c.

crystal cross, set upright. This is a familiar figure. Anna is also familiar to us, she is that Pieta, that Virgin standing regarding the body of her dead son. But this son is, by all theological reasoning, one with the father, hence too, the father. This is no transformation of old von Pahlen back in Livonia however, this is an understudy or more exactly, an overstudy of. that spiritual parent, that foster-father, that beloved Uncle Stanislaus who had invoked old chimes, old cities, old religions for a child Anna, who stood not much higher than Wulf or Alexander) (there always was a Wulf, an Alexander in the von Pahlen-Stanislaus grounds and stables) and growing, grew in wisdom, as Uncle Stanislaus explained the curious old parchments and told her the names of the wooden and the clay images that were what she called the "dolls", that he brought back from Tibet, from China and even maybe, from India. One such a doll had the name of an Indian love-god, anyway. So was he naked to the waist and of brown-red colour and his name, Uncle Stanislaus said, was Krishna. There were strange signs and words that were Tibetan, interspersed with Chinese or Indian transcriptions, as it might happen, and sometimes Uncle Stanislaus would pull an old parchment toward him and, with Anna wedged between his knees, would chant in his fine clear voice, a run of words that sounded like nothing at all or like everything, as Anna listened. The words were charms, he would say, or invocations and they would ward off evil. There shall no evil think come high thy dwelling, Anna.

The Death of Martin Presser

of the new House of Steel, the other side of the river. Even in our Papalie's day, visitors pronounced the old-town unspoiled, with its associations of the earlier settlements in Europe, its Brother's House, its Sister's House, its old Bell House, its famous girls' school, which was the Seminary where Papa met Mama at a German reading-class.

Bethle-hem, the House of Bread, lived mystically and literally in its early brotherhood, the members of which it was said, alone among foreign missionaries, dared race the Jesuits to a new goal and usually won. Herrnhuters they were called, from the Saxon mother-town of Herrnhut, hence, their well-earned epithet, (Herren-huters), Watch Dogs of the Lord. They were the Lord's watch-dogs. They watched outside, as it were, the legitimate fold; they were really, when you come to think of it, neither flesh, fowl nor good red-herring. The fur-traders in New York State, sensing a threat to their market, with the enlightenment of the aborigines into some of the white-men's destruines, openly accused the Moravian missionaries of being Jesuits in disguise. This was a political accusation as well as (from their point of view) a religious one, as to be a Jesuit meant (more or less) to be a Frenchman, and in those days it was the French who were arming and inciting the Indians to revolt, in the French and Indian Wars against the earlier

2

3

English, Dutch and mid-European settlers. The Calvinists and the straight-laced Puritans found these singing Protestants disconcerting - or were they Protestants? Protestant intolerance, no less than Papal intolerance, had compelled them mystically toward a sublime compromise or a sublime blending of the faiths; the United Brethren held their peace. "Are you Protestants?" "Roughly speaking, yes; we are honest men; John Penn will tell you all about us. No, we are not Quakers, not Friends but we are Friends; this Unitas Fratum is not a new church, it has its early beginnings in mid-Europe in the 9th century. Its Greek missioners of the Orthodox Greek Church, you say, who intrigued us away from Rome? Or were we originally heathen, brought into the fold by the Greeks? Whatever we were (and one of our earliest branches was called Calixenes, from the cult of the cup or chalice) we were driven underground by the Inquisition; we were reformers, long, long before the Reformation. Now and again we manifested briefly, here or there, like a spring, bubbling up unexpectedly from deep underground. What we gathered to us underground, is our own affair.

We plunged boldly beyond the forks of the Delaware; we employed our few communal fire-arms only for hunting game, in the imprenetrable forests that lay to right, to left of us. Above our town, towered some tall but not inconsiderable hill-peaks,

3

technically small mountains, and the swift flowing river that flows at its foot, called to the miller, transplanted from his Saxon or his Bohemian or his Danish homeland, to each in his own language or his peculiar dialect. The river said come, come, we will turn, we will hum, with your mill, you will sing, from your wheel, we will bring, bread of life, grain of old, bread of life, body, soul, one will be, in this song, mystery, of the bread, of the river, of the seed, of the giver and so on and so on as rivers have invited mill-wheels since the days of the first shadow of the river Nile, with this somewhat sing-song, somewhat trivial rhythm. Even the mill-wheel sang, not to mention the axe as it chopped wood for the first little log-houses of that town, Bathle-bom, House of Bread indeed, and the distant settlers brought their grain to our mills: they knew us for skilled carpenters, iron-wrights, weavers, candle-makers, - ah, indeed, that! We tilled the ground and we planted apple-trees and plum-trees, we tended our tiny garden-plots where a rose blossomed with wine-red single petals, that was unknown before in this wilderness. "Ah rose of Sharon," murmured Bishop Hitschmann and Christian David bent close to the bush and murmured under his breath, a strophe from his discarded Latin missal. Who was Christian David? He was a carpenter; he went on to Greenland later, he had made the early voyages to the West Indies, he was one of the Unitas Fratrum, the first one, in fact, of this especial branch of this peculiar Brotherhood.

