Her story seemed so unlikely that at first no-one believed it, and many years were to pass before it came by chance to the notice of the feminist Frederika Bremer Foundation, which by and by published it as a pamphlet under the title “The Fate of a German Spinhouse Woman”. That was in 1915, when not even the flowery crinolines of her mother’s epoch remained.
On the afternoon Henriette and Hercule were reunited, thirteen years had already passed since their separation. The tale that she and her mother had started a new life with relatives in Saxony was mere hearsay which one of Gabrielle Vogel’s suitors had invented out of despair. True, they had looked up a relative, but in far from happy circumstances.
Since the turn of the century Gabrielle Vogel’s sister had been working in a run-down brothel in Danzig, and it was here that mother and daughter had headed for after Madam Schall’s establishment had been closed down.
Mercifully, they’d been allowed to stay. They shared a room with two girls who had just arrived from Pomerania in the company of the owner of a vodka distillery, who ran the business with the aid of bribes to the public prosecutor. The establishment was a dreary one. Rats scampered across its tables in the dead of night, sicknesses raged and alcohol was God. Sailors who had jumped ship bought themselves a moment’s love for a quart of beer, the girls gave themselves to tramps in exchange for food, and the distiller made the lion’s share of his income by serving liquor in the front hall. The inevitable could no longer be held at bay: within a week of their arrival, Henriette had been taken on as a prostitute.
Never would she forget the man who robbed her of her virginity, the stench of his rotting teeth and a brutality that seemed unnecessary. Afterwards she had cried, but that, her mother tried to explain, was customary, just as it was customary that she should learn, in future, to brace herself against the men’s repulsive ill-smelling breaths, their unwashed bodies, the lice feasting on the sweat in their armpits, their verminous souls and their mangy, vulgar bedroom conversation.
She had tried to blot all this out by thinking of Hercule. Over the next few years she did little else, falling into deep musings over where he might be, if indeed this unfortunate boy, so ill-equipped for the trials of existence, was anywhere at all. Despite the humiliations she never surrendered to despair. On the contrary, her sufferings fuelled her dreams. The deeper she sank, the closer she came in her imagination to Hercule.
Those first years in Danzig she would later recall as having been lived through as if sleepwalking. All contours had been erased, no faces remained, only bodies; an unbroken chain of strangers turning into a single male body with which she awoke and went to bed, unendingly, day after day, night after night.
By the fifth year she was awaking from one nightmare only to find herself deep in another. One winter night the distiller had taken her to a hotel in the town’s outskirts. A servant in livery had led them into a smoking room furnished in Eastern style, with Turkish carpets on the floor, a hookah in front of an armchair, the walls covered in antique marine charts. The distiller withdrew to a room where she could overhear him loudly discussing her price with the well-to-do suitor who had placed an order for her. Then he left the hotel, promising to pick her up the following morning. Still unsuspecting, she sat down in the armchair and looked around her at a splendour of which she’d not seen the like since Madam Schall’s heyday. Inhaling the smouldering tobacco fumes and contemplating a poster cross-section of a Havana cigar that explained in an incomprehensible language the difference between a madurado and a claro, she didn’t even notice the man coming up behind her chair until, turning round to locate the source of the mysterious sound of human breathing, she was struck dumb with horror at the sight of him. It was the same court magistrate who had brought about the ruin of Madam Schall’s establishment some years before.
Shortly thereafter, when the gendarmes had thrown her into the spinning house, she wondered whether the court magistrate, von Kiesingen, had had an eye on her ever since she had left Königsberg. But it seemed more appropriate to blame the incredible good luck of the unrighteous, and assume he, quite by chance, had come across her in the course of one of his journeys.
What he did to her that evening not only made her want to die. She had really been in mortal danger, only been saved by the diffuse intervention of her guardian angel. Never, except on one occasion, and that with Hercule Barfuss, would she speak about that night’s events. Nor would it be in good taste to include it in this chronicle, not because of the offence it might give, but rather because the event as a whole, with its every macabre detail, scarcely lends itself to words.
The following morning, when the distiller returned to the hotel, he found her lying in a state of shock on a bunk in the servants’ quarters, apathetic, pale and bleeding from several wounds. This was to be the overture to a far greater tragedy, whose first act would begin a month later . . .
Scarcely recovered from this abuse, she was called out again to the very same hotel to meet the very same suitor. The ensuing event soon became public knowledge and a topic of conversation for months on end all round the Gulf of Danzig. Some people sided with the girl, saying what she had done had been to defend her honour. Others took a more serious view, opining that the consequences must be severe, since it had been an act of violence against a representative of the Prussian courts who’d been appointed after all by the King, himself reigning by the grace of God, and therefore contiguous with it.
There was never any trial – a trial might have aggravated the scandal. Besides, the girl was not of age. Yet notwithstanding all the magistrate’s efforts to keep the details of the drama secret, they leaked out anyway.
What was known was that a street girl had stabbed a high-ranking suitor from the civil service, his life only saved thanks to the speedy intervention of an able surgeon. According to one version a girl had tried to cut his carotid artery with a scalpel; in another she’d stabbed him severely in his groin. As time went on the former version became the more popular, though the latter was closer to the truth.
