Doctor Copernicus

IV. Magnum Miraculum

The sun at dawn, retrieving from the darkness the few remaining fragments of his life, summoned him back at last into the present. Warily he watched the room arrange itself around him: that return journey was so far, immeasurably far, that without proof he would not believe it was over. Outside, in the sky low in the east, a storm of fire raged amidst clouds, shedding light like a shower of burning arrows upon the great glittering steely arc of the Baltic. None of that was any longer wholly real, was mere melodrama, static and cold. The world had shrunk until his skull contained it entirely, and all without that shrivelled sphere was a changing series of superficial images in a void, utterly lacking in significance save on those rare occasions when a particular picture served to verify the moment, as now the fragments of his cell, picked out by the advancing dawn, were illuminated integers that traced on the surrounding gloom a constellation, a starry formula, expressing precisely, as no words could, all that was left of what he had once been, all that was left of his life. One morning, a morning much like this one, a fire fierce as the sun itself had exploded in his brain; when that dreadful glare faded everything was transfigured. Then had begun his final wanderings. It was into the past that he had travelled, for there was nowhere else to go. He was dying.

*

The sickness had come upon him stealthily. At first it had been no more than a faint dizziness at times, a step missed, a stumbling on the stairs. Then the megrims began, like claps of thunder trapped inside his skull, and for hours he was forced to lie prostrate in his shuttered cell with vinegar poultices pressed to his brow, as cascades of splintered multicoloured glass formed jagged images of agony behind his eyes. Still he persisted in denying what the physician in him knew beyond doubt to be the case, that the end had come. An attack of ague, nothing more, he told himself; I am seventy, it is to be expected. Then that morning, in the first week of April, as he had made to rise from his couch at dawn, his entire right side had pained him suddenly, terribly, as if a bag of shot, or pellets of hot quicksilver, had been emptied from his skull into his heart and pumped out from thence to clatter down the arteries of his arm, through the ribcage, into his leg. Moaning, he laid himself down again tenderly on the couch, with great solicitude, as a mother laying her child into its cradle. A spider in the dim dawnlight swarmed laboriously across the trampoline of its web strung between the ceiling beams. From without came the burgeoning clatter and crack of a horse and rider approaching. Poised on the rack of his pain he waited, calmly, almost in eagerness, for the advent of the black catastrophe. But the horseman did not stop, passed under the window, and then he understood, without surprise, but in something like disappointment, that he was not to be let go before suffering a final jest, and, instead of death, sleep, the ultimate banality, bundled him unceremoniously under its wing and bore him swiftly away.

*

It was sleep, yes, and yet more than that, an impassioned hearkening, a pausing upon a deserted shore at twilight, a last looking backward at the soon to be forsaken land, yes, yes: he was waiting yet. For what? He did not know. Mute and expectant, he peered anxiously into the sombre distance. They were all there, unseen yet palpable, all his discarded dead. A pang of longing pierced his heart. But why were they behind him? why not before? was he not on his way now at last to join that silent throng? And why did he tarry here, on this desolate brink? A brumous yellowy sky full of wreckage sank slowly afar, and the darkness welled up around him. Then he spied the figure approaching, the massive shoulders and great dark burnished face like polished stone, the wide-set eyes, the cruel mad mouth.

Who are you? he cried, striving in vain to lift his hands and fend off the apparition.

I am he whom you seek.

Tell me who you are!

As my own father I am already dead, as my own mother I still live, and grow old. I come to take you on a journey. You have much to learn, and so little time.

What? what would you teach me?

How to die.

Ah. . Then you are Brother Death?

No. He is not yet. I am the one that goes before. I am, you may say, the god of revels and oblivion. I make men mad. You are in my realm now, for a little while. Come with me. Here begins the descent into Hell. Come.

And so speaking the god turned and started back toward the dark land.

Come!

And the dying man looked before him again, to the invisible ineluctable sea, wanting to go on, unable to go on, turning already, even against his will, turning back toward the waiting throng.

Come. .

And as a soldier turns unwillingly away from a heart-rending vision of home and love only to meet full in the face the fatal shot, he turned and at once the great sphere of searing fire burst in his brain, and he awoke.

