remonstrances only induced the king not to use his spurs yet more
heartlessly. The lackey Hultman had read aloud to him all night or had
related sagas, and had at length coaxed him into laughing at the
prophecy that, had he not been exalted by God to be a king, he would for
his whole life have become an unsociable floor-pacer, who devised much
more wonderful verses than those of the late Messenius of Disa on
Bollhus, but especially the mightiest battle stories. He tried to think
of Rolf Gotriksson, who ever rode foremost of all his men, but today it
did not please him to bound his thoughts within the playroom of a saga.
The restlessness which during the last few days had struck its claws
into his mind would not let go of its royal prey. At the chancellery he
had just seen the heated faces. Ever since the pranks of his boyhood he
had been rapt in his own imaginary world of the past. He had sat deaf to
the piercing cries of distress along the way, while he became
distrustful of each and all who exhibited a more sensitive hearing.
Today as at other times he hardly noted that they offered him the
best-rested horse and the freshest cake of bread, that in the morning
they laid a purse with five hundred ducats in his pocket. He challenged
the horseman at the first mêlée to form a ring about him and offer
themselves to death. On the other hand he noticed that the soldiers
saluted him with gloomy silence, and misfortunes had made him suspicious
even of those nearest to him. The most cautious opposition, the most
concealed disapproval, he made a note of without betraying himself, and
every word remained and gnawed at his soul. Every hour it seemed to him
that he lost an officer on whom he had formerly relied, and his heart
became all the colder. His thwarted ambition chafed and bled under the
weight of failure, and he breathed more lightly the farther behind him
he left his headquarters.
Suddenly Lewenhaupt came to a stand, debating within himself how to
exercise an influence upon the king.
“My heroic Ajax!” said he, and tapped his steaming horse, “you are
indeed an old manger-biter, but I have no right to founder you for no
good cause, and I myself am beginning to get on in years as you are. But
in Jesus’ name, lads, let him who can follow the king!”
When he saw the ensign’s anxious sidelong look toward the king, he spoke
with lowered voice: “Be faithful, boy! His Majesty does not roar out as
we others do. He is too kingly to chide or bicker.”
The king feigned to notice nothing. More and more wildly over ice and
snow he kept up the silent horse-race without goal or purpose. He had
now only four attendants. After another hour one of the remaining horses
fell with a broken fore-leg, and the rider out of pity shot a bullet
through its ear, after which he himself, alone and on foot, went to meet
an uncertain fate in the cold.
At last the ensign was the only man who was able to follow the king, and
they had now come among bushes and saplings, where they could proceed
but at a foot-pace. On the hill above them rose a gray and sooty house
with narrow grated windows, the garden being surrounded by a wall.
At this moment there was a shot.
“How was that?” inquired the king, and looked around.
“The pellet piped nastily when it went by my ear but it only bit the
corner of my hat,” answered the ensign without the least experience of
how he ought to conduct himself before the king. He had a slight Småland
accent and laughed contentedly with his whole blonde countenance.
Enchanted by the good fortune of being man by man with him whom he
regarded as above all other living human beings, he continued: “Shall we
then go up there and take them by the beard?”
The answer pleased the king in the highest degree, and with a leap he
stood on the ground.
“We’ll tie our steeds here in the bushes,” he said exhilaratedly and
with bright color on his cheek. “Afterwards let us go up and run through
anybody that whistles.”
They left the panting horses and, bending forward, climbed up the hill
among the bushes. Over the wall looked down several Cossack heads with
hanging hair, yellow and grinning as those of beheaded criminals.
“Look!” whispered the king, and smote his hands together. “They’re
trying to pull shut the rotten gate, the fox-tails!”
His glance, but recently so expressionless, became now flickering and
anon open and shining. He drew his broadsword and raised it with both
hands above his head. Like a young man’s god he stormed in through the
half-open door. The ensign, who cut and thrust by his side, was often
close to being struck from behind by his weapon. A musket shot blackened
the king’s right temple. Four men were cut down in the gateway and the
fifth of the band fled with a fire-shovel into the garden, pursued by
the king.
Then the king wiped off the blood from his sword on the snow, while he
laid two ducats in the Cossack’s shovel and burst out with rising
spirits, “It is no pleasure to fight with these wretches, who never
strike back and only run. Come back when you have bought yourself a
decent sword.”
