Part 19

To put a showy end to life, which had lost its attraction for him, Jörg went to Nördlingen, a town which was then notorious for its hasty justice.

Dame Hollin thereupon gave Jörg a most terrific lecture. To judge by the tone of her voice, he thought of her as standing in her dark cell like the angel with the flaming sword. For all that her sermon did not touch him specially. He was much more deeply contrite when in the silent night he compared her heroic courage and disdain of death with his own sorry tale, making his invincible obstinacy look like the caricature of her bravery. He admitted the justice of everything she said when with a firm hand she shook his conscience; but he did not admit the justice of what the others said. And when Dame Hollin condemned him it frightened him as much as damnation at the last judgment might; but before that day came he was determined to play his joke upon the senate of Nördlingen, and hang on their gallows.

Months passed. The two neighbours grew to be more and more to each other. The hardened witch succeeded in implanting a little bit of Christianity upon him, at least as much as could be crowded through the narrow-barred window. Jörg accepted her dogmas willingly enough, but would not let go of his own dogma, that he must be hanged on Nördlingen ground.

Jörg had locked teeth with the senate, but the senators had also locked teeth with each other because of this same Jörg.

Two parties formed and quarrelled so heartily that they quite forgot the object of their quarrel. One side, as before mentioned, wished to hang him because he had committed murder; the other, because he had not committed murder. Only the town-scribent constituted, in silence and all by himself, a third party of mediation. He wanted to let Jörg get away. For, he said to himself, if he had been put on the rack the first day, the truth would most likely have come to light; now it is too late. If we wait until both parties agree as to which offence Muckenhuber shall be hanged for, he may meanwhile die of old age in the tower. This would be a clear loss to the town, which supplies the vagabond with food and lodging all for nothing. The town-scribent further concluding with subtle psychological insight that Jörg would probably by this time be mellow and tired of the poor fare of prison, it seemed to him to be the best plan to leave the door open by accident, so that the fellow could run away.

So he gave orders to have the door of his cell left unbolted from time to time. Jörg noticed it, but did not stir; he was determined to be hanged on Nördlingen ground.

But when he told his neighbour of the growing carelessness of his gaoler, things took a new turn. With the knowledge of the open door, though it was not that of her cell, the mighty love of freedom awoke in Dame Hollin. “If I could get out!” she cried, “it would not be to escape; I should but go to come back--go to tell my friends at Ulm of the disgrace I have suffered, and come back with witnesses and testimonials of my innocence. I do not want freedom; I want my honour and reputation----!” She did not finish what she wanted to say, but Jörg understood her.

For some time he had been at work breaking through the thin partition between the two cells. His only tool was a small piece of iron, and the work progressed but slowly. After these words of Dame Hollin he worked day and night with the utmost exertion of his strength, and in the third night he could manage to crawl through the small hole.

There was no time to be lost. This same night Jörg’s door was left unbolted again, so there were a few hasty words of farewell spoken. Dame Hollin crept through into her neighbour’s cell. Thus Jörg, trembling from head to foot, threw his arms about the old woman’s knees, and, as if he wanted to throw the fulness of his obedience and gratitude into one word, he cried, “Mother!” and she passed her hands gently over his face, feeling his features in the darkness, and crying, “My poor, unhappy son!”

Dame Hollin hid in the house of a faithful friend, to escape to Ulm the next day. Jörg slipped over into the deserted cell, and when his gaoler came to the door in the morning to push in a dish of humble fare, he crouched down in a corner, wrapped in the cloak of the old woman, and when the man passed on to his cell, he slipped nimbly through the hole in the wall, and in the garb of Jörg Muckenhuber received his own ration. He kept this up for about a week with much skill and secret delight, if sorrow for the loss of his faithful comrade had not choked his pleasure.

