They that are above
Have ends in everything.
A lame man was standing on the bridge that crosses the Neuer Pregel from
the Kant Strasse--which is the centre of the city of Konigsberg--to the
island known as the Kneiphof. This bridge is called the Kramer Brucke,
and may be described as the heart of the town. From it on either hand
diverge the narrow streets that run along the river bank, busy with
commerce, crowded with the narrow sleighs that carry wood from the
Pregel up into the town.
The wider streets--such as the Kant Strasse, running downhill from the
royal castle to the river, and the Kneiphof'sche Langgasse, leading
southward to the Brandenburg gate and the great world--must needs make
use of the Kramer Brucke. Here, it may be said, every man in the town
must sooner or later pass in the execution of his daily business,
whether he go about it on foot or in a sleigh with a pair of horses.
Here the idler and those grave professors from the University, which was
still mourning the death of the aged Kant, nearly always passed in their
thoughtful and conscientious promenades.
Here this lame man, a cobbler by trade, plying his quiet calling in a
house in the Neuer Markt, where the lime-trees grow close to the upper
windows, had patiently kept watch for three days. He was, like many lame
men, of an abnormal width and weight. He had a large, square, dogged
face, which seemed to promise that he would wait there till the crack of
doom rather than abandon a quest.
It was very cold--mid-winter within a few miles of the frozen Baltic
on the very verge of Russia, at that point where old Europe stretches
a long arm out into the unknown. The cobbler was wrapped in a sheepskin
coat, which stood out all round him with the stiffness of wood, so
that he seemed to be living inside a box. To keep himself warm he
occasionally limped across from end to end of the bridge, but never
went farther. At times he leant his arms on the stone wall at the Kant
Strasse end of the bridge, and looked down into the Lower Fish
Market, where women from Pillau and the Baltic shores--mere bundles of
clothes--stood over their baskets of fish frozen hard like sticks. It
was a silent market. One cannot haggle long when a minute's exposure
to the air will give a frost-bite to the end of the nose. The would-be
purchaser can scarcely make an effective bargain through a fringe of
icicles that rattle against his lips if he open them.
The Pregel had been frozen for three months, with only the one temporary
thaw in November which cost Napoleon so many thousands at his broken
bridge across the Beresina. Though no water had flowed beneath this
bridge, many strange feet had passed across it.
It had vibrated beneath Napoleon's heavy carriage, under the lumbering
guns that Macdonald took northward to blockade Riga. Within the last few
weeks it had given passage to the last of the retreating army, a mere
handful of heartsick fugitives. Macdonald with his staff had been
ignominiously driven across it by the Cossacks who followed hard after
them, the great marshal still wild with rage at the defection of Yorck
and the Prussian contingent.
And now the Cossacks on their spare and ill-tempered horses passed to
and fro, wild men under an untamed leader whose heart was hardened to
stone by bereavement. The cobbler looked at them with a countenance of
wood. It was hard to say whether he preferred them to the French, or
was indifferent to one as to the other. He looked at their boots with
professional disdain. For all men must look at the world from their own
standpoint and consider mankind in the light of their own interests.
Thus those who live on the greed or the vanity, or batten on the charity
of their neighbour, learn to watch the lips.
The cobbler, by reason of looking at the lower end of men, attracted
little attention from the passer-by. He who has his eyes on the ground
passes unheeded. For the surest way of awakening interest is to appear
interested. It would seem that this cobbler was waiting for a pair of
boots not made in Konigsberg. And on the third day his expressionless
black eyes lighted on feet not shod in Poland, or France, or Germany,
nor yet in square-toed Russia.
The owner of these far-travelled boots was a lightly-built dark-faced
man, with eyes quietly ubiquitous. He caught the interested glance of
the cobbler, and turned to look at him again with the uneasiness that is
bred of war. The cobbler instantly hobbled towards him.
“Will you help a poor man?” he said.
“Why should I?” was the answer, with one hand already half out of its
thick glove. “You are not hungry; you have never been starved in your
life.”
The German was quick enough, but it was not quite the Prussian German.
The cobbler looked at the speaker slowly.
“An Englishman?” he asked.
And the other nodded.
“Come this way.”
The cobbler hobbled towards the Kneiphof, where the streets are quiet,
and the Englishman followed him. At the corner of the Kohl Markt he
turned and looked, not at the man, but at his boots.
“You are a sailor?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I was told to look for an English sailor--Louis d'Arragon.”
“Then you have found me,” was the reply.
Still the cobbler hesitated.
“How am I to know it?” he asked suspiciously.
“Can you read?” asked D'Arragon. “I can prove who I am--if I want to.
But I am not sure that I want to.”
“Oh! it is only a letter--of no importance. Some private business of
your own. It comes from Dantzig--written by one whose name begins with
'B.'”
