FIRE AND BLOOD—THE HERMANSTADT MURDER.
At risk of dispelling the idea just given of the somnolent nature of
life at Hermanstadt, I am bound to mention that the quiet little town
was once distinguished by a murder as repulsive and cold-blooded as any
of which our most corrupted capitals can boast.
It came to pass, namely, that during the summer of 1883 the town was
several times roused by the fire-alarm, and at short intervals more
than one barn or stable was partially reduced to ashes. Nobody thought
much of this at the time, for, thanks to the energetic conduct of the
volunteer fire-brigade, assistance was promptly rendered, and though
some few Saxon voices were heard to express a belief that their beloved
compatriots the Roumanians were probably at the bottom of this, as of
most other unexplained pieces of mischief, the majority of people were
of opinion that the unusually dry summer, coupled with some chance acts
of negligence, was quite sufficient to account for these conflagrations.
In the month of September, however, the entire garrison of Hermanstadt
being absent at the military manœuvres, these fires began to assume
an epidemic character, and by a strange coincidence they occurred
invariably at night. During the week the troops were away there were no
less than four or five fires.
Vague alarm now began to take possession of the population, and the
uneasy feeling that something was wrong took shape in a dozen fantastic
rumors, the one more startling than the other. The cook coming back
from market brought news of a parcel of combustible materials found
concealed in some barn or hay-loft; the boys returned from school full
of some mysterious threatening letter, said to have been discovered
posted up on a tree of the promenade; and the shopman, while tying up
a parcel, sought to enliven us by dark allusions to sinister-looking
individuals seen dodging about the scene of conflagration, and
apparently regarding their handiwork with fiendish glee.
By daytime these rumors certainly tended to break the monotony of our
solitude, and, proud of our superior common-sense, we, the bereaved
grass-widows of the absent officers, could afford to laugh at the many
ridiculous stories which were scaring our weaker-minded attendants.
Only when darkness had set in, when the children had gone to bed,
and we ourselves prepared to spend a long, lonely evening, did these
various reports begin to assume a somewhat more definite shape in
our brain, and to appear infinitely less absurd than they had done
in broad daylight. We nervously wondered whether again this night we
should be roused from sleep by the horrid sound of the tocsin. Though
it was autumn, not spring, we could not shake ourselves free from an
atmosphere of vague April fools on a large and most unpleasant scale,
and dimly began to realize what it must feel like to be a Russian
emperor, as quaking we counted the days which must elapse before our
natural protectors and the defenders of the town were restored to us.
One night, having, as usual, gone to bed with these sensations, I
was just dropping into an uneasy sleep, when, sure enough, shortly
before midnight the odiously familiar sound of the fire-alarm broke
in upon my dream, and, hastily opening the window, I could see the
sky all red with the fiery glare, at what appeared to be a very short
distance from our house in the direction of the stables where, about
a hundred paces farther up the street, our horses were lodged. My
husband’s chargers were, of course, away with him at the manœuvres, but
the children’s pony and one horse had remained behind; so, afraid of
anything happening to them in case the orderly were asleep or absent,
I resolved to go and assure myself of their safety. In a few minutes I
was dressed, and, accompanied only by my faithful Brick, who was vastly
delighted at the idea of a midnight walk, I left the house.
Before I had gone many steps I saw that my fears for the horses were
groundless, the fire being ever so much farther away than had appeared
from the window. However, having taken the trouble to rise and dress,
I resolved to go on a little, and see whatever there was to be seen.
It was a lovely moonlight night, almost as bright as day, only that
the town had a much more lively aspect than I had ever seen it wear by
daylight, for every one was afoot, and, like myself, hurrying towards
the red glare visible over the high-pointed gables.
It proved impossible to get close to the fire raging in a narrow street
at the beginning of the Untere Stadt, but any one standing at the top
of the steep stone staircase by which this portion of the town is
reached could command a good view of the scene, all the more striking
from being seen from above. After I had stood there for nearly half an
hour watching the tossing flames below me, and choked by occasional
puffs of smoke, I began to feel both chilly and sleepy, and thought
I might as well go back to bed, since it was nearly one o’clock, and
the excitements of this night appeared to be exhausted. I left a large
crowd still assembled round the scene of action, while the streets I
passed on my homeward way were empty and deserted. Deserted, likewise,
was our own street, the Fleischer Gasse, as it lay before me in the
moonlight; but as I approached I became aware of the solitary dark-clad
figure of a slender young man walking on the pavement just in front of
our house. He seemed to me well dressed, and in appearance thoroughly
respectable—an opinion which Brick, however, failed to share, for
he advanced to meet the stranger with a low growl of suppressed but
intense disapproval, which compliment the respectable young man
returned by savagely hitting the dog with the tightly rolled-up
umbrella he carried in his hand.
I should probably not have cast a second look at this stranger had
not something in the needless brutality of his action attracted my
attention, and caused me to scan his features. I thus noticed that he
appeared to be little over twenty years of age, had a small sallow
face, a sprouting mustache, and dark eyes set rather near together.
