Nothing can cover his high fame but Heaven,
No pyramids set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness
To which I leave him.
“Why I will not let you go out into the streets?” said Barlasch one
February morning, stamping the snow from his boots. “Why I will not let
you go out into the streets?”
He turned and followed Desiree towards the kitchen, after having
carefully bolted the heavy oaken door which had been strengthened as if
to resist a siege. Desiree's face had that clear pallor which marks an
indoor life; but Barlasch, weather-beaten, scorched and wrinkled, showed
no sign of having endured a month's siege in an overcrowded city.
“I will tell you why I will not let you go into the streets. Because
they are not fit for any woman to go into--because if you walked from
here to the Rathhaus you would see sights that would come back to you in
your sleep, and wake you from it, when you are an old woman. Do you know
what they do with their dead? They throw them outside their doors--with
nothing to cover their starved nakedness--as Lisa put her ashes in the
street every morning. And the cart goes round, as the dustman's cart
used to go in times of peace, and, like the dustman's cart, it drops
part of its load, and the dust that blows round it is the infection of
typhus. That is why you cannot go into the streets.”
He unbuttoned his fur coat and displayed a smart new uniform; for Rapp
had put his miserable army into new clothes, with which many of the
Dantzig warehouses had been filled by Napoleon's order at the beginning
of the war.
“There,” he said, laying a small parcel on the table, “there is my
daily ration. Two ounces of horse, one ounce of salt beef, the same as
yesterday. One does not know how long we shall be treated so generously.
Let us keep the beef--we may come to want some day.”
And giving a hoarse laugh, he lifted a board in the floor, beneath which
he hoarded his stores.
“Will you cook your dejeuner yourself,” asked Desiree. “I have something
else for my father.”
“And what have you?” asked Barlasch curtly; “you are not keeping
anything hidden from me?”
“No,” answered Desiree, with a laugh at the sternness of his face, “I
will give him a piece of the ham which was left over from last night.”
“Left over?” echoed Barlasch, going close to her and looking up into her
face, for she was two inches taller than he. “Left over? Then you did
not eat your supper last night?”
“Neither did you eat yours, for it is there under the floor.”
Barlasch turned away with a gesture of despair. He sat down in the high
armchair that stood on the hearth, and tapped on the floor with one foot
in pessimistic thought.
“Ah! the women, the women,” he muttered, looking into the smouldering
fire. “Lies--all lies. You said that your supper was very nice,” he
shouted at her over his shoulder.
“So it was,” answered she gaily, “so it is still.”
Barlasch did not rise to her lighter humour. He sat in reflection for
some minutes. Then his thoughts took their usual form of a muttered
aside.
“It is a case of compromise. Always like that. The good God had to
compromise with the first woman he created almost at once. And men have
done it ever since--and have never had the best of it. See here,” he
said aloud, turning to Desiree, “I will make a bargain with you. I will
eat my last night's supper here at this table, now, if you will eat
yours.”
“Agreed.”
“Are you hungry?” asked Barlasch, when the scanty meal was set out
before him.
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
He laughed quite gaily now, and the meal was not without a certain air
of festivity, though it consisted of nothing better than two ounces of
horse and half an ounce of ham eaten in company of that rye-bread made
with one-third part of straw which Rapp allowed the citizens to buy.
For Rapp had first tamed his army, and was now taming the Dantzigers.
He had effected discipline in his own camp by getting his regiments into
shape, by establishing hospitals (which were immediately filled), and by
protecting the citizens from the depredations of the starving fugitives
who had been poured pell-mell into the town.
Then he turned his attention to the Dantzigers, who were openly or
secretly opposed to him. He seized their churches and turned them into
stores; their schools he used for hospitals, their monasteries for
barracks. He broke into their cellars, and took the wine for the sick.
Their storehouses he placed under the strictest guard, and no man could
claim possession of his own goods.