4

The Secret lay under the heart of Martin Presser. A band of the Governor of Pennsylvania, a new county militia came on the body by accident, "in a dense thicket by the 'sand spring' 11. not scalped but shot in the right side ... the man lying upon his back with his hands folded." The flames of the burning settlement, Gnadenhuetten and the last cries of Susanna Nitschmann, the thought of Johanna Christina and her tiny daughter Johanna, trapped in the dormitory attic of the Community House or the Gemeinhaus, the memory of the transcendant smile on the face of his gifted friend, Fabricius had faded away. There was terror and joy alike, love was faithful unto death, love was trapped in the upper hall of the Gemeinhaus to turn, forgetful and wade back through flames. Johanna Christina paused a second only before she took the first step back, through that inferno. She bent down to her own little Johanna, to whisper that she was a big girl now, she could wait for Mutteron, she could wait while mother went back to help dear Tante Anna Catherine, who could not get up the steep ladder. Little Johanna waited and when Tante Anna Catherine sank down on the edge of a bed and cried out, "Dear Saviour, this is what I expected", little Johanna wondered what it was that Tante Anna Catherine expected. But she did not have long to wait. It was this that Martin Presser had remembered this: it had given him the power to jump to summon help; through the leaping flames, in the blinding smoke; it gave his blurred eyes sight and his heels/race/ through the tangle of rough under-brush, as if shod with lightning. He thought that he could get there in time; where? Bethlehem, the mother settlement, was almost a full day's journey, but he saw the delicate yet curiously tense and erect shoulders of a lady just before him: he must find her, he must tell her that Fabricius ...

She was bending over a rose bush.

The cedar had a red vein under the bark as if the tree
were bleeding.

He thought of the wine-stained single-rose and an
argument that Father Nitschmann had had with
Christian David about the rose of Sharon. They always
came back to Anna van Pahlen's rose-bush as they called it.
She was Anna Cammerhof really. But he and Fabricius ...
even now he dared not think about it. She was so cool, so
quiet, so untaimed, so unaccountable. While Cammerhof was
away she lived with the unmarried Sisters. Working with Father
Brother Amos on the herbs and simples, had led to his Martin's
helping in the new clearing, this side of the Monocacy river,
where the Indians had lately been offering the Sisters
roots and "medecine", as yet unclassified.

6

Now Martin Presser thought of the London fan-maker who was shipping a spinnet by the return journey of the church-ship, Irene, because his heart had been moved to tenderness by the voice of the voice of the fan-maker. It was not always the way. You never knew whose voice it was and the poor fan-maker must have been properly dazzled, when he thought it was Sister Susanna or Sister Anna Louise when it was a young fan-maker. But Martin Presser's feet went faster than his heart-beat and he was not really blinded. It was the way the new North American cedar of course, would propound a fabulous Latin name for - whipped across his eyelids that were stung and inflamed already with the smoke and the sparks, so that he thought he was looking into the wine-red cup of a single rose in blossom.

Cedar of Lebanon, but he's named one that already. Balsam odoratum, myrrha oderifera, not displayed old and yet how annoyed Brother Amos Comenius was when Renatus wanted the children to see the Nativity liturgy in Latin. It was these things, Martin Mack and David Zeisberger rightly argued, would get us into trouble. Trouble was brewing from the first. Keep the thing to music and they can't prove anything. But I am not a musician, thought Martin Presser, I must find words for the thing, but they can trick you, they can trap you with the words, while the music remains inviolate, he-his that London fan-maker -

7

must have been properly dazzled! Suppose he had followed the voice of what he had thought was Sister Susanna or Sister Anna Louisa to the wilderness? It took some people that way.

Renatus, after all, was one of that sort - poor fellow, bedazzled and be-dimmed with dreams, with visions. But what is wrong, anyhow, Brother Amos," Renatus had argued with the old man, "Latin is the language of the colleges, the universities; indeed, Latin is our own native heritage, we of Americans on judicial and formal state occasions, always spoke Latin with the foreign emissaries. You mean, Brother Amos, that we should chant Greek? But if we chant Greek, well, after all, thought Martin Presser, it's an old argument and I was never really sure about that Jesuit, at the forks of the upper Susquehanna.

The Jesuit had been an amiable fellow, but Jesuits were like that. Brother Gotthieb warned him, although Fabricius - dear old him for all that Phippus. Philippus, fellow - was all for following the traffic that their own Indian, advised them, to the contrary. It was Philippus they had with them that time.

