Captured
Far out in the wastes of Småland and Finnved wondrous prodigies appeared in the air and after that work lost all worth and the morrow all hope. People either went hungry or ate and drank with riot and revel amid half-stifled curses. At every farm sat a mother or a widow in mourning. During the day’s occupation she talked of the fallen or the captives, and at night she started from her sleep and thought she was still hearing the thunder of the hideous wagons on which teamsters in black oil-cloth cloaks carried away those who had died of the plague.
In the church of Riddarsholm the body of the Princess Hedwig Sofia had lain unburied for seven years from lack of money, and now a new coffin had been laid out for the old Queen Dowager Hedwig Eleonora, Charles’s mother. Several sleepy ladies-in-waiting were keeping the death-watch, and wax-lights burned mistily around the dead, who lay wrapped in a simple covering of linen.
The youngest lady-in-waiting arose yawning, went to the window, and drew back the black broad-cloth to see if dawn had not appeared.
Limping steps were heard from the ante-room, and a little man of a gnarled and rugged figure, who in every way tried to subdue the thump of his wooden leg, advanced to the coffin and with signs of deep reverence lifted aside the drapery. His fair, almost white hair lay close along his head and extended down his neck as far as his collar. From a flask he poured embalming liquid into a funnel, which was set in the royal corpse between the kirtle and the bodice. But the liquid was absorbed very slowly, and, waiting, he set down the flask on the funeral carpet and went to the lady at the window.
“Is it not seven o’clock yet, Blomberg?” she whispered.
“It has just struck six. It’s an awful weather outside, and I feel in the stump of my leg that we’re going to have a snow-storm. But then it’s a long while since one could foretell anything good in Sweden. Trust me, not this time either will there be enough money for a decent funeral. It was only the beginning when the sainted Ekerot prophesied misery and conflagration. And perhaps the fire didn’t go on over the island in front of the castle! Over the plain of Upsala it threw its light from cathedral and citadel. In Vasterås and Linköping the tempest sweeps the ashes around the blackened wastes—and now there’s burning in all quarters of the kingdom. Forgive my freedom, gracious mistress, but to tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. That’s my old maxim that saved my life once down there by the Dnieper River.”
“Saved your life? You were then a surgeon in your regiment. You must sit down by me here and tell the story. The time is so long.”
Blomberg spoke resignedly and a trifle like a priest, from time to time lifting his dexter and middle fingers with the other fingers closed.
Both cast a glance at the corpse, which slept in its coffin with gracefully disposed locks, and wax and rouge in the deepest of the wrinkles. Thereupon they sat themselves on a bench in the window nook outside the hanging broad-cloth, and Blomberg began whispering his narrative.
I was lying unconscious in the marshy wilderness at Poltava. I had stumped along on my wooden leg and got a blow from a horse’s hoof, and when I came to, it was night. I felt a cold, strange hand fumble under my coat and pull at the buttons. An abomination before the Lord are the devices of the wicked, I thought; but gentle words are pure. Without becoming frightened, I seized the corpse-plunderer very silently by the breast, and by his stammered words of terror I perceived that he was one of the Zaporogeans who had made an alliance with the Swedes and followed the army. As surgeon I had tended many of these men, as well as captured Poles and Muscovites, and could make myself tolerably understood in their various languages.
“Many devices are in the heart of man,” said I meekly; “but the counsel of the Lord, that shall abide. No evil can befall the righteous, but the ungodly shall be filled with misfortunes.”
“Forgive me, pious sir,” whispered the Zaporogean. “The Swedish czar has left us poor Zaporogeans to our fate, and the Muscovite czar, whom we faithlessly deserted, is coming to maim and slay us. I only wanted to get me a Swedish coat so that in a moment of need I could give myself out as one of you. Do not be angry, godly sir!”
To see if he had any knife, I searched out flint and steel while he was speaking and made a fire with dry thistles and twigs which lay at my feet. I noted then that I had before me a little frightened old man with a sly face and two empty hands. He raised himself as vehemently as a hungry animal that has found its prey and bent in the light over a Swedish ensign who lay dead in the grass. Thinking that a dead man might willingly grant a helpless ally his coat, I did nothing to hinder the Zaporogean; but as he drew the coat from the fallen one, a letter slipped from the pocket. I saw by the address that Falkenburg was the name of the boy who had bled to death. He lay now as fairly and peacefully stretched out as if he had slept in the meadow by the house where he was born. The letter was from his sister, and I had only time to spell out the words which from that hour became my favorite maxim: To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. At that moment the Zaporogean put out my light.
