The Fortified House
Surprised by the winter cold, the Swedes in crowded confusion had taken up their quarters behind the walls of Hadjash. Soon there was not a house to be found that was not filled with the frost-bitten and the dying. Cries of distress were heard out in the street, and here and there beside the steps lay amputated fingers, feet, and legs. Vehicles stood fastened to each other so tightly packed from the city gate to the market-place that the chilly-pale soldiers who streamed in from all sides had to crawl between the wheels and runners. Fastened in their harness and turned away from the wind, the horses, their loins white with frost, had already stood many days without food. No one took care of them, and several of the drivers sat frozen to death with hands stuck into their sleeves. Some wagons were like oblong boxes or coffins, where from the chink of the flat lid stared out mournful faces, which read in a prayer-book or gazed longingly with feverish delirium at the sheltering houses. A thousand unfortunates, in muffled tones or silently, cried to God for mercy. Under the sheltered side of the city wall dead soldiers stood in lines, many with red Cossack coats buttoned over their ragged Swedish uniforms and with sheepskins around their naked feet. Wood-doves and sparrows, which were so stiff with frost that they could be caught with the hand, had fallen on the hats and shoulders of the standing corpses and fluttered their wings when the chaplains went by to give a Last Communion in brandy.
Up at the market-place among burnt areas stood an unusually large house, from which could be heard raised voices. A soldier delivered a fagot to an ensign who stood in the doorway, and when the soldier went back into the street, he shrugged his shoulders and said to whomsoever cared to hear him: “It’s only the gentlemen quarreling in the chancellery.”
The ensign at the door had lately arrived with Lewenhaupt’s forces. He carried the fagot into the room and threw it down by the fireplace. The voices within ceased immediately, but as soon as he had closed the door they began with renewed heat.
It was His Excellency Piper who stood in the middle of the floor, his countenance wrinkled and furrowed, with glowing cheeks and trembling nostrils.
“I say that the whole affair is madness,” he burst out, “madness, madness!”
Hermelin with his pointed nose was constantly twitching his eyes and his hands, while he sprang back and forth in the room like a tame rat; but Field Marshall Rehnskiöld, who with his handsome, stately figure was standing by the fireplace, only whistled and hummed. If he had not whistled and hummed, the quarrel would have been finished by this time, because for once they were all fully agreed; but the fact that he whistled and hummed instead of being silent or at least speaking, that could be endured no longer. Lewenhaupt at the window took snuff and snapped shut his snuff-box. His pepper-brown eyes protruded from his head, and it looked as if his comical peruke became ever bigger and bigger. If Rehnskiöld had not continued to whistle and hum, he would have controlled himself today as yesterday and on all other occasions, but now wrath rose to his brow.
He shut his snuff-box for the last time and mumbled between his teeth, “I do not desire that His Majesty should understand statesmanship. But can he lead troops? Does he show real insight at a single encounter or attack? Trained and proved old warriors, who never can be replaced, he offers daily for an empty bravado. If our men are to storm a wall, it is considered superfluous that they bind themselves protecting fagots or shields, and therefore they are wretchedly massacred. To speak freely, my worthy sirs, I can forgive an Upsala student many a boyish freak, but I demand otherwise of a general in the field. Truly it avails not to carry on a campaign under the command of such a master.”
“Furthermore,” continued Piper, “His Majesty at present incommodes no general with any particularly hard command. At the beginning, when one succeeded in distinguishing himself more than another, it went better; but now His Majesty goes around mediating and reconciling with a foolish smile so that one could go crazy.”
He raised his arms in the air with a wrath which had lost all sense and bounds, notwithstanding he was altogether at one with Lewenhaupt. While he was still speaking, he turned about and betook himself impetuously to the inner apartments. The door slammed with such a clatter that Rehnskiöld found himself yet more called upon to whistle and hum. If he only had chosen to say something! But no, he did not. Gyllenkrook, who sat at the table and examined departure-checks, was blazing in the face, and a little withered-looking officer at his side whispered venomously into his car: “A pair of diamond ear-rings given to Piper’s countess might perhaps even yet help Lewenhaupt to new appointments.”