First to arrive on the scene of the assault had been the hotelier, drawn to the room by the terrible screams. He found the girl naked, standing in the middle of the room deathly pale, a bloodied razor in her hand. At her feet, curled in the foetal position, the magistrate was bleeding from the groin. In the subsequent interrogations, the hotelier declared the girl to be not in her right mind. Fortunately a doctor happened to be on hand who’d managed to stop the magistrate’s bleeding with styptic compresses, and had stitched up the cuts in a room hurriedly placed at their disposal.
Henriette, on the other hand, was taken to the spinning house without trial.
It was a nightmarish place where the overcrowding was so bad that the girls had to take turns to sleep on the floor. There were no blankets, no latrines, and they learned to fight over the evil-smelling slush that passed for soup.
Later, when Heinrich von Below looked into the circumstances surrounding the predicament of his wife-to-be, he came to the conclusion that her mother too, at the magistrate’s express order, had been sent to the spinning house, since she’d arrived at the same institution only four days later, and had there been locked up in a wing away from her daughter. No documents existed to confirm his theory, but the events adhered to a logic suggestive of a plan.
It was said the judge had been so badly injured in the assault that he afterwards suffered permanent chronic pain. A couple of girls bore witness to his quirks and maintained that there was no way he could indulge in normal bedroom activities, after the injury he had suffered. The revenge implied a slow death sentence.
That winter Gabrielle Vogel, scarcely thirty-five years old, died of malnutrition. Her body was discovered in a window-bay where death had overtaken her in a wretched state – a human skeleton clad in rags, toothless, bald, smeared in excrement and weighing scarcely more than a child.
Henriette had gone almost out of her mind with grief. She hadn’t even been allowed to see the
corpse, since it was removed at night and buried in some unknown place without so much as a cross to honour the deceased’s memory. Most likely she would have met the same fate had Heinrich von Below, a young and successful businessman, not heard her story.
At the time of the scandal von Below happened to be in Danzig, where he had invested in a high-risk company that loaned money to sanitary contractors. The first gas lamps had made their appearance in Germany, likewise Herr Krapp’s waterclosets, and water mains, which were now being installed to the upstairs floors of houses and within only a few decades would revolutionise sanitation.
A business acquaintance had initiated him into the event the whole town was talking about. Maybe because he himself had been in conflict with the law in a matter concerning a patent where he had gained terrifying insights into the prevailing widespread state of corruption, the tale had stuck in his mind. He took it for granted that in a cause célèbre like this, involving a street girl, there must be a bone buried.
He couldn’t get the story out of his head, it haunted him with a regularity that suggested some deeper meaning. What impressed him were the elements of the tragedy: poverty versus wealth, despair versus superior force, the twofold revenge, and evil winning out because power is all.
Chancing to spend the night at the very same hotel where the assault had occurred, he was shown the room where the girl had stabbed her suitor. There were still bloodstains on the floor. The hotelier told him in confidence that, in his opinion, the girl had avenged herself for some injustice.
Shortly after this von Below had gone to Bavaria, where the company had made commitments in a watercourse project, and almost two years passed before he returned to Danzig.
To his surprise, he still couldn’t get the girl’s story out of his mind. On the pretext of his company’s readiness to invest money in new spinning machines and consequently also in prison care, he managed to get permission to visit the gaol where he made suggestions to its governor of ways to improve the sanitary conditions and so possibly minimise the abominably high death rates among the prisoners. But for him to do this, he said, it was important he should personally inspect the existing arrangements.
Shown around, he saw the workshop, where women sat chained to machines sixteen hours a day; also the kitchens, the prison chapel, the storage spaces and finally the so-called dormitories, where prisoners were locked up at night as in a crypt for the living dead. He didn’t even need to have her pointed out to him. He knew at once it was she.
In the first letter he wrote to the prison governor asking for her release, he noted: “The girl has not even been sentenced, the accusations of vagrancy cannot be substantiated and, furthermore, the sorry calling of street girls cannot be prevented by enforced labour.”
He didn’t know why, but he had fallen in love, there and then, with no other reservations than those emanating from his own titles. Many years later, in a fever on the cotton plantation in German East Africa where, plagued by malaria and homesickness, he was to end his days, he would recall the instant sense of recognition that had struck him when first he set eyes on her. Guided by the governor, he’d found her sitting on the floor at the far end of a room, dressed in rags. Her feet were wrapped in rags. Her hair was tangled. Yet, in the midst of all this degradation, this filth, this darkness, this misery and stench of unwashed bodies, she was still the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes on. She radiated a light, he thought, that lit up the whole of existence.
He managed to get her moved to the barracks where the female overseers lived. The owners promised to provide her with warm clothing and spare her the heavy labour at the machines. After that, he took measures for her release.
A letter to the city police chief was ignored and sent back to him by return of post. Later he realised that several people in the City Council had done everything in their power to put obstacles in his way. A remonstrance with the mayor, too, was rejected because of risk of infection – half the women in the spinning house had been detained without either trial or sentence, which was against the law, but served a moral purpose. One civil servant added: “And besides, it is a prophylactic measure: half of them are syphilitic!”
