Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist

by Heinrich von Kleist

  Arriving in Dresden, where in an outlying district he kept a house with stables as a base of operations from which to pursue his business with the smaller markets in the region, he went straight to the Privy Council, where, as he had suspected from the start, a counselor of his acquaintance confirmed that the business about the passport was a lot of bunk. With, upon his request, a written attestation in hand signed by the disgruntled counselor confirming the speciousness of the alleged ordinance, though he did not yet know what he planned to do about it, he smiled to himself at the wily Junker’s guile; and a few weeks later, having gotten a good price in Leipzig for the herd of horses he’d brought along, without a bitter thought, save for the misery he saw in the world, he rode back to the Tronkenburg castle. The overseer, to whom he presented the written attestation, merely shrugged, and in response to the horse trader’s request if he could now have his horses back, told him to go down into the yard and fetch them. But Kohlhaas, who had traversed the yard, had already heard the distressing news that, on account of his alleged misconduct, his stable hand had been horsewhipped and sent packing a few days after being left behind at Tronkenburg. Kohlhaas asked the local lad what his stable hand had done, and who, in the meantime, had looked after his horses? To which the lad replied that he did not know, whereupon, the horse trader’s heart already thumping with apprehension, the boy opened the stable door. How great was Kohlhaas’ dismay, when, instead of his two fine, well-fed black nags, he found a pair of haggard mares; their protruding bones, on which, like hooks, one could have hung things; their manes and hair all natty, untended and unkempt: the telling sign of misery in an animal’s appearance! Kohlhaas, whom the horses greeted with a feeble whinny, was deeply distressed and asked what had happened to them. The lad, who was standing there beside him, replied that no misfortune had befallen them, that they had been sufficiently fed, but that, given the dearth of workhorses, as it was harvest time, they had been used a bit in the fields. Kohlhaas fumed at this scandalous and underhanded outrage, but well aware of his powerlessness, he swallowed his anger, and since there was nothing else to be done, made ready to leave this den of thieves with his horses, when the overseer, apprised of the exchange of words, appeared and asked what the matter was. “What’s the matter?” Kohlhaas replied, “Who gave Junker von Tronka and his people permission to take the fine black nags I left here and use them for field work? Is this human?” he added, trying to gently rouse the poor exhausted creatures with a garden rake, and demonstrating how they refused to budge. After studying him a while with an insolent expression, the overseer replied: “You thieving lout, you ought to thank your lucky stars your damn mares are still alive. And since your stable boy ran off, who the hell was supposed to tend to them? Didn’t you get off cheaply, chum, to have your horses work off the feed in the fields? I won’t abide any fast ones here,” he concluded, “be off or I’ll call my dogs to clear the yard!” The horse trader’s heart beat hard against his chest. He had a mind to shove the no-good tub of lard into the dung heap and press a foot against his ruddy mug. But finely calibrated as it was, his innate sense of justice still wavered; he was not absolutely certain in his heart of hearts, the only court of law that counted for him, of the culpability of his adversary; and swallowing the insults, silently weighing the circumstances, and walking over to his horses to brush their manes, he asked in a quiet voice: “What did the stable hand do to be booted off the castle grounds?” The overseer replied: “Because the rascal was insolent in the yard! Because he resisted a necessary change of stable, and asked that, on account of his mares, the horses of two young lords who came to visit the castle spend the night out on the street!” Kohlhaas would have given the value of his horses to have had the stable hand present to compare his take on what happened with the words of that blabbering overseer. He stood there, straightening the horses’ bridles, pondering what a man in his situation could do, when the scene suddenly shifted, and Junker Wenzel von Tronka with a horde of knights, servants and dogs came storming into the castle courtyard on their way back from a hare hunt. When the Junker asked what happened, while from one side the dogs set to snarling at the sight of the stranger, and on the other side the knights tried to silence them, the overseer promptly launched into the most spiteful distortion of the facts, imputing that yon horse trader had kicked up a row just because his nags had been used a little. He added with a derisive laugh that the impudent lout declined to recognize the horses as his. Kohlhaas cried out: “Those are not my horses, gracious Sir! Those are not the horses I left that were worth thirty gold guldens a head! I want my well-fed and healthy horses back!” With a momentary pallor in his face, the Junker dismounted and said: “If the pig’s ass doesn’t want his horses back, then let him leave them. Come, Günther!” he cried, “Come, be quick!” patting the dust off his leggings; and “Fetch us some wine!” he called, as he stood with the knights in the doorway, and disappeared within. Kohlhaas said he’d sooner call for the croaker and have the carcasses flung to the vultures than bring these horses back to his stable in Kohlhaasenbrück. He left the haggard nags in the stall and without bothering anymore about them, once he’d assured himself that he’d take the matter into his own hands, swung himself in the saddle of his chestnut brown and rode off.