But one day the door was opened wide enough to admit the town-scribent, together with the gaoler, the former ordering Dame Hollin to follow him to the court-room. Jörg played his _rôle_ as long as he could, crouched down in terror in the darkest corners, and repelled his tormentors with silent gestures. But when the town-scribent cried reassuringly, “Woman, come boldly forth; I lead thee not to the rack, but to freedom,” then Muckenhuber forgot his mask, threw his cloak from his shoulders in impotent rage, started up indignantly and cried, with his clenched hands in his side, “You will do no such thing; I want to be hanged, and I won’t let you off!”

The town-scribent tore his hair in despair and rage when he perceived that the witch was gone and the vagabond was left. He had intended to conduct Dame Hollin to freedom, but it was to have been freedom under weighty conditions; and now she had disappeared without any conditions whatsoever. Jörg, however, who was to have disappeared and no questions asked, sat once more firmly upon the neck of the senate. “Fellow, there’s no putting an end to you!” cried the town-scribent, foaming at the mouth. But Muckenhuber replied coldly, “It is this I complain of, that you won’t even try!”

The senators poured bitter reproaches upon each other, at first in a low tone, then louder, until the storm grew, and there was a wild confusion of voices. Then the town-scribent silenced them all with his deep bass, and united the disputants with a word. He cried, “The cause of all this trouble is only Jörg Muckenhuber. Hang him at once if he does not recant his old confessions!” Jörg replied, “I do _not_ recant!” and when the town-scribent asked him for the second time, “Now, I certainly shan’t recant,” and the third time ...

There stood old Dame Hollin as if she had grown out of the ground, conducted by two of the most respectable burghers of Nördlingen and Ulm. She looked sharply at Muckenhuber, and said in a firm tone, “Jörg, you will recant your false confession!” The voice struck the insolent fellow like a peal of thunder. He was silent and lowered his eyes. There was no sound, one could hear the laboured breathings; then he spoke, “No other power on earth could have made me recant, but I cannot lie in the face of this woman;--I recant!”

Meanwhile the tumult of the populace without was increasing. The air was filled with wild threats, and with demands for the immediate release of Dame Hollin. The gentlemen saw that there was danger in delay. After a short, whispered debate the town-scribent read aloud the writ the old woman was to swear to. But Dame Hollin replied that she did not want mercy but demanded her right. The gentlemen of the senate made very wry faces and began to try persuasion, but they had learned ere this that there was little to be gained in that way with Dame Hollin.

After a moment’s thought, she said to her judges, “You have tried to make a bargain with me. Having done so, you are no longer my judges, and cannot give me my right. Well then, I too am ready to offer you a bargain. Release that wicked lad yonder, I will adopt him in child’s stead, and take him to Ulm with me, and see if I can do better by him than you have done. My property has lain dead while you kept me in the tower. You should refund the usury I have lost; instead of that give me this wicked lad. On this condition will I sign your writ.”

Already the populace clamoured outside the door. The senate would have had no choice, even though she had demanded much more than this.

As she signed the writ, she found a bill appendixed for her fare during the time of her custody. She returned the leaf with a courteous smile to the town-scribent, and as the rabble was knocking at the door he plucked the interesting supplement into bits as fast as possible, and strewed the pieces under the table.

Meanwhile the chains had been removed from Jörg; he looked about him as in a dream. Dame Hollin took his hand, and went to the door with him, where both were received by the gratified shouts of the shuffling crowd.

* * * * *

The old woman kept her word. In her house Jörg became an honest, valiant man, who in the Thirty Years’ War did great service to Ulm, the town of his adoption, and his name was never spoken but in honour and gratitude. But the witch’s counsel was forced to resign office, and after those five years of terror followed a better decade, during which law and justice reigned once more in the old Reichstadt.

_W. H. Riehl._

_ELECTIVE AFFINITIES._

I.

HIGHLY-ESTEEMED MADAM,--I venture to write these lines to you in the firm belief that you, like all women of mental distinction, love the unusual, and hate to the utmost the commonplaces of ordinary conventionality....

