The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  12 Leipzig 1907; republished in Rarissima 1. Seltenste Dokumente der Esoterik aus vier Jahrhunderten, ed F.W. Schmitt, Sinzheim, 2003.

  The Alchemist’s House

  Chapter 3 from The Alchemist’s House: Ismene

  Ismene

  A dull, bronze double call booms out from the great tower of the gothic cathedral and floats on vibrating wings through the damp chill of the dead night air, waking the bells of the other churches from their benumbed sleep so that, after an initial shudder under the impact of the wave of sound, they each join in like an echo with a ‘Yeees — yeees’ — quiet, loud, deep, high, distant, close.

  The second hour after midnight, the witching hour of the Orientals.

  Then the silent waiting starts up again: expectation, hope, fear: what will time bring?

  Noiselessly, with white, glowing eyes shining afar, a monster, a dolphin head with almost no body, sweeps past the line of lamps up the hill: a limousine, streamlined, with the alien shape of some mythical antediluvian beast. In each side of the grotesque head is a row of little lighted windows with white silk curtains showing the shadow of a woman’s head in hazy outline, like a puff of black smoke.

  In the front of the dragon’s head is a large, ungainly figure with huge paws, which seem to come straight out of its chest, as if it had no arms, holding a wheel: the chauffeur in the driver’s seat, wrapped up in shaggy furs.

  The car turns off through a small, winter-dead wood with abandoned crow’s nests in the bare branches, heading for Salnitergasse. The harsh light from its nostrils floods the road with a blinding glare before swallowing up the shimmering ribbon in its maw.

  The massive dark cube of the house ‘At the Sign of the Peacock’ looms up.

  Needles of fire are sticking out of the cracks in the wooden shutters, as if it were burning inside.

  Dull, phosphorescent smoke is pouring up out of the glass roof into the sea of mist.

  Slowly the car creeps round the house. It has lowered its two eyes; suddenly it opens a third, much brighter even than the two others were. It pierces the darkness, moves along the wall, up, down — jumps back from the abrupt glitter of the mosaic door, briefly knocks the mask of night from the peacock’s grinning demon face, continues its search for an entrance.

  Bare walls, no door, no window. The car goes round the corner.

  The door of the clockmaker’s shop is closed but a glimmer of light behind its opaque glass pane shows that the occupants are still awake.

  The chauffeur, wrapped up like a grizzly bear, gets out and knocks. Frau Petronella comes to the door, her full, white hair gleaming like snow in the light of the peaceful glow of the car’s headlamps.

  Gustenhöver, the clockmaker, is sitting quietly at a little maplewood table, he doesn’t even look up when he hears the question: ‘Where is the entrance to Dr Steen’s apartment?’

  He is holding a magnifying glass up to his eye in his beautiful slim fingers and examining a small gold object, glittering with precious stones, with close attention and sympathy, as if it were a sick living being whose heartbeats he had to count. The expression on his face is one of childlike compassion: poor little thing, has your pulse not been able to keep up with the pitiless rush of time?

  On a shelf covered in red velvet are clocks — there must be a hundred, in blue, green, yellow enamel, decorated with jewels, engraved, fluted, smooth or grooved, some flat, some rounded like eggs. They can’t be heard, they’re chirping too softly, but they can be sensed, the air above them must be alive from the imperceptible noise they’re producing. Perhaps there’s a storm raging in some dwarf realm there.

  On a stand is a small piece of flesh-coloured felspar, veined, with colourful flowers of semi-precious stones growing on it; in the middle of them, all innocent, the Grim Reaper with his scythe is waiting to cut them down: like a memento mori clock from the romantic Middle Ages. The dial is the entrance to a cavern full of wheels. No hands, no numbers for the hours, just mysterious signs arranged in a circle: Death has his own time, he doesn’t want us to know in advance when the harvest will begin. When he mows, the handle of his scythe hits the thin glass bell beside him, a cross between a soap bubble and the cap of a large fairy-tale mushroom.

  Right up to the ceiling of the room the walls are covered with clocks. Old ones with proudly chased faces, precious and rich; calmly swinging their pendulums, they declaim their soothing ticktock in a deep bass.

