UNDER MUNICH.
After an instant's reflection in the impenetrable shades, Claudius
concluded to follow the advice of the variety theatre's prima donna.
While a stranger to the City of Breweries, he knew that its
predestination toward thirst was due to its being the site of an ancient
rock-salt mine. In other cities, subterraneans were melodramatic; here,
a labyrinth under the surface and at the level of the dancing and
drinking cellars was so natural that a child of Munich, dropped into a
well, would have no misgivings as to his worming his way up into the
outer air.
At the worst, when pressed by hunger, he could no doubt make an appeal
to the mounted patrol by night or the foot-passengers by day, whom he
would hear overhead, and be released from this living burial at the cost
of the imprisonment and trial which he had temporarily evaded.
Remembering that he had a box of cigar-lights, and regretting again the
want of the cloak so useful in these damp passages, he lighted a match
and began his flight by the sole opening that he spied. An odor of
sausages, cheese and coarse tobacco was here and there strong, and he
correctly divined that at these points, fugitives, probably from the
same enemy as he fled, had recently made halts. Once assured that he was
in a kind of thoroughfare, though one for the nefarious, he felt bolder
and more hopeful about reaching a desirable goal.
He did not pause to think, as he continued, choosing, where there was a
bifurcation, the most trampled corridor, hewn originally by the miners'
pick. But he had much on his mind for future elaboration. Heretofore no
man could have lived a less eventful life, passed among books, globes,
drawing tools and lecture notes. In a few hours the change was great.
The quiet student, with no aspirations but the completion of his
wandering-year in Italian picture-galleries, had become a fugitive from
justice, and on the hands, groping in a lugubrious earthen alley, were
the stains of a fellow-creature's blood. Then, too, the singular
friendships he had formed, the old Jew and his daughter, who were
awaiting him--and this still more remarkable creature who had glanced
across his path, like the divinities from above in antique poems, to
point out the safe retreat.
But too long a time elapsed without his finding such an evidence of his
security as he had too confidently expected. He might have mistaken the
true line, for while at any point of divergence there were marks in the
earth, where traces of saline flows still glistened, and even stones and
bits of stick placed in cavities in the manner of the gypsy clues
familiar to social outcasts, he could not interpret them; for once, his
university education proved faulty.
A new alarm arose from the presence of swarms of rats; larger and more
hideous than their fellows of which one catches a fleeting view in
houses and in the streets, they seemed to be less afraid of the lord of
creation than fables teach. They scuttled off in front of him, it is
true, but he began to think that they followed him when he went by. One
ray of comfort came in the two beliefs that his flashing matches
frightened them, and that, for certain portions of the way,
well-regulated droves of the vermin had districts assigned them; those
that ventured in chase of him too far were beaten back by those on whose
grounds they rashly trespassed.
This latter consolation was lost almost at the same time as the other:
his stock of fuses ran out, while with the last flash he feared that he
saw a larger mass than ever before in his track. The rats had united to
overwhelm him.
Seized with panic, spite of his philosophy, dropping the all but empty
wax-light case in his haste, he dashed madly forward, groping to save
his head and shoulders from contact with the capacious gallery sides,
but unable to take a step with any certainty how it would end.
Fortunately, he had strayed back into an often-traveled path, and while
the scamper of the rats died away at the close of his frantic race, he
heard a sound but little above his level revealing the presence of man.
It was not a cheerful sound; being the tolling of a bell such as is
swung when a dead body is entering a cemetery, is carried to the chapel
before interment.
Nevertheless, fellow beings would be near and he had only to find the
opening by which this burial-ground could be reached. He remembered that
the old cemetery had been immensely extended, if the guide-books were to
be credited, and, while he had no clear idea of the direction he had
rambled, he might have reached the town of twenty thousand dead. The
idea was gruesome of having to call for the aid of a grave-digger, but
he felt that he could not much longer support this journey in the
underworld without the bodily support of food or the mental one of human
fellowship.
Silence most oppressive had followed the patter of the myriad of rats'
feet, and it checked his efforts. They were brought to a termination
just when he looked forward with joy to a grey light dimly indicating
some aperture on the other side of which shone the day. The ground
seemed to give way under him, and he was hurled senseless into the pit
which he had not suspected.
When he returned to consciousness, the bell had ceased to toll; the
silence was once more heavy. But the pangs of hunger--remorseless master
over the young--spurred him into rising.
