by Anthology
An excited crowd immediately surrounded the speaker. “But the fleet!” they cried.
“The fleet is grounded fast on the Greenway polder. Boisot may turn his one eye seaward for a wind till famine and pestilence have carried off every mother’s son of ye, and his ark will not be a rope’s length nearer. Death by plague, death by starvation, death by fire and musketry—that is what the burgomaster offers us in return for glory for himself and kingdom for Orange.”
“He asks us,” said a sturdy citizen, “to hold out only twenty-four hours longer, and to pray meanwhile for an ocean wind.”
“Ah, yes!” sneered the first speaker. “Pray on. There is bread enough locked in Pieter Adriaanszoon van der Werf’s cellar. I warrant you that is what gives him so wonderful a stomach for resisting the Most Catholic King.”
A young girl, with braided yellow hair, pressed through the crowd and confronted the malcontent. “Good people,” said the maiden, “do not listen to him. He is a traitor with a Spanish heart. I am Pieter’s daughter. We have no bread. We ate malt cakes and rapeseed like the rest of you till that was gone. Then we stripped the green leaves from the lime trees and willows in our garden and ate them. We have eaten even the thistles and weeds that grew between the stones by the canal. The coward lies.”
Nevertheless, the insinuation had its effect. The throng, now become a mob, surged off in the direction of the burgomaster’s house. One ruffian raised his hand to strike the girl out of the way.
In a wink the cur was under the feet of his fellows, and Harry, panting and glowing, stood at the maiden’s side, shouting defiance in good English at the backs of the rapidly retreating crowd.
With the utmost frankness she put both her arms around Harry’s neck and kissed him.
“Thank you,” she said. “You are a hearty lad. My name is Gertruyd van der Wert.”
Harry was fumbling in his vocabulary for the proper Dutch phrases, but the girl would not stay for compliments. “They mean mischief to my father”; and she hurried us through several exceedingly narrow streets into a three-cornered market place dominated by a church with two spires. ‘There he is,” she exclaimed, “on the steps of St. Pancras.”
There was a tumult in the market place. The conflagration raging beyond the church and the voices of the Spanish and Walloon cannon outside of the walls were less angry than the roar of this multitude of desperate men clamoring for the bread that a single word from their leader’s lips would bring them. “Surrender to the King!” they cried, “or we will send your dead body to Lammen as Leyden’s token of submission.”
One tall man, taller by half a head than any of the burghers confronting him, and so dark of complexion that we wondered bow he could be the father of Gertruyd, heard the threat in silence.
When the burgomaster spoke, the mob listened in spite of themselves.
“What is it you ask, my friends? That we break our vow and surrender Leyden to the Spaniards? That is to devote ourselves to a fate far more horrible than starvation. I have to keep the oath! Kill me, if you will have it so. I can die only once, whether by your hands, by the enemy’s, or by the hand of God. Let us starve, if we must, welcoming starvation because it comes before dishonor. Your menaces do not move me; my life is at your disposal. Here, take my sword, thrust it into my breast, and divide my flesh among you to appease your hunger. So long as I remain alive expect no surrender.”
There was silence again while the mob wavered. Then there were mutterings around us. Above these rang out the clear voice of the girl whose hand Harry still held—unnecessarily, it seemed to me.
“Do you not feel the sea wind? It has come at last. To the tower! And the first man there will see by moonlight the full white sails of the prince’s ships.”
For several hours I scoured the streets of the town, seeking in vain my cousin and his companion; the sudden movement of the crowd toward the Roman tower had separated us. On every side I saw evidences of the terrible chastisement that had brought this stout-hearted people to the verge of despair. A man with hungry eyes chased a lean rat along the bank of the canal. A young mother, with two dead babes in her arms, sat in a doorway to which they bore the bodies of her husband and father, just killed at the walls. In the middle of a deserted street I passed unburied corpses in a pile twice as high as my head. The pestilence had been there—kinder than the Spaniard, because it held out no treacherous promises while it dealt its blows.
Toward morning the wind increased to a gale. There was no sleep in Leyden, no more talk of surrender, no longer any thought or care about defense. These words were on the lips of everybody I met: “Daylight will bring the fleet!”
