Sleep would not come. It was not because I was proud of my travels and
excited about having been around the big world to China, and feeling
contemptuous of Bartel Sperling, “the traveler,” as he called himself,
and looked down upon us others because he had been to Vienna once and
was the only Eseldorf boy who had made such a journey and seen the
world’s wonders. At another time that would have kept me awake, but
it did not affect me now. No, my mind was filled with Nikolaus, my
thoughts ran upon him only, and the good days we had seen together at
romps and frolics in the woods and the fields and the river in the long
summer days, and skating and sliding in the winter when our parents
thought we were in school. And now he was going out of this young life,
and the summers and winters would come and go, and we others would rove
and play as before, but his place would be vacant; we should see him
no more. To-morrow he would not suspect, but would be as he had always
been, and it would shock me to hear him laugh, and see him do lightsome
and frivolous things, for to me he would be a corpse, with waxen hands
and dull eyes, and I should see the shroud around his face; and next
day he would not suspect, nor the next, and all the time his handful of
days would be wasting swiftly away and that awful thing coming nearer
and nearer, his fate closing steadily around him and no one knowing it
but Seppi and me. Twelve days--only twelve days. It was awful to think
of. I noticed that in my thoughts I was not calling him by his familiar
names, Nick and Nicky, but was speaking of him by his full name, and
reverently, as one speaks of the dead. Also, as incident after incident
of our comradeship came thronging into my mind out of the past, I
noticed that they were mainly cases where I had wronged him or hurt
him, and they rebuked me and reproached me, and my heart was wrung with
remorse, just as it is when we remember our unkindnesses to friends who
have passed beyond the veil, and we wish we could have them back again,
if only for a moment, so that we could go on our knees to them and say,
“Have pity, and forgive.”
Once when we were nine years old he went a long errand of nearly two
miles for the fruiterer, who gave him a splendid big apple for reward,
and he was flying home with it, almost beside himself with astonishment
and delight, and I met him, and he let me look at the apple, not
thinking of treachery, and I ran off with it, eating it as I ran, he
following me and begging; and when he overtook me I offered him the
core, which was all that was left; and I laughed. Then he turned away,
crying, and said he had meant to give it to his little sister. That
smote me, for she was slowly getting well of a sickness, and it would
have been a proud moment for him, to see her joy and surprise and have
her caresses. But I was ashamed to say I was ashamed, and only said
something rude and mean, to pretend I did not care, and he made no
reply in words, but there was a wounded look in his face as he turned
away toward his home which rose before me many times in after years, in
the night, and reproached me and made me ashamed again. It had grown
dim in my mind, by and by, then it disappeared; but it was back now,
and not dim.
Once at school, when we were eleven, I upset my ink and spoiled four
copy-books, and was in danger of severe punishment; but I put it upon
him, and he got the whipping.
And only last year I had cheated him in a trade, giving him a large
fish-hook which was partly broken through for three small sound ones.
The first fish he caught broke the hook, but he did not know I was
blamable, and he refused to take back one of the small hooks which my
conscience forced me to offer him, but said, “A trade is a trade; the
hook was bad, but that was not your fault.”
No, I could not sleep. These little, shabby wrongs upbraided me and
tortured me, and with a pain much sharper than one feels when the
wrongs have been done to the living. Nikolaus was living, but no
matter; he was to me as one already dead. The wind was still moaning
about the eaves, the rain still pattering upon the panes.
In the morning I sought out Seppi and told him. It was down by the
river. His lips moved, but he did not say anything, he only looked
dazed and stunned, and his face turned very white. He stood like that a
few moments, the tears welling into his eyes, then he turned away and
I locked my arm in his and we walked along thinking, but not speaking.
We crossed the bridge and wandered through the meadows and up among the
hills and the woods, and at last the talk came and flowed freely, and
it was all about Nikolaus and was a recalling of the life we had lived
with him. And every now and then Seppi said, as if to himself:
“Twelve days!--less than twelve.”
We said we must be with him all the time; we must have all of him we
could; the days were precious now. Yet we did not go to seek him. It
would be like meeting the dead, and we were afraid. We did not say it,
but that was what we were feeling. And so it gave us a shock when we
turned a curve and came upon Nikolaus face to face. He shouted, gaily:
“Hi-hi! What is the matter? Have you seen a ghost?”
We couldn’t speak, but there was no occasion; he was willing to talk
for us all, for he had just seen Satan and was in high spirits about
it. Satan had told him about our trip to China, and he had begged
Satan to take him a journey, and Satan had promised. It was to be a
far journey, and wonderful and beautiful; and Nikolaus had begged him
to take us, too, but he said no, he would take us some day, maybe, but
not now. Satan would come for him on the 13th, and Nikolaus was already
counting the hours, he was so impatient.
That was the fatal day. We were already counting the hours, too.
