The Swedish Cavalier

by Leo Perutz

  “What kind of a nobleman is he?” the village folk murmured. “When he has a foal, a calf, or a sheep to sell, none knows better than he how to bargain. He’ll haggle over a kreuzer with a commoner, so where’s his nobleman’s dignity?” He merely laughed when told of this. “What use have I for a nobleman’s dignity?” he said. “Dignity never fattened cow nor sow.”

  Despite this, Maria Agneta reflected, her Christian was an officer and a gentleman sans reproche. He made her a new déclaration d’amour every day, and she loved to hear him call her his sweetheart, his little angel and dearest treasure. At the same time, he had to work hard to provide them with the necessities of life. Too pressed for time to join his beloved wife at the luncheon table, he would take a bowl of gruel with the farm-hands. During the day he had to be everywhere at once. “The master of an estate,” he often said, “must acquaint himself with every straw that fills the crib and every shaving that falls to the ground in the wood-yard.”

  Although Maria Agneta yearned to be truly of help to her husband, she found it hard to remember all he taught her. She knew how much kindling and firewood must be brought into the house daily, and how many quarts of beer were consumed at Sunday dinner, and when the workfolk were to be given meat or millet or milk soup or gruel or flummery or dumplings, and that the dumplings must be made of rye and barley flour in equal parts, but she knew many more things besides, and she repeated them softly to herself to pass the time, just as Christian had told them to her.

  “The landlord in the village shall have two brace of chickens and three dozen eggs every month. In return, his wife shall weave eleven pieces of linen for the manor. When I was little the villagers got up a Twelfth Night play and the landlord played Balthazar, but he had to be one of the shepherds, too, and play the bagpipe. A jet-black shepherd he was, and he couldn’t scrub the soot off his face. How I laughed! The village blacksmith shall have eleven guilders’ worth of iron and eight bushels of wheat for keeping the ploughs and other implements in repair–he has a little boy of nine to work the bellows for him. The trees in the pastures belong to the manor, so the miller has no claim on them. They’re elms and oak trees, and the oak, Christian says, is a good tree–a tree from which hams and sausages can be plucked. The village women are duty-bound to work in the farmyard for a kreuzer a day and their food. A sheep yields a pound and a quarter of wool per shearing, a wether a pound and a half. Before I forget, I must tell the shepherd tomorrow that he’s to keep his hens in his cottage and not in the sheep-shed. A sheep yields . . . How much does a sheep yield per shearing? Why can’t I see the moon any more? There must be a mist again. March mists aren’t good, Christian says–they bring hail-storms a hundred days later. The clock just struck one. It’s long since I lay awake so late. It was one o’clock at night when they brought the Lord Jesus before Pilate, and Peter stood in the courtyard and warmed his hands over the fire. How cold I am!”

  She drew the bedclothes over her shoulders, and as she lay there in the dark, vainly awaiting the advent of sleep, she was suddenly overcome with melancholy and dread. She fancied that she was alone in the room, and that Christian was far away and in terrible straits, crying out for help with flames dancing all around him. So lifelike was this vision that she herself could have cried out in fear and despair. Although she knew that he was peacefully asleep beside her, she found herself mourning him as if he were gone from her for ever. “What is this?” she asked herself in dismay. “I’m suddenly plunged in melancholy, but why, why? He’s here beside me–no, he’s far away and crying out for help with no one to hear him. Forgive me, God, it isn’t true. I shouldn’t have said that–it’s not right but what ails me? Why should I feel so afraid?”

  She slipped out of bed, picked up the tinder-box with trembling hands, and lit the wick of the copper lamp. Its flickering light fell on the face of her sleeping husband. She gazed at him as he lay there with his hands folded on his chest, and the fear within her refused to ebb. It seemed to her that there was something strange about his still and motionless face, something she had never seen before–something from another world–but what it was she couldn’t tell.

  A shiver ran down her spine and she began to weep until the tears fell thick and fast.

  “He isn’t gone,” she whispered to herself. “He’s here with me, but–God forgive me–I fancied for a moment that a stranger was lying at my side. How could such a thought have entered my head, and why should I persist in weeping now that I can see him? Why, why?”

