The Master of the Day of Judgment

by Leo Perutz

  He drew the standard lamp closer to him. Then he sat silently in his armchair for about a minute.

  "No, I don't think the concoction was an invention of the Sienese physician,' he began. "It's very ancient, and its origin is no doubt to be sought in the East. Fear and ecstasy. Have you ever taken an interest in the story of the Assassins? Today you may have held in your hands the drug, or one of the drugs, by means of which the Old Man of the Mountain controlled men's minds."

  "And now it has been lost for ever," said Felix.

  "That may be regrettable from the scientific point of view, but I'm very pleased it happened," Dr Gorski went on. "When Solgrub destroyed that last page, he knew what he was doing. The fumes you inhaled, baron, had the power to stimulate the part of the brain that is the seat of the imagination, and it increased the potency of your imagination out of all proportion. Ideas that flitted through your mind took concrete form and appeared before your eyes as if they were real. Do you now see why Dr Salimbeni's experiment had a special appeal to actors, sculptors and painters? They all looked to the drug for new impulses for artistic creation. They saw only the bait without appreciating the danger they were running into."

  He rose, and in a sudden outburst of feeling struck the open pages of the book with his fist.

  "Don't you see the diabolical nature of the trap? The seat of the imagination is also the seat of fear. That is the point. Fear and imagination are inseparably linked. The great phantasts have always been obsessed by fear and terror. Think of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Michelangelo, Brueghel, Edgar Allan Poe. . ."

  "It wasn't fear," I said, and the memory made me shudder. "I know fear, I've experienced it more than once. Fear can be overcome. It wasn't fear or terror, it was a thousand times worse than that, it was a feeling for which there are no words."

  "You know fear, baron? You claim that you know it? Since today perhaps you do. But your previous encounters with it were mere pale reflections of an experience that has been extinct in us for thousands of years. Fear, real fear, the fear felt by primitive man when he stepped out of the light of his fire into the dark, when lightning flashed from the clouds, when the cries of antediluvian saurians re-echoed from the swamps, the primeval fear of a hostile environment felt by lonely man — that is an experience unknown to modern man, who would be incapable of standing up to it. But the nerve capable of reviving it is not dead, it does not stir and shows no sign of life, it may perhaps have been drugged for thousands of years — but we carry about a terrifying sleeper in our brain."

  "And that terrible light? That unimaginable colour?"

  "Perhaps there may be a physiological explanation of that remarkable phenomenon too. But first I must tell you something about the structure of the human eye. It is the retina, or rather a system of nerve fibres ending in the retina, that is sensitive to colour and is stimulated by the basic colours, that is, by rays of quite definite wavelength. Isn't it conceivable that the poisonous fumes you inhaled brought about such an alteration in your retina that it became receptive to other rays of greater or lesser length? That puzzling trumpet red may have been the colour, invisible to us, that lies outside the solar spectrum and is known to physicists as infra-red."

  "What are you saying?" said Felix. "You are talking of dark heat rays. Do you claim that he saw them, that his eye perceived them as colour?"

  "He may have done," Dr Gorski replied. "The phenomenon is open to a number of different interpretations. But what is the point of making hypotheses that can never be proved?"

  He rose and opened the window. The odour of damp earth and withered leaves came in with the wind. Small moths appeared out of the darkness and fluttered round the lamp.

  "And do you think that that evening, while you were sitting here in this room ... do you think that Eugen Bischoff in the pavilion saw the same visions?" I asked.

  Dr Gorski turned and walked away from the window.

  "What do you mean, the same?" he said. "The answer is no. The dreadful visions you saw came from your unconscious. Leprosy, for instance. You have several times been to the East, you have travelled in east Asia. Did you never even once feel, perhaps hardly consciously, a slight fear of that most terrible scourge of Asia? Think about it, baron. Eugen Bischoff? For years he had had one great fear: fear of losing Dina, of losing her to you. And in that unhappy hour he had a dreadful vision of her in your arms. What happened next? The shot, the first shot that hit the wall, may give us a clue. That shot was meant for you, baron. He may then have been seized with horror at what he had done, and turned the weapon against himself. When you walked into the room — do you remember his expression when he saw you? He saw you standing there alive, though he had shot you in the heart. It was with a feeling of infinite astonishment that Eugen Bischoff passed into the next world."

