casement window and out of his dark room flowed com-
forting music, soft and silvery like moonlight through a
rift in the clouds. For her part, Frau Elisabeth tended sev-
eral old geranium plants growing at his back window; he
always forgot to water them but they were always green
and full of blossoms and never showed a wilted leaf be-
cause Frau Elisabeth took care of them very early every

morning.

And now one raw and windy evening when it was get-
ting on toward autumn and no one was abroad in Mo-
stackerstrasse, the poor woman realized that her hour had
come and she was frightened because she was entirely
alone. But as night fell, an old woman came on foot with a
lantern in her hand; she entered the house and boiled
water and laid out linens and did everything that is needful
when a child is about to come into the world. Frau Elisa-

beth allowed herself to be looked after in silence, and only
when the baby was there, wrapped in fine new swaddling
clothes, and had begun his first sleep on earth, did she ask
the old woman whence she had come.

"Herr Binsswanger sent me," said the woman, where-
upon the weary mother fell asleep; and when she awoke in
the morning, milk had been boiled and stood ready for
her, everything in the room had been neatly arranged, and
beside her lay her little son, screaming because he was
hungry; but the old woman was gone. Frau Elisabeth took
the baby to her breast and rejoiced that he was so pretty
and so strong. She thought of his dead father who had not
lived to see him, and tears came to her eyes. But she
hugged the little orphan child and smiled once more, then
fell asleep again with the little one. When she woke up,
there was more milk, a soup had been cooked, and the
child was wrapped in clean linens.

Soon the mother was healthy and strong again and
could look after herself and little Augustus. She realized
then that her son must be christened and that she had no
godfather for him. And so toward evening, when twilight
had come and the sweet music was once more pouring out
of the little house next door, she went over to Herr Bins-
swanger's. She knocked timidly and was greeted by a cor-
dial cry: "Come in!" The music suddenly ceased, and in
the room there was a little old table with a lamp and a
book on it, and everything was as normal as could be.

"I have come to thank you," said Frau Elisabeth, "be-
cause you sent me that good woman. I wish to pay her too,
as soon as I can work again and earn some money. But

now I have another worry. The little boy must be chris-
tened and is to be named Augustus after his father. But I
know no one and I have no godfather for him."

"Yes, I have thought about that too," said her neighbor,
stroking his gray beard. "It would be a good thing if he
were to have a kind, rich godfather who could look after
him if things should ever go badly for you. But I too am
lonesome and old and have few friends and so I cannot
recommend anyone to you, except perhaps myself, if you
would accept me."

This made the poor mother happy, and she thanked the
little man and enthusiastically agreed. The next Sunday
they carried the baby to the church and had him baptized,
and the same old woman appeared there too and gave the
child a taler. When Frau Elisabeth did not want to accept
it, the old woman said: "No, take it. I am old and have
what I need. Perhaps the taler will bring him luck. I was
glad for once to do a favor for Herr Binsswanger. We are
old friends."

They went back to Frau Elisabeth's room together and
she made coffee for her guests. Herr Binsswanger had
brought a cake, so it turned into a real baptismal feast.
After they had finished eating and drinking and the infant
had long since fallen asleep, the old man said diffidently:
"Now that I am little Augustus's godfather, I would like to
present him with a king's palace and a sackful of gold
pieces, but those are things I do not have. I can only add
another taler to the one from our neighbor. However, what
I can do for him shall be done. Frau Elisabeth, you have
certainly wished your little boy all sorts of fine and beauti-

ful things. Now think carefully what seems to you to be
the best wish for him, and I will see to it that it comes true.
You have one wish for your youngster, whatever one you
like, but only one. Consider well, and this evening when
you hear my little music box playing, you must whisper
your wish into your little one's left ear, then it will be
fulfilled."

Thereupon he hastily took his departure and the neigh-
bor woman went away with him, leaving Frau Elisabeth
dumfounded, and if the talers had not been there in the
crib and the cake on the table, she would have thought it
all a dream. She sat down beside the cradle and rocked
her child while she meditated and considered many beau-
tiful wishes. At first she planned to make him rich, then
handsome, then tremendously strong, then shrewd and
clever, but at each choice she felt some hesitation, and
finally she concluded that all this was really only the little
old man's joke.

It had already grown dark and she had almost fallen
asleep sitting beside the cradle, for she was weary from
playing hostess, from her troubles and from thinking of so
many wishes, when suddenly there drifted over from next
door a faint, subtle music, more beautiful and delicate than
had ever been heard from a music box. At the sound Frau
Elisabeth gave a start and remembered, and now she once
more believed in her neighbor Binsswanger and his gift as
godfather, but the more she reflected and the more she
wanted to make a wish, the more confused her mind be-
came, so that she could not decide upon anything. She
was greatly distressed and had tears in her eyes, then the

music sounded softer and fainter, and she knew that if she
did not make a wish that very instant, it would be too late.

She sighed aloud and bent over her boy and whispered
in his left ear: "My little son, I wish for you—I wish for
you—" and as the beautiful music became fainter and
fainter, she was frightened and said quickly: "—I wish
for you that everyone will love you."

The strains had now completely died away and it was
deathly still in the dark room. She bent over the cradle
and wept and was filled with anxiety and fear, and she
cried: "Oh, now that I have wished for you the best thing I
knew, perhaps it was not the right thing. And if everyone,
every single person, loves you, still no one will ever love
you as much as your mother does."

Augustus grew up to be a pretty blond boy with bright,
mettlesome eyes whom his mother spoiled and who was
well liked by everyone. Frau Elisabeth quickly realized
that her christening-day wish for her child was coming
true, for the little one was hardly old enough to walk on
the streets when everyone he met found him so pretty and
pert and clever that they patted his hand and openly ad-
mired him. Young mothers smiled at him, old women
gave him apples, and if at any time he was naughty, no
one believed that he could have done wrong; or if it was
obvious that he had, people shrugged their shoulders and
said: "You really can't hold anything against that dear
little fellow."

People who had noticed the handsome boy came to see
his mother, and she who had once been so alone and had
had very little sewing work to do, now as the mother of

Augustus had more patrons than she could ever have
wished. Things went well with her and with the youngster
too, and whenever they went out walking together, the
neighbors smiled and bowed to them and turned to look
after the lucky boy.

What was best of all happened to Augustus next door at
his godfather's. Herr Binsswanger would sometimes call
him over to his house in the evening when it was dark and
the only light in the room was the little red fire burning
in the black hollow of the fireplace. The old man would
draw the child down beside him on a fur rug on the floor
and would tell him long stories as they both stared at the
quiet flames. Occasionally, when a long story was at an end
and the little boy had grown very sleepy staring with half-
open eyes at the fire in the dark silence, then out of the
darkness flowed sweet polyphonic music, and when the two
had listened to it for a long time in silence, it often hap-
pened that the whole room was suddenly filled with tiny
sparkling cherubs who flew in circles on bright golden
wings, dancing elaborately about one another in pairs and
singing at the same time. The whole room resounded in a
hundredfold harmony of joy and serene beauty. It was the
loveliest thing Augustus had ever experienced, and when
later on he thought of his childhood, it was the dark, quiet
room of his old godfather and the red flames in the fire-
place and the music and the festive, golden, magic flight
of the angelic beings that filled his memory and made him
homesick.

As the boy grew older, there were times when his
mother was sad and felt compelled to think back to that

baptismal night. Augustus ran merrily about in the nearby
streets and was welcome everywhere. People gave him
nuts and pears, cookies and toys, all kinds of good things
to eat and drink, set him on their knees, let him pick flow-
ers in their gardens, and often he did not get home until
late in the evening and would angrily push aside his
mother's soup. If she then was unhappy and wept, he
would look bored and go sullenly to his cot. If she scolded
or punished him, he screamed and loudly complained that
everyone except his mother was nice and kind to him. She
was often seriously angry at her son at these troubled
times, but later, as he lay sleeping among his pillows and
the light of her candle shimmered on his innocent, child-
ish face, then all harshness left her heart, and she would
kiss him cautiously so as not to awaken him. It was her
fault that everyone loved Augustus, and sometimes she
thought with sorrow and almost with dread that perhaps
it would have been better had she never made that wish.

Once she happened to be standing beside Herr Bins-
swanger's geranium window, cutting the withered leaves
from the plants with a small pair of shears, when she
heard the voice of her son in the courtyard that lay behind
the two houses, and turned around to look for him. He
was leaning against the wall with a disdainful look on his
pretty face, and in front of him stood a girl taller than he
was, saying coaxingly: "Come now, you'll be nice, won't
you, and give me a kiss?"

"I don't want to," Augustus said, putting his hands in
his pockets.

"Oh, please do," she said again. "I'll give you something
nice."

"What will you give me?" the boy asked.

"I have two apples," she said timidly.

"I don't want any apples," he said contemptuously and
started to leave.

But the girl caught hold of his arm and said cajolingly:
"Wait, I have a beautiful ring too."

"Let's see it!" Augustus said.

She showed him her ring, and he looked at it carefully,
then took it off her finger and put it on his own, held it up
to the light and nodded approvingly.

"All right then, you can have a kiss," he said carelessly,
and gave the girl a hasty peck on the mouth.

"You'll come and play with me now, won't you?" she
said confidently, taking his arm.

But he pushed her aside and shouted rudely": "Leave me
in peace, can't you? I have others to play with." The girl
began to cry and stole out of the courtyard. He looked
after her with a bored and exasperated expression, then
he turned the ring around on his finger and examined it.
He began to whistle and walked slowly away.

His mother stood still with her gardening shears in her
hand, shocked at the harshness and contempt with which
her child had treated another's love. She turned away from
the flowers and shook her head and said over and over to
herself: "Why, he's bad, he has no heart at all."

When Augustus came home a short time later, she took
him to task, but he looked at her laughingly with his blue

eyes and showed no sign of guilt. Then he began to sing
and he was so affectionate with her, so funny and charm-
ing and tender, that she had to laugh, and she decided
that with children one need not necessarily take every-
thing so seriously.

But the youngster did not entirely escape punishment
for his misdeeds. His godfather Binsswanger was the only
one for whom Augustus felt any regard, and in the eve-
ning when he went to see him his godfather would say:
"Today no fire is burning on the hearth and there is no
music, the little angel children are sad because you were so
bad." The boy would go home in silence and throw him-
self on his bed and weep, and for many days afterward he
would try hard to be good and kind.

Nevertheless, the fire on the hearth burned less and less
often, nor could his godfather be bribed with tears or ca-
resses. By the time Augustus was twelve years old, the en-
chanting, angelic flight in his godfather's room had al-
ready become a distant dream, and if by chance he did
actually dream about it in the night, then on the following
day he would be doubly wild and boisterous and order his
many friends about with the ruthlessness of a field mar-
shal.

His mother had long since grown tired of hearing from
everyone how fine and charming her boy was; she had, in
fact, nothing but trouble with him. And when one day his
teacher came to her and said he knew of someone willing
to enter her son in a distant school, she went next door
and had a talk with her neighbor. Soon thereafter on a

spring morning a carriage drew up and Augustus in a fine
new suit got in and said farewell to his mother and his
godfather and all the neighbors because he was to travel
to the capital and study there. His mother had neatly
parted his blond hair for the last time, had given him her
blessing, and now the horses moved off and Augustus rode
away into the great world.

Many years later when Augustus was a college student
and wore a red cap and a mustache, he traveled back once
more by carriage to his home town because his godfather
had written that his mother was very ill and could not live
long. The youth arrived in the evening, and people were
amazed to see him get out of the carriage followed by the
coachman, who carried a big leather trunk into the house.
Frau Elisabeth lay dying in the old low-ceilinged room,
and when the handsome student saw her looking white
and withered on the white pillows, only able to greet him
with her quiet eyes, he sank down weeping by the bed;
and he kissed his mother's chill hands and knelt beside
her the whole night through, until the hands had grown
cold and the eyes lifeless.

And when his mother had been buried, his godfather
Binsswanger took him by the arm and led him into his
little house, which seemed to the young man even shab-
bier and darker than before, and when they had sat to-
gether for a long time and only the small window shim-
mered feebly in the darkness, then the little old man
stroked his gray beard with his thin fingers and said to
Augustus: "I will make a fire on the hearth, then we won't

need the lamp. I know you must leave tomorrow, and now
that your mother is dead, you won't be back again very
soon."

So saying, he kindled a small fire on the hearth, pulled
his chair near it, and arranged Augustus's chair close to his
own. They sat thus together for another long while, look-
ing into the glowing coals, until the flying sparks had
grown sparse, and then the old man said softly: "Fare-
well, Augustus, I wish you well. You had a fine mother
who did more for you than you know. I would gladly have
made music for you again and shown you the small
blessed ones, but you know that isn't possible any more.
But you must not forget them and you must remember
that they always continue to sing and that perhaps you
will be able to hear them once more if a time comes when
you desire it with a lonely and longing heart. Now give me
your hand, my boy, I am old and must go to bed."

Augustus shook hands with him but could not speak.
He went sadly over to the deserted little house and for the
last time lay down to sleep in his old home, but before
falling asleep he thought he heard again, very far off and
faint, the sweet music of his childhood. Next morning he
left, and for a long time nothing was heard of him in his
home town.

Soon, too, he forgot his Godfather Binsswanger and the
angels. He lived a life of luxury and reveled in it. No one
could equal his style as he rode through the streets waving
to adoring girls and teasing them with secret glances, no
one could drive a four-in-hand with such gaiety and ele-

gance, no one was as boisterous and boastful through a
summer night's drinking bout in the garden. The rich
widow whose lover he was gave him money and clothes
and horses and everything he needed or wanted, he trav-
eled with her to Paris and to Rome and slept in her silken
sheets. His beloved, however, was the soft, blond daughter
of a burgher; he met her recklessly in her father's garden,
and she wrote him long, ardent letters when he was
abroad.

But the time came when he did not return. He had
found friends in Paris, and because his rich mistress had
begun to bore him and study had long since become a nui-
sance, he stayed abroad and lived the life of high society.
He kept horses, dogs, women, lost money and won
money in great golden rolls, and everywhere people pur-
sued him, were captivated by him and served him, and he
smiled and accepted it all, just as he had accepted the
young girl's ring long before. The magic of his mother's
wish lay in his eyes and on his lips, women smothered
him with tenderness, friends raved about him, and no one
saw—he scarcely noticed it himself—that his heart had
grown empty and greedy and that his soul was sick and
full of pain. At times he grew tired of being loved so by
everyone and went alone in disguise to foreign cities, but
everywhere he found people fatuous and all too easy to
conquer, everywhere he scorned the love that followed him
so ardently and was content with so little. He often felt
disgust for men and women because they did not have
more pride, and he spent whole days alone with his dogs

in the beautiful hunting preserves in the mountains; a
stag stalked and shot made him happier than the conquest
of a beautiful spoiled woman.

Then in the course of a sea voyage he chanced to meet
the young wife of an ambassador, a reserved, slender lady
of the northern nobility who stood out with marked dis-
tinction among the many fashionable women and worldly
men. She was proud and quiet, as though no one was her
equal, and when he watched her and saw that her glance
seemed to brush past him too, hastily and indifferently, it
seemed to him as though he were experiencing for the
very first time what love is, and he determined to win her
heart. From then on, at every hour of the day, he stayed
close to her and in her sight, and because he himself was
always surrounded by people who admired him and
sought his society, he and the beautiful, unmoved lady
were always at the center of the company of travelers, like
a prince with his princess; even the blonde's husband
treated him with deference and took pains to please him.

It was never possible for him to be alone with the lovely
stranger until in a southern port the whole party of travel-
ers left the ship in order to spend a few hours wandering
around in the foreign city and feeling earth under their
feet again. He did not move from his beloved's side and
presently, in the colorful confusion of a marketplace, he
succeeded in detaining her in conversation. Innumerable
little dark alleys entered this square, into one of which he
led her; she accompanied him trustfully, but when she
suddenly found herself alone with him she became ner-
vous and looked all around for their traveling companions.

He turned to her passionately, took her reluctant hand in
his, and besought her to leave the ship with him and flee.

The young woman grew pale and kept her eyes fixed on
the ground. "Oh, that is not chivalrous," she said softly.
"Allow me to forget what you have just said."

"I am no knight," cried Augustus. "I am a lover, and a
lover knows nothing except his beloved and has no
thought except to be with her. O fair lady, flee with me,
we will be happy."

She looked at him solemnly and reproachfully with her
clear blue eyes. "How could you know," she whispered
sadly, "that I loved you? I cannot deny it; I love you and I
have often wished that you might be my husband. For you
are the first I have ever loved with all my heart. Alas, how
can love go so far astray! I would never have thought it
possible for me to love a man who is not pure and good.
But I prefer a thousand times to stay with my husband,
whom I do not greatly love but who is a knight full of
honor and chivalry, qualities that are foreign to you. And
now do not say another word, but take me back to the
ship; otherwise, I will call out to strangers to protect me
against your insolence."

And no matter how much he stormed and pled with
her, she turned away from him and would have walked on
alone if he had not silently gone after her and accompa-
nied her to the ship. There he had his trunk taken ashore
without saying goodbye to anyone.

From then on, the luck of this much loved man
changed. Virtue and honor had become hateful to him, he
trod them underfoot and diverted himself by seducing vir-

tuous women through his magical wiles and exploiting un-
suspecting men whom he quickly made his friends and
then contemptuously cast off. He reduced women and
girls to poverty and forthwith disowned them, he sought
out youths from noble houses whom he seduced and cor-
rupted. There was no pleasure that he did not indulge in
and exhaust, no vice that he did not cultivate and then
discard. But there was no longer any joy in his heart, and
to the love that greeted him everywhere no echo re-
sponded in his soul.

Sullen and morose, he lived in a magnificent country
house on the seacoast, and the men and women who vis-
ited him there he tormented with the wildest whims and
spitefulness. He took delight in degrading people and treat-
ing them with complete contempt; he was satiated and
disgusted with the unsought, unwanted, undeserved love
that surrounded him, he felt the worthlessness of a squan-
dered and disordered life in which he had never given but
always simply taken. Sometimes he went hungry for a
long time just to be able to feel a real appetite again, to
satisfy a desire.

The news spread among his friends that he was ill and
needed peace and solitude. Letters came but he never
read them, and worried people inquired of his servants
about his state of health. But he sat alone and deeply
troubled in his hall above the sea, his life lay empty and
desolate behind him, as barren and devoid of love as the
billowing gray salt sea. His face was hideous as he hud-
dled there in his chair at the high window, holding an ac-
counting with himself. White gulls swept by on the coast

wind, he followed them with eyes empty of all joy and
sympathy. As he reached the conclusion of his medita-
tions and summoned his valet, only his lips moved in a
harsh and evil smile. He ordered that all his friends be
invited to a feast on a given day, but his intention was to
terrify and mock them on their arrival with the sight of an
empty house and his own corpse. For he was determined
to end his life by poison.

On the evening before the appointed feast he sent his
whole staff of servants from the house, and the great
rooms fell completely silent. He withdrew to his bedcham-
ber, where he mixed a powerful poison in a glass of Cy-
prus wine and raised it to his lips.

But just as he was about to drink, there was a knocking
at the door, and when he did not reply, the door opened
and a little old man entered. He went straight up to Au-
gustus and carefully took the full glass out of his hands,
and a familiar voice said: "Good evening, Augustus, how
are things going with you?"

Astounded, angered, but also ashamed, Augustus
smiled mockingly and said: "Herr Binsswanger, are you
still alive? It has been a long time, and you actually do not
seem to have grown any older. But at the moment you are
disturbing me, my dear fellow. I am tired and was just
about to take a sleeping potion."

"So I see," his godfather replied calmly. "You are going
to take a sleeping potion and you are right, this is the last
wine that can still help you. But before that we'll chat for
a minute, my boy, and since I have a long journey behind
me, you won't mind if I refresh myself with a small drink."

Whereupon he took the glass and raised it to his lips
and, before Augustus could restrain him, tilted it up and
drained it at a single gulp.

Augustus became deathly pale. He sprang toward his
godfather, shook him by the shoulders, and cried sharply:
"Old man, do you know what you have just drunk?"

Herr Binsswanger nodded his clever gray head and
smiled. "It's Cyprus wine, I see, and it's not bad. You don't
seem to be in want. But I haven't much time and I won't
detain you for long if you will just listen to me."

Disconcerted, Augustus stared into his godfather's
bright eyes with horror, expecting to see him collapse at
any instant.

But Herr Binsswanger simply sat down comfortably on
a chair and nodded benignly at his young friend.

"Are you worried for fear this drink of wine will hurt
me? Now just relax. It's nice of you to be worried about
me. I would never have expected it. But now let's talk
again as we used to in the old days. It seems to me that
you have become satiated with a life of frivolity? I can
understand that, and when I leave, you can refill your
glass and drink it down. But before that I must tell you
something."

Augustus leaned against the wall and listened to the
little old man's good, kind voice, a voice so familiar to him
from childhood that it awoke echoes of the past in his
soul. Deep shame and sorrow overcame him as he looked
back at his own innocent youth.

"I have drunk your poison," the old man went on, "be-
cause I am the one who is responsible for your misery. At

your christening your mother made a wish for you and I
fulfilled it for her, even though it was a foolish wish.
There is no need for you to be told what it was; it has
become a curse, as you yourself have realized. I am sorry
it turned out this way, and it would certainly make me
happy if I could live to see you sitting beside me once
more, at home in front of the hearth, listening to the little
angels singing. That is not easy, and at the moment per-
haps it seems to you impossible that your heart could ever
again be healthy and pure and cheerful. But it is possible,
and I want to beg you to attempt it. Your poor mother's
wish did not suit you well, Augustus. How would it be now
if you allowed me to fulfill a wish for you too, any wish?
Very likely you will not want money or possessions or
power or the love of women, of which you have had
enough. Think carefully, and if you believe you know a
magic spell that could make your wasted life fairer and
better, that could make you happy once more, then wish it
for yourself."

