So I went to the master of this great house and asked him if he had any work for me.
At first glance I thought that I knew him. But I couldn’t remember where I had seen him before. He was a gentle master, without a beard, and I thought that I had met him when he had worn a beard, but I couldn’t recall the occasion.
He had a pleasant voice and a kindly glance. When he looked at me I immediately believed that he wished me well, and as his face seemed so familiar to me I felt that he must have also been well acquainted with me.
When he asked whether I would be willing to serve him, I said: ‘Yes, I will, with pleasure.’
Thus I began to serve him and so became one of the thousand tongues with which the newspapers meddle in the world every morning. I soon saw, however, that what my own tongue said was not only different from what the other tongues said but that all our thousand tongues were contradicting one another and that even this contradiction was no immutable law, as at one moment our tongues agreed, while at another they accused one another of lying, and this changed from moment to moment.
Many tongues repeated what mine had said but repeated it differently and in such a way that we were both wrong. I no longer knew if I had spoken truth or falsehood or whether the others were right or wrong, and when I realized that the world hears all our thousand tongues at the same time then I understood that it is entirely impossible for the world to recognize the voice of truth even if it should one day be heard.
But if I was one of the thousand confusing tongues that made the voice of truth unrecognizable then I was also guilty of confusing the world. And I realized that I had entered into the service of the Antichrist, who sat in this great publishing house as a gentle Master of a Thousand Tongues and smiled with kind eyes. And sometimes, so that his very gentleness might not betray him, he pretended to be furious. This, too, brought him profit, for when he let his anger subside and began to smile again, so that those who were under his command could once more exhale, their fears quieted, he appeared to them to be even more gentle, agreeable, good and honourable than before — and so they praised and esteemed him beyond measure, regarding themselves lucky that they came to be in his service and not in anyone else’s.
When I grew to suspect that I was serving the Antichrist I decided one day to leave his employment. I went to him and told him that I’d had enough of his job and that he must likewise have had enough of my services.
He smiled and took from his pocket a gold cigarette case, asked me to take a seat and told me to have a smoke.
Then I remembered him — I did know him. How often he had already given me cigarettes!
And to make sure that I was not mistaken, I said to him: ‘Sir, I’ve often thought that we’ve met before, and it seems to me that this isn’t the first time that you’ve offered me a cigarette!’
‘I wish,’ he replied, ‘that we really had known each other for a long time, because I like you. I have no intention of releasing you from my service. I have chosen you for a number of important assignments. You are to get to know the world and describe it for me. I am sending you to a foreign land. A revolution is going on. A true hell seems to have broken out there, and because you have an eye for this hell, you will go there.’
‘You have a better eye yourself!’ I said.
‘No,’ said he, ‘I will first learn of hell only after my death. However, let us forget the various departments of the next world so long as I live. I shall give you money and you will go, and you will report to me everything that you have seen.’
Since I was now driven by curiosity as I had previously been driven by vanity, I took the money and went to the country in which hell had broken out.
I wrote from there about everything that I saw. And I saw much.
I lived in one of the great houses that are called hotels. The Hotel Excelsior was its name, so clearly it was a greatly important hotel. I had money.
Across from my windows stood an old, venerable church, and from my elevated vantage point I could see directly into the belfry of this church.
At a time when cannon were being fired in the town against those of its inhabitants who were deemed rebels, I heard the bells tolling loudly, and I watched from my window as the heavy bells swung.
So I went into the church and asked the sexton, who was pulling the ropes, why and for what purpose he was ringing the bells.
‘The minister gave me the order,’ said the sexton.
I went to the minister, who was sitting in his room reading the Bible.
It was already night-time. On the priest’s table a lamp was burning under a green shade. I heard the booming of the bells near by and the cannon thundering in the distance.
He was a gentle man, the minister. He had a smooth face, kindly eyes and a pleasant voice.
‘I can’t hear the sound of the cannon,’ he told me. ‘I’ve ordered that the bells are to be rung whenever they begin to fire the cannon.’
‘Your Reverence,’ said I, ‘are you perhaps the brother of my master, who has sent me here? For I believe that he would have acted the same way as you!’
‘No,’ said the minister, ‘I don’t know your master.’
And he began once more to read the Bible.
I remained in the service of the master who ruled over the thousand-tongued messengers, whose tongues themselves manufactured the news. And he sent me here and there in many directions wherever anything happened and there was unrest. There was unrest everywhere in the world.
THE PLACE OF PEACE
From now on, his love is to be found wherever culture and books rule; no longer does he divide the cosmos by countries, rivers, and seas, no longer according to race and class; he recognizes only two classes now: the aristocracy of learning and the mind as the upper world and the plebs and barbarism as the lower.
But I also came to a peaceful place in a peaceful town. Here delegates from all the restless nations in all the restless parts of the world had convened to consider in what way the tranquillity of the world might be restored. That is to say, they did not mean the actual tranquillity of the world but the state of unrest that ruled the world, which seemed to them to be a state of peace and tranquillity. These delegates of the various peoples did not wish to bring real peace into the world but, rather, to make the conflict that dominated the world feel so natural that the world would begin to believe it was actual peace. This demonstrated to me that their minds were truly confused. The Antichrist had so confused their minds that they mistook conflict for peace and strove to consolidate it. They resembled doctors who cannot let a terminally ill man die because law and conscience forbid them to do so, and they persuade the sick man that, because he hasn’t died, he must therefore be healthy. The world, however, is like a sick man who imagines he must be healthy because he is being kept alive. And the place of which I am speaking, peaceful although it was, none the less resembled a battlefield, namely one on which doctors are battling death, and I could smell the same odour that arises at medical consultations, for I was actually standing at the sickbed of a terminally ill world that could not be allowed to die. There was a stench of camphor and iodoform, and just as real doctors speak in Latin so did these doctors of the world, and the sick patient could understand only every tenth word of what they said.
I came to this peaceful place upon the instruction of my employer, the Master of a Thousand Tongues, and as I could understand Latin I knew what the doctors were talking about. I was prepared to report everything I had heard and understood, and so I wrote it down and sent it to my employer. But he then took one of the numerous red, blue and green pencils that lay on his desk not so he might write with them but only that he could strike with them, and he thus struck out all the truths from my reports so that the world didn’t learn it was terminally ill and was simply not being allowed to die. And thus he acted like the anxious relative of a deathly ill patient. The terminally ill patient is not told that he is dying. He might in that case die sooner, and it would be claimed that the doctors were incompetent.