STORY OF DEES
We had never till now even heard of a mother of Dees! so stern a silence
must have been imposed by the burg upon the mountain.
"Yes," said the woman to us, "they watched me and the little Undine in
my cottage, dreading that I should bespeak the two foreigners, for I
fear neither them nor anything--the world knows it." We stood now with
her within a hütte, or cowshed, which let in the drizzle, and we had
lightning glimpses of a Roman face, and black locks, and proud rags, and
of a child whom she called Undine hugged in her powerful arms to her
bosom.
"Tell us, if you can, about your son," Langler said to her, "but not if
that pains you, for our hearts bleed for you; we tried our best for him,
and our best has turned to your utter sorrow, but you will forgive us,
if you can, since we meant well."
"But I do not sorrow!" she cried. "I am only glad and proud! There he
hangs nailed up like a bat; dead, sirs; with the wind of where he was
born blowing his hair. Is it Max? Is it the lad? It was for this, after
all, that you were born that Rosenkranz Sunday night. I said to you,
'take care, mind your steps, do not always fly on horses of wind,' but
you wouldn't hear, you wouldn't heed, and this is what it was to come
to. But better this than rotting in the dungeon--a grand death for a
grand lad! Yes, he defied them all, the lad! he thought himself the
equal of the baron's self, or of any prince of them. That lad! it is
strange, too, where I had the stuff about me to make the lad; his father
had nothing in the lad; none knew that lad but me, for a mother knows.
He came as a surprise, the lad: he set himself above them all! But now
you hang there, Max, for the eagles----" She was interrupted in this
species of raving by someone who, after peering near at us, suddenly
cried out: "now, Mother Dees, you know that you should be at home, get
you gone from this!" "I defy you all, Hans Richter!" shouted the mother
of Dees in answer. "You can do to me nothing worse than has been done to
him, and it is that which would be sweet to me." "Yes, yes, but you know
that I have caught you blabbing to the foreigners," said the man, "come,
come--" And at this I, understanding that he had laid hands upon her,
landed him a hit on the chest, whereat, without saying more, he took to
his heels.
I suspected that he had run to report to the castle what he had seen, so
I pressed the woman to talk, and within some minutes we had from her
the tale of Dees' life.
Max Dees was born of peasant parents thirty-two years before, within two
miles of Schweinstein burg. From his tenderest years the boy began to
notify a genius to whose nimbleness there appeared to be no end: he took
to painting and to playing the zither; he would make figures of wood and
stone and engines out of fragments of metal; he could cut out and make
his mother's clothes; at the age of eight he vested himself as a bishop,
and went preaching at every doorway of Jonah in the whale's belly and of
Lazarus raised out of the grave: everything he managed with ease and
mastery. However, he had tempests of passion, a craze for the other sex,
and no government over himself.
The fame of his gifts came early to the baron's ears, and Max was early
established a pet in the castle. He was sent to the University of Gratz,
where he highly distinguished himself. As in Austria most of the priests
are of peasant birth, the baron decided to make of the genius a
churchman; and in due course Dees came to be the priest of St Photini's
in the castle-court. At that time Baron Kolár was a widower, with one
child, the joy of his eye, a little maid of sixteen named Undine.
"But Max strung his chords all too high for the folk," his mother told
us; "I said to him: 'do not always fly on horses of wind,' but he would
not hear, he would not heed." The head of Dees, in fact, seems to have
gone half-mad with churchman's-pride; if anyone was lax in religion he
raged, he warned, he launched fines and penances. But no man is a
prophet in his own piggery; the alp men kicked against this rigour; and
there came a time when St Photini's was left almost empty of
worshippers. During all which Max Dees was the tutor of the little
Undine.
It was in this state of things, when matters at the church had turned
from bad to worse, that a wonder happened: one Sunday night the handful
of worshippers in St Photini's beheld a vision hung in mid-air in the
nave--a lamb nailed to a cross: a real lamb to a real cross; they marked
the dripping blood, there could be no mistake. It chanced that the baron
was just then in residence, and present in the church: he, too, saw, and
was almost as awed as anyone. Wild was the effect: St Photini's was
thereafter the holy of holies, and Max Dees more the lord of the alp
than the lord himself.
