Strange News From Another Star

  And when his mother had been buried, his godfather Binsswanger took him by the arm and led him into his little house, which seemed to the young man even shabbier and darker than before, and when they had sat together for a long time and only the small window shimmered feebly in the darkness, then the little old man stroked his grey beard with his thin fingers and said to Augustus: 'I will make a fire on the hearth, then we won't need the lamp. I know you must leave tomorrow, and now that your mother is dead, you won't be back again very soon.'

  So saying, he kindled a small fire on the hearth, pulled his chair near it, and arranged Augustus's chair close to his own. They sat thus together for another long while, looking into the glowing coals, until the flying sparks had grown sparse, and then the old man said softly: 'Farewell, Augustus, I wish you well. You had a fine mother who did more for you than you know. I would gladly have made music for you again and shown you the small blessed ones, but you know that isn't possible any more. But you must not forget them and you must remember that they always continue to sing and that perhaps you will be able to hear them once more if a time comes when you desire it with a lonely and longing heart. Now give me your hand, my boy, I am old and must go to bed.'

  Augustus shook hands with him but could not speak. He went sadly over to the deserted little house and for the last time lay down to sleep in his old home, but before falling asleep he thought he heard again, very far off and faint, the sweet music of his childhood. Next morning he left, and for a long time nothing was heard of him in his home town.

  Soon, too, he forgot his Godfather Binsswanger and the angels. He lived a life of luxury and revelled in it. No one could equal his style as he rode through the streets waving to adoring girls and teasing them with secret glances, no one could drive a four-in-hand with such gaiety and elegance, no one was as boisterous and boastful through a summer night's drinking bout in the garden. The rich widow whose lover he was gave him money and clothes and horses and everything he needed or wanted, he travelled with her to Paris and to Rome and slept in her silken sheets. His beloved, however, was the soft, blonde daughter of a burgher; he met her recklessly in her father's garden, and she wrote him long, ardent letters when he was abroad.

  But the time came when he did not return. He had found friends in Paris, and because his rich mistress had begun to bore him and study had long since become a nuisance, he stayed abroad and lived the life of high society. He kept horses, dogs, women, lost money and won money in great golden rolls, and everywhere people pursued him, were captivated by him and served him, and he smiled and accepted it all, just as he had accepted the young girl's ring long before. The magic of his mother's wish lay in his eyes and on his lips, women smothered him with tenderness, friends raved about him, and no one saw — he scarcely noticed it himself - that his heart had grown empty and greedy and that his soul was sick and full of pain. At times he grew tired of being loved so by everyone and went alone in disguise to foreign cities, but everywhere he found people fatuous and all too easy to conquer, everywhere he scorned the love that followed him so ardently and was content with so little. He often felt disgust for men and women because they did not have more pride, and he spent whole days alone with his dogs in the beautiful hunting preserves in the mountains; a stag stalked and shot made him happier than the conquest of a beautiful spoiled woman.

  Then in the course of a sea voyage he chanced to meet the young wife of an ambassador, a reserved, slender lady of the northern nobility who stood out with marked distinction among the many fashionable women and worldly men. She was proud and quiet, as though no one was her equal, and when he watched her and saw that her glance seemed to brush past him too, hastily and indifferently, it seemed to him as though he were experiencing for the very first time what love is, and he determined to win her heart. From then on, at every hour of the day, he stayed close to her and in her sight, and because he himself was always surrounded by people who admired him and sought his society, he and the beautiful, unmoved lady were always at the centre of the company of travellers, like a prince with his princess; even the blonde's husband treated him with deference and took pains to please him.

  It was never possible for him to be alone with the lovely stranger until in a southern port the whole party of travellers left the ship in order to spend a few hours wandering around in the foreign city and feeling earth under their feet again. He did not move from his beloved's side and presently, in the colourful confusion of a market-place, he succeeded in detaining her in conversation. Innumerable little dark alleys entered this square, into one of which he led her; she accompanied him trustfully, but when she suddenly found herself alone with him she became nervous and looked all around for their travelling companions. He turned to her passionately, took her reluctant hand in his, and besought her to leave the ship with him and flee.