  In the corner is one in a glass coffin. Snow White, standing up, is pretending she’s asleep, but a quiet, rhythmical twitching together with the minute hand shows she’s keeping her eye on the time. Others, nervous Rococo demoiselles — with a beauty spot for the keyhole — are overloaded with decoration and quite out of breath as they each trip along, trying to take precedence over the others and get ahead of the seconds. Beside them are tiny pages, giggling and urging them on: tick, tick, tick.

  Then a long row, gleaming with steel, silver and gold. Like knights in full armour; they seem to be drunk and asleep, for sometimes they snore loudly or rattle their chains, as if they had a mind to break a lance with Cronos himself once they wake and have sobered up.

  On a windowledge a woodman with mahogany trousers and a glittering copper nose is sawing time to sawdust.

  Once they were ill, all of them. Hieronymus, the clock doctor, patient, concerned, has made them well again. And now they can once more make sure, each in his or her own way, that not a minute gets lost, that the present cannot slip away unobserved.

  Just one — it’s hanging close by the devoted doctor — an old maid from the days of the Baroque, her cheeks powdered pink, has stopped — oh God! — at one second to seven.

  ‘She’s dead,’ the others think, but they’re wrong. ‘I’m right once a day,’ she thinks to herself, ‘but no one notices and I can’t say it myself.’ Secretly she hopes Professor Gustenhöver will take pity on her. ‘He’s not like other men, he’ll examine me when no one’s there, he’ll take me by the hand and say, “Stand up and walk, my girl.” Then I’ll be like a bride and I’ll be able to dance, dance, dance again.’

  The chauffeur repeats his question: ‘Excuse me, but where is the entrance to Dr Steen’s apartment?’

  ‘You have to drive to the eastern façade of the house,’ — Frau Petronella points in that direction — ‘and lift the latch of the garden gate, then the gatekeeper will open it.’

  The chauffeur thanks her and leaves.

  Hardly has he closed the door, than the Grim Reaper comes to life. He mows and mows, hitting the thin glass bell so that it sounds swift and soft, like the distant twittering of coal tits: singsingsingsingsingsing-sing.

  The clockmaker raises his head and looks at his wife and she looks at him. It hasn’t made a sound since it’s been here and now it’s striking, he thinks. ‘Could it be for him?’ Frau Petronella asks after a while, glancing at the door.

  The old man thinks, the expression on his face looking as if he were listening inside himself. He rocks his head from side to side uncertainly. ‘Perhaps — perhaps for his employer,’ he says softly and hesitantly.

  A light comes swaying through the little avenue of yews, along the gravel path from the entrance to Dr Steen’s apartment to the garden gate.

  The Copt, Markus, unlocks the gilded grille, lifts up his lantern to light the face of the lady who, wearing a veil and a long fur coat, is out of the car before the chauffeur can help her.

  She grasps the Copt’s wrist and jerks it vigorously round so that the light is falling on him while she is in shadow. There is something brusque, imperious about her action. Perhaps it is intended as a rebuke, or is she accustomed to treat servants like slaves?

  She has not given the chauffeur any instructions whether to wait or not.

  The Copt raises his lip, makes his tiger face and bares his gleaming black teeth. It is something which frightens everyone the first time they see it, no one knows what it is meant to express: anger, fury, astonishment, surprise, d
efence, attack? Or does it not come from his psyche at all? Is it just a remnant, an unconscious memory in the inherited body cells from those times millions of years ago when primaeval man still faced beasts of prey without weapons.

  His olive-yellow complexion and overlarge onyx eyes make the Copt seem even more alien and unreal than by day.

  ‘What a strange racial type!’ any other visitor would probably have thought. The lady pays him not the least attention, striding past him with the arrogant words, spoken to no one in particular, ‘This is where Dr Steen lives.’ The Copt asks no questions and follows in silence.

  The arched entrance to the house is suddenly brightly lit, revealing a small vestibule with an inlay of colourful marble. An old valet in black silk knee-breeches bends low into the darkness.

