Saint Peter's Snow by Leo Perutz

Author:Leo Perutz [Perutz, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Thrillers, pulp, Classic
ISBN: 9781611458862
Amazon: 1611458862
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2014-06-02T22:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

I have thought a great deal about what must have happened inside me after Baron von Malchin revealed his extraordinary plans to me in the village street. After he left me I seem at first to have been completely under the spell of what he said. Behind it I felt the force of an unusually strong will, and I must already have felt obscurely that it was backed by real forces or abilities that were unknown to me. Not for one moment did I feel that he was a phantast, on the contrary, I had a presentiment that he represented a danger to me and to the world in which I had hitherto lived. These misgivings were then partially suppressed by doubts and resistances that rose inside me, and for a time my mind was the battleground of weird, absurd and conflicting ideas—and I felt distinctly that I was feverish.

What I did next was an attempt to escape from these ideas. While absent-mindedly and ditheringly looking for my thermometer—I was shivering with cold though there was a fire in the grate—I suddenly remembered what the schoolmaster had said to me on the day after my arrival at Morwede. “You’re too trusting,” he had said. “If you want to know the truth about anyone here in the village, ask me.”

After that I couldn’t stand it in my room for another moment, but went to find him. I asked where he lived, and a little girl pointed out his house to me.

He met me on the steps in cycling cape and green felt hat. “Ah, doctor, there you are, delighted to see you,” he said unnecessarily loudly. “Come in, come in. I’ve been expecting you for two days. You’re not detaining me, not in the least. It’s Sunday, and I can do what I like with my time. Dagobert, we have a visitor. I knew you would be coming, doctor.”

He took my hand and led me into a room which smelt of methylated spirits and wet loden cloth. A herbarium lay open on the table among all sorts of algae, lichens and mosses. I noticed a cast iron boot-hook shaped like a stag beetle protruding from under the sofa. Spirit glasses containing the edible and poisonous mushrooms of the neighbourhood were arranged in two rows on the chest-of-drawers. A young hedgehog was drinking milk from a stone dish on the floor.

"That’s Dagobert,” the schoolmaster explained. “My only friend since the departure of your unforgettable predecessor. A prickly little friend, but you only have to know him. He and I are alike, aren’t we?”

He cleared an armchair for me on which a dibble, a pair of tweezers, some sausage wrapped in newspaper and a clothes brush were lying, and made me sit down.

“Things have been happening, haven’t they?” he began. "Presumably the distinguished visitors whose presence has been honouring the village have given you food for thought, haven’t they? I thought as much. Was a confidential emissary of the Quai d’Orsay on a

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