The Swedish Cavalier

by Leo Perutz

  And he began to speculate on the nature of the nobleman who employed such lazy, neglectful and dishonest workers.

  “He must be as old as Methuselah,” he said, “a gout-ridden codger who cannot walk properly and has no inkling of what goes on in his fields. He spends the whole day sitting beside a warm stove, smoking his pipe and rubbing his legs with onion juice. He believes what his farmhands tell him—that’s why they cheat him so outrageously.”

  All this was lost on Tornefeld, who gathered only that his companion had at long last spoken of a warm stove. He was so convinced that he would soon be in a well-heated room that his brain fell prey to hallucinations.

  “Today is Martinmas,” he mumbled. “In Germany they eat and drink all day long at Martinmas. Smoking stoves, bubbling saucepans, bake-ovens full of pumpernickel. The farmer will welcome us as soon as we walk in—he’ll give us the choicest cuts off the goose, and we’ll wash them down with a mug of Magdeburg ale followed by a Rosoglio and Spanish bitters. That’s what I call a banquet! Drink up, my friend! Your very good health! God’s blessing on our festive board!”

  Tornefeld came to a halt, raised the imaginary glass in his hand, and bowed left and right. He slipped in so doing and would have fallen flat on his face had not the thief caught him by the shoulder and held him up.

  “Look where you’re going and stop dreaming!” he said. “Martinmas is long past. Forward march—don’t totter along like an old crone leaning on her stick.”

  Tornefeld gave a start and recovered his wits. The farmer, the smoking stove, the plateful of goose and mug of Magdeburg ale—all these had vanished: he was standing in open countryside with an icy wind buffeting his face. Misery descended on him once more. Bereft of hope and any prospect of an end to his sufferings, he sank to the ground and lay full length.

  “Are you mad?” exclaimed the thief. “Do you mean to lie there? What awaits you if you’re caught? The stocks, the gibbet, the iron collar, or the wooden boot, that’s what!”

  “Leave me be, for pity’s sake,” groaned Tornefeld. “I can go no further.”

  “On your feet,” the thief insisted. “Do you want to be hanged—do you want to run the gauntlet?”

  And he was suddenly overcome with rage at the thought that he had joined forces with someone who could do nothing but whine and dawdle. Had he remained on his own, he would long since have reached a place of safety. It would be the youngster’s fault alone if they were captured by the dragoons. He was furious with himself for being such a fool.

  “Why did you desert your regiment if you’re so eager to end on the gallows?” he roared. “You should have got yourself hanged right away. It would have been better for us both.”

  “I wanted to save my life, that’s why I deserted,” Tornefeld whimpered softly. “The court martial had sentenced me to death.”

  “What on earth possessed you to strike your captain? You should have knuckled under and bided your time. You’d still be a musketeer living off the fat of the land. As it is, you’re lying here with a long face.”

  “My captain slandered His Majesty’s most noble person,” Tornefeld whispered, staring stubbornly into space. “He called him a young rake and an arrogant Balthazar for ever spouting the Gospel to distract attention from his escapades. Only a blackguard would have suffered him to speak of my king in such a way.”

  “For myself, I’d rather have six blackguards than one fool. What concern is the king of yours?”

  “I did my duty as a Swede, a soldier, and a nobleman,” said Tornefeld.

  The thief had briefly thought of leaving him to lie there and making off on his own. When he heard these words, however, it occurred to him that he, too, had his vagabond’s code of honour, and that this prostrate youth, for all his fine speeches, was a nobleman no longer: like himself, Tornefeld now belonged to the great fraternity of the destitute. Unable to abandon the boy without besmirching his own honour, he began to reason with him again.

  “Get up, friend, I entreat you. Get up, the dragoons are after us—they’re out to capture you. Do you want us both to end on the gallows, for Christ’s sake? Think of the provosts, think of the thrashing you’ll get! Remember, deserters from the imperial army are flogged nine times around the gibbet before they’re hanged!”

  Tornefeld struggled to his feet and gazed about him with a bemused expression. The veil of mist in the east had been rent asunder by the wind to disclose a vast tract of countryside. The thief saw that he was on the right track and nearing his destination.

