Marget announced a party, and invited forty people; the date for it
was seven days away. This was a fine opportunity. Marget’s house
stood by itself, and it could be easily watched. All the week it was
watched night and day. Marget’s household went out and in as usual,
but they carried nothing in their hands, and neither they nor others
brought anything to the house. This was ascertained. Evidently rations
for forty people were not being fetched. If they were furnished any
sustenance it would have to be made on the premises. It was true that
Marget went out with a basket every evening, but the spies ascertained
that she always brought it back empty.
The guests arrived at noon and filled the place. Father Adolf followed;
also, after a little, the astrologer, without invitation. The spies had
informed him that neither at the back nor the front had any parcels
been brought in. He entered, and found the eating and drinking going
on finely, and everything progressing in a lively and festive way. He
glanced around and perceived that many of the cooked delicacies and all
of the native and foreign fruits were of a perishable character, and
he also recognized that these were fresh and perfect. No apparitions,
no incantations, no thunder. That settled it. This was witchcraft. And
not only that, but of a new kind--a kind never dreamed of before. It
was a prodigious power, an illustrious power; he resolved to discover
its secret. The announcement of it would resound throughout the
world, penetrate to the remotest lands, paralyze all the nations with
amazement--and carry his name with it, and make him renowned forever.
It was a wonderful piece of luck, a splendid piece of luck; the glory
of it made him dizzy.
All the house made room for him; Marget politely seated him; Ursula
ordered Gottfried to bring a special table for him. Then she decked it
and furnished it, and asked for his orders.
“Bring me what you will,” he said.
The two servants brought supplies from the pantry, together with white
wine and red--a bottle of each. The astrologer, who very likely had
never seen such delicacies before, poured out a beaker of red wine,
drank it off, poured another, then began to eat with a grand appetite.
I was not expecting Satan, for it was more than a week since I had seen
or heard of him, but now he came in--I knew it by the feel, though
people were in the way and I could not see him. I heard him apologizing
for intruding; and he was going away, but Marget urged him to stay,
and he thanked her and stayed. She brought him along, introducing him
to the girls, and to Meidling, and to some of the elders; and there
was quite a rustle of whispers: “It’s the young stranger we hear so
much about and can’t get sight of, he is away so much.” “Dear, dear,
but he is beautiful--what is his name?” “Philip Traum.” “Ah, it fits
him!” (You see, “Traum” is German for “Dream.”) “What does he do?”
“Studying for the ministry, they say.” “His face is his fortune--he’ll
be a cardinal some day.” “Where is his home?” “Away down somewhere in
the tropics, they say--has a rich uncle down there.” And so on. He
made his way at once; everybody was anxious to know him and talk with
him. Everybody noticed how cool and fresh it was, all of a sudden, and
wondered at it, for they could see that the sun was beating down the
same as before, outside, and the sky was clear of clouds, but no one
guessed the reason, of course.
The astrologer had drunk his second beaker; he poured out a third.
He set the bottle down, and by accident overturned it. He seized it
before much was spilled, and held it up to the light, saying, “What a
pity--it is royal wine.” Then his face lighted with joy or triumph, or
something, and he said, “Quick! Bring a bowl.”
It was brought--a four-quart one. He took up that two-pint bottle and
began to pour; went on pouring, the red liquor gurgling and gushing
into the white bowl and rising higher and higher up its sides,
everybody staring and holding their breath--and presently the bowl was
full to the brim.
“Look at the bottle,” he said, holding it up; “it is full yet!” I
glanced at Satan, and in that moment he vanished. Then Father Adolf
rose up, flushed and excited, crossed himself, and began to thunder in
his great voice, “This house is bewitched and accursed!” People began
to cry and shriek and crowd toward the door. “I summon this detected
household to--”
His words were cut off short. His face became red, then purple, but
he could not utter another sound. Then I saw Satan, a transparent
film, melt into the astrologer’s body; then the astrologer put up his
hand, and apparently in his own voice said, “Wait--remain where you
are.” All stopped where they stood. “Bring a funnel!” Ursula brought
it, trembling and scared, and he stuck it in the bottle and took up
the great bowl and began to pour the wine back, the people gazing and
dazed with astonishment, for they knew the bottle was already full
before he began. He emptied the whole of the bowl into the bottle, then
smiled out over the room, chuckled, and said, indifferently: “It is
nothing--anybody can do it! With my powers I can even do much more.”