He was thankful that he had not been attacked in his helplessness by the
vermin, and he muttered a prayer in his first stride toward where he
recalled the feeble light. The rats' compact column had figured in his
dreams, and while they were led by the fair waltz-singer and dancer in
order to devour him, unable to resist, the benignant fairy, for once
dark--contrary to all precedent--wore the appearance of Rebecca.
He could not see the light; but a current of warm air stealing steadily
into the underground indicated the orifice. It was a welcome draft, for
it differed in many features from the noisome, dank and earthy
exhalations to which he had luckily become accustomed in his indefinite
sojourn.
His surmise was correct. Through a grating of iron bars, straight at the
side and semi-circular at the top, set in massive masonry of some
building, in the foundation of which he crouched, he saw, in the
vagueness of clouded starlight, the domain of the dead.
On being assured of this, the panic, mastering him before, resumed its
sway; it gave him a giant's strength to escape the fancied, grisly
pursuers, and he moved the whole series of bars far enough away to
enable him to crawl through the gap.
He stood, exhausted, panting, glad of the relief from the waking
nightmare which the darkness encouraged. His weakness could be accounted
for, as his wandering had lasted long; the syncope could not be brief
since nearly thirty hours must have transpired from his rush out of the
variety music-hall.
Before him, for at his back stood the chapel for services, stretched out
the vast cemetery. Some of the cracked, dilapidated tombs dated back to
1600; others marked the addition in 1788 to the original God's-acre. All
was hushed; it was difficult to imagine a phantom where neglect seemed
to rule. It was not in this olden part that descendants of the departed
flocked on All Saints' Day to decorate the mausoleums with evergreens,
plaster images and artificial immortelle garlands. Except for a
screeching-sparrow, which his first steps dislodged, not a sign of life
appeared in this town around which the living city slept as quietly.
His eyes clearing, he believed he descried the gateway and, sure that so
large a _campo santo_ would have a warder in hourly attendance, he made
his way, deviating as the tombs compelled, toward the entrance. To his
surprise, all was still there, and though a lamp burned in the little
stone lodge, it was certainly untenanted. The gate was ajar; there was
no fear of the tenants flitting out bodily for a night's excursion.
Claudius was dying for refreshment and he was not fastidious about
intruding. A man who has traversed the underlying catacombs need not be
delicate about taking a nip of spirits or a hunch of bread. Both were in
a cupboard in the little domicile, supplied with a porter's chair so
ample as to be the watcher's bed, and a stove where a fire merrily
burned, crackling with billets of pine wood.
The disappearance was the more strange, as on a framed placard, at the
base of which was a row of brazen knobs, there was a formal injunction
for the gatewarder never to go away without his place being taken by
another "from sunset to sunrise and an hour after!"
Claudius knew what those knobs and the instructions portended in this
adjunct to the charnel house. The public mortuary was at the other end
of the wires from those bells; the custom was to attach them to the dead
so that, if their slumbers were not that knowing no waking and they
stirred even so little as a finger, the electric transmitter which they
agitated would sound the appeal.
And now the watcher, on whom perhaps depended the duration of a worthier
life than his, had paltered with his trust, while drinking at the
beer-house or chattering with a sweetheart, the bell might ring
unheeded, and the unhappy creature, falling with the last tremor of
vitality, to obtain a desperate succor, would become indeed the corpse
like which he had been laid out in the morgue.
Claudius smiled grimly and sadly. On what flimsy bases the best plant of
wise men too often rest! The latest power of nature had been harnessed
to do man service in his utmost extremity; science had perfected its
instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would
tinkle--the watcher would be laughing out of earshot--and the life would
sink back into Lethe after swimming to the shore!
The student sighed as he ate the piece of bread broken off a small loaf
and drank from the bottle out of which the faithless turnkey hobnobbed
with the sexton, the undertaker's men and the hearse-coachman.
If the bell should ring, with him alone to hear, ought he hasten out by
the gate providentially open, and leave for the care of heaven alone the
unknown wretch who would have summoned his brother-Christians most
uselessly? The resuscitated man would not be "of his parish," since he
was a wanderer from afar. Let the natives bury their own dead!
