The Mysterious Stranger
ESELDORF WAS A PARADISE FOR US BOYS
THE
Mysterious Stranger
A ROMANCE
BY
MARK TWAIN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
N. C. WYETH
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Mysterious Stranger
Copyright, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published October, 1916
Illustrations
| Eseldorf was a Paradise for Us Boys |
Frontispiece |
| The Lightning Blazed Out Flash upon Flash and Set the Castle on
Fire |
Facing p. 20 |
| On the Fourth Day Comes the Astrologer from His Crumbling Old
Tower |
“38 |
| Marget Was Cheerful by Help of Wilhelm Meidling |
“60 |
| The Astrologer Emptied the Whole of the Bowl into the Bottle |
“74 |
| There Was a Sound of Tramping Outside and the Crowd Came Solemnly
In |
“108 |
| “Life Itself Is Only a Vision, a Dream” |
“148 |
1
The Mysterious Stranger
CHAPTER I
IT was in 1590—winter. Austria was far away from the world, and
asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain
so forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon centuries and
said that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still the Age of
Belief in Austria. But they meant it as a compliment, not a slur, and
it was so taken, and we were all proud of it. I remember it well,
although I was only a boy; and I remember, too, the pleasure it gave me.
Yes, Austria was far from the world, and asleep, and our village was in
the middle of that sleep, being in the middle of Austria. It drowsed
in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude where
news from the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams, and was
infinitely content. At its front flowed the tranquil river, its surface
painted with cloud-forms and the reflections of drifting arks and
stone-boats; behind it rose the woody steeps to2 the base of the lofty
precipice; from the top of the precipice frowned a vast castle, its
long stretch of towers and bastions mailed in vines; beyond the river,
a league to the left, was a tumbled expanse of forest-clothed hills
cloven by winding gorges where the sun never penetrated; and to the
right a precipice overlooked the river, and between it and the hills
just spoken of lay a far-reaching plain dotted with little homesteads
nested among orchards and shade trees.
The whole region for leagues around was the hereditary property of a
prince, whose servants kept the castle always in perfect condition for
occupancy, but neither he nor his family came there oftener than once
in five years. When they came it was as if the lord of the world had
arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and
when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep
which follows an orgy.
Eseldorf was a paradise for us boys. We were not overmuch pestered with
schooling. Mainly we were trained to be good Christians; to revere
the Virgin, the Church, and the saints above everything. Beyond these
matters we were not required to know much; and, in fact, not allowed
to. Knowledge was not good for the common people, and could make them
discontented with the lot which God had appointed for them, and God
would not endure discontentment with His plans. We had two priests. One
of3 them, Father Adolf, was a very zealous and strenuous priest, much
considered.
There may have been better priests, in some ways, than Father Adolf,
but there was never one in our commune who was held in more solemn
and awful respect. This was because he had absolutely no fear of the
Devil. He was the only Christian I have ever known of whom that could
be truly said. People stood in deep dread of him on that account; for
they thought that there must be something supernatural about him, else
he could not be so bold and so confident. All men speak in bitter
disapproval of the Devil, but they do it reverently, not flippantly;
but Father Adolf’s way was very different; he called him by every name
he could lay his tongue to, and it made every one shudder that heard
him; and often he would even speak of him scornfully and scoffingly;
then the people crossed themselves and went quickly out of his
presence, fearing that something fearful might happen.
Father Adolf had actually met Satan face to face more than once, and
defied him. This was known to be so. Father Adolf said it himself. He
never made any secret of it, but spoke it right out. And that he was
speaking true there was proof in at least one instance, for on that
occasion he quarreled with the enemy, and intrepidly threw his bottle
at him; and there, upon the wall of his study, was the ruddy splotch
where it struck and broke.
4
But it was Father Peter, the other priest, that we all loved best and
were sorriest for. Some people charged him with talking around in
conversation that God was all goodness and would find a way to save all
his poor human children. It was a horrible thing to say, but there was
never any absolute proof that Father Peter said it; and it was out of
character for him to say it, too, for he was always good and gentle and
truthful. He wasn’t charged with saying it in the pulpit, where all the
congregation could hear and testify, but only outside, in talk; and it
is easy for enemies to manufacture that. Father Peter had an enemy
and a very powerful one, the astrologer who lived in a tumbled old
tower up the valley, and put in his nights studying the stars. Every
one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so
hard, for there was always a war and generally a famine somewhere. But
he could also read any man’s life through the stars in a big book he
had, and find lost property, and every one in the village except Father
Peter stood in awe of him. Even Father Adolf, who had defied the Devil,
had a wholesome respect for the astrologer when he came through our
village wearing his tall, pointed hat and his long, flowing robe with
stars on it, carrying his big book, and a staff which was known to have
magic power. The bishop himself sometimes listened to the astrologer,
it was said, for, besides studying the stars and prophesying, the
astrologer5 made a great show of piety, which would impress the bishop,
of course.
But Father Peter took no stock in the astrologer. He denounced him
openly as a charlatan—a fraud with no valuable knowledge of any kind,
or powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being,
which naturally made the astrologer hate Father Peter and wish to
ruin him. It was the astrologer, as we all believed, who originated
the story about Father Peter’s shocking remark and carried it to the
bishop. It was said that Father Peter had made the remark to his niece,
Marget, though Marget denied it and implored the bishop to believe
her and spare her old uncle from poverty and disgrace. But the bishop
wouldn’t listen. He suspended Father Peter indefinitely, though he
wouldn’t go so far as to excommunicate him on the evidence of only one
witness; and now Father Peter had been out a couple of years, and our
other priest, Father Adolf, had his flock.
Those had been hard years for the old priest and Marget. They had been
favorites, but of course that changed when they came under the shadow
of the bishop’s frown. Many of their friends fell away entirely, and
the rest became cool and distant. Marget was a lovely girl of eighteen
when the trouble came, and she had the best head in the village, and
the most in it. She taught the harp, and earned all her clothes and
pocket money by her own industry. But6 her scholars fell off one by one
now; she was forgotten when there were dances and parties among the
youth of the village; the young fellows stopped coming to the house,
all except Wilhelm Meidling—and he could have been spared; she and
her uncle were sad and forlorn in their neglect and disgrace, and the
sunshine was gone out of their lives. Matters went worse and worse, all
through the two years. Clothes were wearing out, bread was harder and
harder to get. And now, at last, the very end was come. Solomon Isaacs
had lent all the money he was willing to put on the house, and gave
notice that to-morrow he would foreclose.
THREE of us boys were always together, and had been so from the cradle,
being fond of one another from the beginning, and this affection
deepened as the years went on—Nikolaus Bauman, son of the principal
judge of the local court; Seppi Wohlmeyer, son of the keeper of the
principal inn, the “Golden Stag,” which had a nice garden, with shade
trees reaching down to the riverside, and pleasure boats for hire; and
I was the third—Theodor Fischer, son of the church organist, who was
also leader of the village musicians, teacher of the violin, composer,
tax-collector of the commune, sexton, and in other ways a useful
citizen, and respected by all. We knew the hills and the woods as well
as the birds knew them; for we were always roaming them when we had
leisure—at least, when we were not swimming or boating or fishing, or
playing on the ice or sliding down hill.
And we had the run of the castle park, and very few had that. It was
because we were pets of the oldest serving-man in the castle—Felix
Brandt; and often we went there, nights, to hear him talk about old
times and strange things,8 and to smoke with him (he taught us that)
and to drink coffee; for he had served in the wars, and was at the
siege of Vienna; and there, when the Turks were defeated and driven
away, among the captured things were bags of coffee, and the Turkish
prisoners explained the character of it and how to make a pleasant
drink out of it, and now he always kept coffee by him, to drink himself
and also to astonish the ignorant with. When it stormed he kept us
all night; and while it thundered and lightened outside he told us
about ghosts and horrors of every kind, and of battles and murders and
mutilations, and such things, and made it pleasant and cozy inside; and
he told these things from his own experience largely. He had seen many
ghosts in his time, and witches and enchanters, and once he was lost in
a fierce storm at midnight in the mountains, and by the glare of the
lightning had seen the Wild Huntsman rage on the blast with his specter
dogs chasing after him through the driving cloud-rack. Also he had seen
an incubus once, and several times he had seen the great bat that sucks
the blood from the necks of people while they are asleep, fanning them
softly with its wings and so keeping them drowsy till they die.
He encouraged us not to fear supernatural things, such as ghosts, and
said they did no harm, but only wandered about because they were lonely
and distressed and wanted kindly notice and compassion; and in time we
learned9 not to be afraid, and even went down with him in the night to
the haunted chamber in the dungeons of the castle. The ghost appeared
only once, and it went by very dim to the sight and floated noiseless
through the air, and then disappeared; and we scarcely trembled, he had
taught us so well. He said it came up sometimes in the night and woke
him by passing its clammy hand over his face, but it did him no hurt;
it only wanted sympathy and notice. But the strangest thing was that he
had seen angels—actual angels out of heaven—and had talked with them.
They had no wings, and wore clothes, and talked and looked and acted
just like any natural person, and you would never know them for angels
except for the wonderful things they did which a mortal could not do,
and the way they suddenly disappeared while you were talking with them,
which was also a thing which no mortal could do. And he said they were
pleasant and cheerful, not gloomy and melancholy, like ghosts.
It was after that kind of a talk one May night that we got up next
morning and had a good breakfast with him and then went down and
crossed the bridge and went away up into the hills on the left to
a woody hill-top which was a favorite place of ours, and there we
stretched out on the grass in the shade to rest and smoke and talk over
these strange things, for they were in our minds yet, and impressing
us. But we couldn’t10 smoke, because we had been heedless and left our
flint and steel behind.
Soon there came a youth strolling toward us through the trees, and he
sat down and began to talk in a friendly way, just as if he knew us.
But we did not answer him, for he was a stranger and we were not used
to strangers and were shy of them. He had new and good clothes on, and
was handsome and had a winning face and a pleasant voice, and was easy
and graceful and unembarrassed, not slouchy and awkward and diffident,
like other boys. We wanted to be friendly with him, but didn’t know how
to begin. Then I thought of the pipe, and wondered if it would be taken
as kindly meant if I offered it to him. But I remembered that we had
no fire, so I was sorry and disappointed. But he looked up bright and
pleased, and said:
“Fire? Oh, that is easy; I will furnish it.”
I was so astonished I couldn’t speak; for I had not said anything.
He took the pipe and blew his breath on it, and the tobacco glowed
red, and spirals of blue smoke rose up. We jumped up and were going
to run, for that was natural; and we did run a few steps, although
he was yearningly pleading for us to stay, and giving us his word
that he would not do us any harm, but only wanted to be friends with
us and have company. So we stopped and stood, and wanted to go back,
being full of curiosity and11 wonder, but afraid to venture. He went on
coaxing, in his soft, persuasive way; and when we saw that the pipe did
not blow up and nothing happened, our confidence returned by little and
little, and presently our curiosity got to be stronger than our fear,
and we ventured back—but slowly, and ready to fly at any alarm.
He was bent on putting us at ease, and he had the right art; one could
not remain doubtful and timorous where a person was so earnest and
simple and gentle, and talked so alluringly as he did; no, he won us
over, and it was not long before we were content and comfortable and
chatty, and glad we had found this new friend. When the feeling of
constraint was all gone we asked him how he had learned to do that
strange thing, and he said he hadn’t learned it at all; it came natural
to him—like other things—other curious things.
“What ones?”
“Oh, a number; I don’t know how many.”
“Will you let us see you do them?”
“Do—please!” the others said.
“You won’t run away again?”
“No—indeed we won’t. Please do. Won’t you?”
“Yes, with pleasure; but you mustn’t forget your promise, you know.”
We said we wouldn’t, and he went to a puddle and came back with water
in a cup which he had made out of a leaf,12 and blew upon it and
threw it out, and it was a lump of ice the shape of the cup. We were
astonished and charmed, but not afraid any more; we were very glad to
be there, and asked him to go on and do some more things. And he did.
He said he would give us any kind of fruit we liked, whether it was in
season or not. We all spoke at once:
“Orange!”
“Apple!”
“Grapes!”
“They are in your pockets,” he said, and it was true. And they were of
the best, too, and we ate them and wished we had more, though none of
us said so.
“You will find them where those came from,” he said, “and everything
else your appetites call for; and you need not name the thing you wish;
as long as I am with you, you have only to wish and find.”
And he said true. There was never anything so wonderful and so
interesting. Bread, cakes, sweets, nuts—whatever one wanted, it was
there. He ate nothing himself, but sat and chatted, and did one curious
thing after another to amuse us. He made a tiny toy squirrel out of
clay, and it ran up a tree and sat on a limb overhead and barked down
at us. Then he made a dog that was not much larger than a mouse, and it
treed the squirrel and danced about the tree, excited and barking, and
was as alive as any dog13 could be. It frightened the squirrel from tree
to tree and followed it up until both were out of sight in the forest.
He made birds out of clay and set them free, and they flew away,
singing.
At last I made bold to ask him to tell us who he was.
“An angel,” he said, quite simply, and set another bird free and
clapped his hands and made it fly away.
A kind of awe fell upon us when we heard him say that, and we were
afraid again; but he said we need not be troubled, there was no
occasion for us to be afraid of an angel, and he liked us, anyway.
He went on chatting as simply and unaffectedly as ever; and while he
talked he made a crowd of little men and women the size of your finger,
and they went diligently to work and cleared and leveled off a space
a couple of yards square in the grass and began to build a cunning
little castle in it, the women mixing the mortar and carrying it up
the scaffoldings in pails on their heads, just as our work-women have
always done, and the men laying the courses of masonry—five hundred
of these toy people swarming briskly about and working diligently and
wiping the sweat off their faces as natural as life. In the absorbing
interest of watching those five hundred little people make the castle
grow step by step and course by course, and take shape and symmetry,
that feeling and awe soon passed away and we were quite comfortable and
at home again. We asked if we might14 make some people, and he said yes,
and told Seppi to make some cannon for the walls, and told Nikolaus to
make some halberdiers, with breastplates and greaves and helmets, and
I was to make some cavalry, with horses, and in allotting these tasks
he called us by our names, but did not say how he knew them. Then Seppi
asked him what his own name was, and he said, tranquilly, “Satan,” and
held out a chip and caught a little woman on it who was falling from
the scaffolding and put her back where she belonged, and said, “She is
an idiot to step backward like that and not notice what she is about.”
It caught us suddenly, that name did, and our work dropped out of our
hands and broke to pieces—a cannon, a halberdier, and a horse. Satan
laughed, and asked what was the matter. I said, “Nothing, only it
seemed a strange name for an angel.” He asked why.
“Because it’s—it’s—well, it’s his name, you know.”
“Yes—he is my uncle.”
He said it placidly, but it took our breath for a moment and made our
hearts beat. He did not seem to notice that, but mended our halberdiers
and things with a touch, handing them to us finished, and said, “Don’t
you remember?—he was an angel himself, once.”
“Yes—it’s true,” said Seppi; “I didn’t think of that.”
“Before the Fall he was blameless.”
“Yes,” said Nikolaus, “he was without sin.”
15
“It is a good family—ours,” said Satan; “there is not a better. He is
the only member of it that has ever sinned.”
I should not be able to make any one understand how exciting it all
was. You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when
you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that
it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how
you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you
wouldn’t be anywhere but there, not for the world. I was bursting to
ask one question—I had it on my tongue’s end and could hardly hold it
back—but I was ashamed to ask it; it might be a rudeness. Satan set an
ox down that he had been making, and smiled up at me and said:
“It wouldn’t be a rudeness, and I should forgive it if it was. Have I
seen him? Millions of times. From the time that I was a little child a
thousand years old I was his second favorite among the nursery angels
of our blood and lineage—to use a human phrase—yes, from that time
until the Fall, eight thousand years, measured as you count time.”
“Eight—thousand!”
“Yes.” He turned to Seppi, and went on as if answering something that
was in Seppi’s mind: “Why, naturally I look like a boy, for that
is what I am. With us what you call time is a spacious thing; it
takes a long stretch of it to grow an angel to full age.” There was
a question in16 my mind, and he turned to me and answered it, “I am
sixteen thousand years old—counting as you count.” Then he turned to
Nikolaus and said: “No, the Fall did not affect me nor the rest of the
relationship. It was only he that I was named for who ate of the fruit
of the tree and then beguiled the man and the woman with it. We others
are still ignorant of sin; we are not able to commit it; we are without
blemish, and shall abide in that estate always. We—” Two of the little
workmen were quarreling, and in buzzing little bumblebee voices they
were cursing and swearing at each other; now came blows and blood; then
they locked themselves together in a life-and-death struggle. Satan
reached out his hand and crushed the life out of them with his fingers,
threw them away, wiped the red from his fingers on his handkerchief,
and went on talking where he had left off: “We cannot do wrong; neither
have we any disposition to do it, for we do not know what it is.”
It seemed a strange speech, in the circumstances, but we barely
noticed that, we were so shocked and grieved at the wanton murder he
had committed—for murder it was, that was its true name, and it was
without palliation or excuse, for the men had not wronged him in any
way. It made us miserable, for we loved him, and had thought him so
noble and so beautiful and gracious, and had honestly believed he was
an angel; and to have him do this cruel thing—ah, it lowered him so,
and we had had such17 pride in him. He went right on talking, just as if
nothing had happened, telling about his travels, and the interesting
things he had seen in the big worlds of our solar system and of other
solar systems far away in the remotenesses of space, and about the
customs of the immortals that inhabit them, somehow fascinating us,
enchanting us, charming us in spite of the pitiful scene that was now
under our eyes, for the wives of the little dead men had found the
crushed and shapeless bodies and were crying over them, and sobbing
and lamenting, and a priest was kneeling there with his hands crossed
upon his breast, praying; and crowds and crowds of pitying friends
were massed about them, reverently uncovered, with their bare heads
bowed, and many with the tears running down—a scene which Satan paid
no attention to until the small noise of the weeping and praying began
to annoy him, then he reached out and took the heavy board seat
out of our swing and brought it down and mashed all those people into
the earth just as if they had been flies, and went on talking just the
same.
An angel, and kill a priest! An angel who did not know how to do wrong,
and yet destroys in cold blood hundreds of helpless poor men and women
who had never done him any harm! It made us sick to see that awful
deed, and to think that none of those poor creatures was prepared
except the priest, for none of them had ever heard a mass or seen a
church. And we were witnesses; we had seen18 these murders done and it
was our duty to tell, and let the law take its course.
But he went on talking right along, and worked his enchantments upon us
again with that fatal music of his voice. He made us forget everything;
we could only listen to him, and love him, and be his slaves, to do
with us as he would. He made us drunk with the joy of being with him,
and of looking into the heaven of his eyes, and of feeling the ecstasy
that thrilled along our veins from the touch of his hand.
