Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist (5 page)

Turning to the wall clock, the mother noticed that it was going on midnight, took a candle in her hand and motioned for the stranger to follow. She led him down long corridors to the room she'd readied for him; Toni carried the stranger's overcoat and the other things he'd removed; the mother showed him to his bed piled up with comfortable pillows, and after telling Toni to give him a footbath, bid him goodnight and took her leave. The stranger set his sword in the corner and plucked a pair of pistols out of his belt and lay them on the table. While Toni shoved the bed forward and covered it with a white sheet, he looked around the room; and since he concluded from the luxury and taste of the decor that these furnishings must have belonged to the former owner of the plantation, a feeling of trepidation hovered like a vulture round his heart, and he wished himself, hungry and thirsty as he'd come, back in the woods with his relations. The girl had meanwhile fetched a vessel filled with warm,
sweet-scented water from the adjoining kitchen, and bid the officer, who had been leaning at the window, to come refresh himself. Silently shedding scarf and vest, he sank into a chair to bear his feet, and while the girl knelt down before him, busying herself with all the small preparations for the bath, he gazed at her fetching figure. As she knelt down her hair fell in dark billowing curls on her young breasts; a disarming comeliness played upon her lips and graced the long eyelashes that fell upon her downcast eyes; he could have sworn, except for her skin color, which he found objectionable, that he had never set eyes on anything as lovely. Watching her now, he was once again struck, as he had been at first sight of her at the door, by a vague resemblance she bore to someone, though he could not say to whom, and the impression overwhelmed him body and soul. He reached for her hand as, all her preparations completed, she rose from the floor, and since he accurately gauged that there was but one way to test if the girl had a heart, he pulled her down on his lap and asked: “Are you already betrothed to a fiancé?” “No!” the girl said in a hushed voice, casting her big black eyes to the ground with a stunning modesty. And without budging from his lap, she added: “Connelly, the young Negro from the neighboring plantation, did propose to me three months ago, but I declined because I was too young.” The stranger, who with both his hands now grasped her slender body, said: “Where I come from, as the saying goes, at fourteen years and seven months a girl is old enough to marry.” He asked, as she eyed a little golden cross he wore against his breast, “How old are you?” “Fifteen,” she replied. “Well then!” said the stranger. “Does he lack sufficient means to make you happy, this lad?” “Oh no!” replied Toni, without looking up, fingering and letting
go of the cross, “Connolly has become a rich man since the recent turn of events; his father took title of the whole plantation that once belonged to their master.” “Then why did you refuse him?” asked the stranger, and gently stroked the hair from her brow. “Did you not find him attractive?” With a quick toss of the head, the girl laughed; and answering his own question he jokingly whispered in her ear: “Might it perhaps have to be a white man who could win your favor?” To which, after flashing him a fleeting, dreamy look, she responded with a ravishing blush that swept over her sun-kissed face, and suddenly lay her head on his chest. Stirred by her comeliness and sweetness, the stranger called her his dear girl, and feeling as though delivered from all his troubles by the hand of God, wrapped her in his arms. He found it impossible to believe that all of these gestures could merely be the miserable expression of a cold-blooded and cruel-hearted betrayal. The troubled thoughts that had clouded his spirit lifted like a flock of vultures; he chided himself for having doubted her for a single second, and as he rocked her on his knees and inhaled her sweet breath he kissed her on the forehead as a sign of reconciliation and forgiveness between them. Meanwhile, suddenly pricking up her ears, as if she'd heard someone drawing near outside the door, the girl bolted upright; she thoughtfully and dreamily rearranged the cloth that had slipped from over her breasts; and only once she fathomed that it had been a false alarm did she turn back to the stranger with a cheerful look and remind him that if he did not soon make use of the hot water it would get cold. “Heavens,” she said, a bit taken aback, as the stranger peered at her in thoughtful silence, “why are you looking at me in such a strange way?” Fiddling with her pinafore, she tried to hide her growing embarrassment, and