Obsessed by her, he rented an apartment near St Mary’s Church and visited her whenever he could. It calmed him to think she was under his protection. In a room put at his disposal by the governor, he could visit her without their being disturbed, and at every fresh meeting his love for this girl, forbidden fruit for a man of his social standing, grew deeper. The poets had taught him that love which comes suddenly takes the longest to be cured of, and that there is only one palliative for heartache: to love yet more intensely. This didn’t strike him as a problem, feeling as he did that he had always borne her within himself as a possibility, a potential not realised until now. He compared himself secretly to Edward in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, stricken by a reckless passion for his Ottilia, a woman half his age.
He attempted to get her out by bribery, but failed. On another occasion he offered a prison warder two hundred thalers to help her escape, but the warder was removed before the plan could be put into action. Further letters to the authorities met either with cold answers or none.
Confident that she was at least temporarily out of danger, he went to Berlin to attend to business. In March a letter, unmistakably in her handwriting, was smuggled out to him. She was desperate. With no reason given she had been moved back into the prison. She was starving, freezing, sure she was going to die.
Returning, he’d found the prison management had been changed and he was no longer allowed to visit her. A new magistrate, too, had been appointed to the City Court: Klaus von Kiesingen.
Such is the nature of love, Goethe writes in his Elective Affinities. Alone in the right, it believes all other rights vanish before it. Not long afterwards, as he’d departed for Berlin with his wife-to-be, von Below had had occasion to remember this sentiment, for a new scandal, ironically, had contributed to her release.
In sheer desperation, he had confided the affair to a business acquaintance. One meeting with the judge had convinced him that this man was out to kill the girl. He had gone so far as to utter threats: if von Below insisted on poking his nose into other people’s affairs, there would be an accident. This made him hate the man who, with a single word, could have set her free, but conversely was intentionally causing her time to run out.
It was the business acquaintance, a Polish share-dealer known for his unorthodox business methods, who saw a way out, via the mayor’s Achilles heel: for some years he’d been having an affair with the British Consul’s wife. Should this affair become known it would cause a scandal so immense it would raise mayhem in diplomatic circles. It was out-and-out blackmail, and within an hour of von Below’s tête-à-tête with the mayor, Henriette was released.
Many years later, when Charlotte Vogel recounted her mother’s tale to the emissary of the Swedish Frederika Bremer Foundation, she would explain in general terms that the magistrate had done everything in his power to get the mayor to change his decision, even planned to have Henriette kidnapped. He too, however, was to receive his just deserts, albeit not until much later and under the most extraordinary circumstances involving her one true love, the mind-reading Barfuss . . .
THE DAY IN Berlin when Henriette had climbed down from her carriage on Grosse Hamburgerstrasse, and bent over Hercule, he was not sure if it was really happening to him or whether his befuddled brain was playing yet another of its ruthless tricks. He’d been lying, half conscious, in the gutter when a heavenly being laid its hand on his forehead and told the coachman to lift him into the carriage. Inside there was already a passenger: a well-dressed gentleman who gave up his seat and placed himself on the coachman’s box. Not until the carriage was moving again did Hercule realise that reality had in fact surpassed imagination.
Henriette was living in a fairy-tale world that he could never have imagined had he not seen it with his own eyes. The baron belo
nged to a new class of people: manufacturers and industrialists who, after centuries of advances in technique and commerce, had stepped on to history’s stage. Never before had anyone managed to make such immense fortunes in so short a time, and never before had there been such a wealth of luxury items on offer for them to enjoy, for Europe’s colonisation of the world was in its initial, budding phase.
Any splendour he had hitherto seen paled into insignificance beside what he saw in the von Below palace. Chandeliers with prisms the size of ostrich eggs. Pilasters framing Italian landscape murals. Gilded cupids glancing down from the ceilings. There were closets with running water, a steam kitchen with hot-water radiators, and two portable baths in which von Below could spend half his days being massaged by his servant and reading news-sheets in four different languages to keep up with the movements of the stock exchange.
All the rooms had modern lamps which lit up the darkness. Remarkable antiques adorned the shelves and chests of drawers. Stuffed beasts of prey scared him out of his wits as he explored unending corridors. Biedermeier furniture reigned in the salons. Yellowing elephant tusks held up gaming tables. There were Chinese vases, paintings by French masters, and an art gallery where von Below, in his Maecenas role, had collected art by German painters. For hours on end Hercule could stand transfixed before a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich or by Schinkel, whose buildings in the Prussian capital were springing up out of the ground like mushrooms.
There was the twenty-four-man brass band, hired for the extravagant dinners; larders filled with colonial foods from the East India companies von Below had invested in; coffee or cocoa was served in the afternoons, nameless tropical fruits adorned the waiters’ trays. As for the baron, he could only make full use of all the garments he’d ordered from his French tailors by changing his suit three times a day. Theatrical performances were arranged, as were party games and readings featuring popular poets. Two outsized tortoises, their shells encrusted with jewels, crawled about the library – a gift from an Indian maharaja with whom von Below had clinched a deal for importing precious stones.
The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred Page 18