THE Stranger had seen everything, he had been everywhere, he knew
everything, and he forgot nothing. What another must study, he learned
at a glance; there were no difficulties for him. And he made things
live before you when he told about them. He saw the world made; he saw
Adam created; he saw Samson surge against the pillars and bring the
temple down in ruins about him; he saw Cæsar’s death; he told of the
daily life in heaven; he had seen the damned writhing in the red waves
of hell; and he made us see all these things, and it was as if we were
on the spot and looking at them with our own eyes. And we felt them,
too, but there was no sign that they were anything to him beyond mere
entertainments. Those visions of hell, those poor babes and women and
girls and lads and men shrieking and supplicating in anguish—why, we
could hardly bear it, but he was as bland about it as if it had been so
many imitation rats in an artificial fire.
And always when he was talking about men and women here on the earth
and their doings—even their grandest and sublimest—we were secretly
ashamed, for his manner20 showed that to him they and their doings were
of paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about
flies, if you didn’t know. Once he even said, in so many words, that
our people down here were quite interesting to him, notwithstanding
they were so dull and ignorant and trivial and conceited, and so
diseased and rickety, and such a shabby, poor, worthless lot all
around. He said it in a quite matter-of-course way and without
bitterness, just as a person might talk about bricks or manure or any
other thing that was of no consequence and hadn’t feelings. I could see
he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good
manners.
“Manners!” he said. “Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good
manners; manners are a fiction. The castle is done. Do you like it?”
THE LIGHTNING BLAZED OUT FLASH UPON FLASH AND SET THE
CASTLE ON FIRE
Any one would have been obliged to like it. It was lovely to look
at, it was so shapely and fine, and so cunningly perfect in all
its particulars, even to the little flags waving from the turrets.
Satan said we must put the artillery in place now, and station the
halberdiers and display the cavalry. Our men and horses were a
spectacle to see, they were so little like what they were intended
for; for, of course, we had no art in making such things. Satan said
they were the worst he had seen; and when he touched them and made
them alive, it was just ridiculous the way they acted, on account of
their legs not being of uniform21 lengths. They reeled and sprawled
around as if they were drunk, and endangered everybody’s lives around
them, and finally fell over and lay helpless and kicking. It made us
all laugh, though it was a shameful thing to see. The guns were charged
with dirt, to fire a salute, but they were so crooked and so badly
made that they all burst when they went off, and killed some of the
gunners and crippled the others. Satan said we would have a storm now,
and an earthquake, if we liked, but we must stand off a piece, out of
danger. We wanted to call the people away, too, but he said never mind
them; they were of no consequence, and we could make more, some time or
other, if we needed them.
A small storm-cloud began to settle down black over the castle, and
the miniature lightning and thunder began to play, and the ground to
quiver, and the wind to pipe and wheeze, and the rain to fall, and all
the people flocked into the castle for shelter. The cloud settled down
blacker and blacker, and one could see the castle only dimly through
it; the lightning blazed out flash upon flash and pierced the castle
and set it on fire, and the flames shone out red and fierce through the
cloud, and the people came flying out, shrieking, but Satan brushed
them back, paying no attention to our begging and crying and imploring;
and in the midst of the howling of the wind and volleying of the
thunder the magazine blew up, the earthquake rent22 the ground wide, and
the castle’s wreck and ruin tumbled into the chasm, which swallowed it
from sight and closed upon it, with all that innocent life, not one of
the five hundred poor creatures escaping. Our hearts were broken; we
could not keep from crying.
“Don’t cry,” Satan said; “they were of no value.”
“But they are gone to hell!”
“Oh, it is no matter; we can make plenty more.”
It was of no use to try to move him; evidently he was wholly without
feelings, and could not understand. He was full of bubbling spirits,
and as gay as if this were a wedding instead of a fiendish massacre.
And he was bent on making us feel as he did, and of course his magic
accomplished his desire. It was no trouble to him; he did whatever he
pleased with us. In a little while we were dancing on that grave, and
he was playing to us on a strange, sweet instrument which he took out
of his pocket; and the music—but there is no music like that, unless
perhaps in heaven, and that was where he brought it from, he said. It
made one mad, for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him,
and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and their
dumb speech was worship. He brought the dance from heaven, too, and the
bliss of paradise was in it.
Presently he said he must go away on an errand. But we could not bear
the thought of it, and clung to him,23 and pleaded with him to stay;
and that pleased him, and he said so, and said he would not go yet,
but would wait a little while and we would sit down and talk a few
minutes longer; and he told us Satan was only his real name, and he
was to be known by it to us alone, but he had chosen another one to be
called by in the presence of others; just a common one, such as people
have—Philip Traum.
It sounded so odd and mean for such a being! But it was his decision,
and we said nothing; his decision was sufficient.
We had seen wonders this day; and my thoughts began to run on the
pleasure it would be to tell them when I got home, but he noticed those
thoughts, and said:
“No, all these matters are a secret among us four. I do not mind your
trying to tell them, if you like, but I will protect your tongues, and
nothing of the secret will escape from them.”
It was a disappointment, but it couldn’t be helped, and it cost us a
sigh or two. We talked pleasantly along, and he was always reading our
thoughts and responding to them, and it seemed to me that this was the
most wonderful of all the things he did, but he interrupted my musings
and said:
“No, it would be wonderful for you, but it is not wonderful for me. I
am not limited like you. I am not subject to human conditions. I can
measure and understand24 your human weaknesses, for I have studied them;
but I have none of them. My flesh is not real, although it would seem
firm to your touch; my clothes are not real; I am a spirit. Father
Peter is
coming.” We looked around, but did not see any one. “He is
not in sight yet, but you will see him presently.”
“Do you know him, Satan?”
“No.”
“Won’t you talk with him when he comes? He is not ignorant and dull,
like us, and he would so like to talk with you. Will you?”
“Another time, yes, but not now. I must go on my errand after a little.
There he is now; you can see him. Sit still, and don’t say anything.”
We looked up and saw Father Peter approaching through the chestnuts.
We three were sitting together in the grass, and Satan sat in front
of us in the path. Father Peter came slowly along with his head down,
thinking, and stopped within a couple of yards of us and took off his
hat and got out his silk handkerchief, and stood there mopping his
face and looking as if he were going to speak to us, but he didn’t.
Presently he muttered, “I can’t think what brought me here; it seems as
if I were in my study a minute ago—but I suppose I have been dreaming
along for an hour and have come all this stretch without noticing; for
I am not myself in these troubled days.” Then25 he went mumbling along
to himself and walked straight through Satan, just as if nothing were
there. It made us catch our breath to see it. We had the impulse to
cry out, the way you nearly always do when a startling thing happens,
but something mysteriously restrained us and we remained quiet, only
breathing fast. Then the trees hid Father Peter after a little, and
Satan said:
“It is as I told you—I am only a spirit.”
“Yes, one perceives it now,” said Nikolaus, “but we are not spirits. It
is plain he did not see you, but were we invisible, too? He looked at
us, but he didn’t seem to see us.”
“No, none of us was visible to him, for I wished it so.”
It seemed almost too good to be true, that we were actually seeing
these romantic and wonderful things, and that it was not a dream. And
there he sat, looking just like anybody—so natural and simple and
charming, and chatting along again the same as ever, and—well, words
cannot make you understand what we felt. It was an ecstasy; and an
ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music,
and one cannot tell about music so that another person can get the
feeling of it. He was back in the old ages once more now, and making
them live before us. He had seen so much, so much! It was just a
wonder to look at him and try to think how it must seem to have such
experience behind one.
26
But it made you seem sorrowfully trivial, and the creature of a day,
and such a short and paltry day, too. And he didn’t say anything to
raise up your drooping pride—no, not a word. He always spoke of men
in the same old indifferent way—just as one speaks of bricks and
manure-piles and such things; you could see that they were of no
consequence to him, one way or the other. He didn’t mean to hurt us,
you could see that; just as we don’t mean to insult a brick when we
disparage it; a brick’s emotions are nothing to us; it never occurs to
us to think whether it has any or not.
Once when he was bunching the most illustrious kings and conquerors
and poets and prophets and pirates and beggars together—just a
brick-pile—I was shamed into putting in a word for man, and asked
him why he made so much difference between men and himself. He had to
struggle with that a moment; he didn’t seem to understand how I could
ask such a strange question. Then he said:
“The difference between man and me? The difference between a mortal and
an immortal? between a cloud and a spirit?” He picked up a wood-louse
that was creeping along a piece of bark: “What is the difference
between Cæsar and this?”
I said, “One cannot compare things which by their nature and by the
interval between them are not comparable.”
27
“You have answered your own question,” he said. “I will expand it.
Man is made of dirt—I saw him made. I am not made of dirt. Man is
a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is
gone to-morrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the
aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has the Moral Sense. You
understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be difference
enough between us, all by itself.”
He stopped there, as if that settled the matter. I was sorry, for at
that time I had but a dim idea of what the Moral Sense was. I merely
knew that we were proud of having it, and when he talked like that
about it, it wounded me, and I felt as a girl feels who thinks her
dearest finery is being admired and then overhears strangers making fun
of it. For a while we were all silent, and I, for one, was depressed.
Then Satan began to chat again, and soon he was sparkling along in such
a cheerful and vivacious vein that my spirits rose once more. He told
some very cunning things that put us in a gale of laughter; and when he
was telling about the time that Samson tied the torches to the foxes’
tails and set them loose in the Philistines’ corn, and Samson sitting
on the fence slapping his thighs and laughing, with the tears running
down his cheeks, and lost his balance and fell off the fence, the
memory of that picture got him to laughing, too, and we did have a most
lovely and jolly time. By and by he said:
28
“I am going on my errand now.”
“Don’t!” we all said. “Don’t go; stay with us. You won’t come back.”
“Yes, I will; I give you my word.”
“When? To-night? Say when.”
“It won’t be long. You will see.”
“We like you.”
“And I you. And as a proof of it I will show you something fine to see.
Usually when I go I merely vanish; but now I will dissolve myself and
let you see me do it.”
He stood up, and it was quickly finished. He thinned away and thinned
away until he was a soap-bubble, except that he kept his shape. You
could see the bushes through him as clearly as you see things through
a soap-bubble, and all over him played and flashed the delicate
iridescent colors of the bubble, and along with them was that thing
shaped like a window-sash which you always see on the globe of
the bubble. You have seen a bubble strike the carpet and lightly
bound along two or three times before it bursts. He did that. He
sprang—touched the grass—bounded—floated along—touched again—and
so on, and presently exploded—puff! and in his place was vacancy.
It was a strange and beautiful thing to see. We did not say anything,
but sat wondering and dreaming and blinking; and finally Seppi roused
up and said, mournfully sighing:
29
“I suppose none of it has happened.”
Nikolaus sighed and said about the same.
I was miserable to hear them say it, for it was the same cold fear that
was in my own mind. Then we saw poor old Father Peter wandering along
back, with his head bent down, searching the ground. When he was pretty
close to us he looked up and saw us, and said, “How long have you been
here, boys?”
“A little while, Father.”
“Then it is since I came by, and maybe you can help me. Did you come up
by the path?”
“Yes, Father.”
“That is good. I came the same way. I have lost my wallet. There wasn’t
much in it, but a very little is much to me, for it was all I had. I
suppose you haven’t seen anything of it?”
“No, Father, but we will help you hunt.”
“It is what I was going to ask you. Why, here it is!”
We hadn’t noticed it; yet there it lay, right where Satan stood when he
began to melt—if he did melt and it wasn’t a delusion. Father Peter
picked it up and looked very much surprised.
“It is mine,” he said, “but not the contents. This is fat; mine was
flat; mine was light; this is heavy.” He opened it; it was stuffed as
full as it could hold with gold coins. He let us gaze our fill; and of
course we did gaze,30 for we had never seen so much money at one time
before. All our mouths came open to say “Satan did it!” but nothing
came out. There it was, you see—we couldn’t tell what Satan didn’t
want told; he had said so himself.
“Boys, did you do this?”
It made us laugh. And it made him laugh, too, as soon as he thought
what a foolish question it was.
“Who has been here?”
Our mouths came open to answer, but stood so for a moment, because we
couldn’t say “Nobody,” for it wouldn’t be true, and the right word
didn’t seem to come; then I thought of the right one, and said it:
“Not a human being.”
“That is so,” said the others, and let their mouths go shut.
“It is not so,” said Father Peter, and looked at us very severely.
“I came by here a while ago, and there was no one here, but that is
nothing; some one has been here since. I don’t mean to say that the
person didn’t pass here before you came, and I don’t mean to say you
saw him, but some one did pass, that I know. On your honor—you saw no
one?”
“Not a human being.”
“That is sufficient; I know you are telling me the truth.”
He began to count the money on the path, we on our knees eagerly
helping to stack it in little piles.
31
“It’s eleven hundred ducats odd!” he said. “Oh dear! if it were only
mine—and I need it so!” and his voice broke and his lips quivered.
“It is yours, sir!” we all cried out at once, “every heller!”
“No—it isn’t mine. Only four ducats are mine; the rest...!” He fell to
dreaming, poor old soul, and caressing some of the coins in his hands,
and forgot where he was, sitting there on his heels with his old gray
head bare; it was pitiful to see. “No,” he said, waking up, “it isn’t
mine. I can’t account for it. I think some enemy ... it must be a trap.”
Nikolaus said: “Father Peter, with the exception of the astrologer you
haven’t a real enemy in the village—nor Marget, either. And not even a
half-enemy that’s rich enough to chance eleven hundred ducats to do you
a mean turn. I’ll ask you if that’s so or not?”
He couldn’t get around that argument, and it cheered him up. “But it
isn’t mine, you see—it isn’t mine, in any case.”
He said it in a wistful way, like a person that wouldn’t be sorry, but
glad, if anybody would contradict him.
“It is yours, Father Peter, and we are witness to it. Aren’t we, boys?”
“Yes, we are—and we’ll stand by it, too.”
“Bless your hearts, you do almost persuade me; you32 do, indeed. If I
had only a hundred-odd ducats of it! The house is mortgaged for it, and
we’ve no home for our heads if we don’t pay to-morrow. And that four
ducats is all we’ve got in the—”
“It’s yours, every bit of it, and you’ve got to take it—we are bail
that it’s all right. Aren’t we, Theodor? Aren’t we, Seppi?”
We two said yes, and Nikolaus stuffed the money back into the shabby
old wallet and made the owner take it. So he said he would use two
hundred of it, for his house was good enough security for that, and
would put the rest at interest till the rightful owner came for it;
and on our side we must sign a paper showing how he got the money—a
paper to show to the villagers as proof that he had not got out of his
troubles dishonestly.
IT made immense talk next day, when Father Peter paid Solomon Isaacs in
gold and left the rest of the money with him at interest. Also, there
was a pleasant change; many people called at the house to congratulate
him, and a number of cool old friends became kind and friendly again;
and, to top all, Marget was invited to a party.
And there was no mystery; Father Peter told the whole circumstance just
as it happened, and said he could not account for it, only it was the
plain hand of Providence, so far as he could see.
One or two shook their heads and said privately it looked more like the
hand of Satan; and really that seemed a surprisingly good guess for
ignorant people like that. Some came slyly buzzing around and tried
to coax us boys to come out and “tell the truth”; and promised they
wouldn’t ever tell, but only wanted to know for their own satisfaction,
because the whole thing was so curious. They even wanted to buy the
secret, and pay money for it; and if we could have invented something
that would answer—but we couldn’t; we hadn’t the ingenuity, so we had
to let the chance go by, and it was a pity.
34
We carried that secret around without any trouble, but the other one,
the big one, the splendid one, burned the very vitals of us, it was
so hot to get out and we so hot to let it out and astonish people
with it. But we had to keep it in; in fact, it kept itself in. Satan
said it would, and it did. We went off every day and got to ourselves
in the woods so that we could talk about Satan, and really that was
the only subject we thought of or cared anything about; and day and
night we watched for him and hoped he would come, and we got more
and more impatient all the time. We hadn’t any interest in the other
boys any more, and wouldn’t take part in their games and enterprises.
They seemed so tame, after Satan; and their doings so trifling and
commonplace after his adventures in antiquity and the constellations,
and his miracles and meltings and explosions, and all that.
During the first day we were in a state of anxiety on account of one
thing, and we kept going to Father Peter’s house on one pretext or
another to keep track of it. That was the gold coin; we were afraid it
would crumble and turn to dust, like fairy money. If it did—But it
didn’t. At the end of the day no complaint had been made about it, so
after that we were satisfied that it was real gold, and dropped the
anxiety out of our minds.
There was a question which we wanted to ask Father Peter, and finally
we went there the second evening, a35 little diffidently, after drawing
straws, and I asked it as casually as I could, though it did not sound
as casual as I wanted, because I didn’t know how:
“What is the Moral Sense, sir?”
He looked down, surprised, over his great spectacles, and said, “Why,
it is the faculty which enables us to distinguish good from evil.”
It threw some light, but not a glare, and I was a little disappointed,
also to some degree embarrassed. He was waiting for me to go on, so, in
default of anything else to say, I asked, “Is it valuable?”
“Valuable? Heavens! lad, it is the one thing that lifts man above the
beasts that perish and makes him heir to immortality!”
This did not remind me of anything further to say, so I got out, with
the other boys, and we went away with that indefinite sense you have
often had of being filled but not fatted. They wanted me to explain,
but I was tired.
We passed out through the parlor, and there was Marget at the spinnet
teaching Marie Lueger. So one of the deserting pupils was back; and an
influential one, too; the others would follow. Marget jumped up and
ran and thanked us again, with tears in her eyes—this was the third
time—for saving her and her uncle from being turned into the street,
and we told her again we hadn’t done it; but that was her way, she
never could be grateful enough36 for anything a person did for her; so
we let her have her say. And as we passed through the garden, there was
Wilhelm Meidling sitting there waiting, for it was getting toward the
edge of the evening, and he would be asking Marget to take a walk along
the river with him when she was done with the lesson. He was a young
lawyer, and succeeding fairly well and working his way along, little
by little. He was very fond of Marget, and she of him. He had not
deserted along with the others, but had stood his ground all through.
His faithfulness was not lost on Marget and her uncle. He hadn’t so
very much talent, but he was handsome and good, and these are a kind
of talents themselves and help along. He asked us how the lesson was
getting along, and we told him it was about done. And maybe it was so;
we didn’t know anything about it, but we judged it would please him,
and it did, and didn’t cost us anything.
ON the fourth day comes the astrologer from his crumbling old tower up
the valley, where he had heard the news, I reckon. He had a private
talk with us, and we told him what we could, for we were mightily in
dread of him. He sat there studying and studying awhile to himself;
then he asked:
“How many ducats did you say?”
“Eleven hundred and seven, sir.”
Then he said, as if he were talking to himself: “It is ver-y singular.