  The young woman grew pale and kept her eyes fixed on the ground. 'Oh, that is not chivalrous,' she said softly. 'Allow me to forget what you have just said.'

  'I am no knight,' cried Augustus. 'I am a lover, and a lover knows nothing except his beloved and has no thought except to be with her. O fair lady, flee with me, we will be happy.'

  She looked at him solemnly and reproachfully with her clear blue eyes. 'How could you know,' she whispered sadly, 'that I loved you? I cannot deny it; I love you and I have often wished that you might be my husband. For you are the first I have ever loved with all my heart. Alas, how can love go so far astray! I would never have thought it possible for me to love a man who is not pure and good. But I prefer a thousand times to stay with my husband, whom I do not greatly love but who is a knight full of honour and chivalry, qualities that are foreign to you. And now do not say another word, but take me back to the ship; otherwise, I will call out to strangers to protect me against your insolence.'

  And no matter how much he stormed and pleaded with her, she turned away from him and would have walked on alone if he had not silently gone after her and accompanied her to the ship. There he had his trunk taken ashore without saying goodbye to anyone.

  From then on, the luck of this much-loved man changed. Virtue and honour had become hateful to him, he trod them underfoot and diverted himself by seducing virtuous women through his magical wiles and exploiting unsuspecting men whom he quickly made his friends and then contemptuously cast off. He reduced women and girls to poverty and forthwith disowned them, he sought out youths from noble houses whom he seduced and corrupted. There was no pleasure that he did not indulge in and exhaust, no vice that he did not cultivate and then discard. But there was no longer any joy in his heart, and to the love that greeted him everywhere no echo responded in his soul.

  Sullen and morose, he lived in a magnificent country house on the seacoast, and the men and women who visited him there he tormented with the wildest whims and spitefulness. He took delight in degrading people and treating them with complete contempt; he was satiated and disgusted with the unsought, unwanted, undeserved love that surrounded him, he felt the worthlessness of a squandered and disordered life in which he had never given but always simply taken. Sometimes he went hungry for a long time just to be able to feel a real appetite again, to satisfy a desire.

  The news spread among his friends that he was ill and needed peace and solitude. Letters came but he never read them, and worried people inquired of his servants about his state of health. But he sat alone and deeply troubled in his hall above the sea, his life lay empty and desolate behind him, as barren and devoid of love as the billowing grey salt sea. His face was hideous as he huddled there in his chair at the high window, holding an accounting with himself. White gulls swept by on the coast wind, he followed them with eyes empty of all joy and sympathy. As he reached the conclusion of his meditations and summoned his valet, only his lips moved in a harsh and evil smile. He ordered that all his friends be invited to a feast on a given day, but his intention was to terrify and mock them on their arrival with the sight of an empty house and his own corpse. For he wa
s determined to end his life by poison.

  On the evening before the appointed feast he sent his whole staff of servants from the house, and the great rooms fell completely silent. He withdrew to his bedchamber, where he mixed a powerful poison in a glass of Cyprus wine and raised it to his lips.

  But just as he was about to drink, there was a knocking at the door, and when he did not reply, the door opened and a little old man entered. He went straight up to Augustus and carefully took the full glass out of his hands, and a familiar voice said: 'Good evening, Augustus, how are things going with you?'

  Astounded, angered, but also ashamed, Augustus smiled mockingly and said: 'Herr Binsswanger, are you still alive? It has been a long time, and you actually do not seem to have grown any older. But at the moment you are disturbing me, my dear fellow. I am tired and was just about to take a sleeping potion.'

  'So I see,' his godfather replied calmly. 'You are going to take a sleeping potion and you are right, this is the last wine that can still help you. But before that we'll chat for a minute, my boy, and since I have a long journey behind me, you won't mind if I refresh myself with a small drink.'

  Whereupon he took the glass and raised it to his lips and, before Augustus could restrain him, tilted it up and drained it at a single gulp.

  Augustus became deathly pale. He sprang towards his godfather, shook him by the shoulders, and cried sharply: 'Old man, do you know what you have just drunk?'