laughed out loud: “Strange Sir, what strikes you amiss at the sight of me?” The stranger, who wiped his brow with his hand, suppressing a sigh as he lifted her off his lap, replied: “A wondrous resemblance between you and a girl I once knew!” Noticing that he had been distracted from his merry mood, she gaily and attentively grabbed him by the hand and asked: “What girl?” Whereupon, reflecting a moment, the young man spoke up: “Her name was Marianne Congreve and she hailed from Strasbourg. I met her there, where her father was a merchant, shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and was fortunate enough to have received a yes to my proposal and her mother's approval. Dear God, she was the most faithful soul under the sun, and the terrible and stirring circumstances under which I lost her leap to mind when I look at you, so that I cannot keep from crying.” Toni tenderly and intimately pressed her body close to his. “Is she no longer living?” “She died,” replied the stranger, “and it was only at her death that I fathomed that I had lost the epitome of all goodness and virtue. God knows,” he went on, leaning his aching head on her shoulder, “how I could have been so foolish as to criticize the recently established revolutionary tribunal one evening in a public place. I was accused of treason, they came looking for me; in my absence, as I was fortunate enough to have escaped to the outskirts of the city, the raving mob that craved a victim rushed to the house of my bride, and upon her truthful assurance that she did not know my whereabouts, under the pretense that she was in cahoots with me, the embittered hooligans simply dragged her off to the scaffold instead of me. No sooner was I informed of this terrible news than I emerged from my hideout, and shoving my way through the crowd to the place of execution, cried out at the top of
my lungs: “Here, you inhuman beasts, am I!” But in response to the questions of several revolutionary judges who, alas, did not seem to know me, standing there on the platform in front of the guillotine, she turned away from me with a look indelibly etched into my soul and said: “I don't know that person!” Whereupon, moments later, at the sound of the drumbeat and the howl of the mob, egged on by the trumped up charges of the bloodthirsty judges, the blade dropped and her head fell from her shoulders. How I was saved I cannot tell; I found myself a quarter of an hour later in the apartment of a friend, where I staggered from one faint to another, and toward evening, was loaded, half-mad, onto a carriage, and dispatched across the Rhine.” At these words, letting go of the girl, the stranger hastened to the window, and as she saw him bury his profoundly troubled face in a handkerchief, stirred by a deep sympathy for his plight, she impulsively rushed over to him, wrapped her arms around his neck and mingled her tears with his.

What happened next need not be told, since everyone who gets to this point in the tale can guess. Rousing himself afterwards, the stranger had no idea where the impetuous thing he'd done would lead him; in the meantime, however, he fathomed this much, that he had been saved and that he had nothing to fear from the girl in this house. Seeing her lying there on the bed with her arms crossed beneath her, crying her eyes out, he did his best to try and comfort her. He took off the little golden cross, a gift from his faithful Marianne, his dead bride; and leaning over Toni, whispering endless words of endearment, hung it around her neck as an engagement gift, as he called it. And since she kept weeping, heedless of his words, he sat himself down on the edge of the bed, stroking
her hand, covering her with kisses, and said that he would speak to her mother the next morning and ask for her hand in marriage. He described for her the small property he possessed on the shore of the Aar River; a house comfortable and big enough to accommodate her and her mother, if the old woman's age would still allow for the journey; fields, gardens, meadows and vineyards; and a venerable old father who would receive her with gratitude and love, since she had saved his son. And since her never-ending flood of tears drenched the pillow, he took her in his arms and asked her, himself gripped by emotion: “What have I done to hurt you? Can you not find it in your heart to forgive me?” He swore that his love for her would never fade from his heart and that it was only the mad frenzy of emotions, a mingling of desire and the shock of fear she had aroused, that could have induced him to do what he had done. Finally he reminded her that the morning stars sparkled and that if she remained lying in his bed her mother would come and surprise her there; he implored her, for the sake of her health, to get up and rest for a few more hours in her own bed; worried sick by her condition, he asked if perhaps he should pick her up and carry her to her room; but since she made no reply to all his entreaties and lay, quietly sobbing, with her head pressed into her folded arms on the wrinkled pillow, as the light of dawn was already streaming in through both windows, he finally had no choice but, without any further words, to pick her up; he carried her, hanging like a lifeless corpse from his shoulders, up the stairs to her room, and after laying her in her bed and repeating with a thousand endearments all that he had said before, once again calling her his beloved bride, he pressed a gentle kiss on her forehead and rushed back to his room.