Did daylight bring the fleet? History says so, but I was not a witness. I know only that before dawn the gale culminated in a violent thunderstorm, and that at the same time a muffled explosion, heavier than the thunder, shook the town. I was in the crowd that watched from the Roman Mound for the first signs of the approaching relief. The concussion shook hope out of every face. “Their mine has reached the wall!” But where? I pressed forward until I found the burgomaster, who was standing among the rest. “Quick!” I whispered. “It is beyond the Cow Gate, and this side of the Tower of Burgundy.” He gave me a searching glance, and then strode away, without making any attempt to quiet the general panic. I followed close at his heels.
It was a tight run of nearly half a mile to the rampart in question. When we reached the Cow Gate this is what we saw:
A great gap, where the wall had been, opening to the swampy fields beyond: in the moat, outside and below, a confusion of upturned faces, belonging to men who struggled like demons to achieve the breach, and who now gained a few feet and now were forced back; on the shattered rampart a handful of soldiers and burghers forming a living wall where masonry had failed; perhaps a double handful of women and girls, serving stones to the defenders and boiling water in buckets, besides pitch and oil and unslaked lime, and some of them quoiting tarred and burning hoops over the necks of the Spaniards in the moat; my cousin Harry leading and directing the men; the burgomaster’s daughter Gertruyd encouraging and inspiring the women.
But what attracted my attention more than anything else was the frantic activity of a little figure in black, who, with a huge ladle, was showering molten lead on the heads of the assailing party. As he turned to the bonfire and kettle which supplied him with ammunition, his features came into the full light. I gave a cry of surprise: the ladler of molten lead was Professor Van Stopp.
The burgomaster Van der Werf turned at my sudden exclamation. “Who is that?” I said. “The man at the kettle?”
“That,” replied Van der Werf, “is the brother of my wife, the clockmaker Jan Lipperdam.”
The affair at the breach was over almost before we had had time to grasp the situation. The Spaniards, who had overthrown the wall of brick and stone, found the living wall impregnable.
They could not even maintain their position in the moat; they were driven off into the darkness.
Now I felt a sharp pain in my left arm. Some stray missile must have hit me while we watched the fight.
“Who has done this thing?” demanded the burgomaster. “Who is it that has kept watch on today while the rest of us were straining fools’ eyes toward tomorrow?”
Gertruyd van der Wed came forward proudly, leading my cousin. “My father,” said the girl, “he has saved my life.”
“That is much to me,” said the burgomaster, “but it is not all. He has saved Leyden and he has saved Holland.”
I was becoming dizzy. The faces around me seemed unreal. Why were we here with these people? Why did the thunder and lightning forever continue? Why did the clockmaker, Jan Lipperdam, turn always toward me the face of Professor Van Stopp? “Harry!” I said, “come back to our rooms.”
But though he grasped my hand warmly his other hand still held that of the girl, and he did not move. Then nausea overcame me. My head swam, and the breach and its defenders faded from sight.
Three days later I sat with one arm bandaged in my accustomed seat in Van Stopp’s lecture room. The place beside me was vacant.
“We hear much,” said the Hegelian professor, reading from a notebook in his usual dry, hurried tone, “of the influence of the sixteenth century upon the nineteenth. No philosopher, as far as I am aware, has studied the influence of the nineteenth century upon the sixteenth. If cause produces effect, does effect never induce cause? Does the law of heredity, unlike all other laws of this universe of mind and matter, operate in one direction only? Does the descendant owe everything to the ancestor, and the ancestor nothing to the descendant? Does destiny, which may seize upon our existence, and for its own purposes bear us far into the future, never carry us back into the past?”
I went back to my rooms in the Breede Straat, where my only companion was the silent clock.
THE COIN COLLECTOR
Jack Finney
“. . . will let me know the number of the pattern,” my wife was saying, following me down the hall toward our bedroom, “and I can knit it myself if I get the blocking done.”
I think she said blocking anyway, whatever that means. And I nodded, unbuttoning my shirt as I walked. It had been hot out today and I was eager to get out of my office clothes. I began thinking about a dark-green eight-thousand-dollar sports car I’d seen during noon hour in that big showroom on Park Avenue.
