The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories
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 save 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 worth 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. I 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 is 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.
Chapter 8
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 hands 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; and 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 me 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 days.”
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 trip 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