He had been wounded at Kittanning but bore them no grudge against Colonel Armstrong for his assault upon his people. He had suffered too much, although it amazed Christopher Pyrlaeus to find that there was no word for suffering, so far discovered in the dialect. Martin Mack had brought him in one day in a canoe and Sister Anna running down the grass-slope to the river,

9

would remind her, "this is home now, dear
Sister Anna Cammerhof." Although he seemed to stress
the Cammerhof, their Anna von Pahlen( as each knew the other cabled
her) still ran down the river slopes to meet them while she
mother to me, doesn't she? would say, "I know that to call
Litenia home, is a lapsus linguae, as you would say in your not
going very bad school-man's latin; you know I love you and love
all the brothers equally." "Ah - ah! Father Nitschmann
admonish would put her gently away from him, "not quite all equally -
you are a married Sister now, dear Anna Cammerhof" - there was
that way Father Nitschmann said Anna Cammerhof that still seemed
to leave the old Anna free to run wildly down the river slope
to Mr. Martin and Fabricius,
and to halloa, like a silver trumpet through her cupped hands.

hallo-ed to Martin and Fabricius through her clapped hands,

Martin Presser was racing through the tangle of bushes
and small saplings, his heels were veritably shod with lightning,
heart-beat that was suffocating him,
the heels went faster than the heart which was pounding away at
a terrific rate, but the head went faster even than the heart
tosted. The head or rather the thoughts raced backwards, raced
forward. When had he first seen her? Just now, of course,
she was bending at the turn by the thicket, that was the last
though that
she had been her, but that he knew, an unreality, he knew
was a trick
a flash of memory he actually had seen her, bending over
that rose-bush, as he turned, the last time, at the river slope,
while Fabricius shouted directions to the leader of the little
craft; it was baptized Indian Anton, not Philipus, that
time. Philippus had been waiting for them at Gnadenhuetten, and he
was taken them across beyond the Blue Mountain pass, to investigate

XXXX II

Here," and her slender shoulder pushed under the tall man's arm-
pit; she pushed away Martin Mack. "Ah," she said, "Brother
Martin, little you know of the ways of the forest." She was
always teasing Martin Mack and David Zeisberger, when they went
(in their turn, with one of the fire-arms into the woods for wild-
men.) "Fine hunters, indeed. Is this all you watch-dogs-of-
the-Lord have brought back from your three weeks' journey?
Just this? Her eyes were bright as blue fire. "Fine fowl,
you are, little you know of hunting, little you know of a fellow
wounded in the forest. "Here" - she pushed Martin Mack away;
she might have been "at home" now with one of her father's
favourite huntsmen or young soldiers, wounded in an encounter in
one of the eternal skirmishes along the Polish border. Home?
This was the little joke come back to roost, as Anna would have
told you, and now you saw that the little joke indeed had wings
like the eagle. The eagle-wings were the frail shoulders of Anna
von Pahlen, who in some miraculous yet wholly practical way, was
showing Martin Mack and David Zeisberger how to deal with a
wounded huntsman. The negro Andreas, that "first-fruit" as
Zinzendorf called the boy from the West Indies, stood by watching.

This was the picture that formed in Martin Presser's head
as his heart went pounding, as his heels went racing.

And there were other pictures. He had not been there of

I²

19.

course when her hair rayed, like the aureole of a saint about her, although he had scarcely dared recall, even to himself, the tiny segments of the picture that by God's grace, he had been permitted to piece together. It was gold and blue mosaic, so gold, every detail was exact, so clear. Yet over it a sort of mist or veil floated, as if you might see, in the clear water of the upper reaches of the shallows of the Susquehannam, a picture-pavement much as they had unearthed, even as far north as Dresden and, they said, in England. It was the old Romans who had had such picture-pavements, old cathedrals, and he thought of the Jemuit. It seemed he had just so much time for thinking, it seemed he was spacing it out and though his actual mind did not so formulate an equation on a problem, it seemed that some exquisite design existed, that even in this wilderness of bramble and fern and low tangled bushes, there was some path leading somewhere. He had purpose if you could say there was purpose in his mad rush, avoided any semblance of a path that might have the enemy lurking near it, and that had led him he now knew, to the impassable waste. He now knew, as he plunged forward to a heap of white sand that lay banked against a tangle of thorn trees, that he was lost. A woodsman indeed, he most certainly was not, according to the high standards set by Ang, but he loved trees, he truly loved the forest. He had experienced this sort of premonitory and split-second before, on one or two occasions in his long journeys toward the Blue Ridges with his beloved

I3

Fabracius. But they had not been alone then. Not quite alone. Turning, blinded as it were, by the inner knowledge of the fact that he was utterly and incontestably lost in the unexplored wilderness of the upper valley, he stood tense, in one last woodman's second of inspiration. It was just, just possible in the unearthly stillness of the clearing, that he might hear the distant sound of the river or of some tributary streamlet, that he might follow to its source and so re-gain his bearings. He had sensed something and he whirled round to face, as he thought, the blazing settlement of Gnadenhuetten. He saw no blaze nor any trace of smoke above the trees, so he was now, he knew, lost, irretrievably and forever. He had turned on his tracks, he supposed, gone round in circle. But his senses, rather than his mind, seemed to recognise the faintest whisper as of water falling or of leaves whispering. He clasped his hands to his breast and he heard in his mind the words of Sister Anna Catherine that had fortified him last desperate intention to leap from the blazing somehow, to find help. window,} He had not time to repeat the words of Sister Anna Catherine, but his hands clasped across his heart, proclaimed their message. "Dear Saviour, this is what I expected" the hands said, though the lips and even the mind, said nothing.

