The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  “Well, what’s the matter, what do you want? You’re shaking like a leaf,” the Hungarian said. He could only guess what was on the cook’s mind. Perhaps she wanted to know where the ladies were and whether they would be coming home this evening.

  “Lie down in your nest, you don’t have anyone more to wait for. Has anyone been here in my absence?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So? ‘Yes, sir?’ Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The saucy cook was really so confused that she did not know what she was doing.

  “Well, hang me, who was here?”

  “The young count,” the saucy cook whispered.

  “What young count?”

  “Countess Jenny’s young count.”

  “What sort of dumb nonsense are you chattering?”

  “Yes, he was here, Count Emil of Countess Jenny—didn’t he come to the party?—I told him that Lady Evans-Stuart—” the saucy cook rolled on without a thought.

  One can well imagine that such information piqued the Hungarian’s curiosity even more. The saucy cook described everything down to the last hair. Emil’s unexpected arrival—the events in Lady Evans-Stuart’s mansion—his own situation. Wouldn’t it just be better to burn the whole nest down and go to the Hotoohs? This is what he said to himself as he walked upstairs.

  In the meantime, the saucy cook had repaired to her chamber next to the kitchen. She pulled a table and chairs in front of the door, crept into bed, and pulled the blankets over her head. Poor woman! She would never see the light of day again.

  The first thing the Hungarian did was to wash, shave, and reclothe himself entirely. Then he gathered together all the money available and stuffed it in his pockets. This was no theft, since he knew that Jenny and Frida were no longer alive. Emil would get no more, since the Hungarian had made a solid decision to set the lovable cottage afire. Setting fires had literally become a mania with him, which was easily explained, since he had for some time been the head of one of the most dangerous arsonist gangs. He had a nasty, reprehensible habit of expressing his irritation by setting fires. And he was irritated indeed as he destroyed the lovable cottage by fire.

  On the same night he committed this new crime, the Hungarian rowed to New Orleans in the same boat in which Tiberius had often ferried him. He landed far down in the Third Municipality. He did not even tie up his boat when he landed, a sign that he never intended to return to it. Here and there fire bells sounded as he left the riverbank and turned onto the next street. He did not look about. All the more avidly, the fire-reddened heavens looked down on him with coal-black eyes.

  In his present clothing, with a cigar in his mouth and a fashionable riding crop in his hand, he looked quite upstanding.

  Two watchmen on the next corner asked him what time it was.

  The Hungarian drew out his gold cylinder watch with great ceremony and said, “About one-thirty, messieurs.” Then he went further and turned onto E*. One of the watchmen was from the Rhine Palatinate, and he said, “The gentleman is certainly on his way to visit a whore.” The other agreed.

  The Hungarian suddenly stopped in what is called a common alley without blinds.

  “If the abbé is really hiding out with the Hotoohs, as Tall Jacques told me, then I could find refuge with them, too, without a lot of trouble,” he grumbled to himself as he crept along the alley. On the right side there was a high wall, and on the left an old, low building, like a warehouse, that had been freshly painted. This building ended roughly in the middle of the alley, where it joined the cross wall.

  This part of the wall was called a blinded wall, probably because one was unable to cross it, topped as it was with thousands of pieces of broken glass, and one could not see what was happening on the other side. A door located on the side of the warehouselike building led into two entryways with plain walls and no furniture at all. These entryways also did not have any openings for light, which would have been useless anyway owing to the height of the walls in front of the doors.

  The Hungarian had already marveled that he had been able to set foot in the entry without disturbing anyone, and now he was now utterly astounded.

  “Strange,” he thought to himself, “no one ever entered so freely or undisturbed.”

  It was utterly dark, so he was unable to see two figures emerging from the western wall of the back entry, remaining half in and half out. They made very little noise, but the Hungarian still heard them. He thought that someone had to be there, for he had always been received. All that was different was that he had not given the first password before entering the passageway.

