Hammer and Anvil Part 35

"I have only been waiting for your orders."

"And now you have them; and I will see to their prompt execution myself."

He took my arm and hurried me so rapidly away, that I had hardly time to bid the company good-night. His ire had not evaporated: he snorted, he grunted, he clicked with his tongue, and growled at intervals: "The scamp--the scamp--the scamp!"

"You seem to have no very high opinion of our chaplain," I said.

"Don't you grow ironical, young man!" said the doctor, looking up at me. "High opinion! high fiddlesticks! How can there be but one opinion of such a fellow?"

"Yet the superintendent is always friendly to him."

"Because he is friendly to every one; and besides it does not occur to him that this is not a man but a snake. Yes, that is easy enough to do, when other honest folks are left to do the rudeness."

"That is no great trouble for you, doctor."

"Young man, I say, do not exasperate me. I tell you the thing is no trifling matter; for if I cannot drive the fellow away, he will sooner or later oust us all, and his kind friend the superintendent, the very first. He has done you an ill turn already."

"Me?"

"Yes, you, the superintendent, myself. He would like well to kill three birds with one stone."

"Tell me about it, doctor, I beg you."

"I would tell you without your asking. Sit down in your easy-chair and make yourself comfortable: it is likely to be the last time you will sit in it."

We had reached my room; the doctor pushed me into the easy-chair, while he stood before me--sometimes on one leg, sometimes on the other, but rarely on both at once--and spoke as follows:

"The case is simple, and therefore plain. To this pietistic, aristocratic, beggarly mawworm, who has had himself appointed prison-chaplain to let the light of his Christian humility s.h.i.+ne before men, the humanitarian superintendent and the materialist doctor are an abomination. To a fellow like that, humanity is a democratic weakness, and matter he does not respect, unless it is eatable. With the deceased pastor Michaelis, a man of the good old rationalistic school, we lived as if we were in paradise; he and Herr von Zehren, or rather Herr von Zehren and he, in the twenty years that they worked together, made the establishment what it is; that is, a model, in every sense of the word; and during the five years that I have been here I have done all in my power to imbue myself with the spirit of these men, and I believe that I have indifferently well succeeded. Now for this half year, since Michaelis is dead, and this pietistic snake has wormed himself into our paradise, our peace has gone to the deuce; the snake crawls into every corner, and leaves the track of his slimy nature wherever he goes. The officers are demoralized, the prisoners mutinous. Such a plot as that which Cat-Kaspar hatched--thank heaven we are rid of the rascal; he is transferred to-day to N., where he ought to have been sent at first--would formerly have been impossible. Cat-Kaspar was a pet of Mr.

Chaplain, who saw in him a precious, though not over-cleanly vessel, whose purification was his allotted task; and he begged the scoundrel out of the solitary confinement in which the superintendent had judiciously placed him. So it goes on; divine wors.h.i.+p _publice_, prayers _privatim_, soul-saving exhortations _privatissime_. The Judas intrigues against us wherever and whenever he can, flatters the superintendent to his face, swallows down my rudeness, and thinks, 'I shall have you both soon,' like the owl when he heard the two bulfinches singing round the corner. And he thinks he has us by the wings already. You know, the president of the council, who is just such another mawworm, is his uncle, and uncle and nephew are hand and glove.

The president, who is the superintendent's immediate superior, would have removed him long ago, if Minister von Altenberg, one of the last pillars left standing from the good old times, and Herr von Zehren's friend and patron, did not support him, though with but a feeble arm, it is true; for Altenberg is advanced in years, in ill health, and may die any day. In the meantime they work as they can, and collect materials to be water to the mill of the next excellency. And now listen: a.s.sessor Lerch, my good friend, was with the president yesterday. 'My dear Lerch,' said the president, 'you perhaps can give me some information. There is another complaint against Superintendent von Zehren.' 'Another, Herr President?' asked Lerch. 'Unhappily, another. I have hitherto taken no action in these matters, though I have not disregarded them; but this case is so flagrant that I must take it in hand and report it to his excellency. Only think, my dear Lerch, Von Zehren has been guilty of the--folly, I will call it, of allowing the young man who gained such an unhappy notoriety in connection with the smuggling case in Uselin----' and now it all comes out that the superintendent, immediately after the catastrophe--out of which the denouncer had spun a pretty story, you may suppose--did not send you to the mouldy old infirmary, where you would infallibly have died, but took you into his own house, kept you here, and still keeps you, though you have been a convalescent for three weeks now; that he a.s.sociates with you as with his equal; that he has brought you into his family, and indeed made you a member of it, so to speak. Why need I go into all the particulars? hm, hm, hm!"

The doctor had crowed up to the very highest note of his upper register, and had to grunt at least two octaves lower to obtain his usual satisfactory rea.s.surance.

"And you really hold that man as the denouncer?" I cried, angrily springing from my chair.

"I know it. Would I otherwise have been so rude today?"

I could not help laughing. As if growler needed any special provocation before he made free with the calves of an intrusive clodhopper! But the affair had a serious side. The thought that Herr von Zehren, to whom I owed such limitless grat.i.tude, whom I so revered, should through me be brought into so unpleasant a position, was intolerable.

"Advise me, help me, doctor!" I besought him earnestly.

"Yes, advise, help--when I always told you that this state of things could not go on. However, you are so far right: the thing must be helped. And in truth there is but one expedient. We must be beforehand with the viper, and so for this time we shall draw his fangs. I know the superintendent. If he had an idea that they wished to take you from him, he would let his hand be hewn off before he would give you up. Now this evening do you complain of headache, and again to-morrow evening at the same time. Your room is on the ground-floor; at this moment there is not another vacant. Intermittent--quinine--a higher, more airy apartment--day after to-morrow you will be back in your old cell. Let me manage it."