If Rehnskiöld had now ceased to whistle and hum, Lewenhaupt would still have been able to control himself, to take up the roll of papers he carried under his coat and sit down at a corner of the table; but instead, the venerable and at other times taciturn man grew worse and worse. He turned about undecidedly and went toward the entrance door, but there he suddenly stood still, drew himself up and smacked his heels together as if he had been a mere private. Now Rehnskiöld became quiet. The door opened. An icy gust of wind rushed into the room, and the ensign announced with as loud and long-drawn a voice as a sentry who calls his comrades to arms: “Hi-s Majesty!”
The king was no longer the dazzled and wondering half-grown youth of aforetime. Only the boyish figure with the narrow shoulders was the same. His coat was sooty and dirty. The wrinkle around the upward-protruding over-lip had become deeper and a trifle grin-like. On the nose and one cheek he had frostbite, and his eyelids were red-edged and swollen with protracted cold, but around the formerly bald vertex of his head the combed-back hair stood up like a pointed crown.
He held a fur cap in both hands and tried to conceal his embarrassment and diffidence behind a stiff and cold ceremoniousness, while bowing and smiling to each and all of those present.
They bowed again and again still more deeply, and when he had advanced to the middle of the floor, he stood still and bowed awkwardly toward the sides, though with somewhat more haste, being in appearance wholly occupied with what he was about to say. Thereupon he remained a long while standing quite silent.
Then he went forward to Rehnskiöld and, with a brief inclination, took him by one of his coat-buttons.
“I would beg,” he said, “that Your Excellency provide me with two or three men of the common soldiers as escort for a little excursion. I have already two dragoons with me.”
“But, Your Majesty! the country is over-run with Cossacks. To ride in here to the city from Your Majesty’s quarters with so small an escort was already a feat of daring.”
“Oh, nonsense, nonsense! Your Excellency will do as I have said. Some one of the generals present, who is at leisure, may also mount and take one of his men.”
Lewenhaupt bowed.
The king regarded him a trifle irresolutely without answering, and remained standing after Rehnskiöld hastened out. None of the others in the circle considered it necessary to break the silence or to move.
Only after a very long pause did the king bow again to everyone separately and go out into the open air.
“Well?” inquired Lewenhaupt and clapped the ensign on the shoulder with the return of his natural kindliness. “The ensign shall go along! This is the first time the ensign has stood eye to eye with His Majesty.”
“I had never expected he would be like that.”
“He is always like that. He is too kingly to command.”
They followed after the king, who clambered over wagons and fallen animals. His motions were agile, never abrupt, but measured and quite slow, so that he never for a moment lost his dignity. When he had finally made his way forward through the throng to the city gate, he mounted to the saddle with his attendants, who were now seven men.
The horses stumbled on the icy street, and some fell, but Lewenhaupt’s remonstrances only induced the king not to use his spurs yet more heartlessly. The lackey Hultman had read aloud to him all night or had related sagas, and had at length coaxed him into laughing at the prophecy that, had he not been exalted by God to be a king, he would for his whole life have become an unsociable floor-pacer, who devised much more wonderful verses than those of the late Messenius of Disa on Bollhus, but especially the mightiest battle stories. He tried to think of Rolf Gotriksson, who ever rode foremost of all his men, but today it did not please him to bound his thoughts within the playroom of a saga. The restlessness which during the last few days had struck its claws into his mind would not let go of its royal prey. At the chancellery he had just seen the heated faces. Ever since the pranks of his boyhood he had been rapt in his own imaginary world of the past. He had sat deaf to the piercing cries of distress along the way, while he became distrustful of each and all who exhibited a more sensitive hearing. Today as at other times he hardly noted that they offered him the best-rested horse and the freshest cake of bread, that in the morning they laid a purse with five hundred ducats in his pocket. He challenged the horseman at the first mêlée to form a ring about him and offer themselves to death. On the other hand he noticed that the soldiers saluted him with gloomy silence, and misfortunes had made him suspicious even of those nearest to him. The most cautious opposition, the most concealed disapproval, he made a note of without betraying himself, and every word remained and gnawed at his soul. Every hour it seemed to him that he lost an officer on whom he had formerly relied, and his heart became all the colder. His thwarted ambition chafed and bled under the weight of failure, and he breathed more lightly the farther behind him he left his headquarters.