*

The pain was in his right side, although he seemed to know that rather than feel it, for that side was paralysed from ear to heel. Tentatively, with eyes averted, not wishing really to know, he sent out a few simple commands to arm and flank and hip, but to no avail, for the channels of communication were broken. It was as if half of him had come detached, and lay beside him now, a felled grey brute, sullen, unmoving and dangerous. Dangerous, yes: he must be wary of provoking this beast, or it would surely lift one mighty padded paw of pain and smash him. Bright April light shone in the window. He could see the Baltic, steel-blue and calm, bearing landward a ship with a black sail. Was it too much to expect that this burdensome clarity, this awareness, might have been taken from him, was it too much to expect at least that much respite? Below, Anna Schillings was stirring, setting in motion the creaky mechanism of another day. Despite the pain, he felt now most acutely a sense of anxiety and scruple, and, weirdly, a devastating embarrassment. He had not known just such a smarting dismay since childhood, when, marked out by some act or other of mischief, a dish broken, a lie told, he had stood cowering, all boltholes barred against him, in the path of the awful unavoidable engine of retribution. To be found out! It was absurd. Anna would come in a moment, with the gruel and the mulled wine, and he would be found out. Cautiously he tested his face to find if it would smile, and then, despite himself, he began quietly to blubber; it was a tiny luxury, and it made him feel better, after all.

By the time she came sighing up the stairs he had stanched his tears, but of course she sensed disaster at once. It was the stink of his shame, the stink of the child who has wet his breeches, of the maimed animal throbbing in a lair of leaves, that betrayed him. Slowly, with her face turned resolutely away, she set down on the floor beside his couch the steaming pewter mug of wine and the bowl of gruel.

“You are not risen yet, Canon?”

“It’s nothing, Anna, you must not trouble yourself. I am ill.” He found it difficult to speak, the blurred words were a kind of soft stone in his mouth. “Inform the Chapter, please, and ask Canon Giese to come.” No no, no, Giese was no longer here, but in Löbau; he must take care, she would think him in a worse way than he was if he continued raving thus. She stood motionless, with her head bowed and hands folded before her, still turned somewhat away, unwilling or unable to look full upon the calamity that had alighted in her life. She had the injured baffled look of one who has been grievously and unaccountably slighted, but above all she appeared puzzled, and entirely at a loss to know how to behave. He could sympathise, he knew the feeling: there is no place for death in the intricate workings of ordinary days. He wished he could think of something to say that would make this new disordered state of affairs seem reasonable.

“I am dying, Anna.”

He at once regretted saying it, of course. She began quietly to weep, with a reserve, a sort of circumspection, that touched him far more deeply than the expected wild wailings could have done. She went away, sniffling, and returned presently with water to wash him, and a pot for his relief. Deftly she ministered to him, speaking not a word. He admired her competence, her resilience; an admirable woman, really. Something of the old, almost forgotten fondness stirred in him. “Arna?. ” Still she said nothing. She had learned from him, perhaps, to distrust words, and was content to allow these tangible ministrations to express all that could not be said. Sadly and in some wonder he gazed at her. What did she signify, what did she mean? For the first time it struck him as odd that they had never in all the years learned to call each other thou.

*

Day by day the sickness waxed and waned, pummelling him, flinging him down into vast darknesses only to haul him up again into agonising light, shaking him until he seemed to hear his bones rattling, binding up his bowels tonight and on the morrow throwing open the floodgates of his orifices, leaving him to lie for hours, nauseated and helpless, in the stench of his own messes. Bright shimmering patterns of pain rippled through him, as if the sickness, like a gloating clothier, were unfurling for a finicking taste a series of progressively more subtle and exquisite rolls of silken torture. Always, unthinkingly, he had assumed that his would be a dry death, a swift clean shrivelling up, but here were fevers that lasted for days, wringing a ceaseless ooze of sweat from his burning flesh, robbing him of that precious clarity of mind that at first had seemed such a burden.

Sometimes, however, he was sufficiently clear in his thinking to be surprised and even fascinated by his own equanimity in the face of death. That moment was now at hand the terror of which had been with him always on his journey hither, present in every landscape, no matter how bright and various the scenes, like an unmoving shadow, and yet now he was not afraid: he felt only vague melancholy and regret, and a certain anxiety lest he should miss this last and surely most distinguished experience the world would aflbrd him. He was convinced that he would be granted an insight, a vision, of profound significance, before the end. Was this why he was calm and unafraid, because this mysterious something toward which he was eagerly advancing hid from his gaze death’s true countenance? And was this the explanation for the prolonging of his agony, because it was not the death agony at all, but a manner of purification, a ritual suffering to be endured before his initiation into transcendent knowledge? Although he was gone too far now to expect that he might put to living use whatever lesson he was to learn, the profundity of the experience, he believed, would not be thus diminished. Was redemption still possible, then, even in this extremity?