“With your wise consent, sir,” he whispered, “do not draw the corpse-plunderers hither.”
I paid little attention to his talk, but repeated time after time: “To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. That is a big saying my old fellow, and you shall see that I get along further with it than you do with your disguise.”
“We may try it,” answered the Zaporogean, “but we must promise this, that the one of us who survives the other shall offer a prayer for the other’s soul.”
“That is agreed,” I said, and gave him my hand, for it seemed as if through misfortune I had found in this shaggy-bearded barbarian a friend and a brother.
He helped me up and at daybreak we fell into the long line of stragglers and wounded that silently tottered into Poltava to give themselves up as prisoners. They willingly tried to conceal the Zaporogean among the rest. His big boots with their flaps reached up to his hips and his coat-tails hung down to his spurs. As soon as a Cossack looked at him, he turned to one of us and cried with raised voice the only Swedish words he had come to learn in the campaign: “I Shwede, Devil-damn!”
My Zaporogean and I with eight of my comrades were assigned quarters in the upper story of a big stone house. As we two had come up there first, we picked out for ourselves a little separate cubby-hole with a window on an alley. There was nothing else there than a little straw to lie on, but I had in my coat a tin flute, which I had from a fallen Kalmuck at Starodub, and on which I had taught myself to play a few pretty psalms. With that I shortened the time, and soon we noticed that, as often as I played, a young woman came to the window on the other side of the alley. Possibly for that reason I played more than I should have otherwise cared to and I know not rightly whether she was fairer and more seemly than all other women, or whether long sojourn among men had made my eye less accustomed, but I had great joy in beholding her. However, I never looked at her when she turned her face toward our window, because I have always been bashful before women-folk and have never rightly understood how to conduct myself in that which pertains to them. Never, too, have I sought fellowship with men who go with their heads full of wenches and do nothing but hanker after gallant intrigues. “Let everyone keep his vessel in holiness,” Paul saith, “and not in the lust of desire as do the heathen, which know not God; also let no one in this matter dishonor and wrong his brother, because the Lord is a powerful avenger in all such things.”
I recognized, however, that a man should at all times bear himself courteously and fittingly, and as one arm of my coat was in tatters, I always turned that side inward when I played.
She usually sat with arms crossed above the window-sill, and her hands were round and white, though large. She had a scarlet-colored bodice with silver buttons and many chains. An old witch who often stood beneath her window with a wheel-barrow and sold bread covered with jam called her Feodosova.
When it grew dusk, she lighted a lamp, and since neither she nor we had any shutters, we could follow her with our glance when she blew on the fire, but I found it more proper that we should turn away and I therefore set myself with my Zaporogean on the straw in the corner.
Besides the prayer-book, I had a few torn-out leaves of Müller’s “Sermons,” and I read and translated many passages for my Zaporogean. But when I noticed that he did not listen, I gave it over for more worldly objects and asked him of our neighbor on the other side of the alley. He said that she was not unmarried, because maidens in that country always wore a long plait tied with ribbons and a little red tuft of silk. More likely she was a widow because her hair hung loose as a token of sorrow.
When it became wholly dark and we lay down on the straw, I discovered that the Zaporogean had stolen my silver snuff-spoon, but after I had taken it back and reproached him for his fault, we slept beside each other as friends.
I was almost bashful, when it was morning again, at feeling myself happier than for a long time, but as soon as I had held prayers with the Zaporogean and had washed and arranged myself sufficiently, I went to the window and played one of my most beautiful psalms.
Feodosova was already sitting in the sunlight. To show her how different the Swedes were from her fellow-countrymen I instructed my Zaporogean to clean our room, and after a couple of hours the white-washed walls were shining white and free from cobwebs. All this helped me to drive away my thoughts, but as soon as I set myself again at rest, my torments of conscience awakened, that I could be happy in such misery. In the hall outside, my comrades sat on floor and benches, sighing heavily and whispering about their dear ones at home. In due turn two of us every day were allowed to go out into the open air to the ramparts, but when I laid myself on my straw in the evening, I was ashamed to pray God that the lot next morning should fall upon me. I knew very well within myself that, if I longed for an hour’s freedom, it was only to invent an errand to the house opposite. And yet I felt that, if the lot really fell upon me without my prayer, I should still never venture to go up there.