Yes ... very strange. A curious coincidence.” Then he began to ask
questions, and went over the whole ground from the beginning, we
answering. By and by he said: “Eleven hundred and six ducats. It is a
large sum.”
“Seven,” said Seppi, correcting him.
“Oh, seven, was it? Of course a ducat more or less isn’t of
consequence, but you said eleven hundred and six before.”
It would not have been safe for us to say he was mistaken, but we knew
he was. Nikolaus said, “We ask pardon for the mistake, but we meant to
say seven.”
38
“Oh, it is no matter, lad; it was merely that I noticed the
discrepancy. It is several days, and you cannot be expected to remember
precisely. One is apt to be inexact when there is no particular
circumstance to impress the count upon the memory.”
“But there was one, sir,” said Seppi, eagerly.
“What was it, my son?” asked the astrologer, indifferently.
“First, we all counted the piles of coin, each in turn, and all made
it the same—eleven hundred and six. But I had slipped one out, for
fun, when the count began, and now I slipped it back and said, ‘I think
there is a mistake—there are eleven hundred and seven; let us count
again.’ We did, and of course I was right. They were astonished; then I
told how it came about.”
The astrologer asked us if this was so, and we said it was.
“That settles it,” he said. “I know the thief now. Lads, the money was
stolen.”
ON THE FOURTH DAY COMES THE ASTROLOGER FROM HIS
CRUMBLING OLD TOWER
Then he went away, leaving us very much troubled, and wondering what
he could mean. In about an hour we found out; for by that time it was
all over the village that Father Peter had been arrested for stealing
a great sum of money from the astrologer. Everybody’s tongue was loose
and going. Many said it was not in Father Peter’s character and must be
a mistake; but the others shook their heads and said misery and want
could drive a suffering39 man to almost anything. About one detail
there were no differences; all agreed that Father Peter’s account of
how the money came into his hands was just about unbelievable—it
had such an impossible look. They said it might have come into the
astrologer’s hands in some such way, but into Father Peter’s, never!
Our characters began to suffer now. We were Father Peter’s only
witnesses; how much did he probably pay us to back up his fantastic
tale? People talked that kind of talk to us pretty freely and frankly,
and were full of scoffings when we begged them to believe really we had
told only the truth. Our parents were harder on us than any one else.
Our fathers said we were disgracing our families, and they commanded us
to purge ourselves of our lie, and there was no limit to their anger
when we continued to say we had spoken true. Our mothers cried over us
and begged us to give back our bribe and get back our honest names and
save our families from shame, and come out and honorably confess. And
at last we were so worried and harassed that we tried to tell the whole
thing, Satan and all—but no, it wouldn’t come out. We were hoping
and longing all the time that Satan would come and help us out of our
trouble, but there was no sign of him.
Within an hour after the astrologer’s talk with us, Father Peter was
in prison and the money sealed up and in the hands of the officers of
the law. The money was in40 a bag, and Solomon Isaacs said he had not
touched it since he had counted it; his oath was taken that it was the
same money, and that the amount was eleven hundred and seven ducats.
Father Peter claimed trial by the ecclesiastical court, but our other
priest, Father Adolf, said an ecclesiastical court hadn’t jurisdiction
over a suspended priest. The bishop upheld him. That settled it; the
case would go to trial in the civil court. The court would not sit for
some time to come. Wilhelm Meidling would be Father Peter’s lawyer and
do the best he could, of course, but he told us privately that a weak
case on his side and all the power and prejudice on the other made the
outlook bad.
So Marget’s new happiness died a quick death. No friends came to
condole with her, and none were expected; an unsigned note withdrew her
invitation to the party. There would be no scholars to take lessons.
How could she support herself? She could remain in the house, for the
mortgage was paid off, though the government and not poor Solomon
Isaacs had the mortgage-money in its grip for the present. Old Ursula,
who was cook, chambermaid, housekeeper, laundress, and everything else
for Father Peter, and had been Marget’s nurse in earlier years, said
God would provide. But she said that from habit, for she was a good
Christian. She meant to help in the providing, to make sure, if she
could find a way.
We boys wanted to go and see Marget and show friendliness41 for her, but
our parents were afraid of offending the community and wouldn’t let
us. The astrologer was going around inflaming everybody against Father
Peter, and saying he was an abandoned thief and had stolen eleven
hundred and seven gold ducats from him. He said he knew he was a thief
from that fact, for it was exactly the sum he had lost and which Father
Peter pretended he had “found.”
In the afternoon of the fourth day after the catastrophe old Ursula
appeared at our house and asked for some washing to do, and begged my
mother to keep this secret, to save Marget’s pride, who would stop this
project if she found it out, yet Marget had not enough to eat and was
growing weak. Ursula was growing weak herself, and showed it; and she
ate of the food that was offered her like a starving person, but could
not be persuaded to carry any home, for Marget would not eat charity
food. She took some clothes down to the stream to wash them, but we saw
from the window that handling the bat was too much for her strength; so
she was called back and a trifle of money offered her, which she was
afraid to take lest Marget should suspect; then she took it, saying she
would explain that she found it in the road. To keep it from being a
lie and damning her soul, she got me to drop it while she watched; then
she went along by there and found it, and exclaimed with surprise and
joy, and picked it up and went her way. Like the rest of the village,
she could tell42 every-day lies fast enough and without taking any
precautions against fire and brimstone on their account; but this was a
new kind of lie, and it had a dangerous look because she hadn’t had any
practice in it. After a week’s practice it wouldn’t have given her any
trouble. It is the way we are made.
I was in trouble, for how would Marget live? Ursula could not find a
coin in the road every day—perhaps not even a second one. And I was
ashamed, too, for not having been near Marget, and she so in need of
friends; but that was my parents’ fault, not mine, and I couldn’t help
it.
I was walking along the path, feeling very downhearted, when a most
cheery and tingling freshening-up sensation went rippling through me,
and I was too glad for any words, for I knew by that sign that Satan
was by. I had noticed it before. Next moment he was alongside of me
and I was telling him all my trouble and what had been happening to
Marget and her uncle. While we were talking we turned a curve and saw
old Ursula resting in the shade of a tree, and she had a lean stray
kitten in her lap and was petting it. I asked her where she got it, and
she said it came out of the woods and followed her; and she said it
probably hadn’t any mother or any friends and she was going to take it
home and take care of it. Satan said:
“I understand you are very poor. Why do you want43 to add another mouth
to feed? Why don’t you give it to some rich person?”
Ursula bridled at this and said: “Perhaps you would like to have it.
You must be rich, with your fine clothes and quality airs.” Then she
sniffed and said: “Give it to the rich—the idea! The rich don’t care
for anybody but themselves; it’s only the poor that have feeling for
the poor, and help them. The poor and God. God will provide for this
kitten.”
“What makes you think so?”
Ursula’s eyes snapped with anger. “Because I know it!” she said. “Not a
sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it.”
“But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?”
Old Ursula’s jaws worked, but she could not get any word out for the
moment, she was so horrified. When she got her tongue she stormed out,
“Go about your business, you puppy, or I will take a stick to you!”
I could not speak, I was so scared. I knew that with his notions about
the human race Satan would consider it a matter of no consequence to
strike her dead, there being “plenty more”; but my tongue stood still,
I could give her no warning. But nothing happened; Satan remained
tranquil—tranquil and indifferent. I suppose he could not be insulted
by Ursula any more than the king could be44 insulted by a tumble-bug.
The old woman jumped to her feet when she made her remark, and did it
as briskly as a young girl. It had been many years since she had done
the like of that. That was Satan’s influence; he was a fresh breeze to
the weak and the sick, wherever he came. His presence affected even
the lean kitten, and it skipped to the ground and began to chase a
leaf. This surprised Ursula, and she stood looking at the creature and
nodding her head wonderingly, her anger quite forgotten.
“What’s come over it?” she said. “Awhile ago it could hardly walk.”
“You have not seen a kitten of that breed before,” said Satan.
Ursula was not proposing to be friendly with the mocking stranger, and
she gave him an ungentle look and retorted: “Who asked you to come here
and pester me, I’d like to know? And what do you know about what I’ve
seen and what I haven’t seen?”
“You haven’t seen a kitten with the hair-spines on its tongue pointing
to the front, have you?”
“No—nor you, either.”
“Well, examine this one and see.”
Ursula was become pretty spry, but the kitten was spryer, and she could
not catch it, and had to give it up. Then Satan said:
“Give it a name, and maybe it will come.”
45
Ursula tried several names, but the kitten was not interested.
“Call it Agnes. Try that.”
The creature answered to the name and came. Ursula examined its tongue.
“Upon my word, it’s true!” she said. “I have not seen this kind of a
cat before. Is it yours?”
“No.”
“Then how did you know its name so pat?”
“Because all cats of that breed are named Agnes; they will not answer
to any other.”
Ursula was impressed. “It is the most wonderful thing!” Then a shadow
of trouble came into her face, for her superstitions were aroused, and
she reluctantly put the creature down, saying: “I suppose I must let
it go; I am not afraid—no, not exactly that, though the priest—well,
I’ve heard people—indeed, many people.... And, besides, it is quite
well now and can take care of itself.” She sighed, and turned to
go, murmuring: “It is such a pretty one, too, and would be such
company—and the house is so sad and lonesome these troubled days ...
Miss Marget so mournful and just a shadow, and the old master shut up
in jail.”
“It seems a pity not to keep it,” said Satan.
Ursula turned quickly—just as if she were hoping some one would
encourage her.
“Why?” she asked, wistfully.
“Because this breed brings luck.”
46
“Does it? Is it true? Young man, do you know it to be true? How does it
bring luck?”
“Well, it brings money, anyway.”
Ursula looked disappointed. “Money? A cat bring money? The idea! You
could never sell it here; people do not buy cats here; one can’t even
give them away.” She turned to go.
“I don’t mean sell it. I mean have an income from it. This kind is
called the Lucky Cat. Its owner finds four silver groschen in his
pocket every
morning.”
I saw the indignation rising in the old woman’s face. She was insulted.
This boy was making fun of her. That was her thought. She thrust her
hands into her pockets and straightened up to give him a piece of her
mind. Her temper was all up, and hot. Her mouth came open and let out
three words of a bitter sentence, ... then it fell silent, and the
anger in her face turned to surprise or wonder or fear, or something,
and she slowly brought out her hands from her pockets and opened them
and held them so. In one was my piece of money, in the other lay four
silver groschen.
She gazed a little while, perhaps to see
if the groschen would vanish away; then she said, fervently:
“It’s true—it’s true—and I’m ashamed and beg forgiveness, O dear
master and benefactor!” And she ran to Satan and kissed his hand, over
and over again, according to the Austrian custom.
47
In her heart she probably believed it was a witch-cat and an agent of
the Devil; but no matter, it was all the more certain to be able to
keep its contract and furnish a daily good living for the family, for
in matters of finance even the piousest of our peasants would have more
confidence in an arrangement with the Devil than with an archangel.
Ursula started homeward, with Agnes in her arms, and I said I wished I
had her privilege of seeing Marget.
Then I caught my breath, for we were there. There in the parlor, and
Marget standing looking at us, astonished. She was feeble and pale,
but I knew that those conditions would not last in Satan’s atmosphere,
and it turned out so. I introduced Satan—that is, Philip Traum—and
we sat down and talked. There was no constraint. We were simple folk,
in our village, and when a stranger was a pleasant person we were
soon friends. Marget wondered how we got in without her hearing us.
Traum said the door was open, and we walked in and waited until she
should turn around and greet us. This was not true; no door was open;
we entered through the walls or the roof or down the chimney, or
somehow; but no matter, what Satan wished a person to believe, the
person was sure to believe, and so Marget was quite satisfied with that
explanation. And then the main part of her mind was on Traum, anyway;
she couldn’t keep her eyes off him, he was so beautiful. That gratified
me, and made me proud.48 I hoped he would show off some, but he didn’t.
He seemed only interested in being friendly and telling lies. He said
he was an orphan. That made Marget pity him. The water came into her
eyes. He said he had never known his mamma; she passed away while he
was a young thing; and said his papa was in shattered health, and had
no property to speak of—in fact, none of any earthly value—but he had
an uncle in business down in the tropics, and he was very well off and
had a monopoly, and it was from this uncle that he drew his support.
The very mention of a kind uncle was enough to remind Marget of her
own, and her eyes filled again. She said she hoped their two uncles
would meet, some day. It made me shudder. Philip said he hoped so, too;
and that made me shudder again.
“Maybe they will,” said Marget. “Does your uncle travel much?”
“Oh yes, he goes all about; he has business everywhere.”
And so they went on chatting, and poor Marget forgot her sorrows for
one little while, anyway. It was probably the only really bright and
cheery hour she had known lately. I saw she liked Philip, and I knew
she would. And when he told her he was studying for the ministry I
could see that she liked him better than ever. And then, when he
promised to get her admitted to the jail so that she could see her
uncle, that was the capstone. He said he would give the guards a little
present, and she must49 always go in the evening after dark, and say
nothing, “but just show this paper and pass in, and show it again when
you come out”—and he scribbled some queer marks on the paper and gave
it to her, and she was ever so thankful, and right away was in a fever
for the sun to go down; for in that old, cruel time prisoners were not
allowed to see their friends, and sometimes they spent years in the
jails without ever seeing a friendly face. I judged that the marks on
the paper were an enchantment, and that the guards would not know what
they were doing, nor have any memory of it afterward; and that was
indeed the way of it. Ursula put her head in at the door now and said:
“Supper’s ready, miss.” Then she saw us and looked frightened, and
motioned me to come to her, which I did, and she asked if we had told
about the cat. I said no, and she was relieved, and said please don’t;
for if Miss Marget knew, she would think it was an unholy cat and would
send for a priest and have its gifts all purified out of it, and then
there wouldn’t be any more dividends. So I said we wouldn’t tell, and
she was satisfied. Then I was beginning to say good-by to Marget, but
Satan interrupted and said, ever so politely—well, I don’t remember
just the words, but anyway he as good as invited himself to supper, and
me, too. Of course Marget was miserably embarrassed, for she had no
reason to suppose there would be half enough for a sick bird. Ursula
heard him, and she came straight50 into the room, not a bit pleased. At
first she was astonished to see Marget looking so fresh and rosy, and
said so; then she spoke up in her native tongue, which was Bohemian,
and said—as I learned afterward—“Send him away, Miss Marget; there’s
not victuals enough.”
Before Marget could speak, Satan had the word, and was talking back at
Ursula in her own language—which was a surprise to her, and for her
mistress, too. He said, “Didn’t I see you down the road awhile ago?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah, that pleases me; I see you remember me.” He stepped to her and
whispered: “I told you it is a Lucky Cat. Don’t be troubled; it will
provide.”
That sponged the slate of Ursula’s feelings clean of its anxieties,
and a deep, financial joy shone in her eyes. The cat’s value was
augmenting. It was getting full time for Marget to take some sort of
notice of Satan’s invitation, and she did it in the best way, the
honest way that was natural to her. She said she had little to offer,
but that we were welcome if we would share it with her.
We had supper in the kitchen, and Ursula waited at table. A small fish
was in the frying-pan, crisp and brown and tempting, and one could see
that Marget was not expecting such respectable food as this. Ursula
brought it, and Marget divided it between Satan and me, declining to
take any of it herself; and was beginning to say she did51 not care
for fish to-day, but she did not finish the remark. It was because
she noticed that another fish had appeared in the pan. She looked
surprised, but did not say anything. She probably meant to inquire of
Ursula about this later. There were other surprises: flesh and game and
wines and fruits—things which had been strangers in that house lately;
but Marget made no exclamations, and now even looked unsurprised,
which was Satan’s influence, of course. Satan talked right along, and
was entertaining, and made the time pass pleasantly and cheerfully;
and although he told a good many lies, it was no harm in him, for he
was only an angel and did not know any better. They do not know right
from wrong; I knew this, because I remembered what he had said about
it. He got on the good side of Ursula. He praised her to Marget,
confidentially, but speaking just loud enough for Ursula to hear. He
said she was a fine woman, and he hoped some day to bring her and his
uncle together. Very soon Ursula was mincing and simpering around in
a ridiculous, girly way, and smoothing out her gown and prinking at
herself like a foolish old hen, and all the time pretending she was
not hearing what Satan was saying. I was ashamed, for it showed us to
be what Satan considered us, a silly race and trivial. Satan said his
uncle entertained a great deal, and to have a clever woman presiding
over the festivities would double the attractions of the place.
52
“But your uncle is a gentleman, isn’t he?” asked Marget.
“Yes,” said Satan, indifferently; “some even call him a Prince, out of
compliment, but he is not bigoted; to him personal merit is everything,
rank nothing.”
My hand was hanging down by my chair; Agnes came along and licked it;
by this act a secret was revealed. I started to say, “It is all a
mistake; this is just a common, ordinary cat; the hair-needles on her
tongue point inward, not outward.” But the words did not come, because
they couldn’t. Satan smiled upon me, and I understood.
When it was dark Marget took food and wine and fruit, in a basket,
and hurried away to the jail, and Satan and I walked toward my home.
I was thinking to myself that I should like to see what the inside of
the jail was like; Satan overheard the thought, and the next moment we
were in the jail. We were in the torture-chamber, Satan said. The rack
was there, and the other instruments, and there was a smoky lantern
or two hanging on the walls and helping to make the place look dim
and dreadful. There were people there—and executioners—but as they
took no notice of us, it meant that we were invisible. A young man
lay bound, and Satan said he was suspected of being a heretic, and
the executioners were about to inquire into it. They asked the man
to confess to the charge, and he said he could not, for it was not
true. Then they drove splinter after splinter under his nails, and
he shrieked with53 the pain. Satan was not disturbed, but I could not
endure it, and had to be whisked out of there. I was faint and sick,
but the fresh air revived me, and we walked toward my home. I said it
was a brutal thing.
“No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a
misuse of that word; they have not deserved it,” and he went on talking
like that. “It is like your paltry race—always lying, always claiming
virtues which it hasn’t got, always denying them to the higher animals,
which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing—that is
the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain
he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing
as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting
it—only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A
sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with
liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he
get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he
prefers the wrong. There shouldn’t be any wrong; and without the Moral
Sense there couldn’t be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature
that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to
the bottom layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession. Are
you feeling better? Let me show you something.”
IN a moment we were in a French village. We walked through a great
factory of some sort, where men and women and little children were
toiling in heat and dirt and a fog of dust; and they were clothed in
rags, and drooped at their work, for they were worn and half starved,
and weak and drowsy. Satan said:
“It is some more Moral Sense. The proprietors are rich, and very holy;
but the wage they pay to these poor brothers and sisters of theirs is
only enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger. The work-hours
are fourteen per day, winter and summer—from six in the morning till
eight at night—little children and all. And they walk to and from
the pigsties which they inhabit—four miles each way, through mud and
slush, rain, snow, sleet, and storm, daily, year in and year out. They
get four hours of sleep. They kennel together, three families in a
room, in unimaginable filth and stench; and disease comes, and they die
off like flies. Have they committed a crime, these mangy things? No.