Searching for an answer to this extraordinary question, his fevered understanding scavenged like a ragpicker among the detritus of his life, rummaging fitfully through the disconnected bits and scraps that were left. He could find no sense of significant meaning anywhere. Sometimes, however, he sank into a calm deep dreaming wherein he wandered at peace through the fields and palaces of memory. The past was still wonderfully intact there. Amid scenes of childhood and youth he marvelled at the wealth of detail that had stayed with him through all the years, stored away like winter fruit. He visited the old house in St Anne’s Lane, and walked again in quiet rapture through the streets and alleyways of the town. Here was St John’s, the school gate, the boys playing in the dust. A soft golden radiance held sway everywhere, a stylised sunlight. Tenderness and longing pierced him to the core. Had he ever in reality left Torun? Perhaps that was where his real, his essential self had remained, waiting patiently for him to return, as now, and claim his true estate. And here is the linden tree, in full leaf, steadfast and lovely, the very image of summer and silence, of happiness.

But always he returned from these backward journeys weary and dispirited, with no answers. Despair blossomed in him then, a rank hideous flower. Numbed by an overdose of grog, by an unexpectedly successful blending of herbs, or by simple weariness, he withdrew altogether from the realm of life, and lay, a shapeless piece of flesh and sweat and phlegm, in the most primitive, rudimentary state of being, a dull barely-breathing almost-death. Those periods were the worst of all.

At other times the past came to his present, in the form of little creatures, gaudy homunculi who marched into the sickroom and strutted up and down beside his couch, berating him for the injuries he had done them, or perched at his shoulder and chattered, explaining, justifying, denouncing. They were at once comic and sad. Canon Wodka came, and Professor Brudzewski, Novara and the Italians, even Uncle Lucas, pompous as ever, even the King of Poland, tipsy, with his crown awry. At first he knew them to be hallucinations, but then he realised that the matter was deeper than that: they were real enough, as real as anything can be that is not oneself, that is of the outside, for had he not always believed that others are not known but invented, that the world consists solely of oneself while all else is phantom, necessarily? Therefore they had a right to berate him, for who, if not he, was to blame for what they were, poor frail vainglorious creatures, tenants of his mind, whom he had invented, whom he was taking with him into death? They were having their last say, before the end. Girolamo alone of them was silent. He stood back in the shadows some way from the couch, with that inimitable mixture of detachment and fondness, one eyebrow raised in amiable mockery, smiling. Ah yes, Girolamo, you knew me — not so well as did that other, it’s true, but you did know me — and I could not bear to be known thus.

*

Where?

He had drifted down into a dreadful dark where all was silent and utterly still. He was frightened. He waited. After a long time, what seemed a long time, he saw at an immense distance a minute something in the darkness, it could not be called light, it was barely more than nothing, the absolute minimum imaginable, and he heard afar, faintly, O, faintly, a tiny shrieking, a grain of sound that was hardly anything in itself, that served only to define the infinite silence surrounding it. And then, it was strange, it was as if time had split somehow in two, as if the now and the not yet were both occurring at once, for he was conscious of watching something approaching through the dark distance while yet it had arrived, a huge steely shining bird it was, soaring on motionless outstretched great wings, terrible, O, terrible beyond words, and yet magnificent, carrying in its fearsome beak a fragment of blinding fire, and he tried to cry out, to utter the word, but in vain, for down the long arc of its flight the creature wheeled, already upon him even as it came, and branded the burning seal upon his brow.

Word!

O word!

Thou word that I lack!

And then he was once again upon that darkling shore, with the sea at his back and before him the at once mysterious and familiar land. There too was the cruel god, leading him away from the sea to where the others awaited him, the many others, the all. He could see nothing, yet he knew these things, knew also that the land into which he was descending now was at once all the lands he had known in his life, all! all the towns and the cities, the plains and woods, Prussia and Poland and Italy, Torun, Cracow, Padua and Bologna and Ferrara. And the god also, turning upon him full his great glazed stone face, was many in one, was Caspar Sturm, was Novara and Brudzewski, was Girolamo, was more, was his father and his mother, and their mothers and fathers, was the uncountable millions, and was also that other, that ineluctable other. The god spoke:

Here now is that which you sought, that thing which is itself and no other. Do you acknowledge it?