“We are,” he said in effect, with that grim Alsatian humour which the
Prussians were slow to understand; “we are one united family in a narrow
house, and it is I who keep the storeroom key.”
Barlasch had proved to be no false prophet. His secret store escaped the
vigilance of the picket, whom he himself conducted to the cellars in
the Frauengasse. Although he was sparing enough, he could always
provide Desiree with anything for which she expressed a wish, and even
forestalled those which she left unspoken. In return he looked for
absolute obedience, and after their frugal breakfast he took her to task
for depriving herself of such food as they could afford.
“See you,” he said, “a siege is a question of the stomach. It is not the
Russians we have to fight; for they will not fight. They sit outside
and wait for us to die of cold, of starvation, of typhus. And we are
obliging them at the rate of two hundred a day. Yes, each day Rapp is
relieved of the responsibility of two hundred mouths that drop open and
require nothing more. Be greedy--eat all you have, and hope for release
to-morrow, and you die. Be sparing--starve yourself from parsimony or
for the love of some one who will eat your share and forget to
thank you, and you will die of typhus. Be careful, and patient, and
selfish--eat a little, take what exercise you can, cook your food
carefully with salt, and you will live. I was in a siege thirty years
before you were born, and I am alive yet, after many others. Obey me and
we will get through the siege of Dantzig, which is only just beginning.”
Then suddenly he gave way to anger, and banged his hand down on the
table.
“But, sacred name of thunder, do not make me believe you have eaten when
you have not,” he shouted. “Never do that.”
Carried away by the importance of this question, he said many things
which cannot be set before the eyes of a generation sensitive to
plainness of speech, and only tolerant of it in suggestions of
impropriety.
“And the patron,” he ended abruptly, “how is he?”
“He is not very well,” answered Desiree. Which answer did not satisfy
Barlasch, who insisted on taking off his boots, and going upstairs to
see Sebastian.
It was a mere nothing, the invalid said. Such food did not suit him.
“You have been accustomed to live well all your life,” answered
Barlasch, looking at him with the puzzled light of a baffled memory in
his eye which always came when he looked at Desiree's father. “One must
see what can be done.”
And he went out forthwith to return after an hour and more with a
chicken freshly killed. Desiree did not ask him where he had procured
it. She had given up such inquiries, for Barlasch always confessed quite
bluntly to theft, and she did not know whether to believe him or not.
But the change of diet had no beneficial effect, and the next day
Desiree sent Barlasch to the house of the doctor whose practice lay in
the Frauengasse. He came and shook his head bluntly. For even an old
doctor may be hardened at the end of his life by an orgy, as it were, of
death.
“I could cure him,” he said, “if there were no Russians outside the
walls; if I could give him fresh milk and good brandy and strong soup.”
But even Barlasch could not find milk in Dantzig. The brandy was
forthcoming, and the fresh meat; the soup Desiree made with her own
hands. Sebastian had not been the same man since the closing of the
roads and the gradual death of his hopes that the Dantzigers would rise
against the soldiers that thronged their streets. At one time it would
have been easy to carry out such a movement, and to throw themselves
and their city upon the mercy of the Russians. But Dantzig awoke to this
possibility too late, when Rapp's iron hand had closed in upon it.
He knew his own strength so well that he treated with a contemptuous
leniency such citizens as were convicted of communicating with the
enemy.
Sebastian's friends seemed to have deserted him. Perhaps it was not
discreet to be seen in the company of one who had come under Napoleon's
displeasure. Some had quitted the city after hurriedly concealing their
valuables in their gardens, behind the chimneys, beneath the floors,
where it is to be supposed they still lie hidden. Others were among the
weekly thousand or twelve hundred who were carted out by the Oliva Gate
to be thrown into huge trenches, while the waiting Russians watched from
their lines on the heights of Langfuhr.