Alba - Brother Martin presser might have said, though he would not have had time to utter even those two short syllables. Yet though there was not "time" to think so long a sentence as

I4

"Dear Saviour, this is what I expected" or even in his mind to form those two last ejaculatory syllables, there was time for everything, there was all the time in the world - all the time literally in the world for him but there was another thing, all-time/now at his disposal. There was this sudden miraculous understanding of the mystery and there shall be no more time.

He no longer had to space out his thinking, he no longer had to save his reverie or his dream, he no longer had to wait or watch (even when with his beloved Fabricius) lest he be overtaken in a stupor of dream, stricken unaware at his tasks, pausing a moment too long in sliding the canoe into the river, while his head turned instinctively again toward the upper slope, down which Anna had once, down which Anna again, might come racing and halloaing like a silver trumpet through her cupped hands. He did not have to wonder what their Indian Philippus was saying to the Jesuit's Eucharist. That was one of the things now, he would have time to work out, along with all the others. As he had all the time literally in the world in which to think about his lady, he could space time to wonder again at the tangle of impression the Jesuit had left with him. To begin with, it couldn't be possible that the Jesuit were sharing his little joke?

Somehow, on the other hand, the missionary couldn't seriously call his baptized Maryland Indian by the name of Holy Eucharist?

Was it in the best of taste, whatever way you look at it, to call a baptized Indian - and an un-regenerate scoundrel, he

15

looked, at that - by the most sacred name (speaking from the
Jesuit's point of view) of the sacrificial blood and body of God?

Speaking from the Jesuit's point of view, if Brother Martin had but known it, the Indian was a good guide, he was an infernal scoundrel, he had a pretty taste for what he called fire-water, the Jesuit had discovered when he found Eucharist searching his cupboard in the Lord Baltimore Settlement where he was resting from his long months down the river. He had been studying the effects of malaria among the Indians of the original Spanish de Sota Settlement, and had been ordered by his superior further north. For a rest. Lord Baltimore's already civilizing influence and the Catholic residents of Maryland and Upper Virginia would be a change, said Father Francis. Father Francis was due to sail back next month but he made it a special condition of his return to Europe that Father Benedictus have a change and a rest (before he took over this superior's duties) in the estates where they were always welcome. It was a better world altogether, a world transplanted complete from the old country, with its exact traditions and its county/aristocracy and the come and go of Catholic visitors from England. Civilized indeed! But it was no place for Father Benedictus. Father Benedictus explained to his gracious host that he wanted to explore the further side of the Potomac and could he take one of the Indians with him? He had heard a rumour of a disease that had broken out along the reaches of the Susquehanna, though he did not tell his host.

16

23.

that. These rumours were for the most part trustworthy (he had found) among the Indians. The white man had yet to discover how news travelled. There was a whole tribe stricken down with the stinking-disease, as Eucharist inelegantly called it.

Eucharist actually thought he would keep the Holy Father at home, by expatiating on the peculiar ravages of the pest, but he did not know his Jesuit. The Jesuit travelled with the contents of an interesting tin box. In fact, quinine may or may not be an absolvent - it was malaria, I was investigating. "Ho, Ho -" thought the Jesuit as he sighted the Indian Philippus standing guard above the three canoes just at the turn of the river before the lower rapids. The Indian Philippus had known they were on the way for a long time. The Indian, Holy Eucharist, was losing his sense of the "flying messages", he was becoming slightly

corpulent and sallow, yet Eucharist was still an Indian.

The Jesuit showed no surprise at the sight of the three canoes and what was obviously white-man's fishing tackle and the tall singularly indifferent and remote figure of Philippus waiting. "Who is this?" said Father Benedictus. "I thought you told me no one penetrated this fork of the river... he had reached to this point."

I thought you said no one would enter the Settlement where the Iroquois had left the hopelessly sick of the stinking-illness, to die?" Holy Eucharist dipped his paddle for the last time into the water and then slid it onto the floor of the birch-bark canoes.

"Dog-moose -" he said, with what would have been a

I'

24.

deally ironical stress if Eucharist had been a white-man.

But you never knew what an Indian was thinking anyhow, thought
Father Benedictus, even an unregenerate spiritual half-breed like
this scoundrel. He would not give Eucharist the benefit of
his own curiosity. Dog-moose? Did he mean they had dogs?

That they were hunting for moose? Or were they affiliated to a
tribe of the Dogs or a tribe of the Moose or were these two tribes?

Or ... but there was no time to wonder. Now Fabricius was standing
waiting to draw in the canoe, lest it scrape its delicate fabric
on the river pebbles.

Fabricius was smiling ... there was something that thought
"it is not only I thought his smile transcendant", thought
Brother Martin Presser. I say Martin Presser "thought", I must
use some convenient word for the instantaneous impact of the flow
of memory. If I say "thought" I mean something else, though the
word "thought" will have to do for us, for the moment.

Martin Presser had time now, for it all.

