When I looked up, my head still whirling, Lipotin was sitting before me, his gaze fixed upon me, playing with the empty halves of the ivory sphere. I was in my study and everything around was as it had been before ... before ...
“Three minutes. That is sufficient”, said Lipotin in a morose tone, his features haggard, as he put his watch back into his waistcoat pocket. I will never forget the puzzlingly disappointed expression on his face as he asked me:
“So the Devil didn’t take you, after all. That indicates a sound constitution. – Congratulations, anyway. I think from now on you will be able to use this coal with a certain degree of success. It is charged, that I have been able to establish.”
I bombarded him with questions about what had happened to me. It was clear I had been through one of the hallucinatory experiences that have always played such an important role in supposed magic practice. I had taken opium or hashish, I could tell by the mild headache and the slight feeling of nausea the noxious fumes had left me with.
Lipotin answered in monosyllables and seemed unusually sullen. He left after gabbling a few ironic remarks:
“You have the address; go to Dpal bar skyd. Become adviser to the Dharma Rajah of Bhutan, you’ve got what it takes. You will be received with the proverbial open arms. The worst trial is behind you. My respects, – Master!”
Then he hastily grabbed his hat and hurried off. I heard a polite exchange in the hall: Lipotin had met my housekeeper as she arrived back. Then the outside door shut and a moment later Frau Fromm was standing in the doorway, looking most agitated: “I shouldn’t have left you by yourself! I blame myself ...”
“But you have nothing to blame yourself for, dear Fr...” – The words died on my lips. I saw Frau Fromm recoil from me with a gasp of horror. “What is the matter, my dear?”
“The sign above you! The sign!” – she stammered hoarsely. – “Oh, now – everything – everything – is over for me.”
I just managed to catch her in my arms. She clung to me.
I bent over her, shocked; at the same time there welled up within me a feeling of pity, of closeness, a dark sense of guilt and obligation. I was torn to and fro by a vortex of unclear but all the more violent emotions. Instead of checking to see how she was, I kissed her like a man – – like a man who has practised celibacy for centuries. And she, her eyes closed, semi-conscious, kissed me back with a violence, a wild abandon I would never have suspected in this quiet, shy woman.
Suspected? My God, what am I writing? Would I have suspected it of myself? It was not willed, not intentional, nor had we been ambushed by our own sensuality. It was – fate, guilt, compulsion and primaeval necessity! – –
We are now both of us clear that Jane Fromont and Johanna Fromm, that I and John Dee – well, how shall I put it? – that we are a motif in the tapestry of the ages, a motif that will be repeated until the design is complete: I am the “Englishman” that Johanna had “known” in her split consciousness since her adolescence.
And that ought to be the end of it, in all conscience; a dual life story can emerge from the strange depths of its parapsychological cavern and run a more normal course. – Deep within me I feel the same as Johanna. This miracle has so taken hold of me that I want no other wife than Johanna, the woman to whom fate has bound me over the centuries.
But Johanna – we have had a long discussion on the matter, just now, after she woke from her faint – Johanna stands by her initial exclamation: everything is over between us, indeed was pointless, lifeless, cursed from the very beginning. Her hope is lost and all the superhuman effort of her love and sacrifice wasted, for the “Other Woman” was stronger than she was. She could unsettle and hinder the “Other One” but never, never, never could she defeat and destroy Her.
She told me what it was that had so frightened her when she came into the room: she had seen a bright, sharply delineated light hovering over my head; a light in the form of a diamantine crystal about the size of a man’s fist.
Johanna will not accept any explanation, however reasonable. She claims she knows it very well from her trances. She has been told, she says, that this sign indicates the end of her fate and the end of her hopes and nothing can persuade her to change her mind. She did not withdraw from my kisses, from my endearments; she assured me she was mine and would remain mine: “I am your wife of an older title than any other woman now living on earth can say of her wifely dignity.” At that I freed her from my arms. The nobility of her purity, shining with love, forced me down at her feet, and I kissed those feet, kissed them as if they were an ancient, ever-young relic. I felt like a priest before the image of Isis in the temple.
And then Johanna resisted me, almost in desperation she resisted me and my adoration, throwing her arms around wildly, sobbing and crying again and again: hers, hers was the fault alone, and it was she who should struggle and plead for mercy, for
