Count Karlstein Page 8

  So saying, I accompanied her along the road to the woodcutter’s hut and our prospective campsite.

  When that deceitful man, Herr Snivelwurst, seized my wrist with his wet hand, I felt quite faint with Dismay. But, locked in the lumber room below my uncle’s study, some Sternness of Purpose began to return to my Soul.

  After all, now I was a captive. And had I not read, only the week before, of the ordeals and the triumph of Marianna, the Captive of the Abruzzi? She was imprisoned by her wicked cousin in order to force her to make over her fortune to him. A strangely similar plight to mine! Yet it was not my fortune (for I had none) which was at stake, but my Life; and while Marianna had friends and a lover, Verocchio, who fought for her release, I had no one. Except for Hildi, of course.

  I sat down, as the key turned in the lock and my Imprisonment began, and refused to acknowledge the Tears that coursed as free as the mountain torrents down my cheeks. I sat, in fact, as if I were a Princess defying her executioners—with a straight back and my hands folded in my lap and my head held high; and I blessed the memory of dear Miss Davenport, and her insistence that young ladies should comport themselves with Great Dignity even under the most Trying Circumstances.

  I comported myself thus for about a minute, and then I could bear it no longer and lay down and cried properly.

  It was a Horrid room. The window had not been cleaned since the invention of glass, and, besides, was barred with rusty iron rods set deeply into the stone. The bare floor was covered in dust; and such a jumble of objects filled the place as had never, I daresay, been seen since before the Flood.

  Being thoroughly cold and tired, I tried to sleep. There was a large tapestry draped over the back of a broken-down couch, and I might have covered myself with it for warmth had it not been for the picture it showed—a female Saint, I think, undergoing Circumstances even more Trying than mine—which made me extremely uneasy. So I bundled it up and thrust it out of sight behind an oak cabinet, and lay and shivered for a long time.

  But I could not sleep. I might have occupied my mind usefully with Improving Thoughts, but the only Improvement I could imagine then was a pair of wings, to enable me to fly to freedom. And, of course, a Head for Heights. I cleared the dust from the window and peered out hopefully, but there was nothing but a Horrid Precipice, with jagged crags several thousands of feet below.

  Was there anything, I wondered (in the spirit of Marianna, the Captive of the Abruzzi), in the room itself with which I could effect an escape? Marianna had spent her time reflecting upon her situation and drawing Moral Conclusions, but then she, poor girl, had been shut in a chilly dungeon, and chained, besides, so there was not a great deal for her to look at. I supposed that I would need some kind of Implement with which to prize open the door. But the only Implements at hand seemed to be made of porcelain. One was a shepherdess and the other was a dog, and they were both broken. I searched further and found: a bent telescope; a glass paperweight; a statue of some Indian god, dented; a box containing specimens of dead butterflies, pinned to a board; a chipped decanter with a sticky little puddle of something sweet in the bottom. (I tasted it—it was too sweet, and just as I sipped, I thought of Poison and nearly choked.) There were several old dresses, very dusty, full of moths; a broken looking-glass; a portrait of a fat lady; a portrait of a fat boy and girl, both very disagreeable, and a fat dog, even more so; a dull Dutch-looking landscape, in oil, without a frame; a dull peeling-gilt frame, of a different size, without a picture; a gentleman’s full-bottomed wig, inhabited by moths, the cousins of those in the dresses—the male branch of the family, no doubt; and—Horrid Discovery!—a Human Head.

  I have no doubt that I shrieked and put my hands to my mouth. I have observed that that is what I do when I am Startled. But the head that had startled me wore a good-humored, jolly expression and seemed not at all put out to have lost the company of its body.

  It was, of course, made of wood. I realized that it belonged to the wig. It had a little pedestal and a brightly painted face and was altogether the cheerfulest object that I had seen for many months; and I was so lonely by then that I spoke to it and set it up on the bamboo table beside the ottoman, and shook its wig for it and dressed it again. And instantly I felt more cheerful, as if I had been visited by a jovial old soul whose only purpose was to look after me.

