vr nil CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GIFT OF Two Friends of Cornell University 193^ DATE DUE WJJP^ 1 \, 1 OAVLORD Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026235246 The Fool in Christ Emanuel Quint A novel by Gerhart Hauptmann Translated by Thomas Seltzer NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH 1911 Copyrijrht 1910 by S. FISCHER, VERLAG, BERLIN Copyright 1911 by B. W. HUEBSCH "72-y^ All rights reserved PRINTED IN U. S. A. THE FOOL IN CHRIST CHAPTER I On a Sunday morning in the month of May, Emanuel Quint arose from his bed on the floor of his father's lit- tle hut. He washed himself outside at the stone trough in clear water from a mountain spring, holding his hol- lowed hands under the crystal jet that flowed from a de- cayed, moss-grown wooden spout. During the night he had scarcely slept, and now, without waking the fam- ily or taking anything to eat, he started off in the di- rection of Reichenbach. An old woman coming toward him on a path through the fields stopped short when she caught sight of him from afar. For the swinging stride with which Emanuel walked and his remarkably dignified bearing contrasted strangely with his bare feet, bare head, and the poverty of his garments. The greater part of the morning Emanuel kept to the fields aloof from people. At eleven o'clock he crossed the small wooden bridge spanning the brook and made straight for the market-place of the little vil- lage, then very lively because services at the Protestant church were just over, and the people were streaming out. The poor man mounted a stone block and steadied himself by holding to a lamp-post with his left hand. This attracted some of the crowd, he drew others by 2 THE FOOL IN CHRIST signs. They approached, astonished, amused, or curi- ous, or looked on from a distance, and he began to speak in a loud voice: " Ye men, dear brethren ; ye women, dear sisters ! Repent ! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " These words instantly showed that the man was a fool or half-fool, a very strange sort of fool, a sort of fool that had not appeared in that extended valley district for many long years. The good folk were filled with amazement. And when the simple, tattered fellow kept on speaking, and his voice resounded louder and louder in the market-place, many became horrified at the un- heard-of sacrilege. The tramp, as it were, dragged what was holiest in the mud of the streets. So off they ran and notified the town ofiicials. When the sheriff appeared at the market-place with a gendarme, he found it in a state of incredible excite- ment. The hostlers stood before the inns, the cab-driv- ers shouted to one another and pointed with the butt end of their whips to a knot of men over whom Quint, preaching, towered. With each second the throng about Quint increased. Boys signalled to one another with shrill whistles, and at times wild bellowing and laughter rose above the voice of the strange preacher. But he kept on speaking, eagerly, insistently. He had just mentioned the prophet Isaiah and had thundered against the rich and the rulers who " turn aside the needy from judgment, and take away the right from the poor," he had prophesied that God would break the sceptre of the rulers, and then in mov- ing words he was winding up by again exhorting the whole world to repent, when he was firmly seized by his collar and held in the inescapable grasp of the six-footer Krautvetter, the gendarme, who, amid the gibes and THE FOOL IN CHRIST 8 jeers of the bystanders, hauled him. down from his ex- alted post. Emanuel was now led by Krautvetter diagonally across the market-place, followed by the sneers of the crowd. The sheriff was a nobleman by birth and an unsuc- cessful lawyer. A Protestant minister of the neigh- bourhood was dining with him, and when he told him at table of the scandalous occurrence, the minister ex- pressed the wish to see the crazy^ fellow. The divine was the very type of his kind, a man of herculean build and Luther face, the Lutherlike character of which was detracted from only by his pitch-black, oily hair and cunning black eyes. He had no liking for extra-Evan- gelical enthusiasts. "What are sects good for?" he would say. " They produce division, disloyalty, dis- content." About an hour after Emanuel was placed in the lock- up, he was fetched out and led into the presence of the pastor. Nobody was in the room beside the gendarme, the pastor, and the sheriff. Emanuel stood there, his arms hanging at his sides, an immobile expression on his colourless face, which was neither challenging nor intim- idated. The fine line of his mouth could be seen through the thin, reddish, crisply curling beard on his upper lip and chin. His mouth drooped at the corners, and for a man of his youth, the furrows running from his nostrils to each side of his mouth were strongly ac- centuated. His eyelids were inflamed. His somewhat prominent eyes, though wide open, seemed not to ob- serve the things about him. But his inner emotions played on the freckled skin of his face from his fair forehead to his chin, like invisible winds on a calm lake reflecting the yellow heavens at eventide. 4 THE FOOL IN CHRIST " What is your name? " asked the pastor. Quint looked at the pastor and told his name in a high-pitched, resonant voice. " What is your trade, my son .'' " Quint remained silent an instant. Then he began, quietly enunciating sentence after sentence, divided by short pauses for reflection. " I am a tool. It is my trade to lead men to repent — I am a worker in the vineyard of the Lord ! I am a minister of the word ! I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness ! A disciple of the gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, who ascended to heaven and will return to earth again, as we have been prom- ised." " All vei-y well," said the pastor — his name was Schimmelmann — " your faith does you credit, my son. But you know the Bible says, ' In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.' What do you do besides.? I mean what work do you do for a living.'' " Emanuel was silent. Sergeant Krautvetter cleared his throat, moved his sword a bit so that it jingled, and, seeing that Emanuel would not speak, said he had learned that in his village Emanuel was known as a do-nothing, a burden upon his poor hard-working mother. And he had already at- tracted attention by carrying on in the same way as in the morning. Only, in the villages, the people had got used to him and no longer were surprised at his foolish behaviour. Now the pastor arose from his chair in all his length and breadth. He looked at Emanuel sharply, and said with grave emphasis : " Pray and work, we are told, my dear son. God divided men into classes. He gave each class its bur- THE FOOL IN CHRIST 5 den to carry and its privileges. He placed each man in a position according to his class and his education. It is my vocation to be a minister of God. Now, as the ordained minister of God I say to you, you are mis- guided. I say to you, you are wandering in wrong ways. I say this to you as the ordained minister of God. Do you understand me.' I say it to you as one whose calling has given him a deeper insight into God 's plans and intentions than you possess. Should / take your plane in my hands and work with it, my son.'' And should you ascend my pulpit in my place.'' Tell me, what would that mean.? That would mean tramp- ling upon God's regulations. There we are, my dear Baron " — he turned toward the sheriff — " we cannot be too determined and energetic in putting our foot down on it when laymen encroach upon the province of professional ministers of the gospel. It is unwhole- some. It is usurpation. It disquiets the people. M "A layman is irresponsible. All due respect to Herrnhut. But whether the harm that emanates from Hermhut does not outweigh the good, is an open ques- tion. We should not sow seeds in the people's souls which would grow into rank weeds without the watchful eye of the gardener. How easily a rank growth saps the nobler juices from the soul and blossoms into a poisonous flower. Think of the dangerous enthusiasts at Luther's time! Remember Thomas Miinzer! Re- member the Anabaptists ! And how many stray sheep there have been in all countries even recently, stray sheep that turned into ravening wolves. Remember the inflammable material heaped up everywhere this very day, ready for the spark to ignite it and send it up in the air in a terrific explosion. We must not play with fire. For God's, for Christ's sake let us not. There e THE FOOL IN CHRIST is a little plant, the finest, the most delicate there is. We must water and care for that little plant in the peo- 1 pie's soul above everything else. That little plant is j obedience to authority. Therefore, my son, read the Bible. Do that if your work leaves you half an hour free in the evening. Read the Bible when you go from church on a Sunday, read it, unless you prefer to stroll in God's woods and fields. But do not forget to read again and again the passage where it is said, ' Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers.' In spiritual matters I am your higher power, in temporal matters the Baron here is. Therefore, I as your spiritual master say to you : Keep modestly within the bounds that God set you. It is not in your place to preach. Preach- , ing requires a clear, cultivated mind. Now, your mind ' t is neither clear nor cultivated. It cannot be. No- ]i body's in your class is. At bottom you do not seem to be a bad fellow. So I advise you in all good faith, do not throw dust in your own eyes. Do not overtax the » undeveloped powers of your weak understanding. Do y not burrow in the Bible, a sin of which I suspect you. It were better to set the Bible aside for a time than to give the devil a chance to lead you to ruin through God's own pure book." After he had pronounced this speech with the sure delivery of a pulpit orator, the paistor seemed to wait a few moments for an answer. But the admonished man, who had listened without any display of feeling, main- tained a meditative silence. Then the sheriflF' said to the pastor with an ill-humoured expression on his face : " What shall I do with him? " At which the divine heaved a sigh and shook his head to express his displeasure again, and then drew the baron by his sleeve into another room. He told his THE FOOL IN CHRIST 7 friend in a if ew words what he thought — that it would be better not to make too much of the incident. They agreed to dismiss Emanuel with a severe reprimand. Something in them spoke strongly in favour of the sim- ple fellow who had merely meant to do overmuch good. They returned to the office, and the baron, taking the pastor's place, adopted a different tone. He adminis- tered one of those sharp, curt rebukes for which he stood in favour with the higher authorities. He said: " Look out, I warn you ! " He said, " Keep your nose to your plane if you are a carpenter, and do not rob the Lord of his days." He said, " If you create such a disturbance again — ■ it's nonsense, it's blasphemy — • we will lock you up, you may be sure. Now, off with you! You understand.? Make yourself scarce! " When Emanuel Quint stepped out on the street, idlers, who had gathered, received him with a hoot. That pleased him. His whole being was penetrated with a feeling of proud satisfaction that at last he was honoured by be ing permitted to suffer for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Quint, like all fools, took his folly to be wisdom and his weakness to be strength. His eyes shin- ing with tears of the profoundest happiness, he passed through the rough mob, and failed to notice that two men, who had stood hidden among the others, parted from the crowd and followed him. They were brothers, named §charf, linen weavers, decent young men. They had listened to the sermon in the market-place. But while everybody about them was hooting and cutting capers, the whole affair made a deep impression upon them. In their village they were called the bigots, and, like Quint, they were con- sidered not quite right in their minds, because, along with their father, they lived a life apart from the 8 THE FOOL IN CHRIST other villagers, often singing and praying aloud in their dilapidated hut. Emanuel Quint went his way without looking to right or left. As soon as he had crossed the railroad tracks and had reached the highroad outside the village, the brothers accosted him. They asked him if he was not the man who a few hours before had preached repentance in the market-place and had spoken of the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Emanuel assented. For a time the three walked along in silence through the desolate valley country. Then the older brother, Martin, evidently in great perturba- tion, began to ply tEe Fool with anxious questions, every now and then gazing up at the grey, threaten- ing clouds. He wanted to know what one must do to be protected against the terrors of the last days and be assured of eternal bliss. Anton Scharf, who was walking at the Fool's left side, as pale and red-haired as his brother, also looked at Quint tensely. The man with his strangely solemn demeanour, which drew a laugh from most persons, had from the instant he began to preach in the market- place exercised decided power over the brothers, akin to him in spiritual poverty and stress. And without knowing it, he had bound both of them to him with chains of love. As Quint stepped along between the two strangers, intoxicated with the sense of his divine mission and triumphant in his first deed, he heard their words and questions as in a dream. It seemed to him it must perforce be so — that if he just cast the net, fish would swim in. Without astonishing him this filled him with happiness. So, turned toward the two men whose souls were hungry for the word of God, he said: THE FOOL IN CHRIST 9 "Watch!" At a certain point in the way, where the mountains began to rise on each side and the road ascended be- tween, Martin Scharf after some hesitating and stam- mering brought forth a request. In the rude speech of those parts he urged Emanuel to go with them and if possible heal their old father, who had a fever and was confined to his bed. Emanuel said that rested with God. But at the parting of their ways, though some- thing like a refusal had lain in his answer, he went along with the brothers, because they besought him hard ■ and because a curious confidence was conveyed to him from their looks and entreaties. His soul now completely obsessed with enthusiasm was drawn almost against its wiU into the intoxication of the miraculous. As they walked along the rough road between blocks of granite, Emanuel kept praying to himself. He sud- denly saw himself after his first trial faced by another, greater one. He had followed the call of the Saviour. He had given public testimony to the truth of the gospels, but now he wa s to prove that G o d deemed him worth y of th e co mplete^mitation of Christ by healinjs; the sick' and raising the dead. It would be wrong to say that the foolish man had been governed by a spirit of arrogance. He was full of humility. He never failed to add, " Not my will, but Thine, be done," to the ardent prayers he of- fered up in silence, beseeching the Saviour to sanctify him entirely. And so, unconscious of wrong-doing, inwardly trembling with strong expectations, he ap- proached the spot which was to reveal to him clearly how high he stood in God's grace and how near he already was to his Lord and Master. In his infatua- tion he failed to remember the pastor's words, much less 10 TIJE FOOL IN CHRIST the sheriff's warning. He had learned to read from the Bible. Engrossed in it in a wrong-headed way for weeks, months, and years, he had been dulled to the material ills of life, and he was not easily to be frightened by the threat of earthly weapons. The old man Scharf was lying doubled up on the straw of his^wrefched couch. When his sons entered he groaned, painfully opened his little, running, red- rimmed eyes, moved his toothless mouth, and without seeming to realize who had come in, aimlessly clutched at the air with his withered, stiffened hands, and whim- pered and wheezed and groaned again. The younger son, Anton, went over to his father and spoke to him a long time. There was unwonted excitement in his voice. The old man's pains seemed to redouble. He uttered distressing cries as if clamour- ing for help. His breast rose and fell convulsively, and his throat rattled. Now Emanuel stepped up to the bed. But scarcely did the old man perceive him when he started up gasping with fear and horror. He stared at the Fool as if turned to stone and finally burst out with, " Help, Lord Jesus Christ ! " He seemed to be seeing the devil incarnate. It was in vain that the brothers tried to relieve him of his fears. He merely drew back trembling. Then alarm turned into hoiTor, and horror into frenzy. Finally, as if beat- ing away an apparition, he hit at Emanuel desperately. But Emanuel merely stood there with his long, fiery- red lashes lowered over his eyes, gazing at the ground introspectively. Then he slightly raised his long, pale, by no means ungraceful hand. The old man turned unexpectedly quiet after his outburst and seemed to be fixedly watching the movement of Emanuel's hand. Emanuel raised it still higher and laid it softly, THE FOOL IN CHRIST 11 gently; upon the wrinkled, furrowed forehead. Under the touch the old man instantly fell asleep. Seeing this effect — no more wonderful than any- thing else that happens in the world — the brothers were struck speechless with awe. Though they them- selves in a fit of superstition had forced the strange youth to come to their father's bedside, they were com- pletely dismayed, simple as they were, now that the supposed miracle had actually been wrought. The old man, it seemed, was sleeping peacefully. He had not slept for weeks, and had spent his days and nights moaning and groaning. Now he lay there breathing regularly in a profound stupor. As the brothers became more and more alive to this astonishing turn, which relieved them as well as their father from hellish torments, the impulse grew stronger in them, overwrought by work and night vigils, to kiss the hands of him who had brought them help and who now, in tnith, seemed to them a messenger of God. Quint, even more than the brothers, was moved by the supposed miracle. He, too, could scarcely master the turmoil within him. And yet, though he felt like crying aloud because his bliss amounted to physical anguish, and though he thought he heard the rushing of the Divine Spirit in and about him, he stood upright and silent at the sick man's bedside. He merely in- clined his head somewhat backward and raised his eyes to the ceiling, and a large tear slowly coursed down each cheek. The brothers would not let Quint go that evening. Since they had taken their woven goods to the merchant the day before, there was a bit of roasted rye and 12 THE FOOL IN CHRIST bread in the house, a fire could be kindled in the hearth, and some hospitality could be shown to Quint. While Martin prepared a scanty meal of potatoes, bread, and barley broth, the old man continued to sleep quietly. Before sitting down the three young men assumed the customary posture for praying, and Martin said the " Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest." Then, as they ate and drank together, all of them had a lively sense that now the Saviour Himself was present. Thrilled to the very depths of their being they sat there in their poverty at the shaky table, black as if charred by fire, eating bread dipped in salt, every crumb of which they had earned with bitter toil — sat enveloped in festive radiance, secluded as at the Lord's table. Chained to the loom from childhood up, treading its pedals unceasingly as one treads the water to keep from drowning, the earth was a real vale of tears to them. They would have found it such even if they had not been told so constantly in school and church. From the depths of their suffering and need they grasped at the joyous message of the gospel with the strength of a drowning man, and clung to their rescuer. The weaver, keeping to himself in his room, accus- tomed to associate with none but intimates, generally members of his own family, susceptible, therefore, and easily wounded on contact with strangers, converted by his trade into a dreamer, in whom hunger, care, dis- tress become poets, and also, we must not forget, his yearning for everything outside, the sunlight, the air, the blue of the heavens — the weaver forced back upon himself, living, as it were, in another world, reimburses himself for his earthly tribulations in the world of dreams. If, accustomed as he is to be thrown upon his own thoughts and forced to the Bible as to the THE FOOL IN CHRIST 18 spring of water in the yard, the weaver quenches the thirst of his soul with the Bible, and the Bible is his one book, it is inevitable that the biblical world, rather than the real world, fills his being. Emanuel Quint, therefore, seemed to the two young men to have arisen from out of the Bible itself. In the market-place at Reichenbach, though as Christians they had been warned against false prophets, they had instantly succumbed to Emanuel's spell. There is no fool in the world but makes fools. The Scharf j brothers were credulous. Moreover, they had always ' felt that their misery was too overwhelming not to end soon. So they awaited the fulfilment of the divine promise more impatiently than they waited for bread to stay their body's hunger. In their simplicity they had supposed, oh, how often! that the awful end of the world was at hand, and everything was on the brink of annihilation. In summer and in winter they would hurry off to their conventicles miles away, and on leav- ing they would cast a final glance back at their poor little hut, thinking it might be their last farewell. For as soon as they joined the other conventiclers in their praying, singing, and Bible-reading, they felt as if they were very close to the riddle of the final day. It seemed to them as if only a few moments separated them from the last moment. And often during silent prayer, in the little meeting room, while darkness pre- vailed without and the quiet of the grave within, the brothers would suddenly turn pale and stare at each other, horrified yet enraptured, and hear outside the first trumpet blow for judgment day. During the meal they spoke little because of the strange excitement affecting all three of them. The younger Scharf cleared the table with the help of his 14 THE FOOL IN CHRIST brother, who then fetched down the Bible from a beam under the ceiling, opened it on the table before Emanuel, and looked at the new apostle beseechingly. The instant Emanuel laid his hand on the precious book it seemed to the brothers that his eyes began to shine with a supernatural light, and a heavenly fire spread from the divine talisman through his body. lYet it appeared that he, the visionary, had won all the greater composure from the Bible. Despite all his extravagances, at that moment he stood firmly on his feet, once again touching the original source of divine wisdom. He stood on the ground on which, as he supposed, his illusions, which he took for the truth, were based. He began to read, or, rather, to speak in a low, fervent, mysterious voice, merely glancing at the text from time to time : " ' Blessed be ye poor : for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.' ' The spirit of the Lord is upon me,' " he continued. " He sent me as he sent many before me. Behold I am here. I proclaim the Gospel. I am sent ' to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.' " And further he said, " Look at me," and all the woe of a heavy, hidden sorrow seemed to appear on his careworn, suddenly emaciated features. " Mayhap you will say unto me, ' Physician, heal thyself.' If you know me as your father knew me — his outcry proved he knew me — then you know that I am an outcast from among men. From childhood I was treated with scorn. As a boy I was covered with boils. I lay on the sickbed longer THE FOOL IN CHRIST 16 than may seem possible to you, seeing that I am alive. But shame did not debase me, and sickness left my soul alive. For is it not written in the Scriptures, ' Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall sep- arate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil.' They call me a fool. Let them. So also they turned from the Saviour, and said all manner of evil against him. Be- hold, it is God's Lamb who bears the sins of the world. He had no form nor comeliness, and yet they esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. Now, if you say unto me, ' Physician, heal thyself,' then I say unto you, I will not lay aside the garment of earthly shame and disease until I stand in the presence of the Lord. Here in this world suffering is happi- ness. I bless our Father for every pang he has in- flicted upon me. The blood and the suffering of Christ, they are my adornment and my festal robes. I will not take off the garb of earthly affliction until it has been removed from the least of my poor brethren. For do you know who is the least, the poorest, the wretchedest of all men.? The sickest, who begs to be healed.'* The thirstiest of those who languish.'' The one whom hunger most torments.'' Who suffers most bitterly from want.'' Do you know who he is? He! Jesus Christ of Nazareth." Thus Emanuel was speaking when a wild howl came from without. The brothers paled and looked at each other. Some uproarious peasant boys passing by the hut had noticed the lights, and coming up had seen the religious enthusiasts at prayer. They stood grim- acing outside, their mouths and noses pressed flat against the pane of one of the small windows. The blood suddenly mounted to Anton's head, A moment If THE FOOL IN CHRIST before completely in the spell of his devotion, he was now seized with a violent fit of anger, and was ready to chastise the disturbers of peace. Quint regarded the man painfully struggling to con- trol himself with mild tranquillity, perhaps not un- mixed with complacency. " ' Blessed are the meek,' " he said, holding out his hand to him. When he felt Anton's hand in his, he pressed it firmly, and said, " Well for you that God has granted you manliness and courage. Make use of them. Serve the Gospel. The servants of the word should be men. But employ your strength for hu- mility, your courage for patience, and let your zeal be changed into the love of God. Then you will be a rock like unto Peter." CHAPTER II The inner fire that had led Emanuel to give the first testimony of his inspiration, the fire which he took to be the fire of the Holy Ghost, continued to burn even after he left Anton and Martin Scharf. He did not doubt that the Saviour was within him, that He worked miracles through him, and in this way confirmed his calling as an apostle. When he left the brothers, he went into the woods, as one who must hide his bliss. As the dawn came up and the sky grew lighter and the birds began to sing louder, he was drawn deeper into the woods and higher up the mountains. That spring morning on earth, awaited with expectancy, quivering with promises of sensual enjoyments, and already Inspiring all creatures, had a divine significance to Emanuel. The enthusiast's heart was overflowing with love, and the impulse that drove him on and upward was not the desire to see, as soon as possible, the creator of those earthly de- lights, the sun. Emanuel felt that God Himself was rising in its light. He wanted to stand in His glory even if it should wither him. Emanuel breathed in the morning air. But it seemed to him to be the morning of that eternal day from which darkness is forever banished, the day on which, according to the Biblical promise, we shall walk in the face and the peace of God, delivered from evil, partakers of eternal bliss. His bliss mounted to intoxi- pation. The waves of his ecstasy rose so high that, al- 17 18 THE FOOL IN CHRIST most against his will, to save himself from perishing from the inconceivable abundance of his bliss, he began to shout for joy, to sing, and praise God jubilantly. Thus he reached the summit of the Hohe Eule, the highest peak of the region. Had anyone observed the poor labourer, as he raised his hands to the heavens, and ran about murmuring to himself or shouting aloud, and stared fixedly at the east with hot, tearful eyes, awaiting the sun in morbid expectancy, anyone so observing him would have taken him for a madman. And now as the sun broke upon earth in a vaster glory, warm with a golden glow, shedding a dark purple light and filling space as with a mighty divine uproar — as the poor apostle's ears rang with the blare of trumpets and drums and cymbals and harps ■ — Emanuel could hold himself erect for only an in- stant. For only an instant could he look into the ardent blaze. Then fairly consumed by a burning pain deep in his heart he sank on his knees — a pain as sweet as it was fiery — and brokenly besought mercy upon all When Quint awoke from a heavy, deathlike sleep, it was already midday. He did not know what he had dreamt, or if he had dreamt at all, but he was refreshed, and was filled with profound beatitude. He washed his hands and face and slaked his thirst at a brook nearby. Then apparently without a definite goal he descended into the valley, and after some time reached the first hut at the very edge of the woods. He knocked at the door and begged for alms. Some bread was given him. [Avoiding the habitations of men the Fool wandered THE FOOL IN CHRIST 19 along secluded, solitary footpaths down to the plain, and along the plain, now on the balks between the fields, now in the furrow of a blooming potato patch, or at the edge of small streams, the courses of which were marked by lines of willows and alders. It was already dark when he reached a little peasant village situated in a dip in the land. He could see its gables, its chimneys, and the point of a weather-beaten pagan tower and the dark cloud of its oaks, elms, and lindens. Here the Fool was unknown. In the dark he could, without being conspicuous, join some old men and women on their way to the school building. When he reached it, he found a small congregation already as- sembled in one of the schoolrooms awaiting the preacher. Quint had scarcely seated himself in an empty place on the hindmost bench, when the door opened again, and a feminine-looking young man, the village teacher, entered leading another man. This man, broad, low- browed, and short-necked, by no means resembled a mes- senger of peace. He mounted the little platform, and, as if to conceal the sombre glow of his eyes, he began to turn the leaves of the Bible lying open on the desk between two lighted candles. Then he surveyed the congregation, chiefly old women and workingmen, with a menacing^ penetrating look. It was a look which caused poor Emanuel Quint to