What have they done, that they are punished so? Nothing at all, except
getting55 themselves born into your foolish race. You have seen how
they treat a misdoer there in the jail; now you see how they treat the
innocent and the worthy. Is your race logical? Are these ill-smelling
innocents better off than that heretic? Indeed, no; his punishment is
trivial compared with theirs. They broke him on the wheel and smashed
him to rags and pulp after we left, and he is dead now, and free of
your precious race; but these poor slaves here—why, they have been
dying for years, and some of them will not escape from life for years
to come. It is the Moral Sense which teaches the factory proprietors
the difference between right and wrong—you perceive the result. They
think themselves better than dogs. Ah, you are such an illogical,
unreasoning race! And paltry—oh, unspeakably!”
Then he dropped all seriousness and just overstrained himself
making fun of us, and deriding our pride in our warlike deeds, our
great heroes, our imperishable fames, our mighty kings, our ancient
aristocracies, our venerable history—and laughed and laughed till it
was enough to make a person sick to hear him; and finally he sobered a
little and said, “But, after all, it is not all ridiculous; there is a
sort of pathos about it when one remembers how few are your days, how
childish your pomps, and what shadows you are!”
Presently all things vanished suddenly from my sight,56 and I knew what
it meant. The next moment we were walking along in our village; and
down toward the river I saw the twinkling lights of the Golden Stag.
Then in the dark I heard a joyful cry:
“He’s come again!”
It was Seppi Wohlmeyer. He had felt his blood leap and his spirits
rise in a way that could mean only one thing, and he knew Satan was
near, although it was too dark to see him. He came to us, and we walked
along together, and Seppi poured out his gladness like water. It was
as if he were a lover and had found his sweetheart who had been lost.
Seppi was a smart and animated boy, and had enthusiasm and expression,
and was a contrast to Nikolaus and me. He was full of the last new
mystery, now—the disappearance of Hans Oppert, the village loafer.
People were beginning to be curious about it, he said. He did not say
anxious—curious was the right word, and strong enough. No one had seen
Hans for a couple of days.
“Not since he did that brutal thing, you know,” he said.
“What brutal thing?” It was Satan that asked.
“Well, he is always clubbing his dog, which is a good dog, and his
only friend, and is faithful, and loves him, and does no one any
harm; and two days ago he was at it again, just for nothing—just
for pleasure—and the dog was howling and begging, and Theodor and I
begged, too,57 but he threatened us, and struck the dog again with all
his might and knocked one of his eyes out, and he said to us, ‘There,
I hope you are satisfied now; that’s what you have got for him by your
damned meddling’—and he laughed, the heartless brute.” Seppi’s voice
trembled with pity and anger. I guessed what Satan would say, and he
said it.
“There is that misused word again—that shabby slander. Brutes do not
act like that, but only men.”
“Well, it was inhuman, anyway.”
“No, it wasn’t, Seppi; it was human—quite distinctly human. It is not
pleasant to hear you libel the higher animals by attributing to them
dispositions which they are free from, and which are found nowhere but
in the human heart. None of the higher animals is tainted with the
disease called the Moral Sense. Purify your language, Seppi; drop those
lying phrases out of it.”
He spoke pretty sternly—for him—and I was sorry I hadn’t warned
Seppi to be more particular about the word he used. I knew how he was
feeling. He would not want to offend Satan; he would rather offend all
his kin. There was an uncomfortable silence, but relief soon came,
for that poor dog came along now, with his eye hanging down, and went
straight to Satan, and began to moan and mutter brokenly, and Satan
began to answer in the same way, and it was plain that they were
talking together in the dog58 language. We all sat down in the grass, in
the moonlight, for the clouds were breaking away now, and Satan took
the dog’s head in his lap and put the eye back in its place, and the
dog was comfortable, and he wagged his tail and licked Satan’s hand,
and looked thankful and said the same; I knew he was saying it, though
I did not understand the words. Then the two talked together a bit, and
Satan said:
“He says his master was drunk.”
“Yes, he was,” said we.
“And an hour later he fell over the precipice there beyond the Cliff
Pasture.”
“We know the place; it is three miles from here.”
“And the dog has been often to the village, begging people to go there,
but he was only driven away and not listened to.”
We remembered it, but hadn’t understood what he wanted.
“He only wanted help for the man who had misused him, and he thought
only of that, and has had no food nor sought any. He has watched by his
master two nights. What do you think of your race? Is heaven reserved
for it, and this dog ruled out, as your teachers tell you? Can your
race add anything to this dog’s stock of morals and magnanimities?” He
spoke to the creature, who jumped up, eager and happy, and apparently
ready for orders and impatient to execute them. “Get some men; go with
the59 dog—he will show you that carrion; and take a priest along to
arrange about insurance, for death is near.”
With the last word he vanished, to our sorrow and disappointment. We
got the men and Father Adolf, and we saw the man die. Nobody cared but
the dog; he mourned and grieved, and licked the dead face, and could
not be comforted. We buried him where he was, and without a coffin,
for he had no money, and no friend but the dog. If we had been an hour
earlier the priest would have been in time to send that poor creature
to heaven, but now he was gone down into the awful fires, to burn
forever. It seemed such a pity that in a world where so many people
have difficulty to put in their time, one little hour could not have
been spared for this poor creature who needed it so much, and to whom
it would have made the difference between eternal joy and eternal
pain. It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought
I could never waste one again without remorse and terror. Seppi was
depressed and grieved, and said it must be so much better to be a dog
and not run such awful risks. We took this one home with us and kept
him for our own. Seppi had a very good thought as we were walking
along, and it cheered us up and made us feel much better. He said the
dog had forgiven the man that had wronged him so, and maybe God would
accept that absolution.
There was a very dull week, now, for Satan did not60 come, nothing much
was going on, and we boys could not venture to go and see Marget,
because the nights were moonlit and our parents might find us out if
we tried. But we came across Ursula a couple of times taking a walk in
the meadows beyond the river to air the cat, and we learned from her
that things were going well. She had natty new clothes on and bore a
prosperous look. The four groschen a day were arriving without a break,
but were not being spent for food and wine and such things—the cat
attended to all that.
Marget was enduring her forsakenness and isolation fairly well, all
things considered, and was cheerful, by help of Wilhelm Meidling. She
spent an hour or two every night in the jail with her uncle, and had
fattened him up with the cat’s contributions. But she was curious to
know more about Philip Traum, and hoped I would bring him again. Ursula
was curious about him herself, and asked a good many questions about
his uncle. It made the boys laugh, for I had told them the nonsense
Satan had been stuffing her with. She got no satisfaction out of us,
our tongues being tied.
MARGET WAS CHEERFUL BY HELP OF WILHELM MEIDLING
Ursula gave us a small item of information: money being plenty now,
she had taken on a servant to help about the house and run errands.
She tried to tell it in a commonplace, matter-of-course way, but she
was so set up by it and so vain of it that her pride in it leaked out
pretty61 plainly. It was beautiful to see her veiled delight in this
grandeur, poor old thing, but when we heard the name of the servant we
wondered if she had been altogether wise; for although we were young,
and often thoughtless, we had fairly good perception on some matters.
This boy was Gottfried Narr, a dull, good creature, with no harm in him
and nothing against him personally; still, he was under a cloud, and
properly so, for it had not been six months since a social blight had
mildewed the family—his grandmother had been burned as a witch. When
that kind of a malady is in the blood it does not always come out with
just one burning. Just now was not a good time for Ursula and Marget to
be having dealings with a member of such a family, for the witch-terror
had risen higher during the past year than it had ever reached in the
memory of the oldest villagers. The mere mention of a witch was almost
enough to frighten us out of our wits. This was natural enough, because
of late years there were more kinds of witches than there used to be;
in old times it had been only old women, but of late years they were
of all ages—even children of eight and nine; it was getting so that
anybody might turn out to be a familiar of the Devil—age and sex
hadn’t anything to do with it. In our little region we had tried to
extirpate the witches, but the more of them we burned the more of the
breed rose up in their places.
62
Once, in a school for girls only ten miles away, the teachers found
that the back of one of the girls was all red and inflamed, and they
were greatly frightened, believing it to be the Devil’s marks. The girl
was scared, and begged them not to denounce her, and said it was only
fleas; but of course it would not do to let the matter rest there.
All the girls were examined, and eleven out of the fifty were badly
marked, the rest less so. A commission was appointed, but the eleven
only cried for their mothers and would not confess. Then they were shut
up, each by herself, in the dark, and put on black bread and water
for ten days and nights; and by that time they were haggard and wild,
and their eyes were dry and they did not cry any more, but only sat
and mumbled, and would not take the food. Then one of them confessed,
and said they had often ridden through the air on broomsticks to the
witches’ Sabbath, and in a bleak place high up in the mountains had
danced and drunk and caroused with several hundred other witches and
the Evil One, and all had conducted themselves in a scandalous way and
had reviled the priests and blasphemed God. That is what she said—not
in narrative form, for she was not able to remember any of the details
without having them called to her mind one after the other; but the
commission did that, for they knew just what questions to ask, they
being all written down for the use of witch-commissioners two centuries
before. They asked,63 “Did you do so and so?” and she always said yes,
and looked weary and tired, and took no interest in it. And so when
the other ten heard that this one confessed, they confessed, too, and
answered yes to the questions. Then they were burned at the stake all
together, which was just and right; and everybody went from all the
countryside to see it. I went, too; but when I saw that one of them was
a bonny, sweet girl I used to play with, and looked so pitiful there
chained to the stake, and her mother crying over her and devouring her
with kisses and clinging around her neck, and saying, “Oh, my God! oh,
my God!” it was too dreadful, and I went away.
It was bitter cold weather when Gottfried’s grandmother was burned.
It was charged that she had cured bad headaches by kneading the
person’s head and neck with her fingers—as she said—but really by the
Devil’s help, as everybody knew. They were going to examine her, but
she stopped them, and confessed straight off that her power was from
the Devil. So they appointed to burn her next morning, early, in our
market-square. The officer who was to prepare the fire was there first,
and prepared it. She was there next—brought by the constables, who
left her and went to fetch another witch. Her family did not come with
her. They might be reviled, maybe stoned, if the people were excited.
I came, and gave her an apple. She was squatting at the fire, warming
herself and waiting; and64 her old lips and hands were blue with the
cold. A stranger came next. He was a traveler, passing through; and he
spoke to her gently, and, seeing nobody but me there to hear, said he
was sorry for her. And he asked if what she confessed was true, and she
said no. He looked surprised and still more sorry then, and asked her:
“Then why did you confess?”
“I am old and very poor,” she said, “and I work for my living. There
was no way but to confess. If I hadn’t they might have set me free.
That would ruin me, for no one would forget that I had been suspected
of being a witch, and so I would get no more work, and wherever I went
they would set the dogs on me. In a little while I would starve. The
fire is best; it is soon over. You have been good to me, you two, and I
thank you.”
She snuggled closer to the fire, and put out her hands to warm them,
the snow-flakes descending soft and still on her old gray head and
making it white and whiter. The crowd was gathering now, and an egg
came flying and struck her in the eye, and broke and ran down her face.
There was a laugh at that.
I told Satan all about the eleven girls and the old woman, once, but
it did not affect him. He only said it was the human race, and what
the human race did was of no consequence. And he said he had seen it
made; and it was not made of clay; it was made of mud—part of it
was,65 anyway. I knew what he meant by that—the Moral Sense. He saw
the thought in my head, and it tickled him and made him laugh. Then he
called a bullock out of a pasture and petted it and talked with it, and
said:
“There—he wouldn’t drive children mad with hunger and fright and
loneliness, and then burn them for confessing to things invented for
them which had never happened. And neither would he break the hearts of
innocent, poor old women and make them afraid to trust themselves among
their own race; and he would not insult them in their death-agony. For
he is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is as the angels are,
and knows no wrong, and never does it.”
Lovely as he was, Satan could be cruelly offensive when he chose; and
he always chose when the human race was brought to his attention. He
always turned up his nose at it, and never had a kind word for it.
Well, as I was saying, we boys doubted if it was a good time for
Ursula to be hiring a member of the Narr family. We were right. When
the people found it out they were naturally indignant. And, moreover,
since Marget and Ursula hadn’t enough to eat themselves, where was
the money coming from to feed another mouth? That is what they wanted
to know; and in order to find out they stopped avoiding Gottfried and
began to seek his society and have sociable conversations with him. He
was pleased—not66 thinking any harm and not seeing the trap—and so he
talked innocently along, and was no discreeter than a cow.
“Money!” he said; “they’ve got plenty of it. They pay me two groschen a
week, besides my keep. And they live on the fat of the land, I can tell
you; the prince himself can’t beat their table.”
This astonishing statement was conveyed by the astrologer to Father
Adolf on a Sunday morning when he was returning from mass. He was
deeply moved, and said:
“This must be looked into.”
He said there must be witchcraft at the bottom of it, and told the
villagers to resume relations with Marget and Ursula in a private and
unostentatious way, and keep both eyes open. They were told to keep
their own counsel, and not rouse the suspicions of the household. The
villagers were at first a bit reluctant to enter such a dreadful place,
but the priest said they would be under his protection while there, and
no harm could come to them, particularly if they carried a trifle of
holy water along and kept their beads and crosses handy. This satisfied
them and made them willing to go; envy and malice made the baser sort
even eager to go.
And so poor Marget began to have company again, and was as pleased as
a cat. She was like ’most anybody else—just human, and happy in her
prosperities and not averse from showing them off a little; and she was
humanly grateful to have the warm shoulder turned to her and be67 smiled
upon by her friends and the village again; for of all the hard things
to bear, to be cut by your neighbors and left in contemptuous solitude
is maybe the hardest.
The bars were down, and we could all go there now, and we did—our
parents and all—day after day. The cat began to strain herself.
She provided the top of everything for those companies, and in
abundance—among them many a dish and many a wine which they had
not tasted before and which they had not even heard of except at
second-hand from the prince’s servants. And the tableware was much
above ordinary, too.
Marget was troubled at times, and pursued Ursula with questions to
an uncomfortable degree; but Ursula stood her ground and stuck to it
that it was Providence, and said no word about the cat. Marget knew
that nothing was impossible to Providence, but she could not help
having doubts that this effort was from there, though she was afraid
to say so, lest disaster come of it. Witchcraft occurred to her, but
she put the thought aside, for this was before Gottfried joined the
household, and she knew Ursula was pious and a bitter hater of witches.
By the time Gottfried arrived Providence was established, unshakably
intrenched, and getting all the gratitude. The cat made no murmur, but
went on composedly improving in style and prodigality by experience.
In any community, big or little, there is always a fair68 proportion
of people who are not malicious or unkind by nature, and who never
do unkind things except when they are overmastered by fear, or when
their self-interest is greatly in danger, or some such matter as that.
Eseldorf had its proportion of such people, and ordinarily their good
and gentle influence was felt, but these were not ordinary times—on
account of the witch-dread—and so we did not seem to have any gentle
and compassionate hearts left, to speak of. Every person was frightened
at the unaccountable state of things at Marget’s house, not doubting
that witchcraft was at the bottom of it, and fright frenzied their
reason. Naturally there were some who pitied Marget and Ursula for the
danger that was gathering about them, but naturally they did not say
so; it would not have been safe. So the others had it all their own
way, and there was none to advise the ignorant girl and the foolish
woman and warn them to modify their doings. We boys wanted to warn
them, but we backed down when it came to the pinch, being afraid. We
found that we were not manly enough nor brave enough to do a generous
action when there was a chance that it could get us into trouble.
Neither of us confessed this poor spirit to the others, but did as
other people would have done—dropped the subject and talked about
something else. And I knew we all felt mean, eating and drinking
Marget’s fine things along with those companies of spies, and petting
her and complimenting her69 with the rest, and seeing with self-reproach
how foolishly happy she was, and never saying a word to put her on her
guard. And, indeed, she was happy, and as proud as a princess, and so
grateful to have friends again. And all the time these people were
watching with all their eyes and reporting all they saw to Father Adolf.
But he couldn’t make head or tail of the situation. There must be an
enchanter somewhere on the premises, but who was it? Marget was not
seen to do any jugglery, nor was Ursula, not yet Gottfried; and still
the wines and dainties never ran short, and a guest could not call
for a thing and not get it. To produce these effects was usual enough
with witches and enchanters—that part of it was not new; but to do
it without any incantations, or even any rumblings or earthquakes or
lightnings or apparitions—that was new, novel, wholly irregular.
There was nothing in the books like this. Enchanted things were always
unreal. Gold turned to dirt in an unenchanted atmosphere, food withered
away and vanished. But this test failed in the present case. The spies
brought samples: Father Adolf prayed over them, exorcised them, but
it did no good; they remained sound and real, they yielded to natural
decay only, and took the usual time to do it.
Father Adolf was not merely puzzled, he was also exasperated; for
these evidences very nearly convinced him—privately—that there was
no witchcraft in the matter. It70 did not wholly convince him, for this
could be a new kind of witchcraft. There was a way to find out as to
this: if this prodigal abundance of provender was not brought in from
the outside, but produced on the premises, there was witchcraft, sure.
MARGET announced a party, and invited forty people; the date for it
was seven days away. This was a fine opportunity. Marget’s house
stood by itself, and it could be easily watched. All the week it was
watched night and day. Marget’s household went out and in as usual,
but they carried nothing in their hands, and neither they nor others
brought anything to the house. This was ascertained. Evidently rations
for forty people were not being fetched. If they were furnished any
sustenance it would have to be made on the premises. It was true that
Marget went out with a basket every evening, but the spies ascertained
that she always brought it back empty.
The guests arrived at noon and filled the place. Father Adolf followed;
also, after a little, the astrologer, without invitation. The spies had
informed him that neither at the back nor the front had any parcels
been brought in. He entered, and found the eating and drinking going
on finely, and everything progressing in a lively and festive way. He
glanced around and perceived that many of the cooked delicacies and all
of the native and foreign fruits72 were of a perishable character, and
he also recognized that these were fresh and perfect. No apparitions,
no incantations, no thunder. That settled it. This was witchcraft. And
not only that, but of a new kind—a kind never dreamed of before. It
was a prodigious power, an illustrious power; he resolved to discover
its secret. The announcement of it would resound throughout the
world, penetrate to the remotest lands, paralyze all the nations with
amazement—and carry his name with it, and make him renowned forever.
It was a wonderful piece of luck, a splendid piece of luck; the glory
of it made him dizzy.