“Barlasch,” suggested D'Arragon quietly, as he took from his pocket a
paper which he unfolded and held beneath the eyes of the cobbler. It was
a passport written in three languages. If the man could read, he was not
anxious to boast of an accomplishment so far above his station; but
he glanced at the paper, not without a practised skill, to seize the
essential parts of it.
“Yes, that is the name,” he said, searching in his pockets. “The letter
is an open one. Here it is.”
In passing the letter, the man made a scarcely perceptible movement of
the hand which might have been a signal.
“No,” said D'Arragon, “I do not belong to the Tugendbund or to any other
secret society. We have need of no such associations in my country.”
The cobbler laughed, not without embarrassment.
“You have a quick eye,” he said. “It is a great country, England. I have
seen the river full of English ships before Napoleon chased you off the
seas.”
D'Arragon smiled as he unfolded the letter.
“He has not done it yet,” he said, with that spirit which enables
mariners of the Anglo-Saxon race to be amused when there is a talk of
supremacy on the high seas. He read the letter carefully, and his face
hardened.
“I was instructed,” said the cobbler, “to give you the letter, and at
the same time to inform you that any assistance or facilities you may
require will be forth-coming; besides...” he broke off and pointed with
his thick, leather-stained finger, “that writing is not the writing of
him who signs.”
“He who signs cannot write at all.”
“That writing,” went on the cobbler, “is a passport in any German state.
He who carries a letter written in that hand can live and travel free
anywhere from here to the Rhine or the Danube.”
“Then I am lucky in possessing a powerful friend,” said D'Arragon, “for
I know who wrote this letter. I think I may say he is a friend of mine.”
“I am sure of it. I have already been told so,” said the cobbler. “Have
you a lodging in Konigsberg? No? Then you can lodge in my house.”
Without awaiting a reply, which he seemed to consider a foregone
conclusion, he limped down the Kohl Markt towards the steps leading to
the river, which in winter is a thoroughfare.
“I live in the Neuer Markt,” he said breathlessly, as he laboured
onwards. “I have waited for you three days on that bridge. Where have
you been all this time?”
“Avoiding the French,” replied D'Arragon curtly. Respecting his own
affairs he was reticent, as commanders and other lonely men must always
be. They walked side by side on the dusty and trodden ice without
further speech. At the steps from the river to Neuer Markt, D'Arragon
gave the lame man his hand, and glanced a second time at the fingers
which clasped his own. They had not been born to toil, but had had it
thrust upon them.
They crossed the Neuer Markt together, and went into that house where
the linden grows so close as to obscure the windows. And the lodging
offered to Louis was the room in which Charles Darragon had slept in his
wet clothes six months earlier. So small is the world in which we live,
and so narrow are the circles drawn by Fate around human existence and
endeavour.
The cobbler having shown his visitor the room, and pointed out its
advantages, was turning to go when D'Arragon, who was laying aside his
fur coat, seemed to catch his attention, and he paused on the threshold.
“There is French blood in your veins,” he said abruptly.
“Yes--a little.”
“So. I thought there must be. You reminded me--it was odd, the way you
laid aside your coat--reminded me of a Frenchman who lodged here for
one night. He was like you, too, in build and face. He was a spy, if you
please--one of the French Emperor's secret police. I was new at the work
then, but still I suspected there was something wrong about him. I took
his boots--a pretext of mending them. I locked him in. He got out of
that window, if you please, without his boots. He followed me, and
learnt much that he was not meant to know. I have since heard it from
others. He did the Emperor a great service--that man. He saved his life,
I think, from assassination in Dantzig. And he did me an ill turn--but
it was my own carelessness. I thought to make a thaler by lodging him,
and he was tricking me all the while.”
“What was his name?” asked D'Arragon.
“Oh--I forgot the name he gave. It was a false one. He was disguised as
a common soldier--and he was in reality an officer of the staff. But I
know the name of the officer to whom he wrote his report of his night's
lodging here--his colleague in the secret police, it would seem.”
“Ah!” said D'Arragon, busying himself with his haversack.
“It was De Casimir--a Polish name. And in the last two days I have
heard of him. He has accepted the Emperor's amnesty. He has married a
beautiful woman, and is living like a prince at Cracow. All this since
the siege of Dantzig began. In time of war there is no moment to lose,
eh?”
“And the other? He who slept in this room. Has he passed through
Konigsberg again?”
“No, that he has not. If he had, I should have seen him. You can
believe me, I wanted to see him. I was at my place on the bridge all
the time--while the French occupied Konigsberg--when the last of them
hurried away a month ago with the Cossacks close behind. No. I should
have seen him, and known him. He is not on this side of the Niemen, that
fine young gentleman. Now, what can I do to help you to-morrow?”
“You can help me on the way to Vilna,” answered D'Arragon.
“You will never get there.”
“I will try,” said the sailor.