The Marquise of O and Other Stories (18 page)

Kohlhaas, his face paling, turned round and said: ‘It's no matter, so long as they are there. Put out lamps when you go to the hall, so that they can see.' He then, on the pretext of emptying a pot, opened the front window shutters and convinced himself that what the old man had told him was true, for at that very moment the guard was even being silently changed, a procedure no one had thought of since the arrangement had begun. After observing this he went to bed, not indeed feeling much like sleep, but with his mind immediately made up about what to do the next day. For what he resented above all was that the government he was dealing with should keep up a pretence of justice when in fact they were violating his promised amnesty. If he was really a prisoner, of which there could be no more doubt, he intended to force them to declare clearly and unequivocally that this was so. Therefore, as soon as day broke, he ordered his groom Sternbald to harness his carriage and bring it to the front door, for the purpose, as he said, of driving to Lockewitz to see an old friend, the magistrate there who had met him a few days ago in Dresden and invited him and his children to visit him. The soldiers, whispering to each
other when they saw all the active preparations for this being made in the house, surreptitiously sent one of their number into the city; within a few minutes a government officer arrived with some constables and went into the house opposite as if they had business there. Kohlhaas, who was busy getting his two little boys' clothes on, also observed what was happening and deliberately let the carriage wait longer than necessary outside the house. Then, as soon as he saw that the police preparations were complete, and affecting not to notice them, he walked out of the house with his children; telling the lansquenets on guard that they did not need to come with him, he lifted the boys into the carriage, and kissed and consoled his little girls who were weeping because he had arranged for them to stay behind with the old servant's daughter. Hardly had he himself stepped into the carriage when the officer and his constables emerged from the house opposite and asked where he was going. Kohlhaas replied that he wished to visit his friend the magistrate at Lockewitz, who had invited him a few days ago to come and see him with his two sons in the country. To this the officer answered that he would have to wait a few minutes in that case as, on the orders of the Prince of Meissen, some cavalrymen would be accompanying him. Looking down from the carriage, Kohlhaas asked with a smile whether it was thought that his life would be in danger in the home of a friend who had offered to entertain him at his table for a day. The officer answered with a good-humoured and friendly air that the danger was of course not great and added that the men were instructed not to incommode him in any way. Kohlhaas, now looking serious, pointed out that on his arrival in Dresden the Prince of Meissen had left it to his choice whether he would use the bodyguard or not; and when the officer showed surprise at this and referred in cautious terms to the arrangement that had been customary throughout his stay, the horse-dealer recounted to him the circumstances that had led
to the guard being set up at his house. The officer assured him that the orders of the commandant Baron von Wenk, who was at present chief of police, made it his duty to give Kohlhaas uninterrupted protection against any risk, and that he must request him, if he did not wish to be escorted, to go to the government headquarters himself to clear up what must obviously be some misunderstanding. Kohlhaas, turning on the man a look that well expressed his feelings, but determined to force the issue, said he would do that. With his heart beating hard he got out of the carriage, told the servant to take the children back into the hall, and, leaving the groom and the carriage in front of his house, proceeded in the company of the officer and his guards to the government headquarters.

As it happened, the commandant Baron Wenk was just in the middle of inspecting a gang of Nagelschmidt's followers who had been captured the previous evening near Leipzig, and the noblemen with him were questioning these men about a number of points on which they wanted information, when the horse-dealer and his escort entered the hall. The interrogation was halted and in the sudden ensuing silence the Baron, as soon as he saw Kohlhaas, went over to him and asked him what he wanted. When the horse-dealer respectfully explained his intention of driving to Lockewitz to have lunch with the magistrate there, and said that he wished to leave his bodyguard of lansquenets behind since he did not need them, the Baron changed colour, seemed to swallow something else he was about to say, and advised Kohlhaas that he would do well to stay quietly at home and to postpone this meal with his friend at Lockewitz for the time being. With that he cut short the whole conversation, turned to the officer and told him that his orders concerning this man were to stand and he was not be be allowed to leave the city unless escorted by six mounted guards. Kohlhaas asked whether he was a prisoner, and whether he was to understand that the amnesty which had been
solemnly vouchsafed to him before the eyes of all the world was now broken; whereupon the Baron suddenly wheeled round on him, his face flushing fiery red, and stepping close looked him straight in the eyes and exclaimed: ‘Yes, yes, yes!' And with that he turned his back, left him standing and went back to Nagelschmidt's men. Kohlhaas left the room; and although he realized that his only way of saving himself, namely by flight, had now been made very much more difficult by what he had just done, he nevertheless did not regret it, for he now considered that he himself was no longer bound by any obligation to observe the terms of the amnesty. When he reached home he had the horses unharnessed and went to his room, deeply dejected and troubled, and still accompanied by the officer. The latter, to the horse-dealer's silent disgust, assured him that the whole thing was a misunderstanding which would shortly be cleared up, and meanwhile signalled to his constables to bolt all the doors leading from the house to the courtyard; but the front entrance, he hastened to point out, was still open, as always, for Kohlhaas to use as he pleased.