  The lady lifts her veil. ‘I wish to speak to my… I wish to speak to Dr Steen.’

  The old man’s expression shows a brief flicker of surprise and delight. For a moment he raises his hands, as if he were about to clap them together in astonishment, but then, when he registers the indifferent tone in which she has spoken, he lowers them again and his expression hardens as something like sadness and disappointment flits across it.

  He helps the lady out of her fur coat and ushers her up a narrow staircase to a cramped vestibule. Kirgiz weapons on the walls.

  He opens the door to a room and, when the lady has entered, remains on the threshold, head bowed.

  The lady looks slowly round the room. Her previous swift, decisive manner has given way to a strange, almost rigid calm which there is nothing to explain. It is a calm that has a disconcerting effect, since it is in stark contrast to her youthfully slim figure, her strikingly beautiful face and wonderfully slim, restless hands.

  There is a delicate, unusual smell in the air coming from the many — it must be thirty-six — wax candles diffusing their gentle light from a chandelier in the form of peacock heads of fragile old gold set on the rim of a shallow, amaranth-blue bowl.

  The lady drops her white kid gloves on the wall-to-wall silk carpet of a thousand iridescent colours. The servant remains motionless, makes no attempt to pick them up. He seems to know from previous occasions that he is not allowed to; that he is not allowed to do anything unless it is expressly indicated or ordered.

  The walls are covered in purple antique damask silk, places where it has worn thin with age only emphasising how precious it is. Inlaid chests of drawers from the time of Augustus the Strong, marked by use, stand below tapestries with scenes from the Old Testament — the Fall of Man.

  In a corner niche, violently disrupting the calm elegance of the room, is a mother-of-pearl pedestal covered with crude silver objects — barbaric Russian art — and in the middle, like a focal point of Slav vulgarity, is an emerald the size of a child’s fist, with a hole drilled through and a silk thread. It is in front of a gaudily painted earthenware bust of a Mongol with a drooping moustache and slit eyes, representing Genghis Khan.

  In the middle of the room is a long desk with the strangest objects on it: little Japanese Shinto shrines, Chinese jade figures, a tiny monkey skull, Egyptian statuettes of Horus and Osiris, covered in a white, chalky substance and with inserted sapphire eyes, ancient Mongolian river deities made from the mud of the River Peiho, the carved wooden death mask of a samurai with hideously contorted features, horn corals growing out of a stone that look like wonderfully delicate, six-inch high bushes ruffled by the wind, thin, opalescent ancient Greek tear bottles, boxes of rock crystal, ivory, horn and jasper in the most peculiar shapes and, standing upright on a little column of smoky quartz, a red-gold coin almost the size of a man’s hand with a gleaming inscription:

  By Gustenhofere’s Powder redde

  To Gold I was transformed from Ledde.

  above it, as a coat of arms, a peacock.

  Along the edge of the table is a row of those bizarre Javanese marionettes, made of buffalo leather and painted red, green, black and gold, representing demons with quadruple-jointed spider’s arms, pointed noses, star-shaped pupils and receding foreheads, crowned with golden flames that the Malays call wayang purwa.

  ‘Dr Steen is not at home,’ the lady suddenly says to a much-darkened picture by Velasquez.

  Her words sound neither as if she is impatient, nor talking to herself, nor asking a question; they are completely expressionless.

  ‘Herr Dr Steen…… is on the way, in his aeroplane,’ the servant replies, pausing after the first part, as if he is required to ascertain first of all that he is allowed to reply.

  When the lady says nothing, he goes on, ‘Herr Dr Steen has been away for five hours.’

  ‘Dr Steen is unavailable during the day?’

  ‘Dr Steen is unavailable during the day.’

  ‘Is Dr Steen here at that time?’

  ‘Dr Steen is here at that time.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘What is that babble of voices in the next room?’

  ‘The babble of voices in the next room is caused by a band of dervishes; Dr Steen… wants them…’ A questioning pause, then the servant immediately stops, since the lady gives no indication that she wishes to hear any more.

  ‘When my — when Dr Steen arrives, it will not be necessary to announce me.’

