The Queen of the Marauders
The tocsin in the church tower at Narva had ceased. In a breach of the battered rampart lay the fallen Swedish heroes, over whose despoiled and naked bodies the Russians stormed into the city with wild cries. Some Cossacks, who had sewed a live cat into the belly of an inn-keeper, were still laughing in a circle around their victim, but the gigantic Peter Alexievitch, the czar, soon burst his way through the midst of the throng on street and courtyard and cut down his own men to check their misdeeds. His right arm up to the shoulder was drenched with the blood of his own subjects. Weary of murder, troop after troop finally assembled in the square and the churchyard. Under the pretext that the churches had been desecrated by the misbelievers who lay buried there, bands of soldiers began to violate and plunder the graves. Stones were pried up from the floor of the church with crowbars, and outside, the graves were opened with shovels. Pillagers broke the copper and tin caskets into pieces and threw dice for the silver handles and plates. The streets, where at the first mêlée the inhabitants had thrown down fire-brands and tiles, and where the blood of the slain was still swimming in the gutters, were for many days piled up with rusty or half-blackened coffins. The hair on some of the bodies had grown so that it hung out between the boards. Some of the dead lay embalmed and well preserved, though brown and withered, but from most of the coffins yellow skeletons grinned forth from collapsed and mouldered shrouds. People who stole anxiously among them read the coffin-plates in the twilight and now and then recognized the name of a near relative, a mother or a sister. Sometimes they saw the ravagers pull out the decayed remains and throw them into the river. Sometimes, again, protected by night, they themselves succeeded in carrying them off and burying them outside the city. So in the dusk one might encounter an old man or woman who came stealing along toilsomely with children or serving-maids, carrying a coffin.
One night a swarm of pillagers bivouacked in a corner of the churchyard. Hi! what fun it was to pile up a bonfire of bed-slats and bolsters and chairs and coffin-ends and what the devil else could be dragged forth. Flames and sparks blazed up as high as the attic window of the parsonage. Round about stood coffins propped one against another. The bottom of one of the uppermost had been broken, so that the treasurer, of blessed memory, who was inside it, stood there upright with his spliced wig on his head and looked as if he thought: “I pray you, into what company have I been conducted?”
“Haha! little father,” the robbers called to him, as they roasted August apples and onions at the flames; “you always wanted something to wet your whistle, you there!”
The glow of the fire lighted up the living-room of the parsonage and the sparks flew in through the broken panes. In the rooms stood only a broken table and a chair, upon which sat the parson with his head propped on his hands.
“Who knows? Perhaps it might succeed,” he mumbled and raised himself as if he had found the key to a long-considered problem.
His silver-white beard spread itself over all his breast, and his hair hung down to his shoulders. In his youth as chaplain he had gone in for a little of everything and he had never pushed back a cup that was offered him. Afterwards as a widower in the parsonage he had worshipped God with joy and mirth and a brimming bowl, and it was bruited about that he did not reach first for his Bible if a well-formed wench happened to be in his company. He therefore even now took misfortune more bravely and resignedly than others, and his heart was as undaunted as his soldierly body was unbowed by years.
He went out into the entry and cautiously pulled out the five or six rusty nails that held down a couple of boards above a little narrow recess under the stairs. Then he lifted the boards aside.
“Come out, my child!” he said.
When no one obeyed him, his voice grew somewhat more severe and he repeated his words: “Come out, Lina! Both the other maids have been bound and carried away. It was verily at the last minute that I got you in here. But it is almost a day since then, and you cannot live without meat and drink. Eh?”
When he was not obeyed, he threw back his head in annoyance, and he now spoke in accents of harsh command: “Why don’t you obey? Do you think there is food here? There’s not so much as a pinch of salt left in the house. You must be got away, you understand. If it goes ill with you, if a plunderer gets you on the way, I can only say this: clasp your arms about his neck and follow with him on his horse’s back wherever it carries you. Many a time in the rough-and-tumble of war have I seen such a love, and then I have slung the soldier’s cloak over my priest’s frock and waved my hat for a lucky end to the song. Don’t you hear, lass? When your late father, who was a drinker—if I must tell the truth—was my stableboy and pulled me out of a hole in the ice once, I promised for the future to provide for him and his child. Besides, he was Swedish born as I was. Well, haven’t I always been a fatherly master to you, or what has Her Grace to object? Have her wits deserted her, eh?”
Something now began to move in the pitch-black recess. An elbow struck against the wall, there was a rustling and scraping, and with that Lina Andersdotter stepped out in nothing but her chemise, bare legs, and a torn red jacket without sleeves but with a whole back to it, over which hung the braid of her brown hair.