Augustus sat deep in thought and was silent, but he was
too exhausted and hopeless, and so after a while he said:
"I thank you, Godfather Binsswanger, but I believe there is
no comb that can smooth out the tangles of my life. It is
better for me to do what I was planning to do when you
came in. But I thank you, nevertheless, for coming."

"Yes," said the aged man thoughtfully, "I can imagine
that this is not easy for you. But perhaps you can take
thought once more, Augustus, perhaps you will realize
what is now principally lacking, or perhaps you can re-
member those times when your mother was still alive and

when you occasionally came to see me in the evening.
After all, you were sometimes happy, were you not?"

"Yes, in those days," Augustus said, nodding, and the
image of his radiant youth looked back at him from afar,
palely as though out of an antique mirror. "But that can-
not come again. I cannot wish to be a child once more.
Why, then it would begin all over again!"

"No, you are quite right, that would make no sense. But
think once more of the time when we were together back
at home, and of the poor girl whom you used to visit at
night in her father's garden when you were at college, and
think too of the beautiful fair-haired lady with whom you
once traveled on a ship at sea, and think of all the mo-
ments when you have ever been happy and when life
seemed to you good and precious. Perhaps you can recog-
nize what made you happy at those times and can wish
for it. Do so for my sake, my boy!"

Augustus closed his eyes and looked back over his life
as one looks back from a dark corridor toward a distant
point of light, and he saw again how everything had once
been bright and beautiful around him and then had be-
come dimmer and dimmer until he stood now in complete
darkness, and nothing could any longer cheer him. And
the more he thought back and remembered, the more
beautiful and lovable and desirable seemed that little glow-
ing light, and finally he recognized it and tears started
from his eyes.

"I will try," he said to his godfather. "Take away the old
magic which has not helped me and give me instead the
ability to love people!"

Weeping, he knelt before his ancient friend and even as
he sank down he felt his love for this aged man burning
within him and struggling for expression in forgotten
words and gestures. His godfather, that tiny man, took
him up in his arms, carried him to the bed and laid him
down, and stroked his hair and feverish brow.

"That is good," he whispered to him softly. "That is
good, my child, all will be well."

Thereupon Augustus felt himself overwhelmed by a
crushing weariness, as though he had aged many years in
an instant. He fell into a deep sleep, and the old man went
silently out of the empty house.

Augustus was awakened by a wild uproar resounding
through the house, and when he got up and opened his
bedchamber door he found the hall and all the rooms
filled with the friends who had come to his party and
found the place deserted. They were angry and disap-
pointed, and when he went toward them, intending to win
them all back as usual with a smile and a joke, he sud-
denly realized that the power to do this had gone from
him. They had barely caught sight of him when they
all began to scream at him. He smiled helplessly and
stretched out appealing hands in self-defense, but they fell
upon him raging.

"You cheat," one man cried. "Where is the money you
owe me?" And another: "And the horse I loaned you?"
And a beautiful furious woman: "Everybody knows my
secrets now because you've talked about me everywhere.
Oh, how I hate you, you monster!" And a hollow-eyed
young man shrieked, his face distorted with hatred: "You

know what you have made of me, you fiend, you corrupter

of youth!"

And so it went, each one heaping insults and curses on
him—all of them justified—and many striking him; and
after they had left, breaking mirrors as they went and tak-
ing many valuables away with them, Augustus got up
from the floor, beaten and humiliated. When he entered
his bedchamber and looked in the mirror while washing,
his face peered out at him, wrinkled and ugly, the eyes
red and watering, and blood was dripping from his fore-
head.

"That's my reward," he said to himself, as he rinsed the
blood from his face, and hardly had he had time to reflect a
little when uproar broke out once more in the house and a
crowd came storming up the stairway: moneylenders to
whom he had mortgaged his house; a husband whose wife
he had seduced; fathers whose sons he had tempted into
vice and misery; maids and menservants he had dis-
missed, policemen and lawyers. An hour later he sat hand-
cuffed in a patrol wagon on his way to jail. Behind him
the crowd shouted and sang mocking songs, and a street
hoodlum threw a handful of filth through the window into
the prisoner's face.

Then the city reechoed with the shameful deeds of this
man whom so many had known and loved. There was no
sin he was not accused of, none that he denied. People he
had long since forgotten stood before the judges and ac-
cused him of things he had done years before: servants he
had rewarded and who had robbed him revealed his secret
vices, every face was full of loathing and hatred, and there

was no one to speak in his defense, to praise him, to exon-
erate him, to recall any good thing about him.

He did not protest against any of this but allowed him-
self to be led into a cell and out of it again and before the
judges and witnesses. He looked with amazement and sor-
row out of sick eyes at the many evil, angry, hate-filled
faces, and in each he saw under the hatred and distortion
a hidden charm and felt a spark of affection. All these
people had once loved him, and he had loved none of
them; now he begged their forgiveness and sought to re-
member something good about each one of them.

In the end he was sent to prison, and no one ventured to
visit him. Then in his feverish dreams he talked to his
mother and to his first beloved, to his Godfather
Binsswanger and the northern lady on the ship, and when
he awoke and sat lonely and abandoned through the fear-
ful days, he suffered all the pains of longing and isolation
and he yearned for the sight of people as he had never
yearned for any pleasure or possession.

And when he was released from prison, he was sick and
old and no one any longer recognized him. The world
went its way; people rode in carriages and on horseback
and promenaded in the streets; fruits and flowers, toys
and newspapers were offered for sale; and no one turned
to speak to Augustus. Beautiful women whom he had once
held in his arms in an atmosphere of music and cham-
pagne went by in their equipages, and the dust of their
passing settled over Augustus.

But the dreadful emptiness and loneliness that had sti-
fled him in the midst of luxury now had completely disap-

peared. When he paused in the shadow of a gateway to
take shelter for a moment from the heat of the sun, or
when he begged a drink of water in the courtyard of some

modest dwelling, then he was amazed at how sullenly and
ill-temperedly people treated him, the same people who
had earlier responded to his proud and indifferent words
gratefully and with sparkling eyes. Nevertheless, he was
delighted and touched and moved by the sight of every-
one, he loved the children he saw at play and going to
school, and he loved the old people sitting on benches in
front of their little houses, warming their withered hands
in the sun. If he saw some young man following a girl
with yearning glances or a worker returning on a holiday
eve and picking up his children in his arms, or a clever,
fashionable doctor driving by in silence and haste, intent
upon his patients, or equally some poor, ill-clad trollop
waiting by a lamppost, ready to offer even him, the out-
cast, her love, then all these were his brothers and sisters
and each one was stamped with the memory of a beloved
mother and some finer background, or the secret sign of
a higher and nobler destiny, and each was dear and re-
markable in his eyes and gave him food for thought, and
he considered that no one was worse than himself.

Augustus decided to wander through the world and
look for a place where he could be of some service to
people and thus show them his love. He had to get used to
the fact that his appearance no longer made anyone
happy; his cheeks had fallen in, his clothes and shoes
were those of a beggar, even his voice and gait had none of
the engaging quality that had once cheered and delighted

the populace. Children feared him because of his scraggly,
long gray beard, the well-dressed shunned his com-
pany because he made them feel soiled and infected, and
the poor distrusted him as a stranger who might try to
snatch away their few morsels of food. And so it was hard
for him to be of service to anyone. But he learned, and he
allowed nothing to offend him. He helped a little child
stretching out his hand for the latch of a shop which he
could not reach, and sometimes there would be someone
even worse off than himself, a lame man or a blind man
whom he could assist and cheer a little along his road.
And when he could not do that, he cheerfully gave what
little he had, a bright encouraging glance and a brotherly
greeting, a look of understanding and sympathy. He
learned in his wanderings to tell from people's expressions
what they expected of him, what would give them pleas-
ure: for one, a loud cheerful greeting; for another, a quiet
glance; or when someone wanted to be left alone, to be
undisturbed. He was amazed each day at how much mis-
ery there was in the world and how content people could
be nevertheless, and it was splendid and heartening to
him always to find every sorrow followed by laughter, next
to each death knell a child's song, next to every greed and
baseness an act of courtesy, a joke, a comforting word, a
smile.

Human life seemed to him marvelously well arranged.

If he turned a corner and a horde of schoolboys came

bounding toward him, he saw how courage and living joy

and the beauty of youth shone in all their eyes, and if they

teased him and tormented him a little, that was not so

bad; it was even understandable. When he caught sight of
himself in a store window or the pool of a drinking foun-
tain, he saw that he was very wrinkled and shabby. No,
for him it could no longer be a question of pleasing people
or wielding power, he had had enough of that. It was most
edifying to see how others struggled along those paths he
had once followed and believed they were making prog-
ress, and how everyone pursued his goal so eagerly and
with so much vigor and pride and joy—in his eyes this
was a wonderful drama.

Now winter came and then summer once more, and
Augustus lay ill for a long time in a charity hospital, and
here he enjoyed, silently and thankfully, the pleasure of
seeing wretched folk clinging tenaciously to life and tri-
umphing over death. It was marvelous to see the patience
in the faces of those gravely ill, and in the eyes of conva-
lescents the increasing bright joy of life, and beautiful too
were the calm, dignified faces of the dead, and fairer than
all these were the love and patience of the pretty, immacu-
late nurses. But this period too came to an end, the au-
tumn wind blew, and Augustus wandered forth in the face
of winter. A strange impatience took possession of him,
now that he saw how infinitely slow his progress was, for
he still wanted to visit all sorts of places and to look into so
many, many people's eyes. His hair had turned gray and
his eyes smiled weakly behind red, inflamed lids; gradu-
ally his memory too grew clouded so that it seemed to him
as though he had never seen the world other than it was
on that day. But he was content with it and found it alto-
gether splendid and deserving of love.

At the beginning of winter, he came to a city. Snow was
drifting through the dark streets, and a few belated street
urchins threw snowballs at the wanderer, but otherwise
an evening hush hung over everything. Augustus was feel-
ing very weary when he came to a narrow street that
seemed familiar, and then another as well. And there he
was, standing in front of his mother's house and that of
his Godfather Binsswanger, both of them small and shabby
in the cold driving snow; but his godfather's one window
was bright shimmering red and friendly in the winter
night.

Augustus went in and knocked at the living-room door.
The little old man came to meet him and led him silently
into the room, where it was warm and quiet, with a bright
little fire burning on the hearth.

"Are you hungry?" his godfather asked.

But Augustus was not hungry, he only smiled and
shook his head.

"But you must be tired," his godfather said, spreading
his old fur rug on the floor, and the two old people hud-
dled there close to each other and looked into the fire.

"You have come a long way," his godfather said.

"Oh, it was beautiful. I'm just tired now. May I sleep
here? Then I will go on tomorrow."

"Indeed, you may. But don't you want to see the angels
dance once more?"

"The angels? Oh, yes, that's something I would dearly
love, if I could be a child again."

"We haven't seen each other in a long time," his godfa-
ther went on. "You have become so good-looking, your

eyes are again as kind and gentle as they were in the old
times when your mother was still alive. It was good of you
to visit me."

The wanderer in his torn clothes sat quietly beside his
friend. He had never before been so weary, and the pleas-
ant warmth and the glow of the fire made his head swim
so that he could no longer distinguish clearly between that
day and earlier times.

"Godfather Binsswanger," he said, "I've been naughty
again and at home Mother cried. You must talk to her and
tell her I'm going to be good from now on. Will you?"

"I will," his godfather said. "But don't worry, she loves
you."

Now the fire had burned down and Augustus was star-
ing into the dim redness with large, sleep-filled eyes as he
had done in his childhood. His godfather took his head in
his lap, a delicate eerie music drifted softly and enchant-
ingly through the darkened room, and a thousand pairs of
tiny glittering spirits hovered and circled happily about
one another in elaborate arabesques in the air. Augustus
watched and listened and opened wide all his child's re-
ceptive sense to this regained paradise.

Once it seemed to him that his mother called, but he
was too weary, and after all his godfather had promised to
speak to her. And when he had fallen asleep, his godfa-
ther folded his hands and sat listening beside the silenced
heart until complete darkness filled the room.

The Poet

The story is told of the Chinese poet Han Fook that
from early youth he was animated by an intense de-
sire to learn all about the poet's art and to perfect himself
in everything connected with it. In those days he was still
living in his home city on the Yellow River and had
become engaged—at his own wish and with the aid of his
parents, who loved him tenderly—to a girl of good family;
the wedding was to be announced shortly for a chosen day
of good omen. Han Fook at this time was about twenty
years old and a handsome young man, modest and of
agreeable manners, instructed in the sciences and, despite
his youth, already known among the literary folk of his
district for a number of remarkable poems. Without being
exactly rich, he had the expectation of comfortable
means, which would be increased by the dowry of his
bride, and since this bride was also very beautiful and vir-
tuous, nothing whatever seemed lacking to the youth's
happiness. Nevertheless, he was not entirely content, for
his heart was filled with the ambition to become a perfect
poet.

Then one evening when a lantern festival was being
celebrated on the river, it happened that Han Fook was
wandering alone on the opposite bank. He leaned against
the trunk of a tree that hung out over the water, and mir-

rored in the river he saw a thousand lights floating and
trembling, he saw men and women and young girls on the
boats and barges, greeting each other and glowing like
beautiful flowers in their festive robes, he heard the girl
singers, the hum of the zither and the sweet tones of the
flute players, and over all this he saw the bluish night
arched like the dome of a temple. The youth's heart beat
high as he took in all this beauty, a lonely observer in pur-
suit of his whim. But much as he longed to go across the
river and take part in the feast and be in the company of
his bride-to-be and his friends, much deeper was his long-
ing to absorb it all as a perceptive observer and to repro-
duce it in a wholly perfect poem: the blue of the night and
the play of light on the water and the joy of the guests and
the yearning of the silent onlooker leaning against the tree
trunk on the bank. He realized that at all festivals and
with all joys of this earth he would never feel wholly com-
fortable and serene at heart; even in the midst of life he
would remain solitary and be, to a certain extent, a
watcher, an alien, and he felt that his soul, unlike most
others, was so formed that he must be alone to experience
both the beauty of the earth and the secret longings of a
stranger. Thereupon he grew sad, and pondered this mat-
ter, and the conclusion of his thoughts was this, that true
happiness and deep satisfaction could only be his if on
occasion he succeeded in mirroring the world so per-
fectly in his poems that in these mirror images he would
possess the essence of the world, purified and made eter-
nal.

Han Fook hardly knew whether he was still awake or

had fallen asleep when he heard a slight rustling and saw
a stranger standing beside the trunk of the tree, an old
man of reverend aspect, wearing a violet robe. Han Fook
roused himself and greeted the stranger with the saluta-
tion appropriate to the aged and distinguished; the stran-
ger, however, smiled and spoke a few verses in which
everything the young man had just felt was expressed so
completely and beautifully and so exactly in accord with
the rules of the great poets that the youth's heart stood still
with amazement.

"Oh, who are you?" he cried, bowing deeply. "You who
can see into my soul and who recite more beautiful verses
than I have ever heard from any of my teachers!"

The stranger smiled once more with the smile of one
made perfect, and said: "If you wish to be a poet, come to
me. You will find my hut beside the source of the Great
River in the northwestern mountains. I am called Master
of the Perfect Word."

Thereupon the aged man stepped into the narrow
shadow of the tree and instantly disappeared, and Han
Fook, searching for him in vain and finding no trace of
him, finally decided that it had all been a dream caused by
his fatigue. He hastened across to the boats and joined in
the festival, but amid the conversation and the music of
the flutes he continued to hear the mysterious voice of the
stranger, and his soul seemed to have gone away with the
old man, for he sat remote and with dreaming eyes among
the merry folk, who teased him for being in love.

A few days later Han Fook's father prepared to sum-
mon his friends and relations to decide upon the day of

the wedding. The bridegroom demurred and said: "For-
give me if I seem to offend against the duty a son owes his
father. But you know how great my longing is to distin-
guish myself in the art of poetry, and even though some of
my friends praise my poems, nevertheless I know very
well that I am still a beginner and still on the first stage of
the journey. Therefore, I beg you to let me go my way in
loneliness for a while and devote myself to my studies, for
it seems to me that having a wife and a house to govern
will keep me from these things. But now I am still young
and without other duties, and I would like to live for a
time for my poetry, from which I hope to gain joy and
fame."

This speech filled his father with great surprise and he
said: "This art must indeed be dearer to you than any-
thing, since you wish to postpone your wedding on ac-
count of it. Or has something arisen between you and your
bride? If so, tell me so that I can help to reconcile you, or
select another girl."

The son swore, however, that his bride-to-be was no less
dear to him than she had been yesterday and always, and
that no shadow of discord had fallen between them. Then
he told his father that on the day of the lantern festival a
Master had become known to him in a dream, and that he
desired to be his pupil more ardently than all the happi-
ness in the world.

"Very well," his father said, "I will grant you a year. In
this time you may pursue your dream, which perhaps was
sent to you by a god."

"It may even take two years," Han Fook said hesitantly.
"Who can tell?"

So his father let him go, and was troubled; the youth,
however, wrote a letter to his bride, said farewell, and de-
parted.

When he had wandered for a very long time, he
reached the source of the river, and in complete isolation
he found a bamboo hut, and in front of the hut on a woven
mat sat the aged man whom he had seen beside the tree
on the river bank. He sat playing a lute, and when he saw
his guest approach with reverence he did not rise or greet
him but simply smiled and let his delicate fingers run over
the strings, and a magical music flowed like a silver cloud
through the valley, so that the youth stood amazed and in
his sweet astonishment forgot everything, until the Master
of the Perfect Word laid aside his little lute and stepped
into the hut. Then Han Fook followed him reverently and
stayed with him as his servant and pupil.

With the passing of a month he had learned to despise
all the poems he had hitherto composed, and he blotted
them out of his memory. And after more months he
blotted out all the songs that he had learned from his
teachers at home. The Master rarely spoke to him; in si-
lence he taught him the art of lute playing until the pupil's
being was entirely saturated with music. Once Han Fook
made a little poem which described the flight of two birds
in the autumn sky, and he was pleased with it. He dared
not show it to the Master, but one evening he sang it out-
side the hut, and the Master listened attentively. However,

he said no word. He simply played softly on his lute and at
once the air grew cool and twilight fell suddenly, a sharp
wind arose although it was midsummer, and through the
sky which had grown gray flew two herons in majestic
migration, and everything was so much more beautiful
and perfect than in the pupil's verses that the latter be-
came sad and was silent and felt that he was worthless.
And this is what the ancient did each time, and when a
year had passed, Han Fook had almost completely mas-
tered the playing of the lute, but the art of poetry seemed
to him ever more difficult and sublime.

When two years had passed, the youth felt a devouring
homesickness for his family, his native city, and his bride,
and he besought the Master to let him leave.

The Master smiled and nodded. "You are free," he said,
"and may go where you like. You may return, you may
stay away, just as it suits you."

Then the pupil set out on his journey and traveled unin-
terruptedly until one morning in the half light of dawn he
stood on the bank of his native river and looked across the
arched bridge to his home city. He stole secretly into his
father's garden and listened through the window of the
bedchamber to his father's breathing as he slept, and he
slipped into the orchard beside his bride's house and
climbed a pear tree, and from there he saw his bride
standing in her room combing her hair. And while he
compared all these things which he was seeing with his
eyes to the mental pictures he had painted of them in his
homesickness, it became clear to him that he was, after

all, destined to be a poet, and he saw that in poets' dreams
reside a beauty and enchantment that one seeks in vain in
the things of the real world. And he climbed down from
the tree and fled out of the garden and over the bridge,
away from his native city, and returned to the high moun-
tain valley. There, as before, sat the old Master in front of
his hut on his modest mat, striking the lute with his fin-
gers, and instead of a greeting he recited two verses about
the blessings of art, and at their depth and harmony the
young man's eyes filled with tears.

Once more Han Fook stayed with the Master of the Per-
fect Word, who, now that his pupil had mastered the lute,
instructed him in the zither, and the months melted away
like snow before the west wind. Twice more it happened
that he was overcome by homesickness. On the one occa-
sion he ran away secretly at night, but before he had
reached the last bend in the valley the night wind blew
across the zither hanging at the door of the hut, and the
notes flew after him and called him back so that he could
not resist them. But the next time he dreamed he was
planting a young tree in his garden, and his wife and chil-
dren were assembled there and his children were watering
the tree with wine and milk. When he awoke, the moon
was shining into his room and he got up, disturbed in
mind, and saw in the next room the Master lying asleep
with his gray beard trembling gently; then he was over-
come by a bitter hatred for this man who, it seemed to
him, had destroyed his life and cheated him of his future.
He was about to throw himself upon the Master and mur-

der him when the ancient opened his eyes and began to
smile with a sad sweetness and gentleness that disarmed
his pupil.

"Remember, Han Fook," the aged man said softly, "you
are free to do what you like. You may go to your home and
plant trees, you may hate me and kill me, it makes very
little difference."

"Oh, how could I hate you?" the poet cried, deeply
moved. "That would be like hating heaven itself."

And he stayed and learned to play the zither, and after
that the flute, and later he began under his Master's guid-
ance to make poems, and he slowly learned the secret art
of apparently saying only simple and homely things but
thereby stirring the hearer's soul like wind on the surface
of the water. He described the coming of the sun, how it
hesitates on the mountain's rim, and the noiseless darting
of the fishes when they flee like shadows under the water,
and the swaying of a young birch tree in the spring wind,
and when people listened it was not only the sun and the
play of the fish and the whispering of the birch tree, but it
seemed as though heaven and earth each time chimed to-
gether for an instant in perfect harmony, and each hearer
was impelled to think with joy or pain about what he
loved or hated, the boy about sport, the youth about his
beloved, and the old man about death.