When I came to the window in the morning, Feodosova lay sleeping in her clothes on the floor with a cushion under her neck. It was still early and cool, and I did not have the heart to set the tin flute to my mouth. But as I stood there and waited, she may have apprehended in her sleep that I was gazing at her, for she looked up and laughed and stretched her arms out, and all that so suddenly that I did not manage to draw back unnoticed. My brow became hot, I laid aside my flute, and behaved myself in every way so clumsily and unskilfully that I never was so displeased with myself. I pulled and straightened my belt, took my flute again from the window, inspected it, and pretended I was blowing dust out of it. When finally the Russian subaltern who had charge over us unfortunates informed my Zaporogean that he was one of the two who were to go out into the city that day, I drew the Zaporogean aside into a corner and enjoined him with many words to pick a bunch of yellow stellaria such as I had seen around the burned houses by the ramparts. At a suitable opportunity we should then give them to Feodosova I said. She appeared to be a good and worthy woman, who perchance in return might give us poor fellows some fruit or nuts, I said. The miserable bite of bread that the czar allowed us daily did not even quiet our worst hunger, I said.
He was afraid to show himself out in the sunlight, but neither did he dare to arouse mistrust by staying in, and therefore he obeyed and went.
Scarcely was he out of the door, though, when I began to regret that I had not held him back, because now in solitude my embarrassment grew much greater. I sat down on the bed in the corner, where I was invisible, and stayed there obstinately.
Still the time was long, for thoughts were many. After a while I heard the Zaporogean’s voice. Without reflecting, I went to the window and saw him standing by Feodosova with a great, splendid bouquet of stellaria, which reminded one of irises. First she didn’t want to take them but answered that they were impure, since they had been given by a heathen. He pretended that he understood nothing and that he only knew a few words of her speech but with winkings and gestures and nods he made it intelligible that I had sent the flowers, and then at last she took them.
Beside myself with bashfulness, I went back into the corner, and when the Zaporogean returned, I seized him behind the shoulders, shook him, and stood him against the wall.
But scarcely had I let go my grasp when he with his thoughtless vivacity stood at the window again, made signs with his hands and threw kisses on all five of his fingers. Then I came forward, pushed him aside, and bowed. Feodosova sat picking the flowers apart, pulling off the leaves and letting them fall one by one to the ground. Vehemence helped me so that I took courage and began to speak, while I was still considering how it would be most polite to begin a conversation.
“The lady will not take amiss my comrade’s pranks and unseemly gestures,” I stammered.
She plucked still more eagerly at the flowers and answered after a time, “My husband, when he was alive, often used to say that from heel to head such well-made soldiers as the Swedes were not to be found. He had seen Swedish prisoners undressed and whipped by women and had seen that the women at the last were so moved because of their beauty, that they stuck the rods under their arms and sobbed themselves, instead of those they tormented. Therefore have I become very curious these days.... And the love songs which you play sound so wonderful!”
Her speech pleased me not altogether, and I found it little seemly to answer in the same spirit by praising her figure and white arms. Instead I took my flute and played my favorite psalm: “E’en from the bottom of my heart I call Thee in my need.”
After that we conversed of many things, and though my store of words was small, we soon understood each other so well that never did any day seem to me shorter.
At mid-day, after she had clattered about with jugs and plates and swung a palm-leaf fan over the embers in the fire-place, she lifted down from the ceiling a landing-net with which formerly her husband had caught small fish in the river. Into the net she put a pan with steaming cabbage and a wooden flask with kvass, and the net was so long that she could hand us the meal across the street. When I drank to her, she nodded and smiled and said that she did not regard it as wrong to feel pity for captured heathens. Toward evening she moved her spinning-wheel to the window, and we kept on conversing when it was dusk. I no longer felt it as a sin to be happy in the midst of the sorrow that surrounded us, because my intent was innocent and pure. Just as I had seen the stellaria shining over heaps of ashes among the burned and desolate houses by the ramparts as a song of praise to God’s goodness, so seemed to me now the joy of my heart.