As soon as daylight had completely swept away the dark, old Babekan made her way up to her daughter's room, and sitting herself down on the edge of her bed, revealed what she had in mind for the stranger as well as his traveling companions. She said that, since the Negro Congo Hoango would only be back in two days, everything depended on their keeping the stranger in the house for that time, without, however, welcoming his relatives, whose presence, on account of their number, might, in her opinion, jeopardize their plans. To this end, she said, she intended to make out as if she had just learned that General Dessalines was headed this way with his army, and consequently, because the risk was too great, they would have to wait three days, until the general's army had passed, to safely bring his family into the house as he wished. The travelers would, in the meantime, have to be supplied with provisions so that they stayed put, and also, to lure them into the trap, would have to be kept under the illusion that they would find safe haven in the house. She remarked, furthermore, upon the importance of the matter at hand, since the family's possessions would probably bring them rich booty; and insisted that her daughter do everything in her power to aid in this endeavor. Propping herself up in bed, her face flushed with the blush of her reluctance, Toni replied: “It's scandalous and contemptible to abuse the laws of guest friendship with innocent people lured into the house.” She added that a fugitive who sought their protection ought to be doubly safe; and she assured Babekan that if she did not give up the bloody plan she'd just revealed, that she, Toni, would go forthwith to the stranger and reveal to him what a den of cutthroats was this house in which he had thought to find safe refuge. “Toni!” said the mother, putting her hands to her hips and
looking into her daughter's eyes. “I mean it!” the daughter replied. “What ill deed did this young man, not even a Frenchman by birth, but a Swiss, as he said, ever do to us that we should want to fall upon him like thieves, kill him and rob him? Do the accusations made against the planters here also hold true for those on the side of the island he comes from? Does not everything about him rather show that he is the noblest and finest of men, and surely does not share responsibility for the injustices for which the blacks blame his race?” Taking in the strange expression on the girl's face, the old woman simply remarked with quivering lips: “I can't believe my ears!” Then she asked: “What guilt did the young Portuguese gentleman bear who was recently clubbed to death in the doorway? What did the two Dutchmen do to deserve to be shot down in the yard by the Negroes three weeks ago? What blame do the three Frenchmen and all the other white-skinned fugitives bear who were mowed down in this house with flintlock, lance and sword, since the outbreak of the uprising?” “By the light of the sun,” said the daughter, leaping up wildly, “you do me wrong to remind me of all these atrocities! The inhumanities you compelled me to take part in have long since disgusted me in my heart of hearts; and to expiate my sins for all that happened in the eyes of God, I swear to you that I would rather die a tenfold death than permit you to harm even a hair on the head of that young man as long as he is in this house.” “Very well,” said the old woman, with a sudden look of compliance, “let the stranger travel in peace. But when Congo Hoango gets back,” she added, getting up to leave the room, “and finds out that a white man spent the night in this house, you can beg him to show you the same mercy that moved you to disobey his express orders.”

Stunned by this outburst, in which, despite a feigned tone of benevolence, the old woman had given vent to her fury, the girl lingered in her room. She was all too familiar with her mother's hatred of the whites to think that Babekan might let slip such an occasion to satisfy it. The fear that the old woman would presently send word to the neighboring plantations and call upon the Negroes to fall upon the stranger impelled her to throw on her clothes and follow her mother down to the dining room below. And just as her mother returned, distracted, from the pantry, where she appeared to have had some pressing matter to attend to, and sat herself down on a bale of flax, the daughter stood at the door, onto which a mandate had been tacked forbidding all blacks, at the risk of their life, from aiding and abetting the whites; and pretending, as though gripped with terror, to grasp the error of her ways, she suddenly turned to her mother, who, she knew, had been watching from behind, and flung herself at her feet. Clasping her knees, the daughter begged her to forgive the wild words she had spoken in defense of the stranger; she lay the blame on the half-dreaming, half-waking state from which she was suddenly roused by her mother's plans to trick him; and assured the old woman that she would do everything in her power to deliver him for judgment, which, based on the present law of the land, demanded his execution. Looking the girl squarely in the eyes, the old woman said after a while: “In Heaven's name, child, your declaration just saved his life for today! Seeing as you'd threatened to take him under your wing, that pot was already spiked with the poison that would at least have delivered him up dead to Congo Hoango, true to his command.” Whereupon she got up, took the pot of milk on the table and dumped it out the window. Gripped
with horror, unable to believe her eyes, Toni stared at her mother. Sitting herself down again and turning to the girl, who crouched before her on her knees, Babekan picked her up off the floor and asked: “What in the course of a single night could have so muddled your thoughts? Yesterday, after giving him a footbath, did you stay with him a while longer? Did you speak much with him?” Yet Toni, whose heart heaved in her breast, held her tongue, but for a few meaningless words; her eyes cast to the floor, she stood there holding her head, lost in a dream. “A look at the bosom of my unhappy mother,” she said, bowing and kissing her hand, “reminded me of the inhumanity of the race to which that stranger belongs,” and turning around and pressing her face into her apron, she assured the old woman, “as soon as the Negro Hoango gets back you'll see what kind of daughter you have.”