Han Fook no longer knew how many years he had spent
with the Master beside the source of the Great River; often
it seemed to him as though he had entered this valley only
the evening before and been received by the ancient play-
ing on his stringed instrument; often, too, it seemed as

though all the ages and epochs of man had vanished be-
hind him and become unreal.

And then one morning he awoke alone in the house,
and though he searched everywhere and called, the Mas-
ter had disappeared. Overnight it seemed suddenly to
have become autumn, a raw wind tugged at the old hut,
and over the ridge of the mountain great flights of migra-
tory birds were moving, though it was not yet the season
for that.

Then Han Fook took the little lute with him and de-
scended to his native province, and when he came among
men they greeted him with the salutation appropriate to
the aged and distinguished, and when he came to his
home city he found that his father and his bride and his
relations had died and other people were living in their
houses. In the evening, however, the festival of the lan-
terns was celebrated on the river and the poet Han Fook
stood on the far side on the darker bank, leaning against
the trunk of an ancient tree. And when he played on the
little lute, the women began to sigh and looked into the
night, enchanted and overwhelmed, and the young men
called for the lute player, whom they could not find any-
where, and they exclaimed that none of them had ever
heard such tones from a lute. But Han Fook only smiled.
He looked into the river where floated the mirrored images
of the thousand lamps; and just as he could no longer dis-
tinguish between the reflections and reality, so he found
in his soul no difference between this festival and that
first one when he had stood there as a youth and heard the
words of the strange Master.

Flute Dream

Here," said my father, handing me a small ivory
flute, "take this and don't forget your old father
when you are entertaining people in foreign lands with
your playing. It is now high time for you to see the world
and gain knowledge. I had this flute made for you because
you don't like any other kind of work and always just want
to sing. Only be sure always to choose bright, cheery songs,
otherwise it would be a pity about the gift God has given
you."

My dear father understood little about music, he was a
scholar; he thought all I had to do was blow into the pretty
little flute and that would be that. I did not wish to unde-
ceive him, and so I gave him my thanks, put the flute in
my pocket, and took my departure.

Our valley was familiar to me only as far as the big
farm mill; and so beyond that the world began, and it
pleased me greatly. A bee, tired from flying about, had
lighted on my sleeve; I took her with me so that later on at
my first resting place I would have a messenger ready to
send back home with my greetings.

Woods and meadows accompanied me on my way and
the river ran merrily beside me; I saw that the world was
little different from my home. The trees and flowers, the
ears of corn, and the hazel bushes spoke to me, I sang

their songs with them and they understood me just as at
home; the singing wakened my bee, she crept slowly up to
my shoulder, flew off and circled twice around me with
her deep, sweet buzzing, then steered straight as an arrow
back toward home.

Presently a young girl came strolling out of the woods
carrying a basket on her arm and wearing a broad shade
hat of straw on her blond head.

"Gruss Gott," I said to her, "where are you off to?"

"I'm taking the harvesters their dinner," she said, walk-
ing beside me. "And where are you going today?"

"I am going out into the world, my father sent me. He
thinks I ought to give concerts on the flute, but I don't
really know how, I shall have to learn first."

"Well now. And what can you really do? Everyone has
to be able to do something, after all."

"Nothing special. I can sing songs."

"What kind of songs do you sing?"

"You know, all kinds of songs, for the morning and the
evening, and for all the trees and the animals and the
flowers. Now, for example, I could sing a pretty song
about a young girl coming out of the woods and taking the
harvesters their dinner."

"Could you really? Then go ahead and sing it!"

"Yes, but what's your name?"

"Brigitte."

Then I sang a song about the beautiful Brigitte in her
straw hat and what she had in her basket, and how all the
flowers stared at her, and the blue bindweed in the garden

hedge reached out after her, and all the other particulars.
She paid strict attention and said it was good. And when I
told her I was hungry, she raised the lid of her basket and
got out a piece of bread. I took a bite of it, continuing to
walk rapidly, and she said: "You mustn't run while you're
eating. One thing after the other." And so we sat down in
the grass and I ate my bread, and she clasped her brown
hands around her knees and looked at me.

"Will you sing something else for me?" she asked when
I had finished.

"Of course I will. What shall it be?"

"About a girl whose darling ran away from her and she
is sad."

"No, I can't do that. I don't know what that would be
like, and anyway one oughtn't to be so sad. I must only
sing bright, cheery songs, my father said. I'll sing to you
about the cuckoo bird or the butterfly."

"Then you know nothing at all about love?" she asked.

"About love? Oh, yes, I do. That is the most beautiful
thing of all."

I began at once and sang about the sunbeam that has
fallen in love with the red poppy blossoms and how it
sports with them and is filled with joy. And about the fe-
male finch when she is waiting for the male, and when he
comes she flies away and pretends to be terrified. I sang
further about the girl with brown eyes and about the
youth who comes along and sings and is rewarded with a
piece of bread; but now he does not want any more bread,
he wants a kiss from the girl and wants to look into her

brown eyes, and he will go on singing and will not stop
until she begins to smile and shuts his mouth with her
lips.

Then Brigitte bent over and shut my mouth with her
lips and closed her eyes and then opened them again, and
I looked into the close-up, brown-golden stars in which I
saw myself and a few white meadow flowers reflected.

"The world is very beautiful," I said. "My father was
quite right. Now I will help you carry your basket and we
will take it to your people."

I picked up her basket and we walked on, her footsteps
ringing with mine and her merriment matching my own,
and the forest whispered gently and coolly from the
mountain heights; I had never wandered with so much
joy, I continued to sing gaily for a while until I had to stop
from sheer superabundance: there were just too many
songs coming from valley and mountain, from grass and
trees and river and underbrush, all the whisperings and
the stories.

Then I had to reflect: If I could simultaneously under-
stand and sing all these thousands of songs of the world,
about the grass and flowers and people and clouds and
about everything, the leafy forests and the pine forests
and all the animals, and also about the distant seas and
mountains and the stars and the moon, and if all this
could resound and sing inside me at once, then I would
be God Almighty and each new song would take its place
in the sky as a star.

But while I was thinking this, perfectly still inside,
filled with wonder because such a thing had never come

into my mind before, Brigitte stopped and held me back
by the handle of the basket.

"Now I must go up this way," she said. "Our people are
up there in the field. And you, where are you going? Will
you come with me?"

"No, I cannot come with you. I must go out into the
world. My best thanks for the bread, Brigitte, and for the
kiss. I will think of you."

She took her dinner basket, and across it she once more
bent her eyes upon me in the brown shadow, and her lips
clung to mine and her kiss was so sweet and good that I
almost grew sad from sheer gladness. Then I hastily
called farewell and walked quickly off down the road.

The girl climbed slowly up the mountainside, and
under the hanging foliage of the beech trees at the forest's
edge she stopped and gazed after me, and when I signaled
to her, waving my hat over my head, she nodded once and
disappeared into the shadow of the beeches, as silent as a
picture.

I, however, went on my way absorbed in my own
thoughts until the road turned a corner.

There stood a mill and beside the mill a boat lay in the
water and in it sat a solitary man who seemed to have
been waiting just for me, for as I touched my hat to him
and climbed aboard, the boat immediately began to move
and ran downstream. I sat amidships and the man sat in
the stern at the helm, and when I asked him where we
were going he raised his head and stared at me with veiled
gray eyes.

"Wherever you like," he said in a low tone. "Down-

stream and into the ocean, or to the great cities, you have
your choice. It all belongs to me."

"It all belongs to you? Then you are the King?"

"Perhaps," he said. "And you are a poet, it seems. Then
sing me a song as we travel."

I pulled myself together. Fear filled me because of the
solemn gray man and because our boat moved so fast and
silently down the river. I sang about the river, which car-
ries boats and mirrors the sun and boils up on the rocky
shores and is happy when it completes its wanderings.

The man's face remained expressionless, and when I
stopped singing he nodded as silent as a dreamer, and
then all at once to my astonishment he began to sing him-
self, and he too sang of the river and of the river's journey
through the valleys, and his song was more beautiful and
more powerful than mine, but in it everything sounded
quite different.

The river, as he sang of it, rushed down from the hills
like a roistering vandal, dark and wild; with gnashing
teeth it fought against the constraint of mills and arching
bridges; it loathed every boat it had to carry, and in its
waves and long green waterweed it smilingly cradled the
white corpses of the drowned.

All this pleased me not at all, and yet the sound of it
was so beautiful and mysterious that I became wholly
confused and fell silent in my distress. If what this subtle,
clever old bard was singing in his muted voice was true,
then all my songs were only nonsense and silly child's
play. Then the world at bottom was not good and bright
like God's own heart, but dark and desperate, evil and

somber, and when the woods rustled, it was not from joy
but from pain.

We voyaged on and the shadows lengthened, and each
time I began to sing, it sounded less assured and my voice
grew fainter, and each time the strange singer would an-
swer me with a song that made the world ever more enig-
matic and sorrowful and me ever more oppressed and sad.

My soul ached and I lamented not having stayed on
shore with the flowers or with beautiful Brigitte, and to
console myself in the growing dusk I began to sing again
in a loud voice and I sang amid the red glow of evening
the song of Brigitte and her kisses.

Then twilight came and I fell silent, and the man at the
helm sang, and he too sang of love and the pleasures of
love, of brown eyes and of blue eyes, of moist red lips, and
his impassioned singing above the darkling flood was
beautiful and moving, but in his song love too had become
dark and terrifying and a deadly mystery for which men
groped, mad and bleeding in their misery, and with which
they tortured and killed one another.

I gave ear and grew as weary and troubled as though I
had already been underway for years and had traveled
through nothing but sorrow and misery. I felt a constant
faint chilly stream of sorrow and anguish creeping across
to me from the stranger, and into my heart.

"Well then, life is not the highest and best," I cried at
last, bitterly, "but death is. Then I beseech you, sorrowful
King, sing me a song of death!"

The man at the helm now sang about death, and his
singing was more beautiful than anything I had ever

heard. But even death was not the highest and best, even
in death there was no comfort. Death was life, and life
was death, and they were locked together in an eternal,
mad love-battle, and this was the final word and the
meaning of the world, and thence came a radiance that
could glorify all misery, and thence came a shadow that
troubled all joy and beauty and shrouded them in dark-
ness. But from out of this darkness, joy burned more inti-
mately and more beautifully, and love had a deeper glow
within this night.

I listened, and had become perfectly still; there was no
more will in me save that of this strange man. His glance
rested on me calmly and with a certain sad kindliness,
and his gray eyes were full of the sorrow and the beauty of
the world. He smiled at me and then I took heart and
pleaded in my misery: "Oh, let us put about, you! I am
fearful here in the dark and I want to turn back and go
where I can find Brigitte, or home to my father."

The man stood up and pointed into the night, and the
lantern shone bright on his thin, determined face. "There
is no way back," he said solemnly and gently. "One must
continue to go forward if one wants to fathom the world.
And you have already had what is best and finest from the
girl with the brown eyes, and the farther you are from her
the better and finer it will be. But no matter, sail on,
wherever you wish. I will give you my place at the helm!"

I was in deathly despair and yet I saw that he was right.
Full of yearning, I thought of Brigitte and of my home and
of everything that had so recently been near and bright

and my own, and that I had now lost. But now I must take
the stranger's place and man the helm, so it must be.

Therefore, I got up in silence and stepped through the
boat toward the pilot's seat, and the man came toward me
silently, and as we were passing he looked fixedly into my
face and handed me his lantern.

But when I was seated at the helm and had placed the
lantern beside me, I was alone in the boat. I recognized
with a deep shudder that the man had disappeared, and
yet I was not surprised, I had had a premonition. It
seemed to me that the beautiful day of wandering and
Brigitte and my father and my homeland had been only
dreams and that I was old and sorrowful and had already
been voyaging forever and ever on this nocturnal river.

I knew that I must not call the man, and recognition of
the truth came over me like a chill.

To make sure of what I already suspected, I leaned out
over the water and lifted the lantern, and out of the black
watery mirror a face peered up at me, a face with severe
and solemn features and gray eyes, an old knowing face,
and it was I.

And since no way led back, I voyaged forth over the
dark waters deeper into the night.

Strange News
from Another Star

A southern province of our lovely star had suffered
a great calamity. An earthquake accompanied by
fearful thunderstorms and floods had destroyed three
large villages together with all the farms and gardens,
fields and woods. A great many people and animals had
been killed and, saddest of all, there was a total lack of
flowers in adequate quantity to wreathe the dead and ap-
propriately adorn their last resting places.

Whatever could be done was, of course, done promptly.
Immediately after the dreadful hour, messengers bearing
an urgent appeal in the name of charity hurried through
the nearby countryside, and from all the towers in the
province precentors intoned the deeply moving verses
known from of old as the Hymn to the Goddess of Com-
passion, whose strains no man could resist. Sympathizers
and helpers came in throngs from all the cities and towns,
and the unfortunates who were shelterless were showered
with cordial invitations from relations, friends, and even
strangers, to share their homes. Food and clothing,
horses and wagons, tools, stone, and wood, and many
other materials were brought in from all sides, and while
the old men, women, and children were led away by
kindly hands, were comforted and cared for, while the in-
jured were conscientiously washed and bandaged and a

search for the dead was carried out among the ruins, other
people were already at work clearing away fallen roofs,
propping up sagging walls with beams, and preparing for
a swift rebuilding. At first a breath of horror lingered in
the air and there emanated from all the dead a reminder
of grief and admonition to reverent silence, but soon there
came into every countenance and voice a more cheerful
air, a certain muted festiveness: for the common effort in
this urgent undertaking and the very fact of doing some-
thing so handsome and so deserving of thanks reassured
every heart. Whereas the rescuers had begun their work in
awe and silence, shortly a happy voice could be heard here
and there, a subdued song accompanying the shared
labor, and, as might be expected, of all the things sung the
favorites were the two ancient proverbs: "How blessed to
bring aid to one newly afflicted; his heart drinks up kind-
ness as a parched garden drinks up spring rain and re-
sponds with flowers and thanksgiving." And that other:
"The serenity of God flows forth from action partaken of
in common."

But now they were confronted by that lamentable lack
of flowers. To be sure, the dead that had been found first
had been adorned with the flowers and boughs that had
been collected from the ruined gardens. Then people had
fetched all the available flowers from nearby towns. But
the great misfortune was that the three ruined communi-
ties had had the largest and finest gardens of flowers of
that season of the year. People had visited them annually
to see the narcissus and crocuses, which were not to be
found elsewhere in such immense quantities or so care-

fully cultivated or of such marvelously colored varieties.
And all this was now ruined and gone. And so people
stood about in bewilderment, not knowing how the re-
quirements of tradition were to be met for all these dead,
the tradition that every human being and animal must be
adorned at death with the flowers of the season and that
interment be all the richer and more magnificent the more
sudden and tragic the manner of death.

The Eldest of the Province, who had arrived in one of
the first rescue vehicles, soon found himself so over-
whelmed by questions, pleas, and complaints that he had
trouble maintaining his calm cheerfulness. But with an
effort he managed to quiet his heart, and his eyes re-
mained bright and friendly, his voice clear and courteous,
and his lips under his white beard never for an instant lost
the peaceful, kindly smile that became him as a wise man
and a counselor.

"My friends," he said, "a disaster has come upon us
through the will of the gods, who desire to test us. We can
rebuild and return to our brothers everything that has
been destroyed here, and I am grateful to the gods that I at
a great age have been allowed to witness the way you have
all come hither, leaving your own affairs, to help our
brothers. But where will we find the flowers to adorn these
dead beautifully and properly to celebrate their transfor-
mation? For so long as we are alive and present, it must
not happen that a single one of these weary pilgrims is
interred without the proper floral offering. I do not doubt
that you agree."

"Yes," they all cried, "that is our opinion too."

"I knew it," the Eldest said in his fatherly voice. "Now I
shall tell you what we must do, my friends. We must
transport all these weary ones whom we cannot bury to-
day to the great summer temple high in the mountains
where there is still snow. There they will be safe and will
remain unchanged until their flowers can be procured.
But there is only one who can help us obtain so many
flowers at this season. Only the King can do that. There-
fore, one of us must be sent to the King to sue for his

help."

And once more they all nodded and cried: "Yes, yes, to

the King!"

"So be it," the Eldest said, and everyone was happy to
see the radiant smile under his white beard. "But whom
shall we send to the King? He must be young and vigor-
ous, for the journey is long, and we must provide him with
our best horse. However, he must also be handsome and
pure of heart and bright of eye so that the King's heart will
be unable to resist him. He need not say much, but his
eyes must know how to speak. No doubt the best thing
would be to send a child, the handsomest boy in our com-
munity, but how could he make such a trip? You must
help me, my friends, and if there is anyone here who is
willing to undertake this mission or who knows a suitable
person, I beg him to speak up."

The Eldest fell silent, glancing about with his bright

eyes, but no one stepped forward and no voice was raised.

When he had repeated his question a second and then a

third time, there came out of the throng a sixteen-year-old

youth who looked hardly more than a child. He cast his

eyes to the ground and blushed as he saluted the Eldest.

The Eldest looked at him and saw in an instant that
this was the proper messenger. However, he smiled and
said: "It is fine that you wish to be our messenger, but
how comes it that of all this crowd you are the one to vol-
unteer?"

Then the youth raised his eyes to the ancient man and
said: "If there is no other here who wishes to go, then let
me go."

But a man in the crowd shouted: "Send him, Eldest. We
know him. He comes from this village and the earth-
quakes destroyed his flower garden. It was the most beau-
tiful flower garden in our town."

The Eldest looked in kindly fashion into the boy's eyes
and asked: "Are you so grieved about your flowers?"

The youth answered very softly: "I am grieved, but it is
not on that account that I have volunteered. I had a dear
friend and also a beautiful favorite colt, they both were
killed in the earthquake and now they are lying in our hall
and there must be flowers so that they can be buried."

The Eldest blessed him by the laying on of hands, and
very quickly the best horse was chosen for him and he
sprang instantly to the horse's back, tapped him on the
neck and nodded goodbye, then he galloped out of the vil-
lage, straight across the wet, devastated fields and away.

The youth rode all day. To reach the capital and the
King as quickly as he could, he chose the way over the
mountains, and at evening as it was growing dark he was
leading his steed by the reins up a steep path amid woods
and rocks.

A huge dark bird such as he had never seen before flew
in front of him, and he followed it until the bird alighted
on the roof of a little open temple. The youth left his horse
in a forest glade and strode through the wooden pillars
into the simple sanctuary. As sacrificial stone he found
only a boulder set up, a block of black stone of a kind not
to be found in that neighborhood, and on it the strange
symbol of a deity unknown to the messenger: a heart be-
ing devoured by a bird of prey.

To show his reverence to the godhead, he offered as a
gift a blue bellflower he had plucked at the foot of the
mountain and thrust into his buttonhole. Thereupon he
lay down in a corner, for he was very weary and wished to
sleep.

But he could not find sleep, which customarily stood
each night by his bed. The bellflower on the rock or the
black stone itself, or whatever it might be, exuded a pene-
trating, strange, disturbing scent, the uncanny symbol of
the god shone with a spectral radiance in the dark hall,
and on the roof the strange bird sat and from time to time
beat its enormous wings so that there was a rustling in the
trees like a coming storm.

Thus it came about that in the middle of the night the
young man got up and walked out of the temple and
looked up at the bird. The latter beat its wings and stared
at the youth.

"Why are you not asleep?" asked the bird.
"I do not know," the youth said. "Perhaps because I
have learned about sorrow."

"Just what kind of sorrow?"

"My friend and my favorite steed both have perished."

"Is dying so bad, then?" the bird asked disdainfully.

"Oh no, great bird, it is not so bad, it is only a farewell,
but that is not the reason I am sad. The bad thing is that
we cannot bury my friend and my beautiful horse because
we have no more flowers."

"There are worse things than that," the bird said, and
rustled its feathers impatiently.

"No, bird, there is certainly nothing worse. Whoever is
buried without floral offering is debarred from rebirth in
accordance with his heart's desire. And whoever buries
his dead without celebrating the floral festival will see the
shades of his departed in his dreams. You can see how it
is; even now I cannot sleep because my dead are still with-
out flowers."

The bird emitted a rasping screech from its hooked
beak.

"Young man, you are ignorant of sorrow if you have
learned nothing beyond this. Have you never heard tell of
the great evils? Of hatred, murder, and jealousy?"

When he heard these words spoken, the youth felt as
though he were dreaming. Then he bethought himself and
said humbly: "To be sure, O bird, I remember: these
things are written about in the old histories and legends.
But surely that is outside reality, or perhaps it was that
way in the world once a long time ago before there were
any flowers or any kindly gods. Who wants to think of
it!"

The bird laughed softly. Then it stretched itself taller
and said to the boy in its harsh voice: "So now you want to
go to the King, and shall I show you the way?"

"Oh, you know the way," the youth cried happily. "Yes,
if you're willing, please do."

Then the great bird glided silently to the ground, noise-
lessly spread its wings apart, and directed the youth to
leave his horse behind and come with it to the King.

The messenger seated himself and rode on the bird.
"Shut your eyes!" the bird commanded, and the young man
did so, and they flew through the darkness of the sky as
silently and softly as the flight of an owl, only the cold air
whistled around the messenger's ears. And they flew and
flew all night long.

When it was early morning they stopped, and the bird
cried: "Open your eyes," and the youth opened his eyes.
He found himself standing at the edge of a forest, and
beneath him in the first glow of morning lay a glittering
plain, so bright that it dazzled him.

"You will find me here at the edge of the forest again,"
the bird cried. It shot into the sky like an arrow and im-
mediately disappeared in the blue.

