The Man Who Was Born Again

by Paul Busson

  “Ho, ho!” sneered the French master, “we shall see in an instant!”

  He pushed down the poor boy’s obedient head and prepared to strike. I flew at him. He screamed and panted with rage, and lunged at me with his feet. We fell to the floor together. The bench overturned and ink spattered all over us. The other students whooped with delight and stamped their feet. I felt a sharp pain in my right hand. He had bitten me, bitten me with his ugly black teeth. I struck him in the face with my fist. Blood and spit sprayed out. Somebody’s hand caught hold of my collar, tearing me away from the floor. I turned, and beheld a rough, good-natured face beneath a dishevelled grey wig. The rector was surveying the scene with amazement.

  “Have you gone mad, Domine? Get up, Monsieur!” he shouted.

  “He attempted my life,” hissed the blood-spattered teacher.

  “Baron Dronte, you will leave the school this instant,” said the rector, pointing toward the door. Klaus Jaegerle was still standing there, his head humbly bent and his thin legs trembling; he did not even dare to pull up his trousers without permission.

  Chapter Four

  It went ill with me on the occasion when my father kicked and knocked down the groom, and as he lay on the floor, writhing and whimpering, struck him with a horsewhip. In a fit of compassion I tore the whip from my enraged father’s hand and flung it away. For this misdemeanour I was locked up in the attic of our house and allowed only bread and water. There was nothing but a heap of straw in one corner of the room, and a stool to sit on.

  Every morning my father entered, gave me a hearty box on the ears, and made me repeat a verse from the Bible:

  “Jealousy is the rage of a man: therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance. He will not regard any ransom; neither will he rest content though thou givest many gifts.”

  When I had repeated this verse, I received a second box on the ears. I could do nothing but submit to the cruel treatment, but it filled me with hatred. On the fifth day of my punishment, a key turned in the lock. It was done so noiselessly that I knew my visitor could not be my father. It was my cousin Aglaia. But I was so rebellious against the whole world that I did not surrender to the sweet delight I felt at seeing her.

  Gentle and blushing, arrayed in a cool white dress with blue flowers, she stepped through the doorway into the gloomy and dusty attic. Her face was childlike, and indescribably charming. Her spotless skin shone with a milky whiteness, enhanced by the rich copper of her hair. I was well aware of her fondness for me, and in my misery and solitude I had been thinking day and night of her alone. But there was enough bad spirit in me to make me desire to have her suffer.

  “What business have you here?” I growled. “Go to my father, you are his darling, aren’t you? Be off with you this very instant.”

  Her eyelashes trembled and her little mouth began to quiver.

  “I only wanted to bring you my cake,” she said in a very low voice, stretching out to me a large piece.

  But I snatched it out of her hand, threw it on the floor and trampled on it.

  “There!” I said, “you may go and tell my aunt, or my father, if you like.”

  She stood motionless, and I saw two tears run slowly from her pretty grey eyes. Then without a word she went over to the corner, sat down on the straw and cried bitterly. I took no heed of her crying, or, rather, gave no sign that I heeded it, although my own heart was ready to break. Soon, however, I could bear it no longer. I knelt down beside her and began stroking her hand.

  “Darling, darling Aglaia,” I whispered, “forgive me, you are the only one in the house that I love!”

  She smiled through her tears, took my hand in hers and pressed it to her breast. And I remembered how once, led by a dark and troubled impulse, I had stolen into her room while she was sleeping, and by the light of the night-lamp had removed her covering to see her body. Suddenly she awoke and gazed up at me until I stole back out of the room again, full of remorse and fear... As if she guessed what I was thinking, she suddenly looked at me and whispered:

  “You will never do things like that again, will you, Melchior?”

  I nodded silently and continued to press my hand against her breast. My blood went in heaving waves.

  “I will kiss you,” she said, and reached forward with her sweet mouth.

  I kissed her clumsily, and clumsily my hands were about her.

  “No, oh, no,” she faltered, but she still snuggled in my arms.