[Illustration: THE ASTROLOGER EMPTIED THE WHOLE OF THE BOWL
INTO THE BOTTLE]
A frightened cry burst out everywhere, “Oh, my God, he is possessed!”
and there was a tumultuous rush for the door which swiftly emptied
the house of all who did not belong in it except us boys and Meidling.
We boys knew the secret, and would have told it if we could, but we
couldn’t. We were very thankful to Satan for furnishing that good help
at the needful time.
Marget was pale, and crying; Meidling looked kind of petrified; Ursula
the same; but Gottfried was the worst--he couldn’t stand, he was so
weak and scared. For he was of a witch family, you know, and it would
be bad for him to be suspected. Agnes came loafing in, looking pious
and unaware, and wanted to rub up against Ursula and be petted, but
Ursula was afraid of her and shrank away from her, but pretending she
was not meaning any incivility, for she knew very well it wouldn’t
answer to have strained relations with that kind of a cat. But we boys
took Agnes and petted her, for Satan would not have befriended her if
he had not had a good opinion of her, and that was indorsement enough
for us. He seemed to trust anything that hadn’t the Moral Sense.
Outside, the guests, panic-stricken, scattered in every direction and
fled in a pitiable state of terror; and such a tumult as they made with
their running and sobbing and shrieking and shouting that soon all the
village came flocking from their houses to see what had happened, and
they thronged the street and shouldered and jostled one another in
excitement and fright; and then Father Adolf appeared, and they fell
apart in two walls like the cloven Red Sea, and presently down this
lane the astrologer came striding and mumbling, and where he passed
the lanes surged back in packed masses, and fell silent with awe, and
their eyes stared and their breasts heaved, and several women fainted;
and when he was gone by the crowd swarmed together and followed him
at a distance, talking excitedly and asking questions and finding out
the facts. Finding out the facts and passing them on to others, with
improvements--improvements which soon enlarged the bowl of wine to a
barrel, and made the one bottle hold it all and yet remain empty to the
last.
When the astrologer reached the market-square he went straight to a
juggler, fantastically dressed, who was keeping three brass balls in
the air, and took them from him and faced around upon the approaching
crowd and said: “This poor clown is ignorant of his art. Come forward
and see an expert perform.”
So saying, he tossed the balls up one after another and set them
whirling in a slender bright oval in the air, and added another,
then another and another, and soon--no one seeing whence he got
them--adding, adding, adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his
hands moving so swiftly that they were just a web or a blur and not
distinguishable as hands; and such as counted said there were now a
hundred balls in the air. The spinning great oval reached up twenty
feet in the air and was a shining and glinting and wonderful sight.
Then he folded his arms and told the balls to go on spinning without
his help--and they did it. After a couple of minutes he said, “There,
that will do,” and the oval broke and came crashing down, and the balls
scattered abroad and rolled every whither. And wherever one of them
came the people fell back in dread, and no one would touch it. It made
him laugh, and he scoffed at the people and called them cowards and old
women. Then he turned and saw the tight-rope, and said foolish people
were daily wasting their money to see a clumsy and ignorant varlet
degrade that beautiful art; now they should see the work of a master.
With that he made a spring into the air and lit firm on his feet on
the rope. Then he hopped the whole length of it back and forth on one
foot, with his hands clasped over his eyes; and next he began to throw
somersaults, both backward and forward, and threw twenty-seven.
The people murmured, for the astrologer was old, and always before had
been halting of movement and at times even lame, but he was nimble
enough now and went on with his antics in the liveliest manner. Finally
he sprang lightly down and walked away, and passed up the road and
around the corner and disappeared. Then that great, pale, silent, solid
crowd drew a deep breath and looked into one another’s faces as if
they said: “Was it real? Did you see it, or was it only I--and I was
dreaming?” Then they broke into a low murmur of talking, and fell apart
in couples, and moved toward their homes, still talking in that awed
way, with faces close together and laying a hand on an arm and making
other such gestures as people make when they have been deeply impressed
by something.