We wandered many a mile, always following paths which had been our
favorites from the days when we were little, and always we talked
about the old times. All the blitheness was with Nikolaus; we others
could not shake off our depression. Our tone toward Nikolaus was so
strangely gentle and tender and yearning that he noticed it, and was
pleased; and we were constantly doing him deferential little offices of
courtesy, and saying, “Wait, let me do that for you,” and that pleased
him, too. I gave him seven fish-hooks--all I had--and made him take
them; and Seppi gave him his new knife and a humming-top painted red
and yellow--atonements for swindles practised upon him formerly, as I
learned later, and probably no longer remembered by Nikolaus now. These
things touched him, and he said he could not have believed that we
loved him so; and his pride in it and gratefulness for it cut us to the
heart, we were so undeserving of them. When we parted at last, he was
radiant, and said he had never had such a happy day.
As we walked along homeward, Seppi said, “We always prized him, but
never so much as now, when we are going to lose him.”
Next day and every day we spent all of our spare time with Nikolaus;
and also added to it time which we (and he) stole from work and other
duties, and this cost the three of us some sharp scoldings, and some
threats of punishment. Every morning two of us woke with a start and a
shudder, saying, as the days flew along, “Only ten days left”; “only
nine days left”; “only eight”; “only seven.” Always it was narrowing.
Always Nikolaus was gay and happy, and always puzzled because we were
not. He wore his invention to the bone trying to invent ways to cheer
us up, but it was only a hollow success; he could see that our jollity
had no heart in it, and that the laughs we broke into came up against
some obstruction or other and suffered damage and decayed into a sigh.
He tried to find out what the matter was, so that he could help us out
of our trouble or make it lighter by sharing it with us; so we had to
tell many lies to deceive him and appease him.
But the most distressing thing of all was that he was always making
plans, and often they went beyond the 13th! Whenever that happened it
made us groan in spirit. All his mind was fixed upon finding some way
to conquer our depression and cheer us up; and at last, when he had
but three days to live, he fell upon the right idea and was jubilant
over it--a boys-and-girls’ frolic and dance in the woods, up there
where we first met Satan, and this was to occur on the 14th. It was
ghastly, for that was his funeral day. We couldn’t venture to protest;
it would only have brought a “Why?” which we could not answer. He
wanted us to help him invite his guests, and we did it--one can refuse
nothing to a dying friend. But it was dreadful, for really we were
inviting them to his funeral.
It was an awful eleven days; and yet, with a lifetime stretching back
between to-day and then, they are still a grateful memory to me, and
beautiful. In effect they were days of companionship with one’s sacred
dead, and I have known no comradeship that was so close or so precious.
We clung to the hours and the minutes, counting them as they wasted
away, and parting with them with that pain and bereavement which a
miser feels who sees his hoard filched from him coin by coin by robbers
and is helpless to prevent it.
When the evening of the last day came we stayed out too long; Seppi and
I were in fault for that; we could not bear to part with Nikolaus; so
it was very late when we left him at his door. We lingered near awhile,
listening; and that happened which we were fearing. His father gave him
the promised punishment, and we heard his shrieks. But we listened
only a moment, then hurried away, remorseful for this thing which we
had caused. And sorry for the father, too; our thought being, “If he
only knew--if he only knew!”
In the morning Nikolaus did not meet us at the appointed place, so we
went to his home to see what the matter was. His mother said:
“His father is out of all patience with these goings-on, and will not
have any more of it. Half the time when Nick is needed he is not to be
found; then it turns out that he has been gadding around with you two.
His father gave him a flogging last night. It always grieved me before,
and many’s the time I have begged him off and saved him, but this time
he appealed to me in vain, for I was out of patience myself.”
“I wish you had saved him just this one time,” I said, my voice
trembling a little; “it would ease a pain in your heart to remember it
some day.”
She was ironing at the time, and her back was partly toward me. She
turned about with a startled or wondering look in her face and said,
“What do you mean by that?”
I was not prepared, and didn’t know anything to say; so it was awkward,
for she kept looking at me; but Seppi was alert and spoke up:
“Why, of course it would be pleasant to remember, for the very reason
we were out so late was that Nikolaus got to telling how good you are
to him, and how he never got whipped when you were by to save him; and
he was so full of it, and we were so full of the interest of it, that
none of us noticed how late it was getting.”
“Did he say that? Did he?” and she put her apron to her eyes.
“You can ask Theodor--he will tell you the same.”
“It is a dear, good lad, my Nick,” she said. “I am sorry I let him get
whipped; I will never do it again. To think--all the time I was sitting
here last night, fretting and angry at him, he was loving me and
praising me! Dear, dear, if we could only know! Then we shouldn’t ever
go wrong; but we are only poor, dumb beasts groping around and making
mistakes. I sha’n’t ever think of last night without a pang.”
