The Mysterious Stranger, and Other Stories
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, 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, 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
dog 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 the
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 not 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.
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 pretty
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.
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, “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;
and her old lips and hands were blue with the cold. A stranger came