  “We are the yellow and the brown, the women and no fruit!” the Hungarian called out to see if he had heard correctly.

  “The Hotoohs protect, the Hotoohs oppress, no women and one fruit!” was the answer, and the Hungarian then heard the expected ball rolling toward him. He bent down and took the ball in his right hand. It drew him forward, and he followed with sure steps until his feet struck the wall from which they had rolled the ball, attached to a thread. He now allowed his riding crop, which he had been carrying between his teeth since he entered the passageway, to fall, and he crept through the entry in the western wall through which the Hotoohs had earlier appeared.

  “Whom are you seeking?” one of the two Hotoohs, the one who had rolled the ball at him, asked the Hungarian. They were now at the foot of a narrow stairway leading to the Hotooh chamber.

  “I am seeking Abbé Dominique Dubreuil,” the Hungarian replied, joining hands with the Hotooh.

  “First talk,* then seek,” the same man whispered again. It was the whisper of a female animal, called a spark of the god, or spirit, that dwelled in the man’s brain.

  (Here I apologize to the readers because our pen has cut into the paper and then pressed the cut together so hard that the ink runs down.)

  (Ink spots for words. The type for this has never been cast.)

  Now the other Hotooh turned to the Hungarian.

  “You will not be able to recognize Abbé Dominique Dubreuil when we show him to you.”

  “How so?” the Hungarian asked as he climbed the stairs with the Hotooh. The other Hotooh crouched below, for he had something else to do.

  “Because he has a moustache like you, burned-out clubman,” the Hotooh declared, smiling in his fine, mocking manner.

  “Is that all?” the Hungarian asked casually. He was talking about the moustache matter. The smile was on account of the “burned-out clubman.” He noted that. The redhead and Tall Jacques had spoken the truth when they reported that the abbé said the dumbest things when drunk. What else could the Hotooh be referring to but that he thought the Hungarian had the mill’s treasure and had hidden it?

  Abbé Dominique Dubreuil really had acquired a formidable moustache, and a beard and sideburns to boot. He was crouching with a horde of Hotooh women when the Hungarian entered the sanctissimum with the Hotooh. If the abbé had not coughed, the Hungarian would not have recognized him at first glance. He had so changed in the short time no one had seen him.

  This estimable pig had also become quite fat in the meantime, though he had dedicated himself to drink. Other decent persons living among the Hotoohs such as the abbé did would soon have suffered consumption. It is also possible that his once gaunt body was puffed up by dropsy and that he only appeared to be healthy and fat.

  The abbé was quite impressed by the unexpected appearance of the former dictator of the Hamburg Mill. He regretted a thousand times that he had cursed him to the Hotoohs so much, but he seemed rather calmed once more when he threw Lajos a friendly “Comment s’en va?” His peace was disturbed considerably when he heard the Hungarian’s decision to remain here permanently. The abbé’s anxiety was unnecessary, since the Hungarian did not breathe a word he had heard from Tall Jacques or the redhead, nor did he show that he was upset with Dubreuil. The abbé was also silent about the burning of the mill, since he did not want to
conjure up any situation in which his indiscretion might come up. For it remained simply a supposition that the ex-dictator had been the cause of that fateful fire. The Hungarian did not speak of it himself, since it was too touchy. So the two of them remained in continuous check around each other. Once, when the abbé was very drunk—during the reception of a quadroon maiden of fourteen into the Hotooh society—he tried to start talking about the mill (since the Hungarian was so adamant about being silent, the abbé thought his supposition was true), but he quickly let the matter drop. The Hungarian never spoke a word of what had happened on Hiram’s night or what had brought him thither. He wanted to howl with the wolves but not take them into his confidence. Only in this way did he believe that he would soon gain control of everything, just as he had done earlier at the mill, particularly with the college of the clubmen. For he had no intention of staying there permanently. He wanted to take over the dictatorship and then use it—to make money. But something else was written in the book of destiny.

  We pass over an interval of about ten days.