Meanwhile, in the forests of the Erzgebirge, Nagelschmidt had been so hard pressed on all sides by the police and the army that, since he wholly lacked the means to carry out the kind of role he had chosen, he hit upon the idea of really involving Kohlhaas in his venture. Having been fairly accurately informed by a passing traveller about how matters stood with the lawsuit in Dresden, he thought that despite the open hostility between them he could persuade the horse-dealer to enter into a new alliance with him. He therefore sent one of his men to him with a letter, written in barely legible German, which stated that if Kohlhaas were willing to come to Altenburg where the remnants of his disbanded force had got together again, and resume command of them, he for his part would help him with horses and men and money to escape from his arrest in Dresden; he also promised to be in future more obedient and generally
more orderly and better behaved than in the past, and as proof of his loyalty and attachment undertook to come in person to the outskirts of Dresden and rescue Kohlhaas from his imprisonment. Now as ill-luck would have it, when the man carrying this letter reached a village just outside Dresden he fell into one of the violent fits to which he had been subject since childhood, and since he had the letter in the breast of his tunic, it was found by the people who came to his assistance; as soon as he had recovered, he was arrested and taken under guard, with a large crowd following, to the government headquarters. No sooner had the commandant, Baron von Wenk, read the letter than he went at once to the Elector at his palace where he found the lords Kunz and Hinz, the former now recovered from his injuries, and the President of the State Chancellery, Count Kallheim. These gentlemen were of the opinion that Kohlhaas should be arrested without delay and put on trial for secretly conspiring with Nagelschmidt; for they pointed out that such a letter could not have been written unless there had been previous communications from the horse-dealer's side and unless there had in general been a lawless and criminal association between the two men for the plotting of fresh atrocities. The Elector steadfastly refused to breach the safe-conduct granted to Kohlhaas on the basis of this letter alone; he thought indeed that from what Nagelschmidt had written it seemed more probable that there had been no previous alliance between the two of them. All he would consent to do in order to get to the bottom of the matter was, after long hesitation, to accept the President's suggestion that Nagelschmidt's messenger should be allowed to deliver the letter as if he had not been arrested; and they would then see whether Kohlhaas answered it. Next morning the man, who had been thrown into prison, was accordingly brought to government headquarters, where the commandant gave the letter back to him, and with the promise that he would be set free and excused whatever punishment
he had incurred, ordered him to deliver it to the horse-dealer as if nothing had happened. The fellow unhesitatingly lent himself to this base deception, and with much pretence of secrecy he gained admission to Kohlhaas's room under the pretext that he had some crabs to sell (the police official having bought these for him at the market). Kohlhaas, who read the letter as his children played with the crabs, would in other circumstances have seized this ruffian by the scruff of the neck and handed him over to the guards at his door. But knowing that in the present atmosphere even this action might not be interpreted in a way that could make any difference, and feeling convinced that nothing in this world could rescue him from the affair in which he was enmeshed, he looked sadly at the fellow, whose face he knew well enough, asked him where he lived, and requested him to return in a few hours when he would tell him what decision to take to his master. He told Sternbald, who happened to come in, to buy some of the crabs from the man in the room, and when this purchase was concluded and the two men had left him without recognizing each other, he sat down and wrote a letter to Nagelschmidt to the following effect: first, that he accepted his proposal concerning the leadership of his followers in Altenburg, and that accordingly, to free him and his five children from their present state of quasi-arrest, Nagelschmidt should send him a carriage with two horses to Neustadt, near Dresden; that he would also, in order to make speedier progress, need a pair of relief horses on the highway to Wittenberg, that road being, though a detour, the only one by which he could reach him, for reasons too complicated to explain; that although he thought he could win over his guards by bribery, he would like to know that two stout-hearted, intelligent and well-armed men were at hand in Neustadt in case force were necessary; that he was sending him a roll of twenty gold crowns by his messenger to defray the costs of all these arrangements, the use of which sum he would
reckon up with him after their completion; and further, that he declined as unnecessary Nagelschmidt's offer to take part personally in the rescuing of him from Dresden, in fact he expressly ordered him to remain in Altenburg as temporary commander of their men, who must not be left without a leader. When Nagelschmidt's man came back in the evening he gave him this letter, warning him to take good care of it and paying him generously. His intention was to go with his five children to Hamburg and there take a ship to the Levant or the East Indies or wherever else the sun shone down on people who were different from those he knew; for his heart was so burdened and broken with grief that he had already given up the idea of having his pair of blacks fattened again, even apart from the repugnance he felt at making common cause with Nagelschmidt for this purpose. Nagelschmidt's messenger had no sooner handed over the above letter to the Dresden commandant than the Grand Chancellor Wrede was relieved of his duties, the President Count Kallheim appointed head of the High Court in his place, and Kohlhaas, arrested on an order in council by the Elector, was taken heavily chained to the city dungeons. He was brought to trial on the evidence of the letter, copies of which were nailed up throughout the town; and since, when confronted with it at the bar of the court, he answered ‘Yes' to the lawyer's question whether he recognized the handwriting as his own, but merely looked at the ground and answered ‘No' when asked whether he had anything to say in his defence, he was sentenced to be tortured with red-hot tongs by knackers' men, then quartered, and his body burnt between the wheel and the gallows.

