Walpurgisnacht E-Book

Gustav Meyrink

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 281

Beschreibung

Comic, fantastic and grotesque, Walpurgisnacht uses Prague as the setting for a clash between German officialdom immured in the ancient castle above the Moldau, and a Czech revolution seething in the city below. Written in 1917, Walpurgisnacht continues the message of The Green Face, of a decadent society on the brink of collapse and of a Europe past salvation. In it we see Meyrink's exceptional narrative powers at their height.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

The Translator

Introduction to Walpurgisnacht

Walpurgisnacht

Chapter One Zrcadlo the Actor

Chapter Two The New World

Chapter Three The Dalibor Tower

Chapter Four In the Mirror

Chapter Five Aweysha

Chapter Six Jan Žižka of Trocnov

Chapter Seven Farewell

Chapter Eight The Journey to Pisek

Chapter Nine Lucifer’s Drum

Other Books

By the same author

Copyright

THE TRANSLATOR

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.

He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008.

His biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008. He has recently edited and translated The Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

INTRODUCTION TO WALPURGISNACHT

When Walpurgisnacht was published in 1917, the world was enmeshed in the First World War which led to the final destruction of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a multinational state, her people spoke German, Hungarian, Italian and half a dozen Slavonic languages. The only bond of union was in the person of the aged emperor, and only the officers of the army and the higher civil servants felt any great loyalty to him. The kind of feudal political organization the Emperor represented had been out of date since the French Revolution. By 1914 Austria-Hungary had been spiritually dead for 125 years. There was of course plenty of patriotic feeling within the Empire: German nationalism, Italian, Rumanian and Serbian nationalism, each eager to extend its own frontiers. In addition there was Hungarian, Czech, Slovak and Polish nationalism, but very little feeling for the Austro-Hungarian empire as such.

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in June 1914 was simply the spark that lit the fire which would make this European trouble-spot boil over.

In 1917 the Russian revolution broke out. The German and Austrian empires were heartened by the collapse of Russia, but still in October 1917 the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian army began, and the rulers in Vienna sued for an armistice.

By the time Walpurgisnacht was published, Gustav Meyrink had long left Prague, the city he loved and hated the most. He was living in a house called “the house at the last lamp” at Lake Starnberg in Bavaria, the house where he was to die in 1932.

Since Walpurgisnacht is the only novel, apart from The Green Face, in which Meyrink used current events, it is important to understand the European situation in which it was written. Walpurgisnacht is situated in Prague during the First World War. Prague was the town Meyrink drew most of his creative and spiritual inspiration from, it was a place he deeply loved and just as deeply hated. Since he was born the bastard son of an actress and an aristocratic German diplomat, the snobbish society of Prague shunned him and never regarded him as an equal. On the other hand his flamboyant and eccentric appearance aroused envy and dislike among those he wanted to be his peers. His first marriage was a complete failure, and when Meyrink met Philomena Bernt, his future second wife, he encountered str ong opposition, especially from her brother. Prague’s high society took exception to this elegant, mysterious half-aristocrat and he became embroiled in scandals, which brought him to the brink of social and economic ruin. Meyrink, who never did things by half measure, once challenged the whole corps of army officers to a duel. On the pretext of his illegitimacy, they declared him “not qualified to give satisfaction”, thereby emphasizing his second-rate status as a human being.

In 1904 Meyrink, completely disheartened by the treatment he encountered from society, left Prague for good. After a short period in Vienna and travelling, he found his permanent home in Bavaria at Lake Starnberg where he spent many happy years with his second wife and children. Although Meyrink never went back to Prague, it remained the creative inspiration for his work. Its unique atmosphere, its mysterious, dark and haunting presence never ceased to influence his personal development and work. Meyrink may have been comfortable in “the house at the last lamp”, but Prague remained his spiritual home. All the battles he fought there were the same battles he had to fight inside himself. In all his works we find them taking place on two levels: on the immanent-rational level and on the transcendental-irrational, where conflicts are resolved in dimensions beyond the earthly. Hermann Beckh, a fellow writer and thinker, said about Meyrink: “He echoed with the highest human and eternal problems, he looked into the depths of humanity and the soul, he looked into his own fate”.