Suddenly Lewenhaupt came to a stand, debating within himself how to exercise an influence upon the king.
“My heroic Ajax!” said he, and tapped his steaming horse, “you are indeed an old manger-biter, but I have no right to founder you for no good cause, and I myself am beginning to get on in years as you are. But in Jesus’ name, lads, let him who can follow the king!”
When he saw the ensign’s anxious sidelong look toward the king, he spoke with lowered voice: “Be faithful, boy! His Majesty does not roar out as we others do. He is too kingly to chide or bicker.”
The king feigned to notice nothing. More and more wildly over ice and snow he kept up the silent horse-race without goal or purpose. He had now only four attendants. After another hour one of the remaining horses fell with a broken fore-leg, and the rider out of pity shot a bullet through its ear, after which he himself, alone and on foot, went to meet an uncertain fate in the cold.
At last the ensign was the only man who was able to follow the king, and they had now come among bushes and saplings, where they could proceed but at a foot-pace. On the hill above them rose a gray and sooty house with narrow grated windows, the garden being surrounded by a wall.
At this moment there was a shot.
“How was that?” inquired the king, and looked around.
“The pellet piped nastily when it went by my ear but it only bit the corner of my hat,” answered the ensign without the least experience of how he ought to conduct himself before the king. He had a slight Småland accent and laughed contentedly with his whole blonde countenance.
Enchanted by the good fortune of being man by man with him whom he regarded as above all other living human beings, he continued: “Shall we then go up there and take them by the beard?”
The answer pleased the king in the highest degree, and with a leap he stood on the ground.
“We’ll tie our steeds here in the bushes,” he said exhilaratedly and with bright color on his cheek. “Afterwards let us go up and run through anybody that whistles.”
They left the panting horses and, bending forward, climbed up the hill among the bushes. Over the wall looked down several Cossack heads with hanging hair, yellow and grinning as those of beheaded criminals.
“Look!” whispered the king, and smote his hands together. “They’re trying to pull shut the rotten gate, the fox-tails!”
His glance, but recently so expressionless, became now flickering and anon open and shining. He drew his broadsword and raised it with both hands above his head. Like a young man’s god he stormed in through the half-open door. The ensign, who cut and thrust by his side, was often close to being struck from behind by his weapon. A musket shot blackened the king’s right temple. Four men were cut down in the gateway and the fifth of the band fled with a fire-shovel into the garden, pursued by the king.
Then the king wiped off the blood from his sword on the snow, while he laid two ducats in the Cossack’s shovel and burst out with rising spirits, “It is no pleasure to fight with these wretches, who never strike back and only run. Come back when you have bought yourself a decent sword.”
The Cossack, who understood nothing, stared at the gold-pieces, sneaked along the wall to the gate, and fled. Ever further and further away on the plain he called his roving comrades with a dismal and lamenting “Oohaho! Oohaho!”
The king hummed to himself as if chaffing with an unseen enemy: “Little Cossack man, little Cossack man, go gather up your rascals!”
The walls around the garden were mouldering and black. From the wilderness sounded an endlessly prolonged minor tone as from an æolian harp, and the king inquisitively shouldered in the door of the dwelling-house. This consisted of a single large and a half-dark room, and before the fireplace lay a heap of blood-stained clothing, which plunderers of corpses had taken from fallen Swedes. The door was thrown shut again by the cross-draught, and the king went to the stable buildings at the side. There was no door there, and a sound was now heard the more plainly. Within in the darkness lay a starved white horse bound to the iron loop of a wagon.