Fabricius greeted the Jesuit in his glib schoolman's Latin. It was easy for Fabricius to see that the man was not of this region, and his shabby soutane proclaimed him for a Frenchman or a Spaniard, most likely a missionary of the Society

of Jesus. The Jesuit answered affably yet gave his syllables a
slightly pedantic stress as if he were forcing himself, out of
consideration, to speak clearly his own native tongue, to one
obviously not born into the purple, to one not of his own cast and
creed, yet nevertheless a white man in the wilderness.

18

05

Fabricius bent to steady the canoe and Brother Benedictus stepped out. Fabricius, perhaps taking the snub for what it was worth, drew himself up again and instead of evading issues or pretending indifference, took the challenge. "You must forgive me, Father "Benedictus", the Jesuit filled out the pause, "of the lower Mississippi and the Missouri rivers."

"He was right to be a French spy in disguise," Brother Gottlieb whispered to Martin Presser, "probably a French spy." As they stood watching behind the cluster of wax-berry bushes that lined the upper level of the bank of sand and pebbles.

Fabricius turned round as if he heard their voices. "Father Benedictus", he pronounced, as if to an invisible assembly, waiting behind red-plush curtains for their turn to be admitted to an audience. "Father Benedictus", he repeated and he stressed the strophes of his schoolman's Latin, "of the Lower Mississippi River, of the middle reaches of the Mississippi River, of the upper and lower stretches of the Missouri River." Then as Gottlieb and Martin still delayed, though Fabricius knew they were waiting there and listening, Fabricius, who was always one for a joke and liked the sonorous run of language, whether it was the high German of his native Stuttgart or the school-man's Latin of his university, Heidelberg or the sonorous music of the hymns which Zinzendorf had been rendering from Latin into German or from German into many of the Indian dialects, pronounced: "at your good pleasure, Father Benedictus of the Society (I may venture)"

I9

of Jesus. I am one poor heretic of the Society of the United Brethren. This river and its vicinity - " and he paused as if to give the Jesuit time to take in his inclusive gesture - "is part of the Pennsylvania uplands, purchased by William Penn, the heretic Quaker Friend of the Society of Friends, by right of just barter from the Iroquois, the Delawares, the Mohawks and the Shawanese Indians. "This in other words", he paused here as if to frame an even finer edge to his passable Latin; he seemed about to say, "this in other words is our happy hunting-ground, O Fox of the Society of Jesus," but he did not say it.

He said rather (and now Gottlieb mudged Martin Presser, and leaned forward as if waiting for a whispered explanation, Gottlieb mistook he could not follow the Latin, though no one could miss the general implication of the little scene acted below, there on the bank of a sand and pebbles "Brother Gottlieb, Brother Martin," said Fabricius, naming them in the order of seniority. Fabricius said again, more sharply, "Brother Gottlieb, Brother Martin," as if, slightly impatient, he were reproving them for not taking their clue. But Martin clutched Gottlieb's elbow, "just let him go on talking." Martin could not explain what that run of jubilant silver-language was doing to him. It was the sort of shiver you had when you plunged into the river on a hot day, that first exulting withdrawal from the air, when you plunked full deep into the river.

20

galvanized water-hole under the willow trees. It was a sensation, intellectual to be sure, yet somehow demanding the whole body's adherence, a mystery, a miracle - that was what Fabricius's voice was, even in this community where almost every member was musically gifted. Fabricius had started this little masque or speaking-tableau, let him go on with it. "He must go on with it," whispered Martin to Gottlieb, "he'll make such a thing of it, as you can't imagine." Fabricius did indeed make a "thing" of it, and even Martin himself could not have imagined it. It was Fabricius speaking at the upper reaches of the Susquehanna river.

"I present in the order of seniority, sir, one Brother Gottlieb of the Society of the United Brethren," now Martin elbowed Gottlieb out from behind the bushes, "and one Brother Martin."
Martin took his place beside Gottlieb, while the baptized Indian, Philippus, stood like a Roman sentinel, unapproachable. Fabricius continued, "we stand before you as sworn allies, serfs and vassals of one Leige Lord. We take order and obey command of his chosen vassal and vessel; our mundane titles proceed from that vassal or vessel, that chosen instrument of His good-will to men, here in the estate of the Woods-of-Penn, in the valleys of the Lehigh and the Susquehanna rivers. We present ourselves in the name of our spiritual leader, Brother Nicholas Louis and of our mundane leader, Nicholas Louis, Count and Lord of Zinzendorf and Pottendorf, Lord of the Baronies of Freydeck, Schoneck, Thrunstein, and the Vale of Wachovia, Lord of

22

did, in that moment, between the faint whisper that he had thought
might possibly be a hidden spring or stream in this solitude, and the
appearance of the feathered dart from nowhere, weave with most de-
licate perception, the threads back to the immediate past of those
few days after they had left Gnadenhuetten ostensibly for an encamp-
ment of strange Indians below the rapids of the Susquehanna, and
their return to Gnadenhuetten, after the Jesuit had beaten them.
For Martin saw now, that it was the Jesuit this time that had
on their own lands, on their own river, beaten the Watch-dogs-of-
the-Lord to their own legitimate goal.