  Before him lay a derelict windmill and, beyond it, reeds and marshes and moorland and hills and gloomy forests. He knew them well, those hills and forests. They formed part of the diocesan estate with its forges and stamp-mill, its quarries, smelting furnaces and limekilns. This was a realm ruled jointly by Prometheus and the arrogant bishop known far and wide as “the Devil’s Ambassador.” On the horizon the thief fancied he could see tongues of flame darting from the limekilns he had fled not long ago. Fire met the eye at every turn, violet and dusky red and stained black with smoke. That was where the living dead, the thieves and vagrants who had once been his comrades, groaned as they hauled the carts to which they were chained. They had escaped the gallows and ended in hell. As he himself had once done, they spent their days breaking stones bare-handed in the bishop’s quarries, stone after stone for a term of nine long years. They raked glowing slag from the furnaces before whose fiery mouths they stood day and night in the cramped wooden huts they called “coffins.” The flames seared their cheeks and brows, but they no longer felt the heat. All they felt were the whips with which they were driven to work by the bishop’s bailiff and his minions.

  Such was the place to which the thief aspired to return. It was his last resort and refuge, for there were more gallows than church towers in this part of the world, and he knew that the hemp for the rope that should have hanged him had already been heckled and broken.

  He turned away, and his eye fell on the mill. It had stood there deserted for years, the door bolted, the shutters closed. The miller was dead. It was said locally that he had hanged himself because the bishop’s bailiff had distrained his mill, donkey and sacks of flour. Now, however, the thief perceived that the sails were turning. He could hear the axle of the great crab creaking and see smoke rising from the chimney of the miller’s house.

  There was a story current in the neighbourhood. The peasants whispered that the miller left his grave once a year and worked his mill for the space of a night in order to repay a pfennig of his debt to the bishop. The thief had heard this story but knew that it was idle talk. The dead never left their graves. Besides, it was daytime now, not night-time. If the sails were turning in the wintry sunlight, it could only mean that the mill had acquired a new owner.

  The thief rubbed his hands and squared his shoulders.

  “From the look of it,” he said, “we shall have a roof over our heads today.”

  “All I want,” Tornefeld muttered, “is a morsel of bread and a bale of straw.”

  His companion laughed.

  “What were you expecting,” he scoffed, “a feather bed with silken curtains? A French potage, perhaps, with cakes and Hungarian wine to follow?”

  Although the door was unlocked, the miller was nowhere to be seen, neither in his parlour nor in his bedchamber. They even looked for him in the attic, but to no avail. The mill was likewise deserted, yet someone had to be living in the house: a small fire of logs was burning in the stove, and on the table stood a plate of bread and sausage and a pitcher of small beer.

  The thief looked about him suspiciously. Being a connoisseur of human nature, he realised that the table had not been laid for folk without a coin in their pockets. He would have preferred to take the bread and sausage and slink off, but Tornefeld, now that he was in a warm room, had recovered his spirits in full. He seated himself at the table, knife in hand, as if the miller had smoked and fried the sausage for his personal benefit.

 
“Eat and drink, my friend,” he said. “You’ve never been more honourably treated in your life. I’ll pay for whatever we consume. A toast, my friend! Your very good health and that of all gallant soldiers! Vivat Carolus Rex! Tell me, are you a Lutheran?”

  “Lutheran or Papist as the world pleases,” the thief replied, tucking into the sausage. “Whenever I see shrines and crucifixes beside the road I sing out an ‘Ave Maria gratia plena’ to all who come my way. When I’m in Lutheran territory, I say a Paternoster.”

  “That won’t do,” said Tornefeld, and stretched his legs beneath the table. “No man can be two things at once. Persist in that vein and you’ll be damned to all eternity. I myself am of the Protestant persuasion—I scorn the Pope and his precepts. Charles of Sweden is the shield and buckler of all Lutherans. Join me in a toast to his health and the death of all his enemies!”

  He raised his tankard of ale and drained it.