A lifted broadsword would not have checked the king, but the uncertain dusk caused the man of imagination to stand on the threshold, fearful of the dark. Yet he gave no sign of this, but beckoned the ensign. They stepped in down a steep stairway to a cellar. Here there was a spring, and as a stop-cock to the singing wind which stirred the water, a deaf Cossack with whip and reins, and without an idea of danger, was driving a manly figure in the uniform of a Swedish officer.
When they had loosed the rope and had bound the Cossack in the place of the prisoner, they recognized the Holsteiner, Feuerhausen, who had served as major in a regiment of dragoon recruits, but had been cut off by the Cossacks and harnessed as a draught animal for hoisting water.
He fell on his knees and stammered in broken Swedish: “Your Majesty! I gan’t pelief my eyes.... My gratitude....”
The king cheerily interrupted his talk and turned to the ensign: “Bring up the two horses to the stable! Three men cannot ride comfortably on two horses, and therefore we shall stay here till a few Cossacks come by, from whom we can take a new horse. Let the gentleman also stand guard at the gate.”
After that the king went back to the dwelling-house and shut the door after him. The horses which, desperate with hunger, had been greedily gnawing the bark from the bushes, were meanwhile led up to the stable, and the ensign went on guard.
Slowly the hours went by. When it began to draw towards dusk, the storm increased in bitterness, and in the light of sunset the snow whirled over the desolate snow-plain. Deathly yellow Cossack faces raised themselves spying above the bushes, and long in the blast sounded the roving plunderers’ “Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”
Then Feuerhausen stepped out of the stable, where he had sat between the horses so as not to get frost in his wounds from the ropes with which he had been bound. He went forward to the barred doors of the dwelling-house.
“Your Majesty!” he stammered, “the Cossacks are gathering more and more, and darkness is coming soon. I and the ensign can both sit on one horse. If we delay here, this night will be Your Mightiest Majesty’s last, which Gott in His secret dispensation forbit!”
The king answered from within, “It must be as we said. Three men do not ride comfortably on two horses.”
The Holsteiner shook his head and went down to the ensign.
“Such is His Majesty, you damt Swedes. From the stable I heard him walk and walk back and forvart. Sickness and conscience-torture will come. Like a pater familiæ the Muscovite czar stands among his subjects. A sugar-baker he sets up as his friend and a little serving-boy he raises on his glorious imperial throne. Detestable are his gestures when he gets drunk, and he treats women à la françois; but his first and last word always runs: ‘For Russia’s good!’ King Carolus leafs his lands as smoking ash-heaps and does not possess a single frient, not efen among his nearest. King Carolus is more lonely than the meanest wagon-drifer. He has not once a comrade’s knee to weep on. Among nobles and fine ladies and perukes he comes like a spectre out of a thousand-year mausoleum—and spectres mostly go about without company. Is he a man of state? Oh, have mercy! No sense for the public. Is he a general? Good-bye? No sense for the big masses. Only to make bridges and set up gabions, clap his hands at captured flags and a couple of kettle-drums. No sense for state and army, only for men.”
“That may be also a sense,” replied the ensign.
He walked vigorously back and forward, for his fingers were already so stiff with cold that he scarcely could hold his drawn blade.
The Holsteiner shifted the ragged coat-collar around his cheeks and went on with muffled voice and eager gestures: “King Carolus laughs with delight when the bridge breaks and men and beasts are miserably drownt. No heart in his breast. To the deuce wit him! King Carolus is such a little Swedish half-genius as wanders out in the worlt and beats the drum and parades and makes a fiasco, and the parterre whistles Whee!”
“And that is just why the Swedes go to death for him,” answered the ensign, “that is just why.”
“Not angry, my dearest fellow. Your teeth shone so in a laugh when we first met.”