More than any mystery of his personal love for Anna, he had
striven to understand the terrible break in Christian conscious-
ness. More than love, he had wanted the absolute reconciliation
of the irreconciliable. He had wanted (and here he and young
Renatus were at one) to weave back through History, to the be-
ginning of the break or the several breaks in Christian continuity,
and at least to show how those breaks occurred, with the quite
impossible hope of some, of in time, healing old wounds, from
the disastrous thirty-years war (the repercussions of which had,
in one way or another, though those wars were so long over, shaped
all their destinies, even the memory of the Inquisition,
until all men should worship God, not only separately according
to their individual scruples and their personal consciousness,

23

Theirs were small, small beginnings toward
but with one mysterious unity that would be wholly Spirit.
small - small beginnings - He could see, as if framed in one of
those transparencies that he and Christian Seidel had, winter
Now he could see
evenings, helped Rehatus put together, that indeed the Jesuit
had had every right to smile as Fabricius stopped speaking.

Fabricius had stopped speaking but somehow the flow of beautifully
modelled sentences and the agate or silver glint of individual
words would never cease, any more than the Susquehanna or the
Lehigh or their parent the mighty Delaware or the rivers that
Fabricius had (so to speak) handed to the Jesuit as a free gift
(they belonged in that sense to the Jesuit, anyway) the mighty
Missouri or the lordly Mississippi. In Lehigh, Susquehanna, Mis-
souri, Mississippi were the words of the county itself, they were
Indian names for Indian rivers and indeed, over and above a glad
break in his heart - a heart may break for joy as well as sorrow -
Martin saw that more than the reconciliation of the irreconciliable
Protestant and Catholic idiom, was a greater reconciliation.

He had felt that Fabricius in his rock-gravity, was making a gift
of the Missouri and the Mississippi to the Jesuit. But who was
even Fabricius to give the rivers away? The rivers belong to
the Indians, to that scamp Eucharist who, it was obvious had
bartered his birth-right for the white-man's heritage of blankets
and indoor fires and a sure supply of grain in winter, and for
that more precise and dangerous commodity, the white-man's appar-
ently inexhaustible supply of fire-water. And the rivers

24

belonged to that other immovable, incorruptible, a stranger,
whose very name they did not know, though they called him by
Indian (Christopher Pyrlaeus told them)
that name which translated from the Greek original, had a suitabl e and a native tang about it, Lover-of-horses, Philippus, who
was also a disciple of our Lord.

Even in out-of-time, where time does not exist, there
still seems to be some sense of division or proportion. As if
Martin, in that last second or that last split-second (as he
sensed, then saw the arrow) bargained. As if he said, "here,
I know this is the second or the split-second, in which full
free measure of time is granted. But give me this," his argu-
ment might have gone, "memory in full measure of the last few
months of my life," rather than the curious illimitable delight
of reaching back into the vistas of pure memory, of pure child-
hood, rather than my mother's face on the dawn through golden
Oranges, at a window and the wonder of the boy's first
Waltzing in the deep forest on the pony Uncle Eakart bought
one of the flaxen wheat that Ties like the locks of Anna".

And immediately, he had come back to Anna when Anna's locks
was even now I dare not think of it - fell down over her
shoulder that might she, for a joke, for an experiment, for her
will; it madnes repeated to herself, words that she had so
necessarily so uttered. You, Brother Amos Comenius, have done your
" Give me this Indian;

26

head like a wild horse, like a mountain pony, of showing -
see - this gold about her knees -" for Anna was kneeling still,
at the half-hour of prayer, (alone with the wounded Indian that
Father Nitschmann had granted her), O, mighty winged
Eagle, O, wild stallion, O, wild bear, O, mountain lion, O
panther - look at the rain - what a prize for your belt, this
scalp of a white woman - Look - " and she rose to her feet,
still half shrouded (like a tree of golden blossomed) in the veil's
frosted, "look, O, white Hawk, O gold Hawk, O mighty Brother,
look, Open your eyes, my friend just long enough for Father
Nitschmann to speak magic to you, to sprinkle water from the holy
river on your forehead, to mark you with the magic of the
cross-sign and at last we shall be united in the happy Hunting
grounds, beside the rivers of Paradise, forever."