“. . . kind of a ribbed pattern with a matching freggel-heggis,” my wife seemed to be saying as I stopped at my dresser. I tossed my shirt on the bed and turned to the mirror, arching my chest.
“. . . middy collar, batten-barton sleeves with sixteen rows of smeddlycup balderdashes . . .” Pretty good chest and shoulders I thought, staring in the mirror; I’m twenty-six years old, kind of thin-faced, not bad-looking, not good-looking.
“. . . dropped hem, doppelganger waist, maroon-green, and a sort of frimble-framble daisystitch . . . Probably want two or three thousand bucks down on a car like that, I thought; the payments’d be more than the rent on this whole apartment. I began emptying the change out of my pants pockets glancing at each of the coins. When I was a kid there used to be an ad in a boys’ magazine: “Coin collecting can be PROFITABLE and FUN too! Why don’t you start TODAY?” It explained that a 1913 Liberty-head nickel—“and many others!”—was worth thousands and I guess I’m still looking for one.
“So what do you think?” Marion was saying. “You think they’d go well together?”
“Sure, they’d look fine.” I nodded at her reflection in my dresser mirror. She stood leaning in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, staring at the back of my head. I brought a dime up to my eyes for a closer look; it was minted in 1958 and had a profile of Woodrow Wilson, and I turned to Marion. “Hey, look,” I said, “here’s a new kind of dime—Woodrow Wilson.” But she wouldn’t look at my hand. She just stood there with her arms folded, glaring at me, and I said, “Now what? What have I done wrong now?” Marion wouldn’t answer, and I walked to my closet and began looking for some wash pants. After a moment I said coaxingly, “Come on, Sweetfeet, what’d I do wrong?”
“Oh, Al!” she wailed. “You don’t listen to me; you really don’t! Half the time you don’t hear a word I say!”
“Why, sure I do, honey.” I was rattling the hangers, hunting for my pants. “You were talking about knitting.”
“An orange sweater, I said, Al—orange. I knew you weren’t listening and asked you how an orange sweater would go with—close your eyes.”
“What?”
“No, don’t turn around! And close your eyes.” I closed them, and Marion said, “Now, without any peeking, because I’ll see you, tell me what I’m wearing right now.”
It was ridiculous. In the last five minutes, since I’d come home from the office, I must have glanced at Marion maybe two or three times. I’d kissed her when I walked into the apartment, or I was pretty sure I had. Yet standing at my closet now, eyes closed, I couldn’t for the life of me say what she was wearing. I worked at it; I could actually hear the sound of her breathing just behind me and could picture her standing there, a small girl five feet three inches tall, weighing just over a hundred pounds, twenty-four years old, nice complexion, pretty face, honey-blond hair, and wearing . . . wearing . . .
“Well, am I wearing a dress, slacks, medieval armor, or standing here stark naked?”
“A dress.”
“What color?”
“Ah—dark green?”
“Am I wearing stockings?”
“Yes.”
“Is my hair done up, shaved off or in a pony tail?”
“Done up.”
“O.K., you can look now.”
Of course the instant I turned around to look, I remembered. There she stood, eyes blazing, her bare foot angrily tapping the floor, and she was wearing sky-blue wash slacks and a white cotton blouse. As she swung away to walk out of the room and down the hall, her pony tail was bobbing furiously.
Well, brother—and you, too, sister—unless the rice is still in your hair you know what came next—the hurt indignant silence. I got into slacks, short-sleeved shirt and hua-rachos, strolled into the living room, and there on the davenport sat Madame Defarge grimly studying the list, disguised as a magazine, of next day’s guillotine victims. I knew whose name headed the list, and I walked straight to the kitchen, mixed up some booze in tall glasses, and found a screw driver in a kitchen drawer.
