The Angel of the West Window Read online

  (Gustav Meyrink, printed in Der Bücherwurm, Leipzig, 1927, no. 8, p. 236-238.)

  THE ANGEL OF THE WEST WINDOW

  A strange feeling: this packet I am holding in my hand was all neatly tied up and sealed by a dead man! It is as if fine, invisible threads, delicate as a spider’s web, lead out from it into a dark realm.

  The complex pattern of the string, the care with which the blue wrapping paper has been folded – it all bears silent witness to the purposeful designs of a living man sensing the approach of death: he gathers together letters, notes, caskets filled with once vital matters that already belong to the past, suffused with memories that have long since faded, and he arranges them and wraps them up with half a thought for his future heir, for that distant, almost unknown person – me – who will know of his death and who will hear of it at the moment when this sealed packet, left to find its way in the realm of the living, reaches the hand it is destined for.

  It is sealed with the massive red seals of my cousin, John Roger, bearing the arms of my mother’s family. For years this son of my mother’s brother had always been referred to by aged kinswomen as ‘the last of his line’. To my ears this description sounded like a solemn title, especially when added to his foreign-sounding name with the strange, somewhat ridiculous pride of those thin, wrinkled lips which coughed out the last breath of a dying line.

  This family tree – in my brooding imagination the heraldic image grows to monstrous proportions – has stretched its grotesquely gnarled branches over distant lands. Its roots were in Scotland and it sprouted all over England; it is said to be blood-kin to one of the oldest houses in Wales. Vigorous shoots established themselves in Sweden, in America and, finally, in Germany and Styria. Everywhere the branches have withered; in Britain the trunk rotted. Here alone, in southern Austria, one last shoot sprouted – my cousin John Roger. And this last shoot was strangled by England.

  How my grandfather on my mother’s side – ‘His Lordship’, as he liked to be called – had clung to the name and tradition of his ancestors! He, who was nothing but a dairy farmer in Styria! My cousin, John Roger, had followed other paths, had studied science, become a doctor and dabbled in psychopathology, travelling far and wide, to Vienna and Zurich, to Aleppo and Madras, to Alexandria and Turin, to learn from the foremost authorities about the depths of the human psyche. He visited them all, the licensed and the licentious, caring not whether their shirts were stiff with western starch or oriental grime.

  He had moved to England a few years before the outbreak of the war. There he is said to have pursued his researches into the origin and fate of our line. The reason is unknown to me, but a persistent rumour had it that he was on the trail of some strange, deep secret. He was surprised there by the war. As an Austrian reserve lieutentant he was interned. When he came out of the camps five years later he was a broken man; he never crossed the Channel again and died somewhere in London, leaving a few meagre possessions which are now scattered amongst various members of the family.

  My portion, besides a few mementos, is the parcel which arrived today; it bears, in angular handwriting, my name.

  The family tree is withered, the escutcheon shattered.

  That was just an idle thought. There was no King of Arms to perform this sombre ceremony over the family vault.

  The escutcheon is shattered – the words I said softly to myself as I broke the red wax. No more will anyone use that seal.

  It is a magnificent coat of arms that I am breaking. Breaking? Strange, I suddenly feel as if that word is a lie.

  It is true that I am breaking up the coat of arms, but, who knows: perhaps I am just waking it from a long sleep! The shield is split at the foot; in the right-hand, azure field is a silver sword thrust vertically into a green hill, representing the ancestral manor of Gladhill in Worcestershire; on the left in a field of argent is a tree in leaf with a silver spring gushing forth from between its roots, representing Mortlake in Middlesex; and on the forked field – vert – above the foot there is a light in the shape of an early Christian lamp. The last is an unusual heraldic device, which has always puzzled the experts.

  I hesitate before breaking off the last, beautifully clear seal; it is such a pleasure to look at! But what is this?! That is not the burning lamp above the foot of the escutcheon! It’s a crystal! A regular dodecahedron surrounded by a sunburst of rays? No dull oil-lamp, then, but a radiant jewel!