The Cossack, who understood nothing, stared at the gold-pieces, sneaked
along the wall to the gate, and fled. Ever further and further away on
the plain he called his roving comrades with a dismal and lamenting
“Oohaho! Oohaho!”
The king hummed to himself as if chaffing with an unseen enemy: “Little
Cossack man, little Cossack man, go gather up your rascals!”
The walls around the garden were mouldering and black. From the
wilderness sounded an endlessly prolonged minor tone as from an æolian
harp, and the king inquisitively shouldered in the door of the
dwelling-house. This consisted of a single large and a half-dark room,
and before the fireplace lay a heap of blood-stained clothing, which
plunderers of corpses had taken from fallen Swedes. The door was thrown
shut again by the cross-draught, and the king went to the stable
buildings at the side. There was no door there, and a sound was now
heard the more plainly. Within in the darkness lay a starved white horse
bound to the iron loop of a wagon.
A lifted broadsword would not have checked the king, but the uncertain
dusk caused the man of imagination to stand on the threshold, fearful of
the dark. Yet he gave no sign of this, but beckoned the ensign. They
stepped in down a steep stairway to a cellar. Here there was a spring,
and as a stop-cock to the singing wind which stirred the water, a deaf
Cossack with whip and reins, and without an idea of danger, was driving
a manly figure in the uniform of a Swedish officer.
When they had loosed the rope and had bound the Cossack in the place of
the prisoner, they recognized the Holsteiner, Feuerhausen, who had
served as major in a regiment of dragoon recruits, but had been cut off
by the Cossacks and harnessed as a draught animal for hoisting water.
He fell on his knees and stammered in broken Swedish: “Your Majesty! I
gan’t pelief my eyes.... My gratitude....”
The king cheerily interrupted his talk and turned to the ensign: “Bring
up the two horses to the stable! Three men cannot ride comfortably on
two horses, and therefore we shall stay here till a few Cossacks come
by, from whom we can take a new horse. Let the gentleman also stand
guard at the gate.”
After that the king went back to the dwelling-house and shut the door
after him. The horses which, desperate with hunger, had been greedily
gnawing the bark from the bushes, were meanwhile led up to the stable,
and the ensign went on guard.
Slowly the hours went by. When it began to draw towards dusk, the storm
increased in bitterness, and in the light of sunset the snow whirled
over the desolate snow-plain. Deathly yellow Cossack faces raised
themselves spying above the bushes, and long in the blast sounded the
roving plunderers’ “Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”
Then Feuerhausen stepped out of the stable, where he had sat between the
horses so as not to get frost in his wounds from the ropes with which he
had been bound. He went forward to the barred doors of the
dwelling-house.
“Your Majesty!” he stammered, “the Cossacks are gathering more and
more, and darkness is coming soon. I and the ensign can both sit on one
horse. If we delay here, this night will be Your Mightiest Majesty’s
last, which Gott in His secret dispensation forbit!”
The king answered from within, “It must be as we said. Three men do not
ride comfortably on two horses.”
The Holsteiner shook his head and went down to the ensign.
“Such is His Majesty, you damt Swedes. From the stable I heard him walk
and walk back and forvart. Sickness and conscience-torture will come.
Like a _pater familiæ_ the Muscovite czar stands among his subjects. A
sugar-baker he sets up as his friend and a little serving-boy he raises
on his glorious imperial throne. Detestable are his gestures when he
gets drunk, and he treats women _à la françois_; but his first and last
word always runs: ‘For Russia’s good!’ King Carolus leafs his lands as
smoking ash-heaps and does not possess a single frient, not efen among
his nearest. King Carolus is more lonely than the meanest wagon-drifer.
He has not once a comrade’s knee to weep on. Among nobles and fine
ladies and perukes he comes like a spectre out of a thousand-year
mausoleum--and spectres mostly go about without company. Is he a man of
state? Oh, have mercy! No sense for the public. Is he a general?
Good-bye? No sense for the big masses. Only to make bridges and set up
gabions, clap his hands at captured flags and a couple of kettle-drums.
No sense for state and army, only for men.”
“That may be also a sense,” replied the ensign.
He walked vigorously back and forward, for his fingers were already so
stiff with cold that he scarcely could hold his drawn blade.
The Holsteiner shifted the ragged coat-collar around his cheeks and went
on with muffled voice and eager gestures: “King Carolus laughs with
delight when the bridge breaks and men and beasts are miserably drownt.