  Herr Binsswanger nodded his clever grey head and smiled. 'It's Cyprus wine, I see, and it's not bad. You don't seem to be in want. But I haven't much time and I won't detain you for long if you will just listen to me.'

  Disconcerted, Augustus stared into his godfather's bright eyes with horror, expecting to see him collapse at any instant.

  But Herr Binsswanger simply sat down comfortably on a chair and nodded benignly at his young friend.

  'Are you worried for fear this drink of wine will hurt me? Now just relax. It's nice of you to be worried about me. I would never have expected it. But now let's talk again as we used to in the old days. It seems to me that you have become satiated with a life of frivolity? I can understand that, and when I leave, you can refill your glass and drink it down. But before that I must tell you something.'

  Augustus leaned against the wall and listened to the little old man's good, kind voice, a voice so familiar to him from childhood that it awoke echoes of the past in his soul. Deep shame and sorrow overcame him as he looked back at his own innocent youth.

  'I have drunk your poison,' the old man went on, 'because I am the one who is responsible for your misery. At your christening your mother made a wish for you and I fulfilled it for her, even though it was a foolish wish. There is no need for you to be told what it was; it has become a curse, as you yourself have realized. I am sorry it turned out this way, and it would certainly make me happy if I could live to see you sitting beside me once more, at home in front of the hearth, listening to the little angels singing. That is not easy, and at the moment perhaps it seems to you impossible that your heart could ever again be healthy and pure and cheerful. But it is possible, and I want to beg you to attempt it. Your poor mother's wish did not suit you well, Augustus. How would it be now if you allowed me to fulfil a wish for you too, any wish? Very likely you will not want money or possessions or power or the love of women, of which you have had enough. Think carefully, and if you believe you know a magic spell that could make your wasted life fairer and better, that could make you happy once more, then wish it for yourself.'

  Augustus sat deep in thought and was silent, but he was too exhausted and hopeless, and so after a while he said: 'I thank you, Godfather Binsswanger, but I believe there is no comb that can smooth out the tangles of my life. It is better for me to do what I was planning to do when you came in. But I thank you, nevertheless, for coming.'

  'Yes,' said the aged man thoughtfully, 'I can imagine that this is not easy for you. But perhaps you can take thought once more, Augustus, perhaps you will realize what is now principally lacking, or perhaps you can remember those times when your mother was still alive and when you occasionally came to see me in the evening. After all, you were sometimes happy, were you not?'

  'Yes, in those days,' Augustus said, nodding, and the image of his radiant youth looked back at him from afar, palely as though out of an antique mirror. 'But that cannot come again. I cannot wish to be a child once more. Why, then it would begin all over again!'

  'No, you are quite right, that would make no sense. But think once more of the time when we were together back at home, and of the poor girl whom you used to visit at night in her father's garden when you were at college, and think too of the beautiful fair-haired lady with whom you once travelled on a ship at sea, and think of all the moments when you have ever been happy and when life seemed to you good and precious. Perhaps you can recognize what made you happy at those times and can wish for it. Do so for my sake, my boy!'

  Augustus closed his eyes and looked back over his life as one looks back from a dark corridor towards a distant point of light, and he saw again how everything had once been bright and beautiful around him and then had become dimmer and dimmer until he stood now in complete darkness, and nothing could any longer cheer him. And the more he thought back and remembered, the more beautiful and lovable and desirable seemed that little glowing light, and finally he recognized it and tears started from his eyes.

  'I will try,' he said to his godfather. 'Take away the old magic which has not helped me and give me instead the ability to love people!'

  Weeping, he knelt before his ancient friend and even as he sank down he felt his love for this aged man burning within him and struggling for expression in forgotten words and gestures. His godfather, that tiny man, took him up in his arms, carried him to the bed and laid him down, and stroked his hair and feverish brow.

  'That is good,' he whispered to him softly. 'That is good, my child, all will be well.'

  Thereupon Augustus felt himself overwhelmed by a crushing weariness, as though he had aged many years in an instant. He fell into a deep sleep, and the old man went silently out of the empty house.