  She looked again at the sleeping man’s face, hoping that the sight would calm and console her, but the longer she looked the heavier her heart became.

  And then, in her dire distress, she was struck by a sudden thought: she remembered that Margret, formerly a chambermaid at the manor, had taught her how to converse with a person asleep. “Make the sign of the cross over him,” Margret had said, “and take him by the left thumb. That will give you power over him. Then call him in the name of God and ask what you wish to know, and he must tell you the truth willy-nilly.”

  “Forgive my foolishness, Christian,” she whispered. “It’s only a game–only because I want to prove Margret a liar, and because you happen to be asleep while I’m awake. She told me many tall tales, did Margret, before she ran off with the soldiers–for instance, that you can see the Devil riding through the air if you anoint your eyelids with bat’s blood, but that’s not true, someone tried it and saw nothing. If I do this thing, it’s only to pass the time. Forgive me, Christian, but the night’s so long and I cannot sleep.”

  Very swiftly, she drew the sign of the cross on his brow and took hold of his left thumb.

  “Who are you?” she asked with bated breath. “Tell me who you are! In the name of Almighty God, answer!”

  At that, the sleeping man’s face turned pale and his breathing became as laboured as if his chest were weighted down with stones. His mouth shaped some words, but he choked them back and clenched his teeth as if two men were wrestling within him, one eager to speak and the other–the victor–resolved to prevent it. All that emerged from his lips was a groan.

  “In the name of Almighty God,” Maria Agneta cried despairingly, and she turned away rather than dwell on that stranger’s face. “If you are not my Christian, why did you come here–why did you say you loved me?”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then, in the slow, muffled voice of one dreaming, the answer came:

  “In the name of God, I came because I’ve always loved you. It happened when first I saw you–I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Christian!” she cried, surprised and overjoyed, for who but he could have spoken of bygone days? Even as she watched, he opened his eyes and drew a hand across his brow. And when, still half asleep, he sat up and saw her and put his arm around her shoulders, his face had resumed its old, familiar appearance, and her fears and misgivings were as swiftly dispelled as a troubled dream fades at the moment of waking.

  “My little angel,” she heard him say, “there are tears in your eyes. What’s amiss?”

  “It’s nothing,” she whispered. “Truly, dearest, it’s nothing. I was weeping, I don’t know why, but it’s over now. Sometimes, you know, tears are a sign of happiness.”

  “Go to sleep, my darling,” he told her. “You must sleep, it’s very early yet.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, overcome with weariness and already half asleep. Gently releasing himself from her embrace, he smoothed her pillow and reached across her to extinguish the lamp. As she sank back, her hand sought his once more and her eyelids dropped.

  That was the only occasion on which the true image of her childhood sweetheart arose in her mind. From that night forward, becoming fused with the image of the man she had married, it never returned.

  *

  Her pains began on the Wednesday after Easter, while she was walking across the village green with a pound of bread for the old errand-woman, who could no longer walk. She just had time to hurry home and prepare h
erself.

  Her husband, who had to be summoned from the fields, was hailed as soon as he rode into the courtyard and told that it was a girl.

  The christening was attended by all the local nobility. The Üchtritzes, the Dobschützes, the Rottkirchs, the Bafrons, the Bibrans, the Nostitzes from Bohemia, the Tschirnhauses from the Electorate of Saxony–all converged by carriage or on horseback.

  That afternoon the manor house was filled with guests. The ladies sat in a room on the ground floor nibbling preserved fruit and pastries and sipping aquavit. The only one of them to keep the young mother company was Barbara von Dobschiitz, a sharp-nosed old lady much given to expatiating on her devotion to God and good works, though she did so in her own peculiar manner, rebuking the Almighty in the tone she ordinarily employed to a servant who had displeased her.

  “I’m often so pressed for time, my dear,” she complained. “There’s the sermon to be listened to on Sundays, and one day a week of bible study and another of prayer and penitence, and alms to be distributed, and the sick to be visited, and an hour’s devotional reading every afternoon–why, this year alone I’ve read the Garden of Paradise and the Celestial Wreath of Honour three times over from beginning to end. Ah yes, one does one’s best to satisfy the Almighty, but He too often treats His devotees in the strangest manner, to say the least. I went down on my knees . . .”

