The Man Who Was Born Again

by Paul Busson

  Soon afterwards my father fell ill and died. To the last he was full of anxiety for what was to become of me and of my mother. Then, a few weeks later, my mother caught a violent cold, which was followed by inflammation of the lungs. I held her hand in mine to her last minute, and had the consolation of hearing from her those words that were so familiar to me: “Thank God, we shall meet again!”

  And yet I wept bitter tears because she had left me.

  Long since I had obtained a well-paid post in my business, and thus was provided more than sufficiently for my modest needs. In my spare time I committed to writing the long story of my life as Melchior Dronte, and this short account of my existence as Sennon Vo-

  rauf, until now so peaceful, and I added a preface. The manuscript I will now pack up and seal; and it will be inscribed with the address of Kaspar Hedrich, who has in the meantime completed his studies and become a doctor like his late father.

  He is living in a neighbouring town, and when the time has come this now completed manuscript will perhaps give him an explanation of my existence, and it may be that he and others will learn through it to regard death, which they fear more than anything, in another and less gloomy light than they have done hitherto.

  I have become convinced of the truth of certain ideas, but I am unable to impart them to others, for they cannot be expressed in words. Every man must discover them for himself, and I believe that I have shown the way to everyone who will earnestly and with self-denial devote himself to the search for the Truth.

  It is time for me to send this manuscript forth. For great calamities are awaiting all those who are now living.

  Chapter Fifty

  To the I. and R. Town-Commandant in Tirana.

  It is hereby notified: Private Sennon Vorauf attached to Signal-light Section No. 128B. by reason of arbitrary departure is to be registered as having deserted.

  WENZEL SWITSCHKO,

  Lieut.

  Chapter Fifty One

  Dr. Kaspar Hedrich,

  Regimental Surgeon.

  Field post 1128.

  Most respected Mr. Regimental Surgeon!

  This is to inform you that our friend Sennon Vorauf is reported as having deserted and the notification against him has been sent to the Town-Commandant. Most respected Mr. Regimental Surgeon, it is not true that he has deserted, but it was in this way. I and Vorauf and Corporal Maierl went for a walk to the Albanian town of Tirana, and Vorauf had looked funny the whole day, and all at once he says that I am afraid and thank God we shall meet again says he. And he was very kind to us and he gave a silver watch to Maierl and to me a ring with a red stone. Keep this in memory of me says he and so I said Sennon what have you got into your head?

  Meanwhile we had come to a Tekkeh of the Halveti Dervishes; it is a wooden house; the graves of holy Dervishes stand in the doorway; they are covered with green cloth, and all at once Vorauf says: They call me, I must go in. Then the Corporal says: Vorauf, what’s the matter with you, it is strictly forbidden for soldiers to enter the holy places of the Mahomedans, but he went in all the same, and so we

  waited and after a while a Dervish came out wearing a black Turban and a little beard; he was a handsome man and he wore a brown mantle and had a rosary with yellow beads round his neck and the Dervish nodded to us in a friendly way.

  This looked queer and we saluted him and again waited a long time, but nobody came so I went to the house where the Dervishes live and Corporal Maierl waited the while in front of the Tekkeh. One of the Dervishes came with me, he had a grey beard, and he went into the Tekkeh which has only one door and searched for Sennon. Then he came back and said: no one is inside, so we looked at one another and went home and the Corporal reported to the C.O. Lieut. Switschko and then he came to me and cried about Sennon and to-day it is five days and no Sennon to be found and only the Lord God knows where he is.

  He was a good fellow I tell you Mr. Regimental Doctor, and one can’t know. Maierl says he was a holy man he did us so much good and gave us his things. This is what I wanted to report to you and if you want to come it is quite a Mystery about Sennon and I salute you most obediently.

  LEOPOLD RIEMEIS,

  Private, Signal-light Section,

  128B

  Chapter Fifty Two

  It is nearly midnight.

  Beneath my windows the high-road passes, endless and grey. The wind is whistling in the poplars. Something taps at my window-panes. Is it spirits tapping at them?... No, it is only the old leaves, that held out so splendidly against the icy winter storms, and are now being plucked off by a warm thaw-wind. Down with them! the wind seems to be saying.