  Riding along at a gallop to Dresden, he slowed to a trot at the thought of the stable hand and the accusation made against him at the castle, and before advancing another thousand paces, promptly turned his horse around and headed back to Kohlhaasenbrück to sound his man out, as seemed prudent and just. For should there be even a grain of truth in the overseer’s claim of the fellow’s culpability, an unfailing sense of the imperfect ways of the world made the horse trader inclined, despite the offenses he’d suffered, to accept the loss of his horses as a just consequence. On the other hand, he harbored an equally sharp presentiment, and one that took deeper and deeper root the farther he rode and the more stories he heard everywhere he stopped of the daily injustices done to travelers at Tronkenburg: that if, as in all likelihood appeared to be the case, the whole business had simply been trumped up, then it became his obligation to do everything in his power to demand redress for the offense he’d suffered and to insure the future safe passage of his fellow travelers.

  Upon his return to Kohlhaasenbrück, no sooner had he embraced his faithful wife Lisbeth and kissed his children, whose hearts sang for joy at the sight of him, than he asked after Herse, his head stable hand, and if anyone had heard from him. “Yes, dearest Michael,” Lisbeth said, “Herse indeed! Can you imagine, about two weeks ago that poor unfortunate man, beaten within an inch of his life, hobbled back here, beaten so badly he had trouble breathing. We put him to bed, where he spit up globs of blood, and we heard, in answer to our repeated questions, a story that no one could fathom. How he’d been left behind at Tronkenburg with horses that had been refused the right of passage, how on account of the most abominable mistreatment, he was forced to leave the castle, and how he’d been prevented from taking the horses with him.” “I see,” said Kohlhaas, taking off his coat. “Has he recuperated?” “So-so,” she replied, “though he still spits up blood. I wanted to send another stable hand back to Tronkenburg to take care of the horses until your return. For since Herse has always been so honest and so faithful to us, like no one else, it never even occurred to me to doubt his word, substantiated as it was by so many scars, or to suspect that he might have disposed of the horses in some other manner. But he implored me not to make anyone else endure the same sufferings in that den of thieves, and to give up the horses, lest I wished to sacrifice a man in their place.” “Is he still bedridden?” Kohlhaas asked, unbinding his neckerchief. “For a few days now, he’s been back, hobbling round the yard. In short, you’ll see,” she continued, “his story’s true, and this incident is just one more of the brazen outrages committed against strangers of late at Tronkenburg Castle.” “I need to confirm this for myself. Call him for me, would you, Lisbeth, if he’s up and about?” Wi
th these words he sank into the easy chair; and pleased at his apparent calm, the lady of the house went to fetch the stable hand.