  The Swedish cavalier had silently entered the room and tiptoed over to the bed. He laid his hand on the white lace cap that covered Maria Agneta’s brown curls.

  “My sweetest angel,” he said softly, “I came to see you and the little one. You’re thin in the face, but lovely as a summer’s day.”

  “. . . down on my knees,” the old woman pursued, “and prayed to Him to deliver me from rheumatism this year, but what good did it do? Instead of rheumatism, I now have the migraine. Ah, my dear, the agonies I’ve suffered . . .”

  The Swedish cavalier bent over the cradle.

  “You see, my God-given darling?” he whispered to Maria Agneta. “Her little fists are clenched–she’s asleep.” And he left the room as silently as he had come, closing the door behind him.

  The old woman sighed. “If He treats others as He treats me,” she said, still speaking of the Almighty, “He should not be surprised to find all His churches empty ere long.”

  The table in the great dining-hall was thronged with gentlemen seated over jugs of wine and bottles of Rosoglio, Spanish bitters and Danzig brandy.

  The Swedish cavalier had withdrawn to a window alcove with Melchior Bafron, who was reputed to be the best husbandman in Silesia. There they conversed on the properties of good and bad soil, on the profit to be had from renting pastureland, on how calves should be tended and how difficult it was, at the present time, to make money out of fattening Pigs.

  “Speaking for myself,” said Melchior Bafron, “I’ve always been more in favour of raising cattle. Pigs can lose you a mint of money–there’s nothing worthwhile to be expected of them till they’re lying on the butcher’s block. Cattle, on the other hand . . .”

  His host was not entirely in agreement.

  “All livestock can lose a man money if he fails to tend his beasts properly,” he said. “A pig’s twelve bushels of inferior grain should be no cause for regret. What I get for bacon after twelve weeks’ fattening makes an agreeable entry in my account book.”

  Meanwhile, conversation at the dining-table had turned to current events and the imminence of hostilities. It was rumoured that the young King of Sweden, now in Poland with his army, planned to march through Silesia and wage war on the Electorate of Saxony.

  “So we shall soon be afflicted with epidemics and rising prices,” sighed Baron von Bibran. “Foreign armies always bring such evils in their train.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt us were the price of grain and cattle to rise,” Herr von Dobschiitz objected. “The King of Sweden pays well enough.”

  “Yes,” old Tschirnhaus chuckled, “he pays well in quotations from the Gospels.”

  “Even were Poland and Saxony to join forces,” young Hans Üchtritz cried eagerly, “they would never withstand the Lion of the North. He’ll bring the Elector of Saxony to heel just as he imposed terms on the King of Denmark.”

  “Your health, Hans!” came the deep voice of Herr von Nostitz, Hans’s brother-in-law. “Your very good health, but I tell you plainly, if I were the King of Poland I’d as soon have the Devil for a neighbour as Charles the Swede. At least I can cross myself and send the Devil back to hell.”

  “Hush!” said his cousin, Georg von Rottkirch, from across the table. “Have you forgotten where you are? Being a Swede by birth, our host will naturally side with his king. Do you mean to pick a quarrel with him?”

  “I said nothing amiss,” protested Herr von Nostitz, who liked to live at peace with everyone. “A man can cross himself before the Devil, but not before an ill-disposed neighbour, that was my only meaning. I seek no quarrel.”

  “At home, where the couriers change horses,” young Tschirnhaus reported, “one hears all manner of things. It’s said that the King of Sweden means to double the nobility’s term of service with the colours and levy one peasant in seven. It’s also said that he means to wage war on the Samoyeds who dwell in the snows beyond Moscow.”

  “He’ll wage war for as long as he can find enough able-bodied men,” said Baron von Bibran.

  “I consider him an envangelical hero, a present miracle and an example to future generations!” Flown with wine, young Hans Üchtritz bellowed the words so loudly that the copper chandelier above the table vibrated in sympathy. “I raise my glass to the King of Sweden’s victory and everlasting renown!”