  It was the night we first visited the family suffering from yellow fever in their tenement, and the Hungarian and the abbé had gone out to buy some things for the Hotoohs. No one in the city could recognize the abbé, he was so changed. Besides his great beard, which was enough to make him unrecognizable, he had adopted an artificial hump. He looked exactly like Aesop from the back, not that broken-down, crooked-backed character Dubreuil.

  Among other things, they bought a whole set of pill boxes, which the abbé had to stick into his deep pockets. For the Hungarian’s pockets were too shallow, he said. The truth was that the Hungarian was just using the abbé as a pack-mule for the expedition.

  Soon they were on their way back to the Hotoohs when the Hungarian suddenly remembered that he had forgotten the laudanum. The Hotoohs needed it that very night, so they were compelled to make a small detour.

  At the corner of Enghien and Casacalvo Streets, they entered a pharmacy. It was so crowded with persons seeking medicine for fever that they did not have a chance of being served in less than a quarter-hour. To pass the time, the Hungarian read the labels of the tincture bottles on the shelves with an indifferent eye, settling his gaze on only a few of the bottles. The abbé stood on the other side and entertained himself with the roots. But he soon grew tired of that and went to the side where the Hungarian stood. One, two, three persons now left the pharmacy. The pharmacist and his two helpers had their hands full.

  “Tinctura Belladonn,” the Hungarian read half-aloud, then looked at the abbé. “Will it be needed, abbé?”

  “For various purposes,” the abbé said indifferently.

  “Tell me once more, you studied pharmacy, too?”

  “That’s true,” the former first-year student declared.

  “Then you could tell me something better than ‘for various purposes.’”

  “Well, yes—it is used for erysipelas,”11 was the answer.

  “Look now, abbé, you don’t understand a thing—you are telling me a story.”

  “Believe it,” the abbé responded, “but let’s hurry—it will soon be our turn—”

  “If I needed belladonna, abbé, do you think he would give it to us?”

  “Under no circumstances, even for an equal weight of gold.”

  “Then we’ll take along the whole jar,” the Hungarian said decisively. He then turned to the abbé.

  “The jar is too high on the shelf. What do you think, abbé? Do you want to climb up and get it?”

  “What are you thinking about, Lajos?” the abbé said in shock, but softly and hesitantly, so that even the Hungarian, right next to him, could not hear it clearly.

  “Did you understand me, abbé?”

  “Lajos, I beg you, avoid a scandal. How could you demand something of me that I would not demand of you, who are so much taller than I—”

  “Taller yes, but also larger,” the Hungarian interrupted—then, after a short pause, he said: “If you won’t do it, abbé, then I’ll do it—these people here won’t bother me, but take care and follow after me so that no one grabs you, for they have seen us talking.”

  The abbé mechanically grabbed the Hungarian by his coat as if he wanted to hold him back, and he was about to say, “But the laudanum, Lajos,” when the Hungarian climbed up, snatched the belladonna, and rushed out on the street with the whole heavy Pittsburgh jar.

  The abbé ran after him. Keeping the Hungarian always in view, he finally was drawing quite close when a part of his hump came off and lodged under his right arm. This restrained him somewhat, while the Hungarian continued to fly, gaining a considerable lead.

  “Thieves, robbers, murderers!” then “fire, fire!” people swore, as they screamed and howled after the fleeing men. Then they went on yelling as if the whole city were in peril, “Watch! City rats!”

  Such exclamations were raised by people who had no idea what was going on. One cried “Watch!” while a second called “City rat!” and a third cried something quite different, such as “Fire!” and so on.

  Members of the watch hate this confused yelling, and with good reason, for they know that such hyperbolic exclamations are often just calls to warn the real fleeing thieves, murderers, or arsonists.

  Without this confusion, the Hungarian and the abbé would certainly not have succeeded, despite their swift flight. After the Hungarian had run with his belladonna and the abbé had stormed out of the pharmacy, the cry was raised so successfully that several persons dedicated themselves to the crusade of recovering the poisonous lady. If the watch had already been wearing the crescent moon on their belts, it would have been inexcusable for them not to have caught the thieves. But at that time they did not yet carry those emblems. In these days, it is no longer possible to run away with a bella donna unpunished.

