During the morning, from eleven to twelve, Kaspar usually attended an arithmetic lesson away from home. But on Sunday October 17, feeling unwell, at the insistence of his guardian, Kaspar stayed home. Professor Daumer was taking a walk at the time. Apart from Kaspar, who was known to be in his room, no one was left in the Daumer household but Daumer’s mother and his sister, who at that time was busy cleaning the house.
Daumer’s house, in which Kaspar lived, lies in a remote and rarely visited part of town, in an extremely large, desolate square that was nonetheless easily visible. The house, built with extreme irregularity according to the old-fashioned Nuremberg style, full of corners and angles, consisted of a front building, which the landlord occupied, and a rear building in which the Daumer family had their rooms. A separate entrance led to the stairs of the Daumers’ quarters. To get there one passed through an open passageway bounded on both sides by the yard. Along this passageway, in addition to a wooden stall, a place for poultry, and other similar enclosures, in a corner, under a winding stairway, a very low, small, narrow outhouse pressed itself. The already small space in which the outhouse was to be found was made even narrower by a screen that was standing in front of it.
Whenever Kaspar wanted to visit this secret place, it was his habit, out of his love for cleanliness, to take off his jacket and his vest while still in his room and go, undressed except for his pants and an undershirt, with his throat exposed, to that room. It should be further remarked that whoever happens to be in the corridor I just described, on the ground level anywhere near the wooden stall, can easily observe who is coming down the stairs and going to the outhouse.
When, around twelve o’clock, on the day mentioned above, Katharina, the sister of Professor Daumer, was busy sweeping the apartment, she became aware of several spots of blood and bloody footprints on the stairs leading from the first floor to the backyard. She wiped them away right away without thinking that anything was wrong. She thought Kaspar might have had a nosebleed on the stairs. She went up to his room to complain to him about it, but she did not find Kaspar. She noticed, however, that in his room, close to the door, was yet another pair of bloody footprints. When she went back down the stairs to sweep the corridor in the yard that I mentioned earlier, she noticed yet again some traces of blood on the stone pavement of this corridor. She reached the outhouse, and there lay a thick clump of dried blood. At that moment the daughter of the landlord arrived and she showed it to her. The daughter thought it was the blood of a cat who had just had babies there. Daumer’s sister, having immediately washed away this blood, was all the more certain of her opinion that Kaspar had made the mess on the stairs. He must have stepped into this pool of blood and gone upstairs without having cleaned his feet.
It was already past twelve, the table was set, and Kaspar, who otherwise always came to eat punctually at this time, was not there. Daumer’s mother therefore came down from her room to call Kaspar, but could no more find him in his little room than her daughter could before. Mrs. Daumer saw his jacket hanging on the wall and his shirt collar and vest on the piano. From this she drew the certain conclusion that Kaspar would be found in the secret room, and so went down there to look for him. She did not find him there either. She started to go back to her room when suddenly she became aware of a wet spot on the trap door to the cellar, which looked to her like blood. Fearing the worst, she lifted up the trap door, noticed on all the steps of the cellar some drops and some larger spots of blood. She now climbed down to the lowest step and from there saw something white shining in a distant corner of the water-filled cellar. Mrs. Daumer hurried back and asked the landlord’s maid to go into the cellar with a light to see what was the white thing lying there. No sooner had she shined the light on the object described to her than she cried out: “Kaspar is lying dead over there!” The maid, as well as the landlord’s son, who in the meantime had also just arrived, lifted Kaspar off the floor and carried him out of the cellar. His deadly pale face was covered in blood, and he showed no signs of life. When they got upstairs, he gave his first sign of life, an enormous groan. Then he called out in a deep voice: “The man, the man!” He was immediately put to bed, where, with his eyes closed, from time to time he sometimes shouted, sometimes murmured to himself the following broken words and sentences: “Mother!—Tell professor—outhouse—man hit—black man, like kitchen54 —mother say—not found—my room—hide in the cellar.” Following this he was seized by a powerful febrile shivering, which soon turned into violent paroxysms, and finally resulted in a raving fit. Several strong men had a difficult time holding him down. In his attacks of rage he bit a large chunk out of a porcelain teacup from which they were trying to get him to take a warm drink. He swallowed it along with the drink. He remained mentally gone for nearly forty-eight hours. In his deliriums during the night, from time to time he would murmur the following sentence fragments to himself:
