Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist

by Heinrich von Kleist

  As soon as the group slipped through the rear gate, Toni pointed out to Monsieur Strömli the room in which Hoango and Babekan slept; and while Strömli and his people entered the house without making a sound and seized all of the Negroes’ guns, Toni slunk off to the stable in which Nanky’s five-year-old half-brother Seppy slept. For Nanky and Seppy, bastard sons of old Hoango, were both very dear to him, particularly the latter, whose mother had recently died; and since, if they succeeded in freeing the young captive, the return to the seagull pond and their escape from there to Port au Prince – as she resolved to join them – would still involve considerable risk, she reasoned, not incorrectly, that the two boys would come in very handy as hostages in their likely pursuit by the Negroes. She succeeded, unseen, in lifting the boy out of his bed and carrying him in her arms, half-asleep, half-awake, back to the main house. Meanwhile, Monsieur Strömli and his men managed as stealthily as possible to enter Hoango’s quarters; but instead of finding him and Babekan in bed, as Strömli expected, the two, roused by the sound, stood there, albeit half-naked and helpless, in the middle of the room. Musket raised, Monsieur Strömli cried out: “Yield or you’re dead!” But in lieu of a reply, Hoango tore a pistol from off the wall and fired, strafing Monsieur Strömli’s head. Hereupon, Strömli’s men fell upon the black man in a fury; following a second shot that pierced the shoulder of a servant, Hoango was wounded in the hand by the slash of a saber, and the two of them, Babekan and he, were shoved to the floor and bound tightly with ropes to the trestle of a big table. Awakened in the meantime by the sound of shots, Hoango’s Negroes, more than twenty in number, staggered out of their stalls, and hearing old Babekan screaming in the house, came running to get their weapons. Monsieur Strömli, whose wound was of no significance, stationed his people at the windows and had them fire, attempting in vain to hold off the onslaught; oblivious to the fact that two of their number already lay dead in the yard, the Negroes were just then fetching axes and crowbars to break open the door that Monsieur Strömli had bolted shut, when shaking and trembling, Toni burst into Hoango’s room with Seppy in her arms. Monsieur Strömli, who found their arrival most fortuitous, tore the boy from Toni’s arms; drawing his hunting knife, he turned to Hoango and swore to kill the boy on the spot if Hoango did not call out to his men to cease and desist. After a moment’s hesitation, Hoango, whose grip was broken by the blow of the blade on three fingers of his fighting hand, and who, if he chose to resist, would have forfeited his own life, motioned for them to raise him off the floor, muttering: “Alright.” Led by Monsieur Strömli to the window, and waving with a handkerchief in his left hand, Hoango called to the Negroes: “It’s no use, leave the door and return to your quarters!” Whereupon things quieted down a bit; on Monsieur Strömli’s bidding, Hoango sent one of the Negro guards captured in the house out to repeat the order to the hesitant, arguing stragglers remaining in the yard; and as little as they grasped of the situation, they were obliged to heed the words of this delegated messenger, and so the blacks gave up their attempt to break open the door, and one by one returned, albeit grumbling and cursing, to their quarters. Ordering Seppy’s hands to be bound then and there in front of his father, Monsieur Strömli said: “My intention is none other than to set free the officer, my nephew, and if we encounter no further obstacles along the way and succeed in safely making our escape to Port au Prince, you will have nothing to fear for your own life and that of your children, whom I will return to you forthwith.” Toni approached Babekan to bid farewell, reaching her hand out to her mother with a burst of emotion she could not suppress, but the old woman shoved her away. She called her daughter a contemptible traitress, and twisting on the trestle, hissed: “God’s wrath will mow you down before you manage to bring off your filthy deed!” Toni replied: “I did not betray you; I am a white woman, and betrothed to the young man you hold captive; I belong to the race of those with whom you are at war, and will answer to God alone for taking their side.” Hereupon Monsieur Strömli had one of his men stand guard beside Hoango, whom he had bound again and tied to the doorpost; he had the servant, who lay unconscious on the floor with a broken shoulder blade, picked up and carried out; and after repeating to Hoango that he could send for both boys, Nanky and Seppy, in a few days time at the French outpost in Sainte Luce, he turned to Toni, who, overcome by mixed emotions, could not stop crying, heaped as she was with the curses of Babekan and old Hoango, took her hand and led her out of the room.