  The others frowned, reluctant to join him in such a toast, and did so for their host’s sake alone. His was the only voice that broke the ensuing silence.

  “Against the colic,” he was saying, “I give a piglet brick dust mixed with a little oil.”

  Young Üchtritz silently replaced his glass on the table. Herr von Nostitz sat back in his chair and laughed till his wig wobbled. Just then the door was flung open and one of the farmhands, got up in livery for the occasion, announced a belated guest, Baron von Lilgenau.

  The others jumped up and clustered around the new arrival. Nothing could be heard at first but a confused hubbub. Then Herr von Nostitz’s deep bass voice drowned the rest.

  “Hans Georg, my friend, where have you sprung from? It’s a year since I saw you last.”

  The Swedish cavalier had likewise risen to his feet.

  “I had no knowledge of her ladyship’s betrothal and marriage,” he heard the newcomer say. “Then, as I was riding by, someone called out that a christening feast was in progress. I leapt off my horse at once and ran up the steps. Where’s Tornefeld? I must make his acquaintance–I knew his father.”

  The Swedish cavalier felt as if an icy hand had clutched at his heart. Walls, guests, jugs of wine, the table–everything in the room was spinning like a top.

  “Herr von Tornefeld,” he heard Nostitz say in a kind of dream, “allow me to present Hans George Lilgenau, captain of dragoons, a friend of mine and eager to make your acquaintance. He’s cousin to the Lilgenaus of Mankerwitz.”

  “Welcome, sir,” murmured the Swedish cavalier. The ground quaked, the glasses danced, the chandelier swayed. He kept his feet with a supreme effort. His one thought at that moment was of Maria Agneta lying abed in her chamber. It was all over.

  For the second time in this house, he was face to face with the Bloody Baron. The voice of his mortal enemy rang in his ears.

  “I knew your father, the Colonel,” said Lilgenau. “I was privileged to fight under his command at Saverne.”

  Saverne? Was it a trap? Saverne, Saverne . . . When and where had he heard of the place before? Of course! It was at the mill, when Tornefeld had said, “What would you know of Saverne and how things were there?”

  “Ah, yes,” he replied, drawing a deep breath. “My father often told
me of Saverne and–how did he put it?–‘the thunder and lightning of battle, the cries of “Advance!” and “Retire!,” “Rally!” and “Charge!”’ It was at Saverne that he lost an arm.”

  The Bloody Baron looked at him long and hard.

  “It’s almost laughable, how closely you resemble your late lamented father,” he said, and the festivities resumed their course.

  Whenever the harvest was good, the Swedish cavalier purchased a few more acres from his neighbours–a field here, a meadow there–to add to his original three hides of land. Now that five years were up, he had recovered all the land dissipated for his own profit by the former bailiff. But the lord of the manor took no great pleasure in food and drink, nor did he ever linger long beside the hearth. At every season of the year he would be out in the fields as soon as the Angelus bell had rung, watching his farmhands while they reaped and sheaved, dunged the soil and dug ditches.

  Good husbandry provided an ample living for his family and his workfolk alike. His cattle multiplied, his woodlands became a source of revenue. The store-rooms were filled with all that a great house required, the coach-houses contained sleighs and carriages large and small, the stables were always ready with fresh horses for the mail coaches and couriers that called at Kleinroop Manor, and people came from miles around to admire the Spanish rams in the sheep-shed.

  Sometimes, however, when he was riding across the fields with the land that belonged to him stretching away on either side, a shadow flitted across his soul and a chill like a night wind smote his cheek. It was as if all that he considered his own–the fields and pastures, the scattered birch trees, the grain burgeoning in the fields, the stream flowing through the water-meadows, the house and estate, the wife he loved and the child he so anxiously cherished–as if all this were not his own but lent him for a short while only and destined to be taken away, and the more brightly the sun shone, the darker his mood became. On such occasions he would wheel his horse and ride home like the wind, and when his horse’s iron-shod hoofs struck sparks from the gravelled courtyard and his little daughter came running out of the garden, Maria Agneta would capture her, and, with a radiant smile, hold her up for him to embrace and fondle from the saddle.