  Then a door opened somewhere in the house and shut with a slam. We started away from each other.

  “Will you love me always, Aglaia?” I asked imploringly.

  “Always,” she said, and there was a queer expression in her eyes as she looked straight into my face.

  Suddenly she began crying again.

  “Why are you crying, Aglaia?”

  “I do not know perhaps because of the cake,” was her smiling answer.

  And deliberately I picked up the trampled and dirty piece of pastry from the floor and ate it.

  “Perhaps also because I shall not be with you long,” she went on.

  The words came from her like a breath. I stared at her. I felt unhappy and uneasy. I did not understand her.

  “O, Melchior,” she laughed out suddenly, “take no notice of me. If, if that happens, I shall always return to you.”

  She pressed another hurried kiss on my lips, smoothed her dress and ran out of the attic.

  “Aglaia!” I cried in sudden anguish, “stay with me!”

  I felt afraid. But I could only hear the sound of her footsteps descending the stairs.

  An autumn fly beat restlessly round the small window, humming desperately. It was all covered with cobwebs. The shells of beetles, butterflies, sucked dry every kind of dead insect indeed hung in the spider’s torn and rusty network. The fly struggled. Its hum changed to a whizzing sound. A long-legged, hairy spider crept swiftly out of a dark hole, and in an instant the fly was in its hideous clutches. Then, all of a sudden, I saw the spider’s face. It was horrible. I rushed to the door and hammered on it with both my fists.

  “Aglaia,” I cried, “Aglaia!” No one heard me.

  Chapter Five

  The sky was blue, I remember, the air was beautifully warm and sunny on the day when we helped to bring in the fruit-harvest from the great orchard behind the house. The plums dripped with sweetness. They tasted like wine. Aglaia and I could not eat enough of them.

  The greengages that we picked for ourselves were still more wonderful. They melted in the mouth. But that evening Aglaia screamed with pain. By midnight she was dead. The house was filled with cries of grief. My father shut himself up in his study. The maids wept in their aprons.

  Aglaia was dead. I wandered blindly about, just taking things in my hands without knowing what I was doing. I leaned a long time against a carved doorpost, without being able to think a single thought, until my pain brought me back to sensibility. I drank water out of a watering can. The days dragged on with terrible slowness. They had neither beginning nor end. Heavy with grief I watched mutely as our men emptied out the store-room and carried in the black cloth; I saw them cutting asters and autumn roses and making wreaths of them, sobbing and wiping their wet faces with their dirty hands.

  I fidgeted with the door-handle of the room, which had been worn thin through long use and hurt you if you were not careful. And when they began hanging the cloth on the walls and brought the candles from the silver closet, when I heard the shuffling steps of people carrying something heavy and coming down the stairs, I ran out into the garden among the falling leaves.

  A mist was rising, and a drizzle had set in. The fine weather was over. I saw a blue beetle running past and I trod on it. I had done just what my father did when he was angry with a man. Alone there in the garden, huddled on a stone bench, I could not help crying.

  Once in the summer the stone had been so hot that Aglaia and I had tried who could keep a hand on it longest. Her white hand was so deli
cate that it had become blistered... A chill drop of rain fell from the sky on my forehead. I made my way indoors again. A dull yellow light filtered from the death-chamber; I peeped in, and saw the coffin standing on a bier hung with black; on it lay a silver cross and a big wreath made of tinsel, coloured glass and very tiny mirrors. The wax melted and ran down it, the candles flickered. The flowers smelt of earth.

  My aunt was kneeling by the coffin.

  “Oh, my poor dear Aglaia,” I heard her moan, “never again to see your darling face!”

  She turned her swollen eyes to me, and asked, “Is it raining?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered sullenly.

  And then a scream escaped me, and I wept so wildly that my aunt took me by the shoulders and spoke roughly to me.

  “You must not do that, boy, you must not! People will be coming here in a minute!”

  The tread of many feet was heard. The room became suddenly thronged with people: a great murmur of voices arose, and the bullfinch jumped about in its cage from perch to perch, and kept screaming:

  “Look, look, look! Horses!”