Thus matters stood for poor Kohlhaas in Dresden when the Elector of Brandenburg intervened to rescue him from the clutches of arbitrary despotic power and claimed him, in a note presented to the Saxon State Chancellery, as a subject of Brandenburg. For the worthy city governor Heinrich von Geusau, while walking with the Elector along the
banks of the Spree, had acquainted him with the story of this strange and not utterly wicked man; and at the same time, pressingly questioned by his astonished sovereign, he could not avoid mentioning the discredit into which the latter's own person had been brought by the improper conduct of his High Chancellor, Siegfried von Kallheim. The Elector, much angered by this, called the High Chancellor to account, and finding that his kinship with the Tronka family was to blame for the whole thing, at once dismissed him from his post with indications of his severe displeasure, and appointed Heinrich von Geusau High Chancellor instead of him.

Now it happened at this time that the Kingdom of Poland, for reasons not known to us, was involved in a dispute with the House of Saxony, and was repeatedly and urgently pressing the Elector of Brandenburg to make common cause with the Poles against the Saxons. The High Chancellor, Herr von Geusau, being not unskilled in such matters, could therefore reasonably hope to satisfy his sovereign's desire to see justice done to Kohlhaas at all costs, without putting the peace of the whole realm at greater risk than consideration for a single individual warranted. Accordingly he not only demanded that Kohlhaas, in view of the altogether tyrannical procedures which had been used against him and which were offensive to both God and man, should be unconditionally and immediately handed over to be judged, if guilty, according to the laws of Brandenburg, on charges which the Electorate of Saxony might prefer against him through an attorney sent for this purpose to Berlin; but he also demanded a passport for an attorney whom his own Elector was minded to send to Dresden in order to ensure that Kohlhaas obtained redress against Junker Wenzel von Tronka in the matter of the black horses taken from him, and other flagrant and violent injuries done to him, on Saxon territory. The Chamberlain Kunz, who as a result of the changes of office in Dresden had been appointed President
of the State Chancellery and who, for a number of reasons, was reluctant in his present straits to offend Brandenburg, replied in the name of his sovereign, who had been much disheartened by the note from Berlin, expressing astonishment at ‘the unfriendly and inequitable manner in which it challenged the Elector of Saxony's right to try Kohlhaas according to his laws for crimes committed in his territories; it was, after all, general knowledge that the said Kohlhaas possessed a considerable property in Dresden, the capital city, and had himself never denied his Saxon citizenship'. But since Poland was already amassing an army of five thousand men on the Saxon frontier to press its claims by war, and since the High Chancellor von Geusau declared that Kohlhaasenbrück, the place from which the horse-dealer took his name, was situated in Brandenburg and that the execution of the death-sentence passed on him would be treated as a violation of international law, the Saxon Elector, on the advice of the Chamberlain Kunz himself who wanted to withdraw from the whole affair, summoned Prince Christiern von Meissen from his estates and decided, after a few words with this sensible man, to surrender Kohlhaas to the Berlin authorities in accordance with their demand. Although he was far from pleased by the improprieties that had occurred, the Prince had to take charge of the Kohlhaas affair at the wish of his hard-pressed sovereign and therefore asked him on what grounds he now wanted the horse-dealer charged in the High Court in Berlin. Since it was not possible to refer to the offending letter to Nagelschmidt owing to the ambiguous and obscure circumstances under which it had been written, and since the earlier plundering and incendiarism could not be mentioned either because of the proclamation pardoning them, the Elector decided to submit a report on Kohlhaas's armed invasion of Saxony to his Majesty the Emperor in Vienna, accusing Kohlhaas of breaking the public peace of the Empire and requesting his Majesty, on whom of course no amnesty
was binding, to have Kohlhaas arraigned for this at the High Court in Berlin by an Imperial prosecutor. A week later the horse-dealer, still in irons, and his five children who had been retrieved from foundling homes and orphanages at his request, were put into a carriage and taken to Berlin by Friedrich von Malzahn, a lord whom the Elector of Brandenburg had sent to Dresden with an escort of six cavalrymen.