  I told him everything that had happened and he listened with wonderful patience. And then, as if he were bringing me luck, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. The key turned in the lock.

  It was Frau Muller. I sat in a Dignified Manner upon the ottoman and looked straight ahead of me. She said nothing. I said nothing. She set down a tray upon the bamboo table and turned to leave. She left. She locked the door. She went downstairs.

  Food!

  There was a bowl of Frau Wenzel’s thickest soup, two slices of bread, an apple, and a glass of water. I ate ravenously and quite without manners; I even spoke with my mouth full. To the wooden man, of course. He didn’t mind.

  But I had not finished the soup before I made an Astonishing Discovery. Something hard clinked as I dipped my spoon into the bowl; I pushed it to the side—it fell back into the soup, but not before I had seen that it was a key! With the help of a slice of bread, I got it out and sucked it dry. Hildi—no one else could have done it! I blessed her, and I blessed Herr Woodenkopf, too, for the luck he’d brought.

  Being Prudent, I finished the soup before I escaped. (No sense in wasting it.) Being trained by Miss Davenport to anticipate emergencies, I refrained from eating the bread and the apple, dried (on a corner of one of the old dresses) the bread I had fished the key out of the soup with, and put bread and apple into my pocket for later. Then, as there was nothing to keep me there any longer, I left.

  But it was not as easy as that. I thought that I had better take something warm or else I should freeze to death in the forest, so I wrapped the thickest of the dresses around me. And I could not—though from a Practical Point of View, I knew I should—leave Herr Woodenkopf. He had brought me luck. And he cheered me up. And if everything else failed, I could at least throw him at Uncle Heinrich. So I picked him up, complete with wig, and we unlocked the door—very quietly; listened—very carefully; shut the door behind us—very nervously; and went downstairs.

  It was the longest walk of my life.

  Uncle Heinrich’s study was upstairs, and he or Herr Snivelwurst might come up or down at any minute; Frau Muller might come up to retrieve the tray; any of the other servants might cross the hall. I reached the stone archway at the bottom, and my heart was beating at least as loudly as the drum of the Red Indians in Martha, or The Maid of the Woods. I could hear it very clearly. Herr Woodenkopf, who was pressed against my chest with his wig over one eye, could hear it more clearly still, but that did not stop him protecting me, for the hall was empty. The fire was blazing, but otherwise it was dark.

  I was putting it off; but sooner or later I would have to cross the hall. When I had summoned all my courage, I ran as fast as I could, like a mouse, for the great door, praying to Herr Woodenkopf that it was not locked—and found it open—and sped through—and through the courtyard, and the gateway, and down the road like the very wind.

  Oh! It was cold! The dress I’d selected from those mothy bundles blew out clumsily and got in my way, but I blessed its thickness. I fell three times and rolled over and over and got up straight away and ran on. There had been no fall of snow in the last few hours, so I was able to keep to the tracks that had already been made. A little more than halfway down toward the village, I stopped to catch my breath.

  And saw, further down the slope but moving unmistakably up toward me, a Man!

  I plunged off the road instantly and concealed myself until he had passed. I did not know him, and although it was difficult to see clearly, I thought he looked friendly. But if he was going to the castle, I wanted nothing to do with him. I hardly dared breathe until he was out of sight; and when I moved on I walked and did not
run. I did a great deal of shivering and my teeth chattered so much that I put a piece of my bread between them to stop them making so much noise. But they ate it without thinking. They ate the next piece too, and the one after that.

  If any of my readers have been Fugitives (and I hope they have not), they will know the way in which every bush, tree, rock, cave, and shadow seems to conceal an enemy eager to pounce. And how a thousand evil spirits perch among the twigs like wicked birds, their little glassy eyes all staring, staring. And how that small black shape ahead of them, so still, so sinister, so intent upon unspeakable evil, mesmerizes them and drains all the strength out of them; how the hood over its head conceals a face of such Horrid Ugliness and Inhuman Malevolence that words cannot describe it; how, when it moves toward you, with a ghoulish enjoyment of the fear it’s causing you, and raises its thin arms (is it a Skeleton?) and breaks into a run, uttering little cries of triumph—how, when that happens, you can’t help but run yourself, uttering cries of quite another sort.