tremble. All of a sudden he seemed to himself to be laden with guilt, to be a sinner worthy of death. Even at the preacher's first words rolling in the smoky room like the premonitory mutterings of a mighty storm, a desperate striving and wrestling began in the Fool's soul. But a little more and he would ha\e 20 THE FOOL IN CHRIST, jumped up and run away as if pursued by hellish fiends. For what he had done during the last weeks, his presumption fell upon his heart with crushing weight. As if illuminated by a sudden, penetrating flash, he realized his own secret thoughts and their still more secret vanity. He heard the awful words: " ' And now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.' " The poor, pale, red-haired man stared with wide- opened eyes, and let his jaw, fringed with the little straw-coloured beard, droop. He mentally beat his breast. And he bowed ten times, so low that his sweat- covered brow touched the floor. Full of profound contrition he was ready to abandon himself to God's most dreadful chastisement. "4- Brother Nathaniel preached not as the scribes ; rather like St. John the Baptist, who had spoken as with thunder, lightning, and fiery lashes. So a mighty voice went forth from him carrying punishment and setting each listener a-tremble. But he did not merely continue the mission of the first John, the Baptist. He had also absorbed the horri- ble, dismaying images of the other John, those hideous, ghastly phantasies contained in the Book of Revelation. He denounced the blindness, the wickedness of the world, the merchants who are princes, the kings and mighty men who care for nothing but to invent new instruments of war and murder. " ' I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,' " he declaimed. " But I say unto you, I and many a Christian beside me have heard another voice crying THE FOOL IN CHRIST, 21 out at night under the stars, ' Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.' " Woe, woe, woe," he cried, his lids under his bushy brows drooping over his eyes as if he would not look upon the faces that had extorted from him such cries of dread, admonition, and anguish. " I see the angels of the Euphrates let loose! I see them with the swords of vengeance rushing upon all parts of the earth. They descend and smite America and drown a third part of all her people in blood. They descend and smite great Asia, and slay a third part of all living creatures. They descend and smite Europe, Austraha, Africa, and stifle and kill and trample down with glowing feet the enemies of Him which is, and which was, and which is to come. The sun is overcast, the stars fall from heaven upon the earth blazing in an awful conflagration. The sea is blood. The fish and all the creatures of the waters choke with blood. And now the waters rise and spit, spit, spit forth their dead. They spit forth all the victims they swallowed from the beginning of time unto judgment day." Thus^tiie preacher held forth a long time, painting the end of the great Babylon, Fire and brimstone leapt through the schoolroom. The poor, shrinking people listened with trembling jaws. Their thin, bony, wrinkled faces turned from side to side to follow the speaker, and their eyes hung greedily upon his mouth. As if drinking in delight, or as if moved by icy horror, they held their mouths agape, and sighed and groaned. He told them of crowns, and crowns again, with which the "great red dragon having seven- heads and ten horns " was adorned. They smelt the smoke and the roasting odour of the greedy fire bursting from its unfathomable jaws. Under the beast the earth quaked 22 THE FOOL IN CHRIST with renewed massacre and the blare of trumpets. There was no end of destruction, nowhere salvation, no escape for the sinner. And mountains of corpses arose from pestilence, fire, sword, and scourge. Ravens, eagles, and wolves died glutted with carrion. One could smell the thick, poisonous exhalations of decaying bodies. But in the; midst of all this horror rising like a flood high above man's conception, Emanuel Quint suddenly heard some- thing softly sound in his soul like a clear lijtle silver bell, then something ring like a note on a wondrous mysteri- ous reed. His whole being responded with a rapturous shudder. The wild, bushy head with the swollen veins on the brow, tossing back and forth between the lights, no longer had any power over Emanuel. But the preacher, too, seemed at last to bethink himself that the field of souls was now sufficiently prepared to re- ceive the seed of the kingdom to come. The fire and brimstone of purgation had, he assumed, made his lis- teners' tongues sufficiently thirsty for a drop of living water, for that quickening element whose deep weU- spring was open to him. And so he passed on to the certain peace of the elect of God, for whom the New Jerusalem, the place of eternal joy, was ready. He spoke of the grain of mustard seed, which would grow into a tree shadowing the whole world — ■ Emanuel began to listen again ! He spoke of the rosy blood of ', the Lamb, by which the faithful would be washed ■ clean of all sin, snowy white, immaculate. On the place of the old Babylon he built up the new, the blessed Jerusalem. He cried ecstatically: " ' Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first THE FOOL IN CHRIST 23 resurrection. He that overcometh shall inherit all things.' " And like a celestial builder he built up the Holy City piece by piece, out of jasper. He showed his listeners the gates and foundations. He measured the length and breadth of Jerusalem with a golden reed. He made the houses of pure gold, the floors of jasper, sapphire, and emerald. He mentioned sardonyx, sardius, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, jacinth, and lavished words, which, though incomprehensible to the congre- gation, gave them an intoxicating taste of splendour and rapture. He closed with a prayer for repentance and for a faith as firm as the rocks, that the congre- gation might belong to those who were called to dwell for thousands of years in unutterable bliss under the sceptre of the Lamb, which was the one light of the earthly Zion. Outside in the hall, after the people had scattered, Emanuel Quint stepped up to the preacher, and said to him softly: " What must I do to be saved.? " The preacher took Emanuel's hand, and drew him up a flight of creaky wooden stairs into a little guest- room, which the school allowed him. It seemed that the honest man of God was more favourably impressed by Emanuel's appearance than the official representa- tive of Christianity had been recently. Downstairs, the teacher and his wife waited long at the neatly spread table, while the voices of the two men sounded •livelier and livelier from above. When Brother Nathaniel finally appeared for sup- 24! THE FOOL IN CHRIST, per, his whole manner indicated that something unex- pected had come into his hfe. He spoke in a dis- traught way, and ate without giving attention to what was set before him. At the end of the meal he sank into a corner of the sofa, over which a crocheted cover was spread, and picked his teeth, lost in thought — the preacher's manners were not good. The teacher never wearied of speaking of the king- dom of God and its delights. The somewhat effemi- nate man with the soft bearded face of the disciple John was insatiable in this. His voluptuous young wife, who had an Oriental, sensual, flaccid air, drew a wry face when he repeatedly made impatient signs to her with the Bible in his hand to be quicker at clearing the table and hungrier for God's word. " Just now in my room," said Brother Nathaniel suddenly, " I was talking to a man whose manner and language are stiU before my soul. I knew him not, but he knew me. He had heard me spoken of fre- quently — by whom I do not know. He had read of me in many a religious tract — in which I do not know. He is well versed in the Bible. Yet at the first glance I scarcely believed he could read. He kept his name from me. I do not know why. Perhaps he has been punished for some offence. Perhaps he has been locked up in a jail somewhere. Well, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons. But I must repeat, there is a peculiar breath of simplicity and innocence about him. There is a simple, convincing faith in him. The sight of him, I scarcely know why, re- called the text : ' Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.' In fact, he seems sick. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 25 The red spots on his cheeks would indicate consump- tion. But at his age his suffering could scarcely have teen so great as to give him so keen an insight into sorrov? and misery. It is remarkable with what a care- ful, knowing hand he touches everything ! I do not un- derstand it. I cannot comprehend it. " His body is wasted. In many places it shows through the rents in his wretched clothes. But there is a love and a mercifulness about the whole man that in a sense disarms and moves me. He beams with such a gracious spirit of mercy that I with my love seem to myself a dead, a hard-hearted man. He took issue with a passage in Revelation which I used in my sermon, where great Babylon is visited with fire and sword by the holy angels and the Lamb. He said that was not the spirit of the Lamb. He spoke as one who knows, and I who esteem myself armed with the word of God was at a loss what to say in reply. He declared it a fearful misunderstanding, arising from the blindness of hate, which the eternal love of the Saviour did not succeed in entirely eradicating even from the disciples." The teacher was startled. It was unheard-of to doubt the divine truth of the inviolable words of the Scriptures, even the very least letter of them. And he did not withhold expression of his horror. " The Saviour, the Saviour, and again the Saviour," the preacher answered. " There is nothing to say in refutation, dear brother in the Lord, when you have a clear impression that the man with whom you are speak- ing is resting entirely in the bosom of the Lamb. Jesus, Jesus, and again Jesus. This young believer knows of nothing else. And Jesus Himself said : ' The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life.' It is in the pres- 20 THE TOOL IN CHRIST ence of this Jesus that we walk. Who knows in what way he will come? Whether to-day, or to-morrow, or twelve thousand years hence? Who shall say? I laid my hands in blessing upon his head, the pure- hearted, the good-hearted man, and thought of the words of the Saviour when he said, ' Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' " The apostle of the millennium continued in pro- founder meditation : " What do these words show ? Must they not ani- mate every believer to unceasing caution? How do I know if I am harsh with someone that he is not Jesus Himself? How do I know if the Saviour Himself mayhap was not within that man? Is it not wholly in His power again to walk the path of earthly hu- mility and earthly misery? Is it not in His power daily and hourly? Dear brother in Christ, I know J! whereof I speak — that young man may have been the \ Saviour in His own person ! Aye, in a certain sense, *> he was the Saviour." Thus they discussed poor Emanuel Quint until long after midnight. The next morning before sunrise, when the first pale, cold light of dawn spread over the broad planted val- ley. Brother Nathaniel Schwarz started off on a walk he had to take across the fields, On the road through the village he met a young man of about eighteen years of age, the so-called secretary of a certain estate, the owners of which were devout Christians. The young man was their nephew and adopted child, and at the same time their secretary-pupil or secretary-ap- prentice in agriculture. The wandering preacher had THE FOOL IN CHRIST 27 often been given shelter in their home and had partaken of the generous hospitality of their table. The handsome delicate young man came strolling to- ward him in the magic light of the dawn past the gates of the peasants' grounds and the railing about the cot- tage gardens. As soon as the preacher saw him, he remembered how concerned his hosts had been for the salvation of the youth's soul and how they had besought him for advice and help. So he went straight up to him, and gave him a friendly greeting, within himself blessing this apparently chance meeting as a boon from heaven. It turned out that their ways were the same, and they walked along together at an easy gait which soon brought them outside the village to a broad grassy walk between rows of blossoming cherry trees. The transparent arches stretched ahead of them to a dis- tance, and from all sides came the thousand-voiced, restless, joyous clamour of larks. " How is it, Kurt," the brother asked the young man, "that you are up and abroad so early.? " Kurt Simon made some slight answer, blushing shyly. "Tou heard me preach last night.? " « Yes." As a matter of fact, the awful pictures of judgment day and the end of the world had disquieted the secre- tary to the very depths of his soul, and had robbed him of sleep. The brother tried in various ways to insinuate himself into the confidence of the youth's reserved soul. But all his pains resulted merely in increasing his re- serve. " Your aunt gave you a New Testament a few days 28 THE FOOL IN CHRIST, " Yes." " You read some of it ? " " Yes, I read some." " Did you never think of confiding yourself with all your secret needs and sorrows to Him who knows all our needs and sorrows, who from love of us to free us from sin and grant us bliss, shed His blood on the cross ? " Kurt did not reply. In truth, in secret moments he had often done so, and fervently. Yet his prayers had not brought order into the chaos of his inner life. The preacher thought lack of faith was at the root of the trouble with the young man, never stopping to consider whether the conflict in him might not have been produced by too strong faith linked with too tender a conscience. Therefore, in this belief, as the faithful gardener, he attempted to plant the seed of faith. But the singular boy with his sensitive soul rejected adjust- ment between him and God through Brother Nathaniel's clumsy intermediation. He felt more repelled than at- tracted by his counsel. The examples of prayers having been heard that the brother cited seemed ridiculous to him — petty con- firmations of petty miracles — how one man had prayed for twenty marks, another for a new lining to his coat, and so on. On the other hand, there was a mass of inflammable material in him easily set ablaze into a ravening conflagration. It was a piece of good fortune that Nathaniel, full of his meeting with the mild Emanuel and enlivened by the freshness of the late spring morning, did not begin anew to swing the dark torch of doomsday. When they reached the end of the cherry-tree walk, the two men were touched by the sun's first warm rays. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 29 and they ascended a slight slope to see the sun rise over the valley's expanse. Near an immensely tall haystack, partly torn away, upon which the light shone most gar- ishly, they saw a man kneeling and staring past them blindly at the sun, in a state of rapture, like a somnam- bulist. They stopped and stood still. Even though the distant whistle of some factories could be heard summoning the men to work, and near- by the hum of telegraph wires mingled with the clam- our of the larks, yet it was impossible to believe when one saw the man kneeling there in the sunlight, that one was living in the age of steam and electricity. The man wore no clothing over his upper body. His sole garment consisted of clay-coloured trousers held at his hips by a leather strap. His hands were clasped on his knees, and his pale head was thrown back in consuming devotion. His red hair encircled his brow, his temples, cheeks, and shoulders like flames, sacred flames burning an offering that has off^ered itself. His lips were pale. His naked skin, like mother-of-pearl, seemed tender and transparent, as if without weight and shot with light. " Why," said Brother Nathaniel, gathering himself together and speaking involuntarily. " I dreamt of that man the whole night, and I feel as if with my soul's eyes I had seen him in my dreams in that atti- tude of prayer." The sun had scarcely risen a few feet above the hori- zon when Emanuel Quint came out of his remarkable, sick ecstasy. He looked about him blinking and grop- ing as in the dark. He had spent the night on the hajstack because the evening before he had refused 30 THE FOOL IN CHRIST the few pennies Brother Nathaniel had offered him. He always refused money. Thus it was that he had knocked in vain at the inn of the village and asked for shelter ■ — a foolish act which, like his whim of not ac- cepting money, was a special foolishness of the Fool. For a time Emanuel, lost in thought, let his eyes rest upon Brother Nathaniel. Then a faint, kindly smile gliding over his face showed he recognised the fanatic. Kurt Simon looked in astonishment now at his com- panion, now at Emanuel, as he rose from the stubble of the fallow field, took up a coarse shirt lying nearby, and with comic difficulty drew it over his head and shoulders. Then he and the brother shook hands. Without wasting words Emanuel, evidently weary and shivering from time to time, joined the two men, and all three walked along in silence. When Brother Nathaniel spoke finally, Kurt Si- mon could detect emotion quivering in his voice. He, too, had been singularly stirred by the sight of the stranger, and especially by the first sound of his quiet, resonant voice. " I thought long over what we spoke of yesterday even," said the brother. " I, too, slept but little. And in the half -awake condition I was in you stood at times before my eyes. I should like to know, dear brother, who you are ? " " I am a man," the Fool said in reply. The brother seemed to have gained but little by this answer, breathed rather than spoken. " Why did you come to me," he demanded suddenly, " if I am not worthy of your confidence ? " For an instant Emanuel was silent. He stood still in the middle of the field, in the morning, amid the sing- THE FOOL IN CHRIST 31 ing of birds, looked at the preacher with a look of re- proachful love, then bent over his hands and kissed them. " I could tell you who I am," he declared after they had begun to walk again. " But of what consequence is it? What is a name? And what can mine be, which no one ever mentioned without disdain? Why should I utter it? If I take hold of it and raise it out of the dirt that covers it, I raise the top link of a chain of sorrow, affliction, and humiliation. I should have to raise the chain along with it. I would not! For I would not complain! I would not pour out before any man the confession of my own grief. I may do so only before Him that dwells within me." He had spoken with a slight accent of his native dialect. "Who dwells within you?" asked Nathaniel. " God grant that he who wills to dwell within us is within me." Something seemed to be laid like a clamp about the head of the young apprentice. He was walking a ht- tle behind the other two, looking at the long, swinging stride of the ragged man's naked, dusty, bruised feet and the heavy tread of the Moravian Brother. An in- visible, yet impenetrable wall seemed to be rising higher and higher between him and reality. The earth was changed and wondrous, as if time were not, or as if the present were the past and the long past were pres- ent. The struggle of a fantastic conception with reality, the reality about him and the reality he had experi- enced that very day and the day before, amounted to torture. Clasping the little Testament inside his pocket, which his foster-mother had given him in her concern for his soul's salvation, it seemed to him as if 32 THE FOOL IN CHRIST two figures had stepped out of that book and were walking in front of him. Indeed, as if he himself were only a figure in the holy narrative, which had been ab- sorbing him for weeks. But he said to himself he was sick and must not yield to what was probably a vain illusion. His father and mother occurred to him. They were clear-headed people, and he thought they might succeed in dispelling the fantastic cloud envel- oping him. He saw no possibility of doing this him- self. Now he trembled with joy, now with dread. Now he felt like crying to his unsuspecting parents across the distant hills : " Behold, the Saviour walks before me! Behold the son whom you brought forth, who gave you more trouble and anguish than your other children, he is walking in the footsteps of the Saviour ! " And now he felt like crying : " Save yourselves from the horrors of perdition ! " Perhaps Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had arisen again! Why were the larks singing so gaily to-day? Why did they fairly rush through the air? Did Brother Nathaniel know, or did he not know, who was -walking beside him? He was talking to his companion, but Kurt could not hear what he was saying. Nathaniel had mentioned the name of a certain Dor- othy Trudel, a Swiss woman, who in her imitation of Christ had gone so far as to heal the sick, like Paul and Silas. A great blessing went forth from the woman, said the brother. There was no end of the number of those whom she had healed body and soul. She had erected an institution in Mennedorf on the Lake of Zurich, in which all sick people taken with divers diseases and torments, even those possessed with devils, were received and treated. Her faith was great, THE FOOL IN CHRIST 33 the brother said. It must be great, because her prayers possessed mighty power. To be sure, she had not yet caused dead to arise from the grave, but by prayer and the imposition of hands she had saved many a one from precipitating himself into death and damnation. The brother himself had seen many blind men whom Dor- othy had made to see and many raving maniacs whom she had made to behave quietly and sensibly. Brother Nathaniel himself was just on his way to a sick person. He was of the opinion it was well to observe caution and constantly be on one's guard against the wily children of the world. Even Dorothy Trudel had often come into conflict with the physi- cians, their devilish science, and the temporal authori- ties. But persecution had only made her the happier in the Lord. It was every Christian's duty to endure persecution after the example of the Saviour and his apostles. So, Nathaniel had freed himself of fear and made himself ready. And he began again to declaim against the curse of worldliness, but his pale companion remained grave and placid. He said: " I cannot denounce. I cannot hate." And he be- gan to ask Brother Nathaniel searching questions, not hastily, but with evidently suppressed, ardent interest — whether Brother Nathaniel, who was in hopes of working like Paul and Silas, was on the right way, and whether - — here a traitorous red mantled in the Fool's face — one should wish to become so firm in the faith as in the name of Jesus Christ to be able to raise the dead. " What can I teach thee ? Teach thou me ! " ex- claimed Brother Nathaniel in a sudden gust of emotion. 34 THE FOOL IN CHRIST And they seated themselves amid the yellow spring flowers at the wayside, under a solitary oak tree. Be- fore them stretched a field of young wheat. It was evident that the brother's words stirred Eman- uel profoundly. Every now and then his face jerked and quivered faintly. Kurt Simon watched all that went on in a state of almost painful tension. For an instant it flashed through his soul — could that pecu- liarly fascinating drama have been prearranged to con- vert or excite him? But he instantly rejected the idea. Finally, to extricate himself from the impression of the miraculous, he confessed to himself that the brother and that poor man in rags had spoken of naught but things that are commonplaces in a certain circle of the pious. And now Brother Nathaniel opened a huge black leather bag which he always wore slung by a strap over his threadbare pilot-cloth overcoat. He took out a bottle of wine, half a loaf of bread, and a small bowl of butter, and set them on the ground beside him. The sun, risen higher in the heavens and shining on the compartments and brown lining of the bag, re- vealed to Kurt neatly arranged layers of religious tracts, which the brother sold or gave away free to children. All this, as it were, sobered Kurt down and at the same time filled him with a sense of purely earthly well-being. It seemed, too, as if the spring beauty blossoming forth all about now asserted its rights over the three wayfarers, so diff^erent one from the other, and pene- trated their souls, and drew them to it. Emanuel, the red-haired, lost in thought, rested leaning back on the juicy grass. It was difficult to decide whether the in- creasing ecstasy on his features was caused more by THE FOOL IN CHRIST 35 his inner than by his outer vision. He reclined propped on his left arm. He held his right hand curved — his hands were well formed and covered with freckles. And Kurt Simon noticed how now a wasp, now a bee, fearlessly crawled through the hollow of his pakn. In the meantime Brother Nathaniel had gone to a spring a stone's throw away and laid the bottle of wine in it. Every now and then his bushy grey head, re- sembling more an old weather-beaten warrior's of Lu- ther's time than a minister's and herald's of the king- dom of peace, appeared among the willow and ehn bushes. Not far from Kurt and Emanuel lay the brother's broad, earth-coloured slouched hat, which had passed through rain, snow, hail, and tempests, under it his stick, and nearby the bag leaning against one of the mighty, twisted roots of the oak. Since the stranger's appearance Kurt Simon had not ventured a word. Now all of a sudden he heard him- self saying what a glorious morning it was. The Fool looked at him. " Yes," he said in reply, " it is a beautiful morning. But the day which no night f oUoweth will be even raore beautiful." The apprentice blushed. " What we see here," the Fool continued with a slight tremour of inner rejoicing in his voice, " is all we are now in a condition to bear. It is only a reflection a thousand times re- duced of what will be. Of this reflection there is no more than the report of a messenger, and of the report there is scarcely a word, scarcely a syllable." " How will it be, how will it be, when I enter into Sa- lem ! " Kurt silently exulted. 36 THE FOOL IN CHRIST The Fool's proximity transported the young man to a state of exuberant hope and security in his hope. He determined on some occasion to pour out before this man the whole content of his reserved soul with all its self-torture and fear of sin. But little more and he would have fetched a note-book from his pocket, in which he had written a poem of his own composition, and would have read it to Emanuel. The poem was a lament. He accused himself and spoke of his avoid- ance of the world and his triumph over it, of the cold- ness and indifference with which the world meets a heart overflowing with love. The poem was surcharged with a pained, ecstatic yearning for purer spheres " Where man to man in love inclines, And one great Will the world combines." All that his relatives got from the poem was an astonished impression of empty, extravagant phrases. Quint suddenly stroked Kurt's hand, as if he divined something of what was moving him. " ' My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,' and it is and remains a joyous message," he added with the ring of blithe assurance in his voice, which, how- ever, never lost its melodious calm nor turned loud and violent. When the brother returned, he kneeled on the grass, and Quint and Kurt followed his example. He folded his hands and prayed, " Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and bless what Thou hast granted unto us." Then he broke the bread. While they ate, they talked of how the celebration of the Lord's Supper had the sense of a daily act, not only of a memorial service. Even the short prayer has this significance. A meal at which the Lord Jesus is not present is a bestial meal. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 3T But if He is present, it is a holy act and the eaters par- take of heavenly bread and heavenly wine. And so in truth they enjoyed heavenly bread and heav- enly wine in that state of beatitude in which Quint and the brothers Anton and Martin Scharf had eaten to- gether. Only this time, in the Hght of the spring morning, in the reverent rustling and shadow of the broad oak, their beatitude was even more exalted than in the depths of the night in the brothers' little hut. Who will say that these three men did wrong in their thoughts and deeds and heaped grievous sin upon them- selves by avoiding the^ church — the bells just then be- gan to ring in the distance. Who will say they did wrong because in their child-like love of Jesus and the simplicity of their faith they had violated the church's commandments.'' Certain it is, a joy so pure and thrill- ing took hold of them that it lifted them above every- thing common, raising them, indeed, almost too high above the solid foundation of the earth. The word jf the Lord, " Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them," united them. For they doubted not the word, and it did not occur to them that to come to his strayed sheep the Saviour must pass by the way of a pulpit, or a communion service, and through the mouth of a bishop, or a parson, or a trained theologian. They were in accord, and this feeling of harmony was at the same time a feeling of unifying warmth. The love in their hearts was set free, the love for an invisible One present, in which they met and found sat- isfaction. The romance of the spring about them — the gleam- ing colours, the buzz of the insects, the perfume of the flowers — combined with the charm of the holy legend 38 THE FOOL IN CHRIST of Jesus, the son of the Virgin and the Son of God. And the secret of His birth and earthly pilgrimage, His passion, death, and resurrection. His sacred absence and presence, produced a mystic happiness in these three. " A little while, and ye shall not see me ; and again a little while, and ye shall see me." Nearly two thou- sand years after Christ's death these words sounded to the three men as if Jesus Himself had uttered them in their presence, not as if they had come down in an- cient writings. They spoke of spiritual regeneration, and Brother Nathaniel confessed to being a follower of a scattered sect. He proved by the Scriptures that the baptism of children is an abomination of the church rather than an act in the sense of the Saviour. Only a grown man, he maintained, could partake of the sacrament, after serious self -probation and after he reaches a clear free decision through penitence and spiritual chastening. tBrother Nathaniel developed his view wholly according to the doctrine of the Anabaptists. He spoke with great impressiveness, and made it quite clear that no one had fastened the door of dreadful heathenism be- hind him securely enough who had remained without the true baptism. After they had eaten and drunk they arose and left the crumbs of their repast to a flock of finches and bunt- ings. What the brother had said about baptism pe- culiarly stirred Quint and Kurt Simon. Kurt re- mained plunged in thought, while the Fool, as they walked along slowly, began a sort of hesitating confes- sion to the Anabaptist. He besought Nathaniel to sit in judgment upon him and be merciless with him. And after he had learned his arbitrary acts and vain motives — or, at least, some of them — he should openly say THE FOOL IN CHRIST 39 whether Emanuel could obtain forgiveness and what atonement he could make to be worthy of baptism. " I, a sinner," Emanuel continued, " presumed to preach to sinners. Because I am scorned I seized upon the sentence in the Scriptures in which the Saviour says he who has faith shall perform wonders even greater than His own. In order to bend the necks of my enemies with humiliation I wanted to do signs and wonders. Since I could think I clung to that notion. For years I went about locked up within myself, and dreamt of being a wonder-working king and God. I made an idol of myself, and prayed to myself. My desires by no means went out to making the lame walk, the blind see, and the sick free of pain. I wanted that not only I but everybody about me, high and low alike, should marvel at me and idolise me." Nathaniel interrupted Emanuel. In a sudden out- pouring, as if the Holy Ghost had come upon him, he said: " Enough. Who is otherwise worthy to baptise his neighbour with God's baptism than by grace and merci- fulness ? Baptise thou me ! For the number of my sins is legion ! " Thus they chaffered, because each wanted the other to baptise him, and neither felt himself worthy to bap- tise the other. " I do not want to be baptised," thought Kurt Si- mon. His soul began to exclude itself gently from the bargaining of the other two. Gradually he came to see the brother and his companion in the sober Hght of everyday life. They seemed strange and curious. The feeling he had had of the divine presence was gone. Indeed, for whole minutes he found the conduct of the two men almost ridiculous. 