  The servant takes one step backwards, waits for a few seconds, closes the door and leaves.

  Above the house a rattle and roar of engines, which abruptly stops — the giant steel bird has settled on its nest. Minutes pass, a brief jolt runs across the glass roof, continuing as a quiver down the walls, and Dr Steen’s piercing voice can be heard: ‘Markus, will you help the pilot to fasten the hawsers, please.’

  From the film studio comes the dull sound of Arabic drums murmuring a greeting.

  A crash of heavy bolts, the clatter of an iron trapdoor and cold air sinks into the room; the candles of the chandelier in the purple room flicker, making the face of Genghis Khan come alive with little twitching shadows.

  The rungs of a ladder groan under the weight of rapid steps, the trapdoor slams shut: Dr Steen has gone down through the glass roof into his dressing room.

  The lady waits.

  ‘Thank God you’re back, sir,’ she hears the old servant say and a shadow of displeasure crosses her face.

  ‘We were afraid something might have happened to you,’ — a woman’s voice with a foreign accent that sounds like the cooing of a dove.

  ‘There’s no need to worry about me, Leila,’ Dr Steen replies.

  The lady raises her eyebrows in distaste.

  ‘Anything new, old fellow?’

  His valet’s reply is halting but swift: ‘The sheikh has arrived with the dervishes, sir…’ In compliance with her command, he doesn’t mention that the lady is waiting.

  The next moment Dr Steen enters the purple room, stops short when he sees the lady and slaps his forehead in astonishment.

  ‘What? Is that you, Ismene? How can it be? Where did you come from? I didn’t get a letter. I assumed you were God knows where in the Far East.’

  The lady remains seated, leaning back in the armchair, smiles, even if it is a slightly forced smile, and holds out her hand to him.

  ‘I arrived just a few hours ago. In our house down there they told me you were living up here now and hadn’t been seen in the town for months. I expect to be setting off on my travels soon and since I heard you were only available in the evening, I drove straight up. Anyway, it’s Sunday tomorrow and one doesn’t go out on a Sunday. How you’ve changed, Ismael.’

  ‘Twelve years is a long time, Ismene —’ He is about to compliment her on her beauty, she realises and quickly interrupts him. ‘You’ve become a great scholar since we last saw each other. There’s hardly a newspaper you read abroad that doesn’t have whole pages about you and your new theories. I only glanced at them, of course. I’m sorry, but these things don’t interest me. Nor can I agree with your view that Bolshevism and other great movements of rece
nt years do not have their origin in men themselves but —’

  ‘But in a realm of “ghosts”, to put it briefly,’ Dr Steen breaks in with mild mockery.

  ‘Yes, that’s more or less how I was going to put it, Ismael. It’s an idea that shocks me. There’s something irreligious about it that I find outrageous. Among the English too this theory generally meets with opposition, if not vehement disapproval.’

  ‘Among the English? Don’t you mean among English women?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Because they instinctively sense that they would have to look a little more closely at their Liberty-silk views of the dear Lord, if they were to think the matter through. That doesn’t suit them because it might lead to their approving of the most outrageous atrocities, for example being allowed to play cards on Sundays, the mornings of which should be reserved for prayer, the afternoons for procreation. And to think something through? For heaven’s sake, what would happen to the sacrosanct tradition of narrow-mindedness! But let’s change the subject,’ he added quickly when he saw Ismene flush with almost uncontrollable anger. ‘Forgive me, I wasn’t getting at you. I completely forgot that your mother was a hundred per cent English.’

  ‘As was our father,’ Ismene broke in, a sharp tone in her voice.

  Dr Steen gives her a long, hard look, then an ironic smile, but remains silent as he turns to look at the statue of Genghis Khan.

  Ismene follows his look. ‘I know what you are going to say, Ismael. That you’re proud that…’

  ‘— that my mother was of Mongolian descent and could follow it back to the great destroyer, Genghis Khan, and that I am her true son,’ Dr Steen says quickly, ‘and…’ He suddenly falls silent, closes his thin lips tight and bites back what he was going to say: ‘want to wipe these white rats off the face of the earth.’