If at Faust You Don`t Succeed

CHAPTER 2

Johann Faust was alone in his chambers in Cracow, that city in distant Poland where his peripatetic scholar's path had taken him. The officials of the Jagiellonian University had been glad to have him, for Faust was a considerable scholar who had by heart the most important writings in the world—those of Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa before him, and, before him, the secret writings of Virgil, supreme magician of the Roman days. Faust's chambers were simple—a bare wooden-planked floor, swept clean each morning by the serving girl, who muttered a prayer each time she entered Faust's oval-headed door, and spit between her fingers for good luck, because you need all your luck when you clean up after a man as uncanny as Faust. She had crossed herself when she saw, there on the floor, the pentagram, chalked afresh each morning, with its spaces filled with wriggly Hebrew letters, and with symbols that not even the Masons understood.

The furnishings of the room never changed. In a corner was Faust's alembic. The coal fire in the small fireplace burned faintly but hotly; Faust kept it stoked up night and day, summer and winter, for he suffered from chilblains that never entirely went away. There was a window, but heavy velvet drapes generally kept out the light of the day. Faust liked an even lighting, and his eyes were accustomed to the flicker of the fire and the yellow flames of the candles burning in pewter holders in a dozen places around the room. They were tall candles of good beeswax that common citizens could not afford. But some of the wealthy citizens of Cracow kept Faust supplied with these tapers, which were finer than any seen anywhere but the cathedral. They were scented, these candles, with balsam and myrrh, and with rare floral essences distilled from the brilliant flowers of spring. Their odors in part overcame the vapors of mercury and gold and other metals, whose fumes rendered the closed chamber unfit for any but an alchemist long practiced in his art.

Faust was walking up and down his chamber, ten paces in one direction to the wall with its portrait of Agrippa, ten paces to the cabinet with its marble bust of Virgil. His long gray scholar's gown flapped around his spindly legs as he marched, the candles wavering in the slight breeze of his passing. As he walked he talked to himself aloud, because long familiarity with that inner solitude that only the learned know had accustomed him to this form of social intercourse.

"Learning! Wisdom! Knowledge! The music of the spheres! The knowledge of what lies at the bottom of the uttermost seas, the certainty of being able to say what the great cham of China eats for his breakfast, and what the emperor of the Franks says to his mistress in the stygian dark of the night! These are fine things, no doubt! Yet what do they mean to me?"

The blank-eyed bust of Virgil seemed to watch him as he paced, and on the Roman's thin, pale lips a slight expression of surprise might have been noticed, because this discourse by the learned doctor was unlike any that had come from his lips heretofore.

"Yes, of course," Faust went on, "I know these things, and many others besides." He chuckled ironically.

"I can detect the-harmony of the divine spheres that Pythagoras knew. In my investigations I have found that still point from which Archimedes claimed the ability to move the terrestrial globe itself. And I know that the lever is the self, extended to infinity, and the fulcrum is the esoteric knowledge that it has been my lifetime task to learn. And yet, what does it mean to me, this confabulation of miracles to which I have given countless hours of study? Do I live any better than the most ignorant village swain, who seeks his love among the haystacks? True, I have honor among the old men of the cities, and am renowned among the so-called wise ones, of this country and many others. The king of Czechoslovakia has put a golden circlet on my forehead and declared me peerless among men. Does this cause my ague to diminish when I awaken on a chilly morning? Do the fawning ministrations of the king of France, resplendent in his lynx ruff and soft boots of Spanish leather, with the circlet of Clovis on his narrow head, bring any relief to my dyspepsia, my morning sweats, my evening despair? What have I in fact achieved in my attempts to encompass the ever-expanding sphere of knowledge? What is knowledge to me, what is power, when my body shrivels daily, and my skin draws tight around my features, presaging the skull beneath the mottled flesh, which must in time come out?"

"This pursuit of knowledge is all very well. At one time, when I was a youth, ages, decades ago, I thought that all my heart's yearnings would be satisfied if I could capture that divine essence and distillation of knowledge that only the angels know. Yet how satisfying is knowledge, really? What would I not give for a sound digestion? I sit here and eat my daily gruel, since it is all my stomach can digest, while outside the rude red world bustles on, sweaty and unthinking! What is it to me, this piling up of knowledge upon knowledge, amassing a dungheap of wisdom in which I burrow like a beetle? Is this all there is? Would a man not be better offending it all? With this slender dagger, for example?"

And so saying he took up a thin-bladed, keenly pointed stiletto that had been presented to him by a student of the great Nicolas Flamel, who was now buried in Paris at the church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. Faust held it up to the flickering candlelight and watched the reflections play up and down its narrow blade. Turning it this way and that, he said, "Is it in vain, then, that I have learned the several arts of calcination, sublimation, condensation, and crystallization? What good now does my understanding of albification and solidification do for me, when the inner man, Faust the homunculus, the ageless spirit of myself who resides within this aging flesh, is sorrowful and confused, purposeless and adrift? Might it not be better to end it all with this well-made bodkin, inserting it into the pit of my stomach, for example, and ripping upwards, as I have seen the gorgeously costumed Orientals of a distant eastern island do in my visions?"

He turned the stiletto again and again, fascinated by the play of light upon the blade, and the wavering candles seemed to cast a disapproving expression across the white face of Virgil. And there came again that sound that had barely ruffled the surface of his attention: it was the sound of church bells, and Faust remembered belatedly that this was Easter Sunday.

Suddenly, as quickly as it had arisen, his black mood began to dissipate. He moved to the window and opened the drapes.

"I've been breathing too deeply of the fumes of mercury," he said to himself. "I must remember, the Great Work is dangerous to the practitioner, and carries with it on one side the danger of failure, on the other, success and the risk of premature despair. Better for me to go out into the air this fine morning, walk about on the newly sprung grass, even take for myself a glass of beer at the corner tavern, aye, and perhaps a toasted sausage, too, for my digestion feels better this morning. The vapors from the alembic have their counterpart in the vapors of the mind. I'll go forth this instant to dispel them."

And so saying, Faust slipped into his cloak with the ermine trim, a cloak that an emperor might not have scorned, and, making sure he had his wallet, though his credit was high, left his chamber, heading out the front door into the bright sunshine and uncertainties of the new day, uncertainties that even the most skilled of alchemists might not foresee.