We boys followed behind our fathers, and listened, catching all we
could of what they said; and when they sat down in our house and
continued their talk they still had us for company. They were in a sad
mood, for it was certain, they said, that disaster for the village must
follow this awful visitation of witches and devils. Then my father
remembered that Father Adolf had been struck dumb at the moment of his
denunciation.
“They have not ventured to lay their hands upon an anointed servant of
God before,” he said: “and how they could have dared it this time I
cannot make out, for he wore his crucifix. Isn’t it so?”
“Yes,” said the others, “we saw it.”
“It is serious, friends, it is very serious. Always before, we had a
protection. It has failed.”
The others shook, as with a sort of chill, and muttered those words
over--“It has failed.” “God has forsaken us.”
“It is true,” said Seppi Wohlmeyer’s father; “there is nowhere to look
for help.”
“The people will realize this,” said Nikolaus’s father, the judge,
“and despair will take away their courage and their energies. We have
indeed fallen upon evil times.”
He sighed, and Wohlmeyer said, in a troubled voice: “The report of it
all will go about the country, and our village will be shunned as being
under the displeasure of God. The Golden Stag will know hard times.”
“True, neighbor,” said my father; “all of us will suffer--all in
repute, many in estate. And, good God!--”
“What is it?”
“That can come--to finish us!”
“Name it--um Gottes Willen!”
“The Interdict!”
It smote like a thunderclap, and they were like to swoon with the
terror of it. Then the dread of this calamity roused their energies,
and they stopped brooding and began to consider ways to avert it. They
discussed this, that, and the other way, and talked till the afternoon
was far spent, then confessed that at present they could arrive at no
decision. So they parted sorrowfully, with oppressed hearts which were
filled with bodings.
While they were saying their parting words I slipped out and set my
course for Marget’s house to see what was happening there. I met many
people, but none of them greeted me. It ought to have been surprising,
but it was not, for they were so distraught with fear and dread that
they were not in their right minds, I think; they were white and
haggard, and walked like persons in a dream, their eyes open but seeing
nothing, their lips moving but uttering nothing, and worriedly clasping
and unclasping their hands without knowing it.
At Marget’s it was like a funeral. She and Wilhelm sat together on the
sofa, but said nothing, and not even holding hands. Both were steeped
in gloom, and Marget’s eyes were red from the crying she had been
doing. She said:
“I have been begging him to go, and come no more, and so save himself
alive. I cannot bear to be his murderer. This house is bewitched, and
no inmate will escape the fire. But he will not go, and he will be lost
with the rest.”
Wilhelm said he would not go; if there was danger for her, his place
was by her, and there he would remain. Then she began to cry again,
and it was all so mournful that I wished I had stayed away. There was
a knock, now, and Satan came in, fresh and cheery and beautiful, and
brought that winy atmosphere of his and changed the whole thing. He
never said a word about what had been happening, nor about the awful
fears which were freezing the blood in the hearts of the community,
but began to talk and rattle on about all manner of gay and pleasant
things; and next about music--an artful stroke which cleared away
the remnant of Marget’s depression and brought her spirits and her
interests broad awake. She had not heard any one talk so well and so
knowingly on that subject before, and she was so uplifted by it and so
charmed that what she was feeling lit up her face and came out in her
words; and Wilhelm noticed it and did not look as pleased as he ought
to have done. And next Satan branched off into poetry, and recited
some, and did it well, and Marget was charmed again; and again Wilhelm
was not as pleased as he ought to have been, and this time Marget
noticed it and was remorseful.
I fell asleep to pleasant music that night--the patter of rain upon the
panes and the dull growling of distant thunder. Away in the night Satan
came and roused me and said: “Come with me. Where shall we go?”
“Anywhere--so it is with you.”
Then there was a fierce glare of sunlight, and he said, “This is China.”
That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with vanity and
gladness to think I had come so far--so much, much farther than anybody
else in our village, including Bartel Sperling, who had such a great
opinion of his travels. We buzzed around over that empire for more than
half an hour, and saw the whole of it. It was wonderful, the spectacles
we saw; and some were beautiful, others too horrible to think. For
instance--However, I may go into that by and by, and also why Satan
chose China for this excursion instead of another place; it would
interrupt my tale to do it now. Finally we stopped flitting and lit.