40 THE FOOL IN CHRIST So, as if not to lose something precious when scarcely won, he left abruptly, and walked away across the fields. Several times, as he glanced back at the dwindling figures of the wayfarers, the word " obscu- rantists " passed through his mind. The clear, cool water of a brook flowed through the fields, in some places freely reflecting the heavens, in others concealed by small groups of trees and bushes. In one of the groves, where the ground was grassy and . dotted with flowers. Quint had removed all his clothes, while Brother Nathaniel kneeled at the brink of the stream praying. A wood-dove was cooing in the lofty branches of a noble old birch. Nuthatches flew from bush to bush. The laughter of a magpie resounded lustily. And as the naked white body of the poor, misguided Quint moved about on the gaily covered mead, it all seemed like a picture from the innocent days of mankind, a lovely bit from the Garden of Eden. As Emanuel set his hot feet in the cold water, he saw a swarm of tiny fish dart away quick as thought. Then he saw himself in the water. The man who was to baptise and the man to be bap- tised, far removed from any frivolous thoughts, experi- enced a feeling of exalted consecration. It is not to be denied that they sufl^ered themselves to be misled into doing something unheard-of, an act of blasphemy, which the law punishes. But if we remember how Jesus especially loved the poor in spirit and the simple, we will not be without indulgence. The intentions of the men were pure. They wept with profound emotion — Emanuel almost fainting THE FOOL IN CHRIST 41 with ecstasy. But v^e /know they were i n err or. In their infatuation they regarded the kingdom of God established on earth by the great and mighty, though divided, Church as Babylon. They believed in another kingdom of God and thought they divined and under- stood it. Round about them was the world, and the world was the enemy of the kingdom. Beyond that the world was unknown to them. They scarcely knew of it from reports. But they would have nothing in common with it. They would solely proclaim the word of Jesus Christ and his future kingdom on earth. Thus, as the water — to him consecrated water — ran over his head, shoulders, and breast, the poor work- ingman's son not only felt the thrills of a holy cere- mony, but his heart also grew lighter. He had allowed the greater part of the responsibility for this act to devolve upon Brother Nathaniel. Brother Nathaniel was carried away even more than Emanuel. His was an unsubdued, easily inflamed tem- perament. He had broken the stillness with only one question, and his voice was like the rolHng of thunder as he asked: " Dost thou believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? » Emanuel said, " I do." Brother Schwarz in the meantime had come to see more in Emanuel than an ordinary man. His hopeful enthusiast's nature was violently enraptured. And now, as he saw a pair of wood-doves float down from the long green hangings of the birches and suddenly, when over the baptised man, make a sharp turn and dart away, he seemed to himself like John the Baptist, and the heavens appeared to be opened unto him. CHAPTER III The carpenter's son of the Eulen mountains regarded his re-baptism on the whole as a confirmation. The brother's manner and his farewell words had been such that Emanuel dreaded to draw conclusions from them. Within only a few minutes after parting from Brother Nathaniel he was already unable to decide whether it was his own agitation that had made him see the sky open and hear voices, or whether the brother in the ex- uberance of his feelings had said so. " This is my be- loved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Even though no outward miracle had occurred, it was enough, and bhss enough, that such speech had been wrung from the soul of Nathaniel Schwarz. When only ten years old the Fool had heard the brother spoken of in the huts of near and distant neighbours, where he used to run in and out, as the chil- dren do in those parts. Full of profound reverence he esteemed Nathaniel a true man of God, and also an authority, notwithstanding that in the meantime his own soul had grown to be so sturdy that the brother's strong soul could no longer modify its very pecuhar condition and stature. Emanuel walked on and was full of song. Feverish, divinely agitated, he set no goal to his steps. He merely made for a distant chain of mountains, and avoided the villages near his home. He felt like a child who believes that the earth and the sky meet 42 THE FOOL IN CHRIST 43 at the horizon and when you step across it you will be in heaven. Emanuel's soul was full of love. As people ap- proached him he instantly noticed the sorrow and the beauty in their faces. If a man, his soul straightway said " Brother." If a woman, it said " Sister." When they passed each other, he and the woman, or he and the man, his soul said within him : " I know thee, I know thy suffering, thy happiness, and thy pain. I know thee as myself and thy fate and my fate." Their passing on was a parting to him, and he loved his fel- low-men the more that he had to part with them. " Thou must go alone with thy beauty whither thou wouldst not go," he sometimes said if it was a beautiful woman, who perhaps went her way with a heavy burden. Or, if it was a man, he said, " Thou wilt wander on and on with thine ill-concealed yearning, and in thy lone- liness thou wilt not find the friend that will open up to thee thy kingdom in thine own breast." And he loved them all, and he would fain have taken them all in his arms and into his heart, although often enough hate, scorn, and contempt stared at him from their mad glances. He wandered on until sunset. Before again going to rest in a haystack he prayed while the sun was set- ting, and the next morning he prayed as it arose. And his journeying began anew. His nourishment consisted of water, which he drank lying stretched flat on the ground from the surface of the springs (he avoided the villages), of roots, which he took here and there from the fields, sometimes of lettuce leaves, and sometimes, without having to ask, he got some bread and thin cof- fee, remnants of. the evening meal which women or chil- 44) THE FOOL IN CHRIST dren carried back from the fields and factories where the men worked. For all the exaltation and ecstasy of his nature, Quint realised, and could not but realise, that the new within him was still merely fermentation rather than enlightenment. Audacious thoughts thrust themselves forward, which were undoubtedly messengers of hell intended to lead him to vainglory and sin. The ser- pent was subtile. It was still intent upon preventing fallen man by all sorts of wiles from returning to his paradisiacal state of innocence. " Ye shall be as gods," Quint forearmed himself. He would not let himself be tempted to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree. But as he walked — and here the sickly_ disposition of his nature asserted Jtself — -he heard insistent voices whispering: "We greet thee, Christ, Son of God! " " That I am not," said Emanuel. But peace came not to him. " We greet thee, Christ, Son of God," the voices said again. " We greet thee, who art come, who hast de- scended from the throne of the Lord in misery, shame, and lowliness. Draw nigh on thy way. Draw nigh on thy mission. Fear not. Behold, on thy hands and feet the marks of the nails have not yet healed. Thou feelest within thee the burning distress of all thine ancient sufferings. It is fulfilled. The Father hath not contrived new sufferings for thee, thou blessed one. This time thou shalt not be otherwise than the good shepherd, and shalt pipe on the reed, and lead thy flocks into gardens and pastures flowing with milk and honey. We greet thee, Christ, Son of God." " I am not Christ, the Son of God," said Emanuel. And as he wanted to add, " I am only a man," the words involuntarily came to his tongue, " I am only the son of THE FOOL IN CHRIST 45 man." But this alarmed him. It occurred to him that the Saviour had called himself by that name. So, wherever he turned, the serpent had a trap set for him. There was nothing for him to Ao but recall his words quickly and say : " Get thee hence. I do not call my- self the son of man." But for hours, as he walked on, he reflected upon these things more profoundly, and finally it no longer seemed to him to be transgressing Christ's command- ment to call himself, as he had, the son of man. The Saviour's birth on earth, like his own, undeniably bore the marks of extreme abjectness in so far as Joseph, his mother's husband, was not his father. Jesus, there- fore, like himself, Emanuel, was fatherless, and Eman- uel ventured to compare all the secret sufferings he had had to endure on that account, all his tormenting shame and bitterness, with the Saviour's sufferings for the same reason. How it must have filled the boy Jesus with shame and horror when other children spoke of their fathers and asked him about his, and he knew not his name. What stinging pain it must have caused him when he grew older that many of those low, rough men about him could speak differently of their mothers than he could of his. I Emanuel clenched his teeth. How many hundreds of 'times from deep-felt shame had he not denied his mother and father, and so made a fool of himself. Must not Christ, who knew all the secret sufferings of the soul as no one else knew them, have gone through the same experience? Did He not in all likeKhood in answer to the prying questions of the Pharisees raise Himself up proudly one day from out of the pressure of shame to the free height of the Son of man.'' And "ffas it not His intention in assuming that name to wipe 46 THE FOOL IN CHRIST away beforehand for all time the mark of undeserved shame from the brows of all coming generations? On a sudden Quint was convinced it must have been so and not otherwise, and he determined to enter upon this portion of the inheritance of the Saviour with pure confidence. " He it is and not Satan," he assured him- self, " Whose being reveals itself to me at this mo- ment, with this thought." Quite involuntarily he drew himself up and walked with a freer, firmer gait. It was no longer a violent voice blowing " Son of God " into his ears. There was a clear, mute realisation within him that he as the son of man was walking through the fields. He knew of a king sitting upon his throne in Berlin, the capital of the empire. But in his new dignity he suddenly dis- cerned that he, Emanuel Quint, the bastard — thus his stepfather often called him ! — was no less before God. The son of man is lord of the world. The brownish road unrolled itself before him like a strip of cloth. The earth with its cities, towers, streams, and green crops, spread rugs, as it were, strewn with precious things between him and the mountains — all the inheritance and possession of the son of man. The heaven unfurled its broad blue silk tent over him. The sun was his chandelier. The larks were singing to the son of man. The crops were ripening for tLe son of man. The groves were whispering his name in homage. There was nothing mightier or more glorious in the wide world than he whom the birds, the breezes, the blades of grass and the leaves greeted in chorus : " Blessed be he and praised be he, who comes in the name of the Lord! Nothing more glorious than the son of man ! " " I seek not mine own glory, but His glory that sent THE FOOL IN CHRIST 47 me," a voice within him spoke again. And it fright- ened him so that the fields, woods, and hills ceased to call him, suddenly turning dumb. The Fool under- stood that there was a conflicting rise and fall within him. A wave of light seemed always to be driving away a wave of darkness, and a wave of darkness, a wave of light. The struggle went on wholly independently of his will. It was so strong, so independent of Quint that at times it was as if he were standing aside and merely looking on in tense interest and astonishment. " No, no, I seek not mine own glory. But I was again about to fall into temptation and a snare. Is it God? Is it Satan that is tempting me.'' Is it not to God that we pray, ' Lead us not into temptation ' ? " And he said the Lord's prayer, which Jesus taught. Whereupon he turned from Him to whom it was ad- dressed to Him who taught it, and in spirit he followed in the footsteps of the Saviour, as he had done so often before. Quint loved the Saviour. The poor Fool, or in this respect the happy Fool, had conceived a love of the gracious Jesus so great that when he thought of Him his heart ached. His love for Jesus was not of this earth. Nearly two thousand years before Jesus had walked on earth, and now for the first time a man stepped from his hut by the roadside and with a few others looked in the direction whither the holy pilgrim had disappeared. Forthwith Quint set out like a faithful dog to seek His traces, and there had been no other assuagement of his ardent yearning than day and night to foUow those traces. He fell asleep — when he slept — over Jesus' footsteps. His love of Jesus was infinite. He had guarded in 48 THE FOOL IN CHRIST his bosom the well-thumbed Testament which contained the story of the son of Mary. And he felt as if a dear hand in it always soothed his heart. Nay, more, he himself was the Book, which, like John, he fairly devoured. It lived in him, and he lived in it. Had it not dwelt within him, death would have stepped in its place. Had he not dwelt in the Book, the rain would have pierced him with needles, the sun have scorched him, the heavens have fallen upon him like a rock. But thus the cold of death hurt him not, nor the winter's ice, nor the heat of the day, nor the fierceness of the night. But he rested not gladly. As long as he was not upon his feet, it seemed to him that the space grew wider between him and the Friend who walked before him on earth and in heaven, and that he had a smaller share in Him. A child that has lost its mother and, crying, runs in search of her, has no greater love in its soul than this idle carpenter's apprentice, who craved the sight of the Saviour. He was ready to lose himself in the Saviour. Hence, the sentence " I seek not mine own glory " had scarcely entered his consciousness, when he became all self-abnegation and humility, and far from presuming to be a shepherd he felt he was the least sheep in the fold. It was in this sense and no other that he wanted to be a follower of the Saviour. But his love made stronger claims upon him and enticed him farther and farther. It was not enough for his love calmly to en- dure the results of a passive imitation of Christ. It would follow the Shepherd along all the labyrinthine paths He had gone. Not one of the things He had suffered would Quint omit. He would be like Him in all respects, and so nearer to Him. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 49 "We eat Thy flesh and drink Thy blood, as Thou didst command us," Quint pondered. " Does that not signify we should be like unto Thee in all things? Didst Thou not in Thine infinite love bid us be like Thee? Didst Thou not open to us the prospect of that exceeding bliss? Seek in the Scriptures! Yes, seek, seek ! " And Quint drew out his Testament and turned the leaves. Clearly what must be sought for cannot be evident. But seek, and ye shall find! Seek! And Quint wanted to seek. He wanted to remain forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, and like his prototype expose himself to all the hardships of want and the weather. In that period the Saviour and the Saviour alone was to dwell within him. He wanted to give himself up to Him without reserve. And if it be so indeed that Satan once tempted the anointed of the Lord, then forsooth let the devil tempt him also. For he would not be an idler in the kingdom. " Reject me or enlighten me, Lord, after my sojourn in the wilderness. Give me a new spirit or cast me from Thee if Thou findest me unworthy. Send me out through the gates of Thy passion and death, or condemn me to nothingness. Or let me at least touch the hem of Thy mantle. Then shall I never be wholly lost. Let me kiss the ground where Thou didst walk, the stone that was Thy pillow, the thorns of the crown they put upon Thine head. Then will an everlasting prize of eternal light be my joy and comfort in the deepest darkness of the deepest abyss." Several times in the course of the day Quint saw the flash of a gendarme's helmet either on the highroad 50 ,THE FOOL IN CHRIST he was approaching or behind the bushes separating field from field. Like a tramp he would conceal him- self somewhere in a ditch, or in the fields, and wait until the dreaded man on horseback had disappeared from view. But now one of those mighty ones came riding across a field straight at him, his Friesian horse stepping carefully in the furrows, now in a walk, now at a trot. It came to a halt directly in front of Quint, and the gendarme proceeded to ask the usual questions. Quint knew what was in store for him. He had no papers giving his name, birthplace, or trade, and he could not think of making the heavy cavalryman under- stand the cause and purpose of his vagabondage. In his eyes he was moneyless, ragged, without any rights, at the mercy of the man's arbitrary interpretation of the law, although Quint had no evil intentions, and was merely following the inclination of his childlike soul. The gendarme gave him a piercing look. " Oh, let nothing in my soul be hidden from thee," the Fool thought. But the man of law, though his outward appearance gave the opposite impression, was bHnd. He saw a terribly poor man, whose features were pale and suf- fering, but not disfigured by drink. He heard a voice that willingly gave him information. Yet he could not believe otherwise than that here, if ever, a jail-bird stood in front of him. So he gave Quint a good rough talking to. Nevertheless, after he had relieved himself by saying some severe things, he seemed at a loss to know exactly what to do. And — whether his wife had his midday meal ready for him, or in the village nearby there was immediate prospect of a pint of beer and some lunch — however that may be, in- stead of hauling the idle feEow off to the police lock-up, THE FOOL IN CHRIST 51 he merely gave him a last frightful, bloodthirsty look, and rode away. Quint thanked the Lord. He saw divine intervention in that unexpected issue of the adventure. And the same thing took place in his soul as always. He had gradually recognised in the man's hard mask the dead, professional, painfully forced grimace behind which a starving soul languished. And that soul had shone forth upon him beseechingly from an involuntary glance, from the depths of the eyes, which never lie. Distressed, he looked after the rider. He did not hate the man. He loved him. On the third day of his wanderings Quint reached a wild deserted spot in a gloomy mountain region, from which there was a vast view over the mountains, hills, and plains of Silesia. It was in defiance of his own fear that he had made for it. The loneliness, the pro- found quiet of the desolate woods, through which he passed, the rushing surprise and whispered councils of the treetops, when he stood still amid the ferns, mosses, stones, and roots, all oppressed him. It seemed as if here the noiselessness and solitude, which have always been his good, true friends, rose up and turned into a dreadful force, and said things to dash his vain, un- heard-of venture. He had climbed up the mountain side holding his fingers in his ears not to have to hear the thousand-tongued hissing of a host of demons, each minute increasing in number. Sometimes he had pressed himself on the ground and stopped his ears with his fists. He refused to listen to the lying trumpet-calls of a judgment day lyingly proclaimed by the devil. He believed it was an invention of Satan. For he said to himself: 52 THE FOOL IN CHRIST " I will go to Jesus. And if the mountains rise about me like awful judges, and the black clouds on the peaks begin to growl, and winds blow like trumpets making the tree-tops groan, all this, like the wicked, scornful laughter mingled with it, which I cannot help hearing, is nothing but the jugglery of the devil." But it was the laughter of the mocking bird that he heard, then again^the bizarre wail of a bird of prey, which penetrated to the very marrow of his bones, and seemed to him like the evil, racking cries of a soul tor- tured in hell-fire. But when he had climbed above the zone of trees, the Fool grew easier at heart. Those great, unaccus- tomed impressions no longer threatened him, but sud- denly lifted him from the dust of debasement to an exalted height. He saw the world beneath him. The mountains, whose rocky crater-like walls formed a semi- circle about him and towered into the clouds, had be- come a stool for his feet. He breathed freely. He turned to the infinite expanse of the heavens, and said " God ! " He turned to the gay, undulating carpet of the plains, flecked with the shadows of white clouds, and said " God ! " He turned his back to the depths and looked marvelling upon the jagged walls and ledges of the mountains, and said " God ! " He looked upon the gigantic boulders tumbled one over the other as if great cyclopean hands had gathered them together in a thousand years of work, and suddenly before he was capable of uttering the name of God, a voice whis- pered in his ear: " If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread." But Emanuel was on his guard. He refused to listen to the voice that made him the Son of God, and behaved THE FOOL IN CHRIST 53 as if the voice had tempted him to put that request to Jesus. And he begged the Saviour for forgiveness. "I know Thou canst do it!" he said. " And I know Thou wilt do it if I asked Thee ! But man shall not live by bread alone ! " This reflection, it appeared to the Fool, stayed his hunger, which had been troubling him for several hours. " But by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." This set him to thinking further. Quint was strangely ignorant. He had learned to read for the sake of the Bible, and his mind went ex- ploring in it. Whatever other obvious things he was surrounded by from childhood he knew only by their natural reflection in his soul and by that love which bound him to everything that is. Therefore sky, clouds, sun, day, night, moon, and stars remained a pure mystery to him. Also the earth with its living beings, the stones and the grass. And now in the profound solitude, as he compre- hended it all inwardly through his senses of sight and hearing, it seemed to him that every creature and the whole of the surrounding world was the manifestation of the word that had proceeded out of the mouth of God. God spoke to him, and he wanted to listen. He wanted to be all ears, all eyes, all love. " Perhaps," he said to himself, " the mighty voice of the Godhead will be more than I can bear." But then he thought " I would gladly die by God's word." Already he felt disembodied. Sometimes he seemed to be so expanded by the word, so filled with it, so borne away into infinity that he scarcely felt anything in and about him as per- taining to himself. And yet, as he knew, he was nothing but a poor novice in the word. 54 THE FOOL IN CHRIST Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness had been in a worse plight than he, who had Jesus for a friend and companion. Moreover, he had Jesus for a model. He was ignorant of the number before him that had been tempted in the imitatio Christi, which was a special snare of the devil. He believed that like the Saviour he had been led into the wilderness by the Spirit and not by Satan. Also he could cling to the Saviour. Therefore he always overcame his dread. Finally, while laboriously making his way through the high knee-pine on an overgrown path, he began to seek a hidden place among the boulders where he could find shelter from the wind and rain and, if need be, conceal himself from the eyes of man — a place for a permanent sojourn. " Is it not enough for thee," the devilish voice within him asked suddenly, " what is written of the Saviour's temptation in thy book.? Thinkest thou it is too little? Thinkest thou it is a lie.? Or dost thou not understand what is said therein ? " " I will suffer it," Emanuel said half aloud. lAnd now the silence was endowed with fresh terror. The walls of his soul seemed to fall asunder, and his inner being to become boundless. In the enchantment of the silence, in its magic spell, his fancy had to bring forth pictures incessantly, a series of pictures which seemed to chase one another as in a race. Ever swifter they became and ever more grotesque. As if the words " I will suffer it " had been a signal for the outburst of the powers of darkness, whose intention, it seemed, was utterly to confound their victim. Is the silence God.? Is the silence Satan? Are those half-beastly, half-human masks grinning at me THE FOOL IN CHRIST 55 God's or the devil's work? Why does the world aU of a sudden disclose in a thousand disgusting images the horrible obscenity it usually keeps hidden? Why are mine eyes filled with the sight of filth, vile hate, murder, and every impious, unnatural desire? Why is the holy current in my bosom dammed up by a curse? By the grunting of swine and the baaing of goats? Why do I hear those coarse, hideous foul sounds which baseness alone can utter? Even what is holy dragged through sewers amid fiendish laughter, stained with filth, repulsively distorted, and placed before my shud- dering soul? Suddenly a voice cried aloud and awakened the echo between the rocky walls : " Thou knowest not what thou wouldst sufi'er, nor all that Christ suffered!" " For that very reason I must now learn," said Quint to himself, and took courage, and began anew to break his way through the knee-pine. After some searching he found a rude little structure of unhewn blocks of granite, the crevices filled in with moss, and a roof poorly constructed of old weather- worn box-lids, on which were spread layers of vegetable mould. Instead of a door one side was left entirely without a waU. Quint had to bend his head to enter. Inside he found a raised couch of dried moss, large enough for him to lie on. If he bent his head he coijld use it as a seat too, and keep his feet out of the damp. Here one could remain for days and weeks. It was Hearing the middle of the month of May and all that was left of the snow in the mountains were a few dingy slabs. During the day a weak wind from 66 THE FOOL IN CHRIST the south had still blown. After taking a drink of water from a rill to appease his hunger Quint stretched himself on the couch of moss. Twilight fell. The air grew soft and silent. The stars came out in the heavens, and the moon arose. The heavens, like an endless, gold-embroidered silken sail, swelled over the mountains and plains fading away in the twilight. It was as if the countless voices of nature had for many months restlessly been seeking that perfect harmony which they had at last found. Quint had dreaded the night. And yet it gave him more than a foretaste of future bliss. All the demons seemed to be chained or locked in their cages. Or else the magic of beauty had silenced them and made them happy. Swarms of gnats buzzing metallically made a dancing, transparent cloud between the eyes of the Fool and the full moon. Sounding so pleasantly the cloud seemed to grow one with his spirit, aye, to become his very soul now turned visible and audible. Between dreaming and waking Quint gradually fell into a state of bliss such as he had never before experi- enced. Half conscious he determined henceforth to avoid intercourse with men and, as now in the silence, give himself up entirely to the love of God. If now, he thought, a human being were to step into his vision, he must perforce hate him like a ghost. Every human being? At any rate every man! Every man — and how if it were the Saviour.? He left that question unanswered. The Saviour is in me and invisible. Thus he tried to excuse himself that he was about to disown the Saviour. Nobody should come, not even a woman. He ap- peared to himself to be wedded to the glory and the balmy stillness. The wilderness of rocks about him THE FOOL IN CHRIST 57 was something altogether different from hard cold stone. Everything sent forth a living warmth like the bodies of animals in their stalls, except that this warmth was pure and balsamic. There was in it a some- thing exciting and enrapturing, which intoxicated. It was mingled of sweet odours from flowers and blooming grasses, sending forth tickling pollen, which gave out a wild, secret laughter. The floor of the hut was covered with branches of dwarf pine, in which were a goat's horn and a piece of goat's skin. That is why Quint in his dreams saw flocks of goats and goat- footed shepherds, who bustled about with buckets fuU of milk and great round cheeses. Many of the shepherds were horned and wore wreaths of pine branches. As the blood throbbed hot through the veins of the Fool, so the whole of nature seemed to be pulsating. There was something of delightful nakedness in it all. And the breath of nakedness kept rising warmer and warmer, drugging the senses. The moonlight poured like anointing-oil over the soft forms of the crags and peaks, and something like an abyss of scarlet opened and shut again, opened and shut again before Quint's closed eyes, something he wearied not of seeing until it disappeared. Then on a sudden a woman danced before^him stark naked, an Eve witTi voluptuous breasts. She flung herself back and tossed back tlie waves of her red hair. Then she planted her hands in the swelling flesh of her hips and turned about slowly. The Fool started up from his sleep, and cried aloud: " Get thee hence, Satan ! " When morning came Quint was a-hungered, and he went forth in search of something to eat. At the edge 58 THE FOOL IN CHRIST of a broad plateau it seemed to him the tinkling of the bells of a herd sounded from the pastures below. It was only the gurgling of a rill hidden under the stones. But in the distance Quint noticed a solitary house. Being far-sighted he could see goats and kine leave the stable attached to it, could see them raise their heads and sniff the cool morning air, and then run to water. It was no longer balmy as during the night. The south wind was blowing steadily, and the Fool shivered. For a while he watched what was going on at the little hut, which at that distance resembled a toy. He saw the herd form and leave the place. For about a quarter of an hour it moved in a certain direction, coming nearer to him, and then it reached its pasture. Quint descended to hunt for the shepherd. He found a frightfully ragged fellow with blubber lips and unkempt hair. The man started in alarm when he caught sight of Quint. But the stranger seated himself quietly on a granite block at a safe distance, and the goats and kids and even the buck went snifBng around him confidingly. So the shepherd paid no further attention to him and serenely knocked the ashes from his hide pipe. Quint waited quite a while. The heavy cows grazed quietly. At times one of them raised its head and lowed and gave the stranger a blank-eyed stare. Finally Quint stepped up to the shepherd. " I am thirsty." " There's plenty of water here to drink," the man answered promptly in his scarcely intelligible dialect. " Give me a drink of milk, for God's sake." The man looked at Quint with his swollen, blistered eyes, and crossed himself. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 59 " I am as poor as you," he said. " I have not eaten anything for two days." The man put down his pipe, as if he had seen an ap- parition, fetched a tin can from a hiding place under a dwarf pine, and crept, like an animal upon its prey, to a blackish-brown blazed cow, whose udder almost dragged on the ground. He lured her into the knee- pine, where he milked her in concealment. Suddenly he was standing behind Quint, handing the can of milk over his shoulder. Quint drank greedily and felt refreshed. And thenceforth he went to the poor shep- herd daily, and the shepherd gave him milk and willingly shared his hard bread with him, apparently with ever greater pleasure. Each day the poor Fool spent by himself seeing no one beside the shepherd, he sank deeper into the world of his dreams. Everybody who has experienced the charm of a walking-tour, especially in the mountains, knows what a wealth of pictures it evokes, what an labundance of large sensations. Little wonder, then, if Quint under the influence of prolonged solitude and planless wanderings gradually lost all sense of the real and at tiyies became so intoxicated by new powerful 'sensations that he scarcely felt he was mortal. The one thing to bring such extravagance back to reality is the sound of a human voice. In his isolation Quint heard only the ^eathing and rushing of" nature, and held converse only with the stars and the winds. Thus he came to feel his existence as scarcely other than a spirit, a holy ghost, hence divine. What the serpent had said in paradise passed through his mind. Had not the Saviour's rosy blood nullified that hun- 60 THE FOOL IN CHRIST 'dre(3-thousand-year-old sin, and made free the way of the tree of knowledge? Yea, were not bread and wine sanctified by Jesus the fruit of knowledge, and had not he, Quint, eaten of that fruit? Of that fruit of which the serpent had said, " In the day ye eat thereof ye shall be as gods." He was as God, resolved into all that is lofty, often for hours at a time. Then ofttimes he would stand at the edge of precipitous crags and look down into the depths fearlessly with a bacchantic smile. Beneath him solitary birds of prey started up and drifted about lost in the pathless space. Sometimes he would seem to hear mocking laughter from below, and he felt as if to answer that peal he must leap triumphantly into the abyss. Then, he knew, he should float and glide along more airily than a dove. The secret strength of this craving was great. He often felt it, and rebuked himself. And after he had checked the inner assault he told himself : " Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." But it was not only the craving to see faith or the miraculous con- firmed, nor was it a mad belief in his supernatural powers. It was a sort of certainty, a feeling of his own indestructibility, joined to a frantic transport of impatience to mock the powers of death, the powers of the abyss, with a cry of triumph, even were it in earthly death. Such outbursts were sometimes followed by the pro- foundest contrition. And when the voices again began that called "Son of God! Son of God!" and would not be silenced, the poor man crouched on his knees praying and wresthng with his soul for hours, and at the end — sometimes after coming out of a heavy faint — he found his head and body covered with sweat and THE FOOL IN CHRIST 61 heard himself still stammering prayers to the Saviour beseeching Him to set him free from the too-difficult calling of the imitation. After such moments of exhaustion the world of a sudden beckoned to him enticingly — no longer the world that is a woman who lies in travail and brings forth sorrow. The world laughed and danced in last- ing youth and beauty. Quint thought he merely had not known the world, and if now he were tranquilly to descend to the abodes of men, it would cease to be rude to him. It was as if he had taken hold of the end of a golden thread and all he needed to do was follow it through the labyrinths of human intercourse in order no longer to be poor, despised, and wretched; as if a spark of light from hell had suddenly disclosed to him all the shallow tricks and wiles which make the cunning rich in the twinkling of an eye ; and as if sud- denly his fool's tinsel were turned into gold. It was nothing good that stirred within him, that he well knew, though it went on very quietly unac- companied by the hissing of devilish tongues. He would do what they all do — fight hate with hate, rage with rage, abuse with abuse. War would be brought against war ! Lie against lie ! Deceit against deceit ! He would go forth in search of prey in defiance of all the robbers and greedy beasts of prey. He would grab, spoil, amass wealth, which moth and rust corrupt. He would take, and take, and take the pennies from the widows and orphans, the cover from the cold, the bread from the hungry. And the voice of his own greed would drown the cries and curses of the cheated and the robbed, the hungry and the ruined, the tortured and the sick and the murdered. — And of course he would have to renounce Jesus. 62 THE FOOL IN CHRIST " That would make life easy," poor Quint thought rightly. But his ideas fell into confusion again be- cause the constraint he had to put upon himself to desert the Saviour for the sake of the world was insuf- ferable. No, he would not pray to Satan, for: " Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Thus he admonished himself. And a change took place in him. Once more entirely returned to Jesus he determined to give himself up again to His gospel with a pure, calm soul. ,^l^. ^j& ^i^ ^1^ ji^ ^ ^/^ ^ He lay in his hiding-place stretched on the moss, and read and reflected, or, pacing up and down slowly, he took up the Scriptures sentence by sentence and meditated upon them searchingly. The atmosphere about him grew calmer. And his desire for the uni- versal word of God in nature turned toward the revela- tions contained in the letters of the Holy Writ. The nearer Whitsuntide drew the more peaceful Quint became. His soul ripened with a knowledge of new, peculiar things — a knowledge that smoothed down the roughnesses of his nature. God became man, he said to himself. That was the mystery. He became entirely human. And that was the greatest of the miracles. Why did he become human.? That he might be both a human and a divine example to man. Because it is only in the human that man can conceive the divine. What follows? he pon- dered further. That with perfect faith and confidence we should first comprehend the human in the life of the Saviour, and try to understand it better and better, that we should love Him and emulate Him in a human way. So Quint resolved to do. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 63 In this disposition of mind he was all humility. The new spirit, which proved stable, unconsciously estranged him from the teachings of Brother Nathaniel, and even brought him into conflict with his own former conduct. He meant to be truly humble, and he rejected all his former visionary dreams, his ecstatic transports and ex- cesses. Assuredly as always he would be a disciple of Christ, but entirely within the realm of the human. Teach less and do more. Not to succumb to the spirit of vainglory, the evil spirit of self-deception, he would rather turn from the seeming-divine and be all the more inwardly human. He no longer thought of doing wonders. For he had read how Jesus had rebuked the sign-seeking, adulterous, and sinful generation. He also pondered upon the Saviour's warning against false prophets and workers of miracles, and he wanted not to be one of them. Quint could scarcely do enough in his passionate de- sire to humble himself. He had vaguely recognised a certain disharmony between Christ and even the dis- ciples of old. Believing he stood on the side of the Master, he intended to kill ofi' in himself the desire for miracles and rewards, which the Saviour had observed with sorrow in His disciples. He wanted to be the least, by no means the first, of the ministers of the Word. He now looked with suspicion upon everything that is loud. At this stage of his strange career, he dis- dained soaring plans. He would be as the babes and sucklings, pure of heart, a tree full of fruit. He would act Christ's teachings, not teach them. Like the tree, he should be known by his fruit. Therefore it was not as an especially excellent teacher, or disciple, or prophet that he wanted to go down 64. THE FOOL IN CHRIST among men. He wanted to do good in secret rather than openly. Jesus would surely guide him. And Quint would not threaten or promise, but first walk along one of the golden paths of the soul that Jesus had laid like a strip of paradise through the wUdemess of the earth. He would serve all and command none. That was the Fool's prodigious, wholly impracticable resolve. He said the Lord's prayer daily. And because he found it written that the disciples had not prayed at all before Jesus, at their special request, had taught them the Lord's prayer, that was the only prayer he said. He prayed in a childlike spirit. Gradually, in being limited to this one prayer, a strange delusion seized him and unfortunately took firm root. He thought the prayer was actually not a prayer, but the essence of Christ's teachings compressed into a few sentences to be a lodestar for learners. " Our Father which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name." This was said not for them that pray but for God. To whom were the words addressed.'' To a higher God than God.'' Quint thought they were ad- dressed to the Ghost, the God-spirit that is in man. He felt the audacity of this thought, but he continued his sickly ponderings. " Thy kingdom come." To whom were those words addressed.'' Again it seemed to him to the Ghost. He felt how, as he prayed, he directed them as it were to himself. It seemed with that he had struck a holy spring within himself, had awakened a pure, holy endeavor, a new active Holy Ghost. And within us also is the kingdom. Through the Ghost it should be established in our being. " Thy THE FOOL IN CHRIST 65 will be done!" Was that a human request? The al- mighty will of the almighty God, the supreme Jehovah, should His will be done? A petty mortal should pray for that? And to whom, to whom was he to pray for it? If the sentence had been, "Do with me ac- cording to Thy will," that would have been impotence, not a prayer. But Quint referred this also to the Ghost. The will of the Ghost should be done, even if the body were thereby consumed to ashes. " Give us this day our daily bread." Well, that was a great deal dismissed very shortly. Perhaps this re- quest, Quint thought, was a concession to the disciples, who had been hungry for gifts. " And forgive us our debts ! " We are debtors, we need forgiveness, all without exception, Quint thought. And he could not rid himself of the notion that this, too, was only a mock request. "As we forgive our debtors." To that extent and no further are we to be forgiven our sins. " And lead us not into temptation," came at last. What did this, the most remarkable request, signify? The Fool had once asked himself the question in an attack of folly when he was saying the Lord's prayer according to his wont. And the Evil One whispered in his ear, " It means, leave us in peace." But Quint suppressed the hideous voice. " Tempt us not ! Tempt us not!" Was not the Evil One the Tempter? Hence, did not the prayer signify, " Seduce us not through false pretences ! Set no traps and snares in our way ! Provoke us not to resistance by trials and sufferings ! Cause us not, from our needs and lusts, to trespass against our neighbours. Seat us not in judgment seats that we may not pronounce bloody 66 THE FOOL IN CHRIST judgments upon our fellow-sinners. Cause us not to be kings that we may not exercise power and go to perdition through power. Lead us not to rape, mur- der, and theft! Tempt us not, for we are weak. Expect not deeds of one divinely strong and sinless from us poor mortals groping in the dark. Extinguish not the smoking wick, but deliver us from evil. Ours be the Ghost and the peace." It was an awful God to whom we had to address the prayer to lead us not into temptation. And Quint felt how the Saviour had tried to remove the hardness and fearfulness from a fearful representation of God. Hallowed and beloved be Thy name, not with shudder- ing and horror — this sounded in the whole prayer. We invoke in Thee what is love, and what we invoke, love invokes in us. Thus far the Fool was on the right way. But he went still farther. He dethroned the personal God and believed that Jesus had dethroned Him and in His stead had set the Ghost. This conception dominated, almost coerced him, and caused him profound astonishment. It was so strong that at times he well-nigh denied that he stood on the firm earth, breathed the air, was canopied by the heavens. His dwelling-place seemed to be the Ghost alone. All his movements and especially everything he could in a higher sense call his life went on as in a sea com- posed of the souls of all the men that had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Besides that he knew nothing, or, at least, nothing but darkness. Conceive of all the human beings, old men, old women, men and women of all ages, children, all that cover the globe, each with a light in his hand. Some- thing similar was what Quint conceived. They stood apart from one another, yet their lights merged into THE FOOL IN CHRIST 67 one. So, divided from him in body, they were yet one with him in light. A hunger for the souls of people came upon him as never before, a painful love and yearning. It was as if in the light of his boundless love of Jesus the man, a profound knowledge of man's worth and man's mission had been granted him. Love of mankind gnawed at him. It filled the Fool with a consuming passion. He wanted to go to his brothers and sisters. He wanted no longer to remain cold- heartedly apart from them, as he had done before in his self-seeking. He forgot himself wholly. That is, he forgot his former joys and sorrows. He thought he perceived that mankind is the dwelling-place of the Godhead. And while he looked upon the house of God still dazzled by its light and splendour, divining rather than seeing it, the circumstance of his own individual little life seemed of no significance before that exalted thing. Hence a craving for self-sacrifice came upon him, a yearning to give himself up to the universal, freed from the singleness of his body as from a prison cell — his light to the light, his love to the love, in order to be freed from himself and from love and be eternally perfect in God. The complete inne r tra nsformation of Emanuel Quint was a most remarkable process. What was re- markable in it is that a pure childlike spirit of enthusi- asm had replaced the greater part of his enthusiasms by some apparently rational considerations, which gradually combined into a firm system holding the Fool's soul in far more absolute subjection than had his former purely emotional ecstasy. It often hap- pened that he himself was alarmed when he saw how far his meditations had led him away from all his 68 THE FOOL IN CHRIST former paths now that he was one with Jesus the man, as he supposed, and deep in the mystery of the king- dom of God. The joy of the discoverer dominated him. But he determined for the present to keep secret what he had discovered and what he thought he understood when in sudden clairvoyance the scales fell from his eyes. CHAPTER IV One day the brothers Anton and Martin Scharf ap- peared before Emanuel Quint. For weeks they had been seeking him. And now the jerking of their bearded faces betokened what it meant to them at last to have discovered the Fool. And the Fool in his new frame of mind inwardly rejoiced to see them again, and decided straightway to accompany them to a re- mote mountain hut in which they had taken shelter for several days. The brothers had recognised him instantly, though his hair and beard had grown somewhat wild. And as they walked behind him and answered his questions their faces brightened. They first informed Quint that their father had died more than three weeks before. The old man had gone to sleep blissfully in God, in the belief in Jesus, and the certainty of resurrection. They had then sold their home and chattels to be unhampered and free to follow the Fool's traces. Their intention had not remained a secret, and they had had to endure much ridicule. For though a num- ber of believing Christians in the neighbourhood had prophesied wonderful things regarding the appearance and disappearance of Emanuel Quint, the overwhelm- ing multitude had been incited to hate and contempt. But little more and they would have been enraged to the point of persecution. A Socialist agitator and editor by the name of 69 70 THE FOOL IN CHRIST KurowskI had visited the brothers, and hearing of their intention had warned them against carrying it out. He maintained that Quint had probably disappeared across the border never to return again. But they were not to be dissuaded. They trusted their faith in him, the sure instinct of their hearts. Kurowski had spoken at great length, and as Quint seemed to be very much interested in his attitude, the brothers had to repeat in brief what he had said. " You will be misled by your belief in that en- thusiast. He probably acted in all good faith when he delivered his homily in the market-place, but he is deceiving you — deceiving you as he deceives himself. Why? Because he proceeds upon the basis of igno- rance. If he were an educated man, which he is not, since the dominating class prevents general culture, he could achieve tremendous things. There is a new social science. And he who builds not on this science but upon old silly fairy tales, builds on shifting sand. The greatest compassion is of no use. It leads nowhere. There is an idol, capital, and until that idol is shat- tered good and compassion will be of no avail." One of the brothers drew from the long skirt of his very respectable coat a pamphlet the agitator had given him. The Cormrmnist Manifesto. And Emanuel read the " Workingmen of all countries, unite ! " But he heeded not the summons. He asked the brothers to tell him more. When the county physician came to issue the death certificate for their father, an old half-blind woman entered at the same time, and inquired for Quint in a way that conveyed the impression he was a quack. The-physician then said: " The way you poor silly ignorant people always THE FOOL IN CHRIST 71 fall a prey to such charlatans ! The murderers ! Why, they are mixers of poisons. They are bent upon nothing but extracting the last penny from your pockets and making you sicker. Any blear-eyed drunken old woman can get you to sacrifice your health, if it occurs to her to swindle you with a simple promise. Haven't you the faintest notion that there is such a thing as a medical science, medical skill? And that medicine has to be studied.? You can't be bom with it. My good people, if you take my advice, you will keep away from all those tricky scoundrels, those quacks, those jugglers! They suck like leeches at your bodies, souls, and purses. And as for that Quint, the '; Hrouble with him is he is sick. If he ever shows up here again, let me know on the quiet, and we will just pack him off to the insane asylum." Quint's mother had also come to the brothers several times to inquire for him. The last time she had got very angry and had insisted the brothers were keeping Quint's hiding-place a secret. She had cried, saying she would not rest until she found him. She always had maintained that Quint wanted to soar too high, while it was his duty more than any of his brothers' to keep the family up by work and proper behaviour. He ought to try to soothe his father's anger, which was partly due to his suffering. His mother had not spared Quint. Irritated and annoyed as she was, she had called him a score of harsh names. Anton Scharf, always excitable and now thoroughly indignant, began to rehearse all the epithets Quint's mother had used when Quint suddenly interrupted him. " AVhom think ye, thou and thy brother, that I am? " he asked. The brothers remained silent and eyed one another. 7a THE FOOL IN CHRIST But in the looks of the two emaciated enthusiasts, over- excited by work, night vigils, and ardent yearning, there was a strangely determined gleam, which alarmed Quint. He felt as if he must press back on their lips a word still unuttered, a word whose confusing power filled him with dread. And yet again his soul hungered to hear it. A conviction had taken firm hold of the brothers and was still further strengthened by what they heard from Nathaniel Schwarz. It was a foolish notion, but it kept alive in them an unspeakable sense of happiness, a bliss- ful madness, which could have developed nowhere else than among simple, childlike souls in a district remote from the world. They said: " We know thou art the anointed of the Lord." To the Fool's honour be it said he could scarcely mas- ter his horror. He rebuked the brothers severely and attempted to make clear to them the awful absurdity of such a statement. He also bade them keep their opinion an absolute secret. But the two far from being shaken in their opinion were strengthened in it by the ominous force of his words and the flash of his eyes. Yet they were in- clined to obey him with all their soul, and they told him so with an expression of doglike fidelity and hum- bleness. For a long time they walked in silence in the cold, clear air of the mountain ridge with their sorry-looking lord and master, until they came into view of a secluded little hut with a low-hanging shingle roof standing on a slope strewn with boulders. ******** This was the hut in which the brothers a few days before had sought and found shelter. Such as are THE FOOL IN CHRIST 73 not accustomed to look earthly misery straight in the face would have been struck with gruesome surprise by its interior. After passing through a small entry smelling of goat dung you entered a low, black, fairly large room, where the light was a dirty brown turning the figures in it into phantoms. The vile smell took one's breath away. And when, accustomed to the twi- light, you investigated everything the room concealed, you found human beings in the lowest extreme of wretchedness. Even Emanuel and the brothers though inured to the direst want, to whom a penny meant more than a pound does to others, showed they were strangely moved by the sight of this privation. An elderly man with bushy hair and beard rose from a worm-eaten weaver's stool and came to meet the strangers, with noiseless, shuffling steps. His feet were wrapped in rags. The faded cap worn even in- doors showed he had once been a soldier. After scruti- nising Quint almost with terror in his ejes, he bowed over the Fool's hands, and on raising his head again his eyes met the shining eyes of the brothers — shining with an expression of rapturous triumph, readily to be interpreted : " Behold, here is he whom we sought." Quint noticed that he had been expected. And this strange state of expectancy which he found wherever he went strengthened him in the foolish supposition that the world was in particular need of him, and his walking on earth was a divine mission. He was led to a bed covered with straw. In the cellar-like darkness it was hard to see things, but when the straw began to rustle Emanuel discerned an emaciated naked human body not wholly hidden be- neath the ragged coverings. Then he saw raised 74 THE FOOL IN CHRIST toward him, the head of a blonde woman still young and eyes fixed upon him in a stare of anguish. And without asking who Quint was or why he had come, the woman began to make her moan, speaking in a loud, heart-rending voice. For weeks she had been lying on the straw sick and helpless and unable to work. Six months before on a stormy autumn night she had given birth to a child, now lying next to her on the ground In a wooden tub. When Emanuel expressed his compassion in a few heart- felt words, the woman pointed to the child with a ges- ture of exceeding despair, which showed what was the object of her real and latest grief. And the Fool bent his white, freckled face over the sleeping child in the wooden tub, and the brothers saw his eyes fill with tears. For Quint realised instantly that that emaciated naked woman on the straw had spoken the truth. The poor child, breathing heavily and feverishly, was covered all over with a single awful repulsive scab. It was difficult to see how it could still live. The father of the family said nothing. But from his manner it was evident that he went about with the solemn consciousness that God had selected him for peculiarly frightful trials. Had not his left arm been crippled by the rheumatism contracted in the campaign of 1866 and 1870.'' And was there not a blonde girl of fourteen, large-eyed, with hectic spots on her hollow cheeks, sitting on a weaver's spool back of him.'' He knew his tumbledown hut, avoided by men and good for- tune, was a favourite haunt of all sorts of sickness and trouble. Every year death had been a visitor, carry- ing off to the little church-yard cemetery down in the valley his father and his mother and five of his children. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 75 All this gravity, all this severe naked misery set up sweet, secret, hopeful vibrations in Quint, which seemed to rest upon a heavenly instinct that God's help is closest to the profoundest misery — this to be taken not in an earthly, but in a deep mystical sense. It was in sorrow, in sympathy, and in love that God revealed Himself. Amid these uneasy, torturing pulsations He seemed to be hidden behind scarcely a single thin veil. Often the hovering head of the Redeemer would rise up before Quint as if taking form from the vapourous phantoms of all the martyrs of all ages, the head with the crown of thorns on its brow and drops of the sacred blood trickling slowly down over the eyes of the Man of Sorrows. It now seemed that wherever Quint appeared in the midst of grief and care, this secret, hopefully joyous state of his soul communicated itself to all, and every poor wretch welcomed his coming as a good and his going as an evil. The excitement that had taken hold of the three occupants of the little hut and the brothers Anton and Martin was not of the sort that comes from pleasure in mere human goodness and consolation. Quint felt the eyes of the man, the eyes of the woman, and the eyes of the girl resting upon him with a hun- gry, questioning gleam. He saw a strange trembling of their hands, as if doubt and faith in strife with each other nevertheless felt the approach of a desired miracle. Quint saw all this. Quite cool and level-headed in ob- serving it he connected it, of course, with the over- wrought outcry of the two brothers that had startled him only a few minutes before, and he confessed to him- self that without his agency simplicity, anxiety, and misery had here risen to the heights of sinful imagin- ings of an incredible nature. 