The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories
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 hands;
then she spoke again in that bitter tone: “But in His hard heart is no
compassion. I will never pray again.”
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 I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of sick
persons, but I have never done it.
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 quite 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 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. He 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, 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
he 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 and 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:
“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 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.
“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 attempt 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 victors massacre the
survivors and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and
distribute them around.