Free The Green Face by Gustav Meyrink Page B

expeditions. The greybeards
were trotting along in front bleating the club song:

    and bringing up the rear came Swammerdam, like a beanpole
in black with his spade over his shoulder. On his face was an
expression of almost Biblical radiancy, and when someone
asked him why, he just said mysteriously that he had had a most
auspicious dream the night before.
    My friend and I surreptitiously dropped a portion of sheep
dung onto the path. Swammerdam spotted it, stopped, removed
his hat, took a deep breath and, quivering with faith and hope,
looked up at the sun until his pupils had contracted to the size
of pinheads; then he bent down and began to scrape away at the
ground, scattering stones and earth everywhere.
    My friend and I stood by watching and the devil within us
rejoiced.
    Suddenly Swammerdam went deathly pale, dropped his
spade and stared at the hole he had dug, his hands clenched tight and pressed against his lips. Then he bent down and with
trembling fingers picked up a glistening green beetle from the
hole.

    He was so moved that for a long time he couldn’t speak, two
large tears just rolled down his cheeks. Finally he said, `Last
night the ghost of my wife appeared to me in a dream, her face
as radiant as a saint’s; and she comforted me and promised me
that I would find the beetle.’
    We two rascals slipped quietly away like two thieves, and
neither could look the other in the face for shame. Later on my
schoolfriend told me that for a long time he went in awe of his
own hand which, at the very moment when he was using it to
play a cruel trick on an old man, had perhaps been an instrument
of the Lord.”
    After it was dark Doctor Sephardi accompanied Juffrouwvan
Druysen to the Zeedijk, a crooked, pitch-black street in the
eeriest part of Amsterdam at the comer of two canals, right
beside the gloomy church of St. Nicholas.
    Above the gables the reddish glow from the booths and tents
of the summer fairground, which was already in full swing,
illuminated the sky and mixed with the white mist rising from
the city and the glistening reflection of the full moon on the roofs
to create a mysterious iridescent haze in which the shadows of
the church towers hovered like long, pointed triangles of black
gauze.
    The putter of all the motors driving the roundabouts sounded
like the thump-thump of a huge heart. The breathless wail of the
hurdy-gurdies, the constant drum-rolls, the shrill voices of the
barkers and the whiplash crackle of gunfire from the shooting
galleries echoed through the dark streets, conjuring up in the
mind a picture of a torchlit crowd milling round stalls piled high
with gingerbread, brightly-coloured candy and hairy cannibal
faces carved out of coconut shells; gaily-painted wooden horses
were whirling round, bobbing up and down, boat-swings rose
and fell like giant pendulums, black faces nodded, white clay
pipes clenched between their teeth as a target for the air-guns,
excited children tried to throw hoops over rows of knives stuck into rough deal tables, glistening seals honked from their tubs
of dirty water, flags fluttered over tents where the flickering
light reflected by the revolving globe covered in mirror tiles
played on the grotesque antics of the monkeys and the parrots
screeching on silver swings; and all around, shoulder to shoulder, stood the tall houses like a silent crowd of dusky giants with
white, rectangular eyes.

    Jan Swammerdam lived well away from the noisy throng in
a room on the fourth floor of a building that seemed to lurch
forward over the dark street; in the cellar was the notorious
sailors’ tavern, the ‘Prince of Orange’.
    Inside, the whole house was filled with the dusty odour of
dried herbs from a little store by the entrance, and a sign proclaiming that `Spirituous liquors were sold here’ indicated
where, during the day, a certain Lazarus Egyolk ran a gin-shop.
    Doctor Sephardi and Juffrouw van Druysen