  In the meantime, having finished the main fight, firing from the windows, Monsieur Strömli’s sons, Adelbert and Gottfried, hastened, on their father’s orders, to the room in which their cousin Gustav was being held prisoner, and managed, despite stiff resistance, to overwhelm the two blacks who guarded him. One of them lay dead on the floor of the room; the other dragged himself with a bad bullet wound out into the corridor. The brothers, the elder of whom had suffered a light wound to the thigh, untied their dear kinsman; they hugged and kissed him, and handing him pistols and a sword, jubilantly urged him to follow them to the front room, in which, seeing as the battle was won, Monsieur Strömli was calling them all to fall back. Raising himself half-upright in bed, Gustav pressed their hands and smiled without a word; but his mind was clearly elsewhere and instead of reaching for the pistols they held out to him he raised his right hand and stroked his forehead with an expression of unspeakable grief. Sitting themselves down beside him, the youths asked: “What’s the matter?” But no sooner did Gustav wrap his arms around them and silently rest his head on Gottfried’s shoulder, prompting Adelbert, fearing that his cousin was about to faint, to think of fetching him a drink of water, than Toni entered the room with Seppy in her arms, led by Monsieur Strömli. At the sight of her, Gustav went white in the face; rising from bed, he gripped his cousins’ shoulders as though he were about to fall; and before the youths fathomed what he intended to do with the pistol that he now took from their hands, seething with rage, he had already pressed the trigger and sent a bullet flying at Toni. The shot struck her square in the breast; and with a broken syllable of pain, she managed to take several steps forward, and handing the boy to Monsieur Strömli, sank to her knees before him; he hurled the pistol at her and shoved her away with his foot, calling her a filthy whore, then fell back down in bed. “You madman!” Monsieur Strömli and his two sons cried out in unison. The youths rushed to the girl, and picking her up, called for one of the old servants, who on several previous desperate occasions in the course of their journey had already delivered first aid; but with one hand pressed to the mortal wound, the girl gently pushed them from her, and stammered with a rattle in her throat: “Tell him . . . !” pointing to the one who shot her, and again: “Tell him . . . !” “What should we tell him?” asked Monsieur Strömli, as the effort of dying robbed her of the strength to speak. Adelbert and Gottfried leapt up and cried out to the inconceivably miserable murderer: “Do you know that this girl saved your life; that she loves you and that it had been her intention to forsake family, house and home, and escape with you to Port au Prince?” They howled in his ears “Gustav!” and asked: “Can’t you hear us?” and shook him and grabbed his hair, as he lay still and unresponsive on the bed. Then he sat up. He cast a look at the girl rolling in the blood he’d spilled; and the anger that had sparked this terrible act naturally gave way to compassion. Soaking his handkerchief with a flood of hot tears, Monsieur Strömli asked: “Oh, you poor miserable man, why did you do it?” Once again rising from bed, wiping the sweat from his brow, eying the girl, Gustav replied: “The vixen, she tied me up at night and handed me over to the Negro Hoango!” “Dear God,” cried Toni, reaching her hand out to him with an indescribable expression on her face, “I tied you, my best beloved, because . . . !” But she could neither finish the sentence nor reach him with her hand; drained of all strength, she suddenly fell back into Monsieur Strömli’s lap. “Why?” asked Gustav, kneeling before her, pale as death. After a long while, interrupted only by the rattle in Toni�
