Late at night, after the star of Bethlehem, so-many-million light years away, had by the foresight of God blazed on Christmas Trees and in the dreams of children, and on the pressed earth floors of churches, and on the white foreheads of cows, and the sacred hour was past, and the angels were inaudibly singing, he started for home.
Meanwhile, in various parts of the country, the police, wishing to be home with their children and wives, kept their eyes open and saw many a lurking shadow and many a starting shade, many a bush lift itself from its roots and many a tree instantly wave its arms and then regain its former stillness. The earth creaked, the fences sighed, the brittle ruts cracked, distant sounds were magnified as in a microphone. A stray dog seemed a wolf, and a bat an owl. They were startled out of their skins by the patrol, and he who had on his beat the farm of The Belated, which stood between the cemetery and the Great Battle Oak, on the way to Poverty Gully, sweated his imagination to keep the farmer’s Christmas tip and Christmas morning grog before his mind’s eye. The house slept, but not so the Great Oak nor the cemetery.
The policeman started from one of these black waking nightmares that make the last hours of a vigil endless and horrible, to see a hobbling shadow moving on the opposite side of the road. The personage approached rapidly but as if burdened, he was tallish, he wore a cap. The policeman, acting almost automatically indeed, although afterwards he recounted in admirably logical detail his perceptions and conclusions, pointed his gun and called to the person to stop, at the same time rushing into the middle of the road. The unknown stopped. The policeman’s knees shaking, scarce bore him. The unknown, dropping his burden, began to run, but in an embarrassed way as if he were gone in the legs, and the policeman triumphantly leaped upon him, fired his gun into the air and had the pride and joy of seeing a light spring up in the farmer’s house.
The farmer’s son came running out with a gun, and between them, the two of them, on that dark and freezing Christmas morning, dragged the limp burglar, captured at last, to the police-station, some thousand yards away. The creature, in a raucous weeping voice, protested that he was not a burglar, that he was merely going home, that he was some other person, that the policeman and the farmer’s son were cows and thieves: but he was drunk and they paid no attention to him at all; they were so overjoyed, indeed, that they did not even hear what he said. The policeman saw another stripe on his arm, the farmer’s son figured out the saving now that their costly vigilance could be relaxed.
Between them they carried the undeniable proof of their capture’s trade, a sack full of objects of all kinds, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a tin canister, for example. At the police-station before an oil-lamp they surveyed a miserable creature whose age and lineaments they could ill determine, covered in mud from knees to forehead, filthy, crushed, bleeding from hands and face, slobbering and weeping.
The farmer’s son suddenly had an uncomfortable spasm. He listened to the burglar’s clamour, and became convinced that the heroic adventure was a farce: the burglar said he was Odilet, and he was Odilet, he was indeed Odilet, Odilet drunk, fallen by the wayside, bleeding, staggering, fallen into the horses’ trough, but ever bearing onwards and homewards the Christmas offerings for the poor and deserving. With annoyed apologies they set poor Odilet outside the lock-up and watched him go staggering down the road. The policeman realised he had caught a chill: the farmer’s son halfway home began to laugh irresistibly, to shout with laughter under the black sky. He laughed so much that he had to reel against a fence to hold his wind, and he hit himself on the chest, “Oh, oh, oh, ow, ow, ah, eeeeee!” A cow started to moo, a cock began to crow. Then began that long and devilish country symphony of the farmyard waking at midnight, when cock crows to cock, and dog barks in his lonely hole to dog, for hours without a break. Presently this all died down; the farmer’s son was at home and in bed, and the policeman was spinning out fine his wife’s sympathy.
After this fiasco, clearly, doubts were ashamed and hid their noses, the dogs were tired and laid their heads on the straw, the stars struggled over the sky in a fitful nightmare, and all was quiet; the patrol on the farther side of Poverty Gully could not even hear the hoarse whispering of the waterfall, dwindled to a thread in that dry winter.