No heart in his breast. To the deuce wit him! King Carolus is such a
little Swedish half-genius as wanders out in the worlt and beats the
drum and parades and makes a fiasco, and the parterre whistles Whee!”
“And that is just why the Swedes go to death for him,” answered the
ensign, “that is just why.”
“Not angry, my dearest fellow. Your teeth shone so in a laugh when we
first met.”
“I like to hear the Herr Major talk, but I’m freezing. Will not the
major go up and listen at the king’s door?”
The Holsteiner went up to the door and listened. When he came back he
said, “He only walks and walks, and sighs heavily like a man in anguish
of soul. So it always is now, they say. His Majesty nefer sleeps any
more at night. The comedy-actor knows he is not up to his part, and of
all life’s torments, wounded ambition becomes the bitterest.”
“Then it should also be the last for us to jest at. Dare I beg the major
to rub my right hand with snow; it is getting numb.”
The Holsteiner did as he desired and turned back to the king’s door. He
struck his forehead with both hands. His gray-sprinkled, bushy mustaches
stood straight out, and he mumbled, “Gott, Gott! Soon it will be too
dark to retreat.”
The ensign called, “Good sir, I should like to ask if you would rub my
face with snow. My cheeks are freezing stiff. Of the pain in my foot I
will not speak. Ah, I can’t bear it.”
The Holsteiner filled his hands with snow. “Let me stand guard,” he
said, “only for an hour.”
“No, no. The king has commanded that I stay here at the entrance.”
“Och, the king! I know him. I will make him cheerful, talk philosophy,
tell of gallant exploits. He is always amused to hear of a lover who
climbs adventurously through a window. He often looks at the beautiful
side of womankint. That appeals to his imagination, but not to his
flesh, for he is without feeling. And he is bashful. If the fair one
ever wishes to tread him under her silken shoe, she must herself
attack; but if she pretends to flee, then all the other women must
strive against a _liaison_. The most mighty lady his grandmother spoiled
everything with her shriek of ‘Marriage, marriage!’ King Carolus is from
top to toe like the Swedish queen Cristina, though he is genuinely
masculine. The two should have married each other on the same throne.
That would haf been a fine little pair. Oh, pfui, pfui! you Swedes. If a
man gallops his horses and lets people and kingdom be massacred, he is
still pure-hearted and supreme among all, only his bloot is too slow for
amours. Oh, excuse me! I know pure-hearted heroes who were faithfully in
love with two, three different maidens or wives in one and the same
week.”
“Yes, we are so, we are so. But for Christ’s pity you must rub my hand
again. And excuse my moaning and groaning!”
Just inside the gate, which could not be shut, lay the fallen Cossacks,
white as marble with the hoarfrost. The yellow sky became gray, and ever
nearer and more manifold in the twilight sounded the wailing cries:
“Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”
Now the king opened his door and came down across the garden.
The pains in his head, from which he was accustomed to suffer, had been
increased by his ride in the wind and made his glance heavy. His
countenance bore traces of lonely soul-strife, but as he drew near, his
mouth resumed its usual embarrassed smile. His temple was still
blackened after the musket-shot.
“It’s freshening up,” he said, and producing from his coat a loaf of
bread, he broke it in three, so that everyone had as large a piece as he
did. After that, he lifted off his riding-cape and fastened it himself
about the shoulders of the sentinel ensign.
Abashed over his own conduct, he then took the Holsteiner forcibly by
the arm and led him up through the garden, while they chewed at their
hard bread.
Now if ever, thought the Holsteiner, is the time to win the king’s
attention with a clever turn of speech and afterwards talk sense with
him.
“The accommodation might be better,” he began, at the same time biting
and chewing. “Ah, good old days! That reminds me of a gallant adventure
outside of Dresden.”
The king kept on holding him by the arm, and the Holsteiner lowered his
voice. The story was lively and salacious, and the king grew
inquisitive. The roughest ambiguities always lured out his set smile. He
listened with a despairing and half-absent man’s need of momentary
diversion.
Only when the Holsteiner with cunning deftness began to shift the
conversation over to some words about their immediate danger did the
king again become serious.
“Bagatelle, bagatelle!” he replied. “It is nothing at all worth
mentioning, except that we must behave ourselves well and sustain our
reputation to the last man. If the rascals come on, we will all three
place ourselves at the gate and pink them with our swords.”