What was merely hinted at in The Green Face, namely the inevitable and necessary destruction of the world, is spelled out painfully and clearly in Walpurgisnacht. Nothing in this world is complete, and there is no salvation in it.

“Walpurgisnacht”, the night of the 30th April, has always been considered a time of evil. During the witch hunts of an earlier age Walpurgisnacht was considered most dangerous for a “good Christian soul”: it was a pagan feast of the flesh, a feast of carnal desires! It was celebrated (and still is) to ensure the fertility of the land and its people for the coming year. Fires were lit to celebrate the re-awakening of fertility and life, and one leaped over the fire to win the lover one desired. The horned god Pan presided in sensuality and joy of life as god and goddess were united in an orgiastic embrace. Wild and unfettered sexuality was unleashed to ensure the fertility of the land and its people in the year to come. It is a day which marks a change – from the dark and barren days of winter to the light and promising days of spring. A change, a rejection of old values in the hope of a new beginning, with all the uncertainty that implies.

In our novel Walpurgisnacht starts with a whist party. The people involved are perfect caricatures of the “trottelig” or fossilized aristocratic society, which had long outlived its day and purpose. Meyrink is a masterful depictor of human weakness and of the folly of strutting self-importance and ignorance of the real world. Yet, out of all of them, one figure catches the reader’s eye: Dr. Thaddaeus Halberd, former physician to the Imperial Court, last in a long line of doctors who were true aristocrats, not so much by accident of birth as by deeds. His nickname “Penguin” reveals the boundaries imposed on him by birth. A penguin cannot fly, but it can waddle, and things therefore take a little longer…

On the first pages of the first chapter we are introduced to Zrcadlo (the mirror), who has the uncanny ability to become the image of whatever person is present and needing to be taught a lesson or shown their darker side - or so it seems at first. Some pages on we meet Polyxena, the niece of old Countess Zahradka and of Baron Elsenwanger. Her male counterpart appears in the figure of Ottokar Vondrejc, the violin student at the conservatoire. All the other figures in the novel, apart from Lizzie the Czech, provide little more than background scenery.

As with The Golem and The Green Face, we have a handful of protagonists, who carry all the action. As in most of Meyrink’s works, there is a young couple whose relationship will lead to a higher spiritual union or “chymical marriage”. Then there is a solitary old man, seemingly without connection with the young couple yet profoundly influencing their development. In Walpurgisnacht, we find the additional figure of Zrcadlo, the mirror, who drives the action on as a kind of devil’s advocate. From his first appearance, when he unveils the hypocrisy of the old coward, Baron Elsenwanger, he reveals to Halberd the emptiness and aimlessness of his life. He also alters the course of history by bringing back the figure of the legendary Jan Žižka of Trocnov, the revolutionary and radical Hussite. This novel seems to require such an agent provocateur, because its leading figures are either too weak to force the action along or too frightened of change in their personal lives. Zrcadlo forces them to face their mirror image and alter their ways, even to the extent of having their lives destroyed.

Meyrink emphasizes that our body is merely a shell, inhabited by our true self, the “I” which is the essence of our being, the driving force which makes us return life after life to learn and perfect ourselves: “the self is the master”. Later we read: “The highest wisdom appears dressed as a clown…. Once we have recognised something as ‘dress’, once we have seen through it, then it can only be a clown’s costume, and anyone who is in possession of his ‘self sees his own body – and those of others – as merely a clown’s costume.” Still, our body is the only material agent by which our “self’ is able to make its mark upon the world – and the essence of this body is our blood. Blood is life, blood is sensuality as opposed to the fossilized senility of the aristocrats. Through blood we can find our “self’, through blood we are one with our ancestors, we experience their sense of life and can unite with their will and forge a new understanding.