Having left the company, and wending my lonely way through the streets of Berlin, I felt myself to be in a state of lively excitement. The events of the evening passed once more before me, and ere long I was in that incomprehensible mystical mood, which comes so suddenly we know not how or whence. I was quite capable of calling to the spirits that seemed to float about me: “Answer me, if ye hear me!” when the sound of a passing carriage called me back to reality, and my gaze turned from the stars of heaven to a pair of star-like earthly orbs whose mild light shone for a passing moment with full radiance into my soul.

These starry eyes belonged to a young lady who was seated by your side in the carriage. At that moment I was seized with the purpose I am now carrying out.

I herewith enclose an unsealed letter to the lovely possessor of those gleaming stars, and I leave it to your never-erring tact to decide, after having read the letter, whether you will hand it to the young lady, who is doubtless one of your intimate circle of acquaintances, or consign it to the atoning flames of your grate.--Yours most sincerely,

VON SCH.

II.

HIGHLY-ESTEEMED MISS,--If Frau von B. should decide to give these lines into your hands, I shall consider it as a mark of confidence in me which encourages me in a measure to express to you a very singular request, as I am about to do. Perhaps you would have the goodness to look upon this mark of confidence on the part of so admirable a lady as a sort of pledge of my character, on the strength of which you will kindly permit me to conceal my name and social functions. At the same time I shall endeavour, dear Fraulein, to remain in complete ignorance so far as you are concerned.

After these preliminaries touching the scenic arrangement, permit me to come to the point.

I am sure you, as well as most persons possessing a lively imagination, have had occasion in life to observe the following occurrence. We stroll through the crowd of a large town thinking of nothing in particular, and indifferently passing a thousand faces that meet ours with the same indifference....

And in the midst of this placid, colourless mood we are suddenly surprised and fascinated by a pair of eyes that unexpectedly emerge out of the senseless crowd to meet ours for a second and then to disappear again. But what a wealth of experience lies in that passing moment! We know for certain that never in our past life has that face crossed our path, but the sight has touched us with an electric thrill. And as our soul rises into our eyes to greet that other soul, a hundred questions and answers fly back and forth with the rapidity of lightning.

“Who art thou? I have so much to say to thee. Secrets I scarce dare whisper to myself, I would entrust to thee. I feel that there is an invisible band between us.”

“Ah, I feel it too! It would bind us closer than all other human bands.”

And then comes the fear of making oneself ridiculous, and all the tame considerations that hamper every pure and fresh impulse. And all this, dear Fraulein, you and I have experienced. Our souls have met and recognised each other. This is a mighty fact, which you felt as well as I three days ago as your carriage crossed the Kurfürsten Bridge. If we were to meet now in society, the ordinary conventional preliminaries of getting acquainted would take away our naïve impression, we should be bereft of that elemental undeviating conviction which constituted the mysterious charm of our meeting. Let us then remain strangers to each other outwardly, trusting only to these first glowing intuitions.

Let us exchange a few letters, freely and without a thought to conventionality. Their contents shall bind us to nothing in real life, and should we meet by some strange accident, they shall be but a memory.

Do not, I beg of you, listen to the faint-hearted criticism of reason, but follow the first hearty impulse of your soul. It will lead you aright.

With warm sympathy,

THE UNKNOWN OF THE KURFÜRSTEN BRIDGE.

III.

DEAR SIR,--I have decided to answer your interesting letter. Frau von B. is to read all letters that pass between us, so that I can enter upon this correspondence with a happy sense of freedom from responsibility.

I am weary of the dryness of ordinary intercourse, and there is nothing I should like better than to talk to a man for once without reserve. I drop my worsted-work as the prisoner drops his chains, and dip my pen into the ink with the thrilling rapture of dawning freedom.

Do you know what it is to do worsted-work? Have you ever thought about this last reminiscence of mediæval times, this glaring anachronism in a time of steam and electricity and enlightenment?...

Liberty flows and surges about us, and life brings forth thousands of rich blossoms, and we sit imprisoned and--do worsted-work, or drum on the piano, murdering Chopin, or if we are very clever, sing Schumann’s songs with the pathos of dilettantism.