When it became night and I had held prayer with my Zaporogean and yet once more reproached him that he had stolen my snuff-spoon, the garrulous man began to talk to me in an undertone and say: “I see clearly, little father, that you are in love with Feodosova, and in truth she is a good and pure woman whom you may take to wife. That you never would enter upon any love-dealing of another sort I have understood from the first.”
“Such stuff!” answered I, “such stuff!”
“Truth is in the long run less dangerous than lying, you used to say.”
When he struck me with my own maxim-staff, I became confounded, and he proceeded.
“The czar has promised good employment and wages to everyone of you Swedes who will become his subject and be converted to the true faith.”
“You are out of your wits. But if I could get off and take her home with me on horseback, I would do it.”
Next morning, when I had played my psalm, I learned that today it was my turn to go out under the open heavens.
I became warm and restless. I combed and fixed myself up even more carefully than at other times, and changed to the Zaporogean’s ensign coat so as not to wear my torn one. Meanwhile I deliberated with myself. Should I go up to her? What should I say then? Perhaps, though, that would be the only time in my life when I could get to speak with her, and how should I not repent thereafter even to my gray old age, if out of awkwardness I had missed that one chance! My heart beat more violently than at any affair with the enemy, when I stood with my bandages among the bullets and the fallen. I stuck the flute into my pocket and went out.
When I came down on the street she sat at the window without seeing me. I would not go to her without first asking leave, and I did not know rightly how I should conduct myself. Pondering, I took a couple of steps forward.
Then she heard me and looked out.
I lifted my hand to my hat, but with a long ringing burst of laughter she sprang up and cried, “Haha! Look, look, he has a wooden leg!”
I stood with my hand raised, and stared and stared, and I had neither thought nor feeling. It was as if my heart had swelled out and filled all my breast, so that it was near to bursting. I believe I stammered something. I only remember that I did not know whither I should turn, that I heard her still laughing, that everything in the world was indifferent to me, that freedom would have frightened me as much as my captivity and my wretchedness, that of a sudden I had become a broken man.
I remember vaguely a long and steep lane without stone pavement, where I was accosted by other Swedish prisoners. Perhaps, even, I answered them, asked after their health, and took some puffs out of the tobacco pipes they lent me.
I believe I disturbed myself over the fact that it was so long till night, so that I had to return the same way and pass her window in brightest daylight. By every means I prolonged the time, speaking now to one man, now to another, but shortly the Russian dragoons came and ordered me to turn about to my place.
As I went up the lane, I persuaded myself that I should not betray myself, but should salute in a quite friendly manner before the window. Was it her fault that so many of the Swedish soldiers of whom she had had such fine dreams were now pitiful cripples on wooden legs?
“Hurry up there!” thundered the dragoons, and I hastened my steps so that the thumping of my wooden leg echoed between the walls of the houses.
“Dear Heavenly Father,” I muttered, “faithfully have I served my earthly master. Is this the reward Thou givest me, that Thou makest of me in my youth a defenseless captive, at whom women laugh? Yes, this is Thy recompense, and Thou wilt abase me into yet deeper humiliation, that thereby I may at length become worthy of the crown of blessedness.”
When I came under the window and carried my hand to my hat, I saw that Feodosova was away. That gave me no longer any relief. I stumbled up to my prison and at every step heard the thumping of my wooden leg.
“I have talked with Feodosova,” whispered the Zaporogean.
I gave him no reply. My happiness, my flower, that had grown up over the heaps of ashes, lay consumed; and if it had again shone out, I myself, in alarm, would have trampled it to death with my wooden leg. What signified to me the Zaporogean’s whisperings?
“Ah!” he went on, “when you were gone, I reproached Feodosova and said to her that you were fonder of her than she realized, and that, if you were not a stranger and a heathen, you would ask her to be your wife.”
In silence I clenched my hands and bit my lips together to lock up my vexation and embarrassment, and I thanked God that he abased me every moment more deeply in shame and ridicule before men.
I opened the door to the outer hall and began to talk to the other prisoners:
“As wild asses in the desert we go painfully to seek our food. On a field that we do not own we must go as husbandmen, and harvest in the vineyard of the ungodly. We lie naked the whole night from lack of garments, and are without covering against the cold. We are overwhelmed by the deluge from the mountains, and from lack of shelter we embrace the cliffs. But we beg Thee not for mitigation Almighty God. We pray only: Lead us, be nigh unto us! Behold, Thou hast turned away Thy countenance from our people and stuck thorns in our shoes, that we may become Thy servants and Thy children. In the mould of the battle-field our brothers sleep, and a fairer song of victory than that of the conquerors by the sword Thou dost offer to Thy chosen ones.”