Tell the Mayor.—No imprison!—Man gone!—Man comes!—Bell gone!—I ride down to Fürth.—Not to Erlangen in Wallfisch.55 —Not murder, not hold the mouth, not die!—Me sit on the toilet; not murder! Hauser where have been; not to Fürth today; no more leave; already headache. Not to Erlangen in Wallfisch. The man murder me! Go away! Not murder! I love all people; no one does nothing.—Mayor’s wife help! Man also loves you, not murder! Why man me murder? I too want live.—Why you murder me? I to you never anything done. Me not murder! Because I beg, that you not be imprisoned. You never let me out of my prison, you even me murder! You have first killed me, before I understand what life is. You must say why you have imprisoned me.
And so on. He continuously repeated most of these sentences incoherently and out of order. At last the police authorities handed over the Kaspar Hauser case to the Court of Inquiry. On October 20, with the help of the forensic physician, Dr. Preu, this court deposed Hauser with the following result: Hauser was lying in a bed. In the middle of his forehead was a sharp wound, of the size and shape of which the forensic physician reported his findings as follows:
The wound is located on the forehead, ten and a half lines above the bridge of the nose, running diagonally in such a way that two-thirds of the wound is on the right half of the forehead, and the last third on the left. The entire length of the wound, which runs in a straight line, is nineteen and a half lines. The left end of this gap is somewhat wider than the rest of it. From this it follows that the wound was deepest here. As for the origin of the just-described-wound to Hauser, it is unmistakably the result of a stab or a blow (?) with a sharp instrument. The sharp edges of the wound are testimony to the sharp blade of the instrument; the symmetrical ends of the wound demonstrate that it was caused by a slash or stab (?), since if it had been the result of a cut on the forehead, the beginning and end of the wound would have been narrower and more superficial, but the middle would have been deeper and therefore would have appeared more gaping. It is most probable that the wound originated from a slash, since a stab would have shown great contusion in the neighboring flesh, etc.
The wound was, as the doctor explained, in and of itself, insignificant, and could easily have healed in six days, if it had been any other person. But because Kaspar had such an irritable nervous system, it took him twenty-two days to recuperate after he had been wounded. Kaspar recounts the substance of what happened this way:
On the seventeenth I had to cancel my arithmetic lesson that I usually have every day from eleven to twelve with Mr. E. The reason is that one hour before, while I was visiting Dr. Preu, he gave me a walnut, and although I had barely eaten a quarter of it, I immediately felt very sick. Professor Daumer, to whom I reported this, ordered me not to go for my usual lesson this time but to stay at home. Professor Daumer left the house and I retired to my room, I wanted to occupy myself in writing, but abdominal pains prevented me, and a natural need forced me to go to the outhouse. Because of a tearing pain in my stomach, I had to stay there for more than half of a quarter of an hour. Finally I heard a noise coming from the wooden s
table, similar to the one that occurred whenever this door was opened and very familiar to me. Also, from the outhouse I perceived the soft tone of the bells on the door to the house which seemed to me to come less from being rung than from some kind of indirect contact. Right after that I heard light footsteps coming from the other end of the corridor. At the same time I saw through the spaces of the wall-covering (wooden screen) in front of the outhouse and the circular stairs leading to the house, a man sneaking along the corridor. I noticed the very dark hat on him and thought he was the chimney sweep. I stayed a moment longer on the toilet so that the chimney sweep would not see me as I got up. But when I straightened myself up from sitting on the toilet, sticking my head out of the narrow outhouse, as I tried to pull up my trousers, suddenly this black man was standing in front of me and hit me on my head, as a consequence of which my whole body fell down and hit the floor in front of the outhouse. (There follows the description of the man, which cannot be reproduced.)56 I could see nothing of the face or hair of this man, for he was veiled by what I think was a black silk scarf that covered his whole head. I must have lain there unconscious for a considerable time. When I finally regained consciousness, I felt something warm trickling down my face, and grabbed my forehead with both hands, which were then covered in blood.