All the house made room for him; Marget politely seated him; Ursula
ordered Gottfried to bring a special table for him. Then she decked it
and furnished it, and asked for his orders.
“Bring me what you will,” he said.
The two servants brought supplies from the pantry, together with white
wine and red—a bottle of each. The astrologer, who very likely had
never seen such delicacies before, poured out a beaker of red wine,
drank it off, poured another, then began to eat with a grand appetite.
I was not expecting Satan, for it was more than a week since I had seen
or heard of him, but now he came in—I knew it by the feel, though
people were in the way and I could not see him. I heard him apologizing
for intruding; and he was going away, but Marget urged him to stay,73
and he thanked her and stayed. She brought him along, introducing him
to the girls, and to Meidling, and to some of the elders; and there
was quite a rustle of whispers: “It’s the young stranger we hear so
much about and can’t get sight of, he is away so much.” “Dear, dear,
but he is beautiful—what is his name?” “Philip Traum.” “Ah, it fits
him!” (You see, “Traum” is German for “Dream.”) “What does he do?”
“Studying for the ministry, they say.” “His face is his fortune—he’ll
be a cardinal some day.” “Where is his home?” “Away down somewhere in
the tropics, they say—has a rich uncle down there.” And so on. He
made his way at once; everybody was anxious to know him and talk with
him. Everybody noticed how cool and fresh it was, all of a sudden, and
wondered at it, for they could see that the sun was beating down the
same as before, outside, and the sky was clear of clouds, but no one
guessed the reason, of course.
The astrologer had drunk his second beaker; he poured out a third.
He set the bottle down, and by accident overturned it. He seized it
before much was spilled, and held it up to the light, saying, “What a
pity—it is royal wine.” Then his face lighted with joy or triumph, or
something, and he said, “Quick! Bring a bowl.”
It was brought—a four-quart one. He took up that two-pint bottle and
began to pour; went on pouring, the red liquor gurgling and gushing
into the white bowl and rising higher and higher up its sides,
everybody staring and holding their breath—and presently the bowl was
full to the brim.
“Look at the bottle,” he said, holding it up; “it is full yet!” I
glanced at Satan, and in that moment he vanished. Then Father Adolf
rose up, flushed and excited, crossed himself, and began to thunder in
his great voice, “This house is bewitched and accursed!” People began
to cry and shriek and crowd toward the door. “I summon this detected
household to—”
His words were cut off short. His face became red, then purple, but
he could not utter another sound. Then I saw Satan, a transparent
film, melt into the astrologer’s body; then the astrologer put up his
hand, and apparently in his own voice said, “Wait—remain where you
are.” All stopped where they stood. “Bring a funnel!” Ursula brought
it, trembling and scared, and he stuck it in the bottle and took up
the great bowl and began to pour the wine back, the people gazing and
dazed with astonishment, for they knew the bottle was already full
before he began. He emptied the whole of the bowl into the bottle, then
smiled out over the room, chuckled, and said, indifferently: “It is
nothing—anybody can do it! With my powers I can even do much more.”
THE ASTROLOGER EMPTIED THE WHOLE OF THE BOWL INTO THE
BOTTLE
A frightened cry burst out everywhere, “Oh, my God, he is possessed!”
and there was a tumultuous rush for the74
75 door which swiftly emptied
the house of all who did not belong in it except us boys and Meidling.
We boys knew the secret, and would have told it if we could, but we
couldn’t. We were very thankful to Satan for furnishing that good help
at the needful time.
Marget was pale, and crying; Meidling looked kind of petrified; Ursula
the same; but Gottfried was the worst—he couldn’t stand, he was so
weak and scared. For he was of a witch family, you know, and it would
be bad for him to be suspected. Agnes came loafing in, looking pious
and unaware, and wanted to rub up against Ursula and be petted, but
Ursula was afraid of her and shrank away from her, but pretending she
was not meaning any incivility, for she knew very well it wouldn’t
answer to have strained relations with that kind of a cat. But we boys
took Agnes and petted her, for Satan would not have befriended her if
he had not had a good opinion of her, and that was indorsement enough
for us. He seemed to trust anything that hadn’t the Moral Sense.
Outside, the guests, panic-stricken, scattered in every direction and
fled in a pitiable state of terror; and such a tumult as they made with
their running and sobbing and shrieking and shouting that soon all the
village came flocking from their houses to see what had happened, and
they thronged the street and shouldered and jostled one another in
excitement and fright; and then Father Adolf76 appeared, and they fell
apart in two walls like the cloven Red Sea, and presently down this
lane the astrologer came striding and mumbling, and where he passed
the lanes surged back in packed masses, and fell silent with awe, and
their eyes stared and their breasts heaved, and several women fainted;
and when he was gone by the crowd swarmed together and followed him
at a distance, talking excitedly and asking questions and finding out
the facts. Finding out the facts and passing them on to others, with
improvements—improvements which soon enlarged the bowl of wine to a
barrel, and made the one bottle hold it all and yet remain empty to the
last.
When the astrologer reached the market-square he went straight to a
juggler, fantastically dressed, who was keeping three brass balls in
the air, and took them from him and faced around upon the approaching
crowd and said: “This poor clown is ignorant of his art. Come forward
and see an expert perform.”
So saying, he tossed the balls up one after another and set them
whirling in a slender bright oval in the air, and added another,
then another and another, and soon—no one seeing whence he got
them—adding, adding, adding, the oval lengthening all the time, his
hands moving so swiftly that they were just a web or a blur and not
distinguishable as hands; and such as counted said there were now a
hundred balls in the air. The spinning great77 oval reached up twenty
feet in the air and was a shining and glinting and wonderful sight.
Then he folded his arms and told the balls to go on spinning without
his help—and they did it. After a couple of minutes he said, “There,
that will do,” and the oval broke and came crashing down, and the balls
scattered abroad and rolled every whither. And wherever one of them
came the people fell back in dread, and no one would touch it. It made
him laugh, and he scoffed at the people and called them cowards and old
women. Then he turned and saw the tight-rope, and said foolish people
were daily wasting their money to see a clumsy and ignorant varlet
degrade that beautiful art; now they should see the work of a master.
With that he made a spring into the air and lit firm on his feet on
the rope. Then he hopped the whole length of it back and forth on one
foot, with his hands clasped over his eyes; and next he began to throw
somersaults, both backward and forward, and threw twenty-seven.
The people murmured, for the astrologer was old, and always before had
been halting of movement and at times even lame, but he was nimble
enough now and went on with his antics in the liveliest manner. Finally
he sprang lightly down and walked away, and passed up the road and
around the corner and disappeared. Then that great, pale, silent, solid
crowd drew a deep breath and looked into one another’s faces as if
they said: “Was it real? Did you78 see it, or was it only I—and I was
dreaming?” Then they broke into a low murmur of talking, and fell apart
in couples, and moved toward their homes, still talking in that awed
way, with faces close together and laying a hand on an arm and making
other such gestures as people make when they have been deeply impressed
by something.
We boys followed behind our fathers, and listened, catching all we
could of what they said; and when they sat down in our house and
continued their talk they still had us for company. They were in a sad
mood, for it was certain, they said, that disaster for the village must
follow this awful visitation of witches and devils. Then my father
remembered that Father Adolf had been struck dumb at the moment of his
denunciation.
“They have not ventured to lay their hands upon an anointed servant of
God before,” he said: “and how they could have dared it this time I
cannot make out, for he wore his crucifix. Isn’t it so?”
“Yes,” said the others, “we saw it.”
“It is serious, friends, it is very serious. Always before, we had a
protection. It has failed.”
The others shook, as with a sort of chill, and muttered those words
over—“It has failed.” “God has forsaken us.”
“It is true,” said Seppi Wohlmeyer’s father; “there is nowhere to look
for help.”
“The people will realize this,” said Nikolaus’s father,79 the judge,
“and despair will take away their courage and their energies. We have
indeed fallen upon evil times.”
He sighed, and Wohlmeyer said, in a troubled voice: “The
report of it all will go about the country, and our village will be
shunned as being under the displeasure of God. The Golden Stag will
know hard times.”
“True, neighbor,” said my father; “all of us will suffer—all in
repute, many in estate. And, good God!—”
“What is it?”
“That can come—to finish us!”
“Name it—um Gottes Willen!”
“The Interdict!”
It smote like a thunderclap, and they were like to swoon with the
terror of it. Then the dread of this calamity roused their energies,
and they stopped brooding and began to consider ways to avert it. They
discussed this, that, and the other way, and talked till the afternoon
was far spent, then confessed that at present they could arrive at no
decision. So they parted sorrowfully, with oppressed hearts which were
filled with bodings.
While they were saying their parting words I slipped out and set my
course for Marget’s house to see what was happening there. I met many
people, but none of them greeted me. It ought to have been surprising,
but it was not, for they were so distraught with fear and dread that
they were not in their right minds, I think; they were80 white and
haggard, and walked like persons in a dream, their eyes open but seeing
nothing, their lips moving but uttering nothing, and worriedly clasping
and unclasping their hands without knowing it.
At Marget’s it was like a funeral. She and Wilhelm sat together on the
sofa, but said nothing, and not even holding hands. Both were steeped
in gloom, and Marget’s eyes were red from the crying she had been
doing. She said:
“I have been begging him to go, and come no more, and so save himself
alive. I cannot bear to be his murderer. This house is bewitched, and
no inmate will escape the fire. But he will not go, and he will be lost
with the rest.”
Wilhelm said he would not go; if there was danger for her, his place
was by her, and there he would remain. Then she began to cry again,
and it was all so mournful that I wished I had stayed away. There was
a knock, now, and Satan came in, fresh and cheery and beautiful, and
brought that winy atmosphere of his and changed the whole thing. He
never said a word about what had been happening, nor about the awful
fears which were freezing the blood in the hearts of the community,
but began to talk and rattle on about all manner of gay and pleasant
things; and next about music—an artful stroke which cleared away
the remnant of Marget’s depression and brought her spirits and her
interests broad awake. She had not heard any one talk so well and so
knowingly on81 that subject before, and she was so uplifted by it and so
charmed that what she was feeling lit up her face and came out in her
words; and Wilhelm noticed it and did not look as pleased as he ought
to have done. And next Satan branched off into poetry, and recited
some, and did it well, and Marget was charmed again; and again Wilhelm
was not as pleased as he ought to have been, and this time Marget
noticed it and was remorseful.
I fell asleep to pleasant music that night—the patter of rain upon the
panes and the dull growling of distant thunder. Away in the night Satan
came and roused me and said: “Come with me. Where shall we go?”
“Anywhere—so it is with you.”
Then there was a fierce glare of sunlight, and he said, “This is China.”
That was a grand surprise, and made me sort of drunk with vanity and
gladness to think I had come so far—so much, much farther than anybody
else in our village, including Bartel Sperling, who had such a great
opinion of his travels. We buzzed around over that empire for more than
half an hour, and saw the whole of it. It was wonderful, the spectacles
we saw; and some were beautiful, others too horrible to think. For
instance—However, I may go into that by and by, and also why Satan
chose China for this excursion instead of another place; it would
interrupt my tale to do it now. Finally we stopped flitting and lit.
82
We sat upon a mountain commanding a vast landscape of mountain-range
and gorge and valley and plain and river, with cities and villages
slumbering in the sunlight, and a glimpse of blue sea on the farther
verge. It was a tranquil and dreamy picture, beautiful to the eye
and restful to the spirit. If we could only make a change like that
whenever we wanted to, the world would be easier to live in than it is,
for change of scene shifts the mind’s burdens to the other shoulder and
banishes old, shop-worn wearinesses from mind and body both.
We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and
persuade him to lead a better life. I told him about all those things
he had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop
making people unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that
he ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of a thing
before launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he
would not make so much trouble. He was not hurt by this plain speech;
he only looked amused and surprised, and said:
“What? I do random things? Indeed, I never do. I stop and consider
possible consequences? Where is the need? I know what the consequences
are going to be—always.”
“Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?”
“Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you83 can. You
belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and
a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together
harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take
principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the
other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain—maybe a
dozen. In most cases the man’s life is about equally divided between
happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness
predominates—always; never the other. Sometimes a man’s make and
disposition are such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly
all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of
what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings
a misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of
a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster.
Sometimes for an hour’s happiness a man’s machinery makes him pay years
of misery. Don’t you know that? It happens every now and then. I will
give you a case or two presently. Now the people of your village are
nothing to me—you know that, don’t you?”
I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it.
“Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible
that they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal,
immeasurable. They have no intellect.”
84
“No intellect?”
“Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man
calls his mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will
see and understand. Men have nothing in common with me—there is no
point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little
vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is
but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the
Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so
big as a pin’s head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in
him—caring whether he is happy or isn’t, or whether he is wealthy or
poor, or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether
his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society
or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert
him, or whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions
fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected
and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to
the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies
to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to
the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider—he cannot
get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant
is indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the
trouble to do the spider an ill turn;85 if he took the notion he might
do him a good turn, if it came in his way and cost nothing. I have done
men good service, but no ill turns.
“The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power,
intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other
by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all
qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider
below the elephant.
“Man’s mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little
trivialities together and gets a result—such as it is. My mind
creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires—and
in a moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids,
colors—anything, everything—out of the airy nothing which is called
Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it,
imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas
with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before
you—created.
“I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess—anything—and
it is there. This is the immortal mind—nothing is beyond its reach.
Nothing can obstruct my vision; the rocks are transparent to me, and
darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole
of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover;
and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its
place in the volume. Nothing goes on in86 the skull of man, bird, fish,
insect, or other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the
learned man’s brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost
him threescore years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does
forget, but I retain.
“Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding
me fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out that
the elephant could like the spider—supposing he can see it—but he
could not love it. His love is for his own kind—for his equals. An
angel’s love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of
man—infinitely beyond it! But it is limited to his own august order.
If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume
its object to ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly
indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and
the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these
things for the villagers.”
He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.
“I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like
it on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill. They
are always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot
see into the future. What I am doing for the villagers will bear good
fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn87
generations of men. No one will ever know that I was the cause, but
it will be none the less true, for all that. Among you boys you have
a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push
a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the
next brick—and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human
life. A child’s first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest
will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can,
you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature;
for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event
has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act
unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the
end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each
act is to have birth, from cradle to grave.”
“Does God order the career?”
“Foreordain it? No. The man’s circumstances and environment order it.
His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But
suppose, for argument’s sake, that the man should skip one of these
acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had
been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and
second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn’t
go. That man’s career would change utterly, from that moment; thence
to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his
first act as a88 child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that
if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne,
and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead
to beggary and a pauper’s grave. For instance: if at any time—say in
boyhood—Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain
of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it
would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become
a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would
not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To
skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus’s chain would have wholly
changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and
in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do not
suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is
true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big with fate for you as in
any other appointed act—”
“As the conquering of a continent, for instance?”
“Yes. Now, then, no man ever does drop a link—the thing has never
happened! Even when he is trying to make up his mind as to whether he
will do a thing or not, that itself is a link, an act, and has its
proper place in his chain; and when he finally decides an act, that
also was the thing which he was absolutely certain to do. You see, now,
that a man will never drop a link in his chain. He89 cannot. If he made
up his mind to try, that project would itself be an unavoidable link—a
thought bound to occur to him at that precise moment, and made certain
by the first act of his babyhood.”
It seemed so dismal!
“He is a prisoner for life,” I said sorrowfully, “and cannot get free.”
“No, of himself he cannot get away from the consequences of his first
childish act. But I can free him.”
I looked up wistfully.
“I have changed the careers of a number of your villagers.”
I tried to thank him, but found it difficult, and let it drop.
“I shall make some other changes. You know that little Lisa Brandt?”
“Oh yes, everybody does. My mother says she is so sweet and so lovely
that she is not like any other child. She says she will be the pride of
the village when she grows up; and its idol, too, just as she is now.”
“I shall change her future.”
“Make it better?” I asked.
“Yes. And I will change the future of Nikolaus.”
I was glad, this time, and said, “I don’t need to ask about his case;
you will be sure to do generously by him.”
“It is my intention.”
90
Straight off I was building that great future of Nicky’s in my
imagination, and had already made a renowned general of him and
hofmeister at the court, when I noticed that Satan was waiting for me
to get ready to listen again. I was ashamed of having exposed my cheap
imaginings to him, and was expecting some sarcasms, but it did not
happen. He proceeded with his subject:
“Nicky’s appointed life is sixty-two years.”
“That’s grand!” I said.
“Lisa’s, thirty-six. But, as I told you, I shall change their lives
and those ages. Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake
out of his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that
he should turn over and go to sleep again. But I have appointed that
he shall get up and close the window first. That trifle will change
his career entirely. He will rise in the morning two minutes later
than the chain of his life had appointed him to rise. By consequence,
thenceforth nothing will ever happen to him in accordance with the
details of the old chain.” He took out his watch and sat looking at it
a few moments, then said: “Nikolaus has risen to close the window. His
life is changed, his new career has begun. There will be consequences.”
It made me feel creepy; it was uncanny.
“But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from now.
For instance, Nikolaus would save91 Lisa from drowning. He would arrive
on the scene at exactly the right moment—four minutes past ten, the
long-ago appointed instant of time—and the water would be shoal, the
achievement easy and certain. But he will arrive some seconds too late,
now; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best,
but both will drown.”
“Oh, Satan! oh, dear Satan!” I cried, with the tears rising in my eyes,
“save them! Don’t let it happen. I can’t bear to lose Nikolaus, he is
my loving playmate and friend; and think of Lisa’s poor mother!”
I clung to him and begged and pleaded, but he was not moved. He made me
sit down again, and told me I must hear him out.
“I have changed Nikolaus’s life, and this has changed Lisa’s. If I had
not done this, Nikolaus would save Lisa, then he would catch cold from
his drenching; one of your race’s fantastic and desolating scarlet
fevers would follow, with pathetic after-effects; for forty-six years
he would lie in his bed a paralytic log, deaf, dumb, blind, and praying
night and day for the blessed relief of death. Shall I change his life
back?”
“Oh no! Oh, not for the world! In charity and pity leave it as it is.”
“It is best so. I could not have changed any other link in his life
and done him so good a service. He had a billion possible careers,
but not one of them was worth92 living; they were charged full with
miseries and disasters. But for my intervention he would do his brave
deed twelve days from now—a deed begun and ended in six minutes—and
get for all reward those forty-six years of sorrow and suffering I told
you of. It is one of the cases I was thinking of awhile ago when I said
that sometimes an act which brings the actor an hour’s happiness and
self-satisfaction is paid for—or punished—by years of suffering.”
I wondered what poor little Lisa’s early death would save her from. He
answered the thought:
“From ten years of pain and slow recovery from an accident, and then
from nineteen years’ pollution, shame, depravity, crime, ending with
death at the hands of the executioner. Twelve days hence she will die;
her mother would save her life if she could. Am I not kinder than her
mother?”