We sat upon a mountain commanding a vast landscape of mountain-range
and gorge and valley and plain and river, with cities and villages
slumbering in the sunlight, and a glimpse of blue sea on the farther
verge. It was a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to the eye
and restful to the spirit. If we could only make a change like that
whenever we wanted to, the world would be easier to live in than it is,
for change of scene shifts the mind’s burdens to the other shoulder and
banishes old, shop-worn wearinesses from mind and body both.
We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and
persuade him to lead a better life. I told him about all those things
he had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop
making people unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that
he ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of a thing
before launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he
would not make so much trouble. He was not hurt by this plain speech;
he only looked amused and surprised, and said:
“What? I do random things? Indeed, I never do. I stop and consider
possible consequences? Where is the need? I know what the consequences
are going to be--always.”
“Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?”
“Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can. You
belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and
a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together
harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take
principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the
other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain--maybe a
dozen. In most cases the man’s life is about equally divided between
happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness
predominates--always; never the other. Sometimes a man’s make and
disposition are such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly
all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of
what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings
a misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of
a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster.
Sometimes for an hour’s happiness a man’s machinery makes him pay years
of misery. Don’t you know that? It happens every now and then. I will
give you a case or two presently. Now the people of your village are
nothing to me--you know that, don’t you?”
I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it.
“Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible
that they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal,
immeasurable. They have no intellect.”
“No intellect?”
“Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man
calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will
see and understand. Men have nothing in common with me--there is no
point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little
vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is
but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the
Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so
big as a pin’s head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in
him--caring whether he is happy or isn’t, or whether he is wealthy or
poor, or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether
his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society
or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert
him, or whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions
fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected
and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to
the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies
to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to
the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot
get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant
is indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the
trouble to do the spider an ill turn; if he took the notion he might
do him a good turn, if it came in his way and cost nothing. I have done
men good service, but no ill turns.
“The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power,
intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other
by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all
qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider
below the elephant.
“Man’s mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little
trivialities together and gets a result--such as it is. My mind
creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires--and
in a moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids,
colors--anything, everything--out of the airy nothing which is called
Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it,
imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas
with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before
you--created.
“I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess--anything--and
it is there. This is the immortal mind--nothing is beyond its reach.
Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and
darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole
of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover;
and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its
place in the volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish,
insect, or other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the
learned man’s brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost
him threescore years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does
forget, but I retain.
“Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding
me fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out that
the elephant could like the spider--supposing he can see it--but he
could not love it. His love is for his own kind--for his equals. An
angel’s love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of
man--infinitely beyond it! But it is limited to his own august order.
If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume
its object to ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly
indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and
the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these
things for the villagers.”
He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.
“I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like
it on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill. They
are always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot
see into the future. What I am doing for the villagers will bear good
fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn
generations of men. No one will ever know that I was the cause, but
it will be none the less true, for all that. Among you boys you have
a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push
a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the
next brick--and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human
life. A child’s first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest
will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can,
you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature;
for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event
has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act
unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the
end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each
act is to have birth, from cradle to grave.”
“Does God order the career?”
“Foreordain it? No. The man’s circumstances and environment order it.
His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But
suppose, for argument’s sake, that the man should skip one of these
acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had
been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and
second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn’t
go. That man’s career would change utterly, from that moment; thence
to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his
first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that
if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne,
and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead
to beggary and a pauper’s grave. For instance: if at any time--say in
boyhood--Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain
of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it
would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become
a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would
not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To
skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus’s chain would have wholly
changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and
in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do not
suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is
true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as in
any other appointed act--”
“As the conquering of a continent, for instance?”
“Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a link--the thing has never
happened! Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he
will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its
proper place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that
also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do. You see, now,
that a man will never drop a link in his chain. He cannot. If he made
up his mind to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link--a
thought bound to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain
by the first act of his babyhood.”
It seemed so dismal!
“He is a prisoner for life,” I said sorrowfully, “and cannot get free.”