But this success must have been too much for the arrogant, weak head of
Dees. He now dared to let his eye rest on Undine. The baron was often
away at the Court in Vienna or elsewhere; often he had his Undine with
him; but once for five months he left her at home. He appears to have
had a fond confidence in Dees, though all this while he well knew that
Dees was an impostor; or perhaps his confidence was in his own coronet
and height above Dees, upon whom, moreover, he had lavished so many
bounties: for powerful men are but moderately precautious. At any rate,
on a certain Sunday morning when the baron returned to the burg after
this term of absence, he returned to learn that his girl had been hurt
by Dees. The people of the burg afterwards reported that he took it all
very patiently; went down to the church that morning, and, seated in his
easy-chair, enjoyed the oratory of Dees, sneering with his teeth at the
corpse who preached. Only, before this, he had locked Undine into the
chamber, from which she was never to come forth living.
During that same afternoon the baron had a talk with Dees in the burg:
and it was rumoured about the mountain that he then made to Dees an
offer of the chance of marrying Undine--a marvellous offer on the part
of a German nobleman, if it be a fact; but the impudence of Dees was
even more marvellous than the father's meekness: the priest demurred to
disfrock himself by marriage: he trembled, and said no.
That Sunday night the folk flocked as usual to the church in the
castle-court, and the bell ceased to ring, the people waited, but no Max
Dees appeared. The hour for the beginning of the office was long past,
and the congregation was murmuring, when all eyes were caught by a
vision hung in mid-air: but a disgusting one this time--one worthy of
Baron Kolár--a pig nailed to a cross, a real pig to a real cross. And
while they gaped at it, the head of the baron came up through the
trap-door of the vaults; he walked to the pulpit, went up into it. His
hands were red with blood. The people declared that in that one day the
man's hair had turned grey and his back had bent. And from the pulpit he
spoke to them.
He told them that they would never see their friend, the Pater Dees, any
more, since he had proved ungrateful to his patron, and had that
afternoon been imprisoned in the burg, where he would probably be kept
for some years, till the time should be ripe for a still worse thing to
come upon him. He, the baron, had been sorry to shock them with the
vision of the pig, but he had ordained it so in order to clear their
minds completely of the effect of the vision of the lamb which they had
seen. That vision of the lamb had been contrived by the mechanical
genius of their friend, the Pater Dees. On the Sunday night, a year
before, when it had appeared the baron had locked Dees into a room with
him for three hours, and had compelled Dees to tell by what means the
vision had been produced. Dees had confessed that he had nailed a lamb
to a cross in the vaults, and by means of a dark lantern, some
limelight, and some plates of glass--a contrivance not new, yet new in
its perfection--had thrown, as it were, the ghost of the lamb into the
nave of the church. He, the baron, had successfully repeated the same
thing with the pig that evening for them to see. He believed now that
none of them would ever wish for any more church; if they should, he
made them an offer: let any six of them come to him and say so, and he
would supply them with a new priest. He would watch with interest to see
how they would act. Meantime he hoped that they would continue to be
good Christians in their homes; Christianity was the highest sign of
man, and could never be destroyed or abolished, but it was an affair of
aspiration and conduct, not of dogma: they might take it from him that
there was no truth in any one of its dogmas, and for some years he had
been casting about for an easy method of destroying the institution
which persisted in embarrassing the world with those dogmas. Perhaps
their friend, the Pater Dees, had now supplied him with such a method.
He would watch and see. But, meantime, they must never repeat to a soul
what had passed on the alp or what they heard him say that night; he set
up a secret between them and himself, because they were his, and he
loved them, and knew that they truly feared and loved him: but if ever
anyone should recount or imply aught to outsiders that would incur his
displeasure.
So much Langler and I were able to gather from the Mother Dees' gabble.
As for the ill-starred Undine, she seems to have died in, or soon after,
giving birth to the five-year-old Undine of whom I had lightning
glimpses on the breast of the Mother Dees. This child, the granddaughter
of a nobleman, was in rags, and had never been seen by Baron Kolár: a
fact which chilled me with a sense of the changelessness of this man's
resentments.