No, no, it was not so! There was only darkness and disorder here, and a great clamour of countless voices crying out in laughter and pain and execration; he would know nothing of this vileness and chaos.

Let me die!

But the god answered him:

Not yet.

Swiftly then he felt himself borne upwards, aching upwards into the world, and here was his cell, and dawnlight on the great arc of the Baltic, and it was Maytime. He was in pain, and his limbs were dead, but for the first time in many weeks his mind was wonderfully clear. This clarity, however, was uncanny, unlike anything experienced before; he did not trust it. All round about him a vast chill stillness reigned, as if he were poised at an immense height, in an infinity of air. Could it be he had been elevated thus only in order that he might witness desolations? For he wanted no more of that, the struggle and the anguish. Was this true despair at last? If so, it was a singularly undistinguished thing.

He slept for a little while, but was woken again by Anna when she came up with the basin and the razor to shave him. Could she not leave him in peace, even for a moment! But then he chided himself for his ingratitude. She had shown him great kindness during the long weeks of his illness. The shaving, the feeding, the wiping and the washing, these were her necessary rituals that held at bay the knowledge that soon now she would be left alone. He watched her as she bustled about the couch, setting up the basin, honing the razor, painting the lather upon his sunken jaws, all the while murmuring softly to herself, a tall, too-heavy, whey-faced woman in dusty black. Lately she had begun to yell at him, this unmoving grey effigy, as she would at a deaf mute, or an infant, not in anger or even impatience, but with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, as if she believed she were summoning him back by this means from the dark brink. Her manner irritated him beyond endurance, especially in the mornings, and he mouthed angry noises, and sometimes even tried to smack at her in impotent rage. Today, however, he was calm, and even managed a lop-sided smile, although she did not seem to recognise it as such, for she only peered at him apprehensively and asked if he were in pain. Poor Anna. He stared at her in wonderment. How she had aged! From the ripe well-made woman who had arrived at his tower twenty years before, she had without his noticing become a tremulous, agitated, faintly silly matron. Had he really had such scant regard for her that he had not even attended the commonplace phenomenon of her aging? She had been his housekeeper, and, on three occasions, more than that, three strange, now wholly unreal encounters into which he had been led by desperation and unbearable self-knowledge and surrender; she had thrice, then, been more, but not much more, certainly not enough to justify Dantiscus’s crass relentless hounding. Now, however, he wondered if perhaps those three nights were due a greater significance than he had been willing to grant. Perhaps, for her, they had been enough to keep her with him. For she could have left him. Her children were grown now. Heinrich, her son, had lately come out of the time of his apprenticeship in the cathedral bakery, and Carla was in service in the household of a burgher of the town. They would have supported her, if she had left him. She had chosen to remain. She had endured. Was this what she signified, what she meant? He recalled green days of hers, storms in spring and autumn moods, grievings in wintertime. He should have shown her more regard, then. Now it was too late.

“Anna.”

“Yes, Canon?”

“Du, Anna.”

“Yes, Herr Canon. You know that the Herr Doctor is coming today? You remember, yes? from Nuremberg?”

What was she talking about? What doctor? And then he remembered. So that was why he had been granted this final lucidity! All that, his work, the publishing and so forth, had lost all meaning. He could remember his hopes and fears for the book, but he could no longer feel them. He had failed, yes, but what did it matter? That failure was a small thing compared to the general disaster that was his life.

Andreas Osiander arrived in the afternoon. Anna, flustered by the coming of a person of such consequence, hurried up the stairs to announce him, stammering and wringing her hands in distress. The Canon remembered, too late, that he had intended to send her away during the Nuremberger’s visit, for her presence under his keen disapproving nose would surely lead to all that focaria nonsense being started up again — not that the Canon cared any longer what Dantiscus or any of them might say or do to him, but he did not want Anna to suffer new humiliations; no, he did not want that. She had hardly announced his name before Osiander swept roughly past her and began at once to speak in his brusque overbearing fashion. Confronted however by the sight of the shrivelled figure on the couch he faltered in his speechifying and turned uncertainly to the woman hovering at the door.

“It is the palsy, Herr Doctor,” Anna said, bowing and bobbing, “brought on by a bleeding in the brain, they say.”

“O. I understand. Well, that will be all, thank you, mistress, you may go.”

