My name is Theodor Fischer. I was born in a small village in Austria, called in German "Stiftung," — not to be confounded with other villages of similar names. The earliest thing I remember is a great bell in the little square; and an old woman, my grandmother, who used to sit on the steps and knit and tell long stories. My father was a cooper, and my mother used to help him when the season was busy; but there was always enough for bread, and there was a garden behind the house where we raised cabbages and beans.
The village was of that primitive sort which seems left half in the Middle Ages. The houses were close together, with narrow streets between; children played in the doorways, and the priests and schoolmaster were sort of demigods to us; the inn was the center of news, and the clock on the church tower determined not only the time of day but the rhythm of life.
When I was twelve years old there came to the village a company of boys who called themselves the "Choral Society" and who had been invited to sing at the confirmation. Among them was a tall stranger of about seventeen or eighteen, with a grave, soft face and eyes that seemed to look through you. He wore a strange costume — a sort of dark cloak with a hood — and he sang with a voice like a flute. He did not appear to belong to any of the families there; he came and went with the choir, and then remained in the village for some time afterward, lodging at the brewer's house.
He called himself "Satan," and he spoke with an air of infinite melancholy and yet with perfect courtesy. At first we took delight in the oddity of the name and in the gravity of his manners; afterwards we learned to love the beautiful gentleness of his ways. He was kind to children, and he had a way of talking to them as if they were grown persons; he never scolded or punished, but sometimes he refrained from answering, and that was as instructive as a lecture.
There is a fact about the stranger that I cannot omit. He had a power, or pretended to have a power, of producing from thin air any image or picture he pleased, and setting it before one's eyes. He could make, by a motion of the hand and a slight incantation, a full-sized representation of anything he named — a tree, a river, a whole landscape — and it would remain visible for as long as he willed. It was not illusion in the common sense; it had substance and color and life, though no one could touch it. We children owned it as the most wonderful thing in the world.
He used this power to amuse us and to instruct us. He would show us scenes from distant lands — seas, mountains, cities — and then tell us their histories; or he would show human passions, or tragedies, and make us see the causes as plainly as if they were painted on a slate. In this way he taught us the weakness and the grandeur of men; yet he did it without a sermon, and by means of things that were in themselves mere play.
Once, to our amazement, he showed us a vision of the future — not only a single scene, but a course of events, with consequences following causes, and characters developing under their impulses. It was like opening a book whose leaves were yet to be written. We were young and keen, and it thrilled us like the first glimpse of a new world.
But ever mingled with his kindness there was a something cold and remorseless. When he would show the misery or the folly of men, he would do it with a smile that had no warmth, and sometimes his eyes seemed to have dropped the veil of pity. He would say, in a tone of serene conviction, that what we call virtue and vice are mere play; that the atoms and the forces are indifferent; and that our moral praise and blame are the inventions of weakness.
I confess that this speech alarmed me sometimes; yet I could not help loving him. He was my friend. He taught me to read and write, and above all to observe. He used to set me tasks — to watch a man's face and note the twitchings that announced some secret wish; or to hear a sentence and discover the lie in it. He made me quick and subtle, but he also made me suspicious of appearances.
One summer evening, as the sun was setting and the church-bell was calling the people to vespers, he led me out upon the hill that overlooks the village, and there, while the shadows lengthened, he told me the story of his own birth. He said he had come from a region where the world is looked at from above, where men are seen as motes, and where pity is a game. He spoke of spheres and orders of being, and his voice was as cool as a stream.
He said: "I am of another order. I am a spirit that delights in seeing. Men are my toys; their emotions and follies are my pastime. I do not make them suffer; I only make visible the truth of their nature. You pity them because you are small; I have no pity because I am large. To us, the universe is a chess-board: certain stones move under the influence of unseen laws, and when they fall we set them up again."