“I like to hear the Herr Major talk, but I’m freezing. Will not the major go up and listen at the king’s door?”
The Holsteiner went up to the door and listened. When he came back he said, “He only walks and walks, and sighs heavily like a man in anguish of soul. So it always is now, they say. His Majesty nefer sleeps any more at night. The comedy-actor knows he is not up to his part, and of all life’s torments, wounded ambition becomes the bitterest.”
“Then it should also be the last for us to jest at. Dare I beg the major to rub my right hand with snow; it is getting numb.”
The Holsteiner did as he desired and turned back to the king’s door. He struck his forehead with both hands. His gray-sprinkled, bushy mustaches stood straight out, and he mumbled, “Gott, Gott! Soon it will be too dark to retreat.”
The ensign called, “Good sir, I should like to ask if you would rub my face with snow. My cheeks are freezing stiff. Of the pain in my foot I will not speak. Ah, I can’t bear it.”
The Holsteiner filled his hands with snow. “Let me stand guard,” he said, “only for an hour.”
“No, no. The king has commanded that I stay here at the entrance.”
“Och, the king! I know him. I will make him cheerful, talk philosophy, tell of gallant exploits. He is always amused to hear of a lover who climbs adventurously through a window. He often looks at the beautiful side of womankint. That appeals to his imagination, but not to his flesh, for he is without feeling. And he is bashful. If the fair one ever wishes to tread him under her silken shoe, she must herself attack; but if she pretends to flee, then all the other women must strive against a liaison. The most mighty lady his grandmother spoiled everything with her shriek of ‘Marriage, marriage!’ King Carolus is from top to toe like the Swedish queen Cristina, though he is genuinely masculine. The two should have married each other on the same throne. That would haf been a fine little pair. Oh, pfui, pfui! you Swedes. If a man gallops his horses and lets people and kingdom be massacred, he is still pure-hearted and supreme among all, only his bloot is too slow for amours. Oh, excuse me! I know pure-hearted heroes who were faithfully in love with two, three different maidens or wives in one and the same week.”
“Yes, we are so, we are so. But for Christ’s pity you must rub my hand again. And excuse my moaning and groaning!”
Just inside the gate, which could not be shut, lay the fallen Cossacks, white as marble with the hoarfrost. The yellow sky became gray, and ever nearer and more manifold in the twilight sounded the wailing cries: “Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”
Now the king opened his door and came down across the garden.
The pains in his head, from which he was accustomed to suffer, had been increased by his ride in the wind and made his glance heavy. His countenance bore traces of lonely soul-strife, but as he drew near, his mouth resumed its usual embarrassed smile. His temple was still blackened after the musket-shot.
“It’s freshening up,” he said, and producing from his coat a loaf of bread, he broke it in three, so that everyone had as large a piece as he did. After that, he lifted off his riding-cape and fastened it himself about the shoulders of the sentinel ensign.
Abashed over his own conduct, he then took the Holsteiner forcibly by the arm and led him up through the garden, while they chewed at their hard bread.
Now if ever, thought the Holsteiner, is the time to win the king’s attention with a clever turn of speech and afterwards talk sense with him.
“The accommodation might be better,” he began, at the same time biting and chewing. “Ah, good old days! That reminds me of a gallant adventure outside of Dresden.”
The king kept on holding him by the arm, and the Holsteiner lowered his voice. The story was lively and salacious, and the king grew inquisitive. The roughest ambiguities always lured out his set smile. He listened with a despairing and half-absent man’s need of momentary diversion.
Only when the Holsteiner with cunning deftness began to shift the conversation over to some words about their immediate danger did the king again become serious.
“Bagatelle, bagatelle!” he replied. “It is nothing at all worth mentioning, except that we must behave ourselves well and sustain our reputation to the last man. If the rascals come on, we will all three place ourselves at the gate and pink them with our swords.”