She was like all the rest; it seemed as if nobody could open a mouth,
in these wretched days, without saying something that made us shiver.
They were “groping around,” and did not know what true, sorrowfully
true things they were saying by accident.
Seppi asked if Nikolaus might go out with us.
“I am sorry,” she answered, “but he can’t. To punish him further, his
father doesn’t allow him to go out of the house to-day.”
We had a great hope! I saw it in Seppi’s eyes. We thought, “If he
cannot leave the house, he cannot be drowned.” Seppi asked, to make
sure:
“Must he stay in all day, or only the morning?”
“All day. It’s such a pity, too; it’s a beautiful day, and he is so
unused to being shut up. But he is busy planning his party, and maybe
that is company for him. I do hope he isn’t too lonesome.”
Seppi saw that in her eye which emboldened him to ask if we might go up
and help him pass his time.
“And welcome!” she said, right heartily. “Now I call that real
friendship, when you might be abroad in the fields and the woods,
having a happy time. You are good boys, I’ll allow that, though you
don’t always find satisfactory ways of improving it. Take these
cakes--for yourselves--and give him this one, from his mother.”
The first thing we noticed when we entered Nikolaus’s room was the
time--a quarter to 10. Could that be correct? Only such a few minutes
to live! I felt a contraction at my heart. Nikolaus jumped up and gave
us a glad welcome. He was in good spirits over his plannings for his
party and had not been lonesome.
“Sit down,” he said, “and look at what I’ve been doing. And I’ve
finished a kite that you will say is a beauty. It’s drying, in the
kitchen; I’ll fetch it.”
He had been spending his penny savings in fanciful trifles of various
kinds, to go as prizes in the games, and they were marshaled with fine
and showy effect upon the table. He said:
“Examine them at your leisure while I get mother to touch up the kite
with her iron if it isn’t dry enough yet.”
Then he tripped out and went clattering down-stairs, whistling.
We did not look at the things; we couldn’t take any interest in
anything but the clock. We sat staring at it in silence, listening
to the ticking, and every time the minute-hand jumped we nodded
recognition--one minute fewer to cover in the race for life or for
death. Finally Seppi drew a deep breath and said:
“Two minutes to ten. Seven minutes more and he will pass the
death-point. Theodor, he is going to be saved! He’s going to--”
“Hush! I’m on needles. Watch the clock and keep still.”
Five minutes more. We were panting with the strain and the excitement.
Another three minutes, and there was a footstep on the stair.
“Saved!” And we jumped up and faced the door.
The old mother entered, bringing the kite. “Isn’t it a beauty?” she
said. “And, dear me, how he has slaved over it--ever since daylight,
I think, and only finished it awhile before you came.” She stood it
against the wall, and stepped back to take a view of it. “He drew the
pictures his own self, and I think they are very good. The church
isn’t so very good, I’ll have to admit, but look at the bridge--any one
can recognize the bridge in a minute. He asked me to bring it up....
Dear me! it’s seven minutes past ten, and I--”
“But where is he?”
“He? Oh, he’ll be here soon; he’s gone out a minute.”
“Gone out?”
“Yes. Just as he came down-stairs little Lisa’s mother came in and said
the child had wandered off somewhere, and as she was a little uneasy I
told Nikolaus to never mind about his father’s orders--go and look her
up.... Why, how white you two do look! I do believe you are sick. Sit
down; I’ll fetch something. That cake has disagreed with you. It is a
little heavy, but I thought--”
She disappeared without finishing her sentence, and we hurried at once
to the back window and looked toward the river. There was a great crowd
at the other end of the bridge, and people were flying toward that
point from every direction.
“Oh, it is all over--poor Nikolaus! Why, oh, why did she let him get
out of the house!”
“Come away,” said Seppi, half sobbing, “come quick--we can’t bear to
meet her; in five minutes she will know.”
But we were not to escape. She came upon us at the foot of the stairs,
with her cordials in her hands, and made us come in and sit down and
take the medicine. Then she watched the effect, and it did not satisfy
her; so she made us wait longer, and kept upbraiding herself for giving
us the unwholesome cake.
Presently the thing happened which we were dreading. There was a sound
of tramping and scraping outside, and a crowd came solemnly in, with
heads uncovered, and laid the two drowned bodies on the bed.
“Oh, my God!” that poor mother cried out, and fell on her knees, and
put her arms about her dead boy and began to cover the wet face with
kisses. “Oh, it was I that sent him, and I have been his death. If I
had obeyed, and kept him in the house, this would not have happened.
And I am rightly punished; I was cruel to him last night, and him
begging me, his own mother, to be his friend.”
And so she went on and on, and all the women cried, and pitied her, and
tried to comfort her, but she could not forgive herself and could not
be comforted, and kept on saying if she had not sent him out he would
be alive and well now, and she was the cause of his death.