  And again I am gripped by a strange sensation: I feel as if some memory is trying to force its way up into consciousness, a memory that has been sleeping for ... centuries, yes, for centuries.

  How did this precious stone come to be in the coat of arms? And look, a tiny inscription around it? I take my magnifying glass and read, “Lapis sacer sanctificatus et praecipuus manifestationis.”

  With a shake of the head I examine this incomprehensible modification of the familiar coat of arms. That is a stamp that I have certainly never seen! Either my cousin, John Roger, had a second signet in his possession or – – now it’s clear: the sharp cut is unmistakably modern. John Roger must have had a new ring made in London. But, why? The oil-lamp! It suddenly seems so obvious it’s almost ridiculous. The oil-lamp was never anything other than a late, baroque corruption, the escutcheon was always meant to bear a shining rock crystal! But what can the inscription around mean? Curious how the crystal seems so well-known to me, inwardly familiar, so to speak. Rock crystal! I know there is an old tale of a lustrous jewel shining from above, but I have forgotten the tale.

  Hesitantly I break the last seal and untie the parcel. Out tumble ancient letters, documents, deeds, excerpts, yellowing parchments covered with Rosicrucian cyphers, pictures with hermetic pandects, some half-decayed, a few volumes bound in pigskin with old copper engravings, all kinds of notebooks tied up together; then there are some ivory caskets full of marvellous antiques: coins, pieces of wood mounted like relics in silver and gold leaf, pieces of bone and specimens of the best Devon coal, iridescent and cut into facets like a gem-stone, and more of the like. On top, a note in the stiff, angular handwriting of John Roger:

  Read or read not! Burn or preserve! Ashes to ashes and dust to dust! We of the line of Hywel Dda, Princes of Wales, are dead. – – Mascee.

  Are these words intended for me? They must be! They make no sense to me, but neither do I feel the urge to brood over them. Like a child, I think: why should I bother with that now, it’ll all become clear in time! What does the word “Mascee” mean? That does intrigue me. I look it up in the dictionary: “Mascee = an Anglo-Chinese expression meaning something like ‘What does it matter!”’ It is the equivalent of the Russian “Nitchevo”.

  I spent many hours yesterday musing on the fate of my cousin John Roger and on the transience of human hopes and of things material. It was well on into the night when I rose from my desk; I decided to leave a detailed inventory of the legacy until the next day. I went to bed and was soon asleep.

  The thought of the crystal must have pursued me into my sleep; I cannot recall ever having had such a strange dream as visited me that night.

  The crystal was hovering somewhere in the darkness above me. A dull ray emanating from it struck my forehead and I had a clear sensation that this established some significant relationship between my head and the stone. I felt afraid, and tried to withdraw by turning my head from side to side, but I could not escape the ray of light. And as I twisted and turned my head I had a disconcerting sensation: it seemed to me that the ray from the crystal was playing on my forehead even when I buried my face in the pillows. And I clearly felt the back of my head take on the form of the front – a second face was growing out of the crown of my head. – I felt no terror; it was merely a nuisance because it meant I could not avoid the ray of light any more.

  The head of Janus, I thought. Even in my dream I knew that was merely a half-remembered scrap of knowledge from the Latin classes at school, yet I hoped that would be the end of it. But it would not leave me in peace. J
anus? Nonsense, it wasn’t Janus. But what was it, then? With irritating obstinacy that “What then?” kept running through my dream, even though I could not seem to remember who I was. Instead, something else happened: slowly, slowly the crystal floated down from the heights above me and came close to the top of my head. And I had the feeling that the stone was something alien to me, so utterly alien that I could not put it into words. Some object from a distant galaxy could not have been more alien. – I don’t know why, when I think of the dream now, I think of the dove that descended from heaven when Jesus was baptised by John.

  – – The nearer the crystal came, the more it shone directly down onto my head; that is: onto the line where my two heads met. And gradually I started to feel an icy burning there. And this feeling – which was not even unpleasant – woke me up. – – –

  I spent the whole of the following morning pondering over the dream.

