Free The White Dominican by Gustav Meyrink Page B

mysteries of baptism with water without knowing them themselves, he will be given power over the lower world.
    Thus will two pillars come to bear a triumphal arch!
    But if, today, you were to write a book and say, ‘To lead mankind we need neither a soldier nor a diplomat, neither a professor nor a … blockhead, but a priest and no one else’, its publication would be greeted with a scream of rage. And if you were to go on to write, ‘The Church is only one half of a sword that has been broken in twain, and its measures will only be half measures until Christ’s representative is at the same time the Vicar of Solomon, the head of the Order’, the book will be burnt on a bonfire.
    Of course, the truth could not be burnt or crushed. It is becoming more and more manifest, like the inscription over the altar in our St. Mary’s Church, where the painted board they put there to cover it up keeps on falling off.
    I can tell from your expression that you object to the idea that there might be a sacred mystery belonging to the opponents of the Church that the Catholic Church knows nothing of. Yet that is the case, though with the crucial restriction that those who guard it can make no use of it, their community is the other half of the ‘broken sword’ and cannot comprehend its meaning. Truly, it would be more than grotesque to imagine that the respectable gentlemen who founded the Gotha Life Insurance Company should possess a magic arcanum for the overcoming of death.”

    There was a long pause. The two old gentlemen seemed to be lost in thought. Then I heard the clink of glasses, and after a while the Chaplain said, “Where on earth do you get all this strange knowledge from?”
    The Baron was silent.
    “Or do you not like talking about it?”
    The Baron avoided a direct answer, “Hmm. It depends. Some of it is connected with my life, some just came to me and some I … er … inherited.”
    “That one can inherit knowledge is new to me. However, people still tell the oddest stories about your late father.”
    “What, for example?” said the Baron, a smile on his face. “I would be very interested to hear.”
    “Well, people say he was … he was …”
    “A fool!” said the Baron genially.
    “Not exactly a fool. Oh no, not at all. But an eccentric of the first order. He is supposed – so people say, but you mustn’t imagine I believe this kind of talk – he is supposed to have invented a machine to inculcate a belief in miracles in … well … in hounds.”
    “Ha ha ha!” the Baron burst out laughing. He laughed so loud and so long and so heartily that I, in my bed in the next room, found it infectious and had to clench my teeth on my handkerchief so as not to betray to them that I was listening.
    “I knew it was all nonsense”, the Chaplain apologised.
    “Oh!” – the Baron was still gasping for breath – “oh, not at all. It’s quite correct. Ha ha! Just a moment please, I must get this laughter out of my system. That’s better. You see, my father was a character such as you don’t seem to find any more nowadays. He had an immense store of knowledge, and if there was anything the human mind was capable of thinking up, he thought it up. One day he gave me a long look, snapped shut the fat tome he had been reading, threw it to the ground (since that day he never looked into another book) and said to me, ‘Bartholomew, my lad, I have now realised that everything is nonsense. The brain is the most superfluous gland we humans possess. We should have it removed, like our tonsils. I have determined to start a new life from today.’
    The very next morning he moved into a small castle we owned at that time in the country, and spent the rest of his days there. It was only shortly before his death that he returned home, to die here, peacefully, on the floor below.
    Whenever I went to visit him in the castle, he would show me something new. Once it was an enormous, intricate spider’s web on the inside