The light of the fire fell in through the window. Squatted together she held her chemise between her knees, but her fresh, downward-bent face with broad, open features was as merry as if she had just stepped out of her settle-bed on a bright winter morning in the light of the dawn.
The blood ran impetuously enough through the veins of the white-haired chaplain, but in that moment he was but master and father.
“I did not know that in my simple house folk had learned such a ceremonious feeling of delicacy,” said he, and gave her a friendly pat on the bare shoulders.
She looked up.
“No,” she said, “it’s only because I’m so wretchedly cold.”
“Ah, well, that’s natural. That’s the way I like people to talk in my house. But I have no garments to give you. My own hang on me in tatters. The house may burn at any time. I myself can maybe sneak out on my way unaccosted, and I have a Riga riksdollar in my pocket. Who asks about a ragged old man? It’s another affair with you, Lina. I know these wild fellows. I know but one way to get you off, but I myself shrink from telling it. Naturally, you are afraid.”
“Afraid I’m not. It will go with me as it may. To be sure, I am no better than the others. Only I’m perishing of cold.”
“Come here to the door then, but don’t be frightened. Do you see out there in the doorway the rascals have set a little wooden casket. It cannot be very heavy, but perhaps you will have room in it. If you dare lay yourself in the casket, perhaps I can smuggle you out of the town.”
“That I surely dare.”
Her teeth chattered and she trembled, but she straightened herself up a little, let the chemise hang free, and went out on the stones in the doorway.
The pastor lifted off the moist lid, which was loose, and found nothing else in the plundered casket than shavings and a brown blanket.
“That was just what I needed,” she shivered. She pulled up the blanket, wrapped it over her, stepped up, and laid herself on her back in the shavings.
The pastor bent over her, laid both his hands on her shoulder, and looked into her fearless eyes. She might be eighteen or nineteen years old. Her hair was stroked smoothly back to the braid.
As he stood so, it came over him that he had not always looked on her in the past with as pure and fatherly feelings as he himself had wished and as he had pretended to do. But now he did so. His long white hair fell down as far as her cheeks.
“May it go well with you, child! I am old. It matters little whether my life goes on for a while still or is destroyed in the day that now is. I have been in many a piece of mischief and many an ill deed in my time, and for the forgiveness of my sins I will also for once have part in something good.”
He nodded and nodded toward her and raised himself.
There outside the clamor sounded louder than ever. He laid on the lid and fastened in the long, crookedly set screws as well as he was able. Then he knelt, knotted a rope crosswise around the casket, and with strong arms lifted the heavy burden on his back. Bending forward and staggering, he strode out into the open air.
“Look there!” shouted one of the pillagers at the fire, but his nearest comrade silenced him with the word: “Let the poor old man alone! That’s only a miserable beggar’s casket.”
Sweat trickled out over the old man’s face, and his back and arms ached and smarted under the severe weight. Step by step he moved forward through the dark streets. Every now and then he had to set down the casket on the ground to take breath, but then he stood with his hands on the lid in constant fear of being challenged and hustled away or of being stabbed by some roving band of soldier revelers. Several times he had to step to one side because of the heavy wagons, loaded with men and women, who were to be taken hundreds of miles into Russia to people the waste regions. The great conquering czar was a sower who did not count the seeds he strewed.
When finally the old war-pastor reached the town gate and the watch came to meet him, he roused his strength to the utmost with all the collected will-power of his anxiety. With a single arm he held the casket in place on his back, while with his free hand he drew the Riga riksdollar from his pocket and handed it to the sentry as a bribe.
The soldier motioned to him to go on.
He wanted again to move his foot forward, but now he was unable. Through the town gate he saw the river glimmer on the open plain, but then it grew dark before his eyes. Still afraid for his burden in his helplessness, he softly and cautiously lowered the casket beside him on the stone flagging. Thereupon he fell forward and died.
The other men of the watch sprang forward and began to curse and complain. No casket could remain standing there in the door of the gateway.
The officers, who were sitting and gambling in a room of the casemate, now came likewise to the spot. One of them, a little dry, weather-beaten figure with rectangular spectacles, who was more like a clerk than a soldier, took a lantern, came forward and held the lid slightly ajar with his scabbard.
First he drew back his head precipitately, nearly dropping the lantern. The next time he bent down and looked in, he dwelt on the action longer and more searchingly, and afterwards passed his hands over his whole face to hide his thoughts. Then he unhooked his spectacles and stood pondering. When he bent the third time, he sent the light back and forward through the crevice,—and there inside lay Lina Andersdotter quite calmly, screwing up her eyes at him in the lantern’s light without herself knowing what was going on.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
He laid aside the lantern and went a couple of paces up and down through the door with hands crossed behind his back. There came then into his frigid expression a sly and merrily vibrating life, and unnoticed he took some August apples and thrust them into the casket. Thereupon he began to give commands.