Terrified by this, I wanted to go upstairs to Mother,57 but in my confusion and fear (since I was afraid that the man who had hit me was still in the house and would come after me a second time), instead of going to Mother’s door, I found myself in front of the door to the closet next to my room.58 At this point I felt I was beginning to lose consciousness and tried to stay upright by grabbing the closet with my hand.59 When I had recovered, I again wanted to go upstairs to mother, but in my further confusion, instead of going upstairs, I went downstairs, and found myself, to my horror, back down in the corridor. When my eyes fell on the trap door to the cellar, fear gave me the idea of hiding in the cellar. The trap door to the cellar was closed. It is incomprehensible to me to this very moment how I found the strength to lift the heavy trap door. But I did and slipped into the cellar.60
Because of the cold water in the cellar that I had to wade into, my consciousness improved. I noticed a dry spot on the floor of the cellar and sat down there. I had barely sat down than I heard the church bells chime twelve, and I thought to myself: Now you are here, completely abandoned. Nobody will find you here, and you will die here. These thoughts filled my eyes-with tears until I started to vomit. At that point I lost consciousness. When I had come to I found myself in my room on my bed with Mother sitting beside me.
As for the nature of the wounding, this author cannot bring himself to share the opinion of the forensic physician. I have several reasons—though they cannot be published61 —to believe that the wound to Hauser was caused neither by a slash nor a blow, not by a saber nor by an axe, nor by a chisel, nor with any other ordinary knife meant for cutting, but with another well-known sharp cutting instrument. Moreover, the stabbing was not aimed at his forehead but his throat. For as soon as Kaspar saw the man with the weapon in his fist suddenly directed at his throat, he instinctively ducked his head, and in so doing covered his throat with his chin, thereby causing the blow to glance from his throat to his forehead. The perpetrator probably thought his work was accomplished, since Kaspar immediately collapsed bleeding. And he may well have feared, given the nature of the place, that someone could find him at any moment and it was best not to linger next to his victim any longer to see whether everything had succeeded and, if not, to complete the job. And so Kaspar escaped with just a forehead wound.
Soon several more clues were provided that proved to be traces of the perpetrator.62 Among them for example, were that on the same day, at the very same hour when the crime took place, the man Kaspar described had been seen leaving Daumer’s house; moreover, the same well-dressed person described by Kaspar had been seen washing his hands, probably covered in blood, in the water trough that was on the side of the road not far from Daumer’s house. About four days after the crime, outside the gate of the town, an elegant gentleman wearing clothes such as those Hauser described as being worn by the black man, joined a common-looking woman on her way into town. He urgently asked her in detail as to whether the wounded Hauser was alive or dead, and then walked with her up to the gate, where an official notice with respect to Hauser’s wounding could be read. When he read it, without entering the town, he stalked off in a highly suspicious manner, and so on and so forth.
If the reader, in his curiosity, wants to learn more from me, should he ask me the results of the usual judicial inquiry, should he like to know in which direction those clues have led, in what places the divining rod really began to vibrate, and what happened next: I must answer that according to law and in the nature of the subject, I cannot, in my capacity as a writer, speak publicly of matters for which for the present I am allowed to know, or rather to suspect, only in my capacity as a state official. Moreover, may I express the certainty that the authorities in charge of this investigation, using all means at their disposal, even the most unusual ones, have made a tremendous effort to fulfil their duty without rest and without mercy—and, may I add, not entirely without success.