The Canon wished her to remain, but she made a soothing sign to him and went off meekly. He strained to hear her heavy step descending the stairs, a sound that suddenly seemed to him to sum up all the comfort that was left in the world, but Osiander had begun to boom at him again, and Anna departed in silence out of his life.

*

“I had not thought to find you brought so low, friend Koppernigk,” Osiander said, in a faintly accusing tone, as if he suspected that he had been deliberately misled in the matter of the other’s state of health.

“I am dying, Doctor.”

“Yes. But it comes to us all in the end, and you must put yourself into God’s care. Better this way than to be taken suddenly, in the night, the soul unprepared, eh?”

He was a portly arrogant man, this Lutheran, noisy, pompous and unfeeling, full of his own opinions; the Canon had always in his heart disliked him. He began to pace the floor with stately tread, his puffed-up pigeon’s chest an impregnable shield against all opposition, and spoke of Nuremberg, and the printing, and his unstinting efforts on behalf of the Canon’s work. Rheticus he called that wretched creature. Poor, foolish Rheticus! another victim sacrificed upon the altar of decorum. The Canon sighed; he should have ignored them all, Dantiscus and Giese and Osiander, he should have given his disciple the acknowledgment he deserved. What if he was a sodomite? That was not the worst crime imaginable, no worse, perhaps, than base ingratitude.

Osiander was poking about inside the capacious satchel slung at his side, and now he brought out a handsome leather-bound volume tooled in gold on the spine. The Canon craned for a closer look at it, but Osiander, the dreadful fellow, seemed to have forgotten that he was in the presence of the author, who was still living, despite appearances, and instead of bringing it at once to the couch he took the book into the windowlight, and, dampening a thumb, flipped roughly through the pages with the careless disregard of one for whom all books other than the Bible are fundamentally worthless.

“I have altered the title,” he said absently, “as I may have informed you was my intention, substituting the word coelestium for mundi, as it seemed to me safer to speak of the heavens, thereby displaying distance and detachment, rather than of the world, an altogether more immediate term.”

No, my friend, you did not mention that, as I recall; but it is no matter now.

“Also, of course, I have attached a preface, as we agreed. It was a wise move, I believe. As I have said to you in my various letters, the Aristotelians and theologians will easily be placated if they are told that several hypotheses can be used to explain the same apparent motions, and that the present hypotheses are not proposed because they are in reality true, but because they are the most convenient to calculate the apparent composite motions.” He lifted his bland face dreamily to the window, with a smug little smile of admiration at the precision and style of his delivery. Just thus did he pose, the Canon knew, when lecturing his slack-jawed classes at Nuremberg. “For my part,” the Lutheran went on, “I have always felt about hypotheses that they are not articles of faith, but bases of computation, so that even if they are false it does not matter, provided that they save the phenomena. . And in the light of this belief have I composed the preface.”

“It must not be,” the Canon said, his dull gaze turned upward toward the ceiling. Osiander stared at him.

“What?”

“It must not be: I do not wish the book to be published.”

“But. . but it is already published, my dear sir. See, I have a copy here, printed and bound. Petreius has made an edition of one thousand, as you agreed. It is even now being distributed.”

“It must not be, I say!”

Osiander, quite baffled, pondered a moment in silence, then came and sat down slowly on a chair beside the couch and peered at the Canon with an uncertain smile. “Are you unwell, my friend?”

The Canon, had he been able, would have laughed.

“I am dying, man!” he cried. “Have I not told you so already? But I am not raving. I want this book suppressed. Go to Petreius, have him recall whatever volumes he has sent out. Do you understand? It must not be!”

“Calm yourself, Doctor, please,” said Osiander, alarmed by the paralytic’s pent-up vehemence, the straining jaw and wild anguished stare. “Do you require assistance? Shall I call the woman?”

“No no no, do nothing.” The Canon relaxed somewhat, and the trembling in his limbs subsided. There was a fever coming on, and a pain the like of which he had not known before was crashing and booming in his skull. Terror extended a thin dark tentacle within him. “Forgive me,” he mumbled. “Is there water? Let me drink. Thank you, you are most kind. Ah.”

Frowning, Osiander set down the water jug. He had a look now of mingled embarrassment and curiosity: he wanted to escape from the presence of this undignified dying, yet also he wished to know the reason for the old man’s extraordinary change of mind. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “I may return later in the day, when you are less wrought, and discuss then this matter of your book?”