The Holsteiner stroked his forehead and felt around. He began to talk
about the stars that were just shining out. He set forth a theory for
measuring their distance from the earth. The king now listened to him
with a quite different sort of attention. He broke into the question
keenly, resourcefully, and with an unwearied desire to think out new,
surprising methods in his own way. One assertion gave a hand to another,
and soon the conversation dwelt on the universe and the immortality of
the soul, to return afresh to the stars. More and more flickered in the
heavens, and the king described what he knew about the sun-dial. He
stood up his broadsword with its scabbard in the snow and directed the
point toward the Polestar, so that next morning they might be able to
tell the time.
“The heart of the universe,” he said, “must be either the earth or the
star that stands over the land of the Swedes. No land must be of more
account than the Swedish land.”
Outside the wall the Cossacks were calling out, but as soon as the
Holsteiner led the talk to their threatened attack, the king was
laconic.
“At daybreak we shall betake ourselves back to Hadjash,” said he.
“Before then we can hardly secure a third horse, so that each of us can
ride comfortably in his own saddle.”
After he had spoken in that strain he went back into the dwelling-house.
The Holsteiner came down with a vehement stride to the ensign, and
pointing at the king’s door, he cried out, “Forgif me, ensign. We
Germans don’t mince words when a wound oozes after a rope, but I lay
down my arms and give your lord the victory, because I also could shed
my bloot for the man. Do I love him! No-one efer understands him that
has not seen him.--But ensign, you cannot stay any longer out in the
weather.”
The ensign replied, “No cape has warmed me more sweetly than the one I
now wear, and I lay all my cares on Christ. But in God’s name, major, go
back to the door and listen! The king might do himself some harm.”
“His Majesty would not fall on his _own_ sword but longs for another’s.”
“Now I hear his steps even down here. They are getting still more
violent and restless. He is so lonely. When I saw him in Hadjash bowing
and bowing among the generals, I could only think: How lonely he is!”
“If the little Holsteiner slips away from here alife, he will always
remember the steps we heard tonight and always call this refuge Fort
Garden.”
The ensign nodded his approval and answered, “Go to the stable, major,
and seek rest and shelter a while between the horses. And there through
the walls you can better hear the king and watch over him.”
Thereupon the ensign began to sing with resonant voice:
“O Father, to Thy loving grace....”
The Holsteiner went back across the garden into the stable and, his
voice quavering with cold, intoned with the other:
“In every time and every place
My poor weak soul would I commend.
Oh, Lord, receive it and defend.”
“Oohaho! Oohaho!” answered the Cossacks in the storm, and it was already
night.
The Holsteiner squeezed himself in between the two horses and listened
till weariness and sleep bowed his head. Only at dawn was he wakened by
a clamor. He sprang out into the open air and beheld the king already
standing in the garden, looking at the sword that had been set up as a
sun-dial.
By the gate the Cossacks had collected, but when they saw the motionless
sentry, they shrank back in superstitious fear and thought of the rumors
concerning the magic of the Swedish soldiers with blow and shot.
When the Holsteiner had gotten forward to the ensign, he grasped him
hard by the arm.
“What now?” he asked, “Brandy?”
At the same instant he let go his grip.
The ensign stood frozen to death with his back again the wall of the
gate, his hands on his swordhilt, and wrapt in the king’s cloak.
“Since we are now only two,” the king remarked, drawing his weapon out
of the snow, “we can at once betake ourselves each to his horse, as it
was arranged.”
The Holsteiner stared him right in the eyes with re-awakened hate and
remained standing, as if he had heard nothing. Finally, however, he led
out the horses, but his hands trembled and clenched themselves so that
he could hardly draw the saddle-girths.
The Cossacks swung their sabres and pikes, but the sentry stood at his
post.
Then the king sprang carelessly into the saddle and set his horse to a
gallop. His forehead was clear and his cheeks rosy, and his broadsword
glimmered like a sunbeam.
The Holsteiner looked after him. His bitter expression relaxed, and he
murmured between his teeth, while he too mounted to the saddle and with
his hand lifted to his hat raced by the sentry: “It is only joy for a
hero to see a hero’s noble death.--Thanks, comrade!”