A strange feeling came over the young messenger as he
wandered out of the forest into the broad plain. Every-
thing round about him was so different that he did not
know whether he was awake or dreaming. There were
meadows and trees like the ones at home, the sun was
shining, and the wind played in the tall grass, but there
were no people or animals, no dwellings or gardens; in-
stead, it seemed as though an earthquake had occurred

here exactly as in the youth's homeland; ruins of build-
ings, broken branches and uprooted trees, twisted fences
and abandoned farming implements were strewn about,
and suddenly he saw lying in the middle of a field a dead
man in a horrible state of decomposition. The youth felt
revulsion and a touch of nausea rose in his throat, for he
had never before seen such a thing. Not even the dead
man's face had been covered and it was already ravaged
by birds and by decay; the youth gathered leaves and a
few flowers and, with averted eyes, covered the dead coun-
tenance.

An inexpressibly horrible and oppressive smell hung
warm and inescapable over the whole plain. Another
corpse lay near at hand in the grass encircled by a flock of
ravens, and a horse without a head, and bones of men or
animals, and all had been left exposed to the sun, no one
seemed to have thought of floral offerings and burial. The
youth began to fear that an incredible disaster must have
killed each and every person in this land; there were so
many dead that he had to give up picking flowers to cover
their faces. Full of dread, his eyes half closed, he wan-
dered on, and there poured in upon him from all sides car-
rion stench and the smell of blood, and from a thousand
piles of ruins and heaps of dead there welled mightier and
mightier waves of unspeakable misery and sorrow. The
messenger believed he had been caught in a terrifying
dream that was an admonition from the Heavenly Ones
because his own dead were still without floral offerings
and without burial. Then he remembered what the mys-
terious bird on the temple roof had said the night before,

and he seemed once more to hear the harsh voice assert-
ing: "There are many worse things."

Now he realized that the bird had brought him to an-
other star and that everything his eyes saw was real and
true. He recalled the feeling with which sometimes as a
boy he had listened to frightening tales of primeval times.
This special feeling he now experienced again: a shudder-
ing horror, and behind the horror a quiet, happy assur-
ance in his heart, for all this was infinitely remote and
long past. Here everything was like a horror story, this
whole strange world of outrage, corpses, and carrion birds
seemed without sense and without control, subject to in-
comprehensible laws, mad laws according to which the
evil, the absurd, and the ugly always triumphed instead of
the beautiful and good.

And then he caught sight of a living man walking
across the field, a farmer or a farm hand, and he ran
quickly toward him and called out. As the youth drew
near, he was startled and his heart was filled with com-
passion, for this farmer looked frighteningly ugly and
hardly at all like a child of the sun. He appeared to be a
selfish and disgruntled man, a man accustomed to seeing
only what was false and ugly and evil, one who lived con-
stantly in horrifying nightmares. In his eyes and in his
whole face and being, there was no trace of serenity or
kindness, no glimmer of graciousness and trust, these
simplest and most natural of virtues seemed absent in this
unfortunate.

But the youth pulled himself together and with great
friendliness approached the fellow as one distinguished

by misfortune, greeted him in brotherly fashion, and
spoke to him with a smile. The ugly one stood as though
turned to stone, looking with amazement out of great
troubled eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was harsh and
unmusical like the bellowing of cattle; nevertheless, he
could not resist the serenity and undemanding trustful-
ness in the youth's eyes. And when he had stared for a
while at the stranger, there broke over his rude and tor-
mented face a kind of smile or grin—ugly enough but
gentle and amazed, like the first faint smile of a soul re-
born that has just emerged from the lowest regions of the
earth.

"What do you want of me?" he asked.

In accordance with the custom of his homeland, the
youth replied: "I thank you, friend, and I beg you to tell
me whether there is any service I can do for you."

When the farmer was silent, smiling in astonishment
and embarrassment, the messenger said to him: "Tell me,
friend, what has happened here? What is this dreadful
and horrifying thing?" And he gestured round about with
his hand.

The farmer had trouble understanding, and when the
messenger had repeated his question, he said: "Have you
never seen this before? This is war, this is a battlefield."
He pointed to a pile of blackened ruins and cried: "That
was my house," and when the stranger looked with heart-
felt sympathy into the farmer's impure eyes, he lowered
them and stared at the ground.

"Haven't you a king?" the youth went on to ask, and
when the farmer said they had, he asked further: "Then

where is he?" The fellow pointed toward an encampment
that was just visible, remote and tiny in the distance. The
messenger said farewell, placing his hand on the man's
forehead, and departed. The farmer, however, raised both
hands to his forehead, shook his heavy head in perplexity,
and stood for a time staring after the stranger.

The latter ran and ran, past ruins and horrors, until he
came to the encampment. There were armed men every-
where, standing or hurrying about; no one seemed to no-
tice him, and he walked between the men and tents until
he came to the biggest and handsomest tent in the camp,
which was the King's tent. He entered.

Inside, the King was sitting on a simple, low couch, his
mantle beside him, and behind him in deeper shadow
crouched a servant who had fallen asleep. The King sat
bowed over, deep in thought. His face was beautiful and
sad, a shock of gray hair hung over his sun-tanned fore-
head, his sword lay in front of him on the ground. The
youth greeted him with deep reverence, as he would have
greeted his own King, and he stood waiting with arms
crossed on his breast until the King caught sight of him.
"Who are you?" the King asked severely, drawing his
dark brows together, but his glance clung to the pure calm
features of the stranger, and the youth looked at him so
trustingly and so intimately that the King's voice grew
milder.

"I have seen you somewhere before," he said medita-
tively, "or you look like someone I knew in my childhood."
"I am a stranger," said the messenger.

"Then it was a dream," the King said softly. "You re-
mind me of my mother. Speak to me. Explain."

The youth began: "A bird brought me here. In my
country there was an earthquake and so we wanted to
bury our dead and there were no flowers."

"No flowers?" said the King.

"No, no more flowers at all. And it is an ill thing, is it
not, if one has to bury a dead man and cannot celebrate a
flower festival for him; for after all he must enter into his
transformation with splendor and joy."

Then suddenly the messenger remembered how many
unburied dead lay out there on that horrible field, and he
stopped speaking, and the King looked at him and nodded
and sighed heavily.

"I was on my way to our King to ask him for many flow-
ers," the messenger continued. "But when I was in the
temple in the mountains, a great bird came and said that
he would take me to the King, and he brought me through
the air to you. O dear King, it was the temple of an un-
known deity on whose roof the bird sat and there was a
very strange symbol on the altar of this god: a heart being
devoured by a bird of prey. But during the night I had a
conversation with that great bird and now for the first
time I can understand his words, for he said that there
was much, much more suffering and evil in the world
than I knew. And now I am here, and I have crossed that
huge field, and during these hours I have seen infinite
suffering and misfortune—oh, much more than our most
horrible tales contain. Now I have come to you, O King,

and I would like to ask you whether I can be of any service
to you."

The King, who had listened with attention, tried to
smile, but his beautiful face was so sad and embittered
that he could not smile.

"I thank you," he said. "You cannot do me any service.
But you have put me in mind of my mother, and for that I
thank you."

The youth was troubled because the King could not
smile. "You are so sad," he said to him. "Is it because of
this war?"

"Yes," said the King.

The youth could not help breaking a rule of courtesy
toward this heavily burdened and yet, as he felt, noble
man by asking: "But tell me, I beseech you, why do you
carry on such wars on your star? Who is to blame for
them? Are you yourself in part responsible?"

The King seemed angered at this audacity and for a
time stared at the messenger. But he could not continue to
meet with his dark gaze the bright and guileless eyes of
the stranger.

"You are a child," said the King, "and there are things
you cannot understand. War is no one's fault, it occurs of
itself, like storm and lightning, and all of us who have to
fight wars, we are not their originators, we are only their
victims."

"Then no doubt you die very easily?" the youth asked.
"With us at home, to be sure, death is not greatly feared,
and most people approach the transformation willingly

and happily; but never would anyone dare to kill another.
On your star it must be different."

The King shook his head. "It is true that killing is not
rare among us," he said, "but we consider it the worst of
crimes. Only in war is it allowed because in war no one
kills for his own advantage, out of hatred or envy, but all
do only what society demands of them. You are mistaken,
however, if you believe that we die easily. If you look into
the faces of our dead, you will see. They die hard, they die
hard and unreconciled."

The youth listened to all this in astonishment at the
madness and difficulty of the people's way of life on this
star. He would have liked to ask many more questions, but
he knew with certainty that he would never understand
the whole context of these dark and terrifying things; in-
deed, he felt no realAvish to understand them. Either these
pitiable creatures belonged to a lower order, were still
without the bright gods and were ruled by demons, or
some unique mischance, some horrid error, prevailed on
this star. And it seemed to him altogether too painful and
cruel to go on questioning this king, compelling him to
answers and confessions which could only be bitterly hu-
miliating. These people who lived in the dark dread of
death and yet slew one another in masses, whose faces
were composed with such ignoble coarseness as that of
the farmer or with such deep and terrible sorrow as that
of the King, they caused him pain, and yet in their dis-
turbing and shaming fashion they seemed to him so
strange as to be almost laughable, laughable and silly.

But there was one question he could not repress. If
these poor souls, were retarded beings, belated children,
sons of a latter-day outcast star, if their lives passed like a
convulsive shudder and ended in slaughter, if they left
their dead lying in the fields, or even perhaps ate them—
for there had been talk of that in some of those horror
stories of primeval times—then nevertheless there must
be some intimation of the future, a dream of the gods,
something like the seed of soul latent in them; otherwise,
this whole unbeautiful world would indeed be but a mean-
ingless error.

"Forgive me, King," the youth said ingratiatingly, "for-
give me if I put one more question to you before leaving
your astounding country."

"Go ahead and ask," the King said, for to him this stran-
ger seemed a paradox, in many ways he seemed a culti-
vated, mature, and incredibly enlightened spirit, but in
others like a small child whom one must spare and not
take quite seriously.

"O stranger King," the messenger now said, "you have
made me sad. Behold, I come from another country, and
the great bird on the temple roof was right: here with you
there is infinitely more misery than I could ever have im-
agined; a dream of terror, so your life seems to me, and I
do not know whether you are ruled by gods or demons.
Behold, O King, with us there is a legend, and until now I
have considered it mythical nonsense, empty smoke, it is
the legend that once with us too there were such things as
war and murder and despair. These terrifying words
which have long been unknown in our language are to be

found in the old storybooks and to us they sound horrible
and also a little ridiculous. Today I have learned that they
are all true, and I see you and your people doing and
suffering things that I knew only from the dreadful tales
of antiquity. But now tell me: have you not in your souls
an intimation that you are not doing what is right? Have
you not a longing for bright, serene gods, for understand-
ing, for cheerful leaders and mentors? At night do you
never dream of a different and more beautiful life in
which no one wants anything save for the common good?
Where reason and order prevail, where people always
meet one another with cheerfulness and consideration?
Have you never had the thought that the world might be a
single whole and that it might be beneficent and healing
to rely on this presentiment and reverence the whole and
serve it with love? Do you know nothing of what we at
home call music, and the service of God, and blessed-
ness?"

As he listened to these words, the King had bowed his
head. Now he raised it, and his face had changed, it shone
with the faint shimmer of a smile and tears stood in his
eyes.

"Beautiful boy," said the King, "I do not rightly know
whether you are a child or a wise man or perhaps an im-
mortal. But I can tell you that we harbor within our souls
all those things of which you speak. We have a presenti-
ment of happiness, of freedom, of the gods. We have a
legend about a wise man of long ago who perceived the
unity of the world as the harmonious music of the heav-
enly spheres. Does that answer you? Look you, perhaps

you are a saint from the beyond, or you may even be God
himself, even so there is no happiness in your heart, no
power, no will of which there is not a presentiment, a re-
flection, a remote shadow in our hearts too."

And suddenly he drew himself up to his full height, and
the youth stood amazed, for the King's face for a moment
was bathed in a bright, unshadowed smile like the glow of
morning.

"Go now," he cried to the messenger, "go now and leave
us to our wars and our murders! You have made my heart
soft, you have put me in mind of my mother, enough,
enough of this, dear beautiful boy. Go now, flee before the
next battle begins! I shall think of you when blood flows
and cities burn, and I will think of the world as a whole
from which even our blindness and our rage and our ruth-
lessness cannot cut us off. Farewell, and give my greetings
to your star and my greetings to that deity whose symbol
is a heart being devoured by a bird! I know so well that
heart and that bird. And note this, my beautiful friend
from afar: when you think of your friend, when you think
of the poor King embroiled in war, do not think of him
sitting on his couch plunged in misery, but rather think of
him as he stood with tears in his eyes and blood on his
hands and smiled!"

The King raised the flap of the tent with his own hand,
not waking his servant, and let the stranger depart. The
youth, plunged in new thoughts, hurried back across the
plain, and in the evening sunshine he saw on the horizon
a great city in flames, and he made his way over dead men

and the rotting carcasses of horses until it was dark and
he had reached the edge of the forest.

There the great bird was already descending from the
clouds, it took him on its wings and flew back through the
night as silently and softly as the flight of an owl.

When the youth awoke from an unquiet sleep, he was
lying in the little temple in the mountains, and before the
temple in the wet grass stood his horse, whinnying at the
dawn. But about the great bird and about his journey to
another star, about the King and about the battlefield, he
no longer remembered anything at all. All that remained
was a shadow in his soul, a little obscure pain as from a
small thorn, the way helpless sympathy hurts, and a little
unsatisfied wish such as sometimes torments us in dreams
until finally we encounter the person to whom we secretly
long to show our love, whose joy we secretly long to share,
whose smile we secretly long to see.

The messenger mounted his horse and rode all day long
and came to the capital and into the presence of his King,
and he proved to be the right messenger. For the King re-
ceived him with the greeting of grace by touching his fore-
head and exclaiming: "Your eyes have spoken to my
heart, and my heart has assented. Your request is granted
before I have so much as heard it."

Forthwith the messenger received a charter from the
King proclaiming that all the flowers of the whole country
were at his disposal, and companions and outriders and
servants joined him, and horses and wagons appeared,
and when after a few days he made his way around the

mountains, returning home on the level highway to his
province and his town, he was accompanied by wagons
and carts and hampers, horses and donkeys, all bearing
the most beautiful flowers from the gardens and hot-
houses of the north, and there were enough flowers to
wreathe the bodies of the dead and richly adorn their
graves as well as to plant as memorial on each grave a
flower, a bush, and a young fruit tree, as custom de-
mands. And the pain for his friend and his favorite horse
left him and was replaced by a tranquil, happy memory
when he had adorned them too and buried them and over
their graves had planted two flowers, two bushes, and two
fruit trees.

After he had thus performed his duties and assuaged
his heart, the memory of that journey through the night
began to stir in his mind, and he besought those closest to
him for a day of solitude, and sat under the meditation
tree for a day and a night, and spread out in thought, clear
and unwrinkled, the pictures of what had happened to
him on that alien star. As a result he approached the El-
dest one day, begged him for a private conversation, and
told him all.

The Eldest gave ear, sat plunged in thought, and finally
asked: "My friend, did you see all this with your eyes or
was it a dream?"

"I do not know," said the youth. "I believe in fact that it
may have been a dream. However, with your indulgence,
may it be said there seems hardly any difference if these
happenings were presented in actuality to my senses. A
shadow of sadness has remained within me, and in the

midst of joy in life a chilling wind blows upon me from
that distant star. Therefore, I ask you, reverend sir, what
shall I do?"

"Tomorrow go again to the mountains," said the Eldest,
"and to the place where you found the temple. The symbol
of that god of whom I have never heard seems strange to
me, and it may well be that he is a god from another star.
On the other hand, perhaps that temple and its god are so
old that they belong to the times of our earliest forebears,
to those long-ago days when it is said there were still
weapons, horror, and the fear of death among us. Go to
that temple, my friend, and make an offering there of
flowers, honey, and song."

The youth spoke his thanks and followed the directions
of the Eldest. He took a bowl of fine honey such as is set
before the guests of honor at the first Festival of the Bees
in early summer, and he carried his lute with him. In the
mountains he found the place where he had once picked
the blue bellflower, and he found the steep rocky moun-
tain path through the woods where he had led his horse.
But he could not again discover the place of the temple or
the temple itself, or the black sacrificial stone, the wooden
columns, the roof or the great bird on the roof, not that
day and not the next day, and no one could tell him of any
such temple as he described.

So he turned back toward home and when he came to
the Sanctuary of Loving Remembrance, he went in and
offered up the honey, sang a song to the accompaniment
of his lute, and commended to the Deity of Loving Re-
membrance the dream he had had, the temple and the

E

bird, the poor farmer, the dead on the battlefield, and
most especially the King in his war tent. Thereafter, he
went home lightened in heart, hung up on the wall of his
room the symbol of the unity of the worlds, recuperated in
deep sleep from the experiences of the past days, and next
morning began to help his neighbors, who were busy in
garden and field eradicating the last traces of the earth-
quake, singing as they worked.

The Hard Passage

B

back.

eside the dark opening in the cliff at the entrance
to the gorge I stood hesitating, and turned to look

The sun was shining in that pleasant green world,
above the meadows brownish grass blossoms waved and
flickered. It was good to be out there in warmth and well-
loved ease, out where one's soul hummed deep and satis-
fied like a hairy bumblebee in the heavy fragrance and
light; perhaps I was a fool to want to leave all this and
climb up into the mountain range.

My guide touched me gently on the arm. I tore my eyes
away from the beloved landscape, the way a man forcibly
frees himself from a warm bath. Now I saw the gorge ly-
ing in sunless darkness, a little black stream crept out of
the cleft, pale grass grew in small tufts on its bank, in its
bed lay stones that it had tumbled there, stones of all
shades, pale and dead like the bones of creatures that had
died long ago.

"We'll take a rest," I said to the guide.

He smiled indulgently, and we sat down. It was cool,
and out of the rocky entrance flowed a gentle stream of
dark, stone-cold air.

Nasty, nasty to go this way! Nasty to force oneself
through this cheerless rocky entrance, to stride across this

cold brook, to climb up in darkness into this narrow
ragged gorge!

"The way looks horrible," I said in hesitation.

As though from the dying embers of a fire, a strong un-
believable unreasoning hope flared up within me, the hope
that we could perhaps still turn back, that my guide might
even now allow himself to be persuaded, that we might be
spared all this. Yes, why not, really? Wasn't it a thousand
times more beautiful in the place we had just left? Did not
life there flow richer, warmer, more enchanting? And
wasn't I a human being, a childlike, short-lived creature
with a right to some share of happiness, to a cozy corner
in the sun, to the sight of blue sky and flowers?

No, I wanted to stay where I was. I had no wish to play
the hero and martyr! I would be content all my life if I
were allowed to stay in the valley and in the sun.

Already I was beginning to shiver; it was impossible to
linger here for long.

"You're shivering," said the guide. "We had better move
on."

Thereupon he stood up and for a moment stretched to
his full height and looked down at me with a smile; there
was neither derision nor sympathy in the smile, neither
harshness nor compassion. There was nothing there but
understanding, nothing but knowledge. That smile said:
"I know you. I know your fear and how you feel, and I
have by no means forgotten your boastings of yesterday
and the day before. Every rabbity dodge of cowardice your
soul is now indulging in, every flirtatious glance at the

lovely sunshine out there is well known and familiar to
me before you act it out."

With this smile the guide looked at me and took the first
stride into the dark rocky chasm ahead of us, and I hated
him and loved him as a condemned man hates and loves
the ax above his neck. Above all, I hated and despised his
knowledge, his leadership and calmness, his lack of ami-
able weaknesses, and I hated everything in myself that
agreed with him, that approved him, that wanted to be
like him and to follow him.

Already he had taken a number of steps, walking on the
stones through the black brook, and was just on the point
of disappearing from sight around the first bend.

"Stop!" I cried, so full of fear that I was compelled to
think at the same time: If this were a dream, then at this
very moment my terror would dissolve it and I would
wake up. "Stop!" I cried. "I cannot do it, I am not yet
ready."

The guide stopped and looked across at me in silence,
without reproach, but with that dreadful understanding of
his, with that unbearable knowledge and presentiment,
that having-completely-understood-in-advance.

"Would you rather that we turn back?" he asked, and
he had not finished saying the last word when I knew, full
of rebellion, that I would say no, that I would have to say
no. And at the same time, everything long familiar, loved,
and trusted within me cried in desperation: "Say yes, say
yes!" and the whole world and my homeland were chained
like an iron ball to my leg.

I wanted to shout yes, though I knew very well that I
could not do it.

Then with outstretched arm the guide pointed back into
the valley, and I turned around once more toward that
well-loved region. And now what I saw was the most pain-
ful thing that could have happened to me: I saw my be-
loved valleys and fields lying pale and lusterless under a
white enfeebled sun, the colors clashed, false and shrill,
the shadows were a rusty black and without magic, and
the heart had been cut out of everything, everything, the
charm and fragrance were gone—everything smelled and
tasted of things long since over-indulged in to the point of
nausea. Oh, how well I knew all this, how I feared and
hated this horrid trick of the guide, this degradation of
what was dear and pleasant to me, causing the sap and
spirit to drain out of it, falsifying the smells and secretly
poisoning the colors! Oh, I knew this; what was wine but
yesterday, today was vinegar. And the vinegar would
never become wine again. Never again.

I was silent and sad as I followed the guide. He was, of
course, right, now as always. It was a good thing at least
that he remained visibly with me instead—as so often
happened at moments of decision—of disappearing sud-
denly and leaving me alone, alone with that alien voice
inside my breast into which at such times he transformed
himself.

I was silent, but my heart cried passionately: "Only
stay, I will assuredly follow!"