This glen called Poverty Gully was situated within a mile of the war memorial which marked the centre of the village. It had been, in olden times, a smugglers’ lair, but since the wars of 1908 had been overgrown and forgotten. The dense thickets had lately been partly cut away and the glen, though roughly grown and full of old butts and boles, was sometimes used for a Sunday walk, or youthful loves.
Plavnica, the policeman, was thinking at this moment on some such subject, when he heard a faint sound and imagined it was the fall, or the creak, of an elm by the glen path. It soon proved to be irregular soft footfalls ascending the slight mound that led to the glen. Plavnica stood aside cautiously, and saw a thin tall form topped by a cap rising slowly, and blotting out the sky. Plavnica’s belt buckle clicked against his mantle button and his muscles sprang to attention. He thought, “The burglar hides in the Gully. I shall track him and arrest him on the spot.” His wits worked fast, and he was all preparedness. He would, having tracked the burglar to his lair, leave him there, if he showed any disposition to stay, and run for help to block both ends of the glen: if that was not possible, he would try his chances alone with the desperate and cunning man.
The burglar, walking unevenly and nervously, changed his pack on to his left shoulder, as if wearied out with the weight, and presently had got down into the bottom of the Gully. The Gully was hardly large enough to hold a hundred men pressed close together: the path was not more than two hundred yards long from rim to rim, and it wound and hopped by the side of the stream and leaped and skirted rocks and trees. Plavnica approached the glen, heard the man grunt several times, and then perceived a small pencil of light open and sway along the path. As Plavnica had guessed, the burglar made straight for the old smugglers’ lair, now planted with a table and seats. He seemed to put down his burden and resign himself to sleep with grunts and mumblings, and to undertake from time to time a melancholy soliloquy the sound of which reached Plavnica clearly, although the words did not.
Plavnica took off his boots and descended the hardened road in his socks. At a fair distance he put his boots on again and then ran down the road full tilt, his half-laced boots clopping, his mantle flying. At a distance of half-a-mile he blew his police whistle. No one responded; he had to go nearly to the village before he met with reinforcements.
Despite their discouragement over the adventure of Odilet, the two guards were impressed with Plavnica’s recital, and went to round up the patrols in a hurry, since they were no longer required to watch. A band of five set out for Poverty Gully, and there ingeniously disposed their forces.
The burglar had fallen into a heavy sleep; his snoring was heard by them some time before they reached the Gully. He did not awake till the sergeant pulled him by the shoulder. Then suddenly, he grabbed the sergeant’s legs, threw himself violently round, bit him on the knee and at the same moment kicked out at Plavnica. The two men fell upon the burglar and dragged him from the cave. Plavnica turned his bull’s eye upon him, and they saw a convulsed red face, disfigured with dirt, and with tears and rheum, topped by matted hair. They took him to the stream, washed his hands and face forcibly in the icy water and dragged him up the Gully while he protested unintelligibly and sobbed. Plavnica said, “The burglar is a foreigner.” His face was inflamed and puffed up and his eyes malignant: he was older than they had thought, but he had a crafty look. Presently he lapsed into silence and Plavnica whispered, “It’s more dangerous: he’ll try to make a break.” In his pockets they found fishing-lines with hooks attached, and a long thin rope, as well as a handkerchief folded into a triangle. Plavnica, a man of quick ideas, as we have already seen, deduced that the burglar used the fishing paraphernalia to yank light objects from open windows: the others swallowed this
theory hook, line and sinker, but the sergeant, jealous, began to bait our theoretician a bit, with “And suppose he’s simply a fisherman?”
All marched in high glee, but at a slow pace, the ones pulling, the others prodding. Plavnica bore the booty. At length they reached Rottenhill and their arrival on the outskirts was greeted by the cocks, dogs and kine with their chorus of a few hours before.
The policeman in charge was out when they reached the station: so they requisitioned the prisoner’s flask and soon emptied it. All were then so weary that they locked the burglar up until the sergeant in charge should wake, or return, or until morning came. They rolled themselves up in their cloaks and nodded: the burglar was caught, what need to watch? To watch would be pedantic.