When Walpurgisnacht was first published there was a rumour that Meyrink had been asked to write a novel which suggested that the Freemasons were responsible for the out-break of the First World War. Meyrink was not prepared to do this. His answer to this despicable offer can be found in one paragraph, where he states that in masonic rituals one has to take a step backwards in order to become a master. All the protagonists in “Walpurgisnacht” do it. Polyxena encounters an ancestor who, having poisoned her husband, went mad imprisoned in the grey dungeon of the Dalibor Tower. She relives all of her great-grandmother’s wildness, her unbounded sexuality, but fails in the end to take the true step backwards which could possibly have saved the world. Instead, she pulls the bell of Sacré Coeur and decides, “That is where I want my picture to hang”.

Ottokar Vondrejc, the adopted son of the veteran soldier and housekeeper of the Dalibor Tower, knows in his heart that his true ancestors are of royal blood and allows himself to be crowned the Emperor of the new aeon. His weak physical constitution and his determination to prove his love to Polyxena let him down in the end. All that remains is a lifeless caricature of an emperor as dead as the Empire itself.

The only figure to master his past and take a step forward is Dr. Thaddaeus Halberd. He realizes that upholding the tradition of his ancestral lineage of doctors is not enough to qualify him as a worthwhile human being. Lizzie the Czech with her devoted love for Halberd opens for him the door to a higher understanding of the purpose of life, and thus, although it is never consummated, the true chymical marriage is theirs. “His eyes were fixed on the point in the distance where the rails met. ‘The place where they meet is eternity’, he muttered to himself, ‘that is the place where everything will be transformed.’ ” His death stands for the death of a way of life: the end of false and outdated values. Sometimes it is necessary to destroy old values to make way for a new beginning.

Meyrink’s Walpurgisnacht does just that. It is his way of saying goodbye to Prague and the old world, and welcoming the chance of a new beginning. When Ottokar in his final struggle to prove to Polyxena that he is worthy of her love, shouts out to Countess Zahradka, “Mother, mother!”, she shoots him through the forehead but cannot prevent the course of history. This shows that Meyrink finally managed to “kill his mother” (as the English occultist Aleister Crowley insisted, this is the first step on the path to becoming a true magician), killing Prague and with it all the outworn values.

The chymical marriage Meyrink tries to achieve in all his novels was experienced in his personal life with his second wife Philomena. Many critics have dismissed him as no more than a cynic and satirist, but I think he finally proved otherwise: “He was a living man. Both here and beyond.”

Ingrid O. Fisher

Walpurgisnacht

Chapter One

Zrcadlo the Actor

A dog barked.

Once. A second time.

Then a noiseless hush, as if in the darkness the animal were pricking up its ears for any suspicious sounds.

“I think that was Brock barking”, said old Baron Elsenwanger. “That will probably be Schirnding coming.”

“Lord help us, that’s no reason for barking”, objected Countess Zahradka, an old woman with snow-white ringlets, a sharp Roman nose and bushy brows over her large, black, crazed eyes; she seemed irritated at Brock’s unseemly behaviour, and shuffled the pack of cards even faster than she had been doing for the last half hour already.

“What does he actually do, all day long?” asked Dr. Thaddaeus Halberd. With his clean-shaven, intelligent, wrinkled face above an old-fashioned lace cravat, the former Physician to the Imperial Court looked like the spectre of one of his own ancestors; he was sitting opposite the Countess, curled up in a wing chair, his incredibly long, skinny legs drawn up ape-like almost to his chin.

The students on the Hradschin called him the ‘Penguin’, and they would laugh at him when, every day on the dot of twelve outside the Castle courtyard, he would climb into a closed cab, the roof of which had to be laboriously raised and then lowered again before he could fit all of his six foot six into it. The process of disembarkation was just as complicated when the cab stopped, a few hundred yards further on, outside Schnell’s, where Halberd used to peck at his luncheon with jerky, bird-like movements.

“Who would you be referring to?” asked BaronElsenwanger, “Brock or Schirnding?”

“Whom”, the Penguin corrected him.