THE QUEEN OF THE MARAUDERS
The tocsin in the church tower at Narva had ceased. In a breach of the
battered rampart lay the fallen Swedish heroes, over whose despoiled and
naked bodies the Russians stormed into the city with wild cries. Some
Cossacks, who had sewed a live cat into the belly of an inn-keeper, were
still laughing in a circle around their victim, but the gigantic Peter
Alexievitch, the czar, soon burst his way through the midst of the
throng on street and courtyard and cut down his own men to check their
misdeeds. His right arm up to the shoulder was drenched with the blood
of his own subjects. Weary of murder, troop after troop finally
assembled in the square and the churchyard. Under the pretext that the
churches had been desecrated by the misbelievers who lay buried there,
bands of soldiers began to violate and plunder the graves. Stones were
pried up from the floor of the church with crowbars, and outside, the
graves were opened with shovels. Pillagers broke the copper and tin
caskets into pieces and threw dice for the silver handles and plates.
The streets, where at the first mêlée the inhabitants had thrown down
fire-brands and tiles, and where the blood of the slain was still
swimming in the gutters, were for many days piled up with rusty or
half-blackened coffins. The hair on some of the bodies had grown so that
it hung out between the boards. Some of the dead lay embalmed and well
preserved, though brown and withered, but from most of the coffins
yellow skeletons grinned forth from collapsed and mouldered shrouds.
People who stole anxiously among them read the coffin-plates in the
twilight and now and then recognized the name of a near relative, a
mother or a sister. Sometimes they saw the ravagers pull out the decayed
remains and throw them into the river. Sometimes, again, protected by
night, they themselves succeeded in carrying them off and burying them
outside the city. So in the dusk one might encounter an old man or woman
who came stealing along toilsomely with children or serving-maids,
carrying a coffin.
One night a swarm of pillagers bivouacked in a corner of the churchyard.
Hi! what fun it was to pile up a bonfire of bed-slats and bolsters and
chairs and coffin-ends and what the devil else could be dragged forth.
Flames and sparks blazed up as high as the attic window of the
parsonage. Round about stood coffins propped one against another. The
bottom of one of the uppermost had been broken, so that the treasurer,
of blessed memory, who was inside it, stood there upright with his
spliced wig on his head and looked as if he thought: “I pray you, into
what company have I been conducted?”
“Haha! little father,” the robbers called to him, as they roasted August
apples and onions at the flames; “you always wanted something to wet
your whistle, you there!”
The glow of the fire lighted up the living-room of the parsonage and the
sparks flew in through the broken panes. In the rooms stood only a
broken table and a chair, upon which sat the parson with his head
propped on his hands.
“Who knows? Perhaps it might succeed,” he mumbled and raised himself as
if he had found the key to a long-considered problem.
His silver-white beard spread itself over all his breast, and his hair
hung down to his shoulders. In his youth as chaplain he had gone in for
a little of everything and he had never pushed back a cup that was
offered him. Afterwards as a widower in the parsonage he had worshipped
God with joy and mirth and a brimming bowl, and it was bruited about
that he did not reach first for his Bible if a well-formed wench
happened to be in his company. He therefore even now took misfortune
more bravely and resignedly than others, and his heart was as undaunted
as his soldierly body was unbowed by years.
He went out into the entry and cautiously pulled out the five or six
rusty nails that held down a couple of boards above a little narrow
recess under the stairs. Then he lifted the boards aside.
“Come out, my child!” he said.
When no one obeyed him, his voice grew somewhat more severe and he
repeated his words: “Come out, Lina! Both the other maids have been
bound and carried away. It was verily at the last minute that I got you
in here. But it is almost a day since then, and you cannot live without
meat and drink. Eh?”
When he was not obeyed, he threw back his head in annoyance, and he now
spoke in accents of harsh command: “Why don’t you obey? Do you think
there is food here? There’s not so much as a pinch of salt left in the
house. You must be got away, you understand. If it goes ill with you, if
a plunderer gets you on the way, I can only say this: clasp your arms
about his neck and follow with him on his horse’s back wherever it
carries you. Many a time in the rough-and-tumble of war have I seen such
a love, and then I have slung the soldier’s cloak over my priest’s frock
and waved my hat for a lucky end to the song. Don’t you hear, lass? When
your late father, who was a drinker--if I must tell the truth--was my
stableboy and pulled me out of a hole in the ice once, I promised for
the future to provide for him and his child. Besides, he was Swedish
born as I was. Well, haven’t I always been a fatherly master to you, or
what has Her Grace to object? Have her wits deserted her, eh?”