The prisoner began to hammer on the cell, yelling in native idiom, “Let me out, blackguards, poisoners, torturers: I am not the burglar!” “Ah,” said Plavnica, “that man will never confess!” “But you have the evidence there, in that sack,” said the sergeant coldly. “He will say it was planted there by us,” replied Plavnica cunningly. “He will be made to confess,” said the sergeant sternly. “How are you going to do that?” asked Plavnica. “Keep him standing till he begs for a chair, and neither let him lie, sit, squat, lean, stand on one foot, nor bend his knees, until he confesses.” “What is better still,” said another policeman, “and what I’ve seen done to great effect, is to place a hot roast on the table at about twenty feet, no, say ten, so that he can smell it, and keep him from eating for twenty-four hours.” “But how do you keep it hot?” asked Plavnica. “They have a special heater in Kronstadt,” said the town policeman with pride. “Suppose he is a vegetarian,” demurred another: “no, there is an infallible method; take off his boots and make him run about on burrs and pricks, a man running behind him with a whip. Presently he falls and has to pick himself up again, and the pricks adhere to face and hands.” “Suppose we can’t find any burrs and pricks!” said another: “no, the best thing is to tell him his wife’s under arrest, and will be released when he confesses.” “He looks like a bachelor to me,” said the youngest policeman doubtfully: “no, I suggest that you cut the buttons off his braces and make him do a two-step in front of us here for a couple of hours.” “O, I couldn’t bear that,” said in a timorous voice a sentimental policeman who always wore a rose: “I think the most revolting thing would be to make him go out and clean up the—hum, hum, you boys know what I mean!” “Give him a couple of emetics every hour and he’ll spill his confession,” said a rude, brawny policeman. “No,” said Plavnica brightly: “keep him from sleeping. It’s very simple, the Chinese used to do it. In no time at all, he’ll sell you his mother’s tombstone for a bit of sleep, he’ll grant you all you want, he’ll confess to all the murders that’ve been relinquished for want of evidence these last twenty years.” “Suppose he suffers from insomnia,” said the sergeant brutally.
But presently conversation languished, and hearing the burglar behind doors breathing stertorously, they decided to keep him company. In the early morning, they looked in, found him still heavily asleep, searched him and found laudanum on him. Out of a slight torpor he shook himself to denounce them one and all as troublesome asses who were so ashamed of their blank record, that they would rather arrest an honest man than have the untellable tale of their indecipherable nothingness reach Head Office. He was an honest man, he was Odilet the deacon. At this the sergeant-in-charge exploded in a rage. “What, the impudent rascal: he’s taunting us now, for arresting Odilet. But how the devil does he know? “The burglar continued to announce that he was Odilet the deacon. He even dared to laugh at them all. A secret irritation worried them all. How had he found out about Odilet? Was there a listening post in the police-station? A hole under the floor, a dictaphone in the chimney? Did he find out the times of the rounds and hear the reports of the police? They became very uneasy. Perhaps the burglar was not one but a gang.
Their inquisition went on, but the wretch insisted that he was Odilet, gave Odilet’s name, age and domicile, and persisted in recalling a hundred incidents of Odilet’s life which were known, he said, to everyone in the community. “Not to us,” said the sergeant, very stiff. Nothing irritates the law more than impudent mockery, and that is very natural. When a man uses his truncheon to defend our property, we should not laugh at the wart on his nose, or his wits.
At midday two inspectors came down and interrogated the detained man, who had, following the excellent advice of the sergeant, been kept standing since early in the morning. They retired to discuss his obstinacy and to have dinner. The burglar had no dinner. They decided to send a man to the deacon’s rooms to get the deacon to come and confront the burglar himself. This was done. The burglar, who had been mocking up till that hour, began to change his tune: his face altered; instead of red it became rather whitish or greyish, and he looked very old indeed. Presently the news came that Odilet was out on his business and had left no message indicating his time of return. “Send for the landlady or the minister,” said the burglar, laughing bitterly. They dismissed this impudent defiance.