However, not all far, deep, and high places are accessible to the reach of civil justice. With respect to certain places in which justice would have reason to search for the giant responsible for such a crime, it would have to have the power of Joshua’s trumpets, or Oberon’s63 magic horn, in order to do battle, tooth and nail, with the high and mighty colossuses armed with a flail who stand guard in front of certain golden castle gates, and thresh so intensely that between blows no ray of light can penetrate without being dispersed, and so render them for some time, impotent.64
Nonetheless, dark midnight’s evil deeds
Will at last, at daybreak, be brought to light.65
Chapter VIII
Were Kaspar, who must now be considered to belong to polite society, to enter a room full of people unrecognized, he would soon strike everybody as some strange apparition. Blended into his face are the soft features of a child with the angular ones of a man, a few lightly drawn wrinkles as early signs of age, heartwarming friendliness with deliberate seriousness and a slight tinge of melancholy. His naïveté, his trusting openness, and his often more-than-childlike lack of experience, coupled with a certain kind of precociousness and a distinguished but still informal gravity in speech and behavior; and then the awkwardness of his speech, which sometimes strains for the right words, at other times is hard and sounds strange; the stiffness with which he carries himself and the ungainliness of his movements, all make it apparent to every eye capable of observation that here is a mixture of child, youth and man, but without being able to come to any conclusion as to what age group this lovable hybrid really belongs.
In his intelligence there stirs nothing at all of genius, not even any particular outstanding talent.66 What he learns he owes to persistent, tenacious diligence. As for the zeal of burning enthusiasm with which, in the beginning, he seemed to wish to storm the gates of all knowledge, that has long been muted, almost extinguished. In everything he undertakes, he gets no further than the beginning or remains only mediocre. Without a glimmer of fantasy, unable to make any kind of joke, or to understand even a metaphorical way of speaking, he has a dry but completely healthy common sense. With respect to everything concerning his own person, or within the narrowly circumscribed sphere of his meager knowledge and experiences, his judgment and sharp intellect are so right that he could shame and embarrass many a pedant.
In common sense a man, in insight a small boy, in many things less than a child, his speech and behavior display a strange contrasting mixture of man and child. With a serious expression, and in a tone of great moment, he not infrequently makes statements that in anyone else his age would be called stupid or banal. From his mouth, however, there always forces itself a melancholy smile of compassion. He appears especially droll when
speaking of his future life projects, of how he would, once he had learned an honorable profession and earned some money, settle down with his wife and treat her as a necessary piece of furniture. He is only able to think of a wife as a housekeeper, or as a kind of chief maid, whom you keep only as long as she does her job but dismiss if she puts too much salt in the soup, or does not do a good job sewing up the holes in shirts, or who does not brush the clothes properly, etc.
Mild, soft, without vicious inclinations, without passion and emotion, his even temperament is like a placid, mirror-like lake illuminated by a full moon in the still of night. Incapable of harming an animal, compassionate toward a worm, which he is afraid of stepping on, at the same time he is fearful to the point of being a coward.67 Nonetheless, he would insist on his own principles recklessly, even mercilessly, as soon as it became a question of fighting for truths he decided were right and should be carried through. If he felt himself oppressed, he would put up with it silently for a long time, hoping to avoid the difficulty or attempting to change the situation though mild objections. But, in the end, if nothing helped, as soon as the opportunity presented itself to free himself from the constricting bonds, he would calmly do so, showing no anger toward the person who was hurting him. He is obedient, willing, compliant. But if you falsely accuse him of something, or claim something to be true which Kaspar thinks is not, do not expect him, just to be nice or for any other reason, to put up with injustice or a lie. He will modestly but resolutely insist that he is right, and if the other person stubbornly puts up a fight, he will silently leave.
The Wild Child Page 15
