The Angel of the West Window

the world would look different today if she had followed Dee’s advice! At the failure of the plan on which he had set his whole life, Dee decided to conquer a different country from the terrestrial “Greenland”, a country beyond the imagination of most people today, a “country” whose existence is mocked today just as much as “America” was at the time of Columbus. John Dee set off for this country, as unwavering in his determination as Columbus. But his journey took him farther, much farther than Columbus, and was more wearisome, more gruesome, more gruelling. The bare recorded facts of Dee’s life are harrowing enough, how much more harrowing must the experiences have been of which we know nothing? Leibnitz mentions him, but history has decided to ignore him: it prefers to categorise anything it cannot understand as “mad”. But I take the liberty of believing that John Dee was quite the opposite of “mad”.

One thing is certain: John Dee was one of the greatest scholars of his age; there was no monarch in Europe who would not have welcomed him at his court. Emperor Rudolph brought him to Prague where, according to legend, he made gold from lead. But, as I have already indicated, his most fervent endeavours were not directed towards the transmutation of metals but towards another kind of transmutation. What that is I have tried to demonstrate in my novel.

(Gustav Meyrink, printed in Der Bücherwurm, Leipzig, 1927, no. 8, p. 236-238.)

THE ANGEL OF THE WEST WINDOW

A strange feeling: this packet I am holding in my hand was all neatly tied up and sealed by a dead man! It is as if fine, invisible threads, delicate as a spider’s web, lead out from it into a dark realm.

The complex pattern of the string, the care with which the blue wrapping paper has been folded – it all bears silent witness to the purposeful designs of a living man sensing the approach of death: he gathers together letters, notes, caskets filled with once vital matters that already belong to the past, suffused with memories that have long since faded, and he arranges them and wraps them up with half a thought for his future heir, for that distant, almost unknown person – me – who will know of his death and who will hear of it at the moment when this sealed packet, left to find its way in the realm of the living, reaches the hand it is destined for.

It is sealed with the massive red seals of my cousin, John Roger, bearing the arms of my mother’s family. For years this son of my mother’s brother had always been referred to by aged kinswomen as ‘the last of his line’. To my ears this description sounded like a solemn title, especially when added to his foreign-sounding name with the strange, somewhat ridiculous pride of those thin, wrinkled lips which coughed out the last breath of a dying line.

This family tree – in my brooding imagination the heraldic image grows to monstrous proportions – has stretched its grotesquely gnarled branches over distant lands. Its roots were in Scotland and it sprouted all over England; it is said to be blood-kin to one of the oldest houses in Wales. Vigorous shoots established themselves in Sweden, in America and, finally, in Germany and Styria. Everywhere the branches have withered; in Britain the trunk rotted. Here alone, in southern Austria, one last shoot sprouted – my cousin John Roger. And this last shoot was strangled by England.

How my grandfather on my mother’s side – ‘His Lordship’, as he liked to be called – had clung to the name and tradition of his ancestors! He, who was nothing but a dairy farmer in Styria! My cousin, John Roger, had followed other paths, had studied science, become a doctor and dabbled in psychopathology, travelling far and wide, to Vienna and Zurich, to Aleppo and Madras, to Alexandria and Turin, to learn from the foremost authorities about the depths of the human psyche. He visited them all, the licensed and the licentious, caring not whether their shirts were stiff with western starch or oriental grime.

He had moved to England a few years before the outbreak of the war. There he is said to have pursued his researches into the origin and fate of our line. The reason is unknown to me, but a persistent rumour had it that he was on the trail of some strange, deep secret. He was surprised there by the war. As an Austrian reserve lieutentant he was interned. When he came out of the camps five years later he was a broken man; he never crossed the Channel again and died somewhere in London, leaving a few meagre possessions which are now scattered amongst various members of the family.

My portion, besides a few mementos, is the parcel which arrived today; it bears, in angular handwriting, my name.

The family tree is withered, the escutcheon shattered.

That was just an idle thought. There was no King of Arms to perform this sombre ceremony over the family vault.

The escutcheon is shattered – the words I said softly to myself as I broke the red wax. No more will anyone use that seal.

It is a magnificent coat of arms that I am breaking. Breaking? Strange, I suddenly feel as if that word is a lie.

It is true that I am breaking up the coat of arms, but, who knows: perhaps I am just waking it from a long sleep! The shield is split at the foot; in the right-hand, azure field is a silver sword thrust vertically into a green hill, representing the ancestral manor of Gladhill in Worcestershire; on the left in a field of argent is a tree in leaf with a silver spring gushing forth from between its roots, representing Mortlake in Middlesex; and on the forked field – vert – above the foot there is a light in the shape of an early Christian lamp. The last