The Holsteiner stroked his forehead and felt around. He began to talk about the stars that were just shining out. He set forth a theory for measuring their distance from the earth. The king now listened to him with a quite different sort of attention. He broke into the question keenly, resourcefully, and with an unwearied desire to think out new, surprising methods in his own way. One assertion gave a hand to another, and soon the conversation dwelt on the universe and the immortality of the soul, to return afresh to the stars. More and more flickered in the heavens, and the king described what he knew about the sun-dial. He stood up his broadsword with its scabbard in the snow and directed the point toward the Polestar, so that next morning they might be able to tell the time.
“The heart of the universe,” he said, “must be either the earth or the star that stands over the land of the Swedes. No land must be of more account than the Swedish land.”
Outside the wall the Cossacks were calling out, but as soon as the Holsteiner led the talk to their threatened attack, the king was laconic.
“At daybreak we shall betake ourselves back to Hadjash,” said he. “Before then we can hardly secure a third horse, so that each of us can ride comfortably in his own saddle.”
After he had spoken in that strain he went back into the dwelling-house.
The Holsteiner came down with a vehement stride to the ensign, and pointing at the king’s door, he cried out, “Forgif me, ensign. We Germans don’t mince words when a wound oozes after a rope, but I lay down my arms and give your lord the victory, because I also could shed my bloot for the man. Do I love him! No-one efer understands him that has not seen him.—But ensign, you cannot stay any longer out in the weather.”
The ensign replied, “No cape has warmed me more sweetly than the one I now wear, and I lay all my cares on Christ. But in God’s name, major, go back to the door and listen! The king might do himself some harm.”
“His Majesty would not fall on his own sword but longs for another’s.”
“Now I hear his steps even down here. They are getting still more violent and restless. He is so lonely. When I saw him in Hadjash bowing and bowing among the generals, I could only think: How lonely he is!”
“If the little Holsteiner slips away from here alife, he will always remember the steps we heard tonight and always call this refuge Fort Garden.”
The ensign nodded his approval and answered, “Go to the stable, major, and seek rest and shelter a while between the horses. And there through the walls you can better hear the king and watch over him.”
Thereupon the ensign began to sing with resonant voice:
“O Father, to Thy loving grace....”
The Holsteiner went back across the garden into the stable and, his voice quavering with cold, intoned with the other:
“In every time and every place
My poor weak soul would I commend.
Oh, Lord, receive it and defend.”
“Oohaho! Oohaho!” answered the Cossacks in the storm, and it was already night.
The Holsteiner squeezed himself in between the two horses and listened till weariness and sleep bowed his head. Only at dawn was he wakened by a clamor. He sprang out into the open air and beheld the king already standing in the garden, looking at the sword that had been set up as a sun-dial.
By the gate the Cossacks had collected, but when they saw the motionless sentry, they shrank back in superstitious fear and thought of the rumors concerning the magic of the Swedish soldiers with blow and shot.
When the Holsteiner had gotten forward to the ensign, he grasped him hard by the arm.
“What now?” he asked, “Brandy?”
At the same instant he let go his grip.
The ensign stood frozen to death with his back again the wall of the gate, his hands on his swordhilt, and wrapt in the king’s cloak.
“Since we are now only two,” the king remarked, drawing his weapon out of the snow, “we can at once betake ourselves each to his horse, as it was arranged.”
The Holsteiner stared him right in the eyes with re-awakened hate and remained standing, as if he had heard nothing. Finally, however, he led out the horses, but his hands trembled and clenched themselves so that he could hardly draw the saddle-girths.
The Cossacks swung their sabres and pikes, but the sentry stood at his post.
Then the king sprang carelessly into the saddle and set his horse to a gallop. His forehead was clear and his cheeks rosy, and his broadsword glimmered like a sunbeam.
The Holsteiner looked after him. His bitter expression relaxed, and he murmured between his teeth, while he too mounted to the saddle and with his hand lifted to his hat raced by the sentry: “It is only joy for a hero to see a hero’s noble death.—Thanks, comrade!”