  Who could have believed it, that I, Dr. Kaspar Hedrich, the man of exact science, the author of the well-known book, The so-called Occult Phenomena: An Exposure, sits here at this moment, a defeated man, a... Must I retract, or what shall I do? Did I then see better and clearer when I was a boy of fourteen?

  I must go back. I must disengage myself from the reams of paper, to which my old friend Sennon Vorauf has given such a strange appearance with his quaint, florid handwriting and his pale brown ink, as if they were a bundle of letters and diaries of the eighteenth century. Did he do this deliberately? This would hardly square with his upright and straightforward ways. If ever a man was honest towards himself and others, if ever there was one who passionately clung to the truth, it was Sennon Vorauf. I would go to the stake for that.

  I have come home again, after the dreadful war, after all the distress brought on my nation by the forces of darkness. The first thing to meet my eyes was this packet of paper. I broke the seal and read. It had been handed over to me when I was in Alessio, or Lesh, as the Albanians call it, passing a poisoned and sad summer with the malarial sick. I was called out to Tirana by a soldier’s letter to look for Sennon.

  But I must retrace my steps and consider the business from the beginning. Perhaps Sennon is standing behind my shoulder or looking at me through the window, himself unseen. Who can tell?

  When we were boys we saw a great deal of each other, and he mentions in his writings the mysterious incident on the ice, and how he saved my life. My father, who had lived in the East, believed in it. He told me so himself. But I persuaded myself later on that a sudden fever had produced the whole incident in my imagination after I had extricated myself from the water without any help.

  And what came later? One morning I went to Sennon, to take him with me as usual. He was still in bed. His mother told me I might go

  in and wake him. I went in. Sennon was in his bed lying on his back, his eyes wide open. His chest did not heave. Accustomed as I was already to medical observation I saw that his breath had stopped. I became uneasy and put my hand to his heart. It was stone-still.

  I was struck with fear. Was I to throw Mrs. Vorauf into despair by telling her that her son, whom she loved with more than ordinary tenderness, lay dead in his bed? Heavy tears stood in my eyes. I could not take my eyes from off the calm and peaceful face of my dearest friend. Then I thought I saw a luminous nebula flowing into the fine, red scar Sennon wore between his eyebrows like some Indian mark of caste; the nebula came from the air and condensed as it approached him. But this lasted only a short moment, and while I was still standing bewildered before the bed, life came back to the trance-filled eyes of my friend.

  The eyes moved; his usual, charming smile (never have I seen anyone smile so wonderfully as he did) appeared on his lips; and waking he said, “Is it you, !Caspar?”

  I told him at once, as boys will, all I had just seen, adding that I had been about to call his mother, or bring him back to life by shaking him and pouring cold water on him. He looked at me seriously, and begged me, in case I ever saw him again in such a state, not to call him back to life by force, and to prevent others from doing anything of the sort.

  “It is worse than what you call dying, when the slender tie connecting body and soul is strained. It is pain beyond all pains,”he said very earnestly.
r />   I was accustomed to hear him say incomprehensible things. He would often mutter to himself words whose meaning was quite strange to me, or name people with whom he could not have been in touch. But I was a boy, and I did not trouble myself much about such things. At the most I thought to myself: “He is at it again, Sennon is.” This was all the easier because many of our schoolfellows, for all their love of Sennon, thought him a little wrong in his wits. Still they all loved him, and I know of no case of anyone teasing him, or quarrelling with him, or reproaching his peculiarities, as children so often do. That he was worthy of love and respect, even the crudest of us admitted. For even as a boy he was uncommonly kind and helpful. Every opportunity of doing good to others was welcome to him. Even if it was from nothing more than the trivial misfortune of a bad mark that the afflicted boy was suffering, Sennon was not happy till he had dispelled his gloom.

  I was very fond of Sennon, and when he rebuked me in his gentle way his words would produce a greater effect on me than if they had been uttered by my own kind father.