When I met you on the Kurfürsten Bridge, Frau von B. and I were just coming home from a ladies’ party, to which all the guests had brought their worsted-work. I had really suffered under the unendurable weight of conversation on topics of the utmost indifference, under a hypocritical interest in things which cannot possibly interest anybody. My heart was full of bitterness, and on the way home I was considering the question whether such a life was worth living, whether it would not be wiser to run away, to adopt the garb of a man, and try one’s powers boldly in the stream of life.

At that moment I saw you, and I felt all that you speak of in your letter. In that short second in which our eyes met, pictures clearly defined and wondrously bright arose before me.

Dressed as a youth, I seemed to descend from my carriage and seize your hand, and you knew all. Silently we walked through the streets, hand in hand, until we reached your house. There, I told you everything about my lonely childhood, my joyless youth, and the world of dreams and ideals within me. You spoke earnest words of duty and work, called me your friend, and said we would go along part of the way side by side....

After a winter of severe work came bright, sunny days of spring, and I felt at last that in the arms of nature, at her pure altar, I had received a “purer life, and the glad courage of hopeful youth.”

I hope you will return my frankness in full. When we end our correspondence, and return after this bold aside into the track of everyday life, perhaps we shall bring back some new, fresh courage, and the graceful memory of having been for once in our lives as foolish as we pleased.

Kind greetings from your

UNKNOWN.

IV.

HIGHLY-ESTEEMED UNKNOWN FRIEND,--Your amiable letter made me supremely happy. Now I know without a doubt that the mysterious quality of reading the soul of a being akin in spirit is no empty illusion. In that deeply mystical moment I recognised your charming self just as you describe it with winning simplicity. What you write me in many pages I have read word for word out of your eyes. And now that I know how near you are to me in sympathy and in intuitive understanding, now I have so much to say to you, so much to receive from you, that it were a crime not to tear down the paper barriers between us and to replace the dead letter by the living word.

I only await your permission. I promise myself a great deal from this meeting, perhaps a friendship for life, and I warmly beg you to look upon the unusual beginning as an earnest of a happy end.

Hoping impatiently for a gracious reply, I am, your truly devoted,

UNKNOWN.

V.

DEAR FRIEND,--Allow me to tell you that, in spite of your somewhat too lively imagination, I have always looked upon you as a person of much sense, and that there is nothing that moves me more to pity than to see a sensible man attacked by a fashionable craze like spiritualism. I am always seized by the desire to heal the patient, which seems the more difficult the absurder--forgive the word, but I know no better--the cause of the attack.

I hope you will laugh heartily over the following story, and have a healthful feeling of convalescence when you have bravely conquered the first bitter taste of the medicine.

A young widow, living in great seclusion, allows an old friend of her husband’s to persuade her to make a concession to him and to the carnival, and visit a masked ball at his house, in company of her brother, a comely school-boy.

The latter, dressed as a young lady looks charming, makes countless conquests at the ball, and rides home at night in an open carriage with his sister, wrapped in a charming evening-cloak of hers, flushed with champagne, and with the triumphs of the evening.

And lo and behold, upon the Kurfürsten Bridge the glowing eyes of the lad make, as it seems, a deep and lasting impression!

A few days later the widow receives a very remarkable letter from a friend, which tempts her irresistibly to give him a lesson, which I am sure he will have the kindness to take in good part.

She put herself as far as possible in the mood of her ecstatic friend, rummaged among her youthful reminiscences, and composed an answer which puts her friend quite beside himself, and convinces him that there is such a thing as mysterious sympathy of soul, electric glances, mystic bands, spirit kisses, etc., etc.

And now--what do you say?

In a gay carnival-humour, your old friend,

ALEXANDRA VON B.

VI.

DISPATCH.

_Frau Alexandra von B----, H---- St._

Had a photograph taken immediately upon receipt of your letter, to preserve the unutterable expression it produced upon my visage.