The stones in the brook were horribly slippery; it was
tiring and dizzying to walk like this, step by step on nar-

row wet stones that slipped away and shrank under one's
feet. At the same time the path in the brook began to rise
steeply and the dark cliff walls drew closer together, they
swelled ominously and every corner showed the malicious
intention of clamping down behind us and cutting off our
retreat forever. Over wart-covered yellow rocks ran a vis-
cous slimy sheet of water. No sky above our heads, neither
clouds nor blue.

I walked and walked, following my guide and often
closing my eyes in fear and disgust. Then there was a dark
flower growing beside the path, velvety black with an air
of sadness. It was beautiful and spoke to me familiarly,
but my guide walked faster and I felt that if I lingered for
a single moment, if I bestowed so much as one more
glance on that sad, velvety eye, then my depression and
hopeless gloom would become overwhelming and unen-
durable, and my spirit would remain forever imprisoned
in that mocking region of senselessness and madness.

Wet and dirty, I crept on, and as the damp walls came
closer together above us my guide began to sing his old
chant of consolation. In his strong clear youthful voice he
sang in time to each stride: "I will, I will, I will!" I knew
very well that he wanted to encourage me and spur me on,
he wanted to divert me from the hideous toil and hope-
lessness of this hellish journey. I knew that he was wait-
ing for me to chime in with his singsong. But I refused to
do it, I would not grant him that victory. Was I in any
mood to sing? And wasn't I a human being, a poor simple
fellow who in defiance of his own hearthad been drawn
into situations and deeds which God could not expect of

him? Were not every forget-me-not and every pink al-
lowed to stay where they had grown along the brook, to
bloom and wither after their own fashion?

"I will, I will, I will!" the guide sang uninterruptedly.
Oh, if only I had been able to turn back! But with my
guide's skillful help I had long since clambered over walls
and abysses across which there was no possible return.
Tears burned in my throat but I dared not weep, that least
of all. And so defiantly and loudly I joined in the guide's
song, in the same rhythm and tone but not with his words;
instead I sang determinedly: "I must, I must, I must!" But
it was not easy to sing and climb at the same time, soon I
lost my breath and was forced to fall silent, gasping. But
he went on singing unwearied: "I will, I will, I will," and
in time he compelled me after all to join in singing his
words. Now the climbing was easier and I no longer felt
under compulsion, in fact I wished to go on, and as for
weariness from singing, there was no further trace of
that.

Then there was a brightness inside me and as this in-
creased, the smooth cliff receded too, became drier, be-
came kinder, often aided the slipping foot, and above all
more and more of the clear blue heavens appeared, like a
little blue stream between rocky banks, and soon like a
little blue lake that grew longer and wider.

I tried to exert my will more intensely and more pro-
foundly, and the heavenly lake continued to grow and the
path became more practicable, yes, at times I hurried un-
encumbered over long stretches, easily keeping pace with

my guide. And then unexpectedly I saw the summit close
above us, steep and glittering in the shining sunny air.

A short distance below the summit we crawled out of
the narrow crevasse, sun assailed my dazzled eyes, and
when I opened them again my knees shook with dread, for
I found myself standing free and without support on a
sheer ridge; round about were infinite space and terrifying
blue depths, only the narrow summit towered above us
thin as a ladder. But sky and sun were there once more,
and so we clambered up that last terrifying pitch as well,
step by step, with compressed lips and knotted brows. And
stood on the summit, trivial figures on the sun-warmed
rock in the sharp, bitingly thin air.

That was a strange mountain and a strange summit!
We had reached the top by climbing over completely
naked walls of stone, and on that summit there grew out
of the stone a tree, a sturdy squat tree with several short
powerful branches. There it stood, inconceivably lonely
and strange, hard and unyielding in the rock, with the
cool blue of heaven between its branches. And at the top
of this tree sat a black bird harshly singing.

Quiet dream of brief repose above the world, the sun
blazed, the rock glowed, the tree rose unyielding, the bird
sang harshly. Its harsh song signified: Eternity, Eternity!
The black bird sang, and its blank hard eye stared at us
like a black crystal. Hard to bear was its gaze, hard to bear
its song, and frightful above all were the loneliness and
emptiness of that place, the expanse of the barren heav-
ens. To die was inconceivable bliss, to stay there nameless

pain. Something must happen, at once, instantly; other-
wise, we and the world would turn to stone from sheer
horror. I felt the event wafted toward us hot and oppres-
sive like a puff of wind before a storm. I felt it flickering
over my body and soul like a burning fever. It threatened,
it was coming, it was there.

—Suddenly the bird whirled from its bough, plunged
headlong into space.

With a leap my guide dived into the blue, fell toward
the flashing heavens, flew away.

Now the wave of fate had reached its peak, now it tore
away my heart, now it broke in silence.

And already I was falling, I plunged, leaped, I flew;
wrapped in a cold vortex, I shot, blissful and palpitating
with ecstatic pain, down through infinity to the mother's
breast.

A Dream Sequence

It seemed to me that I had already spent a vast amount
of turgid, unprofitable time in that stuffy salon through
whose northern windows shone the false sea and the imi-
tation fiords, and where nothing attracted or held my at-
tention save the presence of the beautiful, suspect lady
whom I took to be a sinner. In vain I longed to have just
one good look at her face. That face floated dimly amid
loose dark hair, a cloud of sweet pallor and nothing more.
Possibly her eyes were dark brown, I felt some inner rea-
son to expect that; but if so her eyes would not match the
face I was trying to read into that indeterminate pallor,
whose shape I knew lay buried in deep, inaccessible levels
of my memory.

Finally something happened. The two young men en-
tered. They greeted the lady with elaborate courtesy and
were introduced to me. Monkeys, I thought, and was an-
noyed at myself because the pretty, stylish cut and fit of
the reddish-brown jacket one of them was wearing filled
me with shame and envy. A horrible feeling of envy to-
ward the irreproachable, unabashed smiler! "Pull yourself
together!" I commanded inwardly. The two young men
reached indifferently for my extended hand—why had I
offered it?—wearing derisive smiles.

Then I realized that something was wrong about me

and felt a disturbing chill creeping up my legs. I glanced
down and grew pale on seeing that I stood in my stocking
feet, shoeless. Again and again these shabby, miserable,
sordid frustrations and disadvantages! It never happened
to others that they appeared naked or half naked in salons
before a company of the irreproachably correct! Disheart-
ened, I tried at least to conceal my left foot with my right;
as I did, my eyes strayed through the window and I saw
the steep wild blue ocean cliffs threatening with false and
sinister colors and demonic intent. Worried and seeking
help, I looked at the two strangers, full of hatred for these
people and full of a greater hatred for myself—nothing
turned out right for me, that was the trouble. And why did
I feel responsible for that stupid sea? Well, if that was the
way I felt, then I was responsible. Beseechingly I looked
the reddish-brown one in the face, his cheeks shone with
health and careful grooming, and I knew perfectly well
that I was exposing myself to no purpose, that he could
not be influenced.

At that moment he noticed my feet in their coarse dark-
green socks—oh, I could still be thankful there were no
holes in them—and smiled disagreeably. He nudged his
comrade and pointed at my feet. The other, too, grinned
in derision.

"Just look at the sea!" I shouted, gesturing toward the
window.

The man in the reddish-brown jacket shrugged his
shoulders; it did not occur to him to so much as turn to-
ward the window, and he said something to the other
which I only half understood, but it was aimed at me and

had to do with fellows in stocking feet who really ought
not to be tolerated in such a salon. As I listened, the word
"salon" again had for me, as it had in my childhood, the
half-seductive, half-meretricious ring of worldly distinc-
tion.

Close to tears, I bent over to see whether anything could
be done about my feet, and now perceived that they had
slipped out of loose house shoes; at least a very big soft
dark-red bedroom slipper lay behind me on the floor. I
took it in my hand uncertainly, holding it by the heel, still
strongly inclined to weep. It slipped away from me, I
caught it as it fell—meanwhile, it had grown even larger
—and now I held it by the toe.

All at once I had a feeling of inner release and realized
the great value of the slipper, which was vibrating a little
in my hand, weighted down by its heavy heel. How splen-
did to have such a limp red shoe, so soft and heavy! Exper-
imentally I swung it a few times through the air, this was
delicious and flooded me with ecstasy to the roots of my
hair. A club, a blackjack, was nothing in comparison with
my great shoe. Calziglione was the Italian name I called
it.

When I gave the reddish-brown one a first playful blow
on the head with Calziglione, the young irreproachable
fell reeling to the divan, and the others and the room and
the dreadful sea lost all their power over me. I was big and
strong, I was free, and at the second blow to the reddish-
brown one's head there was no longer any contest, there
was no more need for demeaning self-defense in my ac-
tions but simple exultation and free lordly whim. Nor did

I now hate my vanquished foe in the least, I found him
interesting, he was precious and dear to me, after all I was
his master and his creator. For every good blow of my
strange shoe-cudgel shaped that primitive and apelike
head, forged it, rebuilt it, formed it; with every construc-
tive impact it grew more attractive, handsomer, finer,
became my creature and my work, a thing that satisfied
me and that I loved. With a final expert blacksmith's blow
I flattened the pointed occiput just enough. He was fin-
ished. He thanked me and stroked my hand. "It's all
right," I said, waving to him. He crossed his hands over
his breast and said obsequiously: "My name is Paul."

My breast swelled with a marvelous feeling of power, a
feeling that expanded the space about me; the room—no
more talk of "salon"!—shriveled with shame and crept
emptily away. I stood beside the sea. The sea was blue-
black, steel clouds pressed down upon the somber moun-
tains, in the fiords the dark water boiled up foaming,
storm squalls strayed in circles, compulsive and terrify-
ing. I glanced up and raised my hand to signal that the
storm could begin. A bolt of lightning bright and cold ex-
ploded out of the harsh blue, a warm typhoon descended
howling, tumultuous gray forms streamed apart in the
heavens like veined marble. Humpbacked waves rose ter-
rifyingly from the tormented sea, the storm tore spindrift
from their tops and stinging wisps of foam and whipped
them in my face. The benumbed black mountains tore
open eyes full of horror. Their silent cowering together
rang out like a supplication.

In the midst of the magnificent charge of the storm,

mounted on gigantic, ghostly horses, a timid voice spoke
close to me. Oh, I had not forgotten you, pale lady of the
long black hair. I bent over to her and she spoke to me
childishly—the sea was coming, one could not stay there.
I was touched and continued to look at the gentle sinner,
her face was only a quiet pallor amid the encircling twi-
light of her hair, then the chiding waves were already
striking at my knees and at my breast, and the sinner
floated helpless and silent on the rising waters. I laughed
a little, put my arm under her knees, and raised her up to
me. This too was beautiful and liberating, the woman was
strangely light and small, full of fresh warmth and her
eyes were sincere, trusting, and alarmed, and I saw that
she was no sinner at all nor any distant, incomprehensible
lady. No sins, no mystery; she was just a child.

Out of the waves and across the rocks I carried her and
through the rain-darkened, royally grieving park, where
the storm could not reach and where from the bowed
crowns of ancient trees simple, softly human beauty
spoke, pure poems and symphonies, a world of noble inti-
mations and charmingly civilized delights, enchanting
trees painted by Corot and noble rustic woodwind music
by Schubert, which subtly tempted me to the beloved
temple in a momentary upsurge of nostalgia. But in vain;
the world has many voices, and the soul has its hours and
its moments for everything.

God knows how the sinner, the pale woman, the child,
took her leave and disappeared from sight. There was an
outside stairway of stone, there was an entrance gate,
there were servants present, all dim and cloudy as though

behind translucent glass, and something else even more
insubstantial, even more cloudy, figures blown there by
the wind; a note of censure and reproach directed against
me aroused my ire at that storm of shadows. All disap-
peared except the form of Paul, my friend and son Paul,
and in his features was revealed and hidden a face un-
namable and yet infinitely familiar, the face of a school-
mate, the primeval legendary face of a nursemaid,
composed of the good nourishing half-memories of the
fabulous earliest years.

Good heart-comforting darkness, warm cradle of the
soul and lost homeland, opens before me, time of inchoate
being, the first uncertain quiverings above the fountain's
source, beneath which sleep ancient times with their
dreams of tropical forests. Do but feel your way, soul, do
but wander, plunge blindly into the rich bath of guiltless
twilight desires! I know you, timid soul, nothing is more
necessary to you, nothing is so much food, drink, and
sleep for you, as the return to your beginnings. There the
waves roar around you and you are a wave, the forest
rustles and you are the forest, there is no outer, no inner
any more, you fly, a bird in the air, you swim, a fish in the
sea, you breathe in light and are light, taste darkness and
are darkness. We wander, soul, we swim and fly and smile
and, with delicate ghostly fingers, we retie the torn fila-
ments and blissfully unite the disjointed harmonies. We
no longer seek God. We are God. We are the world. We kill
and die along with others, we create and are resurrected
with our dreams. Our finest dream, that is the blue sky,
our finest dream, that is the sea, our finest dream, that is

the starlit night, and is the fish and is the bright happy
light and bright happy sounds—everything is our dream,
each is our finest dream. We have just died and become
earth. We have just discovered laughter. We have just ar-
ranged a constellation.

Voices resound and each is the voice of our mother.
Trees rustle, and each one of them rustled above our
cradle. Roads diverge in a star pattern and each road leads
toward home.

The one who had called himself Paul, my creature and
my friend, was there again and had become as old as I
was. He resembled a friend of my youth, but I did not
know which one and therefore I was a little uneasy with
him and showed him a certain courtesy. From this he
drew power. The world no longer obeyed me, it obeyed
him and therefore everything that had preceded had dis-
appeared and collapsed in craven improbability, put to
shame by him who governed now.

We were in a square, the place was called Paris, and in
front of me an iron girder towered into the air; it was a
ladder and on both sides were small iron rungs to which
one could hold with one's hands and on which one could
climb with one's feet. Since Paul desired it, I climbed first
and he beside me on an identical ladder. When we had
climbed as high as a house or a very high tree, I began to
feel frightened. I looked over at Paul, he felt no fear but he
recognized my own and smiled.

For the space of a breath while he smiled and I stared
at him, I was very close to recognizing his face and re-
membering his name, a fissure in the past opened and

split down to my schooldays, back to the time when I was
twelve years old, life's most glorious period when every-
thing was full of fragrance, everything was congenial,
everything was gilded with an edible smell of fresh bread
and an intoxicating shimmer of adventure—Jesus was
twelve years old when he shamed the scribes in the
temple, at twelve we have all shamed our scribes and
teachers, have been smarter than they, more gifted than
they, braver than they. Memories and images pressed in
upon me. Forgotten schoolbooks, detention during the
noon hour, a bird killed with a slingshot, a coat pocket
stickily filled with stolen plums, wild, boyish splashings in
the swimming hole, torn Sunday trousers and torments of
conscience, ardent prayers at night about earthly prob-
lems, marvelous heroic feelings of magnificence on read-
ing verses by Schiller.

It was only a second's lightning flash, avidly hurrying
picture sequences without focus. In the next instant Paul's
face stared at me again, tormentingly half recognized. I
was no longer sure of my age, possibly we were boys. Far-
ther and farther below the narrow rungs of our ladders lay
the mass of streets that was called Paris. But when we
were higher than any tower, our iron girders came to an
end and proved to be surmounted, each of them, by a hori-
zontal board, a minuscule platform. It seemed impossible
to get on top of these. But Paul did it negligently, and I
had to do it too.

Once on top I laid myself flat on the board and looked
down over the edge as though from a high little cloud. My
glance fell like a stone into emptiness and found no goal.

Then my comrade pointed with his hand and I became
fascinated by a marvelous sight that hovered in midair.
There, above a broad avenue at the level of the highest
roofs but immensely far below us, I saw a foreign-looking
company; they seemed to be high-wire dancers and indeed
one of the figures was running to and fro on a wire or rod.
Then I discovered that there were a great many of them,
almost all young girls, and they seemed to me to be gyp-
sies or other nomadic folk. They walked, lay, sat, moved
at the height of the roofs on an airy framework of the
thinnest scaffolding and arborlike poles, they lived there
and were at home in that region. Beneath them the street
could only be imagined, a fine swirling mist extended
from the ground up almost to their feet.

Paul made some remark about it. "Yes," I replied, "it is
pathetic, all those girls."

To be sure, I was much higher than they were, but I
was clinging to my position and they moved lightly and
fearlessly, and I saw that I was too high, I was in the
wrong place. They were at the right height, not on the
ground and yet not so devilishly high and distant as I was,
not among people and yet not so completely isolated;
moreover, there were many of them. I saw very well that
they represented a bliss that I had not yet attained.

But I knew that sooner or later I would have to climb
down my monstrous ladder and the thought of it was so
oppressive that I felt nauseated and could not endure be-
ing up there for another instant. Desperate and shaking
with dizziness, I felt beneath me with my feet for the
rungs of the ladder—I could not see them from the board

—and for hideous minutes hung at that terrifying height
struggling convulsively. No one helped me, Paul was
gone.

In abject fear I executed hazardous kicks and grasp-
ings, and a feeling came over me like a fog, a feeling that
it was not the high ladder or the dizziness that I had to
endure and taste to the full. For almost at once I lost the
sight and form of things, everything turned to fog and
confusion. At one moment I was still hanging dizzily from
the rungs, at the next I was creeping, small and fright-
ened, through narrow underground passages and corri-
dors, then I was wading hopelessly through mud and
dung, feeling the filthy slime rising toward my mouth.
Darkness and obstacles were everywhere. Dreadful tasks
of grave but shrouded purport. Fear and sweat, paralysis
and cold. Hard death, hard birth.

What endless night surrounds us! How many paths of
torment we pursue, go deep into the cavern of our rubble-
filled soul, eternal suffering hero, eternal Odysseus! But
we go on, we go on, we bow ourselves and wade, we swim,
choking in the slime, we creep along smooth noxious
walls. We weep and despair, we whimper in fear and howl
aloud in pain. But we go on, we go on and suffer, we go on
and gnaw our way through.

Out of the seething hellish vapors visibility returned
once more, a short stretch of the dark path was again re-
vealed in the formative light of memory, and the soul
forced its way out of the primeval world into the familiar
circle of known time.

Where was this? Familiar objects gazed at me, I

breathed an atmosphere I recognized. A big room in half
darkness, a kerosene lamp on the table, my own lamp, a
big round table rather like a piano. My sister was there,
and my brother-in-law, perhaps on a visit to me or per-
haps I was with them. They were quiet and worried, full
of concern about me. And I stood in the big dim room,
walked back and forth, stopped and walked again in a
cloud of sadness, in a flood of bitter, choking sadness. And
now I began to look for something, nothing important, a
book or a pair of scissors or something of that sort, and I
could not find it. I took the lamp in my hand, it was heavy,
and I was terribly weary, I soon put it down but then
picked it up again and wanted to go on searching, search-
ing, although I knew it was useless, I would find nothing, I
would only increase confusion everywhere, the lamp
would fall from my hands, it was so heavy, so painfully
heavy, and so I would go on groping and searching and
wandering through the room all my miserable life long.

My brother-in-law looked at me, worried and a little re-
proachful. They can see that I am going mad, I thought
immediately, and picked up the lamp again. My sister
came to me, silent with pleading eyes, full of fear and
love, so that I felt my heart would break, I could say noth-
ing, I could only stretch out my hand and wave her off,
motion to her to stay away, and I thought: Just leave me
alone! Just leave me alone! You cannot know how I feel,
how I suffer, how frightfully I suffer! And again: Leave
me alone! Just leave me alone!

The reddish lamplight dimly flooded the big room, out-
side the trees groaned in the wind. For an instant I seemed

to have a most profound inward vision and sensation of
the night outside: wind and wetness, autumn, the bitter
smell of foliage, fluttering leaves from the elm tree, au-
tumn, autumn! And once more for an instant I was not I
myself but saw myself as though in a picture: I was a pale
haggard musician with flickering eyes named Hugo Wolf
and on this evening I was in the process of going mad.

Meanwhile, I had to go on searching, hopelessly search-
ing, and lifting the heavy lamp onto the table, onto the
chair, onto the bookcase. And I had to defend myself with
beseeching gestures when my sister once more looked at
me sadly and considerately, wanting to comfort me, want-
ing to be near me and help me. The sorrow within me
grew and filled me to the bursting point, and the images
around me were of eloquent, engrossing quality, much
clearer than any ordinary reality; a few autumn flowers
in a glass, with a dark reddish-brown mat beneath it,
glowed with painfully beautiful loneliness, each thing,
even the shining brass base of the lamp, was of an en-
chanted beauty and isolated by fateful separateness, as in
the paintings of the great masters.

I saw my fate clearly. One deeper shade in this sadness,
one further glance from my sister, one more look from the
flowers, the beautiful soulful flowers—and the flood
would come, I would sink into madness. "Leave me! You
do not understand!" On the polished side of the piano a
beam of lamplight was reflected in the dark wood, so
beautiful, so mysterious, so filled with melancholy!

Now my sister rose again and went to the piano. I
wanted to plead with her, I wanted to stop her by mental

power but I could not, no sort of strength went out to her
now from my loneliness. Oh, I knew what was certain to
happen then, I knew the melody that would now inevi-
tably find voice, saying all and destroying all. Monstrous
tension compressed my heart, and while the first burning
tears sprang from my eyes, I threw my head and hands
across the table and listened to and absorbed with all my
senses, and with newly added senses as well, the words
and melody at once, Wolf's melody and the verses;

What do you know, dark treetops,
Of the beauty of olden times?
The homeland beyond the mountains,
How far from us now, how far!

At this, before my eyes and within me the world slid
apart, was swallowed up in tears and tones, impossible to
express the fluidity, the torrent, the beneficence and pain!
O tears, O sweet collapse, blissful melting away! All the
books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing
in comparison with one minute's sobbing when feeling
surges in waves, soul perceives and finds itself in the
depths. Tears are the melting ice of the soul, all angels are
close to one who weeps.

