Page:The Quest Volume 13 (1921-22).djvu/112

 lamp in the shape of a transparent Japanese idol squatting cross-legged. The head consisted of a milky glass ball, and inside the lamp was a snake worked by clockwork and holding up the wick in its jaws. I was just about to open a high Gothic press to put it away when to my great horror I saw hanging in the press the dangling corpse of the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer. In my terror I almost let the lamp fall to the ground; but fortunately in the nick of time I realized that it was only the clothes and tall hat of the Rev. Doctor which had tricked me into fancying I was seeing his dead body.

Nevertheless the incident made a deep impression and left me with a foreboding of the approach of some threatening fatality which I could not get rid of, though the following months had nothing exciting about them.

The Rev. Magister Wirtzigh was, it is true, invariably kind and friendly to me. Yet he resembled Dr. Haselmayer in so many respects that I could not help remembering the incident of the press. His face was round like that of the Rev. Doctor's, only very dark, nearly like a negro's, for he had suffered for many years the incurable result of a wearisome bilious disease, black jaundice. If you stood a few paces from him and if the room was not very well lighted, you could often hardly distinguish his features, and the short, scarcely a finger wide, silvery white beard that grew under his chin up to his ears, showed up then against his dark face like a dully-shimmering uncanny iridescence.

The oppressive anxiety which held me spell-bound, vanished only when in August the news of the outbreak of a terrible world-war fell on all like a thunderbolt.

I remembered immediately what years ago I had