“Come here, boys! Let eight men take the casket to General Ogilvy, salute him and say that this is a small gift from his humble servant, Ivan Alexievitch. Eight of you others who have just come from working on the walls go after it and roll up your leather aprons like trumpets, in which you are to blow the regimental march. But in front of all two men are to go with rushlights. Forward, march!”
The savage soldiers looked open-mouth at one another and obeyed. Laughing, they lifted the casket on their muskets. Two long stalks, tarred and twisted about with straw, were brought forward from a corner of the gateway and lighted at the lantern; and as the procession set itself in motion into the field toward the camp, the musicians tooted the march in their aprons:
O you, who have chosen a gun to bear,
You care not for lodging or bed, lad,
You feed like a prince on the finest fare,
Of girls and of lice you’ve enough and to spare,
But when will you ever be paid, lad?
When they came to the camp, the soldiers rushed together around them in the torch-light. General Ogilvy, who was sitting at table, came out of his tent.
“Beloved little father,” said one of the bearers, “Lieutenant Ivan Alexievitch humbly sends you this gift.”
Ogilvy grew pale and bit his lips under his bushy gray mustaches. His face, wrinkled and strained to harshness, was at bottom good-natured and friendly.
“Is he out of his right mind?” he thundered with pretended wrath, though in reality he was as frightened as a boy. “Put down the casket and break off the lid!”
The soldiers pried it open with their blades, and the dark lid rattled to one side.
Ogilvy stared. With that he burst out laughing. He guffawed so that he had to sit down on an earthen bench. And the soldiers laughed too. They laughed down through the whole lane of tents, so that they reeled and tottered and had to support themselves one against another like drunkards. Lina Andersdotter lay there in the casket with a half-eaten apple in her hand and made great eyes. She had now become warm again and was as blooming of cheek as a doll.
“By all the saints,” Ogilvy burst out. “Not ever in the catacombs of St. Anthony has man seen such a miracle. This is a corpse that ought to be sent to the Czar himself.”
“By no means,” answered one of his officers. “I sent him two little fair-haired baggages day before yesterday, but he only cares for thin brunettes.”
“So it is,” answered Ogilvy, and turned himself bending toward Narva. “Salute Ivan Alexievitch and say that, when the casket is returned, there shall lie in the bottom of it a captain’s commission.—Hey, sweetheart!”
He went forward and stroked Lina Andersdotter under the chin.
But at that she sat up, took hold of his hair, and gave him a resounding box on the ear, and after that another.
He did not let it affect him in the least, but continued to laugh.
“That’s the way I like them,” he said, “that’s the way I like them. I will make you queen of the marauders, my chick, and as token thereof I give you here a bracelet with a turquoise in the clasp. A band of our worst rabble stole it just now from the casket of Countess Horn in Narva.”
He shook the chain from his wrist and she caught it eagerly to her.
When later in the evening the cloth was laid in the tent, Lina Andersdotter sat at the table beside Ogilvy. She had now got French clothes of flowered brocade and wore a head-dress with blonde-lace. But what hands! She managed to eat with gloves, but under them swelled the big, broad fingers and the red shone between the buttons.
“Hoho! hoho!” shouted the generals. “Those hands make a man merrier than he would get with a whole flask of Hungary. Help! Loosen our belts! Hold us under the arms! It will be the death of us.”
Meanwhile she helped herself, munched sweetmeats, and sat with her spoon in the air. If anything tasted bad, she made a face. Eat she could. Drink, on the contrary, she would not but only took a swallow in her mouth and then spurted the wine over the generals. But all their curses and worst expressions she picked up while she sat ever alike blooming and gay.
“Help, help!” shrieked the generals, choked with laughter. “Blow out the light so they can slip her away! Hold our foreheads! Help! Will you have a little pull of a tobacco pipe, mademoiselle?”
“Go to the deuce! Can’t I sit in peace!” answered Lina Andersdotter.
There was one thing, though, that Ogilvy skillfully concealed so that the laughers should not turn to him and nudge him in the ribs and pull his coat-tails and say: “Oho, little father, you’ve got into water too deep for your bald head. Bless you, little father, bless you and your little mishap!”