  Yes, in this spring midnight, with the wind driving over my roof, and invisible feet seeming to walk the road towards some unattainable goal, everything emerges that was swallowed in the whirlpool of youth, or in the wasted, horrible, unproductive years of this foolish war. I remember a day in the summer when to my amazement I saw the birds settling on the head and shoulders of Sennon as he lay at rest in the meadow, and even a little weasel sniffing his hand. A weasel! the shyest of animals. And how everything was disturbed when I came up!

  I remember also a drunken woman, known as Orange Mary, and how she fell to the ground seized by a bad fit of sickness, all blue in the face. Sennon lifted her and stroked her forehead, at which she smiled gratefully and went her way, completely recovered.

  I was present when he stopped the blood running from a cut in a harvester’s hand made by a sickle. I saw how the flames issuing from the joiner Kiebler’s roof, crumpled, shrank and went out as soon as Sennon appeared and stretched out his hand to them. All this I saw with my own eyes. How could I take so little notice of such wonderful things as to forget them so easily? And how endlessly I regret the years spent unheedingly by his side! All my exact knowledge would I give away... But no, my regret for what I have missed will not help me.

  I was foolish like all young people. When I came home for the vacations I considered it below my dignity to continue my acquaintance with Sennon, a mere workman at the optical factory of Deier and Frisch. I preferred the company of Baron Anclever, of District House, and of Lieutenant Leritsch of the Dragoons. I cannot change it now. It is as it is.

  But soon I returned to reason. Professor Schedler’s lectures on psychical phenomena tore me away from the silly life I was leading. I began to look down into the depths, into the dark abysses, which attracted me more than running after ballet dancers, drinking champagne or discussing with fools such trivialities as neckties, trousers and race-horses; I emptied my mind of all this rubbish as one removes useless lumber from the room where one intends to live. But at the same time I forgot all about Sennon.

  Oh, how much I have lost! I press my cheek to the last page of his writing, on which his hand stayed before taking leave of it. I call his name and look up at the black window-panes in the unreasonable hope of seeing his kind, earnest and ever joyous face appear behind the glass instead of the outer darkness. All that for which I now yearn so unutterably was then close at hand, how close! I had only to stretch out my hand, I could have had it for the asking. No one will answer me now and all my knowledge leaves me unsatisfied. Or shall I content myself with the vague makeshift explanation that Sennon Voraufs case is one of so-called “split consciousness,” and that Melchior Dronte’s Evli must have been nothing more than a symbolic animation of his subconscious mind, of his alter ego.

  No, I cannot satisfy myself with the catchwords of science. For I am unsettled on every point.

  When during the war I was with our army in occupied Albania, I went from Lesh to Tirana, hoping to find a home for my poor malarial convalescents in that cool town, with the precipitous icy mountain waters running through its streets, at the foot of the tremendous mountain wall of Berat. There it was I saw Sennon Vorauf for the last time.

  A Signal-light section coming from Durazzo had arrived at Tirana on the same day. The men were walking the streets looking for their billets, and one of them I recognised as Sennon.

  I walked up and spoke to him. His smile met me like sunshine from the land of youth. He was sunburnt and upright, but otherwise unchanged. There was not a wrinkle in his manly, handsome face. This smoothness struck me as strange and unusual. For hunger, exertion and terrors of all sorts had left their traces in the faces of all those whom war had brought into that terrible country, and everyone looked weary and old.

  We greeted each other warmly, speaking of the old days. But our time was short. I had appointments and much business with the huts, for the building of which everything seemed to be missing. Our ships were being constantly torpedoed, the overland roads were impracticable. Everything had to be pulled up Mount Lovcen. boated over the lake of Skutari. and from Skutari brought hither over undescribable roads. Every trivial thing. And lumber for the huts was not trivial. I had to deal with men whose brains were crammed with regulations and tables. It was hopeless; I felt as if I was covered entirely with glue and office-dust. All this disturbed me. I promised Sennon to see him before long. He smiled and shook hands. He knew!

  In the afternoon a man of his section, Leopold Riemeis by name, came to me to be inspected. He had recovered from the papatachi fever but was still very weak. I asked him casually about his army comrade Sennon Vorauf. His face shone. Oh, Vorauf! Sennon! The man had saved his life. A colleague of mine, this, thought I, and smiled. He had, like myself, evidently taken a feverish dream for a reality. I was interested nevertheless. I gave Riemeis a cigarette and asked him to tell me all about it.