“Yea, Lord lead us, be nigh unto us!” echoed all the prisoners murmuringly.
Then out of the darkest corner rose a lonely, trembling voice, which cried: “Oh, that I were as in former months, as in the days when God protected me, when His lamp shone upon my head, when with His light I went into the darkness! As I was in my autumn days, when God’s friendship was over my tent, while yet the Almighty was with me, and my children were about me! Thus my heart cries out with Job, but I hear it no longer and I stammer forth no longer: Take away my trials! With the ear I have heard tell of Thee, O God, but now hath mine eye beheld Thee.”
“Quiet, quiet!” whispered the Zaporogean, taking hold of me, and his hands were cold and trembling. “It can be no one else than the czar who is coming below in the lane.”
The lane had become filled with people, with beggars and boys and old women and soldiers. In the middle of the throng the czar, tall and lean, walked very calmly, without a guard. A swarm of hopping and shrieking dwarfs were his only retinue. Now and then, turning, he embraced and kissed the smallest dwarf on the forehead in a fatherly way. Here and there he stood still before a house and was offered a glass of brandy, which he jestingly emptied at a single gulp. It could be nobody but the czar, because one saw directly that he alone ruled over both people and city. He came so close under my window that I could have touched his green cloth cap and the half-torn brass buttons on his brown coat. On the skirt he had a great silver button with an artificial stone and on his legs rough woolen stockings. His brown eyes gleamed and flashed, and the small black mustaches stood straight up from his shining lips.
When he caught sight of Feodosova, he became as if smitten with madness. When she came down on the street and knelt with a cup, he pinched her ear, then took her under the chin and lifted up her head so that he could look her in the eyes.
“Tell me, child,” he inquired, “where is there a comfortable room where I can eat? May there be one at your house?”
The czar had seldom with him on his excursions any master of ceremonies or other courtier. He took along neither bed nor bed-clothes nor cooking utensils; no, not even a cooking or eating vessel; but everything had to be provided in a turn of the hand wherever it occurred to him to take lodging. It was for this reason that there was now running and clatter at all the gates and stairs. From this direction came a man with a pan, from that another with an earthen platter, from yonder a third with a ladle and drinking utensils. Up in Feodosova’s room the floor was strewn deeply with straw. The czar helped with the work like a common servant, and the chief direction was carried on by a hunchbacked dwarf, who was called the Patriarch. The dwarf every once in a while put his thumb to his nose and blew it in the air straight in front of the czar’s face, or invented rascal tricks of which I cannot relate before a lady of quality.
Once when the czar turned with crossed arms to the window, he noticed me and the Zaporogean, and nodded like a comrade. The Zaporogean threw himself prostrate on the floor and stammered his “I Schwede. Devil-damn!” But I pushed him aside with my foot and told him once for all to be silent and get up, because no Swede conducted himself in that fashion. To cover him as much as possible, I stepped in front of him and took my position there.
“Dat is nit übel,” said the czar, but at once fell back into his mother speech and asked who I was.
“Blomberg, surgeon with the Uppland regiment,” I answered.
The czar scanned me with a narrowing gaze that was so penetrating I have never seen a more all-discerning look.
“Your regiment exists no longer,” he said, “and here you see Rehnskiöld’s sword.” He lifted the sword with its scabbard from his belt and threw it on the table so that the plates hopped. “But for certain you are a rogue, for you wear a captain’s or ensign’s uniform.”
I answered, “‘That is a hard saying,’ saith John the Evangelist. The coat I borrowed, after my own fell in rags, and if that be ill done, I will yet hope for grace, because this is my maxim: To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie.”
“Good. If that is your motto, you shall take your servant with you and come over here so that we may prove it.”
The Zaporogean trembled and tottered as he followed behind me, but as soon as we entered, the czar pointed me to a chair among the others at the table as if I had been his equal and said: “Sit, Wooden-Leg!”