But the Canon was not listening. “Tell me, Osiander,” he said, “tell me truly, is it too late to halt publication? For I would halt it.”

“Why, Doctor?”

“You have read the book? Then you must know why. It is a failure. I failed in that which I set out to do: to discern truth, the significance of things.”

“Truth? I do not understand, Doctor. Your theory is not without flaws, I agree, but—”

“It is not the mechanics of the theory that interest me.” He closed his eyes. O burning, burning! “The project itself, the totality. . Do you understand? A hundred thousand words I used, charts, star tables, formulae, and yet I said nothing. .”

He could not go on. What did it matter now, anyway? Osiander sighed.

“You should not trouble yourself thus, Doctor,” he said. “These are scruples merely, and, if more than that, then you must realise that the manner of success you sought — or now believe that you sought! — is not to be attained. Your work, however flawed, shall be a basis for others to build upon, of this you may be assured. As to your failure to discern the true nature of things, as you put it, I think you will agree that I have accounted for such failing in my preface. Shall you hear what I have written?”

Plainly he was proud of his work, and, a born preacher, was eager to descant it. The Canon panicked: he did not want to hear, no! but he was sinking, and could no longer speak, could only growl and gnash his teeth in a frenzy of refusal. Osiander, however, took these efforts for a sign of pleased anticipation. He laid down the book, and, with the ghastly excruciated smile of one obliged to deal with a cretin, rose and thrust his hands under the Canon’s armpits, and hauled him up and propped him carefully against the bank of soiled pillows as if he were setting up a target. Then, commencing his stately pacing once more, he held the book open before him at arm’s length and began to read aloud in a booming pulpit voice.

“Since the novelty of the hypotheses of this work — which sets the Earth in motion and puts an immovable Sun at the centre of the universe — has already received great attention, I have no doubt that certain learned men have taken grave offence and think it wrong thus to raise disturbance among liberal disciplines, which were established long ago on a correct basis. If, however, they are willing to weigh the matter scrupulously, they will find that the author of this work has done nothing which merits blame. For it is the task of the astronomer to use painstaking and skilled observation in gathering together the history of celestial movements, and then — since he cannot by any line of reasoning discover the true causes of these movements (you mark that, Doctor?) — to conceive and devise whatever causes and hypotheses he pleases, such that, by the assumption of these causes, those same movements can be calculated from the principles of geometry for the past and for the future also. The present artist is markedly outstanding in both these respects: for it is not necessary that these hypotheses should be true, or even probable; it is enough if they provide a calculus which is consistent with the observations. .”

The Canon listened in wonder: was it valid, this denial, this spitting-upon of his life’s work? Truth or fiction. . ritual. . necessary. He could not concentrate. He was in flames. Andreas Osiander, marching into windowlight and out again, was transformed at each turn into a walking darkness, a cloud of fire, a phantom, and outside too all was strangely changing, and not the sun was light and heat, the world inert, but rather the world was a nimbus of searing fire and the sun no more than a dead frozen globe dangling in the western sky.

“. . For it is sufficiently clear that this art is profoundly ignorant of causes of the apparent movements. And if it constructs and invents causes — and certainly it has invented very many — nevertheless these causes are not advanced in order to convince anyone that they are true but only in order that they may posit a correct basis for calculation. But since one and the same movement may take varying hypotheses from time to time — as eccentricity and an epicycle for the motion of the Sun — the astronomer will accept above all others the one easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of truth. Neither, however, will understand or set down anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him. .”

The walls of the tower had lost all solidity, were planes of darkness out of which there came now soaring on terrible wings the great steel bird, trailing flames in its wake and bearing in its beak the fiery sphere, no longer alone, but flying before a flock of others of its kind, all aflame, all gleaming and terrible and magnificent, rising out of darkness, shrieking.

“And so far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy — since astronomy can offer us nothing certain — lest he mistake for truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he came to it!”

No! O no. He flung his mute denial into the burning world. You, Andreas, have betrayed me, you. .

Andreas?

The pacing figure drew near, and swooping suddenly down pressed its terrible ruined face close to his.

You!

Yes, brother: I. We meet again.

*

Andreas laughed then, and seated himself on the chair beside the couch, laying the book on his lap under the black wing of his cloak. He was as he had been when the Canon had seen him last, a walking corpse on which the premature maggots were at work.

You are dead, Andreas, I am dreaming you.