I rang the house-bell, and my maid came down to let me in, when, to my
surprise, the stranger rudely attempted to force himself in behind me;
but we slammed the door in his face, and then my servant told me that
this same young man had been hanging about here for over half an hour,
and had already once endeavored to effect an entrance behind some other
person.
* * * * *
Two days later the troops came back from the manœuvres, and
everything returned to accustomed order and quiet. The officers were,
however, one and all far too much engrossed in recollection of those
glorious imaginary laurels they had been winning on their bloodless
battle-fields to take interest in anything so commonplace as a real
fire; so the tale of the terrors we had undergone during their absence
fell upon callous ears, and as no more conflagrations ensued to give
color of semblance to our story, the matter soon lapsed into oblivion.
The usual winter torpor settled down upon the place, and the months
wore slowly away towards spring without anything having occurred to
disturb their peaceful current, when late on the evening of the 21st of
February the almost forgotten sound of the tocsin was again heard in
the streets, and simultaneously the news of a fourfold murder spread
like wildfire through the town. The house inhabited by a retired
military surgeon, Dr. Friedenwanger, had been discovered burning, and
some members of the fire-brigade, on forcing an entrance, found his
corpse, along with that of his wife, child, and maidservant, still
reeking with warm blood, and mutilated in the most disgusting manner.
At first everybody was quite at sea as to where to look for the
perpetrators of this crime, but by a curious chance, just while Dr.
Friedenwanger was being buried, two days later, a bloody knife and
some iron crowbars, found concealed in a drain near the cemetery, led
to the identification of the murderers in the persons of Anton von
Kleeberg and Rudolf Marlin,[74] two young men of respectable burgher
families, aged about nineteen and twenty-one. The photographs of these
youthful criminals being soon after exhibited in several shop-windows,
neither I nor my maid had any difficulty in recognizing that of
Kleeberg as the portrait of the mysterious stranger who had tried to
enter our house on the night of the fire.
Many interesting details, too lengthy to be here recorded, came out
at the trial, and a long list of misdeeds was brought home to the
culprits, who, among other things, confessed to having laid every one
of the fires the previous summer, thus diverting public attention while
they proceeded to rob some particular house known to be ill-guarded,
or inhabited by women only. There is therefore every reason to suppose
that Messrs. Kleeberg and Marlin, well aware of the temporary absence
of all masculine element from the household, had selected our house
for a visit of this description; and I am likewise firmly convinced
that my beloved and sagacious dog Brick, with that delicate sense of
perception which so favorably distinguishes the canine from the coarser
human race, had instantaneously detected the guilty intentions of the
very respectable-looking young man we met in the moonlight before our
house that September night. The victim, Dr. Friedenwanger, enjoyed a
bad reputation as a usurer, and his murder had been undertaken for the
sake of stealing the watches and jewellery he kept in pawn; while by
subsequently setting fire to the premises the murderers had hoped to
annihilate all traces of their crime. Some of the horrible disclosures
at the trial brought, nevertheless, moments of intense satisfaction to
more than one female breast, as being so many triumphant vindications
of those terrors so cavalierly treated by the other sex a few months
before. Did they now realize in what danger we had been last autumn,
when they were all away engrossed in their miserable sham-fights? Did
they know that their homes might have been reduced to ashes while they
were complacently toying with blank-cartridges? or that their helpless
progeny could easily have been made mince-meat of while they were
slaying their legions of visionary Russians or Turks?
Such the self-evident arguments with which we were now able to clear
ourselves from the base imputation of cowardice, and surely no woman
worthy her sex forbore to make use of these handy weapons, or missed
such glorious opportunity of turning the tables on her lord and master.
* * * * *
Characteristic of Magyar legislation was the circumstance of the
whole trial being conducted in Hungarian, though this language was
absolutely unknown to the two German prisoners, who were thus debarred
the doubtful privilege of comprehending their own death-sentence when
finally pronounced about a year after their crime. Like enough, though,
its meaning was subsequently made clear to them, for Anton von Kleeberg
and Rudolf Marlin were executed at Hermanstadt on the 16th of June,
1885.[75]
FOOTNOTES:
[74] In justice to Saxon national feeling, I have been specially
requested to mention the fact that neither of these two young German
murderers was of Saxon extraction.
[75] As a curious instance of the precariousness of human life, I may
here make mention of Colonel P——, a distinguished countryman of ours,
then occupying a diplomatic post at Vienna. This gentleman, who had
an unwholesome liking for witnessing executions, having accidentally
learned that Hermanstadt boasted two candidates for the gallows, had
requested a Transylvanian acquaintance to send him timely notice of
their hanging, in order that he might assist at the spectacle. This
morbid desire was, however, not destined to be satisfied, as long
before the slow march of justice had culminated in a death-warrant,
Colonel P—— himself had been carried off by the far more rapid
Egyptian fever.