The White Dominican (7 page)

Has he guessed that I’m going to the cemetery? And why I’m going to steal roses there? And for whom? That’s silly, I’m the only one who knows that. I give him a defiant look and deliberately do not wish him a good morning, but my heart stands still for a second when I notice the hard, almost calculating stare he is giving me from beneath his half-closed lids; he stops, takes a reflective suck at his cigar and then closes his eyes, like someone who has just had a strange idea.

I walk past him as quickly as possible, but then, from behind me, I hear him clear his throat in a loud, unnatural manner, as if he were about to declaim a speech, “Hemhem, mhhm, hemm.”

An ice-cold tremor runs down my spine, and I start to run; I can’t help it, I have to run, even though something says, ‘Don’t! You’re just giving yourself away.”

In the first light of dawn I put out the lamps and then go back to sit on the banisters, although I know it will be hours before Ophelia comes and opens the window in the house across the way. But I am afraid I might sleep too long if I go back to bed instead of waiting here.

I have put three white roses on the window-ledge for her, and I was so excited that I almost fell down into the alley as I did.

I pass the time imagining I am lying on the ground with broken limbs; they carry me to my room, Ophelia hears what has happened, guesses the cause, comes to my sick-bed and kisses me, tenderly, lovingly.

Thus I weave myself a childish, sentimental dream, then I blush inwardly at it, embarrassed that I can be so foolish; but the idea of suffering pain for Ophelia’s sake is so sweet.

I tear myself away from my daydream. Ophelia is nineteen and a young lady, while I am only seventeen, although I am a little taller than she is. She would only kiss me in the way one kisses a child that has hurt itself. I like to think of myself as a grown man, and here I am imagining myself lying helpless in bed, being looked after by her. It is not manly, it is like a little boy.

So I dream myself into another fantasy: it is night and the town is asleep when suddenly flames are reflected on my window and a cry echoes through the streets; the neighbouring house is on fire! There is no hope of saving the inhabitants; Baker’s Row is blocked by blazing beams!

In the room across the alleyway the curtains go up in flames; but I leap over from the window of our stair-well and carry my love, who is lying unconscious on the floor in her nightdress, out through the inferno of smoke and fire.

My heart is beating fit to burst with joy and excitement. So vivid is the imagined scene, that I can feel the touch of her bare arms round my neck as I carry her and the coolness of the unmoving lips I cover with kisses. The image keeps on surging through my blood, as if, with each sweet, bewitching detail, it has entered my life-stream, so that I can never free myself from it. And it makes me happy, for I know that the impression is so deep that it will appear to me tonight in a real, a living dream. But how many hours there are until then!

I lean out of the window and look up at the sky: day refuses to break. A whole long day still separates me from the night. I am almost afraid because the morning must come before the night, it might destroy all my hopes! The roses might fall off when Ophelia opens her window, and she won’t see them at all. Or she will see them and pick them up and … what then? Will I have the courage not to hide immediately? An icy cold spreads over my body, for I know I will definitely not have the courage. But I comfort myself with the thought that she might guess whom the roses are from.

She must guess! It is impossible that, however mute and shy they are, the passionate, yearning thoughts of love which my heart radiates, should not penetrate hers!

I close my eyes and imagine, as vividly as possible, that I am over there by her bedside, that I lean down and kiss her in her sleep, in the ardent hope that she will dream of me.

I see it all so clearly in my mind’s eye that for a while I am unsure whether I have been sleeping or what was happening to me. I had been absentmindedly staring at the three white roses over there on the window-ledge until they dissolved in the morning twilight. Now they have reappeared, but I am tortured by the thought that I stole them from the cemetery. Why did I not steal red ones? They belong to life. I cannot imagine that a dead man, waking up to find red roses missing from his grave, would demand them back.

At last the sun has risen. The space between the two houses is filled with the light from its rays. I feel as if we are hovering high above the clouds, for down below the alley has become invisible, swallowed up by the mist the morning breeze wafts through the streets.

A bright figure is moving in the room across the alley. I hold my breath in apprehension. I clasp the banister-rail with both hands to stop myself running away.

Ophelia!