  “The Elector of Saxony has allied himself against Charles with the Muscovite Tsar. I find that laughable. It’s as if an ox and a billy-goat had conspired to vanquish a noble stag. Fall to, my friend—enjoy your meal! I’m landlord and cook, waiter and potboy all in one. The cuisine could be better, I grant you. I wouldn’t say no to an omelette or a morsel of roast beef. My belly’s crying out for something hot.”

  “But you didn’t despise cold fare yesterday,” the thief twitted him. “No one could have grubbed up frozen turnips more eagerly than you.”

  “Ah yes, my friend,” said Tornefeld, “they were dreadful days and indescribable hardships—I never thought I’d survive them. I could already see my funeral procession, candles, wreaths, pall-bearers, coffin, and all. Well, I’m still alive, thank God. I’ve a sure defence against Death’s scythe, and in two weeks’ time I’ll be manning the trenches beside my king.”

  He patted the pocket in which he kept his “arcanum,” as he called it, then pursed his lips and proceeded to whistle a sarabande, beating time on the table with his fingers.

  The thief felt a renewed hatred for this aristocratic youth who had so lately sprawled, wretched and despairing, in the snow. He had brought Tornefeld thus far with the utmost difficulty, yet now the boy sat whistling as if every street were too narrow for him and the world itself too small. A living death among the living dead in the bishop’s infernal stamp-mill and smeltery—that was the most he himself could hope for, whereas this youngster was free to go forth, armed with his arcanum, in quest of fame and fortune. The thief, who would have given anything to set eyes on Tornefeld’s precious arcanum, tried to nettle him into showing it.

  “Don’t take this amiss, young friend,” he said, “but you’re setting off for the war like someone going to a country fair. Why not thresh a farmer’s corn and sweep out his stables instead? War is hard fare, believe me. To chew it, a man needs sharper teeth than yours.”

  Tornefeld stopped his whistling and drumming.

  “I wouldn’t be ashamed to be a farmhand,” he replied. “It’s an honourable estate—after all, Gideon was threshing wheat when the angel appeared to him—but we Swedish noblemen are born warriors. We’re not suited to carting a farmer’s corn or sweeping out his stables.”

  “For all that,” said the thief, “I think you’re better suited to sitting beside a stove than facing an enemy in battle.”

  Tornefeld had been about to pour himself another tankard of ale. He kept his temper, but his hand trembled as he replaced the pitcher on the table.

  “I shall happily perform any duty proper to an honourable soldier,” he retorted. “The Tornefelds have always been soldiers, so why should I skulk beside a stove? My grandfather commanded the Blues at Lützen. He took the field with his king, Gustavus Adolphus, and shielded him with his own body when His Majesty was unhorsed. My father fought in eleven battles and engagements. He lost an arm during the assault on Saverne, but what would you know of Saverne and how things were there? What would you know of the thunder and lightning of battle, the smoke and the screams, the sound of drum and trumpet, the cries of ‘Advance!’ and ‘Retire!’, ‘Rally!’ and ‘Charge!?’ Nowadays the people of Saverne parch hops and weave carpets. That you may possibly know, but nothing more.”

  “Yet you quit your company like a coward,” said the thief. “You deserted your regiment in disgrace. I saw you lying in the snow, weeping. You’re not fit to be a soldier—you’ll never bring yourself to stand guard, dig trenches, charge the enemy, or endure cold and hardship.”

  Tornefeld remained silent. He sat there with his head bowed, staring into the fire.

  “When you hear the drums,” the thief pursued, “I suspect you’ll fear for your miserable life. You’ll look around for a stokehole or a chimney and crawl into it.”

  “By insulting me,” Tornefeld said in a low voice, “you impugn the honour of the Swedish nobility. I won’t stand for it.”

  “Like it or not, it’s all one to me,” sneered the thief. “I consider all noblemen decadent, and I don’t give a fig for their precious honour.”

  At that, Tornefeld sprang to his feet and stood there, pale with anger and humiliation. For want of any other weapon, he snatched up the pitcher and drew back his arm.

  “Not another word,” he gasped, “or I’ll have your hide.”

  But the thief had long since armed himself with the bread knife.

  “Come on, then,” he said with a laugh. “Your threats don’t frighten me. Let’s see if that arcanum of yours renders you proof against steel. If not, I’ll put so many holes in you that . . .”

