 Chapter 7
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 makee 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."
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 was I 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 is
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.
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