For a long time I do not dare to look across. A horrible feeling that I have done something unutterably idiotic chokes me. It is as if the splendour of my dreamland has been simply wiped away. I feel that it will never return and that I should throw myself from the window at once, or do something else dreadful in order to stifle the ridicule which is bound to break out at any moment, if my fears are realised.

I make one last stupid attempt to rescue my self-respect by frantically rubbing at my sleeve, as if there was a dirty mark on it.

Then our eyes meet.

The blood has rushed to Ophelia’s face; I can see her delicate white hands trembling as they hold the roses.

We both want to say something and cannot; each can see that the other lacks the confidence.

Another moment and Ophelia has disappeared.

I crouch down on the steps, curling myself up into a tiny ball, and all I am aware of is the blaze of joy inside me, I am beside myself with a joy that is a jubilant hymn of praise

Can it really be?

Ophelia is a young lady. And me? What am I?

But no. She is young like me. In my mind, I see her eyes again, even clearer than they were in the glare of the sunlight. And I read there: she is a child like me. Only a child could look out of such eyes. We are both still children. She does not feel that I am still just a silly little boy.

I know, just as surely as I know a heart beats in my breast that would let itself be torn into a thousand pieces for her sake, that we will meet again today without having to go looking for each other. I know too that, without either having to tell the other, it will be after sunset, in the little garden between our house and the river.

Just as the out-of-the-way little town girdled by the ever-rolling river lives on in my heart like a tranquil isle, so the memory of a conversation that I overheard one night rises like an island from the restless waves of those youthful days that bear the name of Ophelia.

I had – as I suppose I did hourly at that time – been dreaming of my love, when I heard the Baron open his study door to a visitor. By his voice I recognised the Chaplain. He sometimes came, even at a late hour, for they were old friends and they would talk, usually until long after midnight, over a glass of wine about all sorts of philosophical questions, and I imagine they sometimes discussed my education; in brief, they spoke of things which were of little concern to me.

The Baron refused to let me go to school. He used to say, “Our teachers are like sorcerer’s apprentices, who spend all their time deforming the mind, until the heart dies of thirst. When they have accomplished that, they declare their students ready to go out into the world.”

For that reason he would only give me books to read that he had carefully selected from his own library after he had questioned me in order to ascertain the state of my thirst for knowledge. But he never tested me to see if I had actually read them.

“You will note the things your spirit wants your memory to retain, because it will also make you enjoy them”, was a favourite saying of his. “Schoolmasters, however, are like animal tamers; the latter think it is important for lions to jump through hoops, the former spend all their time getting children to remember that the late lamented Hannibal lost his left eye in the Pontine swamps; the one turns the king of the desert into a circus clown, the other a divine flower into a bunch of parsley.”

The two of them must have been holding a similar conversation, for I heard the Chaplain say, “I would be afraid to let a child drift along like a ship without a rudder. I think it would be certain to run aground.”

“As if most people don’t run aground!” exclaimed the Baron heatedly. “Has someone not run aground, looked at from the higher standpoint of life itself, who, after a youth spent pining behind school windows, becomes, let’s say, a lawyer, marries in order to bequeath his bitter lot to his children, then becomes sick and dies? Do you believe it was for that that his soul created the complicated mechanism we call the human body?”

“Where would we end up if everyone thought as you do?” objected the Chaplain.

“In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain! Each one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to. It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colourful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal.”

“So you do believe in the Devil, Baron? You usually deny it.”

“I believe in the Devil in the same way as I believe in the deadly power of the north wind. But who can point to the place in the universe where cold originates? That is where the Devil must have his throne. Cold spends all its time pursuing warmth, for it wants to become warm itself. The Devil must come to God, icy death to the fire of life; that is the origin of all journeying. They say there is an absolute zero temperature? No one has ever found it yet, and no one ever will, no more than they can ever find absolute magnetic north. Even if you lengthen a bar magnet, or break it in two, the north pole will always be opposite the south pole, in the one case the portion separating the point where the two appear will be longer, in the other shorter, but the two poles will never meet, for that would mean the bar would be a ring and the magnet would no longer be a bar magnet. You may seek the source of either pole in the finite world, but you will always end up on a journey into infinity. Look at the picture on the wall, Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper.
There you can see what I was saying about magnets, as well as about education through the soul, transferred to human beings. The mission of the soul of each of the disciples is indicated symbolically by the position of his hands and fingers. In each one of them the right hand is active, whether it is leaning on the table, the edge of which is divided into sixteen parts, which could indicate the sixteen letters of the ancient Roman alphabet, or joined with the left hand. It is Judas Iscariot alone whose left hand is active, his right hand is closed! John the Evangelist – of whom Jesus said he might tarry till He came, so that a saying went abroad among the disciples that he would not die – has his hands clasped together, which signifies that he is a magnet which is no longer a magnet, he is a ring in eternity, he is no longer journeying.