  But when that Ghastly Phantom calls your name, and cries “Stop!” and has the voice of your sister Lucy…

  I turned, hardly daring to believe it. And yet it was true.

  “Lucy!”

  “Charlotte!”

  “It isn’t you—it’s a spirit—”

  “What happened? Where’ve you been?”

  “Hush, hush! The woods are full of evil spirits—”

  “But where—”

  “What—”

  “How—”

  “When—”

  And so on, in the course of which she ate the rest of my bread and we shared the apple, and Herr Woodenkopf sat between us and watched the road to make sure no one was coming.

  After she’d run away from the police station, she hadn’t known what to do. She’d wandered through the village, not daring to knock on anyone’s door in case they turned her in to Sergeant Snitsch—or Uncle Heinrich. So finally, giving up all hope of shelter, she’d turned toward the forest, meaning to find her way to the mountain guide’s hut (such a safe refuge it seemed now, to both of us! Snug and warm and dry, and far, far away; what fools we were to leave it!), only to find herself face to face, on the dark road, with a Frightful Specter dressed in trailing antique robes, and (horror of horrors!) carrying its own head beneath its arm….

  How she hadn’t turned and run, neither of us knew. But now that she’d made the acquaintance of Herr Woodenkopf, she was quite willing to agree that he wasn’t in the least ghastly—and he had the great advantage of not requiring to be fed.

  “But we’ll have to go up to the hut again,” she said. “It’s the only safe place. We’ve just got to get through tomorrow, and then it’ll be too late for him to take us to the hunting lodge, because Zamiel will have come and gone—”

  “Hush! Don’t say his name! I’m sure it’s unlucky.”

  “Well, anyway, we’ve only got to hide for one more day.”

  “And night. The night’s the most important part.”

  “Yes—a day and a night,” she said impatiently, pushing her way through the snow-laden bushes that grew beside the road. “I’m sure the stream’s here somewhere. We’ll come across it soon.”

  I followed, clutching Herr Woodenkopf tightly. “But, Lucy,” I said, trying to catch her up, “we can’t ever go back, not really.”

  “Of course we can,” she said. But she sounded uncertain.

  “Just think what he’ll do! There’ll be nothing to stop him. He’ll be so angry….Oh, Lucy, I don’t ever want to go back. I want to go away completely for ever.”

  She stopped. “I think I do, too,” she said. “All right. Let’s. We’ll go right over the mountains into the next valley and then—just keep going.”

  The Prospect of Liberty was so delightful that, for a short while, I even forgot the cold. And so, Orphaned Fugitives, we set out through the forest toward Freedom—or toward Death….

  Not being very handy with the pen, I am speaking this to a certain young person who is writing it down for me. I have to set my thoughts in order. This is very difficult. When I was arrested in Geneva for not wearing britches, though that was not my fault, I had a similar difficulty. I am a convivial man, fond of a glass of beer and a smoke and a yarn, and reckoned a capital teller of tall stories—Strange Passengers I Have Known, The Spook of the Brenner Pass, The Drunk Nun, My Experiences in the Regiment, all that kind of thing. But when I was sat down in a chilly cell, with chains around my ankles, and made to spin out the tale of my unhappy mishap with the sausages and the drinking-trough to an old person with a squint and a sniff who had to set them all down for the benefit of the court, I found it very trying. Likewise now. As it is, the young person has just told me to get on with it and stop wasting time. But I should like to know, how do you start? It seems to me that a story needs winding up a bit, like a clock, to set it going properly.

  I’ll start again. Try this:

  I have a great admiration for Miss Davenport. She is a lady of great force and spirit. But being so forceful of character—her, I mean—I was not able to reason with her and convince her that it was not a good idea for me to go up to the castle.

  It wasn’t a good idea because I am not very skillful at jobs like that which require a smooth tongue and an artful manner. My master, Doctor Cadaverezzi, he’d have done it—he was as artful as a bottle of goblins. I remember how he got out of jail, when we became acquainted. I never saw anything like it in my life. What he did was—

  The young person is very stern. I have to get on, she says.