It shows how foolish people are when they blame themselves for anything
they have done. Satan knows, and he said nothing happens that your
first act hasn’t arranged to happen and made inevitable; and so, of
your own motion you can’t ever alter the scheme or do a thing that
will break a link. Next we heard screams, and Frau Brandt came wildly
plowing and plunging through the crowd with her dress in disorder and
hair flying loose, and flung herself upon her dead child with moans and
kisses and pleadings and endearments; and by and by she rose up almost
exhausted with her outpourings of passionate emotion, and clenched her
fist and lifted it toward the sky, and her tear-drenched face grew hard
and resentful, and she said:
“For nearly two weeks I have had dreams and presentiments and warnings
that death was going to strike what was most precious to me, and
day and night and night and day I have groveled in the dirt before
Him praying Him to have pity on my innocent child and save it from
harm--and here is His answer!”
Why, He had saved it from harm--but she did not know.
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 hand;
then she spoke again in that bitter tone: “But in His hard heart is no
compassion. I will never pray again.”
[Illustration: THERE WAS A SOUND OF TRAMPING OUTSIDE AND THE
CROWD CAME SOLEMNLY IN]
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 then 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 a 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 thin 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 victims massacre the
survivors and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and
distribute them around.
Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into the tent and drive the nail
into the temple of her sleeping guest; and we were so close that when
the blood gushed out it trickled in a little, red stream to our feet,
and we could have stained our hands in it if we had wanted to.
Next we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings
of the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans
toward the Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre
of those brave people. Also we saw Cæsar invade Britain--“not that
those barbarians had done him any harm, but because he wanted their
land, and desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their
widows and orphans,” as Satan explained.
Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review
before us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand
through those ages, “leaving famine and death and desolation in their
wake, and other signs of the progress of the human race,” as Satan
observed.
And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over
Europe, all over the world. “Sometimes in the private interest of royal
families,” Satan said, “sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a
war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such
war in the history of the race.”
“Now,” said Satan, “you have seen your progress down to the present,
and you must confess that it is wonderful--in its way. We must now
exhibit the future.”
He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life,
more devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen.
“You perceive,” he said, “that you have made continual progress. Cain
did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins
and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine
arts of military organization and generalship; the Christian has added
guns and gunpowder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly
improved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all
men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have
remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time.”
Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the
human race, although he knew that what he had been saying shamed us and
wounded us. No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering is
nothing to them; they do not know what it is, except by hearsay.
More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to
convert him, and as he had remained silent we had taken his silence
as a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a
disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression
upon him. The thought made us sad, and we knew then how the missionary
must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it
blighted. We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the
time to continue our work.
Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: “It is a
remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high
civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the
world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the
latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people.
They all did their best--to kill being the chiefest ambition of the
human race and the earliest incident in its history--but only the
Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or
three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent
killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the
Christian--not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the
Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with.”
By this time his theater was at work again, and before our eyes nation
after nation drifted by, during two or three centuries, a mighty
procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing
through seas of blood, smothered in battle-smoke through which the
flags glinted and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always we
heard the thunder of the guns and the cries of the dying.
“And what does it amount to?” said Satan, with his evil chuckle.
“Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went
in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating
itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end?
No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel
of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel
defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you
proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not
ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you
and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your
alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who
address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in
the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your
mouth, while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves
for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which
have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all
civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! Drink to
their augmentation! Drink to--” Then he saw by our faces how much we
were hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling, and
his manner changed. He said, gently: “No, we will drink one another’s
health, and let civilization go. The wine which has flown to our hands
out of space by desire is earthly, and good enough for that other
toast; but throw away the glasses; we will drink this one in wine which
has not visited this world before.”
We obeyed, and reached up and received the new cups as they descended.
They were shapely and beautiful goblets, but they were not made of any
material that we were acquainted with. They seemed to be in motion,
they seemed to be alive; and certainly the colors in them were in
motion. They were very brilliant and sparkling, and of every tint, and
they were never still, but flowed to and fro in rich tides which met
and broke and flashed out dainty explosions of enchanting color. I
think it was most like opals washing about in waves and flashing out
their splendid fires. But there is nothing to compare the wine with.
We drank it, and felt a strange and witching ecstasy as of heaven go
stealing through us, and Seppi’s eyes filled and he said, worshipingly:
“We shall be there some day, and then--”
He glanced furtively at Satan, and I think he hoped Satan would say,
“Yes, you will be there some day,” but Satan seemed to be thinking
about something else, and said nothing. This made me feel ghastly,
for I knew he had heard; nothing, spoken or unspoken, ever escaped
him. Poor Seppi looked distressed, and did not finish his remark. The
goblets rose and clove their way into the sky, a triplet of radiant
sundogs, and disappeared. Why didn’t they stay? It seemed a bad sign,
and depressed me. Should I ever see mine again? Would Seppi ever see
his?