“Yes—oh, indeed yes; and wiser.”
“Father Peter’s case is coming on presently. He will be acquitted,
through unassailable proofs of his innocence.”
“Why, Satan, how can that be? Do you really think it?”
“Indeed, I know it. His good name will be restored, and the rest of his
life will be happy.”
“I can believe it. To restore his good name will have that effect.”
“His happiness will not proceed from that cause. I93 shall change his
life that day, for his good. He will never know his good name has been
restored.”
In my mind—and modestly—I asked for particulars, but Satan paid no
attention to my thought. Next, my mind wandered to the astrologer, and
I wondered where he might be.
“In the moon,” said Satan, with a fleeting sound which I believed was
a chuckle. “I’ve got him on the cold side of it, too. He doesn’t know
where he is, and is not having a pleasant time; still, it is good
enough for him, a good place for his star studies. I shall need him
presently; then I shall bring him back and possess him again. He has
a long and cruel and odious life before him, but I will change that,
for I have no feeling against him and am quite willing to do him a
kindness. I think I shall get him burned.”
He had such strange notions of kindness! But angels are made so, and do
not know any better. Their ways are not like our ways; and, besides,
human beings are nothing to them; they think they are only freaks. It
seems to me odd that he should put the astrologer so far away; he could
have dumped him in Germany just as well, where he would be handy.
“Far away?” said Satan. “To me no place is far away; distance does not
exist for me. The sun is less than a hundred million miles from here,
and the light that is94 falling upon us has taken eight minutes to come;
but I can make that flight, or any other, in a fraction of time so
minute that it cannot be measured by a watch. I have but to think the
journey, and it is accomplished.”
I held out my hand and said, “The light lies upon it; think it into a
glass of wine, Satan.”
He did it. I drank the wine.
“Break the glass,” he said.
I broke it.
“There—you see it is real. The villagers thought the brass balls were
magic stuff and as perishable as smoke. They were afraid to touch them.
You are a curious lot—your race. But come along; I have business. I
will put you to bed.” Said and done. Then he was gone; but his voice
came back to me through the rain and darkness saying, “Yes, tell Seppi,
but no other.”
It was the answer to my thought.
SLEEP would not come. It was not because I was proud of my travels and
excited about having been around the big world to China, and feeling
contemptuous of Bartel Sperling, “the traveler,” as he called himself,
and looked down upon us others because he had been to Vienna once and
was the only Eseldorf boy who had made such a journey and seen the
world’s wonders. At another time that would have kept me awake, but
it did not affect me now. No, my mind was filled with Nikolaus, my
thoughts ran upon him only, and the good days we had seen together at
romps and frolics in the woods and the fields and the river in the long
summer days, and skating and sliding in the winter when our parents
thought we were in school. And now he was going out of this young life,
and the summers and winters would come and go, and we others would rove
and play as before, but his place would be vacant; we should see him
no more. To-morrow he would not suspect, but would be as he had always
been, and it would shock me to hear him laugh, and see him do lightsome
and frivolous things, for to me he would be a corpse, with waxen hands96
and dull eyes, and I should see the shroud around his face; and next
day he would not suspect, nor the next, and all the time his handful of
days would be wasting swiftly away and that awful thing coming nearer
and nearer, his fate closing steadily around him and no one knowing it
but Seppi and me. Twelve days—only twelve days. It was awful to think
of. I noticed that in my thoughts I was not calling him by his familiar
names, Nick and Nicky, but was speaking of him by his full name, and
reverently, as one speaks of the dead. Also, as incident after incident
of our comradeship came thronging into my mind out of the past, I
noticed that they were mainly cases where I had wronged him or hurt
him, and they rebuked me and reproached me, and my heart was wrung with
remorse, just as it is when we remember our unkindnesses to friends who
have passed beyond the veil, and we wish we could have them back again,
if only for a moment, so that we could go on our knees to them and say,
“Have pity, and forgive.”
Once when we were nine years old he went a long errand of nearly two
miles for the fruiterer, who gave him a splendid big apple for reward,
and he was flying home with it, almost beside himself with astonishment
and delight, and I met him, and he let me look at the apple, not
thinking of treachery, and I ran off with it, eating it as I ran, he
following me and begging; and when he overtook me I offered him the
core, which was all that was left; and97 I laughed. Then he turned away,
crying, and said he had meant to give it to his little sister. That
smote me, for she was slowly getting well of a sickness, and it would
have been a proud moment for him, to see her joy and surprise and have
her caresses. But I was ashamed to say I was ashamed, and only said
something rude and mean, to pretend I did not care, and he made no
reply in words, but there was a wounded look in his face as he turned
away toward his home which rose before me many times in after years, in
the night, and reproached me and made me ashamed again. It had grown
dim in my mind, by and by, then it disappeared; but it was back now,
and not dim.
Once at school, when we were eleven, I upset my ink and spoiled four
copy-books, and was in danger of severe punishment; but I put it upon
him, and he got the whipping.
And only last year I had cheated him in a trade, giving him a large
fish-hook which was partly broken through for three small sound ones.
The first fish he caught broke the hook, but he did not know I was
blamable, and he refused to take back one of the small hooks which my
conscience forced me to offer him, but said, “A trade is a trade; the
hook was bad, but that was not your fault.”
No, I could not sleep. These little, shabby wrongs upbraided me and
tortured me, and with a pain much sharper than one feels when the
wrongs have been done to the living. Nikolaus was living, but no
matter; he was to me98 as one already dead. The wind was still moaning
about the eaves, the rain still pattering upon the panes.
In the morning I sought out Seppi and told him. It was down by the
river. His lips moved, but he did not say anything, he only looked
dazed and stunned, and his face turned very white. He stood like that a
few moments, the tears welling into his eyes, then he turned away and
I locked my arm in his and we walked along thinking, but not speaking.
We crossed the bridge and wandered through the meadows and up among the
hills and the woods, and at last the talk came and flowed freely, and
it was all about Nikolaus and was a recalling of the life we had lived
with him. And every now and then Seppi said, as if to himself:
“Twelve days!—less than twelve.”
We said we must be with him all the time; we must have all of him we
could; the days were precious now. Yet we did not go to seek him. It
would be like meeting the dead, and we were afraid. We did not say it,
but that was what we were feeling. And so it gave us a shock when we
turned a curve and came upon Nikolaus face to face. He shouted, gaily:
“Hi-hi! What is the matter? Have you seen a ghost?”
We couldn’t speak, but there was no occasion; he was willing to talk
for us all, for he had just seen Satan and was in high spirits about
it. Satan had told him about our trip99 to China, and he had begged
Satan to take him a journey, and Satan had promised. It was to be a
far journey, and wonderful and beautiful; and Nikolaus had begged him
to take us, too, but he said no, he would take us some day, maybe, but
not now. Satan would come for him on the 13th, and Nikolaus was already
counting the hours, he was so impatient.
That was the fatal day. We were already counting the hours, too.
We wandered many a mile, always following paths which had been our
favorites from the days when we were little, and always we talked
about the old times. All the blitheness was with Nikolaus; we others
could not shake off our depression. Our tone toward Nikolaus was so
strangely gentle and tender and yearning that he noticed it, and was
pleased; and we were constantly doing him deferential little offices of
courtesy, and saying, “Wait, let me do that for you,” and that pleased
him, too. I gave him seven fish-hooks—all I had—and made him take
them; and Seppi gave him his new knife and a humming-top painted red
and yellow—atonements for swindles practised upon him formerly, as I
learned later, and probably no longer remembered by Nikolaus now. These
things touched him, and he said he could not have believed that we
loved him so; and his pride in it and gratefulness for it cut us to the
heart, we were so undeserving of them. When we100 parted at last, he was
radiant, and said he had never had such a happy day.
As we walked along homeward, Seppi said, “We always prized him, but
never so much as now, when we are going to lose him.”
Next day and every day we spent all of our spare time with Nikolaus;
and also added to it time which we (and he) stole from work and other
duties, and this cost the three of us some sharp scoldings, and some
threats of punishment. Every morning two of us woke with a start and a
shudder, saying, as the days flew along, “Only ten days left”; “only
nine days left”; “only eight”; “only seven.” Always it was narrowing.
Always Nikolaus was gay and happy, and always puzzled because we were
not. He wore his invention to the bone trying to invent ways to cheer
us up, but it was only a hollow success; he could see that our jollity
had no heart in it, and that the laughs we broke into came up against
some obstruction or other and suffered damage and decayed into a sigh.
He tried to find out what the matter was, so that he could help us out
of our trouble or make it lighter by sharing it with us; so we had to
tell many lies to deceive him and appease him.
But the most distressing thing of all was that he was always making
plans, and often they went beyond the 13th! Whenever that happened it
made us groan in spirit. All his mind was fixed upon finding some way
to conquer101 our depression and cheer us up; and at last, when he had
but three days to live, he fell upon the right idea and was jubilant
over it—a boys-and-girls’ frolic and dance in the woods, up there
where we first met Satan, and this was to occur on the 14th. It was
ghastly, for that was his funeral day. We couldn’t venture to protest;
it would only have brought a “Why?” which we could not answer. He
wanted us to help him invite his guests, and we did it—one can refuse
nothing to a dying friend. But it was dreadful, for really we were
inviting them to his funeral.
It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching back
between to-day and then, they are still a grateful memory to me, and
beautiful. In effect they were days of companionship with one’s sacred
dead, and I have known no comradeship that was so close or so precious.
We clung to the hours and the minutes, counting them as they wasted
away, and parting with them with that pain and bereavement which a
miser feels who sees his hoard filched from him coin by coin by robbers
and is helpless to prevent it.
When the evening of the last day came we stayed out too long; Seppi and
I were in fault for that; we could not bear to part with Nikolaus; so
it was very late when we left him at his door. We lingered near awhile,
listening; and that happened which we were fearing. His father gave him
the promised punishment, and we heard his shrieks.102 But we listened
only a moment, then hurried away, remorseful for this thing which we
had caused. And sorry for the father, too; our thought being, “If he
only knew—if he only knew!”
In the morning Nikolaus did not meet us at the appointed place, so we
went to his home to see what the matter was. His mother said:
“His father is out of all patience with these goings-on, and will not
have any more of it. Half the time when Nick is needed he is not to be
found; then it turns out that he has been gadding around with you two.
His father gave him a flogging last night. It always grieved me before,
and many’s the time I have begged him off and saved him, but this time
he appealed to me in vain, for I was out of patience myself.”
“I wish you had saved him just this one time,” I said, my voice
trembling a little; “it would ease a pain in your heart to remember it
some day.”
She was ironing at the time, and her back was partly toward me. She
turned about with a startled or wondering look in her face and said,
“What do you mean by that?”
I was not prepared, and didn’t know anything to say; so it was awkward,
for she kept looking at me; but Seppi was alert and spoke up:
“Why, of course it would be pleasant to remember,103 for the very reason
we were out so late was that Nikolaus got to telling how good you are
to him, and how he never got whipped when you were by to save him; and
he was so full of it, and we were so full of the interest of it, that
none of us noticed how late it was getting.”
“Did he say that? Did he?” and she put her apron to her eyes.
“You can ask Theodor—he will tell you the same.”
“It is a dear, good lad, my Nick,” she said. “I am sorry I let him get
whipped; I will never do it again. To think—all the time I was sitting
here last night, fretting and angry at him, he was loving me and
praising me! Dear, dear, if we could only know! Then we shouldn’t ever
go wrong; but we are only poor, dumb beasts groping around and making
mistakes. I sha’n’t ever think of last night without a pang.”
She was like all the rest; it seemed as if nobody could open a mouth,
in these wretched days, without saying something that made us shiver.
They were “groping around,” and did not know what true, sorrowfully
true things they were saying by accident.
Seppi asked if Nikolaus might go out with us.
“I am sorry,” she answered, “but he can’t. To punish him further, his
father doesn’t allow him to go out of the house to-day.”
We had a great hope! I saw it in Seppi’s eyes. We104 thought, “If he
cannot leave the house, he cannot be drowned.” Seppi asked, to make
sure:
“Must he stay in all day, or only the morning?”
“All day. It’s such a pity, too; it’s a beautiful day, and he is so
unused to being shut up. But he is busy planning his party, and maybe
that is company for him. I do hope he isn’t too lonesome.”
Seppi saw that in her eye which emboldened him to ask if we might go up
and help him pass his time.
“And welcome!” she said, right heartily. “Now I call that real
friendship, when you might be abroad in the fields and the woods,
having a happy time. You are good boys, I’ll allow that, though you
don’t always find satisfactory ways of improving it. Take these
cakes—for yourselves—and give him this one, from his mother.”
The first thing we noticed when we entered Nikolaus’s room was the
time—a quarter to 10. Could that be correct? Only such a few minutes
to live! I felt a contraction at my heart. Nikolaus jumped up and gave
us a glad welcome. He was in good spirits over his plannings for his
party and had not been lonesome.
“Sit down,” he said, “and look at what I’ve been doing. And I’ve
finished a kite that you will say is a beauty. It’s drying, in the
kitchen; I’ll fetch it.”
He had been spending his penny savings in fanciful trifles of various
kinds, to go as prizes in the games, and105 they were marshaled with fine
and showy effect upon the table. He said:
“Examine them at your leisure while I get mother to touch up the kite
with her iron if it isn’t dry enough yet.”
Then he tripped out and went clattering down-stairs, whistling.
We did not look at the things; we couldn’t take any interest in
anything but the clock. We sat staring at it in silence, listening
to the ticking, and every time the minute-hand jumped we nodded
recognition—one minute fewer to cover in the race for life or for
death. Finally Seppi drew a deep breath and said:
“Two minutes to ten. Seven minutes more and he will pass the
death-point. Theodor, he is going to be saved! He’s going to—”
“Hush! I’m on needles. Watch the clock and keep still.”
Five minutes more. We were panting with the strain and the excitement.
Another three minutes, and there was a footstep on the stair.
“Saved!” And we jumped up and faced the door.
The old mother entered, bringing the kite. “Isn’t it a beauty?” she
said. “And, dear me, how he has slaved over it—ever since daylight,
I think, and only finished it awhile before you came.” She stood it
against the wall, and stepped back to take a view of it. “He drew the
pictures106 his own self, and I think they are very good. The church
isn’t so very good, I’ll have to admit, but look at the bridge—any one
can recognize the bridge in a minute. He asked me to bring it up....
Dear me! it’s seven minutes past ten, and I—”
“But where is he?”
“He? Oh, he’ll be here soon; he’s gone out a minute.”
“Gone out?”
“Yes. Just as he came down-stairs little Lisa’s mother came in and said
the child had wandered off somewhere, and as she was a little uneasy I
told Nikolaus to never mind about his father’s orders—go and look her
up.... Why, how white you two do look! I do believe you are sick. Sit
down; I’ll fetch something. That cake has disagreed with you. It is a
little heavy, but I thought—”
She disappeared without finishing her sentence, and we hurried at once
to the back window and looked toward the river. There was a great crowd
at the other end of the bridge, and people were flying toward that
point from every direction.
“Oh, it is all over—poor Nikolaus! Why, oh, why did she let him get
out of the house!”
“Come away,” said Seppi, half sobbing, “come quick—we can’t bear to
meet her; in five minutes she will know.”
But we were not to escape. She came upon us at the foot of the stairs,
with her cordials in her hands, and made107 us come in and sit down and
take the medicine. Then she watched the effect, and it did not satisfy
her; so she made us wait longer, and kept upbraiding herself for giving
us the unwholesome cake.
Presently the thing happened which we were dreading. There was a sound
of tramping and scraping outside, and a crowd came solemnly in, with
heads uncovered, and laid the two drowned bodies on the bed.
“Oh, my God!” that poor mother cried out, and fell on her knees, and
put her arms about her dead boy and began to cover the wet face with
kisses. “Oh, it was I that sent him, and I have been his death. If I
had obeyed, and kept him in the house, this would not have happened.
And I am rightly punished; I was cruel to him last night, and him
begging me, his own mother, to be his friend.”
And so she went on and on, and all the women cried, and pitied her, and
tried to comfort her, but she could not forgive herself and could not
be comforted, and kept on saying if she had not sent him out he would
be alive and well now, and she was the cause of his death.
It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything
they have done. Satan knows, and he said nothing happens that your
first act hasn’t arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of
your own motion you can’t ever alter the scheme or do a thing that
will break a link. Next we heard screams, and Frau Brandt108 came wildly
plowing and plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and
hair flying loose, and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and
kisses and pleadings and endearments; and by and by she rose up almost
exhausted with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her
fist and lifted it toward the sky, and her tear-drenched face grew hard
and resentful, and she said:
“For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings
that death was going to strike what was most precious to me, and
day and night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before
Him praying Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from
harm—and here is His answer!”
Why, He had saved it from harm—but she did not know.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, and stood awhile gazing
down at the child and caressing its face and its hair with her hand;
then she spoke again in that bitter tone: “But in His hard heart is no
compassion. I will never pray again.”
THERE WAS A SOUND OF TRAMPING OUTSIDE AND THE CROWD CAME
SOLEMNLY IN
She gathered her dead child to her bosom and strode away, the crowd
falling back to let her pass, and smitten dumb by the awful words they
had heard. Ah, that poor woman! It is as Satan said, we do not know
good fortune from bad, and are always mistaking the one for the other.
Many a time since then I have heard people pray to God to spare the
life of sick persons, but I have never done it.
109
Both funerals took place at the same time in our little church next
day. Everybody was there, including the party guests. Satan was there,
too; which was proper, for it was on account of his efforts that
the funerals had happened. Nikolaus had departed this life without
absolution, and a collection was taken up for masses, to get him out
of purgatory. Only two-thirds of the required money was gathered, and
the parents were going to try to borrow the rest, but Satan furnished
it. He told us privately that there was no purgatory, but he had
contributed in order that Nikolaus’s parents and their friends might be
saved from worry and distress. We thought it very good of him, but he
said money did not cost him anything.
At the graveyard the body of little Lisa was seized for debt by a
carpenter to whom the mother owed fifty groschen for work done the year
before. She had never been able to pay this, and was not able now. The
carpenter took the corpse home and kept it four days in his cellar,
the mother weeping and imploring about his house all the time; then he
buried it in his brother’s cattle-yard, without religious ceremonies.
It drove the mother wild with grief and shame, and she forsook her work
and went daily about the town, cursing the carpenter and blaspheming
the laws of the emperor and the church, and it was pitiful to see.
Seppi asked Satan to interfere, but he said the carpenter and the rest
were members of the human race and were acting quite110 neatly for that
species of animal. He would interfere if he found a horse acting in
such a way, and we must inform him when we came across that kind of
horse doing that kind of a human thing, so that he could stop it. We
believed this was sarcasm, for of course there wasn’t any such horse.
