I glanced over the backs of the books and found Greek, Latin, Hebrew titles, as far as I could see by the feeble light of the lamp on the table. My acquaintance, meanwhile, had taken up a position on the floor in the dark by the wall.
“Come here,” he called after a while, “we will practice a little philosophy. That means keeping one’s mouth shut, lying on one’s stomach and thinking.”
He struck a match and applied it to the paper and wood in the fireplace, in front of which he was lying. The flame leapt up; he poked and blew the fire with great skill. I lay down near him on the ragged carpet. He stared into the flames, which drew my attention as well, and we lay silent for perhaps a whole hour stretched out in front of the flaring wood fire. We watched it flame and roar, die down and flicker up again, until finally it settled down into a subdued glow.
“Fire worship was not by any means the silliest form of worship invented,” he murmured without looking up. Those were the only words spoken. With staring eyes I gazed into the fire. Lulled by the tranquillity of the room, I sank in dreams, seeing shapes in the smoke and pictures in the ashes. Once I started up. My companion had thrown a little bit of resin into the glow. A little slender flame shot up, I saw in it the bird with the gold hawk’s head. In the glow which died away in the fireplace, golden glittering threads wove themselves together into a net, letters and pictures, memories of faces, of animals, of plants, of worms and serpents. When I woke from my reveries and looked across at my companion, he was absorbed, staring at the ashes with the fixed gaze of a fanatic, his chin in his hands.
“I must go now,” I said softly.
“Well, go then, good-bye!”
He did not get up, and as the lamp had gone out, I had to feel my way across the dark room, through dark corridors and down the stairs, and so out of the enchanted old dwelling. Once in the street I stopped and looked up at the house. In not one of the windows was a light burning. A little brass-plate shone in the gleam of the gas-lamp before the door.
“Pistorius, vicar,” I read thereon. As I sat in my little room after supper I remembered that I had learnt nothing about Abraxas, or anything else from Pistorius. We had scarcely exchanged ten words. But I was quite contented with the visit I had paid him. And he had promised to play next time an exquisite piece of organ music, a Passacaglia by Buxtehude.
Without my having realized it, the organist Pistorius had given me a first lesson, as we lay on the floor in front of the fireplace of his melancholy hermit’s room. Staring into the fire had done me good, it had confirmed and set in activity tendencies which I had always had, but had never really followed. Gradually and in part I saw light on the subject.
When quite a child I had from time to time the propensity to watch bizarre forms of nature, not observing them closely, but simply surrendering myself to their peculiar magic, absorbed by the contemplation of their curling shapes. Long dignified tree-roots, colored veins in stone, flecks of oil floating on water, flaws in glass—all things of a similar nature had had great charm for me at that time, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust, and especially the little circulating colored specks which I saw when I closed my eyes. In the days following my first visit to Pistorius this began to come back to me. I noticed that I was indebted solely to staring into the open fire for a certain strength and pleasure, for the increase in my depth of feeling which I had felt since. It was curiously beneficial and enriching—dreaming and staring into the fire!