He had Feodosova on his knee, without the least consideration of what could be said about it, and round them stamped and whistled the dwarfs and a crowd of Boyars who now began to collect. A dwarf who was called Judas, because he carried a likeness of that arch-villain on the chain around his neck seized a handful of shrimps from the nearest plate and threw them to the ceiling, so that they fell in a rain over dishes and people. When in that way he had made the others turn toward him, he pointed at the czar with many grimaces and called cold-bloodedly to him: “You amuse yourself, you Peter Alexievitch. Even outside of the city I have heard tell of the pretty Feodosova of Poltava, I have; but you always scrape together the best things for yourself, you little father.”
“That you do,” chimed in the other dwarfs in a ring around the czar. “You are an arch-thief, you Peter Alexievitch.”
Sometimes the czar laughed or answered, sometimes he did not hear them, but sat serious and meditative, and his eyes moved meanwhile like two green-glinting insects in the sunlight.
I called to mind how I had once seen the most blessed Charles the Eleventh converse with Rudbeck, and how it then came over me that Rudbeck, for all his bowings, amounted to far more than the king. Here it was the other way about. Although the czar himself went around and did the waiting and let himself be treated worse than a knave, I saw only him—and Feodosova. I read his thoughts in the smallest things. I recognized him in the forcibly curtailed caftans and shaven chins at the city gate.
There was a buzzing in my head, and I knelt humbly on the straw and stammered: “Imperial Majesty! To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie, and the Lord said to Moses: ‘Thou shalt not hold with the great ones in that which is evil.’ Therefore I beseech that I may forego further eating. For behold I am soon done with the game, and my gracious lord—who is both like and unlike Your Imperial Majesty—has in the last year turned me to drinking filtered marsh water.”
A twitching and trembling began in the czar’s right cheek near the eye. “Yes, by Saint Andreas!” said he. “I am unlike my brother Charles, for he hates women like a woman, and wine like a woman, and offers up his people’s riches as a woman her husband’s, and abuses me like a woman; but I respect him like a man. His health, Wooden Leg! Drink, drink!”
The czar sprang forward, seized me by the hair, and held the goblet to my mouth, so that the Astrakan ale foamed over my chin and collar. As we drank the prescribed health, two soldiers entered in brownish-yellow uniforms with blue collars and discharged their pistols, so that the hot room, which was already filled with tobacco clouds and onion smell, was now also enveloped in powder smoke.
The czar sat down again at the table. Even in all that noise he wanted to sit and think, but he never allowed anyone else to shirk the duty of drinking and become serious like himself. He drew Feodosova afresh to his knee. Poor, poor Feodosova! She sat there, a bit sunk together, with arms hanging and mouth impotently half-open, as if she awaited cuff and blow amid the caresses. Why had she not courage to pull the sword to her from the table, press her wrist against the edge and save her honor, before it was too late? Over and over she might have laughed at my wooden leg and my disgrace, if with my life I could have preserved her honor. Nor had I ever before been so near her and seen so clearly to what a wondrous work she had been formed in the Heavenly Creator’s hands. Poor, poor Feodosova, if you had but felt in your heart with what a pure intent a friend regarded you in your humiliation and how he prayed for your well-being!
Hour after hour the banquet continued. Those of the Boyars and dwarfs who were most completely overcome already lay relaxed in the straw and vomited or made water, but the czar himself always rose up and leaned out through the window. “Drink, Wooden Leg, drink!” he commanded, and hunted me around the room with the glass, making the Boyars hold me till I had emptied every drop. The twitching in his face became ever more uncanny, and when we were finally together at the table again, he moved three brimful earthen bowls in front of me and said: “Now, Wooden Leg, you shall propose a health to be drunk all round and teach us to understand its meaning with your maxim.”
I raised myself again as well as I could.
“Your health, czar!” I shouted, “for you are assuredly born to command.”
“Why,” he asked, “should the soldiers present arms and salute me if any other was worthier to command? Where is there anything more pitiful than an incompetent ruler? The day I find my own son unworthy to inherit my great, beloved realm, that day shall he die. Your first truth, Wooden Leg, requires no bowl.”
The pistols cracked, and all drank but the czar.
Then I gathered the fragments of my understanding as a miser his coins, for I believed that, if I could catch the czar in a gracious and mild humour, I might perhaps save my Feodosova.
“Well, then, Imperial Majesty,” I continued, therefore, lifting one of the bowls on high “this is Astrakan ale, brewed of mead and brandy with pepper and tobacco. It burns much before it delights, and when it delights it puts one to sleep.”