  Recall that when the physician from the Howard Association left the tenement to get into his carriage, he found a man there who ended a laconic conversation with a blow of his fist to the doctor’s forehead before throwing him on the ground. This man was the Hungarian, who had seized the opportunity presented by the empty carriage to enter it and take the reins. One has already heard of the coarse manner in which the Hungarian helped the creeping abbé into the carriage. But the Hungarian was not going to haul his poisonous pharmaceutical mam’sell to the Hotoohs. He drove so fast on rounding a corner that the doctor’s carriage hit a lamppost, breaking not one but all four wheels. The harness also broke the horse’s jawbone when the carriage suspension collapsed. His coach-driving was at an end.

  “Leave the matter be, Lajos,” the shaken abbé said, still out of breath. “I believe there is a Hotooh-Kralle in the next street—”*

  If they had not heard the notorious music of the watch beating away at the very moment the abbé made his suggestion, the Hungarian probably would have resisted. But now? They could not be sure—they had no friends in the area, and they looked too heated and suspicious. In short, the abbé’s suggestion was accepted by the belladonna thief. In the abbé’s case it was cowardice that led him to seek asylum—for the Hungarian, it was too monotonous to have another argument, and perhaps he thought the Hotoohs would grow impatient if he remained away too long.

  They fled.

  Behind them they heard the loud beating of sticks and the snarl of rattles.

  Now they splashed through the rainwater and entered—a Hotooh-Kralle? Not at all—they were in the tenement of the count’s family.

  The abbé had gone the wrong way. They had returned to the same block where they had entered the doctor’s carriage.

  Was it an accident, or had a higher power driven them here?

  And only now, having fled the feverish asylum of the Atreids twice, and after shuffling the deck again and drawing the trump of Hiram’s night, and after bringing you through the detour of the Hotoohs and the bella donna—only now does the curtain rise on our tragedy, “The Reunion.”

  • • •

  C
onstanze raised her torso from the bed as the two entered. She recognized the count’s voice at once. But she could not understand the words he exchanged with Abbé Dubreuil, since they had used Hotooh language. In the first moment of her surprise she lay her right hand on her glowing forehead as if she were thinking of words or as if she feared that this sudden appearance were only a dream. Then she gathered all her strength and lifted herself up. At the same instant the count also recognized her.

  “Countess Constanze!” he cried out, “what does this mean? You here? And what—”

  Constanze is moving her lips—only inarticulate sounds issue forth. She throws back her arms, looks at the count, then turns to the face of her mother, who seems half sleeping and half waking. Her movements become ever more violent. It is clear that she would like to be able to speak, to call out—but instead she simply presses her hands to her mouth several times and then expels such a terrifying shriek that the Hungarian takes another step back, Melanie rises up in shock, and the abbé staggers over the threshold of the back room with wobbly knees.

  “Mother!” Constanze would like to call out, “that is Count Lajos, that is Frida’s husband, who was to come to the farm, and whose acquaintance you were anxious to make—look, Mother, that is Count Lajos, of whom I told you so much, and who was thought to be lost—look, Mother, that is the unhappy father of a child who died such a dreadful death—”

  Constanze would have loved to say to the count: “Where did you go on that dreadful night? Why did you not come to visit Gertrude and me? Why didn’t you come visit us at the farm? Did you perhaps see the prince, or were you with him? But then, how did you get here? You come too late, Count Lajos—look in there, you’ll find Father, Brother, and Little Sister, and then you can look around here. Isn’t it true, Count Lajos, that since the last time we met we have become quite unhappy?”

  That is probably what Constanze would have said to her mother and to Lajos, had she been able to speak.

  Yet the appearance of the Hungarian was too unexpected, too sudden. She remained silent.