It was true that news continued to filter in, and never quite ceased,
all through the terrible twelve months that were to follow. More
especially did news that was unfavourable to the French find its way
into the beleaguered city. But it was not authentic news, and Sebastian
gathered little comfort from the fact--not unknown to the whispering
citizens--that Rapp himself had heard nothing from the outer world since
the Elbing mail-cart had been turned back by the first of the Cossacks
on the night of the seventh of January.
Perhaps Sebastian had that most fatal of maladies--to which nearly all
men come at last--weariness of life.
“Why don't you fortify yourself, and laugh at fortune?” asked Barlasch,
twenty years his senior, as he stood sturdily on his stocking-feet at
the sick man's bedside.
“I take what my daughter gives me,” protested Sebastian, half peevishly.
“But that does not suffice,” answered the materialist. “It does not
suffice to swallow evil fortune--one must digest it.”
Sebastian made no answer. He was a quiet patient, and lay all day with
wide-open, dreaming eyes. He seemed to be waiting for something. This,
indeed, was his mental attitude as presented to his neighbours, and
perhaps to the few friends he possessed in Dantzig. He had waited
through the years during which Desiree had grown to womanhood. He waited
on doggedly through the first month of the siege, without enthusiasm,
without comment--without hope, perhaps. He seemed to be waiting now to
get better.
“He has made little or no progress,” said the doctor, who could only
give a passing glance at his patients, for he was working day and night.
He had not time to beat about the bush, as his kind heart would have
liked, for he had known Desiree all her life.
It was Shrove Tuesday, and the streets were full of revellers. The
Neapolitans and other Southerners had made great preparations for the
carnival, and the Governor had not denied them their annual licence.
They had built a high car in one of the entrance yards to the
Marienkirche; and finding that the ancient arch would not allow the
erection to pass out into the street, they had pulled down the pious
handiwork of a bygone generation.
The shouts of these merrymakers could be dimly heard through the double
windows, but Sebastian made no inquiry as to the meaning of the cry.
A sort of lassitude--the result of confinement within doors, of
insufficient food, of waning hope--had come over Desiree. She listened
heedlessly to the sounds in the streets through which the dead were
passing to the Oliva Gate, while the living danced by in their hideous
travesty of rejoicing.
It was dusk when Barlasch came in.
“The streets,” he said, “are full of fools, dressed as such.”
Receiving no answer, he crossed the room to where Desiree sat, treading
noiselessly, and stood in front of her, trying to see her averted face.
He stooped down and peered at her until she could no longer hide her
tear-stained eyes.
He made a wry face and a little clicking noise with his tongue, such
as the women of his race make when they drop and break some household
utensil. Then he went back towards the bed. Hitherto he had always
observed a certain ceremoniousness of manner in the sick chamber. He
laid this aside this evening, and sat down on a chair that stood near.
Thus they remained in a silence which seemed to increase with the
darkness. At length the stillness became so marked that Barlasch slowly
turned his head towards the bed. The same instinct had come to Desiree
at the same moment.
They both rose and groped their way towards Sebastian. Desiree found the
flint and struck it. The sulphur burnt blue for interminable moments,
and then flared to meet the wick of the candle. Barlasch watched Desiree
as she held the light down to her father's face. Sebastian's waiting was
over. Barlasch had not needed a candle to recognize death.
From Desiree his bright and restless eyes turned slowly towards the dead
man's face--and he stepped back.
“Ah!” he said, with a hoarse cry of surprise, “now I remember. I was
always sure that I had seen his face before. And when I saw it it
was like that--like the face of a dead man. It was on the Place de la
Nation, on a tumbrel--going to the guillotine. He must have escaped, as
many did, by some accident or mistake.”
He went slowly to the window, holding his shaggy head between his two
clenched hands as if to spur his memory to an effort. Then he turned and
pointed to the silent form on the bed.
“That is a noble of France,” he said; “one of the greatest. And all
France thinks him dead this twenty years. And I cannot remember his
name--goodness of God--I cannot remember his name!”