Forgetful of all causes and reasons, I wept my way
down from the heights of unbearable tension into the
gentle twilight of ordinary feelings, without thoughts,
without witnesses. In between, images fluttered: a coffin
in which lay a man very dear and important to me, but I
knew not who. Perhaps you yourself, I thought; then an-
other scene appeared to me from the far pale distance.

Had I not years ago or in an earlier life witnessed a mar-
velous sight: a company of young girls living high in the
air, cloudlike and weightless, beautiful and blissful, float-
ing light as air and rich as string music?

Years flew between, forcing me gently but irresistibly
away from the picture. Alas, perhaps my whole life had
had only this meaning, to see those lovely hovering maid-
ens, to approach them, to become like them! Now they
disappeared in the distance, unreachable, uncompre-
hended, unreleased, wearily encircled by fluttering desire
and despair.

Years drifted down like snowflakes and the world was
changed. I was wandering sadly toward a small house. I
felt wretched, and an alarming sensation in my mouth
preoccupied me, cautiously I poked my tongue at a doubt-
ful tooth, which at once slipped sideways and fell out. The
next one—it, too! A very young doctor was there, to whom
I appealed, holding out one tooth in my fingers beseech-
ingly. He laughed merrily, dismissing me with a deadly
professional glance and shaking his young head—that
doesn't amount to a thing, quite harmless, happens every
day. Dear God, I thought. But he went on and pointed at
my left knee: that's where the trouble was, that was some-
thing quite different and no joking matter. With panic
speed I reached down to my knee—there it was! There
was a hole into which I could thrust my finger, and in-
stead of skin and flesh there was nothing to feel but an
insensitive, soft, spongy mass, light and fibrous as the
substance of wilted plants. O my God, this was destruc-
tion, this was death and disintegration! "So there's nothing

more to be done?" I asked with painstaking friendliness.
"Nothing more," said the young doctor and disappeared.

Exhausted, I walked toward the little house, not as des-
perate as I really should have been, in fact almost indiffer-
ent. Now I had to enter the little house where my mother
was waiting for me—had I not already heard her voice?
Seen her face? Steps led upward, crazy steps, high and
smooth, without a railing, each one a mountain, each a
summit, a glacier. It was certainly too late—perhaps she
had already left, perhaps she was already dead? Had I not
just heard her call again? Silently I struggled with the
steep mountainous steps; falling and bruised, wild and
sobbing, I climbed and strained, supporting myself on
failing arms and knees, and was on top, was at the gate,
and the steps were again small and pretty and bordered by
boxwood. My every stride was sluggish and heavy as
though through slime and glue, no getting on, the gate
stood open, and within, wearing a gray dress, my mother
walked, a little basket on her arm, silently sunk in
thought. Oh, her dark, slightly graying hair in the little
net! And her walk, the small figure! And the dress, the
gray dress—had I completely lost her image for all those
many many years, had I never properly thought of her at
all? There she was, there she stood and walked, only vis-
ible from behind, exactly as she had been, very clear and
beautiful, pure love, pure thoughts of love!

Furiously I waded through the sticky air with paralyzed
gait, tendrils of plants curled round me like thin strong
ropes tighter and tighter, malignant obstacles everywhere,
no getting on! "Mother!" I cried. —But I had no voice

. . . No sound came. There was glass between her and
me.

My mother walked on slowly without looking back, si-
lently involved in beautiful loving thoughts, brushing with
her familiar hand an invisible thread from her dress,
bending over her little basket with her sewing materials.
Oh, that little basket! In it she had once hidden an Easter
egg for me. I cried out desperate and voiceless. I ran and
could not leave the spot! Tenderness and rage consumed
me.

And she walked on slowly through the summerhouse,
stood in the open doorway on the other side, stepped out
into the open. She let her head sink a little to one side,
gently listening, absorbed in thoughts, raised and lowered
the little basket—I recalled a slip of paper I had found as
a boy in her sewing basket, on which she had written in
her flowing hand what she planned to do that day and to
take care of. "Hermann's trousers raveled out—put away
laundry—borrow book by Dickens—yesterday Hermann
did not say his prayers." Rivers of memory, cargoes of
love!

Bound and chained, I stood at the gate, and beyond it
the woman in the gray dress walked slowly away, into the
garden, and disappeared.

Faldum

1. THE FAIR

The road leading to the city of Faldum wound through
upland country, sometimes past forests or broad green
meadows, sometimes past cornfields, and the nearer it
came to the city, the more farms, dairies, gardens, and
country houses it skirted. The sea was too far away to be
seen, and the world seemed to consist of nothing but
gentle hills, pretty little valleys, meadows and woods,
farmlands and vegetable gardens. It was a country amply
supplied with fruit and firewood, milk and meat, apples
and nuts. The villages were charming and clean, the
people on the whole were honest, diligent, and by no
means inclined to dangerous or revolutionary enterprises,
and everyone felt content if his neighbor prospered no
better than himself. This was the nature of Faldum, and
most places in the world are much the same so long as
certain things do not happen to them.

The pretty road to the city of Faldum (the city had the
same name as the country) on this particular morning
had seen since first cockcrow livelier traffic both afoot and
on horseback than at any other time of the year, for this
was the day of the great annual fair in the city and for
twenty miles around there was not a farmer or farmer's

wife, not a master or apprentice or schoolboy, not a man-
servant or maidservant, not a youth or maiden, who had
not been thinking for weeks of the great fair and dream-
ing of going there. Not all could go, of course; someone
had to look after the cattle and little children, the sick and
the old, and whoever had been chosen to stay and take
care of the house and property felt as if he were losing
almost a year of his life and bitterly resented the beautiful
sun that since early morning had shone warm and radiant
in the blue sky of late summer.

Married women and girls hurried along with little bas-
kets on their arms, the young men with clean-shaven
cheeks had carnations or asters in their buttonholes, all
were in Sunday attire, and the schoolgirls' carefully
braided hair still shone wet and lustrous in the sunshine.
Those driving carriages had a flower or a red ribbon tied
around the handles of their whips, and whoever could
afford it had decorated the harness of his horses with
strings of brightly polished brass disks that reached to the
horses' knees. Rack wagons came by with green roofs of
beech boughs arching over them, and crowded under-
neath, people sat with baskets or children in their laps,
most of them singing loudly in chorus. There appeared
now and again a wagon especially gay, with its banners
and paper flowers, red, blue, and white among the green
beech leaves, and from it village music swelled and
echoed and between its boughs in the half shadow glinted
and sparkled golden horns and trumpets. Little children
who had been dragged along since sunrise began to cry
and were comforted by their perspiring mothers, and

many were given lifts by good-natured drivers. An old
woman was pushing twins in a baby carriage, both asleep,
and on the pillow between the sleeping children lay two
beautifully dressed and combed dolls with cheeks no less
round and rosy.

Anyone living along the road who was not going to the
fair that day had an entertaining morning with this con-
tinuous procession of sights. However, these stay-at-
homes were few in number. A ten-year-old youngster sit-
ting on the garden stairs was weeping because he had to
remain with his grandmother, but when he saw a couple
of village boys trotting past he decided that he had sat and
wept long enough and sprang down onto the road to join
them. Not far from there lived an elderly bachelor who
didn't want to hear a thing about the fair because he be-
grudged the money. He had planned, while everybody was
away celebrating that day, to trim the high whitethorn
hedge around his garden in peace and quiet, for the hedge
needed it, and hardly had the morning dew begun to evap-
orate when he had gone cheerily to work with his long
hedge shears. But he had stopped after barely an hour and
angrily sought refuge in his house, for no man or boy had
gone past, walking or riding, without looking in aston-
ishment at the hedge-cutter and making some joke about
his ill-timed diligence, at which the girls had giggled; and
when he had threatened them furiously with his long
shears, they had all waved their hats and laughed at him.
Now he was sitting inside behind closed shutters, peering
out enviously through the cracks, but his anger subsided
in time, and as the last few fairgoers bustled and hurried

by as though their lives depended on it, he pulled on his
boots, put a taler in his pouch, picked up his walking
stick, and was about to set out. Then it suddenly occurred
to him that a taler was after all a lot of money; he re-
moved it and instead put a half taler into his leather
pouch and tied it up. He thrust the pouch into his pocket,
locked the house and the garden gate, and ran so fast that
he reached the city ahead of many of the pedestrians and
even overtook two wagons.

With him gone and the house and garden deserted, the
dust over the road gently began to settle; the sound of
hoofs and the band music had faded away in the distance
and already the sparrows were coming out of the fields of
stubble, bathing in the white dust and surveying what was
left over from the tumult. The road lay empty and dead
and hot; from the far distance from time to time, faint
and lost, came a shout or the notes of a horn.

Then a man strolled out of the forest, his broad-
brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, and he wandered
unhurriedly and alone along the empty country road. He
was tall and had the firm quiet stride of a hiker who has
traveled great distances afoot. He was dressed inconspicu-
ously in gray and out of the shadow of his hat his eyes
peered attentive and calm, the eyes of one who desires
nothing more from the world but observes everything
scrupulously and overlooks nothing. He took note of the
innumerable confused wagon tracks running along the
road, the hoof marks of a horse that had thrown the shoe
from its left hind foot; in the distance through the dusty
haze he saw the roofs of the city of Faldum, small and

shimmering, on the top of a hill; he saw a little old
woman, full of anxiety and fear, rushing around a garden
calling to someone who did not answer. On the edge of the
road the sun flashed from a piece of metal and he bent to
pick up a bright round brass disk that had come from a
horse collar. He put this in his pocket. And then he saw
standing beside the road an old whitethorn hedge which
for a few paces had been freshly trimmed; at the start the
work seemed neat and precise as if executed with pleas-
ure, but with each half stride it grew less even and soon a
cut had gone too deep, neglected twigs were sticking up
bristly and thorny. Farther on, the stranger found a child's
doll lying in the road with its head crushed by a wagon
wheel, then a piece of rye bread still gleaming with melted
butter; and finally he found a heavy leather pouch in
which there was a half taler. He leaned the doll against a
curbstone, crumbled up the slice of bread and fed it to the
sparrows, but the pouch with the half taler he thrust into
his pocket.

It was indescribably quiet on the abandoned road, the
turf on either side lay gray with dust in the sun. Nearby in
a farmyard the chickens ran around, with no one to mind,
cackling and stuttering dreamily in the warm sun. An old
woman was stooping over a bluish cabbage patch, pulling
weeds out of the dry soil. The wanderer called to her to
ask how far it was to the city. But she was deaf, and when
he called louder she only looked at him helplessly and
shook her gray head.

As he walked on, from time to time music reached him
from the city, swelling and then dying away, then it came

oftener and for longer periods, and finally it sounded un-
interruptedly, like a distant waterfall, music and a confu-
sion of voices, as though a parliament of mankind were
happily assembled up there. A stream now ran beside the
road, broad and quiet, with ducks swimming on it and
brownish-green waterweed under the blue surface. Then
the road began to climb, the stream curved to one side and
a stone bridge led across it. A thin man who looked like a
tailor was sitting asleep with drooping head on the low
wall of the bridge; his hat had fallen off into the dust and
beside him sat a droll little dog keeping watch. The
stranger was about to waken the sleeper lest he fall off the
wall of the bridge in his sleep. But on looking down he saw
that the height was moderate and the water shallow; and
so he let the tailor go on sleeping undisturbed.

Now after a short steep rise in the road the stranger
came to Faldum's city gate, which stood wide open, with
no one in sight. He strode through, his steps resounding
suddenly and loudly on the paved street where in front of
the houses on both sides stood rows of empty, unhar-
nessed wagons and caleches. From other streets came
noise and confused shouting, but here there was no one,
the little street lay in shadow and only the upper windows
of the houses reflected the golden day. The wanderer sat
down on the pole of a rack wagon for a short rest. When he
got up to leave, he placed on the driver's seat the brass
harness decoration he had found in the road.

He had gone barely a block farther along when he was
engulfed in the noise and confusion of the fair. In a hun-
dred booths dealers loudly hawked their wares, children

blew on silvery trumpets, butchers fished long necklaces
of fresh wet sausages out of huge boiling kettles, a quack
stood on a high platform peering encouragingly through
thick horn-rimmed glasses and pointing to a chart on
which were inscribed all sorts of human diseases and ail-
ments. A man with long black hair walked past, leading a
camel by a rope. The animal looked down arrogantly from
its long neck on the crowds of people and twisted its di-
vided lips back and forth as it chewed.

The man who had come out of the woods looked atten-
tively at all this, allowed himself to be pushed and shoved
along by the people, glanced now into the stand of a dealer
in colored prints, then read sayings and mottoes on
sugared gingerbread, but he lingered nowhere and seemed
not yet to have found what presumably he was looking
for. And so he proceeded slowly and came to the big cen-
tral square, where a bird dealer had set up shop on one
corner. He listened for a while to the voices that came
from the many little cages, and he answered them, whis-
tling softly to the linnet, the quail, the canary, the war-
bler.

Suddenly he saw nearby a bright flash of light, as bril-
liant and blinding as though all the sunshine had been
concentrated at this one point, and when he approached,
it turned out to be a big mirror hanging in an exhibitor's
booth, and beside it were other mirrors, tens and dozens
and more, big, small, rectangular, round, oval, mirrors to
be hung on the wall, mirrors on stands, hand mirrors and
little narrow pocket mirrors that you could have with you
so as not to forget your own face. The dealer was standing

there manipulating a sparkling hand mirror so that the
reflection of the sun danced around his booth; meanwhile,
he shouted tirelessly: "Mirrors, ladies and gentlemen.
This is the place to buy mirrors! The best mirrors, the
cheapest mirrors in Faldum! Mirrors, ladies, magnificent
mirrors! Just take a look at them, all genuine, all of the
best crystal!"

The stranger stopped beside the mirror booth as if he
had found what he was looking for. Among the people in-
specting the mirrors were three young country girls; he
took up a position close to them and saw that they were
fresh, healthy peasants, neither beautiful nor ugly, in
thick-soled shoes and white stockings, with blond, rather
sun-faded plaits and eager young eyes. Each of the three
was holding a mirror in her hand, not one of the large or
expensive ones, and while they hesitated over the pur-
chase and enjoyed the pleasurable torment of choice, each
would gaze forlornly and dreamily into the clear depths of
the mirror, surveying her image, her mouth and eyes, the
little ornament at her throat, the sprinkling of freckles
across the bridge of her nose, the smooth hair, the rosy
ear. They became silent and solemn; the stranger who
was standing just behind them saw their large-eyed, seri-
ous faces peering out of the three mirrors.

"Oh, how I wish," he heard the first one say, "how I
wish I had hair that was all red-gold and long enough to
reach to my knees!"

The second girl, hearing her friend's wish, sighed softly
and looked more intently into her mirror. Then, blushing,

she timidly divulged what her heart dreamed of: "If I had
a wish, I would like to have the prettiest hands, all white
and delicate, with long narrow fingers and rosy finger-
nails." She glanced down at the hand that was holding the
oval mirror; though not ugly, it was rather short and
broad and had become roughened and coarse from work.

The third, the smallest and merriest of the three,
laughed and cried gaily: "That's not a bad wish. But you
know hands aren't so important. What I'd like most is to
be, from today on, the best and nimblest dancer in the
whole country of Faldum."

Then the girl gave a sudden start and turned around,
for out of the mirror, behind her own face, peered a stran-
ger's face with gleaming black eyes, the face of the man
from the forest, whom the three had not seen standing
behind them until now. They stared at him with amaze-
ment as he nodded and said: "You have made three nice
wishes, young ladies. Are you really serious about them?"

The small girl had put down the mirror and hidden her
hands behind her back. She wanted to pay the man back
for startling her, and was trying to think of a sharp re-
joinder; but when she looked into his face, there was such
power in his eyes that she grew confused. "Is it any busi-
ness of yours what I wish?" was all she could say, blush-
ing.

But the one who had wished for beautiful hands was
impressed by the tall man's dignified and fatherly air. She
said: "Yes, indeed, I am serious about it. Could one wish
for anything finer?"

The mirror dealer had approached, other people too
were listening. The stranger pushed back the brim of his
hat so that his smooth high forehead and imperious eyes
were strikingly visible. Now he nodded and smiled at the
three girls and cried: "Just look, now you have everything
you wished for!"

The girls stared at one another, then each looked
quickly into a mirror, and they all grew pale with aston-
ishment and joy. The first one had thick gold locks reach-
ing to her knees. The second held her mirror in the whit-
est, slimmest princess hands, and the third was suddenly
standing in red leather dancing shoes on ankles as slim as
those of a doe. They could not grasp what had happened,
but the one with the beautiful hands burst into blissful
tears, leaned on the shoulder next to her, and wept hap-
pily into her friend's long hair. Now people began shout-
ing, and news of the miracle was cried abroad from the
neighborhood of the booth. A young journeyman who had
seen the whole thing stood there staring at the stranger
with wide-open eyes as though he had been turned to
stone.

"Wouldn't you like to wish something for yourself?" the
stranger suddenly asked him.

The apprentice gave a start, became totally confused,
and let his eyes rove about helplessly, trying to spy some-
thing he could wish for. Then he saw hanging in front of
the pork butcher's booth a great wreath of thick red
knackwurst and he stammered, pointing at it: "A string of
knackwurst like that, that's what I'd like to have!" And be-

hold, there the wreath hung around his neck, and all who
saw it began to laugh and shout, and everyone tried to
press closer, everyone wanting to make a wish, and they
were all allowed to. The next to have a turn was bolder
and wished for a new outfit from top to toe; hardly had he
spoken when he was dressed in brand-new clothing as fine
as the burgermeister's. Then came a country woman who
took her courage in both hands and asked straight out for
ten talers, and forthwith the talers were jingling in her
purse.

Now people saw that in all truth miracles were happen-
ing and at once the news spread from the marketplace
across the city, and a huge group quickly formed around
the booth of the mirror dealer. Many were still laughing
and joking, wouldn't believe a word of it, and made
skeptical remarks. But many had succumbed to the wish
fever and came rushing with glowing eyes and faces hot
and contorted with greed and worry, for each feared that
the source might dry up before he had a chance to partici-
pate. Boys wished for cookies, crossbows, dogs, bags full
of nuts, books, and games of bowls; girls went away
happy with new clothes, ribbons, gloves, and parasols. A
little ten-year-old boy who had run away from his grand-
mother and was quite beside himself with the sheer splen-
dor and glamour of the fair wished in a clear voice for a
live horse, a black one; and forthwith behind him was a
black colt whinnying and rubbing his head affectionately
on the boy's shoulder.

An elderly bachelor with a walking stick in his hand,

quivering with excitement and hardly able to speak a
word, forced his way through the miracle-intoxicated
throng.

"I wi-wish," he stammered, "I wi-wish for myself twice
one hundred—"

The stranger looked at him closely, took a leather pouch
from his pocket, and held it in front of the excited man's
eyes. "Wait a minute!" he said. "Didn't you perhaps lose
this money pouch? There's a half taler in it."

"Yes, I certainly did," cried the bachelor. "That's mine."

"Do you want it back again?"

"Yes, yes, give it here!"

So he got his pouch back again and thus used up his
wish, and when he understood this he went at the stranger
furiously with his cane, but did not succeed in hitting
him; instead, he knocked down one of the mirrors and the
fragments had not yet ceased rattling when the dealer was
standing there demanding money, and the bachelor had
to pay.

Then a corpulent householder stepped forward and
made a capital wish—to wit, a new roof for his house.
Immediately brand-new tiles and whitewashed chimneys
were visible, shining in his street. Then everyone became
feverish again and their wishes were pitched higher, and
soon there was a man who felt no shame in making the
modest wish for a new four-story house on the market-
place, and in a quarter of an hour he was leaning over his
own windowsill and watching the fair from that vantage
point.

It was now really no longer a fair; instead, all the life of

the city, like a river from a spring, flowed only from that
spot beside the mirror booth where one could get a wish
from the stranger. Cries of wonder, envy, or derision
greeted each wish, and when a hungry little boy had
wished for nothing but a hatful of plums, his hat was
filled again with taler pieces by someone who had made a
less modest wish. Great rejoicing and applause broke out
when the fat wife of a storekeeper made use of her wish to
cure herself of a large goiter. But then came an example
of what anger and jealousy can do. The woman's hus-
band, the shopkeeper, who lived in conflict with her and
had just had a fight with her, made use of his own wish,
which might have made him rich, to restore the vanished
goiter to its old place. But the precedent had been set, and
crowds of the sick and infirm were fetched and people fell
into new frenzies as the lame began to dance and the
blind ecstatically greeted the light with reawakened eyes.

Meanwhile, youngsters had run about everywhere an-
nouncing the miraculous happenings. The story was told
of a loyal old cook who was standing at the hearth roast-
ing a goose for her employers when she heard the news
through the open window. She could not resist running off
to the marketplace in order to wish herself rich and happy
for life. But the farther along she pressed in the crowd the
more tormented her conscience became, and when it was
her turn to wish she gave up her plan and only requested
that the goose might not burn up before she got back
home.

The tumult would not cease. Nursemaids came rushing
out of houses with their little ones in their arms, invalids

stormed eagerly into the streets in their nightgowns. In a
state of great confusion and despair, a little old lady made
her way in from the country and when she heard about
the wishing she begged in tears that she might find her
lost grandchild safe and sound. Behold, without an in-
stant's delay there came the boy riding on a little black
horse and fell laughing into her arms.

Finally the whole city was transformed and overcome
by intoxication. Pairs of lovers, their wishes fulfilled,
wandered happily arm in arm; families rode in caleches,
still wearing the old mended clothes they had put on that
morning. Many who were already regretting unwise
wishes had either sadly disappeared or drunk themselves
into forgetfulness at the old fountain in the marketplace,
which a prankster through his wish had supplied with the
best wine.