He pretended always to treat her with slightly indifferent familiarity, but he never sat so near her that his dog could not jump up between them. He never took hold of her so that anyone saw it, and never either when no one saw it, for then he knew that her hand would catch him on the face so that the glove would split and the red shine out in all its strength. It was enough that, notwithstanding, she now and then gave him a slap in the middle of the face, and no one did she snub worse than him. But at all that he only laughed with the others, so that never before had there been in the camp such a clamor and bedlam.
Sometimes he thought of knouting her, but he was ashamed before the others, because everything could be heard through the tent, and he feared that they then would the more easily guess how things stood and how little he got along with the girl. Wait, he thought, we shall be sitting alone sometime under lock and key. Just wait! Till then things may go on as they do.
“Help, help!” shouted the generals. “That’s how she carries her train. We must take hold of it. Lord, lord, no; but just look!”
“Take it up, you,” said she. “Take it up, you. That’s what you are for.”
And so the generals were cuffed and bore her train, both when she came to the table and when she went.
Then it happened one evening when she sat among the drinking old men that an adjutant stepped in, hesitating and embarrassed. He turned to Ogilvy.
“Dare I be frank?”
“Naturally, my lad.”
“And whatever I say will be forgiven?”
“By my honor. Only speak out!”
“The czar is on his way out to the camp.”
“Very good, he is my gracious lord.”
The adjutant pointed at Lina Andersdotter.
“The czar has a fancy for tall brunettes,” said Ogilvy.
“Your Excellency, in these last days he has changed his taste.”
“God! Call the troops to arms—and forward with the three-horse wagon!”
Now the alarm was struck. Drums rolled, trumpets shattered, weapons clattered, and shouts and trampling filled the night. The drinking party was broken up, and Lina Andersdotter was set in a baggage-wagon.
Beside the peasant who was driving, a soldier sprang up with a lighted lantern, and she heard the peasant softly inquire of him the purpose of the flight.
“The czar,” answered the soldier in a monotone and pointed with his thumb over his shoulder at the girl.
At that the peasant shrunk together as at a frost-cold breeze and whipped the small, shaggy horses more and more wildly. He hallooed and beat and urged them into a thundering gallop. The lantern-light fell caressingly on the fir bushes and the burnt homesteads; the wagon banged and tottered among the stones, and creaked in its joints.
Lina Andersdotter lay on her back in the hay and looked at the stars. Whither was she carried? What fate awaited her? She wondered and wondered. On her wrist hung the bracelet as a talisman, a pledge for the accomplishing of Ogilvy’s wonderful prediction. Queen of the Marauders! It sounded so grand, though at first she had so gradually discovered what the word really betokened. She stroked and plucked at the small silver rings. Then she sat up and scanned the stony road in the lantern’s light. Cautiously she moved further and further out. Unnoticed, she climbed slowly over the wagon-sill and lowered her feet to the ground. Would she be crushed and left lying? For a few steps she dragged along. Then she lost her hold, stumbled, and fell lacerated among the bushes.
On thundered the baggage-wagon with its three galloping horses, and the lantern-light vanished. Then she got up and wiped off the blood from her cheeks while she wandered forth into the trackless woods.
When she met barbarous-looking fugitives and they saw her pretty face, they at once picked berries and mushrooms for her and followed along. She got a whole court of ragamuffins and she treated them so ill that they scarcely dared to touch her dress, but sometimes they stabbed each other. Finally she took service with a skipper’s wife, who was to sail with her husband to Danzig. Scarcely had it begun to grow dark when the ragamuffins came out one after another and took service for nothing. The skipper sat on his cabin in the moonlight, blew his shepherd’s pipe, and congratulated himself on having got such a willing crew. And never had an old woman seen a stronger serving-maid. But hardly had they put to sea when Lina Andersdotter sat herself beside the skipper with her arms crossed, and all the ragamuffins lay on their backs and sang in tune with the pipe.
“Do you think I’ll scour your bunks?” said she.
“Beat her, beat her,” cried the old woman, but the skipper only moved nearer and blew and blew on his pipe. Night and day the vessel rocked on the bright waves with slack sail, and the skipper played for Lina Andersdotter, who danced with her ragamuffins, but down in the cabin sat the old woman crying and lamenting.
When they came to Danzig the skipper stuck the pipe under his arm and slunk off the vessel at night with Lina Andersdotter and her ragamuffins. They guessed now that she thought of going to the Swedish troops in Poland and compelling the king himself to give her his hand.
When she with her followers stepped humming in among the Swedish women of the camp, there was uproar and alarm, because for two days they had sat by their wagons without food. The last provisions had been delivered to the sutlers and divided among the soldiers. Then she stepped forward to the first corporal she happened on and set her hands on her hips.