“No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first
childish act. But I can free him.”
I looked up wistfully.
“I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers.”
I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.
“I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa Brandt?”
“Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely
that she is not like any other child. She says she will be the pride of
the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now.”
“I shall change her future.”
“Make it better?” I asked.
“Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus.”
I was glad, this time, and said, “I don’t need to ask about his case;
you will be sure to do generously by him.”
“It is my intention.”
Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky’s in my
imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and
hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me
to get ready to listen again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap
imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not
happen. He proceeded with his subject:
“Nicky’s appointed life is sixty-two years.”
“That’s grand!” I said.
“Lisa’s, thirty-six. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives
and those ages. Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake
out of his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that
he should turn over and go to sleep again. But I have appointed that
he shall get up and close the window first. That trifle will change
his career entirely. He will rise in the morning two minutes later
than the chain of his life had appointed him to rise. By consequence,
thenceforth nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with the
details of the old chain.” He took out his watch and sat looking at it
a few moments, then said: “Nikolaus has risen to close the window. His
life is changed, his new career has begun. There will be consequences.”
It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny.
“But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now.
For instance, Nikolaus would save Lisa from drowning. He would arrive
on the scene at exactly the right moment--four minutes past ten, the
long-ago appointed instant of time--and the water would be shoal, the
achievement easy and certain. But he will arrive some seconds too late,
now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best,
but both will drown.”
“Oh, Satan! oh, dear Satan!” I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes,
“save them! Don’t let it happen. I can’t bear to lose Nikolaus, he is
my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa’s poor mother!”
I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved. He made me
sit down again, and told me I must hear him out.
“I have changed Nikolaus’s life, and this has changed Lisa’s. If I had
not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from
his drenching; one of your race’s fantastic and desolating scarlet
fevers would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years
he would lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying
night and day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life
back?”
“Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is.”
“It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life
and done him so good a service. He had a billion possible careers,
but not one of them was worth living; they were charged full with
miseries and disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave
deed twelve days from now--a deed begun and ended in six minutes--and
get for all reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told
you of. It is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said
that sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour’s happiness and
self-satisfaction is paid for--or punished--by years of suffering.”
I wondered what poor little Lisa’s early death would save her from. He
answered the thought:
“From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then
from nineteen years’ pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with
death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die;
her mother would save her life if she could. Am I not kinder than her
mother?”
“Yes--oh, indeed yes; and wiser.”
“Father Peter’s case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted,
through unassailable proofs of his innocence.”
“Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?”
“Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the rest of his
life will be happy.”
“I can believe it. To restore his good name will have that effect.”
“His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I shall change his
life that day, for his good. He will never know his good name has been
restored.”
In my mind--and modestly--I asked for particulars, but Satan paid no
attention to my thought. Next, my mind wandered to the astrologer, and
I wondered where he might be.
“In the moon,” said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was
a chuckle. “I’ve got him on the cold side of it, too. He doesn’t know
where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good
enough for him, a good place for his star studies. I shall need him
presently; then I shall bring him back and possess him again. He has
a long and cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that,
for I have no feeling against him and am quite willing to do him a
kindness. I think I shall get him burned.”
He had such strange notions of kindness! But angels are made so, and do
not know any better. Their ways are not like our ways; and, besides,
human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks. It
seems to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could
have dumped him in Germany just as well, where he would be handy.
“Far away?” said Satan. “To me no place is far away; distance does not
exist for me. The sun is less than a hundred million miles from here,
and the light that is falling upon us has taken eight minutes to come;
but I can make that flight, or any other, in a fraction of time so
minute that it cannot be measured by a watch. I have but to think the
journey, and it is accomplished.”
I held out my hand and said, “The light lies upon it; think it into a
glass of wine, Satan.”
He did it. I drank the wine.
“Break the glass,” he said.
I broke it.
“There--you see it is real. The villagers thought the brass balls were
magic stuff and as perishable as smoke. They were afraid to touch them.
You are a curious lot--your race. But come along; I have business. I
will put you to bed.” Said and done. Then he was gone; but his voice
came back to me through the rain and darkness saying, “Yes, tell Seppi,
but no other.”
It was the answer to my thought.