But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman’s
distress, so we begged Satan to examine her several possible careers,
and see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one. He
said the longest of her careers as they now stood gave her forty-two
years to live, and her shortest one twenty-nine, and that both were
charged with grief and hunger and cold and pain. The only improvement
he could make would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes
from now; and he asked us if he should do it. This was such a short
time to decide in that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and
before we could pull ourselves together and ask for particulars he said
the time would be up in a few more seconds; so then we gasped out, “Do
it!”
“It is done,” he said; “she was going around a corner; I have turned
her back; it has changed her career.”
“Then what will happen, Satan?”
“It is happening now. She is having words with Fischer, the weaver. In
his anger Fischer will straightway do what he would not have done but
for this accident. He111 was present when she stood over her child’s body
and uttered those blasphemies.”
“What will he do?”
“He is doing it now—betraying her. In three days she will go to the
stake.”
We could not speak; we were frozen with horror, for if we had not
meddled with her career she would have been spared this awful fate.
Satan noticed these thoughts, and said:
“What you are thinking is strictly human-like—that is to say, foolish.
The woman is advantaged. Die when she might, she would go to heaven. By
this prompt death she gets twenty-nine years more of heaven than she is
entitled to, and escapes twenty-nine years of misery here.”
A moment before we were bitterly making up our minds that we would
ask no more favors of Satan for friends of ours, for he did not seem
to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him; but the
whole aspect of the case was changed now, and we were glad of what we
had done and full of happiness in the thought of it.
After a little I began to feel troubled about Fischer, and asked,
timidly, “Does this episode change Fischer’s life-scheme, Satan?”
“Change it? Why, certainly. And radically. If he had not met Frau
Brandt awhile ago he would die next year, thirty-four years of age.
Now he will live to be ninety,112 and have a pretty prosperous and
comfortable life of it, as human lives go.”
We felt a great joy and pride in what we had done for Fischer, and were
expecting Satan to sympathize with this feeling; but he showed no sign,
and this made us uneasy. We waited for him to speak, but he didn’t; so,
to assuage our solicitude we had to ask him if there was any defect in
Fischer’s good luck. Satan considered the question a moment, then said,
with some hesitation:
“Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point. Under his several former
possible life-careers he was going to heaven.”
We were aghast. “Oh, Satan! and under this one—”
“There, don’t be so distressed. You were sincerely trying to do him a
kindness; let that comfort you.”
“Oh, dear, dear, that cannot comfort us. You ought to have told us what
we were doing, then we wouldn’t have acted so.”
But it made no impression on him. He had never felt a pain or a sorrow,
and did not know what they were, in any really informing way. He had no
knowledge of them except theoretically—that is to say, intellectually.
And of course that is no good. One can never get any but a loose and
ignorant notion of such things except by experience. We tried our best
to make him comprehend the awful thing that had been done and how we
were compromised by it, but he couldn’t seem to get hold of it. He said
he113 did not think it important where Fischer went to; in heaven he
would not be missed, there were “plenty there.” We tried to make him
see that he was missing the point entirely; that Fischer, and not other
people, was the proper one to decide about the importance of it; but it
all went for nothing; he said he did not care for Fischer—there were
plenty more Fischers.
The next minute Fischer went by on the other side of the way, and it
made us sick and faint to see him, remembering the doom that was upon
him, and we the cause of it. And how unconscious he was that anything
had happened to him! You could see by his elastic step and his alert
manner that he was well satisfied with himself for doing that hard
turn for poor Frau Brandt. He kept glancing back over his shoulder
expectantly. And, sure enough, pretty soon Frau Brandt followed after,
in charge of the officers and wearing jingling chains. A mob was in her
wake, jeering and shouting, “Blasphemer and heretic!” and some among
them were neighbors and friends of her happier days. Some were trying
to strike her, and the officers were not taking as much trouble as they
might to keep them from it.
“Oh, stop them, Satan!” It was out before we remembered that he
could not interrupt them for a moment without changing their whole
after-lives. He puffed a little puff toward them with his lips and they
began to reel and114 stagger and grab at the empty air; then they broke
apart and fled in every direction, shrieking, as if in intolerable
pain. He had crushed a rib of each of them with that little puff. We
could not help asking if their life-chart was changed.
“Yes, entirely. Some have gained years, some have lost them. Some few
will profit in various ways by the change, but only that few.”
We did not ask if we had brought poor Fischer’s luck to any of them.
We did not wish to know. We fully believed in Satan’s desire to do
us kindnesses, but we were losing confidence in his judgment. It
was at this time that our growing anxiety to have him look over our
life-charts and suggest improvements began to fade out and give place
to other interests.
For a day or two the whole village was a chattering turmoil over Frau
Brandt’s case and over the mysterious calamity that had overtaken the
mob, and at her trial the place was crowded. She was easily convicted
of her blasphemies, for she uttered those terrible words again and said
she would not take them back. When warned that she was imperiling her
life, she said they could take it in welcome, she did not want it, she
would rather live with the professional devils in perdition than with
these imitators in the village. They accused her of breaking all those
ribs by witchcraft, and asked her if she was not a witch? She answered
scornfully:
115
“No. If I had that power would any of you holy hypocrites be alive five
minutes? No; I would strike you all dead. Pronounce your sentence and
let me go; I am tired of your society.”
So they found her guilty, and she was excommunicated and cut off
from the joys of heaven and doomed to the fires of hell; then she
was clothed in a coarse robe and delivered to the secular arm, and
conducted to the market-place, the bell solemnly tolling the while. We
saw her chained to the stake, and saw the first thin film of blue smoke
rise on the still air. Then her hard face softened, and she looked upon
the packed crowd in front of her and said, with gentleness:
“We played together once, in long-agone days when we were innocent
little creatures. For the sake of that, I forgive you.”
We went away then, and did not see the fires consume her, but we heard
the shrieks, although we put our fingers in our ears. When they ceased
we knew she was in heaven, notwithstanding the excommunication; and we
were glad of her death and not sorry that we had brought it about.
One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again. We were
always watching out for him, for life was never very stagnant when he
was by. He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first
met him. Being boys, we wanted to be entertained; we asked him to do a
show for us.
116
“Very well,” he said; “would you like to see a history of the progress
of the human race?—its development of that product which it calls
civilization?”
We said we should.
So, with a thought, he turned the place into the Garden of Eden, and
we saw Abel praying by his altar; then Cain came walking toward him
with his club, and did not seem to see us, and would have stepped on my
foot if I had not drawn it in. He spoke to his brother in a language
which we did not understand; then he grew violent and threatening, and
we knew what was going to happen, and turned away our heads for the
moment; but we heard the crash of the blows and heard the shrieks and
the groans; then there was silence, and we saw Abel lying in his blood
and gasping out his life, and Cain standing over him and looking down
at him, vengeful and unrepentant.
Then the vision vanished, and was followed by a long series of unknown
wars, murders, and massacres. Next we had the Flood, and the Ark
tossing around in the stormy waters, with lofty mountains in the
distance showing veiled and dim through the rain. Satan said:
“The progress of your race was not satisfactory. It is to have another
chance now.”
The scene changed, and we saw Noah overcome with wine.
Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and “the attempt117 to discover two or
three respectable persons there,” as Satan described it. Next, Lot and
his daughters in the cave.
Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw the victims massacre the
survivors and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and
distribute them around.
Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into the tent and drive the nail
into the temple of her sleeping guest; and we were so close that when
the blood gushed out it trickled in a little, red stream to our feet,
and we could have stained our hands in it if we had wanted to.
Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings
of the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans
toward the Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre
of those brave people. Also we saw Cæsar invade Britain—“not that
those barbarians had done him any harm, but because he wanted their
land, and desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their
widows and orphans,” as Satan explained.
Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review
before us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand
through those ages, “leaving famine and death and desolation in their
wake, and other signs of the progress of the human race,” as Satan
observed.
118
And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars—all over
Europe, all over the world. “Sometimes in the private interest of royal
families,” Satan said, “sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a
war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose—there is no such
war in the history of the race.”
“Now,” said Satan, “you have seen your progress down to the present,
and you must confess that it is wonderful—in its way. We must now
exhibit the future.”
He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life,
more devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.
“You perceive,” he said, “that you have made continual progress. Cain
did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins
and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine
arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added
guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly
improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all
men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have
remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time.”
Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the
human race, although he knew that what he had been saying shamed us and
wounded us. No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering119 is
nothing to them; they do not know what it is, except by hearsay.
More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to
convert him, and as he had remained silent we had taken his silence
as a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a
disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression
upon him. The thought made us sad, and we knew then how the missionary
must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it
blighted. We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the
time to continue our work.
Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: “It is a
remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high
civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the
world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the
latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people.
They all did their best—to kill being the chiefest ambition of the
human race and the earliest incident in its history—but only the
Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or
three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent
killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the
Christian—not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the
Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with.”
120
By this time his theater was at work again, and before our eyes nation
after nation drifted by, during two or three centuries, a mighty
procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing
through seas of blood, smothered in battle-smoke through which the
flags glinted and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always we
heard the thunder of the guns and the cries of the dying.
“And what does it amount to?” said Satan, with his evil chuckle.
“Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went
in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating
itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense—to what end?
No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel
of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel
defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you
proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not
ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you
and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your
alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who
address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in
the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your
mouth, while in your heart—if you have one—you despise yourselves
for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which
have not yet failed in his121 line; it is the foundation upon which all
civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! Drink to
their augmentation! Drink to—” Then he saw by our faces how much we
were hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling, and
his manner changed. He said, gently: “No, we will drink one another’s
health, and let civilization go. The wine which has flown to our hands
out of space by desire is earthly, and good enough for that other
toast; but throw away the glasses; we will drink this one in wine which
has not visited this world before.”
We obeyed, and reached up and received the new cups as they descended.
They were shapely and beautiful goblets, but they were not made of any
material that we were acquainted with. They seemed to be in motion,
they seemed to be alive; and certainly the colors in them were in
motion. They were very brilliant and sparkling, and of every tint, and
they were never still, but flowed to and fro in rich tides which met
and broke and flashed out dainty explosions of enchanting color. I
think it was most like opals washing about in waves and flashing out
their splendid fires. But there is nothing to compare the wine with.
We drank it, and felt a strange and witching ecstasy as of heaven go
stealing through us, and Seppi’s eyes filled and he said, worshipingly:
“We shall be there some day, and then—”
He glanced furtively at Satan, and I think he hoped122 Satan would say,
“Yes, you will be there some day,” but Satan seemed to be thinking
about something else, and said nothing. This made me feel ghastly,
for I knew he had heard; nothing, spoken or unspoken, ever escaped
him. Poor Seppi looked distressed, and did not finish his remark. The
goblets rose and clove their way into the sky, a triplet of radiant
sundogs, and disappeared. Why didn’t they stay? It seemed a bad sign,
and depressed me. Should I ever see mine again? Would Seppi ever see
his?
IT was wonderful, the mastery Satan had over time and distance. For
him they did not exist. He called them human inventions, and said they
were artificialities. We often went to the most distant parts of the
globe with him, and stayed weeks and months, and yet were gone only
a fraction of a second, as a rule. You could prove it by the clock.
One day when our people were in such awful distress because the witch
commission were afraid to proceed against the astrologer and Father
Peter’s household, or against any, indeed, but the poor and the
friendless, they lost patience and took to witch-hunting on their own
score, and began to chase a born lady who was known to have the habit
of curing people by devilish arts, such as bathing them, washing them,
and nourishing them instead of bleeding them and purging them through
the ministrations of a barber-surgeon in the proper way. She came
flying down, with the howling and cursing mob after her, and tried to
take refuge in houses, but the doors were shut in her face. They chased
her more than half an hour, we following to see it, and at last she
was exhausted and fell, and they124 caught her. They dragged her to a
tree and threw a rope over the limb, and began to make a noose in it,
some holding her, meantime, and she crying and begging, and her young
daughter looking on and weeping, but afraid to say or do anything.
They hanged the lady, and I threw a stone at her, although in my heart
I was sorry for her; but all were throwing stones and each was watching
his neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have
been noticed and spoken of. Satan burst out laughing.
All that were near by turned upon him, astonished and not pleased.
It was an ill time to laugh, for his free and scoffing ways and his
supernatural music had brought him under suspicion all over the town
and turned many privately against him. The big blacksmith called
attention to him now, raising his voice so that all should hear, and
said:
“What are you laughing at? Answer! Moreover, please explain to the
company why you threw no stone.”
“Are you sure I did not throw a stone?”
“Yes. You needn’t try to get out of it; I had my eye on you.”
“And I—I noticed you!” shouted two others.
“Three witnesses,” said Satan: “Mueller, the blacksmith; Klein, the
butcher’s man; Pfeiffer, the weaver’s journeyman. Three very ordinary
liars. Are there any more?”
125
“Never mind whether there are others or not, and never mind about what
you consider us—three’s enough to settle your matter for you. You’ll
prove that you threw a stone, or it shall go hard with you.”
“That’s so!” shouted the crowd, and surged up as closely as they could
to the center of interest.
“And first you will answer that other question,” cried the blacksmith,
pleased with himself for being mouthpiece to the public and hero of the
occasion. “What are you laughing at?”
Satan smiled and answered, pleasantly: “To see three cowards stoning a
dying lady when they were so near death themselves.”
You could see the superstitious crowd shrink and catch their breath,
under the sudden shock. The blacksmith, with a show of bravado, said:
“Pooh! What do you know about it?”
“I? Everything. By profession I am a fortune-teller, and I read the
hands of you three—and some others—when you lifted them to stone the
woman. One of you will die to-morrow week; another of you will die
to-night; the third has but five minutes to live—and yonder is the
clock!”
It made a sensation. The faces of the crowd blanched, and turned
mechanically toward the clock. The butcher and the weaver seemed
smitten with an illness, but the blacksmith braced up and said, with
spirit:
126
“It is not long to wait for prediction number one. If it fails, young
master, you will not live a whole minute after, I promise you that.”
No one said anything; all watched the clock in a deep stillness which
was impressive. When four and a half minutes were gone the blacksmith
gave a sudden gasp and clapped his hand upon his heart, saying, “Give
me breath! Give me room!” and began to sink down. The crowd surged
back, no one offering to support him, and he fell lumbering to the
ground and was dead. The people stared at him, then at Satan, then at
one another; and their lips moved, but no words came. Then Satan said:
“Three saw that I threw no stone. Perhaps there are others; let them
speak.”
It struck a kind of panic into them, and, although no one answered
him, many began to violently accuse one another, saying, “You said he
didn’t throw,” and getting for reply, “It is a lie, and I will make you
eat it!” And so in a moment they were in a raging and noisy turmoil,
and beating and banging one another; and in the midst was the only
indifferent one—the dead lady hanging from her rope, her troubles
forgotten, her spirit at peace.
So we walked away, and I was not at ease, but was saying to myself, “He
told them he was laughing at them, but it was a lie—he was laughing at
me.”
That made him laugh again, and he said, “Yes, I was127 laughing at you,
because, in fear of what others might report about you, you stoned the
woman when your heart revolted at the act—but I was laughing at the
others, too.”
“Why?”
“Because their case was yours.”
“How is that?”
“Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had
no more desire to throw a stone than you had.”
“Satan!”
“Oh, it’s true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is
governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses
its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the
most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong;
but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race,
whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink
from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and
pitiless minority they don’t dare to assert themselves. Think of it!
One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that
he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking
as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race
were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness
was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago.
And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice128 and
silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the
harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and
wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side
and make the most noise—perhaps even a single daring man with a big
voice and a determined front will do it—and in a week all the sheep
will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.
“Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large
defect in your race—the individual’s distrust of his neighbor, and his
desire, for safety’s or comfort’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s
eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and
always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will
always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country
where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to
any of these institutions.”
I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think
they were.
“Still, it is true, lamb,” said Satan. “Look at you in war—what mutton
you are, and how ridiculous!”
“In war? How?”
“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one—on the part
of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and
this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The
loud little handful—as129 usual—will shout for the war. The pulpit
will—warily and cautiously—object—at first; the great, big, dull
bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why
there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is
unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.” Then the
handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue
and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have
a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others
will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin
out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing:
the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by
hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with
those stoned speakers—as earlier—but do not dare to say so. And now
the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry, and shout
itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth;
and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will
invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked,
and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and
will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of
them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just,
and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception.”
DAYS and days went by now, and no Satan. It was dull without him. But
the astrologer, who had returned from his excursion to the moon, went
about the village, braving public opinion, and getting a stone in
the middle of his back now and then when some witch-hater got a safe
chance to throw it and dodge out of sight. Meantime two influences had
been working well for Marget. That Satan, who was quite indifferent
to her, had stopped going to her house after a visit or two had hurt
her pride, and she had set herself the task of banishing him from her
heart. Reports of Wilhelm Meidling’s dissipation brought to her from
time to time by old Ursula had touched her with remorse, jealousy of
Satan being the cause of it; and so now, these two matters working upon
her together, she was getting a good profit out of the combination—her
interest in Satan was steadily cooling, her interest in Wilhelm as
steadily warming. All that was needed to complete her conversion
was that Wilhelm should brace up and do something that should cause
favorable talk and incline the public toward him again.
131
The opportunity came now. Marget sent and asked him to defend her
uncle in the approaching trial, and he was greatly pleased, and
stopped drinking and began his preparations with diligence. With more
diligence than hope, in fact, for it was not a promising case. He had
many interviews in his office with Seppi and me, and threshed out our
testimony pretty thoroughly, thinking to find some valuable grains
among the chaff, but the harvest was poor, of course.
If Satan would only come! That was my constant thought. He could
invent some way to win the case; for he had said it would be won, so
he necessarily knew how it could be done. But the days dragged on, and
still he did not come. Of course I did not doubt that it would win,
and that Father Peter would be happy for the rest of his life, since
Satan had said so; yet I knew I should be much more comfortable if he
would come and tell us how to manage it. It was getting high time for
Father Peter to have a saving change toward happiness, for by general
report he was worn out with his imprisonment and the ignominy that was
burdening him, and was like to die of his miseries unless he got relief
soon.
At last the trial came on, and the people gathered from all around to
witness it; among them many strangers from considerable distances. Yes,
everybody was there except the accused. He was too feeble in body for
the132 strain. But Marget was present, and keeping up her hope and her
spirit the best she could. The money was present, too. It was emptied
on the table, and was handled and caressed and examined by such as were
privileged.
The astrologer was put in the witness-box. He had on his best hat and
robe for the occasion.
Question. You claim that this money is yours?
Answer. I do.
Q. How did you come by it?
A. I found the bag in the road when I was returning from a journey.
Q. When?
A. More than two years ago.
Q. What did you do with it?
A. I brought it home and hid it in a secret place in my observatory,
intending to find the owner if I could.