  Hesitantly and with great difficulty I prised a fragment of memory loose from the rock face of the past: a recollection of a conversation, of a story, of something I had thought up or read – or whatever – in which a crystal occurred and a face – but it was not called “Janus”. A half faded vision rose before my mind’s eye:

  When I was still a child my grandfather – the noble Lord who was, in fact, only a Styrian farmer – used to take me on his knee to play ride-a-cock-horse, and at the same time he would tell me all sorts of stories in a hushed voice.

  All my childhood memories of fairy-tales are set on my Grandfather’s knee – he was almost a fairy-tale figure himself. And Grandfather told me of a dream. “Dreams”, he said, “are a stronger legal title than any parchment or fee simple. Always remember that. If you are to be a real heir, then, one day perhaps, I will bequeath our dream to you: the dream of the son of Hywel Dda.” And then, in a low, mysterious voice, as if he were afraid the very air in the room might be listening, close to my ear and yet still jogging me up and down on his knee, he told me of a jewel in a land where no living man could go, unless he were accompanied by one who had overcome death; and of a crown of gold and crystal on the double head of, of – – –? I think I remember him talking of this double-headed dream creature as of an ancestor or a family spirit, but then my memory fails entirely. Everything is blurred in a misty light.

  I never had a dream of that kind until – until last night! – Was that the dream of the sons of Hywel Dda?

  There was no point in going on brooding about it. Anyway, I was interrupted by a visit from my friend Sergei Lipotin, the old art dealer from the Werrengasse.

  Lipotin – in the city he is known by his nickname of “Nitchevo” – was formerly Antiquary to the Czar, and is still an impressive old gentleman, in spite of the dismal fate that has befallen him. Once a millionaire, a connoisseur, an expert in Asiatic art with a world-wide reputation – now a back-street dealer in junk chinoiserie, marked by death and hardly able to make ends meet, he is still a czarist to the core. I owe a number of rare pieces in my possession to his infallible judgement. And, strange to say, whenever I am gripped by the desire for some special objet which seems inaccessible, Lipotin appears and brings me something in that line.

  Today, as I had nothing more remarkable to hand, I showed him my cousin’s consignment from London. He was full of praise for some of the old prints; “Rarissima” he called them, using a favourite phrase of his. There were also a few objects in the manner of medallions which aroused his interest: “Solid German Renaissance work, above average quality.” Finally he examined John Roger’s coat of arms, gave a gasp of surprise and gazed at it abstractedly. I asked him what it was that had excited him. He shrugged his shoulders, lit a cigarette and said nothing.

  We chatted about unimportant matters. Just before he left he casually remarked, “Did you know that our old friend, Michael Arangelovitch Stroganoff, is unlikely to survive the last packet of cigarettes he bought. It is for the best. What has he left to pawn? No matter. It is an end we shall all come to. We Russians are like the sun – we rise in the East and go down in the West. Farewell!”

  Lipotin went. I mused on what he had told me. Michael Stroganoff, the old Baron I had first met in the coffee house, was about to cross over into the green realm of the dead, into the green land of Persephone. Since I have known him he has lived on tea and cigarettes. He arrived here after his flight from Russia with nothing but what he could carry on his person, half a dozen diamond rings and about the same number of gold pocket watches – all that he had been able to stuff into his pockets when he broke through the Bolshevik picket line. From the proceeds of these jewels he lived a carefree life in the grand manner. He smoked only the most expensive cigarettes, specially imported from the East; who knows what hands they passed through before reaching him. “To let the things of this earth go up in smoke,” he used to say, “is perhaps the only favour we can do God.” At the same time he was slowly starving to death; and whenever he was not sitting in Lipotin’s little shop he was freezing in his tiny attic somewhere in the suburbs.

  So Baron Stroganoff, former Imperial ambassador to Teheran, is on his deathbed. “No matter. It is all for the best,” Lipotin had said. With a mindless sigh to the empty air, I turn to the books and manuscripts of John Roger.

