“If that’s the way you see it, I have no objection,” my visitor answered calmly. His piercing gaze had an indescribable power, and slowly, tortuously the memory of a long forgotten past clawed its way back up from the depths. I could not say whether it came from last night’s dream or whether it was the reawakening of an age-old chain of events that had lain dormant for a hundred years. Meanwhile Gärtner continued imperturbably:
“As you are making an effort to help me explain your doubts, I can put things more simply and briefly than might otherwise be the case – ‘We are old friends!’ That is correct. – But ‘Dr. Theodor Gärtner’, your fellow student and the companion of your trivial student pranks, has little to do with the matter. Therefore it is quite correct if we say: he is dead. You are quite correct in your assumption that I am someone else. – Who am I? Gärtner.”
‘You mean that is your profession?’ I almost exclaimed, as it struck me that his name meant gardener, but I managed to suppress the silly question. The other continued, without heeding my involuntary movement:
“My work as a gardener has taught me how to handle roses, nurturing them, improving the strain. My special art is grafting. Your friend was a healthy stock; the one you see before you is the scion. The natural blossom of the stock has vanished. The child my mother bore has long since drowned in the sea of transmutation. The stock, the rootstock onto which I was grafted, was the offspring of another mother, of the mother of a former student of chemistry, Theodor Gärtner by name, the one you knew, whose unripe soul has passed through the grave.”
A shiver went down my spine. His relaxed figure was as enigmatic as his speech. My lips automatically formed the question:
“And why are you here?”
“Because it is time,” he answered, as if it were obvious. With a smile he added:
“I like to be there when I’m needed.”
“And so you’re not a chemist” – I wasn’t concerned with whether it followed on from what he had just said – “any more; nor are you – –”
“I have always been one, even when your friend Theodor was turning up his nose like any ignoramus at the secrets of the royal art. I am, and have been for as long as I can remember – an al-chymist.”
“How can that be, an alchemist?” I exclaimed, “You, who were always –?”
“I who was always –?”
Then I remembered that the old Theodor Gärtner I had known was dead.
The “other” continued:
“You should remember that in every age there have been both adepts and bunglers. You are thinking of the latter if you are thinking of the medieval quacks and charlatans, though it is from their pseudo-art that the much-vaunted chemistry of today has developed, in which your friend Theodor took such childish pride. The quacks of the middle ages have become eminent professors of chemistry at the universities. We of the ‘Golden Rose’, however, have never been interested in dissecting matter, postponing death or succumbing to the hunger for gold, that accursed plaything of mankind. We have remained what we always have been: technicians in the laboratory of eternal life.”
Again I felt an almost physically painful shock as a current of distant, elusive memory ran through me; but it would have been impossible to say why or to what end this memory was calling me. I suppressed a question and just nodded in agreement. My visitor saw it, and again the strange smile flitted across his face. I heard him say:
“And you? What has happened to you in all these years?” A rapid glance took in my desk: “I see you are a – writer. You ignore the advice of the Bible and cast your pearls before the reading public? You are rummaging about in mouldy old documents – you always enjoyed that – and intend to amuse the world with the peculiarities of some past century? I believe that the present world and the present age finds little meaning in the meaning of life.”
He paused, and once again I caught a whiff of the drifts of melancholy that seemed to be settling over us. I had to pull myself almost physically out of the brown study by starting to talk about my work on the legacy of my cousin, John Roger. The more I related, the more my eagerness to confide increased, and it was a relief to find Gärtner listening to me calmly and attentively. As I went on I became convinced he would always be there with help if ever I should need it. For the moment, though, all I heard from him was an occasional “Really”, until he suddenly looked up and abruptly asked:
“So – sometimes you feel that your function as a chronicler or editor gets mixed up with the burden of your own destiny that is threatening to become tangled up with the dead things of the past?”
Desperate to unburden my heart, I told him everything that I had felt and suffered in the weeks following the arrival of John Roger’s legacy, beginning with the Baphomet dream and omitting nothing. “I wish I had never seen John Roger’s papers!” – thus I finished my confession – “Then I would have kept my peace of mind; I would gladly have sacrificed my ambition as a writer for that, I assure you.”
With a smile on his face, my visitor observed me through the clouds of