And in the whole city of Faldum there were only two
people who knew nothing about the miracle and had not
made wishes for themselves. These were two young men
who were behind closed windows high up in an attic room
of an old house on the edge of town. One of them stood in
the middle of the room with a violin under his chin and
played with utter surrender of body and soul; the other sat
in a corner with his head in his hands, totally absorbed in
listening. Through the little windowpanes the beams of
the late afternoon sun obliquely lit a bunch of flowers
standing on the table and played over the torn wallpaper.
The room was completely suffused with warm light and
the glowing tones of the violin, like a little secret treasure
chamber filled with the glitter of gems. The violinist's eyes

were closed and he swayed back and forth as he played.
The listener stared at the floor, lost in the music, as mo-
tionless as though there were no life in him.

Then footsteps sounded in the street and the house gate
was thrown open and someone pounded heavily up the
stairs all the way to the attic room. It was the owner of the
house, who tore the door open and came shouting and
laughing into the room. The music abruptly ceased; the
silent listener leaped up startled and distressed, the violin-
ist too was angry at being disturbed. But the landlord paid
no heed, he swung his arms about like a drunkard and
shouted: "Fools, there you sit fiddling and outside the
whole world is being changed. Wake up and run so you
won't be too late—there's a man in the marketplace who
makes a wish come true for everyone. So you needn't live
under the roof any more and continue to owe me the
miserable bit of rent. Up and away before it's too late! I too
have become a rich man today."

The violinist heard this with astonishment, but since
the man would not leave him in peace, he set his violin
aside and put his hat on his head; his friend followed si-
lently. Barely were they out of the house when they saw
the most remarkable changes in the city. They walked be-
mused, as though in a dream, past houses that only yes-
terday had been gray and askew and mean but now stood
tall and elegant as palaces. People they had known as beg-
gars drove by in four-horse carriages or looked in proud
affluence out of the windows of beautiful homes. An ema-
ciated fellow, who looked like a tailor and was followed by
a tiny dog, was sweating as he wearily dragged behind

him a great heavy sack, from which gold pieces trickled
through a small hole onto the pavement. As though drawn
by some magnet, the two youths arrived in the market-
place and in front of the booth with the mirrors. There
stood the strange man and he said to them: "You're in no
hurry with your wishes. I was just about to leave. Well,
tell me what you want and don't feel any hesitation."

The violinist shook his head and said: "Oh, if they'd
only left me alone! I don't need anything."

"You don't? Think again!" cried the stranger. "You may
wish for anything at all, anything you can think of."

The violinist closed his eyes for a moment and re-
flected. Then he said softly: "I would like a violin on
which I could play so marvelously that the whole world
with its uproar could no longer come near me."

And behold, he was already holding a priceless violin
and a bow in his hands, and he tucked the violin under his
chin and began to play: it sang sweet and strong like the
song of Paradise. Whoever heard it stopped and listened
and his eyes grew solemn. But the violinist, playing more
and more intensely and beautifully, was swept away by
Those Who Are Invisible and disappeared in the air, and
still from a great distance his music came drifting back
with a soft radiance like the glow of sunset.

"And you? What do you wish for yourself?" the
stranger asked the other young man.

"Now you have taken the violinist away from me!" the
youth said. "I want nothing from life but to listen and
watch, and I would like to think only about what is im-

mortal. And so I would like to be a mountain as big as the
countryside of Faldum and so tall that my summit would
tower above the clouds."

Then a thundering began beneath the earth and every-
thing started to shudder. There was a sound of breaking
glass, the mirrors fell one after another into splinters on
the pavement, and the marketplace rose swaying like a
cloth under which a cat has suddenly awakened and is
arching her back. An immense terror seized the people,
thousands fled screaming out of the city into the fields.
But those who remained in the market square saw behind
the city a mighty mountain rising up into the evening
clouds, and they saw the quiet stream transformed into a
wild white torrent that rushed down foaming from high
up on the mountain, with many falls and rapids, into the
valley below.

Only a moment had passed, and the whole countryside
of Faldum had become a gigantic mountain with the city
lying at its foot, and now far away one could see the
ocean. However, no one had been injured.

An old man standing beside the mirror booth, who had
seen the whole thing, said to his neighbor: "The world's
gone mad. I'm glad I haven't much longer to live. Only I'm
sorry about the violinist. I would have liked to hear him
play once more."

"Yes, indeed," said the other. "But tell me, what has be-
come of the stranger?"

They looked all around. He had disappeared. But when
they gazed up at the new mountain they saw the stranger

walking away, his cape waving in the wind; they saw him
stand for an instant, gigantic against the evening sky, and
then vanish behind a cliff.

2. THE MOUNTAIN

Everything perishes, and all new things grow old. That
annual fair was a thing of the past, and many a man who
had wished himself rich on that occasion had long since
grown poor again. The girl with the long red-gold hair had
acquired a husband and children, who themselves had
visited the fair in the city in the late summer of each year.
The girl with the nimble dancing feet had married a mas-
ter workman, she could still dance magnificently, better
than many young people, and although her husband had
wished himself a great deal of money, it looked as though
this merry couple would run through it all within their
lifetimes. But the third girl, the one with the beautiful
hands, it was she who still thought more than anyone else
about the stranger at the mirror booth. Indeed, this girl
had never married and had not grown rich, but she still
had her delicate hands and on their account no longer did
farm work but tended the children of the village wherever
she was needed and told them fairy tales and stories, and
it was from her that all the children had learned about the
miraculous fair and how the poor had become rich and
the countryside of Faldum had become a mountain. When
she told these stories she looked smilingly straight at her
slender princess hands and was so lively and charming that

one could believe there had been no luckier or more splen-
did prize given out at the mirror booth than hers, although
she remained poor and husbandless and had to tell her
beautiful stories to other people's children.

Everyone who had been young at that time was now old,
and whoever had been old then had now died. Only the
mountain was unaltered and ageless, and when the snow-
on its summit sparkled through the clouds, it seemed to
smile and be happy that it was no longer a man and did
not have to reckon in terms of human time. High above
the city shone the mountain's cliffs, its huge shadow
moved each day across the land, its brooks and rivers
brought down advance notice of the waxing and waning
of the seasons, the mountain had become the protector
and father of all. Forests grew on it and meadows with
waving grass and flowers; springs gushed forth from it
and snow and ice and stones, and on the stones grew
bright moss and beside the brooks forget-me-nots. Within
the mountain were caverns where with unchanging mu-
sic water dripped in silver threads year after year from
stone to stone, and in its crevasses were secret chambers
where with millennial patience crystals grew. On the
summit of the mountain no man had ever stood. But
many claimed to know that up there at the very top was a
small round lake in which nothing had ever been mirrored
except the sun, the moon, the clouds, and the stars. Nei-
ther man nor animal had ever looked into this pool which
the mountain held up to the heavens, for even eagles
could not fly so high.

The people of Faldum lived happily in their city and in

the many valleys; they christened their children, they car-
ried on trade and commerce, they bore one another to the
grave. And all that was handed on from forefathers to
grandchildren and continued as a living tradition was
their knowledge and their dreams about the mountain.
Shepherds and chamois hunters, naturalists and bota-
nists, mountain cowherds and travelers increased the
treasure, and the makers of songs and tellers of tales
spread it abroad; they learned of endless Stygian caves, of
sunless waterfalls in hidden chasms, of towering glaciers,
they learned the paths of the avalanches and the tricks of
the weather, and everything the land received by way of
warmth and frost, water and growth, weather and wind,
all came from the mountain.

No one any longer knew about the earlier times. To be
sure, there was the beautiful saga of the miraculous an-
nual fair at which each soul in Faldum had been allowed
to wish for whatever he wanted, but that the mountain
had been formed on that day no one would now believe.
The mountain, they knew for certain, had stood in its
place from the beginning of time and would remain there
for all eternity. The mountain was home, the mountain
was Faldum. But the stories about the three girls and
about the violin player, these the people loved to hear, and
every once in a while there had been here or there a youth
who would lock his door and lose himself in his violin
playing as he dreamed of vanishing in his most beautiful
song like the violin player who had been swept away into
heaven.

The mountain lived on, silent and immense. Each day

it saw the sun rise distant and red out of the ocean and
pursue its circular course past its summit from east to
west, and each night it watched the stars following the
same silent track. Each year winter wrapped it heavily
with snow and ice, and each year in their season the ava-
lanches thundered on their way and at the edges of their
melting snows the bright-eyed summer flowers, blue and
yellow, laughed in the sun and the brooks were in spate
and the lakes shone blue and warm in the sunlight. In
viewless caverns, lost waterfalls roared and the small
round lake high above on the summit lay under heavy ice
and waited all year for the brief period of high summer
when for a few days it opened its bright blue eye to the
sun and for a few nights reflected the stars. Dark caverns
where stood the waters resounded with the unceasing fall
of drops on stone, and in secret shafts the thousand-year-
old crystals grew steadfastly toward perfection.

In the foothills of the mountain, a little higher than the
city, lay a valley through which a broad stream with a
smooth surface flowed between alders and willows.
Thither went the young people who were in love and they
learned from the mountain and the trees the marvel of
the seasons. In another valley men trained with horses
and weapons, and on a high steep promontory a mighty
fire burned each year during the night of the summer sol-
stice.

Ages slipped by and the mountain safeguarded the
lovers' valley and the field of arms, he gave a home to cow-
herds and woodsmen, hunters and lumbermen; he pro-
vided stone for building and iron for smelting. Indifferent

and permissive, he watched the first summer fire blaze on
the promontory and saw it return a hundred times and
many hundred times again. He saw the city down below
reach out with little stumpy arms and grow beyond its an-
cient walls. He saw the hunters discard their crossbows
and take up firearms. The centuries ran past him like the
seasons of the year, and the years like hours.

It caused him no concern that in the long course of
years a time came when the red solstice fire did not blaze
on the smooth rock and from then on remained forgotten.
He was not worried when in the march of the ages the
field of arms was deserted and plantain and thistles over-
grew the lists. And he did nothing to interfere when in the
long course of the centuries a landslide altered his form
and half the city of Faldum was reduced to rubble under
the thundering rocks. He barely glanced down and did not
even notice that the city lay there in ruins and no one re-
built it.

All this disturbed him not at all. But something else did
begin to worry him. The ages had slipped by and, behold,
the mountain had grown old. When he saw the sun rise
and move across the sky and depart, it was not the way it
had once been, and when he saw the stars reflected in the
pale glaciers he no longer felt himself their equal. Neither
the sun nor the stars were any longer especially important
to him; what was important now was what was happen-
ing to himself and within himself. For he could feel deep
beneath his cliffs and caverns an alien hand at work, hard
primitive rock grew friable and weathered into flaky slates
as streams and waterfalls ate their way deeper. The

glaciers had disappeared, the lakes had broadened, forests
had been transformed into boulder fields and meadows
into black moors; the barren ribbons of his moraines ex-
tended vastly far out into the country in pointed tongues,
and the landscape below was strangely altered, had become
oddly stony, blasted and silent. The mountain withdrew
more and more into himself. He was clearly no longer the
equal of the sun and the stars, his equals were wind and
snow, water and ice. Whatever seems eternal and yet
slowly wears away and perishes, that was his equal.

He began to guide his brooks more affectionately down
into the valley, he rolled his avalanches with greater cau-
tion, he offered his flowery meadows more solicitously to
the sun. And it happened that in his advanced age he also
remembered men again. Not that he thought of men as
equals, but he began to look about for them, he began to
feel abandoned and to think about the past. But the city
was no longer there, there were no songs in the valley of
love, and no huts on the mountain peaks. There were no
more men. All had gone. All had grown still, had become
parched, a shadow lay in the air.

The mountain shuddered when he realized what disso-
lution meant; and as he shuddered, his summit bent to
one side and pitched down and the rocky fragments rolled
after it across the valley of love, long since filled up with
stones, down into the sea.

Yes, times had changed. Why was it that just now he
had to remember men and think about them continually?
Had it not once been very beautiful when the fire on the
promontory had burned and the young people in pairs

had wandered through the valley of love? And oh, how
sweet and warm their songs had sounded!

The ancient mountain was wholly sunk in memories,
he hardly noticed the centuries flowing by, how here and
there in his caverns there was subsidence accompanied by
collisions and a soft thundering. When he thought about
men he was pained by a dull echo from past ages of the
world, a not-understood inclination and love, a dim inter-
mittent dream as though once he too had been a man or
like men, had sung and heard others sing, as though the
idea of mortality had once in his earliest days transfixed
his heart.

The ages flowed by. In collapse and surrounded by a
barren wasteland of rubble, the dying mountain gave
himself up to his dreams. How had that once been? Was
there not still a resonance, a slender silver thread that
united him with the bygone world? Laboriously he bur-
rowed in the night of moldering memories, groping cease-
lessly for torn threads, repeatedly bending far out over the
abyss of things past. —Had there not been for him too, in
the very distant ages past, the glow of friendship, of love?
Had not he too, the lonely one, the great one, once been an
equal among equals? —-Had not once at the beginning of
the world a mother sung to him too?

He brooded and brooded, and his eyes, the blue lakes,
grew cloudy and dull and turned into moor and swamp,
and over the strips of grass and little patches of flowers
swept the rolling boulders. He continued to brood, and
from an unimaginable distance he heard a chime ringing,
felt the notes of music around him, a song, a human song,

and he trembled with the painful joy of recognition. He
heard the notes and he saw a man, a youth, wholly envel-
oped in music, poised in midair in the sunny sky, and a
hundred buried memories were aroused and began to
quiver and stir. He saw a human face with dark eyes, and
the eyes asked commandingly: "Do you not want to make
a wish?"

And he made a wish, a silent wish, and as he did so, he
was freed from the torment of having to think about all
those lost and distant things, and everything fell from him
that had caused him pain. The mountain collapsed and
with it the country, and where Faldum had been, the il-
limitable sea tossed and roared, and over it in steady alter-
nation moved the sun and the stars.

Iris

In the springtide of his childhood Anselm used to run
and play in the green garden. One of his mother's
flowers called the sword lily was his special favorite. He
used to press his cheek against the tall, bright-green
leaves, touch their sharp points with exploratory fingers,
deeply inhale the scent of the marvelous large blooms,
and stare into them for minutes at a time. Within, there
were long rows of yellow fingers rising from the pale blue
floor of the flower, and between them ran a bright path far
downward into the calyx and the remote blue mystery of
the blossom. He had a great love for this flower and peer-
ing into it was his favorite pastime; sometimes he saw the
delicate upright yellow members as a golden fence in a
king's garden, sometimes as a double row of beautiful
dream trees untouched by any breeze, and between them,
bright and interlaced with living veins as delicate as glass,
ran the mysterious path to the interior. There at the back
the cavern yawned hugely and the path between the
golden trees lost itself infinitely deep in unimaginable
abysses, the violet vault arched royally above it and cast
thin, magic shadows on the silent, expectant marvel.
Anselm knew that this was the flower's mouth, that be-
hind the luxuriant yellow finery in the blue abyss lived her

heart and thoughts, and that along this lovely shining
path with its glassy veins her breath and dreams flowed to
and fro.

Alongside the tall flower stood smaller ones which had
not yet opened; they rose on firm, sap-filled stems in little
chalices of brownish-yellow skin, out of which the new
blossoms forced their way upward silently and vigorously,
wrapped tight in bright-green and lilac, but at the very top
the new deep violet, erect and neatly rolled, peered out in
delicate points, and even these young, tight-rolled petals
showed a network of veins and a hundred secret signs.

In the morning when he came out of the house, fresh
from sleep and dreams and strange worlds, there stood
the garden waiting for him, never lost yet always new,
and where yesterday there had been the hard blue point of
a blossom tightly rolled, staring out of its green sheath,
now hung thin and blue as air a young petal with a tongue
and a lip, tentatively searching for the curving form of
which it had long dreamed. At the very bottom where it
was still engaged in a noiseless struggle with its sheath,
delicate yellow growth was already in preparation, the
bright veined path and the far-off fragrant abyss of the
soul. Perhaps as early as midday, perhaps by evening, it
would open, the blue silk tent would unfold over the
golden forest, and her first dreams, thoughts, and songs
would be breathed silently out of the magical abyss.

There came a day when the grass was full of blue bell-
flowers. There came a day when suddenly there were new
sounds and a new fragrance in the garden, and over the
reddish, sun-drenched leaves hung the first tea rose, soft

and golden red. There came a day when there were no
more sword lilies. They were gone; there were no more
gold-fenced paths leading gently down into fragrant mys-
teries, and the cool pointed leaves stood stark and un-
friendly. But red berries were ripening in the bushes, and
above the starflowers flew new, unheard-of butterflies,
joyous and unconfined, reddish-brown ones with mother-
of-pearl backs, and whirring, glassy-winged hawk moths.
Anselm talked to the butterflies and the pebbles, he
made friends with the beetles and lizards, birds told him
bird stories, ferns secretly revealed to him under the roof
of their giant fronds their stores of brown seeds; for him
fragments of green and crystal glass, catching the sun's
rays, turned into palaces, gardens, and sparkling treasure
chambers. With the lilies gone, the nasturtiums bloomed;
when the tea roses wilted, then brambles grew brown.
Everything changed places, was always there and always
gone, disappeared and came again in its season, and even
those marvelous frightening days, when the wind
whistled chilly through the pine forest and in the whole
garden the wilted foliage rattled very sear and dead,
brought still another song, a new experience, a story, until
once more all subsided, snow fell outside the windows and
palm forests grew on the panes, angels with silver bells
flew through the evening, and hall and attic were redolent
of dried fruit. Friendship and confidence never failed in
that good world, and when snowdrops unexpectedly shone
beside the black ivy leaves, then it was as though they had
been there all the time. Until one day, never expected and
yet always exactly the way it had to be and always equally

welcome, the first pointed bluish bud peeped out again
from the stem of the sword lily.

To Anselm everything was beautiful, everything was
delightful, friendly, and familiar, but his highest moment
of magic and of grace came each year with the first sword
lily. At some moment in his earliest childhood he had read
in her chalice for the first time the book of marvels, her
fragrance and changing, multifarious blue had been sum-
mons and key to the universe. Thus the sword lily had
gone with him through all the years of his innocence, had
become new with each new summer, richer in mystery
and more moving. Other flowers too had mouths, others
diffused fragrance and thoughts, others too enticed bees
and beetles into their small sweet chambers. But to the
boy the blue lily had become dearer and more important
than any other flower, she was for him the symbol and
example of everything worth contemplating and marvel-
ing at. When he stared into her chalice and in absorption
allowed his thoughts to follow that bright dreamlike path
between the marvelous yellow shrubbery toward the twi-
light interior of the flower, then his soul looked through
the gate where appearance becomes a paradox and seeing
a surmise. Sometimes at night too he dreamed of this
flowery chalice, saw it opening gigantically in front of
him, like the gate of a heavenly palace, and through it he
would ride on horseback, would fly on swans, and with
him flew and rode and glided gently the whole world
drawn by magic into the lovely abyss, inward and down-
ward, where every expectation had to find fulfillment and
every intimation came true.

Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each al-
legory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is
ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you
and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his
life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here
or there along the way; everyone is sometime assailed by
the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that
behind the allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be
sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illu-
sion for the surmised reality of what lies within.

Thus to the boy Anselm the chalice of his flower
seemed to be the open, unvoiced question toward which
his soul was striving in growing anticipation of a blessed
answer. Then the lovely multiplicity of things drew him
away again, in conversation and games with glass and
stones, roots, bushes, animals, and all the friendly pres-
ences of his world. Often he was sunk in deep contempla-
tion of himself, he would sit with closed eyes absorbed in
the marvels of his own body, feeling as he swallowed, as
he sang, as he breathed, strange sensations, impulses, and
intimations in mouth and throat, groping too for the path
and the gate by which soul can go to soul. With amaze-
ment he observed the colored figures full of meaning
which appeared to him out of the purple darkness when
he closed his eyes, spots and half circles of blue and deep
red with glassy-bright lines between. Sometimes Anselm
realized with a happy start the subtle hundredfold inter-
connections between eye and ear, smell and taste; he felt
for beautiful fleeting instants tones, noises, and letters of
the alphabet related and very similar to red and blue, to

hard and soft; or he marveled, as he smelled some plant or
peelings of green bark, at how strangely close smell and
taste lie together and often cross over into one another and
become one.

All children feel this, although not all with the same
intensity and delicacy, and with many the feeling is gone
and as though it had never existed even before they have
learned to read their first letters. Others retain the mystery
of childhood for a long time and a vestige and echo of it
stays with them into the days of white hair and weariness.
All children, as long as they remain within this mystery,
are uninterruptedly occupied in their souls with the single
important thing, with themselves and their paradoxical
relationship to the outside world. Seekers and wise men
return to this preoccupation in their mature years; most
people, however, forget and abandon, early and for good,
this inner world of the truly important, and all their lives
long wander about in the many-colored mazes of wishes,
worries, and goals, none of which has a place in their in-
nermost being and none of which leads them back to their
innermost being or to home.

During Anselm's childhood, summers and autumns
softly came and went, again and again the snowdrops,
wallflowers, violets, lilies, periwinkles, and roses bloomed
and faded, beautiful and luxuriant as always. He lived to-
gether with them; flower and bird, tree and spring listened
to him, and he took his first written letters and the first
woes of friendship in his old fashion to the garden, to his
mother, to the many-colored stones that bordered the
beds.

But then came a spring that did not sound and smell
like all the earlier ones; the blackbird sang and it was not
the old song, the blue iris bloomed and no dreams or fairy
tales drifted out and in along the gold-fenced pathway of
its chalice. Strawberries in hiding laughed from among
the green shadows, butterflies tumbled magnificently
above the woodbine, but nothing was any longer the
way it had always been; the boy had other interests, and
he was frequently at odds with his mother. He himself did
not know what the trouble was or why it hurt so, why
something was always bothering him. He only saw that
the world had changed, that the friendships of earlier
times had fallen away and left him alone.