  I pick out this and that at random and start to read. – – –

  I have spent the whole day rummaging through the documents John Roger has left me and the outcome is that it seems pointless to try to arrange these scraps of ancient records and antiquarian studies into any kind of ordered whole – it is rubble and no effort can reconstruct the building it came from! I seem to hear a voice whispering, “Read and burn. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust!”

  Why should I care about this story of a certain John Dee, Lord of the Manor of Gladhill? Just because he was an old Englishman with an idée fixe who may have been one of my mother’s ancestors?

  But I cannot bring myself to throw the rubbish away. There are times when things have greater power over us than we over them; perhaps they are more alive than we and are just shamming lifelessness? I cannot even bring myself to stop reading. I do not know why, but the musty pages tighten their grip on me with every hour. The jumble of fragments begins to sort itself into a picture which emerges, sad yet splendid, from the mists of time: the portrait of a man, high-minded and fearfully betrayed; radiant in the morning of life, dimmed by the gathering clouds at midday, mocked and persecuted, nailed to the cross, refreshed with vinegar mingled with gall, cast down into hell and yet one of the elect, called to delight in the mysteries of heaven with all noble souls, a steadfast witness to his faith, a loving spirit.

  No! The story of John Dee, a late descendant of one of the oldest houses of these Islands, of the old Welsh Princes, an ancestor of my mother’s line – that story shall not be lost for ever!

  But I realise that I cannot write it as I would wish. I lack almost all the necessary background, especially the great knowledge my cousin enjoyed in those sciences which some call the occult and others think they can brush aside with the word “parapsychology”. In such matters I lack experience and judgement. The best I can do is to sort these scattered fragments and order them according to some clear plan: in the words of my cousin, John Roger, “to preserve and pass them on”.

  The result will surely be a mosaic with pieces missing. But does not the fragment often exert a stronger attraction than the complete picture? The way the curve of a smile breaks off to continue in the crease of a tormented brow – an enigma; the eye still staring out when the forehead is missing – an enigma; the sudden blaze of crimson from the crumbling wall – enigmas, enigmas ...

  It will take weeks, if not months, of meticulous work to bring some order to this tangle of already half-decaying documents. I hesitate: should I undertake it? If I felt certain that some inner spirit was compelling me to it, I would refuse out of pure contrariness and send up the whole bundle in smoke to ... “to do the good Lord a favour”.

  I keep on thinking of poor
Baron Michael Arangelovich Stroganoff, who will not even finish his packet of cigarettes – perhaps because God has scruples about allowing one man to do him too many favours. Today the dream with the jewel returned. Everything followed the same pattern except that the icy feeling as the crystal came down over my double head caused me no pain, so that I did not wake up this time. I’m not sure whether it had anything to do with the fact that it finally touched the top of my head, but, at the very moment when the beam of light illuminated both faces equally, I saw that I was the double-headed man and yet, at the same time, was another person: I saw myself – that is, the “Janus” – move both lips of the face on one side of the head whilst those on the other side remained motionless. It was the silent one that was the “real” me. For a long time the “other” made great efforts to produce a sound. It was as if he was struggling to find some word from the depths of sleep.

  Finally a breath came from the lips, wafting the words through the air towards me:

  “Order not! Do not presume! Where reason imposes its order it dams up the fountainhead and opens the way to ruin. Let me guide your hand as you read so you bring not destruction. – Let – me – guide – –”

  I could feel the torment that the effort of speaking caused my “other” head; it was probably that that woke me up.

  I don’t know what to think. What is going on? Is there a ghost somewhere inside me? Does some phantom from a dream want to come into my life? Is my consciousness about to split, am I becoming ... “ill”? For the moment I am sure I am perfectly healthy and whilst awake I do not feel the least temptation to grow a second face; even less do I feel under some “compulsion” to act or think in a certain way. I am completely master of my emotions and of my will: I am free!