  Riemeis was a Styrian, a peasant’s son. He was somewhat clumsy in expressing himself, but I could understand him all right. This is the way it had happened.

  In a little place called Kakarichi, Riemeis had been overtaken by the fever. But what a fever it was! He felt like burning alive, his skin was covered with abscesses, and at other times he was so cold that he would have liked to crawl into a bonfire. And no more medicine seemed to be at hand. The chief surgeon, who was attached to the unit, only shook his head. In eight days Riemeis had become a skeleton covered with skin, and quinine was not to be had; it had all been eaten up long before.

  “Look here, boys,” said the surgeon to the men of the platoon, “if any of you has any quinine he must give it to Riemeis. Otherwise a couple of days hence we’ll be burying him."

  They would have gladly given their quinine if they had any, but when there is none of it there is none. Good God, and there were crosses already standing along all the roads, and our poor soldiers lying under them in this foreign, poisoned country!

  “Well, Riemeis,” said the doctor, tapping his invalid on the shoulder, “there’s nothing to be done.” And he went off. Riemeis’s head was burning that day, but he knew what the doctor had said. “There’s nothing to be done.”

  Sennon was sitting by Riemeis’s bed. It was night. “Sennon, please, some water,” the sick man groaned. But Sennon gave no answer. There he was sitting with his eyes wide open: he heard nothing. Riemeis looked at him with fear. And then something happened. A shining object fell as though from Sennon’s forehead and struck the floor. Sennon moved, looked round, smiled, bent down to the ground and took up a little glass case with little white tablets in it. Quinine tablets: lots of them, from the depot at Cattaro.

  Peasants are queer people. They did not say a word about it to the doctor, but they put their heads together and began whispering: “My grandfather told me...” They put no questions to Sennon. They were afraid of doing it. But they surrounded him with love and respect, did all his work for him, listened to every word he spoke.
And they understood very well that his heart was full to overflowing with the thought of all the suffering of the poor who had been driven into the butchery.

  But to return to Sennon Vorauf.

  He carried with him all the suffering of the world, all the distress of innumerable men, and his heart wept day and night - even when he smiled. They understood him very well, the soldiers did, and he would have been ill advised who would have attempted to interfere with Sennon, even if he were a general. The men were driven wild by the dreadful work they were made to do. But they could not help it. There had never been a braver, a more dutiful man than Vorauf. But everyone thought - to make him shoot at people - no, no one could have done it. So spoke Riemeis.

  At that point I had to leave the man. to mark out the ground for the huts. I asked Riemeis to give my love to Sennon. I would come tomorrow. Yes, to-morrow. The same evening I was detailed off to El-bassan.

  Then came the letter signed by Leopold Riemeis, and a copy of the notification of desertion.

  But fourteen days passed before I could come to Tirana. Fourteen long days. I hoped that by then they had found Vorauf.

  I began by calling on the C.O. of Vorauf’s section. Lieutenant Wenzel Switschko, who had authorised the notification. I found him to be a stout, narrow-minded, self-complacent sort of man, with the ordinary service views.

  The case was perfectly clear to him. Vorauf was what you call an “effete intellectual snob” (a splendid phrase!); he had simply deserted, and the Tekkeh into which he disappeared had certainly another way out. He knew this sort of trick. But if he was brought back! By God, he would know about it!

  I gave up any hope of the C.O., and went to the men.

  Riemeis received me with tears in his eyes. Corporal Maierl, a good-natured giant and a blacksmith by trade, also had to gulp down a few times before he could speak. They practically repeated what was in Riemeis’s letter. We went to the Tekkeh of the Halveti Dervishes. Slate-blue pigeons were cooing on the immemorial cypresses. A narrow rill ran past the timber building, and in the distance, above the rosy almond trees in flower and the evergreen oaks, rose the snow-white tops of the Berat ridge. Two large coffins stood in the open vestibule of the Tekkeh. They had gabled covers, and were hung with emerald-green cloths. On each of them lay the turban of the deceased.