  I stood up. The pastor came. He was troubled with a bad cold, and flourished his handkerchief now and then. By him Aglaia had been baptised and confirmed. Carriages were driving up: the Sassens arrived, the Zochtes, the Merentheims, the cuirassiers from town, Doctor Zeidlow, old Countess Trettin, the Hohentrapps... The church bell sounded from the village, slowly, mournfully, ding… dong… ding… dong.

  Then the school-children came in. My aunt beckoned to the schoolmaster. I heard her saying through her sobs:

  “You are to sing the same hymn that you sang for my blessed Hanschen, even though she has been confirmed. For she is as pure and innocent as a newborn babe. O God! O God!”

  Ursula Sassen and Gisbrecht approached and gently led her away. Then the servants lifted up the coffin and carried it out into the rain. It was only a short way to the churchyard. Crows were sitting on the drooping willows. Crooked old crosses bent over towards either side of the gravelled path. The iron doors of the family vault stood open, displaying their rusty inner sides. Above the vault, resting on two crossbones, was a marble skull.

  The birds had built a nest in its gaping mouth. But the nest was empty and forsaken. Moss grew on the top of the skull like woolly hair. I seemed to notice everything. The men put the coffin down and the school-children sang as my aunt had desired, a hymn which is usually sung only for very little children, such as my cousin Hans, who had been two years old when he died.

  “When little inheritors of Heaven Die in their innocence They are not lost to us. They are only lifted to Heaven By their Father That they may not be lost.”

  Then the pastor spoke. He blew his nose again and again, and spoke his words during the pauses. The old man was crying. Even the eighty-years-old Countess Trettin raised her handkerchief to her eyes.

  “Dust unto dust,” said the pastor.

  The coffin was carried down the stairs of the vault. Every sound was hollow, and the echoes were full of awe. Voices came from below. Something fell with a clatter, down there in the gloom. The rain poured down harder and harder. The carriages drove away through pools of water. The men tied red handkerchiefs over their hats, the women threw their skirts over their heads when they went out.

  My father looked round darkly. The sexton approached him with the keys of the vault.

  “Here. Drink,” said my father, and the sexton, all wet, and his teeth chattering, bowed low.

  He made a grimace and lifted his hand to his shoulder. He suffered from rheumatism.

  “Aglaia is freezing,” was my disconsolate thought...

  When I got back to the big house it was empty, the passages were still. But there was whispering everywhere, for the clocks went on ticking. The stairway creaked all night, and the wind wailed in the chimneys. It was a terribly strange house... So big and so empty.

  Chapter Six

  In my father’s house a Dutch clock stood on the first-floor landing, with a bright dial on which moved the moon, the sun and the stars. The twisted hands passed over these as they went their way, and the pendulum swung forward and back in a muffled tone, hollow and threatening: Boom! Boom!

  At every quarter the clockwork sounded its treble stroke that seemed to come from afar, ding-dang-dong. At the end of each hour, as the number of strokes told the time, a door swung open above the dial and a little brown cock slipped out and flapped its wings with a groaning noise instead of a shrill crow because it had lost its voice. When the hour was struck the bird drew back and the door was shut again. At noon, however, instead of the cock, a porcelain angel came out, dressed in a gold garment trimmed with blue, and with three stiff jerks raised a green palm leaf. And at midnight it was Death that appeared instead of the angel. So, at least, we children had been told when Aglaia was still alive.

  One night I happened to be standing at the top of the stairs. The landing smelt of apples and the strange wood of the large wardrobes along the wall. The walls were hung with carved wooden deer heads, on which were affixed antlers that my father and grandfather had taken. My father and grandfather had won so many spoils of the chase that at least a hundred heads were to be found all over the house. One of the deer had been kept tame in a paddock and afterwards let loose. Then it tossed a keeper to death and the servants used to say that his blood still clung to the antlers. The paint had peeled off the eyeballs of this deer’s head and it looked down on me uncannily with blind white eyes.