  "And Solgrub?" Felix asked from the window.

  "Solgrub was an officer in the Russian army, he took part in the Manchurian campaign. What do any of us really know about others? Each of us has his own Day of Judgment inside himself. Who knows? Perhaps it was the dead in that campaign who in his last hour rose against him."

  He went over to the table and swept some dust from the cover of the old book.

  "There the monster lies," he said. "It will do no more mischief, its time has passed. Through how many hands may it have passed in the course of the centuries? Would you like to keep it, Felix? If not, I have all sorts of mouldering learned junk at home, I feel well in the odour of yellowing parchment. The pages that are written on are yours, baron. Keep them in memory of a time when I saw you as I never again want to see a human being."

  When I left the house Dina was standing by the garden gate. I had to pass her, there was no other way out. Deep, burning pain rose in me, I thought of what had been and could never be again, there were shades between us. For a moment her hand lay in mine, and then it vanished in the dark. I raised my hat. Silently we went our separate ways.

  Editor's Postscript

  When the Great War broke out Gottfried Adalbert Baron von Yosch and Klettenfeld rejoined the army as a volunteer. He was sent to the front, and was killed some months later while on a mounted reconnaissance patrol in the wooded country of Kostelniece during the battle of Limanova. His account of the events of the autumn of 1909 was found with other papers in the saddle-bag of his horse.

  During the long Russian nights of December 1914 the novel — Baron von Yosch's posthumous work can hardly be properly described as anything else — was passed from hand to hand by the officers of the 6th Royal and Imperial Regiment of Dragoons. I received it from my squadron commander — without any comment — towards the end of the month. The reasons why the baron had resigned his commission five years before the outbreak of war were known to most of us. The suicide of the court actor Bischoff caused a considerable stir, and I well remember the part played in that affair by Baron von Yosch.

  I expected, when I began looking through his papers, to find an attempt at self-justification, a perhaps embellished but essentially truthful account of the facts of the case. So far as purely external events are concerned, the first part of his story in fact corresponds with the real course of events. This made it the more surprising when I discovered that from a certain point onwards the story loses all contact with reality. At that point (it occurs in Chapter 8 where the author characteristically states: "Inside me and all round me everything had changed, and I had returned to the world of reality") the story takes a sharp turn into fantasy. Should it be necessary to state explicitly that Baron von Yosch caused the suicide of the court actor Bischoff, a man with a tendency to depression who was therefore easily influenced, and that, when he was called to account by the dead man's relatives and was driven into a corner, he took refuge in telling a lie on his word of honour? That is the truth of the matter. Everything else, the intervention of the engineer, the hunt for the "monster", the mysterious concoction, the vision, is hazardous invention. In reality the affair, which was reported to His Majesty's Chanc
ery, ended in Baron von Yosch's being found guilty by a court of honour.

  What was Baron von Yosch's purpose in writing this story? Did he intend to publish it? Did he hope that the court of honour would revise its verdict? That strikes me as highly improbable. Not all his intellectual faculties were equally developed, but he was by no means deficient in a sense of reality. But if his story was not intended for publication, why the very substantial effort entailed in telling it, which must have taken up years of his life?

  Experienced criminologists provide the answer. They point to the "play with the evidence", the self-tormenting urge, observable in many of those found guilty by the courts, to force a new interpretation on the evidence of their crime, to prove to themselves that they might have been acquitted if fate had not decided against them.

  Was it revolt against unalterable fate? But — looked at from a higher standpoint — has this not always been the origin of all art? Does not every eternal masterpiece derive from the experience of disgrace, humiliation, wounded pride? The thoughtless mob may wildly applaud a work of art — to me it reveals the devastated mind of its creator. In all the great symphonies of tones, colours and ideas I see a gleam of the marvellous colour trumpet red, a faint reflection of the great vision that for a short while raised the Master above the bewildering maze of his tormenting guilt.

  In conclusion let me state that I succeeded in overcoming Baron von Yosch's closest relatives' reservations about publishing his story. Publication takes place with their consent.