These finger positions are strange things, they conceal the deepest mysteries of religion. You find them on old statues of gods in the East, but they also reappear in the paintings of almost all the masters of the Middle Ages.

A legend has been handed down in our family that our ancestor, the lamp-bearer Christopher Jöcher, came from the East, bringing with him the secret of using finger gestures to call up the shades of the dead and bend them to his will for all sorts of purposes.

A document which I possess reveals he was a member of an ancient order which in one place calls itself Shi Kiai, that is ‘The Dissolution of the Corpse’, and in another Kieu Kiai, ‘The Dissolution of the Swords’.

This document tells of things which will sound very strange to your ears. With the help of the art of making the hands and fingers spiritually alive, some members of the order disappeared from the grave along with their corpse, and others transformed themselves in the earth into swords.

Do you not see in that, Father, a striking parallel with the Resurrection of Christ? Especially if you relate it to the mysterious hand gestures in pictures and statues from the Middle Ages and Oriental antiquity?”

I heard the Chaplain becoming restless, walking up and down the room with hurried steps. Then he stopped and spoke in urgent tones:

“All this, my dear Baron, sounds too much like Freemasonry for me, as a Catholic priest, to accept without contradiction. What you call the deadly north wind is, for me, Freemasonry and everything connected with it. I know well – we have spoken about it often enough – that all great painters and artists were united by a common bond, which they called the Guild, and that they declared this unity beyond frontiers by attaching to the figures in their pictures secret signs, usually in the position of the fingers or gestures of the hands, or through the attitude of faces in the clouds, or sometimes through their choice of colours. Often enough the Church, before commissioning pictures of saints, made them solemnly swear to desist from this practice, but they kept on finding ways of circumventing their oath. People hold it against the Church that she says, if not for everyone to hear, that art comes from the Devil. Is that so incomprehensible for a strict Catholic? When it is well known that artists possessed and preserved a mystery that was clearly directed against the Church?

I know of a letter from a great painter of the past to a Spanish friend in which he openly admits the existence of the secret league.”

“I know that letter too”, the Baron broke in. “In it the painter says – more or less, I cannot remember his exact words – ‘Go to such and such a person, a man by the name of X, and go down on thy knees and beg him to give me just one hint of how to proceed further with this mystery. I do not want to remain merely a painter to the end of my life.’ And what does that tell us, my dear Chaplain? Nothing more than that the famous artist, however far he had been initiated into the externals, was in reality only a blind man. There is no doubt in my mind that he belonged to the Guild and that he was a Freemason, which, for me, is as much as to say: he was a mere labourer in the brickyard who was only involved in work on the exterior of the building. You are quite correct when you say that all the architects, painters, sculptors, goldsmiths and engravers of those days were Freemasons. But – and this is the crucial point – they were only acquainted with the external rituals and only understood them in an ethical sense; they were merely tools of that invisible power, which you, as a Catholic, mistakenly think of as the ‘Master of the Left Hand’. Tools they were, nothing else, and their sole purpose was to preserve certain mysteries in symbolic form for posterity, until the time shall be ripe. They always came to a halt part of the way along the path, for they kept on hoping that human lips would give them the key that would open the door. They never suspected that it lies in the execution of their art itself; they never understood that art conceals a deeper meaning than merely producing pictures or creating literature, namely to develop within the artist a kind of hypersensitivity of perception and sensation, of which the first expression is called a ‘right sense of art’. Even an artist alive today, insofar as his profession has opened his senses to the influences of that power, will be able to bring those symbols back to life in his works. There is no need at all for him to learn of them from the lips of a living person, nor to have been received into one or other of the Lodges. On the contrary, there are ‘invisible lips’ that speak a thousand times more clearly than the tongues of men. What is true art other than scooping up a portion of this eternal abundance?