In the living room, coldly ignored by what had once been my radiant laughing bride, I set the drinks on the coffee table, reached behind Marion’s magazine, and gripped her chin between thumb and forefinger. The magazine dropped and I instantly inserted the tip of the screw driver between her front teeth, pried open her mouth, picked up a glass and tried to pour in some booze. She started to laugh, spilling some down her front, and I grinned, handing her the glass, and picked up mine. Sitting down beside her, I saluted Marion with my glass, then took a delightful sip and as it hurried to my sluggish blood stream I could feel the happy corpuscles dive in, laughing and shouting, and felt able to cope with the next item on the agenda which followed immediately.
“You don’t love me any more,” said Marion.
“Oh, yes, I do.” I leaned over to kiss her neck, glancing around the room over her shoulder.
“Oh, no, you don’t. Not really.”
“Oh, yes, I do. Really. Honey, where’s the book I was reading last night?”
“There! You see! All you want to do is read all the time! You never want to go out! The honeymoon’s certainly over around here, all right!”
“No, it isn’t, Sweetknees, not at all. I feel exactly the way I did the day I proposed to you; I honestly do. Was there any mail?”
“Just some ads and a bill. You used to listen to every word I said before we were married and you always noticed what I wore and you complimented me and you sent me flowers and you brought me little surprises and”—suddenly she sat bolt upright—“remember those cute little notes you used to send me! I’d find them all the time,” she said sadly, staring past my shoulder, her eyes widening wistfully. “Tucked in my purse maybe”—she smiled mournfully—“or in a glove. Or they’d come to the office on post cards, even in telegrams a couple times. All the other girls used to say they were just darling.” She swung to face me. “Honey, why don’t you ever . . .
“Help!” I said. “Help, help!”
“What do you mean?” Marion demanded coolly, and I tried to explain.
“Look, honey,” I said briskly, putting an arm companion-ably around her shoulders, “we’ve been married four years. Of course the honeymoon’s over! What kind of imbeciles,” I asked with complete reasonableness, “would we be if it weren’t? I love you, sure,” I assured her, shrugging a shoulder. “Of course. You bet. Always glad to see you; any wife of old A1 Pullen is a wife of mine! But after four years I walk up the stairs when I come home; I no longer run up three at a time. That’s life,” I said, clapping her c
heerfully on the back. “Even four-alarm fires eventually die down, you know.” I smiled at her fondly. “And as for cute little notes tucked in your purse—help, help!” I should have known better, I guess; there are certain things you just can’t seem to explain to a woman.
I had trouble getting to sleep that night—the davenport is much too short for me—and it was around two forty-five before I finally sank into a kind of exhausted broken-backed coma. Breakfast next morning, you can believe me, was a glum affair at the town home of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred E. Pullen, well-known, devoted couple.
Who can say whether the events of the night before affected those which now followed? I certainly couldn’t; I was too tired, dragging home from the office along Third Avenue, heading uptown from Thirty-fourth Street about five thirty the next evening. I was tired, depressed, irritated, and in no hurry at all to get home. It was hot and muggy outside and I was certain Marion would give me cold cuts for supper—and all evening long, for that matter. My tie was pulled down, my collar open, hat shoved back, coat slung over one shoulder, and trudging along the sidewalk there I got to wishing things were different.
I didn’t care how, exactly—just different. For example, how would things be right now, it occurred to me, if I’d majored in creative botany at college instead of physical ed? Or what would I be doing at this very moment if I’d gone to Siam with Tom Biehler that time? Or if I’d got the job with Enterprises, Incorporated, instead of Serv-Eez? Or if I hadn’t broken off with what’s-her-name, that big, black-haired girl who could sing “Japanese Sandman” through her nose?
At Thirty-sixth Street I stopped at the corner newsstand, plunking my dime down on the counter before the man who ran it; we knew each other long since, though I don’t think we’ve ever actually spoken. Glancing at me, he scooped up my dime, grabbed a paper from one of the stacks and folded it as he handed it to me; and I nodded my thanks, tucking it under my arm, and walked on. And that’s when it happened; I glanced up at a brick building kitty-corner across the street and there on a blank side wall three or four stories up was a painted advertisement—a narrow-waisted bottle filled with a reddish-brown beverage and lying half buried in a bed of blue-white ice. Painted just over the bottle in a familiar script were the words, “DRINK COCO-COOLA.”