�s throat, during which they waited in vain for a word from her lips, Monsieur Strömli spoke up: “Because, upon Hoango’s return there was no other way to save you, you poor unfortunate man; because she wanted to avoid the mortal combat that you would surely have started; because she wanted to gain time enough for us, dispatched thanks to her ingenuity, to come to your rescue with weapons in hand.” Gustav covered his face in his hands. “Oh God,” he cried out, without looking up, feeling as though the ground gave way beneath his feet, “is what you tell me true?” He wrapped his arms around her and looked her in the eyes with a shattered heart. “Oh,” cried Toni, and these were her last words: “you should not have doubted me!” At which her beautiful soul gave up the ghost. Gustav tore at his hair. “God’s truth,” he cried, as his cousins wrenched him from the corpse, “I should not have doubted you; for you were betrothed to me by an oath, though we had not put it into words!” Sobbing, Monsieur Strömli pressed the displaced pinafore to the girl’s breast. He comforted his servant, who had done his best with the limited tools at hand to remove the bullet, which, he said, had entered her breastbone; but all his efforts, as has already been said, were to no avail, she was pierced by the lead and her soul had already departed for happier climes. In the meantime, Gustav staggered to the window; and while Monsieur Strömli and his sons deliberated with quiet tears on what to do with the body, and whether they ought not to go fetch her mother, Gustav fired the bullet with which the other pistol was loaded through his brain. This new dreadful deed was more than they could bear. All helping hands now turned to him; but, since he had put the pistol in his mouth, his poor shattered skull was in part plastered against the wall. Monsieur Strömli was the first to collect his wits. Since daylight once again shone brightly through the window and servants reported that the Negroes had once again begun to gather in the yard, he had no choice but to immediately think of their retreat. Not wanting to leave the two corpses to the ravages of the Negroes, they lay them on a bed, and after reloading their muskets, the sad party set off for the seagull pond. Monsieur Strömli, with Seppy in his arms, took the lead; he was followed by the two strongest servants carrying the dead bodies on their shoulders; the wounded servant hobbled behind on a stick; and Adelbert and Gottfried covered the slowly advancing funeral cortege with loaded muskets, one on each side. Catching sight of this poorly guarded group, the Negroes emerged from their quarters with pikes and pitchforks in hand, ready to attack; but Hoango, whom Monsieur Strömli had had the foresight to untie, stepped outside onto the steps of the house and signaled to his men to stop. “In Sainte Luce!” he cried to Monsieur Strömli, who had already advanced with the bodies to the gate. “In Sainte Luce!” the latter replied; whereupon the sad party crossed the open field and reached the edge of the woods, without being pursued. At the seagull pond, where they rejoined their family, shedding tears, they dug a grave; and after exchanging the rings of the dead, they lowered the dear ones with whispered prayers into the place of eternal rest. Monsieur Strömli was glad enough to safely reach Sainte Luce five days later with his wife and children; there, true to his word, he released the two Negro boys. He managed to make it to Port au Prince just in time to take to the ramparts shortly before the attack; and when finally, despite stubborn resistance, the city fell to the forces of General Dessalines, he managed to escape along with the French army on ships of the English fleet, sailed to Europe, and without further incident, journeyed home to Switzerland. With what was left of his modest fortune Monsieur Strömli bought lands near the Rigi; and a passing stranger in 1807 could still see in his garden in the shade of the bushes the monument he had erected to the memory of Gustav and his betrothed, the faithful Toni.