So I let Doctor Willibrod Snellius manage it; and two days later I was sleeping, if not under lock and bolt, at least behind the iron gratings of my old cell.

CHAPTER VI.

I stood behind these iron gratings on the following morning, and looked sadly out of the window. Strangely enough, I had not thought the evening before that these gratings could produce any unpleasant sensations in me now, and yet such was the case. They served as a grave reminder to me of what lately I had almost forgotten, that I was, after all, a prisoner. "It makes no difference," the superintendent said, when I took leave of him, and all had vied to make a family festival of the last day that I was to spend under their roof; but be that as it might, there _was_ a difference. My breakfast was not now as appetizing as it had been when I sat at it under the high trees of the quiet garden with Frau von Zehren and Paula; and even though I could go, if I chose, into the garden, which seemed to give me a friendly greeting, I must after a certain time return here again.

I looked around the cell, and now first remarked what pains they had taken to make me forget where I was. There was the picture of the Sistine Madonna with the child, which I had grown to love so during my illness, and which was hung opposite my bed, just as it had hung in Paula's room. There stood upon the bureau the same two terra-cotta vases, and in each a couple of fresh roses. There was the easy-chair in which Dr. Snellius had falsely predicted that I had sat for the last time, and over the back hung a cover of crotchet-work on which I had seen Paula engaged the previous evening. There hung the same _etagere_ with the same neatly-bound books; Goethe's _Faust_, Schiller's and Lessing's works, which Paula had so often urgently recommended me to read, and into which I had as yet hardly looked. They had done all they could to make my prison as endurable, as pleasant as possible; but did not the very pains they took show that it was a prison, and that the episode of my apparent freedom was at an end. Yes, they had been kind, inexpressibly kind to me, under the friendly smiling mask of Samaritan compa.s.sion to one sick unto death--a mask that must be laid aside, as soon as a Pharisee pa.s.sed that way and looked askance upon the moving sight. No, no; I was and remained a prisoner, whether my chains were decked with roses or not.

Why had I not been able to break these chains? True, as I had begun, it was impossible; but why did I begin so clumsily? Why did I not keep to myself, calmly trusting in my own strength and my own craft, and in some lucky chance that must have offered sooner or later? Now, as things had happened, after I had incurred such a debt of grat.i.tude to these people, after I had grown so attached to them, I was twice and thrice a prisoner. For the tempting pottage of friends.h.i.+p and love, I had bartered the first inalienable birthright of man, which is the very breath of his soul--the right of liberty. Seven years! Seven long, long years!

I strode up and down my cell. For the first time since my sickness I felt something of my former strength; it was but a remnant, but enough to bring back a part of my old roving humor, of my old restlessness.

How would it be then when I felt myself all that I had ever been? Would it not, combined with the knowledge that nothing held me but my own will, drive me to frenzy? Would it not have been better if they had left me in my old slavery, with the dream that some day I should be able to break their bonds, even if this dream was never verified?

"Here is a young man who wants to speak with us," announced the sergeant. Since my sickness when "we" had come through so much together, he frequently used in speaking to me the same plural which he employed with all who, in his opinion, had acquired an entire claim on his honest heart; for example, the superintendent and all his family, including the doctor, and now myself.

"What sort of a man!" I asked, while a joyous s.h.i.+ver ran through me. As long as I had been in confinement this was the first time that any one had come to see me; and somehow I connected the extraordinary event of a visitor with the thoughts that had been pa.s.sing through my mind.

"Looks like a sailor," answered the sergeant. "Says he has news of our dead brother."

This sounded extremely improbable. My brother Fritz had been dead for five years; he had fallen from the foreyard overboard one stormy night, and was drowned. The s.h.i.+p had returned in safety; there was no mystery of any sort connected with his death; and if any one now brought me intelligence of his end, there must be some other purpose involved with it.

"Can I speak with him, Sussmilch?" I asked, in the most indifferent tone I could a.s.sume, while my heart seemed to rise in my throat.

"We can speak to whom we like."

"Then let him in; and, Sussmilch, if he is a sailor he would like a gla.s.s of something; perhaps you could get me something of the kind?"

What superfluous trouble a man with an evil conscience gives himself and others! I must needs lie, always a trial to me, to get the old man out of the way; and the honest Sussmilch, who had not a thought of being present at my interview with the stranger, had to go down two flights of stairs into the cellar.

"But we mustn't touch a drop ourselves," said the old man, warningly.

"Have no fear."

He went, after first introducing the visitor--a broad-shouldered deeply-bronzed man in sailor dress who was an entire stranger to me.

CHAPTER VII.

I gazed in mute astonishment at the stranger, whose looks and manner were, to use the mildest expression, very singular; but was really frightened when he, so soon as the door had closed behind the sergeant, without a word and with the haste of a man completely out of his senses, but still with the dexterity of a clown in a circus, began to tear off his clothes, and to my utter amazement appeared in precisely the same dress as that which now lay in its various elements at his feet, while a triumphant smile disclosed two rows of the whitest teeth in the world.

"Klaus!" I exclaimed, in joyous amazement.

The white teeth were now visible to the very last grinder. He seized both my extended hands, but remembered at once that such friendly manifestations did not belong to his part, and hurriedly whispered:

"Into them, quick! They will fit--folds will open out of themselves--only quick before he comes back!"

"And you, Klaus?"

"I stay here."