The Silent Prophet Read Online Free PDF Page A

lay in a strange meadow. Scheller was an entirely happy man. From lack of understanding he was incapable of a moment's doubt—a condition that normally accompanies love as shadow accompanies light. As the bliss he received was boundless, he radiated it again outwards. It was a bliss mightier than Scheller himself. Friedrich envied him and simultaneously relished the misery of his own solitude. He now imagined that his entire life would acquire meaning and expression when he met the woman he sought. Although he considered Scheller's method of picking up a girl in the park foolish, he did betake himself to the green spaces, which is not the colour of hope but of yearning. Moreover, everything was already autumnal and yellow. And the impatience of his searching heart waxed as the world approached winter.
    He began to study with redoubled zeal. But as soon as he put down a book, it seemed to him as foolish as Scheller himself. Scholarship concealed what was really important as the rock strata concealed the earth's centre—secret, ever burning, ever invisible, not to be revealed before the end of the world. One learned about amputating legs, Gothic grammar, canon law. One could just as easily have learnt how to store furniture, manufacture wooden legs or pull teeth. And even philosophy made up its own answers and interpreted the sense of the question in relation to the answer that suited it. It was like a schoolboy who alters the problem set him to fit the false result of his mathematical labours.
    Before long Friedrich began to become a less frequent attender in the lecture theatres. 'No,' he said, 'I'd rather pass the time with Grünhut. I have seen through them all. This intellectual flirtation of the elegant professors who lecture to the daughters of high society in the evenings from six to eight. A light-hearted excursion into philosophy, Renaissance art history, with lantern-slides in a darkened hall, national economy with sarcastic remarks about Marxism—no, that's not for me. And then, the so-called strict professors, who give lectures at a quarter past eight in the mornings, just after sunrise, so as to be free for the rest of the day—for their own work. The bearded senior lecturers who are on the look-out for a good marriage so that, through some connection with the Minister of Education, they may at last become established professors with salaries. And the malicious smiles of spiteful examiners, who carry off glorious victories over failed candidates. The University is an institution for the children of good middle-class homes with well-organized primary teaching, eight years of middle school, private coaching by tutors, the prospect of a judgeship, of a prosperous legal practice or a government office through marrying a second cousin—not a first cousin, because of consanguinity. And finally for the blockheads of the uniformed students' societies who fight each other, for pure Aryans, pure Zionists, pure Czechs, pure Serbs. Not for me! I'd rather write addresses with Grünhut.'
    Once he discovered Savelli's name in one of the library catalogues. The book was entitled International Capital and the Petroleum Industry. He looked for the book and did not find it. It was out on loan. And as if this incident had been a sign from above he immediately betook himself from the library to Savelli.
    In Savelli's room, on the fifth floor of a grey tenement in a proletarian district, there were three men. They had removed their jackets and hung them over the chairs they were sitting on. An electric bulb on a long flex hung from the ceiling and swung low over the rectangular table, constantly moved by the breath of the men talking but also by their repeated attempts to shift the lamp out of their field of vision whenever it hid one or the other. Sometimes, irritated by the annoying bulb but without recognizing it as the cause of his impatience, one of the three would get up, walk twice round the table, cast a searching glance at