  * The 19th century

  * In 1794 the French Convention National abolished slavery on the French part of the Island of Santo Domingo in what today is Haiti, whereupon the white planters balked, refusing to abide by the law. A bitter struggle that would become the Haitian Revolution broke out between the blacks, at first supported by French revolutionary forces, and their former masters. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Putting economics over ethics, Napoleon subsequently backed the cause of the planters. But Haiti finally won its independence and declared itself a free republic in 1804.

  * The child of a white and a mulatto.

  † Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758–1806), a former black slave who joined the French army, rising to the rank of officer, and subsequently fought the French as a military leader of the Haitian revolution. He became the first ruler of an independent Haiti and thereafter anointed himself Emperor Jacques I.

  SAINT CECILIA, OR THE POWER OF MUSIC

  (A LEGEND)

  · · ·

  At the end of the sixteenth century, as the iconoclast storm of destruction raged in the Netherlands, three brothers, young students in Wittenberg, met up in the City of Aachen with a fourth brother, himself engaged as a preacher in Antwerp. They sought to lay claim to an inheritance left them by an old uncle whom none of them knew, and since no one was there to meet them at the place where they were supposed to apply, they retired to an inn in town. After several days, which they spent sounding out the preacher on the curious incidents that had been occurring in the Netherlands, it so happened that Corpus Christi Day was soon to be celebrated by the nuns in the Cloister of Saint Cecilia, which, at the time, was located just outside the gates of the city; so that, fired up by the revelry, their youth, and the example of the Netherlanders, the four brothers decided to treat the City of Aachen to its own spectacle of destruction. That evening, the preacher, who had already lead several such initiatives, gathered together a group of young merchants’ sons and students committed to the new religious teachings, all of whom spent the night at the inn carousing over wine and food, heaping curses on the papacy; and as soon as day broke over the ramparts of the city, they equipped themselves with pickaxes and other tools of destruction to carry out their business. They triumphantly agreed upon a signal, at the sounding of which they would start smashing the stained-glass windows decorated with Biblical tales; and certain of the large following they would find among the people, they resolved that by the time the bells sounded in the cathedral, they would not have left a stone of the sanctuary intact. The abbess, who had, come daybreak, been warned by a friend of the impending danger to the cloister, sent word several times in vain to the imperial bailiff in charge of keeping the peace in the city, requesting a guard detail to protect the cloister; the officer, who was himself hostile to the papacy, and as such, at the very least a clandestine sympathizer with the new religious teachings, denied her request for a guard detail under the pretext that she was imagining things and that there was not the slightest risk of danger to the cloister. Meanwhile, the hour struck at which the service was to begin, and amidst fear and prayer, and with a dark foreboding of things to come, the nuns prepared themselves for mass. Their only protectors were a 70-year-old cloister caretaker and a few armed porters who stood watch at the gates of the church. In such cloisters, as is common knowledge, the nuns, who are well-trained in all sorts of instruments, play their own music; often – perhaps precisely on account of the feminine feel of this mysterious art form – with a precision, a mastery and a sensitivity not to be found in male orchestras. And to add twice-over to the sisters’ distress, their Kappellmeisterin, Sister Antonia, who ordinarily conducted the orchestra, had several days before fallen ill with a nervous fever; such that, in addition to the danger posed by the four blasphemous brothers who had already been spotted, cloaked and ready, beside the columns outside the church, the cloister was all in a huff, worrying how the performance of a sacred musical work would come off in a seemly manner. The abbess, who on the previous evening had ordered that a stirring age-old Italian mass composed by an anonymous master be presented, a work which the cloister orchestra had already performed on several occasions and to the finest effect, on account of its exceptional holiness and loveliness, now more adamant than ever in her command, once again sent wo
rd to Sister Antonia to find out how she was; but the nun who transmitted the message returned with the news that Sister Antonia lay unconscious in her bed and that it was altogether out of the question to think that she might direct the aforementioned work. Meanwhile, in the cathedral, where more than a hundred evil-doers of all classes and ages armed with hatchet and crowbar had assembled, the most unthinkable incidents had occurred; some of the porters stationed at the gates of the sanctuary had been rudely shoved around and the lone nuns who every now and then passed through the aisles engaged in some pious matter were treated to the sauciest and most shameless remarks, as a consequence of which the old caretaker hastened to the sacristy, and falling to his knees, begged the abbess to cancel the service and put herself under the protection of the commandant in the city. But the abbess was unwavering in her resolve that the prescribed service be celebrated in honor of God Almighty; she reminded him of his sworn duty to stand guard over the mass and the sacred festivities conducted in the cathedral; and since the bell had just tolled, she commanded the nuns who stood trembling around her to pick an oratorio, no matter which nor of what quality, and to immediately begin the service with it.