For Anna did not know what wildness, what madness had
overtaken her. What impulse from some lost, some hidden an-
cestor, struck upward from her kneeling heels to her heart, so
that she rose, as a wilted flower will rise, when its stalk is set
in water. So Anna stood, like a wilted flower, through whose
plucked and transplanted stem, cool water ran. That water
could not be classified into name of town or country, that water
of the River of Life, bore the same resemblance to all river-
water, and from the beginning of time shows its symbol, two lines

30

hidden treasure and who sang like that from deep, deep. It was
what some of the Native Indians (as Eucharist has borne witness) from
far distance, called the Moose-singing, when the voice of David
Christian went deep, deep down into his boots and then rose like
a cloud of deep-purple, fragrant and like a blanket. Shivering in
the swamp, waiting for the crocodile, Andreas the Moor thought of
deep-purple blossoms and a blue butterfly that was bigger and big-
ger and was brushing across his eyes. When he opened his eyes,
he did not see his grandfather but one of the strange Dogs, as
Annunciata called them. And the Dog was biting his foot - well,
better a Dog than a crocodile. The Dog was spitting into the
swamp, and then the Dog laughed, "a draught of hemlock? not yet, my
good Saviour, but all in your good time. In the name of the Father,
the Son and the Holy Ghost -" and though the man was not one of the
Annunciata
good Fathers that had taken away, Andreas (though
he was only, this moment, so baptized) looked up, ashen, into the
face of God.

Brother Christian David, of course, it was plain for anyone to
see, had the face of God. But so far Andreas had not been able,
whispering at his work, his old forgotten bog-and-forest language,
interspersed with bastard Spanish, to tell his sister in the Con-
vent of the Most Sacred Heart above Saint Thomas in the West
Indies, that he had found the Lady.

Martin (our own "familiar") had found the Lady and we might

31

38

venture to say that Fabricius, though no word was spoken of her (other than might be spoken of Sister Rosina or Sister Anna Catherine or Sister Johanna Christina) shared the treasure of that sacred mystery with him. Martin had heard a rumour of this occasion from Sister Rosina, who knew a little Spanish, had gently added, urged, insisted on Andreas telling her what it was that worried him so, muttered as he whispered to himself, while he scraped fish outside the Gemein house kitchen. Andreas the Moor explained politely that he was not, in truth, he was only telling his sister at the Contract of the Sacred Heart. Indies about the Lady. Sister Rosina took council with Brother Christian Seidel who confided in Fabricius, but they agreed with Rosina that it was better, for the moment, not to speak further of this - and Rosina told Andreas that they would keep his secret. The Lady would wish it that way, she said delicately. It was only a whisper, a breath - the Secret remained inviolable, but it was not only the piercing yet kindly eyes of Father Nitschmann that saw clear, in no glass darkly, that Sister Anna Cammerhof might be - might be - happier, less lonely, more one of the choir of married sisters - if - Cammerhof himself had never mentioned the "if" - after that first and last occasion when their hands brushed, like a new Abelard, a new Heloise across a parchment scroll of some curious Mongolian or Tibetan characters that lay on the centre table of the famous von Pahlen-Stamlaus library in Livonia. In fact, Anna von Pahlen had come on the little man by accident; she had wanted to get away - to get away - everyone's eyes were on

32

The Lady would wish it that way ... even as in that
fraction of a fraction of a second before the arrow pierced his
heart, Martin Presser had seen clearly, not only the reconciliation of
EXEK "the gifted Fabricius" and the Jesuit Father, but the
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
reconciliation ... he had no words with which to state it, or
thoughts. He was perhaps beyond thought or thinking when his
message reached us.

They had left him for dead. It was perhaps unseemly that
a Sister, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX skilled though she be and
new
by Amos Comeneus for her work in the dispensary , should have
insisted that the Indian- unbaptized Indian / remain where she
had / led him to her own room.

Andreas, the Moor said that he was dead already.

Brother Amos had gone out XXXXXXX to take his turn in the
Watch of the Continual Devotion .

When he came back, the unbaptized Indian had opened his eyes.

Andreas the Moor said his was not the face of God. But
Andreas the Moor was prejuduced in favour of the Dog who had
spoken majic against crocodiles.

John

Christopher Pyraeus Pyrlaeus was summoned.

Andreas the Moor could not understand any of it and anyhow
now the door was open.

Father Nitschmann said," we must call him by his own name."
That was when Brother John Christopher Pyrlaeus was summoned to
interpret.

Anna was dazed with almost three days fasting and the
long watch. She had seen her Saviour. But the wounds on the
forehead, the naked beautifully modelled torse, the muscular long
legs

5.

especial branch of the peculiar brotherhood.

"So his name was Christian?" "How do you mean, his name was Christian?" "Why, don't you remember, I was wondering what his name was, I was wondering when Mamalie would stop talking, but I did not want to interrupt her to find out what his name was - that is, I suppose this is the carpenter from Moravia who told Count Zinzendorf first about the brotherhood?" "Yes, of course, I thought you knew that." "Well, you see there is Christian this and Christian that, and all that really mattered, all that strictly concerned my part in this strange history, happened - how shall I say? It happened behind a wall - don't you see - when I was so wounded - I believe a 'psychic-wound' is the technical present-day term for that sort of repercussion ... I mean Papa did or did not have concussion of the brain and those evenings and those days, directly after his somewhat mysterious accident, are a blank. To this day, they are a blank, and it was only within comparatively recent years, that I recovered the painful memory of that mysterious accident at all. I mean, all those things Mamalie told me, about Christian this and Christian that, were shelved away with me. I carried them in my mind ... well, it's a sort of miracle, don't you see? that I did so carry them. Those things Mamalie told me and my early impressions of the old-town were like those underground,

33

had been familiar to her, at every street corner
of her native villages; this is that Lord.