At 3.30 in the afternoon there entered the sergeant who had been on duty late the night before; seeing the burglar held at attention by the tired armed guard, he exclaimed, “For the love of Christ, what is it now?” The guard saluted and said, “Inspectors’ orders, sir!” “Why?” said the sergeant. “The prisoner is suspected of being the burglar,” replied the guard. At that the sergeant let out a shout, went and brought the burglar a chair, and began to laugh and laugh, at last asking between gasps, “For somebody’s sweet sake, who arrested him? Do not keep me in suspense: it is too much …” The guard properly surprised, said, “I do not know.” An Inspector poked his head round the door and said, “Sergeant Busno? What is the joke?” Sergeant Busno, calming himself as well as he could, replied, “I apologise, sir, but this is twice in one night that Deacon Odilet has been arrested for burglary.” He went to the table and looked at the list of the things found in Odilet’s pack, a pair of pewter candlesticks (much battered), a tin canister, etc. He began to laugh again. At that moment Odilet fell to the floor, and the farmer’s son rode up to say that the burglar had entered their house in the early hours of the morning and stolen the new china clock and half a dozen silver forks got as presents with the porridge.
BEFORE the end of the Police Commissioner’s tale, clouds had begun to gather, and a cool breeze to blow. “We will have rain this afternoon, but not yet,” said the Danish Woman, turning a weather-eye to the sky. “Tonight we will have heavy rain. How we depend on the sun! In the sun I feel like a dragon-fly or gnat, bright and restless: when even a slight shadow falls, I cannot repress a shiver of fear, as if the ice-age would suddenly dart out of the pole and freeze us to death in these attitudes. Even policemen, I see,” she continued turning to the Police Commissioner, “are sensitive to cold and dark.”
“The weather has changed: that is an excuse for a tale,” said the Master of the Day. “Will you tell it, woman from Denmark, daughter of Copenhagen? You must have tales in your blood, all you people from the Sound.”
“I am too sad, at this moment: I would be boring,” said the Danish Woman.
“Then, a boring, sad tale, for it is your turn,” commanded the Master.
The Danish Woman’s Tale
THE DEATH OF SVEND
IN the gloomy January of a recent year my brother Svend came home to Copenhagen to marry. He had worked two years in Germany and five in France, perfecting himself in the bookbinding trade, which he first learned at home in Denmark. He came home once a year, at Christmas, during those seven years, and on each trip he spent his time courting Karen whom he first saw when she was fifteen. She was even then pretty, voluptuous and vain, and had had lovers, they said, from the age of thirteen. Svend would believe nothing like that and was so angry at the least breath of criticism that it was not possible for us to speak of her except with praise.
Svend had one eye green and one brown, he li
mped badly with a diseased hip, and his complexion was yellowish because of the way he worked, stooping all day over a bench in a workshop, and all night over his own private bench in the poor hotel room he rented. He was difficult to get on with, dry, and without charm; the advances of ordinary conversation he met with silence; but he was extremely kind to the poor and miserable, he worked unremittingly, he lived chastely in the hope of marrying Karen, and from beneath his demeanour of commonplace sobriety occasionally broke the sly smiles and twinklings of a lonely drollery.
Karen got prettier, always wore beautiful shoes, gay woollen caps and sweaters, ran down the streets like a rainbow rabbit, drank strong Danish drinks like a fish, was all fleece, bravado and brightness, danced, chattered and played all the popular sports, and wore for short periods engagement rings of various designs and values. The rings disappeared, the smiles remained; yet when Svend returned from Paris for his fifth Christmas, Karen was quite kind to him and for the first time held out a promise to him. His proposal of marriage was rejected by Karen and her brothers made fun of him publicly: yet a month after he returned to Paris he got an inconsequential but affectionate letter from her, with the postscript, “I pay no attention to my pompous stiffs of brothers: I do what I like in my own life.”
Svend said nothing to anybody, but looked at his bankbook which showed the results of his five years’ saving. He had saved every year three-fifths of his salary, and all the money he made in outside work. He would have saved more but for the Christmas journey home, the new suit he bought each year to gladden the sight of Karen, the few expensive leathers he had to buy for special orders, and the medical expenses for his bad leg.
The Salzburg Tales Page 12