Thus a year passed, and then another, and Anselm was
no longer a child. The colored stones around the flower-
beds bored him, the flowers were silent, and he kept the
beetles in a case, impaled on pins. The old joys had dried
up and withered, and his soul had begun the long hard
detour.

Boisterously the young man made his way into life,
which seemed to him to have just begun. Blown away and
forgotten was the world of allegory; new desires and new
paths enticed him. The aura of childhood still lingered
about him, in his blue eyes and soft hair, but he was irri-
tated when reminded of it and had his hair cut short and
adopted as bold and worldly an air as he could muster.
Unpredictable, he stormed through the troubling second-
ary-school years, sometimes a good student and friend,
sometimes alone and withdrawn, now buried in books
until late at night, now wild and obstreperous at his first

youthful drinking bouts. He had had to leave home and
saw it only on very brief occasions when he came to visit
his mother. Greatly changed, grown tall, handsomely
dressed, he would bring friends or books with him, always
different ones, and when he walked through the old
garden, it was small and silent under his distraught
glance. He no longer read stories in the many-colored
veins of the stones and the leaves, he no longer saw God
and eternity dwelling in the blue secrecy of the iris blos-
som.

Anselm went to secondary school, then to college; he
came home with a red cap and then with a yellow one,
with fuzz on his upper lip and then with a youthful beard.
He brought books in foreign languages with him and one
time a dog, and in a letter case in his breast pocket he
sometimes carried secret poems, the sayings of ancient
wise men, or pictures of pretty girls and letters from
them. He came back from travels in distant lands and
from sea voyages on great ships. He came back again and
was a young teacher, wearing a black hat and dark
gloves, and his old neighbors tipped their hats to him and
called him professor although he was not yet that. Once
more he came, wearing black clothes, and walked slim
and solemn behind the slowly moving hearse in which his
old mother lay in a flower-covered coffin. And after that he
seldom returned.

In the metropolis where Anselm was now a teacher and
had a high academic reputation, he went about behaving
exactly like other people of the world. He wore a fine hat
and coat, he was serious or genial as the occasion de-

manded, he observed the world with alert but rather
weary eyes, and he was a gentleman and a scholar just as
he had wanted to be. But now things took a new turn for
him, very much as they had at the end of his childhood.
He suddenly felt as if many years had slipped past and
left him standing strangely alone and unsatisfied with a
way of life for which he had always longed. It was no real
happiness to be a professor, it was not really gratifying to
be respectfully greeted by citizens and students, it was all
stale and commonplace. Happiness once more lay far in
the future and the road there looked hot and dusty and
tiresome.

At this time Anselm often visited the house of a friend
whose sister he found attractive. He was no longer in-
clined to run after pretty faces; in this too he had
changed, and he felt that happiness for him must come in
some special fashion and was not to be expected behind
every window. His friend's sister pleased him greatly and
often he thought he truly loved her. But she was a strange
girl; her every gesture, every word, bore her own stamp
and coloring, and it was not always easy to keep pace with
her in exactly the same rhythm. Evenings when Anselm
walked up and down in his lonely home, reflectively lis-
tening to his own footsteps echoing through the empty
rooms, he struggled a great deal within himself about this
woman. She was older than he would have wished his
wife to be. She was odd, and it would be difficult to live
with her and pursue his academic ambitions, with which
she had no sympathy at all. Also she was not very robust
or healthy and in particular could not easily endure com-

pany and parties. By preference she lived in lonely quiet
amid flowers, music, and books, letting the world go its
way or come to her if it must. Sometimes her sensitivity
was so acute that when something alien wounded her she
would burst into tears. Then again she would glow with
some silent and secret happiness, and anyone who saw
her would think how difficult it would be to give anything
to this strange beautiful woman or to mean anything to
her. Sometimes Anselm believed she loved him, some-
times it seemed to him that she loved no one but was
simply gentle and friendly with everyone and wanted
nothing but to be left in peace. But he demanded some-
thing quite different from life, and if he were to marry,
then there must be life and excitement and hospitality in
his home.

"Iris," he said to her, "dear Iris, if only the world were
differently arranged! If nothing at all existed but your
beautiful gentle world of flowers, thoughts, and music,
then I too would wish for nothing at all but to spend my
whole life with you, to hear your stories and to share in
your thoughts. Your very name does me good. Iris is a
wonderful name, and I have no idea what it reminds me
of."

"But you do know," she said, "that the blue and yellow
sword lilies are called that."

"Yes," he replied with an uneasy feeling. "I know it very
well and that in itself is beautiful. But always when I pro-
nounce your name it seems to remind me of something
else, I don't know what, as though it were connected with
some very deep, distant, important memories, and yet I

don't know what they might be and cannot seem to find
out."

Iris smiled at him as he stood there at a loss, rubbing
his forehead with his hand.

"I always feel the same way," she said to Anselm in her
light, birdlike voice, "whenever I smell a flower. My heart
feels as though a memory of something completely beauti-
ful and precious were bound up with the fragrance, some-
thing that was mine a long time ago and that I have lost. It
is that way too with music and sometimes with poems—
suddenly there is a flash for an instant as though all at
once I saw a lost homeland lying below in the valley, but
instantly it is gone again and forgotten. Dear Anselm, I
believe we are on earth for this purpose, for this contem-
plation and seeking and listening for lost, far-off strains,
and behind them lies our true home."

"How beautifully you put it," he said admiringly, and he
felt an almost painful stirring in his breast, as though a
compass hidden there were persistently pointing toward
his distant goal. But that goal was quite different from the
one he had deliberately set for his life, which disturbed
him, for was it, after all, worthy of him to squander his
life in dreams with only pretty fairy tales for pretext?

And one day Herr Anselm came back from one of his
lonely journeys and found his barren scholar's quarters so
chilly and oppressive that he rushed off to his friend's
house, determined to ask beautiful Iris for her hand.

"Iris," he said to her, "I don't want to go on living this
way. You have always been my good friend. I must tell
you everything. I need a wife, otherwise my life seems

empty and meaningless. And whom should I want for a
wife but you, my darling flower? Are you willing, Iris?
You shall have flowers, as many as we can find, you shall
have the most beautiful garden. Are you willing to come to
me?"

Iris looked him in the eye calmly and with deliberation;
she did not smile, she did not blush, and she answered
him in a firm voice.

"Anselm, I am not surprised at your question. You are
dear to me, although I had never thought of being your
wife. But look, my friend, I demand a great deal from the
man I marry. I make greater demands than most women.
You offer me flowers and you mean well by it. But I can
live even without flowers, and without music too; I could
very well do without many other things as well, if it were
necessary. But one thing I cannot and will not do without:
I can never live so much as a single day in such a way that
the music in my heart is not dominant. If I am to live with
a man, it must be one whose inner music harmonizes
beautifully and exactly with mine, and his single desire
must be that his own music be pure and that it blend well
with mine. Can you do that, my friend? Very likely you
will not become more famous this way or garner further
honors, your house will be quiet, and the furrows which I
have seen in your brow for many a year must all be
smoothed out. Oh, Anselm, it will not work. Look, you are
so constituted that you always have to study new furrows
into your forehead, constantly create new worries, and
what I perceive and am, you no doubt love and find pleas-
ant, but for you as for most people it is after all simply a

pretty toy. Oh, listen to me carefully: everything that now
seems a toy to you is life itself to me and would have to
be so to you too, and everything you strive for and worry
about is for me a toy, in my eyes is not worth living for—
I shall not change, Anselm, for I live according to an inner
law, but will you be able to change? And you would have to
change completely if I were to be your wife."

Anselm could not speak, startled by the strength of her
will, which he had always thought weak and frivolous. He
remained silent and thoughtlessly crushed a flower he had
picked up from the table in his nervous hand.

When Iris gently took the flower from him, her action
struck him to the heart, like a sharp rebuke—and then
suddenly she smiled cheerfully and charmingly, as though
she had unexpectedly found a way out of the darkness.

"I have an idea," she said in a gentle voice, and blushed
as she spoke. "You will find it strange, it will seem to you a
whim. But it is no whim. Will you listen to it? And will
you agree that it will decide about you and me?"

Without understanding her, Anselm stared at Iris with
worry in his pale features. Her smile compelled him to
have confidence and say yes.

"I want to give you a task," Iris said, becoming immedi-
ately very serious again.

"Do so, it is your right," Anselm replied.

"This is serious with me," she said, "and it is my last
word. Will you accept it as it comes straight from my soul
and not quibble or bargain about it, even if you don't
understand it right away?"

Anselm promised. Then she said, getting up and giving

him her hand: "Often you have said to me that whenever
you speak my name you are reminded of a forgotten
something that was once important and holy in your eyes.
That is a sign, Anselm, and it is what has drawn you to
me all these years. I too believe you have lost and forgot-
ten something important and holy in your soul, something
that must be reawakened before you can find happiness
and attain what is intended for you. —Farewell, Anselm! I
give you my hand and I beg you: go and make sure you
find again in your memory what it is you are reminded of
by my name. On the day when you have rediscovered that,
I will go with you as your wife wherever you wish and
have no desires but yours."

In confusion and dismay, Anselm tried to interrupt her
and dismiss this demand as a whim, but with one bright
look she reminded him of his promise and he fell silent.
With lowered eyes he took her hand, raised it to his lips,
and left.

In the course of his life he had taken upon himself
many tasks and had carried them out, but none had been
so strange, important, and at the same time dismaying as
this one. Day after day he hurried around concentrating
on it until he was weary, and the time always came when
in despair and anger he denounced the whole undertak-
ing as a crazy feminine notion and rejected it completely.
But then something deep within him disagreed, a very
faint secret pain, a soft, scarcely audible warning. This
low voice, which was in his own heart, acknowledged that
Iris was right and it made the same demand that she did.

However, the task was much too difficult for this man

of learning. He was supposed to remember something he
had long ago forgotten, he was to find once more a single
golden thread in the fabric of the sunken years, he was to
grasp with his hands and deliver to his beloved something
that was no more than a vanished bird song, an impulse
of joy or sorrow on hearing a piece of music, something
finer, more fleeting and bodiless than a thought, more
insubstantial than a dream, as formless as morning mist.

Sometimes when he had abandoned the search and
given up in bad temper, unexpectedly something like a
breath from a distant garden touched him, he whispered
the name Iris to himself ten times and more, softly and
lightly, like one testing a note on a tight string. "Iris," he
whispered, "Iris," and with a faint pain he felt something
stir within him, the way in an old abandoned house a door
swings open without reason or a cupboard creaks. He
went over his memories, which he had believed to be
stored away in good order, and made amazing and star-
tling discoveries. His treasury of memories was a great
deal smaller than he would have surmised. Whole years
were missing, and when he thought back they stood there
as empty as blank pages. He found that he had great diffi-
culty in summoning up a clear image of his mother. He
had completely forgotten the name of a girl whom as a
youth he had hotly courted for a whole year. He happened
to remember a dog he had once purchased on the spur of
the moment and had kept with him for a time; it took him
a whole day to recall the dog's name.

Painfully, with increasing sorrow and fear, the poor fel-
low saw how wasted and empty was the life that lay be-

hind him, no longer belonging to him, alien and with no
relationship to himself, like something once learned by
heart of which one could now only with difficulty retrieve
meaningless fragments. He began to write; he wanted to
set down, going backward year by year, his most impor-
tant experiences so as to have them clearly in mind again.
But what had been his most important experiences?
When he had been appointed professor? When he had re-
ceived his doctorate, been an undergraduate, been a sec-
ondary-school student? Or when once in the forgotten
past this girl or that had for a time pleased him? He
looked up terrified: Was this life? Was this all? He struck
himself on the forehead and laughed bitterly.

Meanwhile, time ran on, never had it fled so inexorably!
A year was gone and it seemed to him that he was in ex-
actly the same position as when he had left Iris. Yet in this
time he had greatly changed, as everyone except himself
recognized. He had become almost a stranger to his ac-
quaintances, he was considered absentminded, peevish,
and odd, he gained a reputation of being an unpredictable
eccentric—too bad about him, but he had been a bachelor
too long. There were times when he forgot his academic
duties and his students waited for him in vain. Deep in
thought, he would sometimes prowl through the streets,
brushing the housefronts and the dust from the window-
sills with his threadbare coat as he passed. Many thought
that he had begun to drink. But at other times he would
stop in the midst of a classroom lecture, attempting to re-
call something; his face would break into an appealing,

childlike smile in a manner entirely new to him, and then
he would go on talking with a warmth of feeling that
touched many of his listeners to the heart.

In the course of his hopeless search for some continuity
among the faint traces of bygone years, he had acquired a
new faculty of which he was not aware. It happened more
and more frequently that behind what he had hitherto
called memories there lay other memories, much as on an
old wall painted with ancient pictures still older ones have
been overpainted and lie hidden and unsuspected. He
would try to recall something, perhaps the name of a city
where he had once spent some days on his travels, or the
birthday of a friend, or anything at all, and while he was
burrowing and searching through a little piece of the past
as though through rubble, suddenly something entirely
different would occur to him. A breath would unexpect-
edly reach him like an April morning breeze or a Septem-
ber mist. He smelled a fragrance, tasted a flavor, felt deli-
cate dark sensations here and there, on his skin, in his
eyes, in his heart, and slowly it came to him that there
must once have been a day, blue and warm or cool and
gray, or whatever kind of day, and the essence of it must
have been caught within him and clung there as a buried
memory. He could not place in the real past that spring or
winter day he distinctly smelled and felt, he could attach
no name or date to it; perhaps it had been during his col-
lege days, perhaps, even, he had been in the cradle, but
the fragrance was there and he knew that something lived
in him which he did not recognize and could not identify

or define. Sometimes it seemed to him as though these
memories might well reach back beyond life into a former
existence, although he would smile at the thought.

Anselm discovered a good deal in his helpless wander-
ings through the abysses of memory. He found much that
touched and gripped him, and much that startled him and
filled him with terror, but the one thing he did not find
was what the name Iris meant to him. In the torment of
his fruitless search he went once to explore his old home,
saw the woods and the streets, the footpaths and fences,
stood in the old garden of his childhood and felt the waves
break over his heart, the past encompassing him like a
dream. Saddened and silent, he returned and with the an-
nouncement that he was ill he had everyone who wanted
to see him turned away.

One, however, insisted on entering, the friend he had
not seen since his courtship of Iris had ended. This friend
found Anselm sitting unkempt in his cheerless study.

"Get up," he said to him, "and come with me. Iris wants
to see you."

Anselm sprang to his feet.

"Iris! What has happened to her? —Oh, I know, I
know!"

"Yes," said his friend, "come with me. She is going to
die. She has been ill for a long time."

They went to Iris, who was lying on a sofa, slender and
light as a child. She smiled luminously with overlarge eyes
and gave Anselm her light white childlike hand, which lay
like a flower in his. Her face was as though transfigured.

"Anselm," she said, "are you angry with me? I set you a

hard task and I see that you have remained faithful. Go on
searching, go on as you have been doing until you find
what you are looking for. You thought you were searching
on my account but you were doing it for yourself. Do you
realize that?"

"I suspected it," Anselm said, "and now I know it. It is a
vast journey, Iris, and I would long since have turned
back, but now I can find no way to do that. I don't know
what is to become of me."

She gazed deep into his sorrowful eyes and smiled en-
couragingly; he bent over her thin hand and wept in si-
lence, and her hand became wet with his tears.

"What is to become of you?" she said in a voice that was
only like a glow of memory. "What is to become of you is
something you must not ask. You have sought many
things in your life. You have sought honor and happiness
and knowledge and you have sought me, your little Iris. All
these were only pretty pictures and they deserted you, as I
must now desert you. It has been the same with me. What
I sought always turned out to be dear and lovely pictures
and they always failed and faded. Now I have no more
pictures, I seek nothing more, I am returning home and
have only one small step to take and then I shall be in my
native land. You too will join me there, Anselm, and then
you will have no more furrows in your brow."

She was so pale that Anselm cried out in despair: "Oh,
wait, Iris, do not go yet. Leave me some sign that you are
not disappearing completely."

She nodded and reached over to a vase beside her and
gave him a fresh, full-blown blue sword lily.

"Here, take my flower, the iris, and do not forget me.
Search for me, search for the iris, then you will come to
me."

Weeping, Anselm held the flower in his hands and
weeping took his leave. When a message from his friend
summoned him, he returned and helped adorn Iris's coffin
with flowers and lower it into the earth.

Then his life fell to pieces around him; it seemed im-
possible for him to go on spinning this thread. He gave
everything up, left his position and the city, and disap-
peared from the world. Here and there he turned up
briefly. He was seen in his native town leaning over the
fence of the old flower garden, but when people inquired
after him and wanted to assist him he was nowhere to be
found.

The sword lily remained dear to him. Whenever he
came upon one, he would bend over it and sink his gaze
into the calyx for a long time and out of the bluish depths
a fragrance and a presentiment of all that had been and
was to be seemed to be rising toward him, until sadly he
went his way because fulfillment did not come. It was as
though he were listening at a half-open door and behind it
the most enchanting secret was being breathed, and just
when he felt that at that very moment everything would
be made plain to him and would be fulfilled, the door
swung shut and the chill wind of the world blew over his
loneliness.

In his dreams his mother spoke to him; her face and
form he had not seen so close and clear for many long
years. And Iris spoke to him, and when he awoke, an echo

lingered in his ears to which he would devote a whole day
of thought. He had no permanent abode. He hurried
through the country like a stranger, slept in houses or in
the woods, ate bread or berries, drank wine or the dew
from the leaves of bushes, but was oblivious to it all. Some
took him for a fool, some for a magician, some feared
him, some laughed at him, many loved him. He acquired
skills he had never had before, like being with children
and taking part in their strange games, or holding conver-
sations with a broken twig or a little stone. Winters and
summers raced by him, he kept looking into the chalices
of flowers and into brooks and lakes.

"Pictures," he said at times to himself, "everything just
pictures."

But within him he felt an essence that was not a picture
and this he followed, and the essence within him at times
would speak, and its voice was the voice of Iris and the
voice of his mother, and it was comfort and hope.

Wonders came his way but did not surprise him. For
example, one winter day he was walking through the
snow in an open field, ice forming in his beard. There in
the snow stood slim and pointed an iris stalk which bore a
single beautiful blossom. He bent over to it and smiled, for
now he realized what it was that Iris had again and again
urged him to remember. He recognized his childhood
dream when he saw between the golden pickets the light-
blue, brightly veined path leading into the secret heart of
the flower, and he knew that this was what he sought, that
this was the essence and not any longer a picture.

And presentiments came to him again, dreams guided

him, and he found a hut where children gave him milk,
and as he played with them they told him stories; they told
him that in the forest near the charcoal burners' huts a
miracle had occurred. There the spirit gate had been seen
standing open, the gate that opens only once in a thou-
sand years. He listened and nodded assent to the cher-
ished picture and went on, a bird in an alder bush sang in
front of him, a bird with a strange sweet note like the
voice of the dead Iris. He followed the bird as it flew and
hopped ahead of him, deep into the forest.

When the bird fell silent and disappeared, Anselm
stopped and looked about him. He was standing in a deep
valley in the forest, water ran softly under broad green
leaves; otherwise, all was silent as if full of expectation.
But in Anselm's breast the bird continued to sing with the
beloved voice and it urged him on until he stood in front
of a cliff overgrown with moss, and in the middle of it was
a gaping fissure that led narrowly into the interior of the
mountain.

In front of the fissure sat an old man who arose when
he saw Anselm approaching and cried: "You there, turn
back! This is the spirit gate. No one has ever returned who
entered here."

Anselm glanced up and into the rocky entrance. There
he saw a blue path disappearing deep inside the mountain
and golden pillars stood close together along both sides
and the path within led downward as though into the
chalice of an enormous flower.

In his breast rose the bird's clear song and Anselm
strode past the guardian into the fissure and between the

golden columns into the blue mystery of the interior. It
was Iris into whose heart he entered, and it was the sword
lily in his mother's garden into whose blue chalice he
softly strode, and as he silently drew closer to the golden
twilight all memory and all knowledge were suddenly at
his command, he felt of his hand and found it small and
soft, voices of love sounded near and familiar in his ears,
and the ring they had and the glow of the golden columns
were like the ring and glow everything had had at that
distant time in the springtide of his childhood.

And the dream he had dreamed as a small boy was his
again, that he was striding into the chalice, and behind
him the whole world of images strode too and glided and
sank into the mystery that lies behind all images.

Softly Anselm began to sing, and his path sloped gently
downward into his homeland.

HERMANN HESSE

Strange News from
Another Star

Translated by Denver Lindley

In 1919, the same year Demian was published, seven of these
stories appeared as a book entitled Marchen—literally, Fairy
Tales. For this first edition in English, we have followed the
arrangement Hesse made for the final collected edition of his
works, where he added an eighth story, "Flute Dream."

The new note so clear in Demian was first sounded, Hesse
believed, in some of these tales written during the years 1913 to
1918, the period that brought him into conflict with supporters
of the war, with his country and its government, with conven-
tional intellectual life, with every form of orthodoxy both in the
world and in himself. Unlike his earlier work, from Peter Cam-
enzind through Knulp, the stories in Strange News from Another
Star do not allow for an essentially realistic interpretation. They
are concerned with dream worlds, the subconscious, magical
thinking, and the numinous experience of the soul. Their subject
is the distilling of wisdom.

The eight stories are "Augustus," "The Poet," "Flute Dream,"
"Strange News from Another Star," "The Hard Passage," "A
Dream Sequence," "Faldum," and—perhaps the masterpiece of
the collection—"Iris."