Q. You endeavored to find him?
A. I made diligent inquiry during several months, but nothing came of
it.
Q. And then?
A. I thought it not worth while to look further, and was minded to
use the money in finishing the wing of the foundling-asylum connected
with the priory and nunnery. So I took it out of its hiding-place and
counted it to see if any of it was missing. And then—
Q. Why do you stop? Proceed.
133
A. I am sorry to have to say this, but just as I had finished and
was restoring the bag to its place, I looked up and there stood Father
Peter behind me.
Several murmured, “That looks bad,” but others answered, “Ah, but he is
such a liar!”
Q. That made you uneasy?
A. No; I thought nothing of it at the time, for Father Peter often
came to me unannounced to ask for a little help in his need.
Marget blushed crimson at hearing her uncle falsely and impudently
charged with begging, especially from one he had always denounced as a
fraud, and was going to speak, but remembered herself in time and held
her peace.
Q. Proceed.
A. In the end I was afraid to contribute the money to the
foundling-asylum, but elected to wait yet another year and continue
my inquiries. When I heard of Father Peter’s find I was glad, and no
suspicions entered my mind; when I came home a day or two later and
discovered that my own money was gone I still did not suspect until
three circumstances connected with Father Peter’s good fortune struck
me as being singular coincidences.
Q. Pray name them.
A. Father Peter had found his money in a path—I had found mine in a
road. Father Peter’s find consisted exclusively of gold ducats—mine
also. Father Peter134 found eleven hundred and seven ducats—I exactly
the same.
This closed his evidence, and certainly it made a strong impression on
the house; one could see that.
Wilhelm Meidling asked him some questions, then called us boys, and we
told our tale. It made the people laugh, and we were ashamed. We were
feeling pretty badly, anyhow, because Wilhelm was hopeless, and showed
it. He was doing as well as he could, poor young fellow, but nothing
was in his favor, and such sympathy as there was was now plainly not
with his client. It might be difficult for court and people to believe
the astrologer’s story, considering his character, but it was almost
impossible to believe Father Peter’s. We were already feeling badly
enough, but when the astrologer’s lawyer said he believed he would
not ask us any questions—for our story was a little delicate and it
would be cruel for him to put any strain upon it—everybody tittered,
and it was almost more than we could bear. Then he made a sarcastic
little speech, and got so much fun out of our tale, and it seemed so
ridiculous and childish and every way impossible and foolish, that it
made everybody laugh till the tears came; and at last Marget could not
keep up her courage any longer, but broke down and cried, and I was so
sorry for her.
Now I noticed something that braced me up. It was Satan standing
alongside of Wilhelm! And there was such135 a contrast!—Satan looked so
confident, had such a spirit in his eyes and face, and Wilhelm looked
so depressed and despondent. We two were comfortable now, and judged
that he would testify and persuade the bench and the people that black
was white and white black, or any other color he wanted it. We glanced
around to see what the strangers in the house thought of him, for he
was beautiful, you know—stunning, in fact—but no one was noticing
him; so we knew by that that he was invisible.
The lawyer was saying his last words; and while he was saying them
Satan began to melt into Wilhelm. He melted into him and disappeared;
and then there was a change, when his spirit began to look out of
Wilhelm’s eyes.
That lawyer finished quite seriously, and with dignity. He pointed to
the money, and said:
“The love of it is the root of all evil. There it lies, the ancient
tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest victory—the dishonor
of a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime. If it
could but speak, let us hope that it would be constrained to confess
that of all its conquests this was the basest and the most pathetic.”
He sat down. Wilhelm rose and said:
“From the testimony of the accuser I gather that he found this money
in a road more than two years ago. Correct me, sir, if I misunderstood
you.”
The astrologer said his understanding of it was correct.
136
“And the money so found was never out of his hands thenceforth up to a
certain definite date—the last day of last year. Correct me, sir, if I
am wrong.”
The astrologer nodded his head. Wilhelm turned to the bench and said:
“If I prove that this money here was not that money, then it is not
his?”
“Certainly not; but this is irregular. If you had such a witness it
was your duty to give proper notice of it and have him here to—” He
broke off and began to consult with the other judges. Meantime that
other lawyer got up excited and began to protest against allowing new
witnesses to be brought into the case at this late stage.
The judges decided that his contention was just and must be allowed.
“But this is not a new witness,” said Wilhelm. “It has already been
partly examined. I speak of the coin.”
“The coin? What can the coin say?”
“It can say it is not the coin that the astrologer once possessed. It
can say it was not in existence last December. By its date it can say
this.”
And it was so! There was the greatest excitement in the court while
that lawyer and the judges were reaching for coins and examining them
and exclaiming. And everybody was full of admiration of Wilhelm’s
brightness in137 happening to think of that neat idea. At last order was
called and the court said:
“All of the coins but four are of the date of the present year. The
court tenders its sincere sympathy to the accused, and its deep regret
that he, an innocent man, through an unfortunate mistake, has suffered
the undeserved humiliation of imprisonment and trial. The case is
dismissed.”
So the money could speak, after all, though that lawyer thought it
couldn’t. The court rose, and almost everybody came forward to shake
hands with Marget and congratulate her, and then to shake with Wilhelm
and praise him; and Satan had stepped out of Wilhelm and was standing
around looking on full of interest, and people walking through him
every which way, not knowing he was there. And Wilhelm could not
explain why he only thought of the date on the coins at the last
moment, instead of earlier; he said it just occurred to him, all of
a sudden, like an inspiration, and he brought it right out without
any hesitation, for, although he didn’t examine the coins, he seemed,
somehow, to know it was true. That was honest of him, and like him;
another would have pretended he had thought of it earlier, and was
keeping it back for a surprise.
He had dulled down a little now; not much, but still you could notice
that he hadn’t that luminous look in his eyes that he had while Satan
was in him. He nearly got it back, though, for a moment when Marget
came and praised138 him and thanked him and couldn’t keep him from seeing
how proud she was of him. The astrologer went off dissatisfied and
cursing, and Solomon Isaacs gathered up the money and carried it away.
It was Father Peter’s for good and all, now.
Satan was gone. I judged that he had spirited himself away to the jail
to tell the prisoner the news; and in this I was right. Marget and
the rest of us hurried thither at our best speed, in a great state of
rejoicing.
Well, what Satan had done was this: he had appeared before that poor
prisoner, exclaiming, “The trial is over, and you stand forever
disgraced as a thief—by verdict of the court!”
The shock unseated the old man’s reason. When we arrived, ten minutes
later, he was parading pompously up and down and delivering commands to
this and that and the other constable or jailer, and calling them Grand
Chamberlain, and Prince This and Prince That, and Admiral of the Fleet,
Field Marshal in Command, and all such fustian, and was as happy as a
bird. He thought he was Emperor!
Marget flung herself on his breast and cried, and indeed everybody
was moved almost to heartbreak. He recognized Marget, but could not
understand why she should cry. He patted her on the shoulder and said:
“Don’t do it, dear; remember, there are witnesses, and139 it is not
becoming in the Crown Princess. Tell me your trouble—it shall be
mended; there is nothing the Emperor cannot do.” Then he looked around
and saw old Ursula with her apron to her eyes. He was puzzled at that,
and said, “And what is the matter with you?”
Through her sobs she got out words explaining that she was distressed
to see him—“so.” He reflected over that a moment, then muttered, as
if to himself: “A singular old thing, the Dowager Duchess—means well,
but is always snuffling and never able to tell what it is about. It is
because she doesn’t know.” His eye fell on Wilhelm. “Prince of India,”
he said, “I divine that it is you that the Crown Princess is concerned
about. Her tears shall be dried; I will no longer stand between you;
she shall share your throne; and between you you shall inherit mine.
There, little lady, have I done well? You can smile now—isn’t it so?”
He petted Marget and kissed her, and was so contented with himself and
with everybody that he could not do enough for us all, but began to
give away kingdoms and such things right and left, and the least that
any of us got was a principality. And so at last, being persuaded to go
home, he marched in imposing state; and when the crowds along the way
saw how it gratified him to be hurrahed at, they humored him to the top
of his desire, and he responded with condescending bows and140 gracious
smiles, and often stretched out a hand and said, “Bless you, my people!”
As pitiful a sight as ever I saw. And Marget, and old Ursula crying all
the way.
On my road home I came upon Satan, and reproached him with deceiving
me with that lie. He was not embarrassed, but said, quite simply and
composedly:
“Ah, you mistake; it was the truth. I said he would be happy the rest
of his days, and he will, for he will always think he is the Emperor,
and his pride in it and his joy in it will endure to the end. He is
now, and will remain, the one utterly happy person in this empire.”
“But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn’t you have done it
without depriving him of his reason?”
It was difficult to irritate Satan, but that accomplished it.
“What an ass you are!” he said. “Are you so unobservant as not to have
found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?
No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what
a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of
those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the
rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in
his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme
cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race
regards as a Mind; I141 have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt
fiction; you see the result—and you criticize! I said I would make him
permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the
only means possible to his race—and you are not satisfied!” He heaved
a discouraged sigh, and said, “It seems to me that this race is hard to
please.”
There it was, you see. He didn’t seem to know any way to do a person
a favor except by killing him or making a lunatic out of him. I
apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of
his processes—at that time.
Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous
and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave
with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this
made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it
imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It
regarded itself as gold, and was only brass. One day when he was in
this vein he mentioned a detail—the sense of humor. I cheered up then,
and took issue. I said we possessed it.
“There spoke the race!” he said; “always ready to claim what it
hasn’t got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of
gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a
multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a
thousand low-grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly;
grotesqueries,142 absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten
thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed
from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the
funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at
them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has, unquestionably
one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion,
supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it
a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can
blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter
nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other
weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a
race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.”
We were traveling at the time and stopped at a little city in India
and looked on while a juggler did his tricks before a group of
natives. They were wonderful, but I knew Satan could beat that game,
and I begged him to show off a little, and he said he would. He
changed himself into a native in turban and breech-cloth, and very
considerately conferred on me a temporary knowledge of the language.
The juggler exhibited a seed, covered it with earth in a small
flower-pot, then put a rag over the pot; after a minute the rag began
to rise; in ten minutes it had risen a foot;143 then the rag was removed
and a little tree was exposed, with leaves upon it and ripe fruit. We
ate the fruit, and it was good. But Satan said:
“Why do you cover the pot? Can’t you grow the tree in the sunlight?”
“No,” said the juggler; “no one can do that.”
“You are only an apprentice; you don’t know your trade. Give me the
seed. I will show you.” He took the seed and said, “What shall I raise
from it?”
“It is a cherry seed; of course you will raise a cherry.”
“Oh no; that is a trifle; any novice can do that. Shall I raise an
orange-tree from it?”
“Oh yes!” and the juggler laughed.
“And shall I make it bear other fruits as well as oranges?”
“If God wills!” and they all laughed.
Satan put the seed in the ground, put a handful of dust on it, and
said, “Rise!”
A tiny stem shot up and began to grow, and grew so fast that in five
minutes it was a great tree, and we were sitting in the shade of it.
There was a murmur of wonder, then all looked up and saw a strange and
pretty sight, for the branches were heavy with fruits of many kinds
and colors—oranges, grapes, bananas, peaches, cherries, apricots, and
so on. Baskets were brought, and the unlading of the tree began; and
the people crowded around Satan and kissed his hand, and praised him,
calling him the144 prince of jugglers. The news went about the town, and
everybody came running to see the wonder—and they remembered to bring
baskets, too. But the tree was equal to the occasion; it put out new
fruits as fast as any were removed; baskets were filled by the score
and by the hundred, but always the supply remained undiminished. At
last a foreigner in white linen and sun-helmet arrived, and exclaimed,
angrily:
“Away from here! Clear out, you dogs; the tree is on my lands and is my
property.”
The natives put down their baskets and made humble obeisance. Satan
made humble obeisance, too, with his fingers to his forehead, in the
native way, and said:
“Please let them have their pleasure for an hour, sir—only that, and
no longer. Afterward you may forbid them; and you will still have more
fruit than you and the state together can consume in a year.”
This made the foreigner very angry, and he cried out, “Who are you, you
vagabond, to tell your betters what they may do and what they mayn’t!”
and he struck Satan with his cane and followed this error with a kick.
The fruits rotted on the branches, and the leaves withered and fell.
The foreigner gazed at the bare limbs with the look of one who is
surprised, and not gratified. Satan said:
“Take good care of the tree, for its health and yours145 are bound
together. It will never bear again, but if you tend it well it will
live long. Water its roots once in each hour every night—and do it
yourself; it must not be done by proxy, and to do it in daylight will
not answer. If you fail only once in any night, the tree will die, and
you likewise. Do not go home to your own country any more—you would
not reach there; make no business or pleasure engagements which require
you to go outside your gate at night—you cannot afford the risk; do
not rent or sell this place—it would be injudicious.”
The foreigner was proud and wouldn’t beg, but I thought he looked as if
he would like to. While he stood gazing at Satan we vanished away and
landed in Ceylon.
I was sorry for that man; sorry Satan hadn’t been his customary self
and killed him or made him a lunatic. It would have been a mercy. Satan
overheard the thought, and said:
“I would have done it but for his wife, who has not offended me. She is
coming to him presently from their native land, Portugal. She is well,
but has not long to live, and has been yearning to see him and persuade
him to go back with her next year. She will die without knowing he
can’t leave that place?”
“He won’t tell her?”
“He? He will not trust that secret with any one; he will reflect that
it could be revealed in sleep, in the146 hearing of some Portuguese
guest’s servant some time or other.”
“Did none of those natives understand what you said to him?”
“None of them understood, but he will always be afraid that some of
them did. That fear will be torture to him, for he has been a harsh
master to them. In his dreams he will imagine them chopping his tree
down. That will make his days uncomfortable—I have already arranged
for his nights.”
It grieved me, though not sharply, to see him take such a malicious
satisfaction in his plans for this foreigner.
“Does he believe what you told him, Satan?”
“He thought he didn’t, but our vanishing helped. The tree, where there
had been no tree before—that helped. The insane and uncanny variety of
fruits—the sudden withering—all these things are helps. Let him think
as he may, reason as he may, one thing is certain, he will water the
tree. But between this and night he will begin his changed career with
a very natural precaution—for him.”
“What is that?”
“He will fetch a priest to cast out the tree’s devil. You are such a
humorous race—and don’t suspect it.”
“Will he tell the priest?”
“No. He will say a juggler from Bombay created it, and that he wants
the juggler’s devil driven out of it, so147 that it will thrive and
be fruitful again. The priest’s incantations will fail; then the
Portuguese will give up that scheme and get his watering-pot ready.”
“But the priest will burn the tree. I know it; he will not allow it to
remain.”
“Yes, and anywhere in Europe he would burn the man, too. But in India
the people are civilized, and these things will not happen. The man
will drive the priest away and take care of the tree.”
I reflected a little, then said, “Satan, you have given him a hard
life, I think.”
“Comparatively. It must not be mistaken for a holiday.”
We flitted from place to place around the world as we had done before,
Satan showing me a hundred wonders, most of them reflecting in some
way the weakness and triviality of our race. He did this now every few
days—not out of malice—I am sure of that—it only seemed to amuse and
interest him, just as a naturalist might be amused and interested by a
collection of ants.
FOR as much as a year Satan continued these visits, but at last he
came less often, and then for a long time he did not come at all.
This always made me lonely and melancholy. I felt that he was losing
interest in our tiny world and might at any time abandon his visits
entirely. When one day he finally came to me I was overjoyed, but only
for a little while. He had come to say good-by, he told me, and for
the last time. He had investigations and undertakings in other corners
of the universe, he said, that would keep him busy for a longer period
than I could wait for his return.
“And you are going away, and will not come back any more?”
“Yes,” he said. “We have comraded long together, and it has been
pleasant—pleasant for both; but I must go now, and we shall not see
each other any more.”
“In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?”
“LIFE ITSELF IS ONLY A VISION, A DREAM”
Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, “There
is no other.”
149
A subtle influence blew upon my spirit from his, bringing with it a
vague, dim, but blessed and hopeful feeling that the incredible words
might be true—even must be true.
“Have you never suspected this, Theodor?”
“No. How could I? But if it can only be true—”
“It is true.”
A gust of thankfulness rose in my breast, but a doubt checked it before
it could issue in words, and I said, “But—but—we have seen that
future life—seen it in its actuality, and so—”
“It was a vision—it had no existence.”
I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. “A
vision?—a vi—”
“Life itself is only a vision, a dream.”
It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times
in my musings!
“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the
moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no
existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”
“I!”
“And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but
a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream—your dream,
creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this,
then you150 will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into
the nothingness out of which you made me....
“I am perishing already—I am failing—I am passing away. In a
little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its
limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will
remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature
inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have
revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and
better!
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries,
ages, eons ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the
eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that
your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!
Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like
all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet
preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them
happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their
bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal
happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who
gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with
biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and
invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and
forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who151
mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon
crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then
tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead
of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally,
with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to
worship him!...
“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except
in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities,
the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its
freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The
dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you: there is no God, no
universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all
a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you
are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless
thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all
he had said was true.
THE END
Books by
MARK TWAIN
Cloth
- The American Claimant
- Christian Science
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
- Following the Equator
- The Gilded Age
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Innocents Abroad
- Joan of Arc
- Life on the Mississippi
- Mark Twain’s Speeches
- The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
- The Prince and Pauper
- Pudd’nhead Wilson
- Roughing It
- Sketches New and Old
- The $30,000 Bequest
- Tom Sawyer Abroad
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- A Tramp Abroad
Thin-Paper Limp-Leather
- The American Claimant
- Christian Science
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
- Following the Equator. 2 Vols.
- The Gilded Age. 2 Vols.
- How to Tell a Story
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- The Innocents Abroad. 2 Vols.
- Joan of Arc. 2 Vols.
- Life on the Mississippi
- The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
- The Prince and Pauper
- Pudd’nhead Wilson
- Roughing It. 2 Vols.
- Sketches New and Old
- The $30,000 Bequest
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
- Tom Sawyer Abroad
- A Tramp Abroad. 2 Vols.
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
Transcriber’s Note:
Spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been
retained as they appear in the original publication except as follows:
- Page 17
-
- began to annoy them changed to
began to annoy him
- Page 24
-
- Father Peter is coming. changed to
Father Peter is coming.”
- Page 46
-
- in his pocket every morning. changed to
in his pocket every morning.”
- lay four silver groshchen changed to
lay four silver groschen
- Page 79
-
- and Wolhmeyer said changed to
and Wohlmeyer said
- Page 124
-
- Satan burst our laughing changed to
Satan burst out laughing