“To - who - would - you - be - referring”, interrupted the Countess reprovingly, emphasising every word. The two old gentlemen fell into an embarrassed silence.

Again the dog out in the garden barked, a deep bark this time, almost a howl.

Immediately the dark, curved mahogany door decorated with a pastoral scene opened and His Excellency, Privy Counsellor Baron Caspar von Schirnding entered, wearing, as usual when he came to a whist evening in Elsenwanger House, tight black trousers with his slightly chubby figure enveloped in an old-fashioned russet frock-coat made of marvellously soft cloth.

Without a word, he scurried across to a chair, deposited his straight-brimmed top hat on the floor underneath it and then ceremonially kissed the Countess’ hand.

“And why would he still be barking”, muttered the Penguin pensively.

“This time he means Brock”, Countess Zahradka explained, with a preoccupied glance at Baron Elsenwanger.

“But you’re covered in perspiration, Counsellor. We can’t have you catching cold”, the latter exclaimed, paused, then suddenly started to squawk, with an operatic trill, into the darkness of the adjoining room, that immediately lit up as if by magic, “Božena, Božena, Bo-shaaaynah, would you serve the supper, please - prosím.”

The company went into the dining room and sat round the large table.

Only the Penguin stalked stiffly along the walls, marvelling at the scenes from the battle between David and Goliath on the tapestries, as if seeing them for the first time, and running a connoisseur’s hand along the magnificent curves of the Maria Theresa chairs.

“I’ve been down there! In the world!” exclaimed von Schirnding, mopping his brow with an enormous, red and yellow checked handkerchief. “And I took the opportunity to have my hair cut.” He ran his finger round the inside of his collar, as if his neck were itchy.

Four times a year he would make such remarks, suggesting that desperate measures were needed to keep his hair under control, deluding himself that nobody knew he wore wigs, first short-cropped ones and then others with longer locks. His quarterly comments were always received with murmurs of astonishment, but this time his companions were so astounded when they heard where he had been that they forgot their traditional exclamations.

“What? Down there? In the world? In Prague? You?” Dr. Halberd whirled round in amazement “You?”

The other two were open-mouthed. “In the world! Down there! In Prague!”

Finally the Countess managed to stutter, “But - but then you must have gone over the bridge! What if it had collapsed?!”

“Collapsed!! Lord preserve us!” croaked Baron Elsenwanger, and went pale. “Touch wood.” He went over to the stove where there was still a log left from the winter, picked it up, spat on it three times and threw it into the empty fireplace. “Touch wood!”

Božena, the maid, dressed in a ragged smock and headscarf - and barefoot, as was still the custom in old-fashioned aristocratic households in Prague - brought in a magnificent tureen of heavy, beaten silver.

“Aaah! Sausage soup!” Countess Zahradka gave a satisfied growl and dropped her lorgnette: the maid’s fingers, in white kid gloves that were much too large, were submerged in the soup and the Countess had taken them for sausages.

“I took … the electric tram!” von Schirnding gasped, still mindful of his great adventure.

The others exchanged glances: they were beginning to doubt his words. Only the Penguin maintained a stony expression.

“The last time I was down there – in Prague – was thirty years ago!” groaned BaronElsenwanger, shaking his head as he tied his napkin round his neck. The ends stuck out behind his ears, making him look like a large, timid white rabbit “For my poor brother’s funeral in the Týn Church.”

“In my whole life I’ve never been to Prague at all”, declared the Countess with a shudder. “Catch me going there! When they executed my ancestors in the Old Town Square!”

“Well, yes, but that was back in the Thirty Years War, dear Countess”, said the Penguin, in an attempt to calm her down. “It was a long time ago.”

“Fiddlesticks; it seems like yesterday to me. Damned Prussians, the lot of ’em.” The Countess stared absent-mindedly at her soup, puzzled to find no sausages in it; then she shot a glance through her lorgnette across the table, to see if one of the gentlemen there might have sneaked them from her.