Fabricius said his eyes were lamps, he quoted suitable
text, in Latin.

Sister Rosina said that she was sure there was
such occurrence in Acts somewhere, and Egypt, she thought and the
Holy Ghost descending.

Someone murmurwd, "Brother Nicholas Louis could explain it."
again,
Andreas the Moor said he was dead already, he had seen
the Spirit-come-to-fetch- him of his grandfather.

Sister Anna Catherine said it had happened in Silesia, she
had heard from Brother Nathanael Seidel of some such
Spirit descending at the time of baptism of a drunken gypsy.

Brother Martin Mack had hastened to
remark that this was a good Indin. He had been wounded by
Colmnel Armstrong's men at Kittanning, XIXXXWVXXMXRIIXXXK
XMXWXX but he bore them no grudge. It was Martin Mack's
canoe that brought him to the settlement.

Brother John Christopher Prylaeus said the Indian syllables
might be translated lover-of-horses as the word or words the Indian
gave him, as his name, might be translated lover-of-horses.

XXXIV Father Nitschmann said, "in the name of the Father, the Son and
the Holy Ghost, I baptize thee, Philip."

10.

grandfather (his mother's father) and some special crony.
There had been a Secret then, this, at least, Francis Sylvester
had been privileged to acknowledge, but his sacrifice was specific
and personal. In fact, it was that sort of personal gracious-
ness and generosity and courtliness, to which we can hardly apply
so grave a word as sacrifice. How could Brother Francis possibly
approach Sister Elizabeth Caroline, during the days of her danger-
ous illness? How could Francis approach his wife Elizabeth with
reference to a past mental and physical agony which were better,
far better, for her peace of mind, forgotten? But the "knowledge"
in point of fact, did actually exist; its presence was made
specific by a special memorial day in the church, though the
"knowledge" by Mama's day, had boiled down to a date and a few
lines in the list of church anniversaries at the beginning of the
Liturgy and Offices of Worship or as a calender reminder in each
new year's Text Book. The date was September 16, 1741. The
few lines read: *Powerful experience of the fact that Jesus Christ*
*is the Chief Shepherd and Head of His Church.* But the new Text
Books and the old chronicles are both in a sense, singularly
reticent, about just what that "powerful experience" was.

The Secret lay under the heart of Martin Presser. A band
of the Governor of Pennsylvania's new county militia came on the
new body by accident, "in a dense thicket by the 'sand spring',

34.

Father Benedictus of the Society of Jesus could have
quoted, chapter and verse, many instances from which the body of
the圣PATRICK was witnessed in his incorruptability of the
death
that is of the body after the resurrection of the
Holy Saints and Martyrs.

We speak now of Martin Presser.

We know of no mention of anything remarkable about the
finding of his body, noted in the diaries of Martin Mack, the one
or the chronicles of the Settlement.

We would no longer say what we choose to call the miracle,
from the personal diaries of Martin Mack or the records of the
Brotherhood.

In fact, we would not know of it at all, if it were not for the
official report of the Governor of Pennsylvania's new county
militia, who came across the body.

They found

The body of Martin Presser was found in a dense thicket by the
'sand spring' not scalped but shot in the right side ... the man
lying upon his back with his hands folded."

it had lain
in the open, showed no signs of decay.
the official report continues, though, lying some time

This report concluded, was no doubt due to the fact that the
"sand spring" where the body was found, lying, was no doubt one
of the many as yet unidentified chemical deposits, of which in
while the neighbourhood abounded.

London
Winter 1943

39.

her. Her father was impatient - "the Czar of all the Russians is a married man, my dear Anna and the princelings of England are all bespoken, as far as I learn and Denmark and Sweden" - he went on in a long mock ceremonious and slightly cruel list of Excellencies, that he seemed to indicate, Anna was aspiring for. Anna wanted to be let alone. But they would not leave Anna von Pahlen alone - there was too much to be gained by this last new suggestion from the Emperor of Austria. Anna had run wildly along a corridor that would end, she supposed, somewhere - "the library - they never come in here now," she said to herself, "no one ever even bothers to lock the doors of the one room that contains our most priceless treasures, the parchments and the little dolls that Uncle Stanislaus brought back, to be treasured, he had told Mama's Mama, above all gold and heraldry and even, he had joked, the sacred honour of our name. "What do you mean, Uncle Stanislaus?" Anna had ventured to ask him and he said he would tell her someday more about the papers or the parchments and all about the strange cities with domes and little bells shaking in the wind and ladies with eyes shaped like almonds, with green silk and rose silk and violet and blue silk petticoats and little jacket on little jacket, on on to infinity, like the petals of a flower, all matching or merging, like a great open peony - "How do you know about all the petticoats, Uncle Stanislaus?" And they all laughed and toasted Anna and she sat on Uncle Stanislaus' knee "and a swallow of apricot-brandy - it won't harm the child" - and he danced her on his knee and said, "ah, we'll run