Shall take the liberty of presenting you with a specimen ere long. Acceptance to be looked upon as an act of penal justice. In abject humility at having made an everlasting fool of himself, your friend,

VON SCH.

_Franz von Schönthan._

_HOT PUNCH._

THERE is one thing that is beginning to strike me as very odd in life. It is how you make experiences without knowing it, and time goes on, and suddenly it dawns upon you that such and such an event was an experience. For instance, you spend an evening out of doors, because the weather is inviting, and you don’t in the least suspect the gentle breeze that is caressing you of any evil design, and then the next day, when the rheumatism sets in, or a toothache, or a stiff neck, or something or other of a surgical nature, which is best met by an application of spirits of camphor, then you know for certain that you were in a draught, and you are the wiser for the experience. You promise yourself solemnly that you will not be caught that way again, but the next time maybe it is not the draught, but sour milk, or beer that was too cold, and instead of a swollen cheek you find yourself in possession of the native semicolon bacillus, which luckily is unable to exist in hot punch, as they have discovered at the Imperial Health Office. This is a great thing, for when Frenchmen raise diseases in their undrained seaport towns, we in Berlin don’t have to confine ourselves to drinking carbolic lemonade, as we once feared, when we had lent Dr. Koch to France, and the papers were so full of cholera that one hated to touch them.

Hot punch is a scientific discovery, which is efficient against the very fear of the disease, as I had occasion to observe in the case of Frau Postlieutenant, who was so moved by reading the papers that she was once affected in a peculiar manner, and could not find her pulse when she felt for it, which put her in an indescribable state of mind; for when the pulse is gone the last stage is approaching, and it is time to give a thought to one’s funeral. A glass or two of hot punch allayed the symptoms immediately, and before fifteen minutes were gone Frau Postlieutenant could feel her pulse all over. She assured us that it was hammering in her toes quite as strongly as in her temples. She was saved.

“Frau Buchholz,” said she, “if you had not happened to come in just now, who knows but the black omnibus would have had to be harnessed for me by this time?”

“It did look bad enough,” I replied, “but not so bad as all that. It was enough, though, to frighten a person out of her seven wits.”

“I shan’t read another paper until the fruit season is over,” said the Frau Postlieutenant.

“There you are right,” said I. “A juicy pear in one hand, and in the other thrilling accounts of the cholera would be more than Goliath could stand.”

So this was an experience once more, to the effect that not everything that the papers bring is good for people, and that there is no better thing to bring one’s pulse back than a glass of punch, provided it is good and hot.

The Frau Postlieutenant does not belong to that class of persons who try to give themselves an air by being ungrateful; who, when they have visited anywhere, talk about the discomfort of the beds, and, when they have been asked out, run to tell their neighbour the next day that it is quite beyond them to understand how any one can venture to offer such poor refreshments. No, she is not that sort, for when she had quite recovered she sent around to invite me to take a ride with her to the Grunewald, and drink coffee at Paulsborn, and then back again by way of Schildhorn. She had hired a very swell turn-out for the afternoon, first-class, with a coachman in livery, whose coat-tails, gorgeous with buttons, hung down from the box like a yard and a half of starry sky.

It is not to be denied that the further end of the Kurfürstendamm, where there are no more houses, is pretty sandy, and the dust is given to flying about at a great rate; but as I had on my potato-coloured dress, trimmed with light brown satin, I did not suffer perceptibly, but the Frau Postlieutenant, in her black gown all covered with fine braiding, soon looked as if she had been done up in packing paper. Every vigorous breath of air brought some of the landscape between our teeth, where it gave a horribly rasping sound, but we bore up bravely, knowing that in Paulsborn the coffee-pot was awaiting us with its soothing contents.

Our conversation was of a very refined strain, chiefly about the lack of really cultured society, which naturally led us to talk about the Bergfeldts. Frau Postlieutenant admitted that Frau Bergfeldt might have many excellent qualities, but she for her part should certainly never be willing to ride through the Grunewald with her in an open carriage.