For a moment she was deep in thought and muttered to herself, “Blood, blood, how it spurts out when someone’s head is chopped off.” Then, turning to von Schirnding, she said aloud, “Were you not frightened, Counsellor? What if you had fallen into the hands of the Prussians, down there in Prague?”

“The Prussians? We’re hand in hand with the Prussians now.”

“Are we now? So the war’s finally over? I’m not surprised; I expect Windischgrätz gave them a good thrashing again.”

“No, Countess”, said the Penguin. “For three years now we have been allied to the Prussians” (“Al-lied! “confirmed Elsenwanger emphatically) “with whom –1 mean, with who – we are fighting shoulder to shoulder against the Russians. It is - ” He broke off politely when he noticed the Countess’ ironic, incredulous smile.

The conversation came to a stop, and for half an hour all that could be heard was the scraping of knives and spoons or the soft slap of Božena’s bare feet as she went round the table serving new dishes.

Baron Elsenwanger wiped his lips. “Well Countess, gentlemen, I think it’s time we – ”

A low, long-drawn-out howl from the garden sounded through the summer night and cut him short

“Jesusandmary, an omen! Death is in the house!”

When the Penguin had pulled aside the heavy satin curtains and opened the glass door behind them that led onto the balcony they could hear one of the servants down in the park cursing the dog in a low voice, “Quiet Brock, you blasted mangy cur!”

A flood of moonlight poured into the room and the flames of the candles in the crystal chandeliers flickered and smouldered in the soft breeze redolent with acacias. Far below, on the other side of the Moldau, Prague was slumbering beneath a sea of mist, from which a reddish haze rose up towards the stars. Against this background, a man was walking, slowly and very upright, along the barely three-inch-wide parapet of the high park wall. He had his hands stretched out in front of him like a blind man; at times he would be half swallowed up by the sharp silhouettes of the branches of the trees, as if the glittering moonlight had suddenly curdled, at others he was vividly illuminated, as if he were floating over the blackness.

Dr. Halberd could not believe his eyes. For a moment he thought he must be dreaming, until the sudden, furious barking of the dog brought him down to earth again; he heard a piercing scream, saw the figure on the parapet wobble and then, as if swept away by a silent gust of wind, disappear.

The rustling of bushes and the crack of breaking branches told him that the man had fallen into the garden.

“Thief! Murder! Fetch the police!” shrieked Counsellor von Schirnding, who, together with the Countess, had jumped up and run to the door when they heard the scream. Konstantin Elsenwanger had fallen gibbering to his knees, burying his face in the cushions of his armchair, and was repeating the Lord’s Prayer, his hands together and still clutching a leg of roast chicken.

The Penguin rushed onto the balcony and, like some gigantic night-bird with featherless wing-stumps, was gesticulating from the balustrade down into the darkness, where the servants from the porter’s lodge, urged on by his shrill commands, had run out into the park with lanterns and were searching the dark groves amid a welter of shouts and curses. The dog seemed to have trapped the intruder, to judge by the loud barks that came at regular intervals.

“Well then, what is it? Have you finally managed to catch the Prussian cossack?” fumed the Countess, who from the very beginning had not shown the least trace of excitement or fear, leaning out of the open window.

“Holy Mother of God, he’s broken his neck!” they heard Božena wail; then the men carried a lifeless body from the foot of the wall into the light falling from the dining room onto the lawn.

“Bring him up here. Quickly, before he bleeds to death”, ordered the Countess in her calm, icy voice, ignoring the whimpering of her host, who made horrified protest and suggested they should throw the dead man over the wall and down the slope before he could come back to life again.

“At least take him into the picture gallery”, pleaded Elsenwanger, pushing the old lady and the Penguin, who had picked up one of the candelabras, into the room full of portraits of his ancestors, and locking the door behind them.

Apart from a table and a few carved chairs with high, gilt arms, there was no furniture in the elongated room, which was more of a corridor. From the musty smell of decay and the layer of dust it was obvious that it was never aired and that it was a long time since anyone had been there.