  “What did you do in Tronkenburg Castle?” Kohlhaas asked, as Lisbeth entered the room with him. “I’m not pleased with you.” The stable hand, on whose pale face red splotches appeared at these words, remained silent a while. “You’re quite right, Sir!” he replied. “Hearing a child’s crying within, I tossed into the Elbe the match I happened, by God’s grace, to have with me, with which I’d intended to set afire that den of thieves, and thought to myself: Let God’s lightning strike, I can’t do it!” Whereupon, struck by the man’s reply, Kohlhaas said: “But what did you do to deserve to be booted out of the castle?” To which Herse replied: “By a bad trick, Sir,” and wiped the sweat from his brow. “But what’s done is done. I didn’t want to let the horses be worked to death in the field, so I said that they were young and hadn’t ever pulled a plough.” Trying to hide his mounting rage, Kohlhaas replied that the stable hand had not been altogether truthful here, since the horses had already taken a turn or two last Spring. “At the castle, where you were, after all, a sort of a guest,” the horse trader continued, “you should have pitched in at least once or even a couple of times if they were short-handed in harvesting.” “That I did, Sir,” said Herse. “I thought, since they gave me sorry looks, they wouldn’t work the horses too hard. On the third morning I hitched them up and we brought back three wagonloads of hay.” Kohlhaas, whose heart was pounding, cast his gaze at the ground and added: “Nobody told me about that, Herse!” Herse assured him it was so. “My only fault, Sir, was my refusal to hitch them up again at noon before the horses had a chance to eat their fill; and that, when the overseer and the estate manager offered to give them free feed, in exchange, if I stuck the money you left me for feed in their moneybag, I replied: “Not on your life!” turned around and walked away.” “But that alone could not possibly have caused your expulsion from Tronkenburg.” “God forbid,” cried the stable hand, “it was on account of another misdeed! That very evening two horses of two knights who came to visit the castle were taken into the stable and my two horses were tied to the gate outside. And when I took the reins from the overseer, who had himself taken the horses out, and asked him where my animals would spend the night, he pointed to a hog shed battened with boards to the castle wall.” “You mean,” interrupted Kohlhaas, “that it was such a paltry shelter for horses that it looked more like a hog shed than a stable.” “It was a hog shed, Sir,” replied Herse, “honestly and truly a hog shed, from which the pigs ran in and out and I couldn’t stand up straight.” “But maybe there was no other place to put the horses,” Kohlhaas interjected, “the knights’ steeds did, in a certain sense, take precedence.” “The space was tight, that I grant you,” said the stable hand, lowering his voice. “Seven knights in all were now housed in the castle. If it’d been you, Sir, I’m quite sure you’d’ve had the horses pushed a little closer together. I said I wanted to rent a stable in the village; but the overseer replied that he needed to keep an eye on these horses and that I’d better not take them out of the yard. “Hm!” said Kohlhaas. “What did you say to that?” “Since the manager said the two guests would just spend the night and ride on the next morning, I led the horses into the hog shed. But the next day the guests were still there; and on the third day I was told the gentlemen would be staying another couple of weeks.” “It wasn’t half as bad in the hog shed as it appeared when you first poked your nose in, now was it, Herse?” said Kohlhaas. “Right you are, Sir,” the former replied. “Once I’d swept up a little. I gave the servant girl a few coins to make her put the pigs someplace else. And during the day I managed to let the horses stand upright by prying the roof planks loose at dawn and replacing them at dusk. They peered out the roof like geese, longing for Kohlhaasenbrück or some other place where things were better.” “So then, why in heaven’s name did they run you out?” “I tell you, Sir,” the stable hand replied, “it’s because they wanted to be rid of me. Because as long as I was there, they couldn’t work the horses to death. Everywhere I went, in the yard and in the servants’ quarters, they gave me angry looks; and since I thought to myself: You can make faces at me till you dislocate a jaw, they finally managed to pick a quarrel and kick me out.” “But the cause!” cried Kohlhaas. “They must surely have had a cause!” “Indeed they did,” replied Herse, “and the most rightful cause at that. On the evening of the second day, which I’d spent in the hog shed, I took out the horses, the poor creatures all smeared with dung, to ride them to the watering hole to wash them off. And as soon as I reach the castle gate and turn around, I hear the overseer and the manager charging after me out of the servants’ quarters with their lackeys, dogs and whips, crying: ‘Halt, you thieving scoundrel! Halt, you gallows bird!’ like they were stark raving mad. The gatekeeper steps in my path; and when I ask him and the howling mob chasing after me: ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘The matter?’ says the overseer and grabs the horses by the bridle. ‘Where the hell are you headed with these horses?’ and grabs me by the shirt. ‘Where I’m headed?’ says I, ‘to the watering hole, for heaven’s sake! You think I wanted to . . .?’ ‘To the watering hole?’ shrieks the overseer. ‘I’ll toss you on the highroad to Kohlhaasenbrück and teach you how to swim in the dirt!’ So they drag me off my horse with a murderous heave, him and the manager who’s got me by the leg, and fling me flat out in the dung heap. ‘Hell’s bells!’ cry I, ‘I’ve got harnesses and horse blankets and a bundle of laundry back at the stable.’ But while the manager leads the horses away, the overseer and his lackeys pile on top of me, kicking and whipping and pummeling till I drop half-dead behind the gate. And when I protest: ‘You thieving dogs, where are you taking my horses?’ and raise myself upright – ‘Get the hell out of here!’ cries the overseer, and ‘Now, Kaiser! Up, Jäger! Get him, Spitz!’ and a pack of more than a dozen dogs attack. So I reach for whatever comes to hand and manage to break off a plank from the fence and lay three dogs flat dead; but the pain of my flesh wounds is more than I can bear, my head is swimming-the whistle blows, the dogs are yelping in the yard, the gate flies shut, the crossbar slid in, and me I sink unconscious out on the street. “But didn’t you want to get away, Herse?” Kohlhaas said, pale with horror, shamming a roguish grin. “Admit it,” the horse trader said, as the man looked down, all red in the face, “you didn’t like it in the hog shed, did you, better, you figured, to be safe and sound in a stable in Kohlhaasenbrück.” “May God strike me dead!” cried Herse. “I left harnesses and horse blankets and a bundle of laundry in the hog shed. Don’t you think I’d’ve taken the three guldens I left wrapped in a red silk neckerchief hidden behind the feed crib? Hell’s bells! When I hear you say that, I want to light up that match I tossed away and set the whole place on fire!” “Hold on!” said the horse trader, “I didn’t mean it badly! I believe everything you said, word for word, and I will take it up at the supper table. It pains me that you had to suffer all this in my service; go now, Herse, go to bed, and have them bring you a bottle of wine to drown your misery – You will have justice!” Whereupon the horse trader got up, completed an inventory of the things his head stable hand left behind in the hog shed; specified the value of each; even asked him to estimate the cost of his convalescence; and after shaking his hand one more time, let him take his leave.