If at Faust You Don`t Succeed

CHAPTER 5

The protagonists of the drama in Faust's chambers might, had they not been so involved in their own situation, have noticed a face that appeared momentarily at the one uncovered chamber window, then ducked down out of sight. It was Faust himself.

He had picked himself up in the Devil's Walk, his scalp bleeding from the Lett's powerful but clumsily directed blow. He had tottered for a moment, then sat down upon a curbstone to regain his senses. The Lett came out of the doorway then, and had raised his oaken cudgel to ensure a really deep unconsciousness, or perhaps death—whatever. A man couldn't be too finicky about these things, not in this day and age, not with the plague, ghastly in its gray cerements, raging in the south of Europe, not with Moslem warriors, bearing curved swords and imbued with an inexhaustible fanaticism, boiling up from Andalusia and threatening to break out again through the Pyrenees as in the days of Charlemagne, to wreak havoc on the soft cities of Languedoc and Aquitaine. These matters concerned the Lett not at all.

But before he had a chance to strike again there was a sound of full-throated men's voices lifted in lively dispute, and he knew it was university students, natural enemies to the caste that the Lett, all unknowingly, represented. They spotted him and raised the cry. The Lett took to his heels and raced away, to live to hit people over the head another day, and continued running until he was well clear of Cracow, at which time, seeing that he was on the road to Bohemia, he continued to the south, and so moved out of our story forever.

Faust was lifted to his feet by the students and brushed clean of the dirt and chicken entrails he had fallen into. Sewers in those days were no more than the dream-children of the most impractical of those architects who created our dark, cramped, smelly but friendly cities of the Dark Ages.

The voices wafted out the window, and insinuated themselves into Faust's ear.

It was at the point where Mack was about to sign his name in blood to the parchment Mephistopheles had brought that Faust came unglued. There was an impostor in his house! The devil was tempting the wrong man!

Faust turned from the window and raced around the house to the front. He entered, throwing back the heavy oak door so that it banged against the wall. Faust raced down the hallway, braked at his door, and threw it open.

He was just in time to catch Mack's final flourish as he signed the parchment. Then the devil rolled up the parchment, saying, "Now, my dear doctor, we will proceed to the Witches' Kitchen, where our expert cosmeticians will put you into condition for the adventures that lie ahead."

And then Mephistopheles raised his hands, flames sprang up, bright iris and violet flames, tinged here and there with sinister heliotrope, and flared in glory around the two figures. When they subsided the figures were gone.

"Damn!" Faust cried, running into the room, stopping, and pounding his fist into his palm. "One minute too late!"