The life-size pictures were not in frames but let into the panelling. There were portraits of men in leather jerkins, parchment scrolls held imperiously in their hands; women with high lace collars and puffed sleeves; a knight in a white cloak bearing the Maltese cross; a young, ash-blonde lady in a crinoline, beauty spots on cheek and chin, her depraved features exhibiting a cruel, lasciviously sweet smile, with wonderful hands, a thin, straight nose, delicately chiselled nostrils and slender, high-arched brows over her greenish-blue eyes; a nun in the habit of the Barnabites; a page; a cardinal with lean, ascetic fingers, lead-grey lids and a meditative, colourless expression. Each stood in a niche, so that it looked as if they were coming into the room out of dark passageways, woken from centuries of sleep by the flickering gleam of the candles and the unrest in the house. Attimes they seemed to be stealthily leaning forward, taking care that their clothes should not rustle and betray them, at others to be moving their lips, twitching their fingers or raising their brows, to freeze immediately, as if they were holding their breath and stopping their hearts from beating, whenever either of the two living people happened to glance at them.

“You’ll not be able to save him, Halberd”, said the Countess, her gaze fixed on the door. “It will be just the same as all those years ago. You remember. He’ll have a dagger in his heart. Again you’ll say ‘He’s beyond all human aid, I’m afraid’.”

For a moment the former Court Doctor had no idea what she was referring to. Then he suddenly understood. He had come across it before: she used sometimes to mix up the past and the present. The scene from the past that was confusing her suddenly came to life within him. Many, many years ago, in her palace on the Hradschin, her son, who had been stabbed, had been carried into a room. And it had been preceded by a cry from the garden and a dog barking, just the same as this evening. As now, there had been portraits of ancestors hanging around the walls and there had been a silver candelabra on the table. For a brief moment the doctor was so confused that he no longer knew where he was. He was so ensnared in memory, that when they brought the injured man in and set him carefully down on the table, it did not seem real at all. Instinctively he sought for words to comfort the Countess, as he had done all those years ago, until all at once he realised it was not her son lying there, and that instead of the youthful Countess of long ago, it was an old woman with white ringlets who was standing by the table.

A revelation, faster than thought and too fast for him to grasp it properly, flashed through his mind, leaving in its wake a dull sense, rapidly fading, that ‘time’ is nothing more than a fiendish comedy, which an all-powerful, invisible enemy conjures up in the human brain.

One fruit of this insight remained: for a split second he had experienced from within something which until then he had not been capable of understanding properly, namely the strange, disconcerting moods of the Countess, who would sometimes see historical events from the time of her forebears as belonging to the present, and weave them inextricably into her everyday life.

It was as if he were responding to an irresistible urge when he shouted, “Water, bandages”, and when - as all those years ago - he bent down and reached for the lancet which, out of long-redundant habit, he still carried in his breast pocket.

He only really regained his composure when he felt the breath from the mouth of the unconscious man on his exploring fingers and his eye chanced to fall on Božena’s naked white thighs - with the lack of inhibition characteristic of Bohemian peasant girls, she had tucked up her skirts and squatted down to get a better view. At the shock of the contrast between blooming young life, the deathly rigor of the unconscious man, the ghostly figures of the ancestors on the walls and the wrinkled, senile features of the Countess, the image from the past concealing the present dissolved like a veil of mist before the sun.

The valet putt he burning candelabra on the floor, from where its light illuminated the singular features of the unconscious man: his lips were ashen and formed an unnatural contrast with the bright-red make-up on his cheeks, making him look more like a wax figure from a fairground than a human being.

“Holy Saint Wenceslas, it’s Zrcadlo!” exclaimed the maid, modestly pulling her skirt down below the knee, as if she felt the flickering light made the portrait of the page in its niche in the wall look as if he were casting a lustful eye on her.

“Who is it?” asked the Countess in surprise.

“Zrcadlo - the ‘mirror’ ” , explained the valet, translating the Czech name. “That’s what we all call him up here on the Hradschin, but I don’t know if that’s what he’s really called. He’s a lodger with …” he paused in embarrassment, “with … well, with Lizzie the Czech.”