At this instant, when philosophy pointed out to the student the unbarred
portals, the bell in the midst of the row rang clearly if not very
loudly. It sounded in his ear like the last trump. Could he doubt that
this appeal was to him exclusively? The removal of the custodian, his
own miraculous escape--all pointed to this conclusion.
But might he not run out and, if he saw the traitorous warder on his
road, repeat to him the alarm? Not much time would be lost, for the gong
still vibrated, and his personal safety ranked above his neighbor's in
such a crisis.
But Claudius' hesitation had been that of physical weakness; confronted
in this way with the problem of fraternity, he did not waver any longer.
On the threshold of safety, he turned straight back into the jaws of
destruction. He had not emerged from that darkness and depth of earth,
to descend into a lower profundity and a denser darkness of the soul.
He glanced at the brazen monitor: its surface still shivered, though his
senses were not fine enough to hear the faint sound. But there was no
delusion; the dead in the morgue had signaled to the world on whose
verge it was balanced.
It cost the student no pang now to retrace the steps he had painfully
counted, to reach the building, out of the cellars of which he had so
gladly climbed. On thus facing it, he knew by a window being lighted
that his goal was there.
He had found fresh energy in his mission, rather than the scanty
refreshment, and in three minutes was at the door. Heavy with iron
banding the oak, it was not made for the hand of the dying to move it,
but Claudius dragged it open with violence. He sprang inside with the
vivacity of a bridegroom invading the nuptial chamber, although here was
no agreeable sight.
A long plain hall, of grey stone, the seams defined with black cement;
all the windows high up, small and grated; only the one door, never
locked. Two rows of slate beds, three of which only were occupied; two
men and a boy, nude save a waistcloth; over their heads--sluggishly
swayed by the air the new-comer had carelessly admitted--their clothes
were hung like shapeless shadows. They had been dredged up in the Isar's
mud, found at a corner, dragged from under a cartwheel. No one
identifying them, they were deposited here; their fate? dissection for
the benefit of science, and interment of the detached portions in the
pauper's hell.
Which had rung the bell?
Claudius investigated the three: the boy had been crushed by the
sludge-basket of the steam-dredge; not a spark of life was left there,
his companion was green and horrible; he, too, had passed the bourne.
But on the other row, alone, a robust man with disfigured face, and red
whiskers, looked like a fresh cut alabaster statue. Cold had blanched
him; but a faint steam arose from his armpits, in the sepulchral light
of a green-shaded gas-jet. There heat remained to prove that the great
furnace in the frame had not ceased to be fed.
The student bent over him to feel the heart, when, as promptly, he
sprang back. Spite of the maltreated face, he recognized his combatant
in the duel with canes; it was Major Von Sendlingen, who had been flung
on the slab in the public dead-house.
Had Baboushka commanded his death to prevent her complicity in the
assault on Daniels and his daughter being published, and had she
suggested the stripping which caused the police to confound the noble
officer with the victim of the "pickers-up" of drunkards?
But the major shivered in the blast from the door left open, and a brief
flush ran over the icy skin.
If his enemy did not extend relief to him immediately, he would never
recover strength to ring the death-bell to which ran the wires appended
to his fingers and toes.
With three or four rapid strokes and twistings, Claudius broke them. He
looked round; this waif of the gutter had no clothes, but a torn and
shapeless garment dangled over his head; it was the old cloak of the
student. The pockets had been torn bodily away to save time; it was the
mere integument of the garment.
But it sufficed to retain the scanty heat lingering in the unfortunate
man, when wrapped about him. With a surprising spell of strength,
Claudius lifted him upon his breast when so enveloped, and crossed the
grounds for the third time.
The warder had returned but he had left the gate open to close its
sliding grate by mechanism worked within his little house. To his amazed
eyes, Claudius presented himself with the burden.
"Help him! revive him! he is living!" he said. "I will go fetch the
police surgeon! it is my officer--Major von Sendlingen!"
After the announcement of the rank, Claudius knew that the officer would
want for nothing. He let the body fall into the large armchair and,
taking advantage of the warder's consternation at seeing the dead-like
body sitting between him and the only exit, glided through the narrow
space between the sliding rails and disappeared.
The boom of an alarm bell, set swinging over the gateway by the warder,
added wings to his feet, for he feared that police and patrol would
hurry to the cemetery from all quarters, and he wanted, above all, to
reach the Jew's hotel before morning.