Yes, brother, but it is I nevertheless. I am as real as you, now, for in this final place where we meet I am precisely as close to life as you are to death, and it is the same thing. I must thank you for this brief reincarnation.

What are you?

Why, I am Andreas! You have yourself addressed me thus. However, if you must have significance in all things, then we may say that I am the angel of redemption — an unlikely angel, I grant you, with dreadfully damaged wings, yet a redeemer, for all that.

You are death.

Andreas smiled, that familiar anguished smile.

O that too, brother, that too, but that’s of secondary importance. But now, enough of this metaphysical quibbling, you know it always bored me. Let us speak instead, calmly, while there is still time, of the things that matter. See, I have your book. .

Behind the dark seated smiling figure great light throbbed in the arched window, where the steel-blue Baltic’s back rose like the back of some vast waterborne brute, ubiquitous and menacing. Above in the darkness under the ceiling the metal birds soared and swooped, flying on invisible struts and wires, filling the sombre air with their fierce clamour. The fever climbed inexorably upward along his veins, a molten tide. He clutched with his fingernails at the chill damp sheets under him, striving to keep hold of the world. He was afraid. This was dying, yes, this was unmistakably the distinguished thing. Minute fragments of the past assailed him: a deserted street in Cracow on a black midwinter night, an idiot child watching him from the doorway of a hovel outside the walls of Padua, a ruined tower somewhere in Poland inhabited by a flock of plumed white doves. These had been death’s secret signals. Andreas, with his faint and sardonic, yet not unsympathetic smile, was watching him.

Wait, brother, it is not yet time, not quite yet. Shall we speak of your book, the reasons for your failure? For I will not dispute with you that you did fail. Unable to discern the thing itself, you would settle for nothing less; in your pride you preferred heroic failure to prosaic success.

I will accept none of this! What, anyway, do you know of these matters, you who had nothing but contempt for science, the products of the mind, all that, which I loved?

Come come: you have said that you are dreaming me, therefore you must accept what I say, since, if I am lying, it is your lies, in my mouth. And you have finished with lying, haven’t you? Yes. The lies are all done with. That is why I am here, because at last you are prepared to be. . honest. See, for example: you are no longer embarrassed in my presence. It was always your stormiest emotion, that fastidious, that panic-stricken embarrassment in the face of the disorder and vulgarity of the commonplace, which you despised.

There was movement in the room now, and the pale flickering incongruity of candles lit in daylight. Dim faceless figures approached him, mumbling. A ceremony was being enacted, a ritual at once familiar to him and strange, and then with a shock, like the shock of falling in a dream, he understood that he was being prepared for the last rites.

Do not heed it, brother, Andreas said. All that is a myth, your faith in which you relinquished long ago. There is no comfort there for you.

I want to believe.

But you may not.

Then I am lost.

No, you are not lost, for I have come to redeem you.

Tell me, then. My book. ? my work. ?

You thought to discern the thing itself, the eternal truths, the pure forms that lie behind the chaos of the world. You looked into the sky: what did you see?

I saw. . the planets dancing, and heard them singing in their courses.

O no, no brother. These things you imagined. Let me tell you how it was. You set the sights of the triquetrum upon a light shining in the sky, believing that you thus beheld a fragment of reality, inviolate, unmistakable, enduring, but that was not the case. What you saw was a light shining in the sky; whatever it was more than that it was so only by virtue of your faith, your belief in the possibility of apprehending reality.

What nonsense is this? How else may we live, if not in the belief that we can know?

It is the manner of knowing that is important. We know the meaning of the singular thing only so long as we content ourselves with knowing it in the midst of other meanings: isolate it, and all meaning drains away. It is not the thing that counts, you see, only the interaction of things; and, of course, the names. .

You are preaching despair.

Yes? Call it, rather, redemptive despair, or, better still, call it acceptance. The world will not bear anything other than acceptance. Look at this chair: there is the wood, the splinters, then the fibres, then the particles into which the fibres may be broken, and then the smaller particles of these particles, and then, eventually, nothing, a confluence of aetherial stresses, a kind of vivid involuntary dreaming in a vacuum. You see? the world simply will not bear it, this impassioned scrutiny.

You would seduce me with this philosophy of happy ignorance, of slavery, abject acceptance of a filthy world? I will have none of it!

You will have none of it. .

You laugh, but tell me this, in your wisdom: how are we to perceive the truth if we do not attempt to discover it, and to understand our discoveries?