“With whom?”

The maid giggled behind her hand and the rest of the servants found it difficult to repress their laughter.

The Countess stamped her foot. “I want to know who with!”

The injured man was already giving the first signs of life, grinding his teeth, and it was Halberd who looked up and answered. “In her youth Lizzie the Czech was a celebrated… er … courtesan. I had no idea she was still alive and kicking on the Hradschin; she must be ancient I presume she lives …”

“… in Totengasse, where all the bad girls live”, Božena hastened to explain.

“Well go and fetch the woman”, ordered the Countess. Obediently the girl rushed out.

Meanwhile the man had recovered consciousness; he stared at the flickering candles for a while, then stood up slowly, without taking the least notice of his surroundings.

“Do you think he was trying to break in?” the Countess asked the servants in a low voice.

The valet shook his head and tapped his forehead, indicating he thought the man was mad.

“My opinion is that it is a case of sleep-walking”, said the Penguin. “At full moon people who are susceptible tend to be seized by an inexplicable urge which makes them, without their being aware of it, do all kinds of strange things: climb up trees, houses and walls, and often they will walk along the narrowest of ledges at dizzying heights - on roof gutters, for example - with a surefootedness which they would certainly lack if they were awake.” He turned to his patient, “Hey, you! Pane Zrcadlo, do you think you have gathered your wits enough to be able to find your way home?”

The somnambulist gave no reply, although he did seem to have heard the question, if not understood it, for he slowly turned his head towards the doctor and stared at him with empty, unmoving eyes.

Halberd drew back involuntarily, rubbed his forehead a few times, as if he were rummaging through his memories, then murmured, “Zrcadlo? No, I’ve never heard the name, but I have seen this man before. Where can it have been?”

The intruder was tall and gaunt, with a sallow complexion; his head was covered in a tangle of long, dry, grey locks. The violence of the contrast between his thin, clean-shaven face with the sharp Roman nose, sloping forehead, sunken temples and pinched lips and the make-up on his cheeks and his black cloak of threadbare velvet made him look like a figure out of a nightmare rather than a living human being.

‘He looks like an old Egyptian Pharaoh who has disguised himself as an actor to hide the fact that it is a mummy under the make-up’, was the bizarre thought that crept into the Penguin’s mind. ‘Incredible that I can’t remember where I’ve seen that face before, it’s striking enough.’

“The fellow’s dead”, grunted the Countess, half to herself, half to the Penguin, as she went up to the man standing in front of her and scrutinised his face from close to through her lorgnette with as little concern as if she were examining a statue. “Only a corpse could have such shrunken pupils. It doesn’t seem to be able to move a single muscle, Halberd. Stop quivering like an old woman, Konstantin”, she shouted at the dining-room door, which had slowly opened a crack to reveal the pale, terrified faces of Schirnding and Baron Elsenwanger. “Come in now, the pair of you, can’t you see he doesn’t bite.”

The name of Konstantin seemed to have the effect of a psychological shock on the stranger. For a moment he trembled violently from head to toe, and his expression changed with lightning rapidity, like someone with incredible muscular control pulling faces in front of the mirror. As if his nose, jaw and cheekbones had suddenly become soft and pliable under the skin, his features slowly changed by gradual, bizarre stages, from the arrogant mask of an Egyptian king to a face that bore an unmistakable resemblance to the Elsenwanger family type.

It took scarcely a minute for this physiognomy to replace his former appearance and fix itself in his features so that, to their astonishment, the others seemed to see a completely different person before them. His head lolling on his chest and his left cheek swollen up as if by an abscess, so that the eye looked small and piercing, he trotted bow-legged up and down beside the table for a while, his lower lip stuck out, as if he were unsure what to do; then he felt all over his body for his pockets and rummaged in them.

Finally he saw Baron Elsenwanger, who was clutching onto Schirnding’s arm, speechless with horror, nodded to him and said in a bleating voice, “Konstantindl, just the man, I’ve been looking for you all evening.”