“Aren’t you ashamed,” said she, “to let my women starve, when in spite of all you can’t get along without them?”
“Your women? Who are you?”
She pointed to her bracelet. “I am Lina Andersdotter, the Queen of the Marauders, and now take five men and follow us!”
He looked toward his captain, the reckless Jacob Elfsberg, he looked at her pretty face and at his men. How the line surrounded her with their muskets, and the women armed themselves with whip-handles and pokers! At night when the light of the camp-fire tinged the heavens, the king, inquisitive, got into his saddle. As the wild throng came back with well-laden wagons and oxen and sheep, the troops cheered louder than ever: “Hurrah for King Charles! Hurrah for Queen Caroline!”
The women thronged about the king’s horse so that the lackeys had to hold them back, and Lina Andersdotter went to him to shake hands with him. But he thereupon rose in his stirrups and shouted over the women’s heads to the corporal and the five soldiers: “That’s well maraudered, boys!”
From that moment she would never hear the king named, and whenever she met a man, she flung her sharpest abuse right in his face, whether he was plain private or general. When Malcomb Bjorkman, the young guardsman—who, however, was already famous for his exploits and wounds—held out his hand to her, she scornfully laid in it her ragged, empty purse; and she was never angrier than when she heard General Meyerfelt whistling as he rode before his dragoons, or recognized Colonel Grothusen’s yellow-brown cheeks and raven-black wig. But if a wounded wretch lay beside the road, she offered him the last drops from her tin flask and lifted him into her wagon. Frost and scratches soon calloused her cheeks. High on the baggage-wagon she sat with the butt of a whip and commanded all the wild camp-followers, loose women, lawful wives, and thievish fellows that streamed to them from east and West. When at night the flare of a fire arose toward heaven, the soldiers knew that Queen Caroline was out on a plundering raid.
Days and years went by. Then, after the jolly winter-quarters in Saxony, when the troops were marching toward the Ukraine, the king commanded that all women should leave the army.
“Teach him to mind his own affairs!” muttered Lina Andersdotter, and she very tranquilly drove on.
But when the army came to the Beresina, there was murmuring and lamenting among the women. They gathered around Lina Andersdotter’s cart and wrung their hands and lifted their babies on high.
“See what you have to answer for! The troops have already crossed the river and broken all the bridges behind them. They have left us as prey to the Cossacks.”
She sat with her whip on her knee with her high boots, but on her wrist gleamed the silver chain with its turquoise. All the more violently did the terrified women sob and moan around her, and from the closed baggage-wagons, which were like boxes, crept out painted and powdered Saxon hussies. Some of them, none the less, had satin gowns and gold necklaces. From all sides came women she had never seen before.
“Dirty wenches!” muttered she. “Now at last I have a chance to see the smuggled goods that the captains and lieutenants brought along in their wagons. What have you to do among my poor baggage-crones? But now we all come to know what a man amounts to when his haversack is getting light.”
Then they caught hold of her clothes and called upon her as if she alone could seal their fate.
“Is there no one,” she asked, “who knows the psalm: ‘When I am borne through the Vale of Death’? Sing it, sing it!”
Some of the women struck up the psalm with choked and nearly whispering voices, but the others rushed down to the river, hunted out boats and wreckage from the bridges, and rowed themselves across. Each and every one who had a husband or a beloved in the army had hoped even at the last she would be taken along and hidden; but all the worst women of the rabble, who belonged neither to this man nor to that, stood with their rags or their tasteless, ridiculous gowns in a ring around Lina Andersdotter. Meanwhile swarms of Cossacks, who had crossed the river to snap up any straggling marauders, were sneaking up through the bushes on their hands and knees.
Then her heart failed her and she stepped down from the wagon.
“Poor children!” she said, and patted the hussies on the cheek. “Poor children, I will not desert you. But now,—devil take me!—do you pray to God that he will make your blood-red sins white, for I have nothing else to offer you than to shame the men and die a hero’s death.”
She opened the wagon-chest and hunted out from among her plunder some pikes and Polish sabres, which she put into the hands of the softly-singing women. Thereupon she herself grasped a musket without powder or shot and set herself among the others around the cart to wait. So they stood in the sunset light on the highest part of the shore.
Then the women on the river saw the Cossacks rush forward to the cart and cut down one after another of them with the idea that they were men in disguise. They wanted to turn their boats, and soldiers sprang down from their ranks to the water and opened fire.
“Hurrah for King Charles,” they cried with a thousand intermingled voices; “and hurrah—No, it’s too late. Look, look! There is Queen Caroline who in the midst of the harlots is dying a virgin with a musket in her hand!”