There is no need to search for the truth. We know it already, before ever we think of setting out on our quests.

How do we know it?

Why, simple, brother: we are the truth. The world, and ourselves, this is the truth. There is no other, or, if there is, it is of use to us only as an ideal, that brings us a little comfort, a little consolation, now and then.

And this truth that we are, how may we speak it?

It may not be spoken, brother, but perhaps it may be. . shown.

How? tell me how?

By accepting what there is.

And then?

There is no more; that is all.

O no, Andreas, you will not trick me. If what you say were true, I should have had to sell my soul to a vicious world, to embrace meekly the hideousness, yes — but I would not do it! This much at least I can say, that I did not sell—

— Your soul? Ah, but you did sell it, to the highest bidder. What shall we call it? — science? the quest for truth? transcendent knowledge? Vanity, all vanity, and something more, a kind of cowardice, the cowardice that comes from the refusal to accept that the names are all there is that matter, the cowardice that is true and irredeemable despair. With great courage and great effort you might have succeeded, in the only way it is possible to succeed, by disposing the commonplace, the names, in a beautiful and orderly pattern that would show, by its very beauty and order, the action in our poor world of the otherworldly truths. But you tried to discard the commonplace truths for the transcendent ideals, and so failed.

I do not understand.

But you do. We say only those things that we have the words to express: it is enough.

No!

It is sufficient. We must be content with that much.

The candleflames like burning blades pierced his sight, and the grave voice intoning the final benediction stormed above him.

Too late!—

You thought to transcend the world, but before you could aspire to that loftiness your needs must have contended with. . well, brother, with what?

Too late! — Death’s burning seal was graven upon his brow, and all that he had discarded was gone beyond retrieving. The light, O! and the terrible birds! the great burning arc beyond the window!

With me, brother! I was that which you must contend with.

You, Andreas? What was there in you? You despised and betrayed me, made my life a misery. Wherever I turned you were there, blighting my life, my work.

Just so. I was the one absolutely necessary thing, for I was there always to remind you of what you must transcend. I was the bent bow from which you propelled yourself beyond the filthy world.

I did not hate you!

There had to be a little regard, yes, the regard which the arrow bears for the bow, but never the other, the thing itself, the vivid thing, which is not to be found in any book, nor in the firmament, nor in the absolute forms. You know what I mean, brother. It is that thing, passionate and yet calm, fierce and coming from far away, fabulous and yet ordinary, that thing which is all that matters, which is the great miracle. You glimpsed it briefly in our father, in sister Barbara, in Fracastoro, in Anna Schillings, in all the others, and even, yes, in me, glimpsed it, and turned away, appalled and. . embarrassed. Call it acceptance, call it love if you wish, but these are poor words, and express nothing of the enormity.

Too late! — For he had sold his soul, and now payment would be exacted in full. The voice of the priest engulfed him.

“Only after death shall we be united with the All, when the body dissolves into the four base elements of which it is made, and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at each stage a part of his mortal nature, until, shorn of all earthly evil, he shall find redemption in the Empyrean and be united there with the world soul that is everywhere and everything and eternal!”

Andreas slowly shook his head.

No, brother, do not heed that voice out of the past. Redemption is not to be found in the Empyrean.

Too late!—

No, Nicolas, not too late. It is not I who have said all these things today, but you.

He was smiling, and his face was healed, the terrible scars had faded, and he was again as he had once been, and rising now he laid his hand upon his brother’s burning brow. The terrible birds sailed in silence into the dark, the harsh light grew soft, and the stone walls of the tower rose up again. The Baltic shone, a bright sea bearing away a ship with a black sail. Andreas brought out the book from beneath his cloak, and placing it on the couch he guided his brother’s hand until the slack fingers touched the unquiet pages.

I am the angel of redemption, Nicolas. Will you come with me now?

And so saying he smiled once more, a last time, and lifted up his delicate exquisite face and turned, to the window and the light, as if listening to something immensely far and faint, a music out of earth and air, water and fire, that was everywhere, and everything, and eternal, and Nicolas, straining to catch that melody, heard the voices of evening rising to meet him from without: the herdsman’s call, the cries of children at play, the rumbling of the carts returning from market; and there were other voices too, of churchbells gravely tolling the hour, of dogs that barked afar, of the sea, of the earth itself, turning in its course, and of the wind, out of huge blue air, sighing in the leaves of the linden. All called and called to him, and called, calling him away.

D.C.