76 THE FOOL IN CHRIST These poor, ignorant people, he said to himself, in their delirium actually take me to be Jesus Christ, the Son of God. But instead of instantly doing that which he had once before attempted, instead of trying to tear up that sickly misbelief by its roots, he let matters take their course. Indeed, their delusion reacted upon him. It rendered him helpless. It reduced him to the very same state of inner and outer trembling which he per- ceived among the inmates of the abode of misery to which he had come as a guest. The brothers Anton and Martin Scharf, the starved veteran, whose name was Schubert, and the fourteen- year-old daughter Martha ministered to Quint. They came to an understanding with one another by their looks, and with an air of special importance went down into the cellar and fetched up some provisions, which had been bought with the pennies of the brothers. Martha had gathered some dry brushwood, which now crackled merrily in the stove. She brought in cold mountain-spring water in a potsherd and set potatoes on to boil — an unusual feast for the family, which had to content itself mostly with a soup made of husks. There was something- still choicer hidden in the cellar — wine, one bottle of wine which the brothers had bought from a hideous, gypsy-like man, unaware that he was smuggling it from Bohemia into Prussia. So the one bottle of wine was set on the table. Emanuel heeded not all these preparations for a syba- ritic feast. He had moved a stool to the sick woman's bedside and sat quietly with bent head speaking to her in a low tone. There was not a trace of shame in her because of her almost complete nakedness. Want, a THE FOOL IN CHRIST 7T vain struggle against misery year in year out had quite starved out that luxurious sentiment. Though Emanuel Quint knew of families blessed with numerous offspring who went about in the house naked to save clothes, or because they did not have enough rags to go around and had to use them by turns, he was touched by a feel- ing as he sat at this woman's side which made him avoid looking at her. In his struggle with an inner agitation which he thought he had mastered during the last few weeks, he often failed to hear what she said. It seemed to him as if the woman, whose face was so haggard and drawn That her thin lips could not meet over her teeth, was seductive, despite her gruesome misery, in the vo- luptuous adornment of her loose, reddish, barbaric hair. He was bitterly ashamed of his thoughts. But the spot- less lustre of her round, slim shoulder, which he could not help seeing, the pearly glint of her body through the straw, which seemed to mock the poverty all about her, kept making him uncertain. He loved the woman. He loved her because in his heart he always bore the suffering of compassion like an open wound, because that hatred which dominates everything among men in their struggles with one another had no place in his breast, and thus human hatred was replaced by human love. As in a ship's hold the goods it carries over the waters lie divided from one another in rooms separated by walls, and in a storm one load sometimes breaks through the waUs and faUs into the room of another, so it hap- pened in Quint's soul. If with other human beings we make a distinction between heavenly and earthly love, then in the case of the Fool we must say that his earthly love secretly broke Into the separate chamber of his 78 THE FOOL IN CHRIST heavenly love, even though it seemed to him that thereby heavenly love were carried all the higher heavenward. The poor woman broke into complaints, complaints not against man — this was bitter for Emanuel — but against God. She told her story. It was a story of unremitting want. And the thought passed through the poor Fool's mind, how could she know of any other condition, a happy condition, and despair of attaining it.'' When a child she had had to suffer the frightful tortures of having a drunkard for a mother. Often, even when broken down by excessive work, she had seen things that poisoned her memory and undermined the strength of her mind. Her parents demanded the most beastly, obscene things of her, and themselves enacted them in her very pres- ence. Finally, to her gratification, her mother stayed away for longer and longer periods, begging and drinking. Then at least there were several weeks of peace at a time, and the walls of the narrow, ruinous hut no longer resounded with quarrels and brutal blows. In the meantime the father became bedridden. He could no longer take his barrel-organ out on the ridge- road where tourists passed, and the door was opened wider to want than ever. Hunger and sickness became constant guests. To attend to her father, to provide for herself and her brothers and sisters, all that from now on fell upon her shoulders, the shoulders of a girl of eleven, until one day after he had gone through great suffering she found her father lying cold on his rotting straw couch in the light of the wintry sun. Silenced the curses with which the old man had al- ways unburthened his soul, the curses that had goaded the child on to ceaseless work and kept her bound in hell. But her mother turned up. During the night. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 79 in the madness of a drunken fit, she appeared at the hut demanding money and admission. In tremours of terror the child opened the door to her. The drunken woman did not recognise death upon the face of her husband. In her frenzy she went to the bed, mocked the dead man, and hurled curses at him. Her fury mounting, she finally grasped the corpse and dishonoured its face with blows. At last she fell upon the bed next to her dead husband, red, bloated, reeking with whiskey, and lay there snoring until late in the morning. The woman grew more and more eager as she went on with her story. She caught her breath painfully and tossed from side to side making the straw crackle at short regular intervals. Now came her sufferings as a grown girl and a woman. Then the pangs of childbirth, of the last childbirth scarcely six months before, from which, lying neglected for weeks, she had not yet arisen. And again and again she asked, " Why ? " Why all those sor- rows heaped upon her ? There is a good God in heaven, we are told, she said. Is what her husband never wearied of repeating true, she asked, that the Saviour would once again appear on earth and for a thousand years spread sheer joy and happiness.? She did not believe so. She had believed too often and had always been deceived. It seemed to her as if that talk of having to believe and becoming better were merely a lie. Schubert, her husband, stepped to the bedside, and in a few words reproached her with the sin of doubting. How gladly would Quint have said to the poor woman so THE FOOL IN CHRIST -diseased with an issue of blood, " Arise, and walk." Or merely, " Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." But the conviction had long since ceased tO' prevail within him. Even before his first fool's sermon in the market-place of Reichenbach the Christ of the sermon on the mount had hovered be- fore him, and " Take up your cross ! " had been the so- lution for him. To be sure he did not understand that solution then, as he came to understand it later. How could Quint preach the " Take up your cross " "to that woman groaning under the rod of anguish, whose hungry eyes contradicting her words suppli- cated for all the satisfactions of the heavenly paradise? How could he say to that poor creature what he had always cried to himself, " Deny thyself ! " or " Suffer- ing is thy reward ! Hope for no other ! He who seeks rewards is he who always produces evil in the world. He is the wolf. Be not the wolf, the wicked one, in the fold. Be the lamb! Be God's lamb! Be the patient sheep under the hands of the shearer and the butcher." No, all that he reserved for himself. As for the woman, he could not but fan her hopes in a just compensation .in the life hereafter. During the meal the Fool remained silent buried in his own thoughts. The woman, he reflected, will never see the earthly paradise of the future. None of us shall. We have to give ourselves up without hope of a share in it, as examples, as self-sacrificing masons of a church that we ourselves shall never enter. It is not the thirst to sacrifice myself for God which is impelling me. But with God and in God for men, according to Christ's example, for men! Man, the Son of man, it is to Him alone that I offer up my earthly strength, in love, without reserve. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 81 But the brothers Anton and Martin and the weaver Schubert suspected nothing of his reflections. Those poor men in their contracted sphere Hved their inner Hves wholly in their firm delusion, their firm credulity, which, like every delusion, it is difficult for the sober- minded to comprehend. From time to time there comes over the old world, in conjunction with a new or a revived belief, a feeling of rejuvenescence. And just at that time, about 1890, a new faith and a spring feeling hovered in the air of Germany. It was an intoxication the causes of which were many. The wave penetrated to the remotest cor- ners of the land, and, as it were, caused the blood of the people to put forth blossoms. It reached the broth- ers, causing them to depart imperceptibly farther and farther from the ground of sober reality. The monstrous conception that they should be hon- oured first in the community of God at his second ad- vent on earth filled their waking hours as well as their sleeping dreams. It was an intoxication hard to mas- ter. So, while they ate and drank they could no longer keep their happiness within bounds, and it broke forth, despite Quint's presence, in self-righteousness and pride. They spoke in hoarse voices lowered out of respect to Quint. And they spoke not of the salvation of all as the important thing, but the damnation of the wicked and the last judgment. Not pardon, but revenge. Not suflTering for Jesus' sake, but the reward of suff"er- ing. In horror Quint admitted to himself how far these, once his truest disciples, had departed from the kingdom of God, such as he yearned for. The thing that occupied them was the approach of the millennium, which was to change the earth into para- dise. And it was noticeable that they no longer reck- 82 THE FOOL IN CHRIST oned upon fresh sufferings before the coming of the millennium. To be sure the Revelation of St. John with all its terrors haunted them, but in their opinion they were under the Saviour's direct protection. They pictured to themselves how on judgment day the Son of man coming down in glory sat upon the Father's right hand, and divided his sheep from the goats. And they poured out the vials of their wrath upon all the godless powers of the day, against whose account they wrote the vast sum of mankind's woe on earth. They thought of Lazarus and the rich man — how Lazarus was carried by the angels into the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man suffered torments and thirsted in a Turkish-bath hell. It contented them that the rich man thirsted. Growing excited over the wine and food they began to cast not a few of their fellow- creatures into the eternal flames of hell to be compan- ions of Dives — the village miller, the parson, the fus- tian dealer, for whom they had sweated at their looms, and many another beloved neighbour. Quint thought of rebuking the brothers severely. But he reconsidered, and remembered how broad the gulf between them had grown. He restrained himself. These men after all, he reflected, though grown up, were in a sense only children who, if they were to become capable of understanding truth, had to be led upward to truth step by step. Moreover, Quint stood in some awe of his own new truth. He was afraid. He had not yet the full courage to admit it openly. And suddenly, he scarcely knew how or why, the Fool began to speak of the " mysteries of the kingdom of heaven," involuntarily using an expression of the Sav- iour's. Though he was careful to respect his disciples' ardour, he made them uncertain of their opinions and THE FOOL IN CHRIST 83 expectations of the kingdom to come, so that they sat there dumbfounded when he arose and went to rest in the empty room in the loft. Emanuel had slept only a short time when he awoke and stepped into the moonlight shining through the at- tic window, and with difficulty tried to decipher pas- sages in his little Bible. Then he paced up and down slowly, but restlessly, the full length of the attic, pon- dering upon the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. Suddenly a shriek sounded in the room below, and imme- diately after Anton Scharf, who had slept in the vesti- bule, entered and besought him earnestly to come down. When Quint entered the room, the baby was scream- ing in the tub and the woman on the straw couch was weeping hysterically. She wrung her hands and held them up to Emanuel and begged him for help. Old Schubert was sitting on his weaver's stool holding tight in his arms a something that was writhing convulsively. Martin Scharf, at a loss what to do, was standing along- side holding the smoking stump of a candle in his hand. " She is in one of her fits again," said the older brother. Quint now perceived it was Martha who was in her father's arms. He took the candle from Martin's hand, and as soon as the light approached her frightfully dis- torted face, she hissed and spat like a cat. But she did not come to her senses, and all were suddenly startled by a beastly howl resembling a dog's, which burst from her narrow, bared breast. Then in a mad whirl of words she began to curse God, Jesus Christ, and all the angels. Quint felt what was expected of him. Even without 84) THE FOOL IN CHRIST that incentive his whole being was profoundly stirred to give help. Quite instinctively he did what is usually done to rouse a person from heavy sleep. He asked for fresh water from the spring, and then, raising his voice, spoke to Martha very sharply. The attack had probably come to an end of itself. But when the girl's body relaxed peacefully, this was new proof to the men, ready of faith, of the Fool's won- der-working powers. And after Quint had left the room to be by himself in the chilly clear moonlight of the open air, and the girl was slumbering quietly at her mother's side, the men talked with one another until long after dawn, completely penetrated by the sup- posed miracle. Martha did not awaken until late in the afternoon. What she related was of a nature to strengthen the de- lusions of the little circle. She wore an air of beatific solemnity. When asked why, she declared that in a dream she had seen Jesus Christ surrounded by a heav- enly halo with all the marks of his wounds. " O Jesus, my sweet light. Now is the night departed,, Now is Thy saving grace To me again imparted." From that time on, whatever the housework she was doing, the girl kept singing this and similar verses to lierself. CHAPTER V The world has often had the experience that a false belief will spread over wide areas like a conflagration, or a blight, or an epidemic. Thus, in that remote dis- trict, the rumour got abroad that a man had appeared who, if he was not Christ Himself, was at least an apos- tle. If not an apostle, then a saint. If not a saint, then a wonder-worker. And two days later in the morning Emanuel found the hut besieged by a throng of the infirm and the disabled. If it is difficult to be- lieve this, remember what the lay physician and the wise old woman with her faith cures mean to the common people. By chance it was the first day of Whitsuntide that looked down upon the lame, blind, coughing, feverish, groaning multitude. There were men and women and children, old people and middle-aged people. The sun shone warm upon the bare, stony field. Martha, who was the first to espy the strange influx, bade them wait. By nature not impatient, they sat about on the scattered blocks of granite, a well-behaved crowd, awaiting the wonder-working healer. Very close by was one of those paths which lure the dwellers of the valleys, plains, towns, and villages up into the glory of the mountains. And to-day, being Whitsunday, all those paths were alive with gay throngs jocund with the spring. Some of them on the near- est path stood still to scrutinise the curious camp. After a while they saw a man step from the little hut, 85 86 THE FOOL IN CHRIST blown lopsided by the wind, and thereupon a general movement among the waiting multitude. It was with outward calm and inward agitation that Emanuel Quint had observed the crowd of supplicants through the window. Finally he sent out the weaver Schubert to teU them that Quint was only a poor man like themselves, and of aU things the least likely to be a wonder-worker. And when the people surrounded the weaver, whom they knew, he did as he had been bid- den, but not in so convincing a way as to shake their faith. On the contrary, they ran in thick swarms to Quint's window. Women making a great outcry raised their infants in front of the panes, men displayed their crippled limbs, and many pointed simultaneously to the eyes of blind persons, and wildly begged that they be healed. Thereupon the Fool came to a firm decision. He stepped out courageously into the urgent assemblage. Straightway they covered with kisses the folds of his threadbare coat and his hands and naked feet. The on- lookers saw how the tall grotesque man for a time rode helpless as upon a wave of misery. At length Anton and Martin Scharf succeeded in clearing a space be- tween their idol and the senseless throng. There was nothing for Quint to do but to address the assemblage. Whatever the content of his sermon was, a clear state- ment of it h£is never been given by any one of those who heard it. Under the inspiration of the moment the Fool probably mixed together all sorts of contradictory things, as they rushed to his lips from his previous re- flections and his recollections of the Bible. " What came ye out for to see ? " is the way he began. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 8T "A physician? I am a sick man, not a physician, A man clothed in soft raiment? In better raiment than clothes your crooked limbs? Verily, I am as poorly clothed as you. Behold, they that wear soft clothing dwell peacefully in kings' houses. What came ye out for to see? A prophet who curses the sins of the world? I am not come to curse. What came ye out for to see ? One more than you, a master in art, a mas- ter in writing? Know I am as unlearned and less than you! I cannot heal the sick or raise the dead except they be sick in the spirit and dead in the spirit. If ye would be healed in the spirit and supplicate therefor, mayhap ye will be helped. I was baptised, baptised with water, but I cannot baptise another with water. I baptise with the spirit." Looking at the brothers and Schubert the weaver, he continued : " The Son of man came not into the world to destroy the souls of men. Nor came He into the world to remove the yoke from one and place it upon another, to shift the burden from the back of the good man to the back of the bad man. But He Himself will take all burdens upon Himself. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Jesus Christ you rightly call the Son of God. But God is spirit. Jesus was born of the spirit. Far be it from you and from me to assume that God is a body and that an earthly body brought forth the Son. That which is born of the spirit is spirit. Step into the birth of the spirit, then shall you be in spiritual regeneration. The Father is spirit, the Son is spirit, and I, too, am born again of the spirit. I hesitate not to proclaim unto you. He that is bom again of the spirit, he is the Son of God. Thus, I am the Son of God. And you, too, each of you, can become the same as I am through the spiritual regenera- tion. Each and all of you can become God's children." 88 THE FOOL IN CHRIST Inside the hut the sick woman and Martha looked through the open window and listened to the sermon of the blind leader of the blind, understanding as little of it as any of the devout listeners outside. Deeply moved and excited by the sonorous tones of Emanuel's loud, fervent voice they paid small heed to his words. Still less did they understand their connection. All, even the brothers Anton and Martin, merely found they were reminded of what they knew of the Bible, and the brothers lived only in their delusion. And they found their delusion confirmed in an unheard-of way by Eman- uel's dangerous words, " I am the Son of God." They were unable to take into consideration the sense in which he had meant he was the Son of God. When Quint finished his sermon, the crowd stormed up to him to invoke his help, jostling one another out of the way. The blind stumbled. Babies cried, while their mothers wrangled and abused one another in foul language. They waved stumps of a3rms, dis- torted hands, walking sticks, and crutches right under the Fool's eyes. Now began an awful scrimmage. The most horrible thing to see was the display of disgusting infirmities. The Fool was frightened. What were words here? After trying a time in vain to bring order into the unbridled mob, he withdrew into the hut. But here he was received by the wife of his host in a way which ren- dered him even more helpless than the onslaught of the crowd. The woman was kneeling in the middle of the room. She raised her arms and prayed. And mur- muring prayers she looked at him with credulous eyes shining with a light of madness. Martha stood at the stove, her lips trembling, her hands folded in evident emotion. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 89 The Fool felt a dull confusion rising in him, joined to a temptation more difficult to resist than any that had ever before assailed him. The madness about him was waxing. It was like a mighty storm issuing from the bowels of the earth, irresistible in its might. A ter- rible power was growing up around him, of which he knew not whether he himself or somebody else had un- chained it, a power of faith, which mounted and carried him away as a mountain torrent rises and carries off bits of twigs. Well, you will say, he was a fool, and took himself without much hesitation for that which the people in their folly took him to be. That is, he took himself to be, if not the Son of God, at least a man of supernatural powers able to work miracles. To be sure, he clapped his hand to his brow, and secretly asked himself if after all he was not more than he knew. But then he courageously cast from his mind every- thing that would persuade him to an overweening opin- ion of himself. And so he turned in pain, if not in disgust, from the almost naked body at his feet and the enraptured looks which prayed to him impiously. He hastened out through the back door, and fled across the mountain pastures like a fugitive. The clamorous multitude and the inmates of the little hut sought but could not find him. He had suddenly disappeared. Two young men, tourists, had caught sight of Eman- uel running away. Since everything they had seen and heard impressed them as a tremendous adventure, they followed, and succeeded in overtaking him after he had ^one a long distance. They gave him a friendly bow and spoke to him. 90 THE FOOL IN CHRIST They were brothers by the name of Hassenpflug, !from . Miinster, " Bohemians " in the early twenties, who lived chiefly on borrowed money and edited a mag- azine in Berlin which nobody read. In brief, they were enthusiasts, poets, and Socialists. They saw a good catch in Quint. The vast number of questions with which they plied him he allowed at first to go unanswered, merely turning large, searching eyes upon them. In fact it would not have been easy for him to answer most of their queries. For example, what is a Socialist.'' He did not know whether he was a Socialist. Nor had he heard of anarchism, or Russian nihilism, or a book by Egidy, Ernste Gedariken. At times his face flushed a dark red from shame at his ignorance. But after the three had walked along together in the rare air of the high ridge, a sort of intimacy sprang up between them. Speaking with sectarian zeal Quint's companions gradually unfolded a world entirely new to him, in which he showed a lively curiosity, grasping the unfamiliar ideas with a hungry mind and taking pains to examine them keenly. The manners of the brothers were not pleasant to him. The older one took delight in a sort of gay mockery with which he usually accompanied the statements of the younger brother. When the younger brother spoke of freedom, the right to happiness, a universally har- monious care-free existence on earth, the future state of perfection into which man would develop. Quint had the painful impression that the other brother was com- pletely dominated by scepticism. He seemed to doubt everything. But the platform upon which the three stood united was their youth, the love of an unknown, real world. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 91 still to be conquered, a world ia which they had been placed and which would gradually unfold its marvels to them as they slowly ripened into manhood. It is strange how an intelhgent youth of the age of the brothers deems himself extra-and-super-natural, though every impulse has its roots in things earthly. They themselves were unaware how glorious the world seemed to them, how inconceivably precious. Had any- one told them so, they would have denied it. The Has- senpflug brothers surely did not fail to quote Schopen- hauer, or deal out some of Marx's and Engels's criticism upon the rotten state of society, or use Bellamy to point to .the future Socialist state, to paradisiacal conditions to be striven for. They never dreamed that it would have been impossible for them to conceive of greater happiness than the youth in which they lived. Emanuel Quint, though he was older than the broth- ers and had suffered very differently from them, having had to bear poverty and deprivation, nevertheless, like them, was stirred by the foaming intoxication of youth. And if we take into consideration the whole gravity of his remarkable destiny, the brief road of his hfe gone sadly amiss, we must yet say it was the wealth of young, gushing love which filled him with a hot, insatiable craving to pour out that love, even though his blood flowed away with it. Karl Hassenpflug, the younger brother, remarked hoTTseldom he could extract even a scant reply from this strangely solemn Fool, and began to answer his own questions. Then Quint by degrees learned something like this: In almost all countries of the globe the firm conviction has spread that the present state of society is unjust,^ a state in which the smaller part of mankind enjoys 92 .THE FOOL IN CHRIST comfort, while the far greater part suffers want, and that this social order was doomed to immediate over- throw. Karl himself harboured not the least doubt that the great social revolution was to take place within a very short time, which could be counted perhaps by months. It was the third estate, the working-class, the so-called proletarians, who would bring about the revo- lution. A great party was already formed and grow- ing in nearly every country. This party's motto was: " Freedom, equality, brotherhood of man." As soon as it attained to power the first thing it would do would be to shatter an idol, the Moloch capital. Each would then enjoy the fruits of his honest toil, instead of yielding up the lion's share to the thieving rich. That great event of liberation would be the result of a natural social process, a sort of decay of modem so- ciety. Modern society would rot and fall like over- ripe fruit. But there were people who would not wait for that natural process to take place. These worked to bring about liberation sooner, using violent means, guns and dynamite. Among them, said Karl Hassen- pflug, the rage of the oppressed took on dreadful forms. Their motto was : " War to the knife ! No mercy to the beast of our system ! " And he read to Quint an an- archistic appeal fairly reeking with the bloody breath of revenge. Using the execution of an anarchist on the Place de la Roquette in Paris as a provocative example, the ap- peal called the representatives of the legal powers a gang of curs, scoundrels, ruffians, murderers. Com- pared with these outbursts the bitter denunciations of the Scharf brothers seemed to the Fool to be the gentle whisperings of goodness. He shuddered inwardly. And turning quietly to the speaker he said: THE FOOL IN CHRIST 93 " As surely as I am a poor man among the poor they are far from the kingdom of heaven." The brothers were touched as by something infinitely naive. From now on they tried to extract his secret con- ceits from the original vagrant. They had been pro- digiously astonished to come upon such a man and such an event while off on a Whitsunday excursion. The thing seemed to be a part of the New Testament. They well knew, as the whole circle of the young intel- lectuals of that time knew, that the people are the native soil for everything primitively young and fresh. And here in a district strange to them, remote from the great roads of commerce, they everywhere met with an intact, virgin folk-spirit. They were of those to whom the uniform culture of Europe was a levelling down. So, eagerly, in a thirst for knowledge, they tried on all sides to force their way into the walled province of the lower classes, as if in it there must be sources of reve- lation sealed up in the province of the educated. They now turned the conversation in another direc- tion. They thought that this man having been so be- sieged by the sick must be possessed of a mania for per- forming wonders or by a hypochondriac belief in some universal remedy, which he may have inherited. But his father was not a shepherd-healer, and he had not in- herited a book of recipes. No, it was the leaves of the Bible that they heard rustling in his few simple words. And his talk had not the faintest ring of therapeutic conceit. He said: " I have nothing to do with the ills of the body. I make not whole the body of him that is sick. I cannot bring back to life the body of him that is dead. I am 94. THE FOOL IN CHRIST only a physician to the soul, which never dies. I see men suffering want. I see they would overcome want. I know the hope by which they live, the hope of finally conquering want. I myself am in want. I know how bitter it is to do without my daily bread and suffer hun- ger. But man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. You said," he continued, " that the workingmen all over the world are striving for a state of things in which each shall enjoy the fruit of his own work. But I say. Enjoy now! Each moment enjoy the living word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. When the time comes that the workingmen's paradise, as you say, will blossom on earth, I shall be far from it in the kingdom of heaven." When the brothers asked the Fool what and where the word was, the soul's true food, he drew forth his little Testament, and read to them from the Gospel of St. John : " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Christian Hassenpflug then asked him how about the announce- ment of the kingdom of heaven on earth, wherein the Bible to an extent agreed with the upward-striving forces of the present. Emanuel was silent at first. Then he said: " It may be, except ye be bom again, ye cannot see the kingdom of God." Thus he cited St. John iii : 3 in a way that gave him a mystically voluptuous satisfaction — that taking up of the food of the spirit, that letting the soul draw in sustenance through holy words which proceed out of the mouth of the Saviour. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 95 Feeling somewhat tired, the three sat down near the so-called Speidlerbaude. A great St. Bernard dog dashed out from the inn and came bounding over the meadow, barking furiously. But they paid no atten- tion to him, and Emanuel explained that the kingdom of God is a mystery. " In truth," he said, winding up with a quotation from St. Matthew, " there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed. Everything in its time will be revealed, and nothing is so hidden that some day it shall not be known. And even if there be cause to hide the light under a bushel for a little season, it is not done for all eternity." Quint readily consented to be the guest of the broth- ers at the inn. While they walked toward it the dog kept barking almost incessantly. He would stop only to come closer to them and growl. This drew a mass of staring people to the vestibule and doorway, and pretty soon the dog, always with his eye on Emanuel, received warm encouragement from the rapidly increasing crowd of tourists in front of the inn. Quint's sermon to the halt and the blind had already been advertised by some good folk in rough mountain- climber's costume. And since the object of a walking tour is pleasure, everything falling within the tourist's vision subserves that object. And we must not forget that true, righteous indignation is a genuine Sunday amusement of your pleasure-seeking butcher and baker. So when the news of the lay sermon on the mountain meadow, as yet a bit of harmless mischief, had spread in the dining-room of the inn crowded with tourists, it pro- duced a storm of laughter, but also profound indigna- tion. In such cases men's hearts are wont to unite. While the butcher, the baker, the sausage-maker, and haberdasher sits over his third glass of beer and his wife 96 THE FOOL IN CHRIST over her coffee, he is highly conscious of his moral du- ties as a citizen, especially when off on a trip. Who does not deem it right that he should be? The winged word that rose above the dog's barking and reached the Fool's ears was " cabbage apostle." Your butcher and baker from Breslau as well as from Dresden had of course heard a good deal of those crazy vegetarians who make the eating of vegetables a life principle. It was even a more frequent sight in Dres- den than elsewhere to see persons in hair shirts with a rope about their waists and their hair reaching to their shoulders walking through the streets barefooted. Quint and the brothers behaved as if unaware that the shouts and laughter applied to them. But they could no longer maintain their front when a gigantic tourist with an alpen-stock, a knapsack, and short top- boots blocked their way and laughed saucily in their faces. " No turnips here," said the cattle-dealer. That made the brothers extremely angry. They let loose a stream of violent words upon the purplish, bloated, perspiring mountain-climber. But he, instead of replying, took hold of Emanuel's coat over his chest and good-humouredly shook him to and fro, trolling j ovially : I " Du bist verriiclct, me'in Kind." The St. Bernard took this as a signal to go for the poor vagrant's calf, at which the waitress hit the dog on his snout. Perhaps the cattle-dealer regretted his treatment of the Fool. At all events he fell into a rage, and his wife had to pacify him. If she had not, he might have exe- cuted his bellowed threat of sticking the three harmless youngsters, as he called them, on the inn chimney. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 97 For all that the brothers had dragged Emanuel with them to the very threshold. Here they met with the Bohemian host. He stood in the doorway and refused to admit them. He said nothing, or, rather, he tran- quilly grunted a few unintelligible words, the meaning of which was that they should be off with them and that without delay. Such hardihood naturally made the brothers still an- grier. They, Kandidaten der Philosophie, who had worn the band of black, red, and gold! Never as long as they lived had the host of a tavern forbidden them entrance. But their indignation was of little avail. Amid the howls of laughter of the whole mob o£ tour- ists they had to betake themselves away. At the outer edge of the crowd was an hostler. As the trio passed by he shouted to the inn-keeper, who wore a flattered smile because of the applause of his guests, that Quint was the man of whom he had often spoken, the man who had been knocking about on the mountain for weeks. Nobody knew what his designs were. The police had better be set upon him. The three feeling greatly vexed had been walking along together for about a quarter of an hour when Quint left the path and struck into the woods through the low mountain pines. He told the brothers to foUow him. And suddenly a stretch of meadow-land opened up among the spruce and dwarf pines. Here the shepherd who had been friendly to Quint was pasturing his flock of goats and cows. To the brothers he looked like a wild man of the woods. But they were hungry, and when they saw by a gesture of his and a gesture in response from Quint that the two knew each other, they immediately proposed sending the shepherd back to the inn for something to eat. The 98 THE FOOL IN CHRIST matter ■was promptly arranged. Quint gave the shepherd the money the brothers handed him and got him finally to understand where he was to deliver his purchases. Emanuel now led his new acquaintances along track- less ways until they reached the dwelling hidden among rocks and dwarf pine that for weeks had been his shelter against wind and rain. At the gurgling rill nearby Quint in stoic calm washed the wound from the St. Bernard's bite. And now he became talkative, al- most gaily outspoken, as one who feels he is host in his own home. Speaking with a slight tinge of his dialect and not without oratorical grace and ease, he said in eiFect : " Here is where I dwelt several weeks in almost com- plete seclusion and took counsel with myself concern- ing all sorts of grave things. This hut, which is scarcely a hut, was at any rate a hiding-place for m.e. But since the kingdom of God, as I said, is still a mys- tery, though so many men call themselves Christians, why should a believer, a minister of the word, complain if he, too, must conceal himself from people? " I well observe that you are learned and I am not learned." He drew forth his little Bible from one of the long skirts of his sadly worn coat. " I have merely read and re-read this one holy Book. But I believe God would have been with me even had I not known this Book." He kissed the Bible, and con- tinued, " God is so large in my heart that it is an impossible thought for me to think that he is bound to some book or other. A book in itself is wonderful, especially for those who cannot read. I believe the fear of the Bible may come from the times when it must still have seemed inconceivable to men to see books THE FOOL IN CHRIST 99 speak, to see them, in a certain sense, live. And all the more so this book which I have in my hand. " But God lives only in me, not in the Bible. If I hide the Bible here under the stones and let it lie there, and no man who can read and in whom it can awaken to life ever finds it, it remains dead. It is always dead. We alone are alive. The Bible without me is dead as a stone. I, on the other hand, without the Bible, if God wills it, am a vessel of His grace, com- pletely filled with the Holy Ghost." Emanuel pointed to his red-lashed eyes. " With these eyes that look outward and inward I shall either see God Himself, or never see Him." He pointed to the sun in the pale sky. " Whosoever sees not the sun looks first in a book. For such an one God hath no tongue to speak. The supreme instru- ment of God's revelation is man, not a book, no mat- ter what sort of a book it may be. But man, as an instrument of the revelation, created another means for human-divine revelation, the Bible. The Bible," said Quint, " is nothing but a letter by which men who are remote from one another — as a matter of fact, all of us are remote each from the other in time and space — tell of their life and sufferings and that which God wrought in them. God hallows men, men hallow the Bible, and man through the Bible can hallow man. Thus was I hallowed by Jesus through the Bible." An expression of profound gladness appeared on the Fool's face. " We must be satisfied with the pure, quiet knowl- edge of this. It is enough if I feel that no one — nothing ! — not even a Bible ! stands between me and God. But at my side stands my brother, the Son of 100 THE FOOL IN CHRIST man, Jesus who died from love of his brethren for God's sake. " Such things cannot be expressed to those who, awaiting the relief of their sufferings, work for the satisfaction of their desires. Least of all to those who see a God in human form instead of the Holy Ghost. They live in hopes ! I live in certainty ! It is true, when I look again upon the misery of men from which I fled, the old heartache, the old horror, the old despair renew their hold on me, and I feel ashamed of my happiness. " Such moments," Quint continued, " sometimes seize me so strongly that I should like to make an end of myself this way or that. Once I hear a call, ' Save your heavenly things from the world ! Leave the world and flee still farther into God ! ' Another time, though I know why Christ died for us, I am driven to sacrifice myself like Him upon the cross for man- kind's sake. I cannot succeed in not loving men, even when their conduct is gross. There is a great help- lessness in all of them. When I see men senselessly raging against themselves I feel a compassion rising within me, a compassion so painful that it amounts to torture. They are blind. They know not what they do." While speaking Emanuel paced up and down on the narrow, hard-trodden path in front of his shelter, taking long strides. The brothers, each seated on a large square block of granite, listened gravely with- out interrupting. By their looks they told each other that of all the remarkable things that had happened to them in their lives this was the most remarkable, this unexpected adventure on an innocent Whitsunday ex- cursion. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 101 Each of them carried ^ memorandum book in his pocket to jot down all sorts of observations and con- ceits for use in later literary works — they intended to produce immortal literary works. So their attitude to Quint was as to an object under observation, an in- teresting bit of " copy," of help to them in perfecting their knowledge of the German folk-soul. They came to an understanding with each other by their glances and put this question to him. What was his actual aim in life, his real intentions, what did he mean to do in the future, how and for what did he contemplate working, what were his hopes? " Jesus ! " Quint gave instead of an answer after SI few moments' pause. " Jesus, Jesus ! I want noth- ing, only to live like Jesus." r j Quint said he loved men, but he had always felt alien /and alone among them. His being did not emerge ' from " the earnest expectation of the creature " until he learned of Jesus, the Son of man. From that time on he still felt alien, like Jesus, only on earth, but also like Jesus at home on earth. Jesus had become the mediator for him and remained the mediator, not only between him and God, but also between him and men, between him and the earth — " all of nature," he added expressly. There are in- numerable ways leading to God. But he. Quint, was a man, and it was natural to him and by no means a sin before God or against God to love God in man. " I am a man," he said again, " and the fate allotted me on earth can be nothing but a human appearance of God. No one has ever given so pure an example of God's way on earth as Jesus Christ. So the life of Jesus, the imitation of Christ, is my goal! Unity in spirit with Jesus is my true life. lOa THE FOOL IN CHRIST, " ' Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ^e have done it unto me.' So said the Saviour. And that is the word by which I will act, and none other. I will seek the least of my brethren and do unto him as if he were Jesus Christ — Jesus the Saviour needing help, in earthly distress. To accomplish anything else in this world will be far from me. I will kiss the wounds of the Saviour, the marks of the nails. I will wash his wounds as best lies in my power. I will assuage his pain. And the wounds of any man whosoever shall be unto me the wounds of Jesus." It was not until late in the afternoon, long after they had finished the meal the shepherd had brought them, that the Hassenpflug brothers left Emanuel. They climbed up trails the Fool showed them to a lively mountain hospice built on a crag between two sheer descents and rising into a defiant tower of granite blocks. When Emanuel disappeared from view, they rubbed their eyes as if they had each dreamed the same dream and had just awakened in the full daylight. As they continued climbing they congratulated each other upon again living at the end of the nineteenth century, not about nineteen hundred years earlier. With that the intermezzo of their merry mountain tour seemed to be concluded. On again reaching the ridge of the mountain they made for the castle-like shelter along with a troop of tourists, all in high spirits. Like the rest of the ex- cursionists they did not fail to enjoy the wide prospect or turn their field-glasses upon important points on both the Prussian and the Bohemian sides. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 103 As for Quint he lay down on his couch of moss in his little hut, and mused upon the recent events. He had iled because something, he knew not what, seemed to threaten the freedom of his resolve, because dark shapes, without heed for his newly won faith, his new knowledge, tried to draw him into a strong current which might sweep away everything, carry it off, who knows where, into the abyss of falsehood, to eternal death. " I will remain alone," thought Quint — his meet- ing with the Hassenpflug brothers had brought him to this thought again ! — " Alone I shall lead no one astray, and no one will lead me astray ! I shall not be a vexation to the world, and the world will not vex me. With all my thoughts I will live in quiet im- mersion in the Saviour, like John the Disciple, whom Christ loved. " Verily I am not an Egyptian sorcerer," he con- tinued to commune with himself. " I never pretended in any way to be one of those who shew signs and wonders. I know what Jesus said in Mark viii : 12, ' Verily there shall no sign be given to this genera- tion.' " But there was something in Emanuel Quint that always undermined the determination to live for him- self without regard for others. It was his heart, his love for his fellow-beings. His love kept alive within him like an open wound a painful compassion, so that he necessarily felt the " Be locked in close em- brace, ye millions! " in the rejoicing of his soul and in the bitter anguish of his own sufferings. ******** Quint had been pondering after this fashion about half an hour or more and lay on the moss couch with 104 THE FOOL IN CHRIST closed eyes between waking and sleeping, when he felt the breath of a living creature upon him. He opened his eyes and started in alarm. Bending over him was a man with a face repulsively hideous, a face the like of which Quint had never before seen. Quint sprang to his feet. The hideous man quietly removed a pack from his shoulders and placed it in the hut, all without a word or sign of greeting. He was a smuggler, peaceful, but notorious for his sly- ness. He had the face of a baboon. A broad flat nose, pitch-black hair, a low bulge instead of a human fore- head, tiny little dog's eyes, and a broad, round pro- tuberant muzzle. On his upper lip the black hair was thin, but his throat and his cheeks up to his temples and under his eyes were covered with a heavy growth. This creature, which after all was to be addressed as a man, was small but powerfully built. His garments consisted of some sort of breeches, a sort of coat, and a sort of shirt. His shirt stood open in the front and revealed his body covered with thick hair like an ani- mal's almost to the navel. The smuggler evidently took Quint for a colleague. He went out of the hut, and squatted on all fours at the rill in the knee-pine, and greedily lapped the ice- cold glacier water like a poodle. His thirst was great. He had behind him a long, wearisome climb from the Hirschberger valley up over all sorts of criss-cross ways, which he took alternately, scarcely ever going to the same place for a rest more than Once a year. His smuggler's tricks, his great good humour, and, by no means least, his awful ugliness, had made him renowned over a wide district as Bohemian Joe. He entered the hut again and remarked to Quint, THE FOOL IN CHRIST 105 "It's uncertain to-day." With that he took up his pack, disappeared, and returned without the pack. " We shall not be able to stay here after all," he said, and pointed to the peak surmounted by the hospice. The people up there looking like ants were crawHng about on the edge of the crag and emitting shouts, which, echoing through the rocky corridors, seemed to bear no relation to the insects that produced them. " That's for us," said Bohemian Joe in his moun- tain dialect. He lingered a while, and unpacked the large crusty end of the loaf of bread wrapped in sl gay cloth. He wanted to lay in a cargo for the trip. Now the two men heard the barking of dogs. Since Quint had the clearest conscience in the world, he could not see how the shouting of men and the barking of dogs concerned him. But the eyes of Bohemian Joe, keen as an eagle's, had already discerned a forester, a frontier soldier, and another man in uniform. " Hurry up ! Now we've got to sprint." With a leap and a bound he was at his pack strap- ping it on his shoulder. Had it not been for the dogs, he might have left it there temporarily. He beckoned to Quint to follow him. A cunning smile on his lips closed like an ape's seemed to say, " If they catch us now, no more Bohemian Joe." Mechanically, without knowing exactly why. Quint followed the smuggler. For some time they crept along obscure paths, themselves completely hidden by the knee-pine. Strangely enough they made for the very direction from which the three pursuers were ap- proaching. They crossed and re-crossed a stream several times to put the dogs off the scent, and at the very moment that the forester, the frontier soldier, and the gendarme began to make search in Quint's hut. 106 THE FOOL IN CHRIST they found themselves unseen directly at the base of the crag surmounted on high by the hospice. ******** The forester, the frontier inspector, and the gen- darme had met by chance in the hospice, where a good beer was served. There the tourists had told them of the strange Fool who made the mountain-side unsafe. So the man of law, the gendarme, felt he had to face the discharge of a very tedious task that his superiors had assigned to him. A sheriff of the district of Reichenbach had sent a circular letter to various offi- cials of the district of Hirschberg saying that one Emanuel Quint had disappeared from his native vil- lage, that a search was being made for the said Quint, because from the reports of a number of trustworthy witnesses he was suspected of all sorts of public mis- chief, the same having been proved in various par- ishes, and so on. Even his mother, the wife of a car- penter, had nothing good to say for him. Moreover, it was to be established whether it was not necessary to place the said Quint in a workhouse or the county insane asylum. For all these reasons the police officers were requested to arrest the said Quint wherever they came upon him. In addition passers-by had recognised the Hassen- pflug brothers as Quint's companions, and pointed them out to the gendarme. Whereat the gendarme, his spurs jingling, strode over to the table at which the students sat. They were slow to answer him, and in- tentionally gave him inaccurate information, and joked him teasingly. They mixed so much Latin with their banter and altogether were so hard to understand that the gendarme, though several times turning red with, rage, could not take exception to what they said. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 107 The inn-keeper, the lessee of the hospice, now- stepped up to invite the gendarme to the use of his spy-glass, a long telescope set up on the peak of a rock outside, for which tourists paid to peep through. The frontier officer and the forester accompanied the host and the gendarme ; and the sensation-seekers among the hospice guests of course trundled after. For weeks the host had seen by means of the spy- glass, a strange man down below in an unfrequented part of the mountain-side. He seemed to be leading the life of a hermit. And now as they looked they could clearly see him at the entrance to the little hut. And what was more, they saw him in the company of Bohemian Joe. " Unfortunately," said the forester when they found the birds flown, " unfortunately, while we were look- ing through the telescope, the people made too much of a hullabaloo. That Bohemian Joe needn't be warned twice." Bohemian Joe's flight — Quint followed him the whole time — lasted for hours. Finally they reached a hut on the Bohemian side where they might feel secure at least from the Prussian officials. From the hut they had a wide prospect far over the beautiful old woodlands of Bohemia into Austria. It was situ- ated in so solitary a spot that the other dwellings scat- tered here and there in the labyrinth of the high-walled valleys looked like toy buildings of a dwarf race. In the interior the hut was propped up by a number of black posts, through which, to reach the room proper, you had to wind your way as through the up- rights of a shaft. Across the ceiling of the living 108 THE FOOL IN CHRIST room a split beam hung so low that Quint with his head brushed down from the deep holes in it some of the sawdust made by the wood-worms. The sun had set. A pale light entered through the dim window panes — where there were panes and not holes stuffed with straw or nailed up with boards. Here, in this room, Bohemian Joe seemed to be at home, though nobody greeted him. He took off his pack in the dark, and lit a match at a crack between the tiles of the stove. It sputtered up and filled the room with a sharp smell of phosphorus. With the match he hunted about and found a tallow candle stuck in the mouth of a bottle. Slowly the light spread and revealed a woful picture of neglect. Even Bo- hemian Joe felt he had to weaken the impression by saying the place looked a bit " curious." Quint, though familiar with misery, was compelled to admit it was curious. He was almost driven back into the open air by the vile, choking smell of ordure, decay, and cold damp. At the instant the candle caught light he saw four or five mice scamper in all directions across the black clay floor. Indeed, little suspicious scurrying sounds came from all over, from the window-sills and the table, that filled one comer of the room. Joe explained: " That is what happens when they eat up the cats." But Quint was already fascinated by another, a phantomlike sight, and paid no attention to what Joe said. Was it a real thing he saw or only an illusion of his soul wearied by all the impressions of the day.'' It seemed to him as if in the faint pale moonlight at the window, or formed of the moonlight, there was sitting an old, old woman, snow-white against the black of the room. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 109 Quint, moved by profound awe, must have whispered something very softly, because Joe encouraged him to be wholly at his ease and speak aloud. He said the old woman was one hundred and ten years old, some even averred one hundred and fourteen. Many were of the opinion she could never die. She could not die because in her lifetime she had not been altogether right. By that he meant to say she had done godless things, had impiously practised witchcraft, and as pun- ishment she was unable to obtain the peace of death. At that moment a strange, wonderful sound filled the room, a sort of singing which, though accompanied by words, was so supematurally soft and touching that you could not believe it came from a human throat. Little boys do not sing that way, nor little girls, nor yet trained singers of this world, such as Quint had heard in the village churches. No voice exercised a power so quiet, so puzzling, so harrowing. Emanuel instantly forgot himself and his surround- ings. Unconsciously, involuntarily he went over and stood opposite the old woman — for she it was and none other who sang. Tears ran down his face, but he was unaware of them. As if investigating a mys- tery of strange regions he searched the large, rigid, noble features of the centenarian. Her skin was withered, but tenderly transparent and shining like a child's, and long loose snowy locks flowed about her face. There was not the least perceptible movement of her thin white lips as the simple words quivered from the sublime old woman's soul. " My little shirt is sewed. My little bed is made. Come, oh, come. Thou last, eternal night ! " 110 THE FOOL IN CHRIST Bohemian Joe burst out laughing. " That song," he said, " this isn't the first time the shrivelled old hag has droned it. But she won't die for a good long time yet. There's things, there's all sorts of things in the world. One can do them, an- other can't. She knew how. She was a tough 'un." Suddenly a goat bleating loudly came in from the outside and poked its snout at the old woman sitting in the pale moonlight like a figure of snow. But she did not stir. She kept her eyes fixed in front of her. Her withered, crooked hands lay dead in her lap. With her inner senses she seemed to belong to another realm of creation. With her outer senses she seemed to be lifeless. " Well, now for something to eat," said Bohemian Joe, and went into the entry. From there Quint soon heard the worn-out squeak of a barrel-organ. That was the way in which Joe, who always possessed a surplus of good humour, advertised his presence in the organ-grinder's hut. Whereat the almost sep- tuagenarian grandson of the old woman, an organ- grinder, , came groping his way down the ladder from his box-room in the loft. [As he descended, stepping on the creaking rounds emitting rude sounds intelligible only to Joe, he re- sembled a gigantic tower wrapped in rags. As soon as he reached the floor he began to break twigs over his knees until he had a large bundle of them ready. He gathered them up in the skirts of his military coat as women gather things in their aprons, carried the fagots into the living-room, and let them drop in front of the stoke-hole of the oven. Joe kept speaking to him the whole time. Quint still stood sunk in observation of the old THE FOOL IN CHRIST 111 woman while the goat eag;er lx_Iicked the p alm__o£-J3ls left hand. Half alive to what was going on around him he heard names mentioned, the names, probably, of men who plied their trade in secret ways no differ- ently from Joe. And a little later, when steps in the entry announced visitors, he concluded they must be the smugglers Joe had spoken of. Three contrabandists now actually made their ap- pearance. They gave Joe a loud, lively greeting, evidently delighted to be in a secure place of rest after long, wearisome wanderings. Again the barrel-organ resounded from the vestibule, where it was kept on a bench built in the house. Joe in his love of fun had set it going. Soon after the smugglers were seated at the table shuffling cards and passing about a Selters bottle filled with corn brandy. When it reached Quint, he handed it on without taking a drink. That made him the butt of some coarse remarks. And many such remarks were aimed at the old woman. The smugglers, though they had dishonoured the holy day, made up by celebrating it freely with brandy. They called her ugly names and abused and reviled her, speaking aloud. One of the smugglers then wanted to know whence Quint came and whither he was going. Without replying the Fool arose and kissed the old woman's hands. Then he walked over to her grand- son, who was shoving the iron pot of potatoes into the oven, to ask him some questions, among others where the old woman's bed was. The shaggy-headed brute of an organ-grinder pointed to an old bare frame of boards in the corner. Quint took the ancient woman in his arms, and carried her there. It was a surprisingly, startlingly light burden. 113 THE FOOL IN CHRIST The freak of a man now acted the part of the Good Samaritan and professional physician. He brought water and washed the old woman, who trembled strangely under his kindly touch, and began to draw long, slow, deep breaths. The players did not lower their voices, yet they refrained from interfering. One of them was a small, pale, hump-backed fellow by the name^o f Schwabe, once a tailor. Heaven knows how he came to take up the profession of smuggling. Shy as a rule, yet, curiously enough, most daring, as the other smugglers knew, when it came to actual danger. There was something droll about him which inclined the roughest hearts in his favour. Besides, he was ever ready to do a service, so that he always stood in people's good graces. He was a Protestant. Never- theless he stopped before all the so-called marterln ^ on the Bohemian side, and prayed, and while ascending the mountains he sang indiscriminately profane songs and pious hymns. He was full of odd conceits which made his companions laugh. He gave them descrip- tions of the world originating in his own limited un- derstanding, which met with some credulity and some scepticism, and made him and his entertainment prized. Schwabe, instead of playing cards, read trash from a smeary newspaper. But now he looked up from the paper to follow Quint's doings with some interest. He drew his companions' attention from their cards and began to give one of those marvellous accounts always at the disposal of his gift of gab. Something wonderful had happened to him to-day, he said, and added as he never failed to, 1 Small pictures representing a person's death by an accident in the mountains. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 113 " You don't believe it. But I tell you, I swear a holy oath, it's so." " Well, what is it, tailor ? " the others asked. " It's as true as I am sitting here. This morning I saw Klenner's wife washing out pails, carrying water to the cows in the stalls, and climbing up to the hay- loft, just as good as ourselves." " Klenner's wife ? She's been paralysed for years. She get up from her chair .'' " " That's what I'm telling you. They took her to Schubert's hut this morning, and she came back spry as a weasel." Then he went on to give a highly decorated account of what had happened that morning in front of Schubert's hut. In his narrative Emanuel figured as a sort of medical wonder-worker. Twice he had saved the Sultan and the Emperor of Austria from certain death. In Hungary or somewhere under a stone he had found the recipe for a salve said to be an all- powerful remedy. But the most remarkable thing, Schwabe thought, was this, that the wonder-worker all of a sudden vanished as into thin air from the very midst of the crowd. " Wait a bit," said Bohemian Joe amid the laughter of the others. He had risen at the tailor's last words. " Let's take a closer look at the fellow over there." In one of those moods that suddenly came upon him he refused to play cards any longer. The others so far having been the losers raised a howl. But the little man was not to be moved. Something, he knew not what, had flashed through his mind. Had Quint from the beginning made an inexplicable impression upon him.'' Or did it sud- 114) THE FOOL IN CHRIST, denly occur to him that it was a sin for him, good Cathohc that he was, to be gambling on Whitsunday? Or was he of a sudden seized with pity for the old woman whom death seemed to have forgotten? How- ever that may be, he got up, went over to the Fool, and sighing oddly, began to philosophise upon the sadness of existence in general and that of the old woman in particular. , When a person came to Emanuel speaking in snch a tone he knew the soil had been prepared, and 4)rth- with commenced to sow the seed of the kingdom, feacl^ time he began that way, he spoke so purely and simply that to everybody, no matter what his nature, it seemed less of a beginning than something long, long known. Nothing to sunder or separate was any longer prese&t. What was inmost and truest in man's nature was bound without hindrance to all that is inmost and truest. The old woman lying on the boards stretched 6ut straight and stark felt cold even though Emanuel had covered her up to the chin with his own jacket-and all sorts of rags. So Joe went to fetch a brick for her that had been warmed up on the hearth. Whereat a stream of ridicule poured over him from the table where the gamblers sat. Even more fell to Quint's share for having drawn away their companion. All at once Bohemian Joe was seized with one of his dreaded fits of anger. Holding the brick aloft he suddenly stood in front of the rowdies — an immediate threat not to be misunderstood from one of his wild nature. Often in taverns the hideous gypsy-like little fellow had given samples of his herculean strength- — "just for fun." And he had served a few terms in jail for acts of violence committed when he was out of his THE FOOL IN CHKIST 115 senses. For as a rule he was a good-natured creature. Now a word from the Fool summoned him back to the old woman's deathbed. Schwabe, too, left his place by the gamblers, and shambled shyly to the bed. A peculiar solemn certainty had arisen in his mind that here at last was the near end of a more than hundred-year life-struggle. Hence it did not seem surprising to him when Quint explained this in a loud voice to the old woman's aged grandson. But almost eight hours were still needed before the old woman could breathe her last. It happened at the time when the sun in its might broke forth from the gates of the east casting dark red beams, which coloured the waxen yellow face with purple patches. Quint bound the dead woman's sagging jaw with a piece of coarse blue linen that Schwabe proffered, tying it firmly over her fine, rosy bare head. Then hushed silence prevailed in the room, while the light of the morning spread. The other smugglers had betaken themselves off long before. But Quint sat with Schwabe and Joe at the very table the gamblers had tossed their cards and beat their fists on. He spoke or read from the Bible. He had slept little, and at the sight of the old woman had always thought of his own mother. She must have missed him. He pictured to himself how painful every mother's fate is and how the burden of a long life is made still heavier by loneliness. Bohemian Joe having been a foundling had never known a father or mother. Schwabe, after his seventh year, had been exclusively in his mother's care, and when fourteen 116 THE FOOL IN CHRIST years old his mother had once taken him to see a man kept behind lock and key in the prison of a large city. The man, he was told, was his father. Somewhat stirred and brought close to one another by similar recollections, a grave meditative spirit took hold of them and caused them to speak of serious things. " Why," asked Joe addressing Emanuel in an altered, respectful tone, " why, after she died, did you stand at the window so long, crying.'' Were you re- lated to her.? " " Because," answered Emanuel, " life is unutterably painful to most of us." Then he went on to speak of the darkness of this night-enveloped earth and how the spirits of the departed are transfigured by the purification of life — for life is always a purification ! Since they seemed not to understand, he read from Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians : " And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. " For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. " And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. " And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power : " That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. " Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: " But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, THE FOOL IN CHRIST IIT even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory ; " Which none of the princes of this world knew : for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. " But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard." These words read without pathos had an effect very different from the effect of the Bible when read from the pulpit. They aroused his listeners' eagerness for knowledge. And since it is natural in man always to be looking for the revelation of something concealed, they hoped through Emanuel to see both himself and the Scriptures explained, which intimated things so puzzling. But Emanuel had chosen that particular passage thinking it would speak for him both in regard to what he said and what he left unsaid. All he ac- complished was that the two men inquired about the very mystery which they, only half convinced, sup- posed was the wonderful power that knew the right moment at which to heal and at which to kiU. Thus Emanuel was compelled to say he had chosen to be a messenger of the Gospel of his own free will. As a child he had received the baptism of those who were dead, lukewarm, false Christians. Later he had received the baptism of John the Baptist, and finally the baptism of the Holy Ghost. This, the last, baptism contained the mystery of the kingdom. " The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ," he con- tinued, " be with us all. Amen." With that he arose and was about to depart when a neatly, simply clad woman entered. It was the wife of the school teacher of a poor community in the neighbourhood. For years she had been sending or 118 THE FOOL IN CHRIST bringing' the old woman soup. Now she saw she was dead, and when she fully realised how her weak attempt at benevolence had been outdone by a stronger hand, she sank into silence, visibly moved. CHAPTER VI The teacher's wife had recognised Quint as soon as she entered the room. It was not the first time she had seen him. About a week before, co-religionists in Prussia had recommended the Scharf brothers to her hus- band as exemplary ministers of the Word. He gave them a hearty welcome, as was to be expected from one of those who await the coming of Christ. When they told him the object of their joumeyings, the simple man expressed some slight astonishment, if not actual scruples, even though they had refrained from speaking of the delusion that dominated them. Their ardour, their eagerness to find Quint, their extravagant admiration of him, the praise they lavished upon him — all this, perforce, troubled the teacher. So also the fact that the brothers had sold their homestead. He did not keep his concern hidden from his wife. It is always a serious matter if industrious workmen leave their work and go about idle. But still more serious if they accept too credulously or put too literal a construction upon things which, if not taken with allowances, are apt to produce mischief. Thus, the prophecies of a former quack named Thomas, that the world was soon coming to an end, seemed to have become an irrefutable article of faith, to the brothers. And Emanuel's calling as an apostle was raised above the least shadow of doubt. The teacher deemed it his duty to warn the brothers of the false prophets which come in sheep's clothing, 119 120 THE FOOL IN CHRIST of whom the Bible speaks with abhorrence. But he had to admit that after hours, aye, days, spent in praying, singing, and striving, the belief in the divine mission of the vagrant whom they sought remained as firmly rooted in their souls as ever. They were not to be shaken. Of no avail the long discourses by which the pious zealots changed night into day, mindful of the word, " Watch therefore ; for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." Finally, the result to be expected came about — Stoppe the teacher was almost drawn into the whirlpool. At all events he, too, began to look for Quint's coming with some of the tenseness of expectancy. Scepticism, even in persons of culture and strong character, cannot hold out permanently against abso- lute conviction. All the less so in a person ready to believe, like the teacher. And the Scharf brothers kept at him constantly, telling him again and again of Quint's sermon in the market-place of the county seat, of the miracle he had wrought with their father, of many answers to prayers, and remarkable cures. He was at last convinced — by facts, he thought — of Quint's wonder-working power. However, he was not sure if Quint's power and mission on earth pro- ceeded from heaven or from hell. It might even come, he thought, from mesmeric magnetism joined to a mis- guided love of the Saviour, a love that had still to be purged. After a time the teacher got the brothers into the home of the Schuberts. Here for weeks they kept up their search for Quint, growing more excited from hour to hour. He who has ever experienced how a pet illusion for the realisation of which he makes THE FOOL IN CHRIST lai actual efforts, sometimes against all reason, reaches enormous proportions, will not be at all astonished that the Schubert household became the hotbed of many fan- tastic misbeliefs and hallucinations. When Quint was at last discovered and the Schuberts took him under their roof, the brothers vis- ited the teacher to teU him of their happy find and report aU. the new wonders of Quint. They asked the teacher to return with them. He held back, using im- portant duties as a pretext. But Mrs. Stoppe could not resist her growing curiosity. The evening of the very same day she went to Schubert's hut, and reached it just as Quint was going out to wander by himself in the moonlight in the solitudes of the mountain ridge. At about ten o'clock in the morning of the day the old woman died Mrs. Stoppe took Quint back to the school with her. The school was a tiny log house with a garden in front, where the teacher, a man of about forty, was busy with his bee hives. He saw his wife and the stranger coming, and was peculiarly, perhaps a bit uncomfortably, moved. But he went to meet his wife, and held out his hand to her companion. Mrs. Stoppe, noticing how greatly exhausted Emanuel was, went in to prepare a room for him. In the meanwhile the teacher showed him his bees. Emanuel went straight up to the hives. The teacher warned him. But Emanuel without the least fear let the excited bees crawl over his face and hands. He even plucked them from his hair and dusty feet and set them back at the hole. It was in a very sweet bed that Quint soon after laid himself to sleep, and it was in an exquisitely clean 122 THE FOOL IN CHRIST kitchen — also the living-room — amid shining pots and pans of earthen and pewter ware that Mrs. Steppe sat some time later telling her husband where she had found Quint in the morning. The incident of the old woman's death and, unfortunately, the Fool himself had made an unmistakable impression upon her. She was profoundly stirred by the strange cir- cumstance that the old woman, whom everybody avoided, who could not die, they said, because of her past sins, had died almost in his arms. He had set her soul free. " If he had been with us, that time, the good, pious man, our children would not have died," she said, and began to weep silently, rising at the same time, and busying herself at the hearth. The thing that had given this woman the real con- tent of her lonely existence had been two children. They left behind them a new content for her life — her mourning for them. Stoppe chided his wife. " We should be resigned," he said. " We should not be impatient. We should be glad. As the apostle says, our flesh shall rest in hope of the Lord. But we must not be too eager in our hope. Every day we should open our windows and keep watch against false prophets. For Jesus, the true Saviour, said, as you can read in St. Luke, chapter xxi, verse 8, ' Take heed that ye be not deceived: for many shall come in my name saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye not therefore after them.' And in St. Matthew it says, ' There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders ; inso- much that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.' Therefore let ys be on our guard." THE FOOL IN CHRIST 123 " I do not believe," said his wife, " that he thinks or does wrong things, or bears evil in his heart. Be- sides, I did not say I took him to be a prophet. He himself does not consider he is. It seems to me he speaks as a man, acts as a man, and walks simply as a man." The teacher shook his soft St. John's head doubt- fully. " We cannot help putting upon him the responsi- bility for much of what happened, and you know the responsibility has been put upon him. Let each man do his duty, and serve God in secret in the place that has been assigned to him. In answer to my prayers He put me in this remote spot, where I seem the nearer to Him the farther I am from people. God blessed me in my doings, and He daily makes it clear to me that I am not entirely useless to my people and their children scattered about here in their poverty-stricken huts. That, I think, should be enough for us." Stoppe's wife was the daughter of a minister, and various misfortunes in her father's house had taught her to think. " Because Emanuel Quint," she said, " serves the Saviour in a different manner, we must not conclude that he is all wrong and evil." She reminded her husband of the community of the saints founded by the apostles and still accepted even from the pulpits as existent in Christ. And shoving a freshly baked pancake still in the pan under the teacher's nose she expressed the strong conviction that Quint, if anyone in the community, was a true, genuine saint. " He is making my people unruly," said the teacher. " They run about with heated brains, and tell one an- IM THE FOOL IN CHRIST other absurdities. They will get themselves and me into trouble." The teacher spoke somewhat testily, lapsed into silence, ate his pancake, and then went on, " And whom will the police blame.? The man that shelters him. WJio but I will have to bear the consequences if the scandal spreads ? " "It all depends," his wife rejoined, "upon whether Quint is a deceiver or a true Christian. If he is a true Christian and truly filled with the pure apostolic spirit, we do not have to stop and question whether to reject or follow him. Because the greatest good that can befall us upon earth is to suffer for the sake of Him who unhesitatingly died upon the cross for us." To this the teacher had nothing to say. At about two o'clock In the afternoon Anton Scharf called upon the teacher, entering the house noisily. He was pale and nervous and his lips twitched uneasily under his blond, pointed little beard. His brown hair stood up on end like a brush. He called out a lively " How do you do .'' " and threw his cap carelessly on one of the benches of the little school- room. Mr. and Mrs. Stoppe were just then engaged in hanging a picture of Christ walking upon the Sea of Galilee. Anton Scharf's excitement was of a peculiar sort. There was a certain solemnity at the bottom of it, with an admixture of wlldness, of defiance, and eager- ness for fight, even eagerness for violence. " Brother," he shouted, so that the schoolroom fairly shook, " the signs and wonders multiply. These past few days we have seen things that everybody should take to heart. We have seen the living power of the THE FOOL IN CHRIST 125 apostles, the living power of God. I say unto you, a child has been born unto us that is now walking in our midst, whose coming was prophesied in the Holy Writ. Not we alone have seen him. Hundreds of the poor, sick, weary, and heavy-laden have seen his countenance shine, have heard his voice — and were healed. Verily, verily, I say unto you, this one is more than an apostle and a prophet ! The children of the world also feel his coming, and bestir themselves. They crane their necks, they scent the day of judgment. They are up and abroad to seize him with swords and staves. But nowhere is it written that Jesus shall be crucified by them a second time." The misguided man raised his fist and shook it at the Prussian side of the mountains, whence, it seemed, he expected the onslaught of the enemies of God's king- dom. " And when these things begin to come to pass," he continued, his eyes sparkling, " then look up, and lift up your heads ; for your redemption draweth nigh." Con- cluding his peroration with this citation from St. Luke, he drew forth a huge red handkerchief, and wiped away the large drops of perspiration from his forehead and neck. The teacher in a calm, almost icy voice, asked what it was all about. But it was no easy matter to get exact information from Scharf in the excited state he was in. So much, however, was certain, that the Prussian police were looking for Quint. The teacher had already heard this in the morning from passers-by. Finally Scharf recovered sufficiently to give a more accurate account. In the morning a gendarme had come riding up on horseback to Schubert's hut, which was surrounded by just as many of the poor as on the day before. He 126 THE FOOL IN CHRIST questioned a number of them roughly, and then or- dered all of them to be off. He said repeatedly that the police were after Quint because he was nothing but a lazy fellow who shirked work. Next he went into the hut, his spurs jingling, his sabre dragging on the ground, and subjected the three Schuberts and Anton himself to a painful cross-examination — Martin was not present, having left the day before in search of Quint. The gendarme carefully noted everything in his memorandum book. " I suppose he hoped he would find proof that we were beggars, or something worse," said Scharf. " But I gave him a piece of my mind, and I proved to him that we were independent men, not without means for the present, and that we did not have to apply to any- one for alms. Apparently that did not exactly suit his purpose. So you see how important it is now and in the future to be protected against want by having some means and be shielded from the wickedness of the children of the world." It was plain to see that Anton's narrative and unre- strained manner disquieted Stoppe. His face turned pale. " Brother Scharf," he said, calling him " Brother " in the usage of the Moravian Brethren, " we are bound by an express commandment of the Lord not to resist the authorities." Scharf was taken aback. Stoppe urged him to be calm, and questioned him a long time, kindly and mildly, though almost in greater detail than the gendarme. He asked about Emanuel's previous life, whether sinful things were not concealed in his past. " No," answered Brother Scharf, " I believe, I believe with all confidence." THE FOOL IN CHRIST 127 He was convinced that Emanuel had fled because he had had foreknowledge of the coming of the gendarme. For that reason he was not fearful for Quint's safety. Steppe now told Anton that Quint was under the very same roof as himself. Anton started. He clapped his hard hand to his brow, as if something had suddenly become clear to him — the irresistible impulse that had sent him to the little log-house of the teacher. The teacher looking out of the window saw that the same attractive force had been at work in others beside Anton. A number of the country folk were gathered there. His conscience was touched and being genuinely pious he proposed to turn to God in the apostolic way, and pray for enlightenment. He was convinced of the efBcacy of prayer, believing in Jesus' promise, " What- soever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do." He went to God in prayer for even lesser things, and when he exchanged pious opinions with co-religionists, he never failed to mention certain hints that God had let drop after his prayer, definite, unambiguous answers to his prayers. The three now offered up silent and spoken prayers, to which the teacher's wife added a few gentle, fervent words. They earnestly besought the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to disclose to them whether Emanuel Quint stood in God's favor or was possessed of a spirit of error. Suddenly from under the window they heard the strains of a choral sung by women and children — the answer to their prayers. " O Jesus, my sweet light. Now is the night departed. Now is Thy saving grace To me again imparted." il28 THE FOOL IN CHRIST 'And they joined in the chorus. ******** It was Martha Schubert who had come singing the song. On hearing it a number of women and children and a few men had hastened up and swelled the chorus. The mere fact of its being Friday in Whitsuntide week would have brought them. Bohemian Joe and Schwabe had advertised the old woman's death at the Inn of the Seven Valleys. They had spoken with loud-mouthed conviction of the saving effect produced, in their opinion, by the wonder-work- ing physician. From the inn the report travelled, and went from house to house. That Quint was being harboured in the schoolhouse also became known. And suddenly, before Stoppe could prevent him, An- ton Scharf in a passion to give testimony threw open the window and shouted like a madman to the increasing crowd, uttering words that came rushing to his mind from the Acts of the Apostles. " For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me ; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear that Prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people." While all this was happening at the front of the house, the prophet was sleeping a death-like sleep in the room under the gable. Mrs. Stoppe, when she saw the waves of excitement rising, and especially Brother Anton's loud-spoken enthusiasm, feared Quint might be awakened from his well-earned rest. She expressed her concern to Brother Anton and then to the multitude waiting outside, among whom she went with the perfect THE FOOL IN CHRIST 129 confidence of a woman who knew each one personally, and who on occasion had done good to each. She attempted to calm them, and herself a picture of composure, exhorted the crowd of poor people to be patient. She said Emanuel Quint was undoubt- edly a true and upright minister of God. That was enough! There was no need to ascribe powers and in- tentions to him that were absolutely incompatible with his simple humility. The effect of this last admonition was nullified by many voices raised at the same time to protest emphat- ically that Emanuel had performed miracles which ex- cluded all doubt. At this point the former tailor's apprentice Schwabe elbowed his way through the jabbering throng to Mrs. Stoppe. Stuttering and stammering, as was his way, he told her he had something to say to her in private. In the dark entry, where Mrs. Stoppe stood holding the door shut with her hand on the knob, Schwabe told her that on the Austrian side they were also hot in pursuit of Quint, and it was by no means im- probable — and nobody need be surprised — that the police would appear at the schoolhouse in less than an hour. A minute later Schwabe was repeating his statement in the schoolroom to the teacher and Anton Scharf. The teacher said if it was the gendarme from the Spindelmiihle, he could probably prevent Quint's being arrested. Perhaps, too, he might answer for him other- wise if only the many poor people were not standing about the schoolhouse, since that in the eyes of the po- lice was an offence. " But Quint is without means of support," he con- tinued. " So possibly in spite of anything we say, they 130 THE FOOL IN CHRIST will take him right over the border into Prussia and de- liver him to the police there." Finally the teacher concluded it was wisest to awaken Quint and tell him everything. While they were debating what to do, Martin Scharf put in appearance, and asked if Quint was in the house. At the general " Yes " the man, wearied by his long search and lack of sleep, broke down, sob- bing and shedding tears of joy. As when a spark falls upon a heap of inflammable material, the heap bursts into flames, so the little assem- blage was set a-sobbing and crying by Martin Scharf's sudden transport. They fell into a paroxysm of broth- erliness and community of spirit, weeping and embra- cing and bestowing apostolic kisses upon one another. ******** Emanuel in his curtained room had after all been awakened by the uproar downstairs, and lay on his back listening and busying his brain with scruples. He im- mediately interpreted the noises as applying to himself, having learned to recognise them at the Schuberts'. He knew a credulous multitude, demanding help in their great need, was awaiting him outside. Involuntarily folding his hands, he prayed to the Divine in profound introspection. It was always the essence of his prayers to place him- self as an instrument entirely under the will of the God- head. He looked back upon the past few days. He had not the feeling of having sought anything in life other than God, nor of having come the way to the teacher's house of his own volition. Yet he asked, " Did I walk in the right way ? Did I indeed do not my will but Thine.? " And trying in his spirit to THE FOOL IN CHRIST 131 destroy the last remnant of his own will, he threw him- self on his face before God and implored: " Make of me nothing but a word, a breath, a glance, a pulse-beat of Thee ! " It is said Christ left the power to perform miracles to his apostles. I am not an apostle. I am wholly un- worthy to be an apostle. The Saviour's love is like a sea. Mine is but a trickling rill. The true Saviour's love is a force that not only makes sick bodies whole, but with a breath changes souls condemned to hell into blessed angels in heaven. I am a blind man. On my closed eyelids rests the shadow of the shadow of such love. Yea, were I certain it were really the shadow of the shadow of the Saviour's love, I could with that alone turn the desert of the world into a millennial paradise. " But I cannot perform wonders. Far be it from me to believe I could do more than has already been wrought by the abundant grace of the eternal wisdom. Is it for me to wish to improve Thy work, thou Holy Ghost? I am not so arrogant. I harbour not in my- self such madness of presumption. " Thou knowest. Thou which art in me ! Nothing is hidden from Thee! But why sendest Thou these needy ones to me, who seek what is earthly, not divine, something of which the children of the world perhaps deprive them, not the children of heaven.'' They fill me with pity. My heart overflows with compassion. [And with all my soul I would give them of the heavenly that is in me. How much more of the earthly ! For it is nothing to me to part with the earthly. Lead me ! Teach me whether and how I should show compassion and love to my brothers and sisters groping in terrestrial darkness! Or should I turn from them and their piti- 132 THE FOOL IN CHRIST ful, bitter, fleeting needs and return wholly to Thine heart? " But why forsooth have I been placed here in the world? Why was I sent down in this earthly body of frailty and bear Thee in me like a light? Should I not light the way for my brothers? For whom should the way be lit if not for them that sit in darkness ? To whom should God be brought if not to the godless? Who should be led back home if not the stray sheep? Who should be comforted and led up to light if not they that have been thrust into darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth? Who returns home and is received with love and rejoicing by his father? None other than the prodigal son, who takes his small portion of goods in arrogance and eats husks with the swine." And Quint tossed about in bed, and wrung his hands, and pressed his face in the pillows, and whispered sob- bing: " Father, I have sinned against heaven and in Thy sight. Lord, Lord, I am no more worthy to be called Thy son." A feeling of profound remorse came upon him, joined to the glowing desire to suffer for the Father, die for Him, extinguish himself entirely. A feeling of sin filled him. But the cause of it was hidden. He could not recall that he had ever, like the prodigal son, wilfully gone into a far country. But he had no doubts of his own sin. And now he thought he understood not only why the stray sheep followed him, but also why armed men on horseback carrying death-dealing weapons were restlessly searching for him, why they were hunt- ing him down like a wild animal. His sin was from long before. It resided in nothing earthly. It was not THE FOOL IN CHRIST 133 that he endeavoured to imitate God and follow in Jesus' steps, but that he had left the Father. And for a long time he pondered upon the fall of man, revolving this thing and that in his soul, until with a sudden jerk he rose from bed, and said softly to him- self: " I will continue to serve you, my brothers and sis- ters." And a new resolve formed within him. It enveloped him with a sort of joyous sublimity when he suddenly appeared in the schoolroom among the restless people. He loved the Scharf brothers, and they had a boundless human affection for him. They kissed his hands pas- sionately, which for their sake he suffered them to do, smiling gently. As soon as the people outside recognised Quint's face through the window, they stormed up to the house. The teacher's wife succeeded in turning the key in the lock of the front door, but when Emanuel Quint ascended the little platform, the brothers persuaded her to open the door again. Women, children, old men, and young men streamed in, Bohemian Joe at their head. An ex- pectant solemnity took hold of all. They quietly shoved one another into seats on the school-benches, and those for whom there were no seats stood crowded close together. So many had come, following a blind impulse, that the entry and front steps were crowded, and a broad place in front of the window was filled with an open-mouthed, staring throng. Absolute silence prevailed before Quint began to speak. This sermon of his, accompanied by the cheep- ing of the sparrows outside, was spoken in a tone that 134' THE FOOL IN CHRIST could not but move his hearers, though most of them did not understand it. " The strength of Jesus," he began, " was made per- fect in weakness. Therefore the apostle said, ' When I am weak, then am I strong.' Hence let no one fear be- cause he is weak, or ignorant, or sick, or even poor. And let no one fear because he is persecuted by the chil- dren of the world. Jesus was crucified, his apostles persecuted and killed. But fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. They that are dead will be killed, but they that are alive in Christ cannot be killed by the dead. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," he continued. " Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh. We are the peace, we are the love of God, nothing else. We are the spirit. Christ walked on earth in man's form. He still walks among us. But even though we have seen Him with our eyes, touched Him with our hands after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we Him no more except in the spirit. " He is in us, and we are in Him. That is our solace and comfort, and we would rather walk in his spirit out- side the body than walk in the body spiritward. Thus every affliction that besets us is light and but for a mo- ment. For we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. " Do they think to persecute, torture, and destroy us.'' They will dissolve our earthly house, but thereby only make manifest that we are a building of God; a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. " God the Lord is the spirit. And where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Therefore they cannot THE FOOL IN CHRIST 135 seize us with swords and staves. They cannot cast us in a dungeon except it have many doors to the king- dom of heaven. " Let it not make us sorry that we are f oohsh in the sight of the world. God hath chosen the fooUsh things of the world, the weak things of the world, and the base and despised things of the world. May God help you that ye be not foolish in the flesh, but that ye may par- take of that foolishness of God which is wiser than men, and that weakness of God which is mightier than the strength of kings. May God help you to the hidden wisdom, that ye snatch not for bread, except it be the body of the Lord Jesus Christ, nor for wine, except it be the blood of the Lord! Nor for a banquet, except it be the Lord's supper! For when we are merry, we rejoice in the Lord; and when we are sorrowful, it is be- cause of His affliction. " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Cast out the natural man, die in the body, and be bom again in the Spirit. The natural man receiveth nothing of what I say, he receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God ; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them. The natural man saith of me as the Jews said of Paul, ' He is a fool for Christ's sake.' But there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed, and they to whom our Gospel has remained hidden until this hour shall bide their time and in patience await the fulfil- ment of the promise. " For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the Hght of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Then we all, with open face, shall behold as in a glass the glory of the Lord. " Ye men, dear brethren, ye women, dear sisters, fear 136 THE FOOL IN CHRIST not because I am persecuted. For we have the testi- mony of our conscience that we have our conversation in the world in peace, in simphcity, and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom. It is our duty to preach Christ, reconciliation, and peace. If we are troubled on every side, yet we are not distressed. If we are per- plexed, yet we are not in despair. If we are perse- cuted, yet our souls are not taken captive. If we are cast down, yet we remain free. For there is no love and no craving so ardent, so irresistible, as for all time to bear about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus and the life of the Lord Jesus in our hearts." ,.j*, »j>, jt afc Jl& ^ ^It 4fc Up to about the point in his speech where he said " Ye men, dear brethren, ye women, dear sisters, fear not," all had listened devoutly. Anton and Martin, of course, were completely carried away by the discourse of the Fool in Christ. But even the teacher had kept his eyes fixed unswervingly upon Quint's lips, and in listening to this new proclamation of the Spirit, he had set aside all his scruples regarding true and false proph- ets and obedience to the authorities. The teacher's wife and Martha Schubert, sitting on the edge of the low platform, had looked up at the preacher prayerfully. The teacher's wife was evidently overcome by a devo- tional spirit mounting almost to ecstasy. But now low whispering began. Many of those sit- ting on the benches craned their necks. A baby in the crowd beneath the window set up a loud wail, and many faces turned from Emanuel to see what was happening outside. The whispering grew noisier. Of all those present it was Bohemian Joe who faced about upon the audience indignantly and commanded order. For an instant there was silence. But the next mo- THE FOOL IN CHRIST 137 ment there was a commotion outside as when a hawk descends upon a flock of sparrows. The people shrieked and scattered hastily. The outcry was taken up in the entry, from which the crowd jostling and buffeting one another stormed into the open. Next the women in the schoolroom set up wild shrieks of fright, and a panic ensued. The people losing their heads, made a rush for the door and window. When those who were left in the room — Quint, the teacher and his wife, Martha Schubert, the Scharf brothers, Schwabe, and Bohemian Joe — had recovered from their astonishment, they were at a loss to account for the general flight. But the warning cry of " Po- lice ! " coming from the outside gave them the expla- nation. Bohemian Joe shook his head and sighed aloud, " Well, well ! " Then he set a bench straight that had been upset in the panic, and remarked, " That's the way people are," and quoted a sentence from the Bible that somehow had stuck in his memory, " The spirit is wiUing, but the flesh is weak." Now Anton Scharf arose and made a somewhat dis- connected harangue, speaking angrily and defiantly. " If ye think as I do, dear brethren and sisters, let us lock with firm locks the tabernacle of God, the manger of the Lord, the new Bethlehem, against the onslaught of the world. Let us defend it with our hands. Here the fire of the Lord came out of the midst of the bush. Here the voice of the Lord called unto us out of the midst of the bush. The place whereon we stand is holy ground. No messenger of hell shall set foot here." With that the man in his frenzy tore the low top- boots from his naked feet. This made the Fool smile faintly; 138 THE POOL IN CHRIST Quint had remained calm, and still remained calm, while expressing his disapproval of his faithful ad- herent's violence by shaking his head. " We have nothing to do with force," he said. " It is the way of the true disciple of the Saviour not to re- sist evil — to resist not on earth and not with force. " They that seek shall find me." In the meantime the teacher's wife had gone to meet two Austrian gendarmes, whom she had seen coming. The teacher was on the point of following in order to uphold her with the police, but changed his mind, and went up to Quint on the platform. " Tell me," he asked straightforwardly, " what would you have us do ? " Quint stood up simply. He was a little pale. Shrug- ging his shoulders almost imperceptibly he answered: " Walk in the steps of Jesus Christ." And he went to the door composedly. His friends heard him go to his room. The gendarme spoke to the teacher's wife with good- natured politeness, though they insisted upon arresting Quint, and that without delay, in compliance with their orders. On entering the schoolroom both gentlemen at the same time emitted an astonished " Aha ! " There most unexpectedly they saw before them two persons, Schwabe and Bohemian Joe, whose reputation among the police on both sides of the border was the same. When the Scharfs gave their name, they were informed, to their astonishment, as if it were a pleasant bit of news, that they, too, would be put under arrest. They wished to know of what they were guilty. " My dear fellow," one of the green-coats laughed THE FOOL IN CHRIST 139 at Anton, who cast a withering look upon him, " you yourself probably know of what you are guilty. At any rate you're in good company.'.' He nodded toward Schwabe and Bohemian Joe. Schwabe cowered. But Bohemian Joe, fearlessly looking the Austrian administrators of the law straight in the eye, remarked in a hasty, not exactly well-bred tone, that even if he had done a dirty trick or two — ■ and with God's help he intended to do another dirty trick or two — they wouldn't string him up, because he had spent an hour at prayer-meeting. "Prayer-meeting.'' Fudge!" said the green-coat. But the Scharfs launched out against him. Talking excitedly and interrupting each other, they spoke of all sorts of apocalyptic things of which the green-coats had never before heard. The very ordinary occurrence of Quint's sermon in the schoolroom they magnified into an event of momentous significance. Threatening, beg- ging, and shouting, it seemed almost as if they were try- ing to convert those honest, unsuspecting officials, who looked at each other with a smile that said, " These peo- ple do not seem to belong in the penitentiary, but in the insane asylum." " Well, well, we know all about it now," said one of the green-coats. CHAPTER VII The policemen arrested Emanuel because he was sus- pected of being a fugitive from justice. Apparently the Prussian authorities had informed them that Quint had reappeared and disappeared again in the company of Bohemian Joe. That was why they put handcuffs on him when they seized him in the bedroom, and said, " Here's the ring- leader ! " Both the Scharfs vociferously insisted upon being handcuffed also. But they could not create the sus- picion of being fugitives from justice, and to their great distress they had to walk unbound to the Prussian. fron- tier under the guard of the second officer and at some distance behind Quint. Though the gendarmes tried to use the less frequented roads, they could not avoid passing a few huts, where, now that evening W£is approaching, there were lively signs of holiday-making — the slamming of doors, the calling of bar-maids, and the squeaking of fiddles. Here the passing by of a queer, tall, thin, giraffe-like man in handcuffs guarded by a gendarme could not go unnoticed. The way was long and on the whole diffi- cult. Arid at the end of an hour the Austrian officer found himself by no means alone with his prisoner. It was impossible to chase away the troops of children. Men and women from huts here and there, who belonged to those whose superstition inclined them in favour of 140 THE FOOL IN CHRIST 141 the poor prisoner, had also joined the procession. Groups of sweating excursionists brought up the rear. Some were going the same direction at any rate, and the others were willing to turn from their way for the sake of following the criminal. The second gendarme walked at a great distance behind. With his two un- fettered, and therefore evidently less dangerous, law- breakers, he attracted a smaller public. A torturing bitterness welled up in the Fool's soul. He had been filled with the pure spirit of the Bible, with a pure love of man. And now again, as so often before, the world's scorn broke over him. This- time it was all the more inconceivable since there seemed to be absolutely no reason for imposing the ignominy of handcuffs upon him. They led him along as if he were a ravening beast. His anger nearly burst forth at the trampling behind him, at the talking and shouting, and the conjectures whether he was being arrested for rob- bery, assault, or murder. The people put no bridle on their tongues. And poor Quint, whose worst fault was some shyness of work — of course we know that idle- ness is the mother of every vice — had to listen to frank remarks concerning his high forehead, his pointed nose, his red beard, his long arms and legs, and even his freckles. Some were of the opinion that he had com- mitted murder by poisoning. But he felt if he were to cry out, " I am not ! " the cry would come echoing back at him like pelting stones. If he were to say, " I am a peaceful disciple of the Sav- iour," and nothing else, the only response would be wild, hideous laughter. And if he were to utter the whole truth, tell them that compared with them he was the free man and not the prisoner, the pardoned and not the 142 THE FOOL IN CHRIST condemned criminal, he knew there would scarcely be sharp stones enough lying about on the ground for furi- ous hands to stone God with. This thought brought him comfort. The incom- parable peace of profound composure descended upon him. The trampling and chattering behind him touched him as little as the rolling of stones down a hill- side, the murmur of a brook, the trotting of horses, or the soughing of wind. It seemed to him that those be- hind him were images of bronze, or stone, or clay, dead men without life! Men forgotten, abandoned, and buried, who, perhaps, when the allotted time came, would be awakened by the loving breath of the Creator and would become what he himself was. The divine joy in his soul gleamed brighter and brighter, so that sometimes he involuntarily drew his bluish coat about him as if to hide the light within him. And then he thought, " I am a light ! Why do they not see that I shine? Verily, because their eyes are irrev- ocably sealed with the cataract of deadness. Why do they not see that they are doing me unspeakable good by causing me to experience the same that Christ expe- rienced, Christ whom I imitate, whom I will establish more and more firmly in my inward being. With their hardness, their scoffing, their ignorance and indifference, do they not make me more like the Saviour, so that I have become the same as He in one part of my being, in my experience, in my suffering of sorrows ? Do they not understand that he is walking next to me on this way of the cross? I should like to kiss the hands of the gendarme who leads me along this and no other way. Do they not observe the unheard-of — that for long moments I was so engrossed in the Saviour and He THE FOOL IN CHRIST 143 in me, that He Himself in my body, wearing handcuffs, was walking in front of them ? " At the Pichlerbaude Quint was handed over to the German police. When the German gendarme saw him, he burst into a jovial laugh, and the gentlemen from Austria and the troop of followers joined in. " It's time you got a hair-cut," he remarked to Quint, whose hair had grown to some length during his hermit's life. This bit of humour produced a still louder laugh, be- cause it looked as if the strapping horseback-rider had come just to act as Quint's barber, and as if Quint had come just to have his hair cut.. The laughter had not yet wholly died down when a boy of about twelve pushed close up to Quint and held out a hunk of rye bread spread with rendered fat. The Fool, engrossed in his thoughts, looked at him, then suddenly woke up again to the life about him. Visi- bly touched by the boy's intention, he tried to put his right hand in blessing on his head, forgetting he wore handcuffs. It was a pitiful gesture. The boy natu- rally interpreted it as the poor sinner's attempt to take the bread, and he suddenly realised that in his hearty impulse he had forgotten the very thing that had especially stirred his pity, the fetters on a man's hands. So his good deed, instead of passing off quickly, was protracted and aroused the very notice he dreaded. The blood suddenly mounted to his face. But it was only for an instant that he stood at a loss. He was quick to notice the ragged side-pocket in the prisoner's coat and as quick to sticli the bread in. With that the 144. THE FOOL IN CHRIST soles of two bare brown feet went twinkling over the upland meadow and disappeared. The bystanders laughed again, but this time there was a shamefaced attempt to cut the laughter short. Some left the crowd and walked away. Others even began to collect money for Quint after the gendarmes had ex- changed papers. " Take it, silly ass," the German gendarme shouted, and with seeming roughness unloosened Quint's hand- cuffs. Was it that Quint's soul was still dazzled by the ray of eternal goodness that God had sent down through a little boy, and he did not see what they proffered him.'' Or did he think he would stain his hands by taking money from these strolling excursionists.? However that may be, his open palms fell limply at his sides. During the descent into the Hirschberger valley the Scharf brothers walked alongside Quint. The gen- darme had no mistrust of them. He lighted one of the cigars to which he had helped himself from the cigar- cases that had been held out to him, and comfortably leading his horse by the reins he let the prisoners walk in front of him without concern. The brothers, of course, were happy to be with Quint again. But they were all a-quiver with indignation at what had happened to them, especially to Quint. Anton Scharf was the more excited. He paid no heed to the steepness of the road, and every now and then stumbled. He shook his clenched fist and threat- ened and cursed the children of the world. " They do no good ! They are afraid and see not ! They have ears and hear not ! The curse of God which is upon them maketh them deaf and blind ! " ^ Until they were permitted to join Quint the brothers THE FOOL IN CHRIST 145 had discussed and weighed many matters, chiefly the measures to be taken against the powers of the infatu- ated world. Martin now asked Quint's sanction for what they wished to do. It was impossible, they thought, to keep Quint and themselves in custody a long time. When they were set free, they would go to a certain pious lady of noble birth, a very old, very rich, and very benevolent unmarried lady known and respected in the whole district as the Gurau Lady, and ask her to take Quint under her protection. After she had done so and after Quint through her great influence was allowed to follow his peaceful way undisturbed, they would form a community of sympathisers, a community of the worthiest, with Quint as their leader. " The imitation of Christ," Quint replied, " must be taken up each for himself, and the Saviour alone can be the leader. I shall never forget myself so far as to presume to be first anywhere in the world where the Saviour would have been the last." They reached a place where the gendarme intended to rest, and suddenly they heard his thunderous " Halt ! " The prisoners stood still and waited for him. He came up clearing his throat and cursing good-na- turedly, and seated himself on a bench placed there for the use of tourists. " Sit down, boys. Take it easy. We've got a good long stretch ahead of us yet," he said. " If the devil hadn't got into you, I shouldn't have to be scram- bling around in the mountains on a holiday. With my avoirdupois that's no joke, you know. Why, you're making faces as sour as a lemon ! " He gave them a searching look of his small eyes, smiled broadly, and shook his helmed head. " I wish I knew what's got into you. I think you've turned crazy. Once I had 146 THE FOOL IN CHRIST to arrest another fellow like you. But he did end up in the insane asylum. He wanted to make me believe he was going to ride into heaven in a coach and pair. He had a certificate from somebody or other saying so black on white. And the coach was to be of fire. What's the matter with you ? Do you think the world's coming to an end day after to-morrow ? Till then, woe [ Many a drop of whiskey will be drunk before then I Don't turn the people's heads. You're driving those poor folk up there in the huts absolutely insane. Who put such nonsense into you.'' When I was in barracks, I went to church often enough. I know what religion is, and who our Lord Jesus Christ is, better than you, I fancy. I've never come across such idiocy." " Sir," said Martin Scharf, " we have done nothing except what the spirit of the Lord commanded us to do. We should bear testimony to Jesus Christ! This very day. To-morrow it may be too late. Yea, if we delay one hour, how do we know that we have not missed for all eternity .'' " " Great Lord, man, do you think we've been waiting just for you.'' Don't we bear testimony to Jesus Christ every Sunday in every church — every Sunday, I tell you? Am I a heathen.'' Am I not as good a Christian as you? " Anton Scharf clenched his teeth, and looked at the sergeant grimly before bursting out in his unconsidered way : " There are those who bear false witness against Je- sus Christ. There are enough and too many such, who call themselves and others Christians, yet are nothing else than vain children of the world." Quint waved his hand to him, and Anton desisted. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 14T Observing that the sergeant's eyes were fixed upon him with some interest, Quint began to speak quietly: " We should none of us presume to call ourselves Christians. The Christian is Christ. There is only one Christ, Christ the Saviour. Wherever else He is, He is hidden! What would the world be if Christ were in thee, in a thousand, and a hundred thousand, yea, in a million others.? That would be the kingdom! Chris- tian means to be nothing else than Christ. And who dare say, ' I am Christ ' ? " The gendarme looked somewhat amazed. His horse had several times thrust his nose against him impatiently, and he now stood up and gave the sig- nal to move on. " Forward ! Don't use tiredness as a pretext," he said. " You talk a lot of upsidedown things. You yourselves don't know what you blabber. Shoemaker, stick to your last. Don't make the people rebellious. No one will keep you from going to church, for all I care, twice every Sunday — too much for me, though." " But I say unto you, sergeant," exclaimed Anton Scharf , " that in this place is one greater than the church and the temple ! " This was one of the many Bible citations with which Anton was familiar. His sickly eyes again gleamed I with that mad belief which was the chief source of all I later misfortunes. The gendarme looked at the coarse, bearded face as one regards a person whose sanity one is justified in doubting. " When a man begins to rattle like that," he ob- served, " it's usually his upper story that goes first." 148 THE FOOL IN CHRIST They walked the rest of the way in the same order as before. The brothers again tried to win Quint over to their idea of a community. But Emanuel, disquieted by that gleam in Anton's eyes, resisted still more vigor- ously than before. He even grew angry, and emphat- ically said that nothing was farther from his mind than to add to the legions of idle phrase-mongers, or furnish substance for any superstition in this world. " I am reconciled to God. I was reconciled to Him by Jesus Christ. And if I am kept here on earth to- testify to anything by my deeds, it is to this my recon- ciliation to God and my reconciliation to men. I am reconciled to them. I am not angry at my poor breth- ren and sisters on this earth. Take heed that ye, too, be reconciled. He that is reconciled may preach recon- ciliation. Why take ye thought for rae? Am I not worthy to suffer what my brethren and sisters suffer.? Am I not worthy to be a man among men.? The Son of man is a man among men. Go home. Follow Jesus, and when you think of me, think not of me, but of the Son of man. Think of the Saviour and pray that He may become one with you. But henceforth let no one inquire for me ! " For the night the prisoners were placed in the police lock-up at Hainsdorf, the brothers in a room together, the Fool in Christ in a room by himself. As he lay in the dark, damp cell with bread and water at his side he dreamed a dream, from which he soon awoke. Then in a state of profound beatitude he remained awake un- til the morning. * Quint dreamed the Saviour Himself had come to him f in prison. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 149 To understand all the different sorts and degrees of Breams is to know the human soul more profoundly than we have yet learned to know it. Emanuel Quint's dream was of those that are as real as any event in our so- called waking actual life. If the policeman who had the key to his cell had appeared before Quint, he could not have been distincter, more in the body, more real than the Saviour. We dream smells, faces, poems, words. We hear stories, we hear music, we feel that we touch things. Sometimes we preserve the memory of such sense impressions in a dream for decades, a mem- ory that is clear-cut and vivid, while many more im- portant events of our waking life fade from our minds beyond recall. Quint heard the faint footfall of the Saviour, he saw Him enter through the creaking gate with slightly bowed head. He saw a strange pale sheen about the Saviour's blond hair, no stronger than the reflection of lamplight. It cast a faint gleam upon the damp walls and the plastering of the arch over the doorway. He knew that thus and not otherwise looked the Saviour, the Son of man, the son of Mary, the King with the crown of thorns, who had no form nor comeliness, and was esteemed stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He recognised each feature of His face. Thus looked His deep eyes, thus the reddish brows arched over them, thus the freckles lay about the corners of His eyes and about His fine, quivering nostrils. Thus He moved His arm and raised His hand, and gently ran His long, slender fingers through His curly pointed beard. And on the back of His hand there was a frightful mark, where the rusty nails had been driven through to pin Him to the cross. Dark drops of blood oozed from the wound. 150 THE FOOL IN CHRIST And marks also were on His feet, which were rough and dusty, as if He had come from a long j ourney made barefoot. A power emanated from Him which struck Quint to the ground as with a storm of compassion and love. He could do nothing but kiss and kiss again both those dear feet and shed a flood of tears over them. And now Emanuel heard a soft grave voice: " Brother Emanuel, lovest thou me? " " Yea," said Emanuel, " more than myself." And again the voice said: " Brother Emanuel, lovest thou me ? " And when the dreamer again asseverated his love, the voice added, " Then, Emanuel Quint, I will remain with thee for- ever." Just as real as his sensations had been a few mo- ments before when the key had grated in the lock and the head and hand of the newcomer appeared in the door- way, and Emanuel thought another poor sinner was being led in, so real was his feeling a few minutes later, that he was transported into the seventh heaven. And when he raised his head and spread his arms, the thing finally happened that gave his dream the sanctity of a miracle. When Quint and the form of the Saviour opened their arms to each other like long-separated, loving brothers. Quint felt the Saviour's body, the Saviour's whole being enter into him and penetrate every part. The expe- rience was inconceivable, marvellous in its absolute reality. For it seemed as if the mystic marriage took place heart and soul, tangibly, in every nerve, every pulse-beat, every drop of blood, and Jesus passed into His disciple and dissolved in him. THE FOOL IN CHRIST 151 The next morning the sheriff set the two weavers, Martin aiid Anton Scharf, free. Quint, however, was detained in custody. He was to be transferred to his home parish. At an inn nearby the Scharf brothers met Bohemian Joe and Schwabe, who had followed the traces of the gendarme, and afterward all four of them under Schwabe's guidance struck across the fields to a some- what distant village. It was a place where there were many poor weavers and basket-makers. From of 'old it was the home of a pietistic sectarianism which flourished unnoticed by the surrounding world. Schwabe had kindred here, a married sister and her family. When he and his companions entered her house, the pale, anxious-looking woman seemed reticent, as if she were standing on guard in the entry and could not admit anyone to the living-room. The fact was that a blacksmith by the name of John aus dem Oberdorfe was holding prayer-meeting in the room. A small congregation of pious Christians were celebrating the so-called third holiday. Before the new spirit produced by their contact with Quint came over Bohemian Joe and Schwabe, they had been inclined to poke fun at the little circle. Yet it was in the full knowledge that they would find the peo- ple at prayer-meeting that the two smugglers had brought the Scharf brothers here. After some parley Schwabe's sister went in to call her husband, a small, yel- low, half -naked man, and in a few minutes he led the four men into the little assembly. The congregation was just then on its knees offering up a long silent prayer. The motes in the morning sun, shining in through three small windows, danced over aged grey heads, young blond heads, and bald 152 THE FOOL IN CHRIST Heads, Suddenly an old toothless woman arose and be- gan to splutter unintelligible words in an almost unin- telligible language. Her ecstasy the congregation of enthusiasts took to be the " speaking with tongues " mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. When the old woman had exhausted herself weeping and groaning and calling upon Jesus, she was relieved by a man who prayed aloud and supplicated God for the Holy Ghost. After he was done Martin Scharf rose from the ground • — he and the other three had thrown themselves to the floor when they entered — and spoke in a tone so new to the people, that the whole congregation sat up and listened. He was not loud in his speech, but what he said was in the tone of giving positive information. "Sing," he said, "rejoice! The Lord, the Saviour is with us. The time is past for the beating of breasts, the sighing, the weeping and supplicating. The prom- ise hath been fulfilled. Have we not heard his voice? Have we not seen the bridegroom with our eyes? The bride sitteth in mourning before the bridegroom cometh. But when the bridegroom draweth nigh, she is full of gladness. I bring joyous tidings. No one before me hath come to you with a message like unto mine. Jesus Christ hath arisen ! " No one in the small assemblage marvelled at the mes- sage. / Too ofte n had the joyous tidings been pro- claimed to them]^ Yet they all trembled, and what caused them to tremble was the conviction quivering in the speaker's voice. It was so strong that they were as greatly moved by the well-known words as by the communication of some great piece of news. " Ask no more," said Scharf breaking off, " but let each hold himself in readiness. Let each put on a wed- THE FOOL IN CHRIST 153