With that I threw the bowl to the ground so that it broke in a thousand pieces. Then I lifted the next bowl.
“This is Hungarian wine. ‘Drink no more only water,’ writes the Apostle Paul to Timothy, ‘but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and because thou art so often sick.’ So speaks a holy one to weakly men and stay-at-homes. But go out on the battle-field amid frost and wailing and tell me: To how many of the groaning would this bowl of sweetish wine give relief from pain and a softer death?”
Therewith I threw that bowl also to the ground so that it broke. Then I lifted the third bowl.
“This is brandy. It is despised by the fortunate and the rich, because they thirst not after refreshment as the desert for coolness, but would only gibe at the pleasure it gives. But brandy assumes power in the very moment it swims over the tongue, like a despot in the moment he steps across a threshold, and the bleeding and dying draw comfort from a few drops.”
“Right, right!” acclaimed the czar, and took the bowl and drank it, at the same time that he handed me two gold-pieces, while the pistols cracked. “You shall have a pass and a horse to go your way, and wherever you come, you shall tell about Poltava.”
Then I knelt yet again in the straw and stammered: “Imperial Majesty—in my pettiness and weakness—beside you sits a—a pure and good woman.”
“Haha!” screamed the dwarfs and Boyars and tottered to their feet. “Haha! haha!”
The czar got up and carried Feodosova toward me.
“I understand. He who limps on a wooden leg may fall in love, too. Good. I present her to you as she goes and stands, and you shall have a good situation with me. I have promised every Swede who enters into my service and is baptized in our faith that he shall become one of our people.”
Feodosova stood like a sleep-walker and stretched her hands toward me. What did it matter that she had laughed at me. I should soon have forgotten that and she would soon not have seen my wooden leg, for I should have cared for her and worked for her and prayed with her and made her home bright and tranquil. I should have lifted her up to my bosom as a child and asked her if an honest and faithful heart could not make another heart throb. Mayhap she already bore the answer on her tongue, for slowly she beamed up and became flushed, and her whole face became transfigured. Far away in a corner house on Priest Street in Stockholm a lonely old woman sat with her sermon-book and listened and wondered whether a letter would not be left for her through the door, whether no disabled man would step in with a greeting from the remote wilderness, whether I never should come or whether I lay already dead and buried. I had prayed for her every night. I had thought of her in the tumult in the midst of stretchers and wailing wounded. But at that moment I thought of her no longer; I saw and heard nothing else but Feodosova. And yet I was angry and strove against something heavy which weighed upon my heart and which I did not understand, but was only slowly and gradually able to make out.
I bent to Feodosova to kiss her hand, but she whispered, “The czar’s hand, the czar’s hand.”
Then I stretched myself toward the czar and kissed his hand.
“My faith,” I whispered equally softly, “and my royal lord I may not desert.”
The czar’s cheek still twitched, and the dwarfs in their terror pulled forth the Zaporogean from his nook to make the czar laugh at his ridiculous figure. But then the czar’s arms began to move convulsively. His face grew gray and he trembled in one of his dreaded fits. He went toward the Zaporogean and struck him in the face with clenched fist so that the blood streamed from his nose and mouth, and with such a hoarse and altered voice that it could no longer be recognized he hissed: “I have seen through you, liar, from the moment you came into the room. You are a Zaporogean, a renegade, who have hidden yourself in Swedish clothes.—To the wheel with him, to the wheel!”
All, even the drunken men, began to tremble and feel toward the doors, and in his terror one of the Boyars whispered: “Bring forward the woman! Shove her forward! As soon as he gets to see pretty faces and woman’s limbs, he grows quiet.”
They seized her, her bodice was cut over the bosom, and, softly wailing, she was supported forward step by step to the czar.
It grew black around me, and I staggered backward out of the room. I remained standing on the street under the stars and I heard the clamor grow muffled and the dwarfs began to sing.
Then I clenched my hands and remembered a promise on the field of battle to pray for a poor sinner’s soul. But the more fervently I spoke with my God, the further went my thoughts, and my invocation became a prayer for a yet greater sinner who with his last faithful followers wandered about on the desolate steppes.
The surgeon ceased with an anxious glance toward the coffin, and the lady-in-waiting followed him forward to the catafalque.
“Amen!” said she, and the two again spread the covering over the wax-pale Queen Dowager, Charles’ mother.