  He broke off. They both lowered their weapons, the one the bread knife and the other the pitcher, suddenly aware that they were not alone.

  A man was seated on the bench beside the stove. He had a face like Spanish leather, yellowish and wrinkled, and his sunken eyes resembled two empty walnut shells. He wore a jerkin of red cloth, a broad-brimmed waggoner’s hat with a feather in it, and a pair of heavy, knee-length riding boots. And as he sat there in silence with bared teeth and crooked mouth, the other two were overcome with fear. The thief, convinced that this was the dead miller come from Purgatory to see how his mill was faring, surreptitiously crossed himself behind Tornefeld’s back. He also invoked Christ’s agony, wounds, water and blood in the hope that the miller’s ghost would promptly vanish into a cloud of stinking, sulphurous vapour and return to Purgatory, but the man in the red jerkin continued to sit there motionless, staring at them like an owl about to swoop on its prey.

  “Where did you spring from?” Tornefeld asked, his teeth chattering. “I didn’t see you come in.”

  “A little old woman brought me in a bucket,” the man replied with a low laugh. His voice had the muffled sound of one shovelful of graveyard soil landing on another. “What of you? What are you doing here, eating my bread and drinking my beer. You expect me to say grace for you?”

  “He looks as if the Devil’s kept him pickled in vinegar for ten years,” the thief muttered to himself.

  “Hush, he may take offence,” Tornefeld whispered hurriedly. Aloud, he said, “Your pardon, sir, but everything’s frozen stiff outside and times are so hard that I haven’t tasted a morsel of bread for three whole days, so help me God. That’s why I sat down at your table uninvited.”

  “He looks as if a weasel breathed in his face,” the thief said softly.

  “Uninvited, sir,” Tornefeld repeated with a bow, “although I don’t have the honour of your acquaintance. However, rest assured that you’ll be duly recompensed.”

  The thief realised that this was no way to converse with a ghost. It also occurred to him that he had used the wrong formula in his haste and confusion. One invoked Christ’s blood and wounds against dropsy, smallpox or gangrene, but not to banish evil spirits. Before he could recite the correct spell, the man in the waggoner’s hat turned and addressed him.

  “From the way you look at me, fellow, you know who I am.”

  “I know too well who you are,” the thief replied in a trembling voice, �
�and I also know where you hail from. You’ve come from the House of Limbo, where the windows belch flame and folk bake apples on the windowsills.”

  He had a vision of Purgatory, the fiery abode of souls in need of purification. That was the House of Limbo, but the man in the red jerkin took him to mean the bishop’s smelting furnaces and limekilns, from which smoke and tongues of flame rose heavenward day and night.

  “I see you don’t know me after all,” he said. “I’m not one of my lord bishop’s smelters, foundrymen or furnacemen.”

  Snowflakes were whirling outside. The thief took a step toward the window and pointed to the windmill’s sails, which now hung motionless.

  “It’s my belief,” he said in a low, halting voice, “that you’re the same miller who fled this world with a noose about his neck, and that you now dwell in the fiery abyss.”

  “Yes, I’m that same miller.” The man in the red jerkin rose from the bench beside the stove and fell to pacing up and down. “Yes, I’m he, and it’s true that I once, at an evil hour, sought to end my life with a rope, but the bailiff and his minions arrived in time. They cut me down and the surgeon bled me. My life was restored to me. Now I’m a waggoner in the service of His Grace the bishop. I drive back and forth along the highway, bringing my master merchandise from all manner of lands and cities—from Venice and Mechlin, Warsaw and Lyon. And you? What’s your trade? Whence do you come and whither are you bound?”

  The thief eyed him uneasily as he paced the room, spurs jingling. He felt sure that this long-dead man, who tried to pass for a creature of flesh and blood, knew perfectly well that he was looking at a thief who had spent his young life stealing all that came his way: bacon and eggs, bread and beer, ducks from the pond and nuts off the tree. Rather than speak of his trade, therefore, he levelled a hesitant finger at the gloomy woods in which the forges and the stamp-mill lay.