  Like I should have done then. But didn’t, on account of the idea I had, when I’d gone a little way up the road toward the castle.

  That idea was simply to turn around, go back to the village, and tell him about it. I knew what he’d do. He’d raise his eyebrows, as if to say: What? A little matter like that? Nothing could be easier! Then he’d set his hand to his chin, and frown, and say: “But there are certain complications that make it interesting.” Then he’d dismiss me and go off to think about it while I’d go and have a yarn in the taproom or polish the Cabinet or mend the Flying Devil (and he was an artful little perisher if ever I saw one. He had a spring up his posterior that was held in by a catch, and he leapt out of the Cabinet like a firework. But he had a mind of his own, that little…I remember once in Basle, we was performing—)

  Oh, very well. Where was I?

  Looking for the doctor, that’s right.

  So I turned round and went back to the village—and what did I find? An uproar! A riot! Shouts of Fire, and crowds milling about the streets outside the Jolly Huntsman. Not that they’re streets like they understand the meaning of the word in Basle, or Geneva. In Geneva, when you say “street,” you mean street. Here, they said “Street,” and they meant lane or track. So I latched on to a fellow from the inn, a useful sort of man with a full bottle in his hand, and asked him what had happened. I wasn’t exactly worried, you see, about Doctor Cadaverezzi, because he’d have been able to escape from Noah’s Flood itself if he’d had a mind to; but all the same…

  “You oughter bin there!” says this fellow. “The Devil hisself come up out the floor!”

  “Go on,” says I, eyeing his bottle.

  “All smoke and sulfur, all springs and horns and whiskers—and that little girl what stood there in the middle of it, a Princess, she was! You oughter seen it!”

  A Princess? I thought to myself. He never had no Princess in the Cabinet when I last saw it.

  And a fat little lad with a feather in his hat nods solemnly and says, “Oh, yes, I seen him, I seen the Devil, he was there all right, beckoning to Doctor Cadaverezzi with a long sharp finger—and then a trapdoor opened in the floor—I seen it—and all red light and smoke poured up out of it—and the Devil carried Doctor Cadaverezzi and the Princess off to Hell, laughing fit to bust—”

  “But what about this fire?” I said.

  “The whole place was blazing!” says the little fat lad.
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br />   “No, it weren’t,” says a thin mournful fellow dressed in green. “It were only smoke.”

  “It were the smoke of Hell itself,” says the man with the bottle….

  And so on. They’re like children, these country folk. I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this lot, all contradicting each other and starting off another rumor as soon as they’d managed to swallow the last one.

  But the big question was, where was the doctor?

  Because no one had seen him at all since the first yell of Fire. He’d vanished—and so had that Princess, whoever she was, who kept coming into all the different stories I heard.

  We’d moved back inside now and I was snug by the fire in the Jolly Huntsman, with a mug of beer and half a dozen sausages in front of me (but I made sure they stayed on the plate this time—till I ate ’em, of course). And now there was a sensible-looking fellow saying how he saw her, the Princess, that is, trying to get away from some little oily fellow who’d got ahold of her—and how he didn’t like the look of him, I mean the sensible-looking fellow didn’t like the look of the oily-looking fellow, so he spilled a mug of beer down his neck for him and made him let go.

  “Good for you,” says I. “That was a noble action, giving up your beer like that.”

  “My beer?” says he. “Get away—I wouldn’t spill my beer. I got hold of my neighbor’s and used that.”

  I said he was a sensible-looking fellow.

  But that set me thinking, that little episode. A Princess, appeared from nowhere—and a missing little girl (well, two, but one’ll do for the moment). An uncle, eager to get her back for some dark deed he had in mind—and an oily-looking fellow grabbing hold of the Princess.

  Could this oily-looking fellow be the uncle? I never had an uncle, so I couldn’t speak from personal experience, but from observing the uncles of others, I reckoned there was two kinds: fat jolly ones and thin old mean ones. I never heard of an oily uncle—it isn’t right somehow. But all the same, suppose this Princess had been one of those little girls?