  Augustus was awakened by a wild uproar resounding through the house, and when he got up and opened his bedchamber door he found the hall and all the rooms filled with the friends who had come to his party and found the place deserted. They were angry and disappointed, and when he went towards them, intending to win them all back as usual with a smile and a joke, he suddenly realized that the power to do this had gone from him. They had barely caught sight of him when they all began to scream at him. He smiled helplessly and stretched out appealing hands in self-defence, but they fell upon him raging.

  'You cheat,' one man cried. 'Where is the money you owe me?' And another: 'And the horse I loaned you?' And a beautiful furious woman: 'Everybody knows my secrets now because you've talked about me everywhere. Oh, how I hate you, you monster!' And a hollow-eyed young man shrieked, his face distorted with hatred: 'You know what you have made of me, you fiend, you corrupter of youth!'

  And so it went, each one heaping insults and curses on him -all of them justified - and many striking him; and after they had left, breaking mirrors as they went and taking many valuables away with them, Augustus got up from the floor, beaten and humiliated. When he entered his bedchamber and looked in the mirror while washing, his face peered out at him, wrinkled and ugly, the eyes red and watering, and blood was dripping from his forehead.

  'That's my reward,' he said to himself, as he rinsed the blood from his face, and hardly had he had time to reflect a little when uproar broke out once more in the house and a crowd came storming up the stairway: moneylenders to whom he had mortgaged his house; a husband whose wife he had seduced; fathers whose sons he had tempted into vice and misery; maids and menservants he had dismissed, policemen and lawyers. An hour later he sat handcuffed in a patrol wagon on his way to jail. Behind him the crowd shouted and sang mocking songs, and a street h
oodlum threw a handful of filth through the window into the prisoner's face.

  Then the city re-echoed with the shameful deeds of this man whom so many had known and loved. There was no sin he was not accused of, none that he denied. People he had long since forgotten stood before the judges and accused him of things he had done years before: servants he had rewarded and who had robbed him revealed his secret vices, every face was full of loathing and hatred, and there was no one to speak in his defence, to praise him, to exonerate him, to recall any good thing about him.

  He did not protest against any of this but allowed himself to be led into a cell and out of it again and before the judges and witnesses. He looked with amazement and sorrow out of sick eyes at the many evil, angry, hate-filled faces, and in each he saw under the hatred and distortion a hidden charm and felt a spark of affection. All these people had once loved him, and he had loved none of them; now he begged their forgiveness and sought to remember something good about each one of them.

  In the end he was sent to prison, and no one ventured to visit him. Then in his feverish dreams he talked to his mother and to his first beloved, to his Godfather Binsswanger and the northern lady on the ship, and when he awoke and sat lonely and abandoned through the fearful days, he suffered all the pains of longing and isolation and he yearned for the sight of people as he had never yearned for any pleasure or possession.

  And when he was released from prison, he was sick and old and no one any longer recognized him. The world went its way; people rode in carriages and on horseback and promenaded in the streets; fruits and flowers, toys and newspapers were offered for sale; and no one turned to speak to Augustus. Beautiful women whom he had once held in his arms in an atmosphere of music and champagne went by in their equipages, and the dust of their passing settled over Augustus.

  But the dreadful emptiness and loneliness that had stifled him in the midst of luxury now had completely disappeared. When he paused in the shadow of a gateway to take shelter for a moment from the heat of the sun, or when he begged a drink of water in the courtyard of some modest dwelling, then he was amazed at how sullenly and ill-temperedly people treated him, the same people who had earlier responded to his proud and indifferent words gratefully and with sparkling eyes. Nevertheless, he was delighted and touched and moved by the sight of everyone, he loved the children he saw at play and going to school, and he loved the old people sitting on benches in front of their little houses, warming their withered hands in the sun. If he saw some young man following a girl with yearning glances or a worker returning on a holiday eve and picking up his children in his arms, or a clever, fashionable doctor driving by in silence and haste, intent upon his patients, or equally some poor, ill-clad trollop waiting by a lamp-post, ready to offer even him, the outcast, her love, then all these were his brothers and sisters and each one was stamped with the memory of a beloved mother and some finer background, or the secret sign of a higher and nobler destiny, and each was dear and remarkable in his eyes and gave him food for thought, and he considered that no one was worse than himself.