  Old Margaret, who shuffled up and down the passages with her stick, and who was allowed to live on at our house out of charity, had told me that about midnight on a death-anniversary the dead passed through the house in which they had been happy when they were alive. So as I stood at the top of the stairs, I held a candlestick in my hand, burning a wax candle that had burnt over Aglaia’s coffin a year ago, and waited for her to come.

  The cupboards creaked, something went tap, tap, tap on the wall, then there was a sound like a sigh. The wind swept over the roof, and the tiles rattled. The clock struck twelve. As the first stroke rang out, the door above the dial swung open and the little Death came forth. Its hourglass and scythe turned to the right, then to the left, and its skeleton hand was raised to beat time with the strokes.

  “Boom-boom,” went the clock, hoarsely.

  “Aglaia!” I called in a low voice, and I peered fearfully down the passage.

  Then a door opened noiselessly, and by the uncertain light of my candle I saw a very old woman. Her face was all wrinkled and brown, and she wore a big white bonnet. I staggered back against the wall, and when I had controlled myself with all the strength of will I possessed I looked again, but I could see nothing any longer except the closed door... Then down the stairs I heard a cough and shuffling footsteps. Something grey came hobbling up. The candlestick shook in my hand. But it was only old Margaret.

  Growing anxious about me she had come to see where I was. I clung to her sleeve like a child and told her all that had just happened. She chuckled, and nodded.

  “It was the old lady, Aglaia’s great-grandmother,” she explained. “Aglaia Starke, the burgomaster’s daughter, who spoilt your pedigreed shopwoman. Her family was in trade. You saw right, Melchior, you saw right. It was she who came, not the young Aglaia.”

  She caught at my coat. But I tore myself away and went stumbling down the stairs.

  Chapter Seven

  That afternoon a villager named Heiner Fessl, the blacksmith, was executed. The magistrate was attempting to seduce Fessl’s wife, and Fessl happened to overhear it. When it seemed to him that his wife was yielding, Fessl left his forge and burst into the bedroom with a red-hot iron, which he thrust into the magistrate. The magistrate died in great pain. The woman was also long in dying.

  There were no powerful protectors to take up Fessl’s case, and he was sentenced to death on the wheel. Early in the morning of the terrible day the executioner went into the fields and promised the rav
ens that they would have a poor sinner’s flesh for supper. So the hangman’s doves perched on the roofs all day, waiting. As the hour approached for the event my father ordered me to put on my lavender-grey silk coat and accompany him.

  “You are a milksop and a booby, and no Dronte,” he said, “so I am going to cure you.”

  I felt sick with fear when I heard in the distance the muffled drums and the murmur of the crowd. All the streets were crowded. Fessl had been promenaded about the town in the executioner’s tumbril, and now they were bringing him back to the square in which the scaffold had been erected. I was relieved when I found that we were unable to get close to the scaffold, the crowd refusing to let us pass. They paid no attention for once to my father’s rank.

  “There,” growled my father; “see how bold the canaille gets when they gather together.”

  But he softened when the baker obsequiously brought us two chairs to sit on from his booth near by.

  “What you are going to see will do you good,” said my father, after a while. “Justice does not work with rose-water and sugar-candy. If it did, we, the nobility, would have to break rocks for the roads and hand over our lands and goods to the rabble.”

  All the trees surrounding the square were swarming with people. Just in front of us a horrible fellow, dressed like a Hessian cattle-dealer, was perched on a lime tree. From under his worn three-cornered hat grinned an apeish face which he seemed able to twist into a thousand different expressions, and his yellow eyes were able to squint in the ugliest manner. His crooked nose almost touched his chin and gave him a devilish appearance which was still more devilish because of his hideous grimaces. The people near us thought him more amusing than uncanny. They shouted all sorts of crude and coarse words to him; and he answered with obscene gestures.

  Then the crowd began to push and crane forward. The sad procession had arrived in the square. Two attendants in dirty red coats led a stout, elderly, grey-haired man to the scaffold. Master Red-cap, the executioner, followed up the steps and stood at one side with bared arms.