The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 04

Now it happened that the Chamberlain wished to go to Berlin on account of several considerable pieces of property in the Neumark of Brandenburg which his wife had fallen heir to from the estate of the Arch-Chancellor, Count Kallheim, who had died shortly after being deposed. As Sir Kunz really loved the Elector, he asked, after reflecting for a short time, whether the latter would leave the matter to his discretion; and when his master, pressing his hand affectionately to his breast, answered, "Imagine that you are myself, and secure the paper for me!" the Chamberlain turned over his affairs to a subordinate, hastened his departure by several days, left his wife behind, and set out for Berlin, accompanied only by a few servants.

Kohlhaas, as we have said, had meanwhile arrived in Berlin, and by special order of the Elector of Brandenburg had been placed in a prison for nobles, where, together with his five children, he was made as comfortable as circumstances permitted. Immediately after the appearance of the Imperial attorney from Vienna the horse-dealer was called to account before the bar of the Supreme Court for the violation of the public peace proclaimed throughout the Empire, and although in his answer he objected that, by virtue of the agreement concluded with the Elector of Saxony at Lützen, he could not be prosecuted for the armed invasion of that country and the acts of violence committed at that time, he was nevertheless told for his information that His Majesty the Emperor, whose attorney was making the complaint in this case, could not take that into account. And indeed, after the situation had been explained to him and he had been told that, to offset this, complete satisfaction would be rendered to him in Dresden in his suit against Squire Wenzel Tronka, he very soon acquiesced in the matter.

Thus it happened that, precisely on the day of the arrival of the Chamberlain, judgment was pronounced, and Kohlhaas was condemned to lose his life by the sword, which sentence, however, in the complicated state of affairs, no one believed would be carried out, in spite of its mercy. Indeed the whole city, knowing the good will which the Elector bore Kohlhaas, confidently hoped to see it commuted by an electoral decree to a mere, though possibly long and severe, term of imprisonment.

The Chamberlain, who nevertheless realized that no time was to be lost if the commission given him by his master was to be accomplished, set about his business by giving Kohlhaas an opportunity to get a good look at him, dressed as he was in his ordinary court costume, one morning when the horse-dealer was standing at the window of his prison innocently gazing at the passers-by. As he concluded from a sudden movement of his head that he had noticed him, and with great pleasure observed particularly that he put his hand involuntarily to that part of the chest where the locket was lying, he considered that what had taken place at that moment in Kohlhaas' soul was a sufficient preparation to allow him to go a step further in the attempt to gain possession of the paper. He therefore sent for an old woman who hobbled around on crutches, selling old clothes; he had noticed her in the streets of Berlin among a crowd of other rag-pickers, and in age and costume she seemed to him to correspond fairly well to the woman described to him by the Elector of Saxony. On the supposition that Kohlhaas probably had not fixed very deeply in mind the features of the old gipsy, of whom he had had but a fleeting vision as she handed him the paper, he determined to substitute the aforesaid woman for her and, if it were practicable, to have her act the part of the gipsy before Kohlhaas. In accordance with this plan and in order to fit her for the rôle, he informed her in detail of all that had taken place in Jüterbock between the Elector and the gipsy, and, as he did not know how far the latter had gone in her declarations to Kohlhaas, he did not forget to impress particularly upon the woman the three mysterious items contained in the paper. After he had explained to her what she must disclose in disconnected and incoherent fashion, about certain measures which had been taken to get possession, either by strategy or by force, of this paper which was of the utmost importance to the Saxon court, he charged her to demand of Kohlhaas that he should give the paper to her to keep during a few fateful days, on the pretext that it was no longer safe with him.

As was to be expected, the woman undertook the execution of this business at once on the promise of a considerable reward, a part of which the Chamberlain, at her demand, had to pay over to her in advance. As the mother of Herse, the groom who had fallen at Mühlberg, had permission from the government to visit Kohlhaas at times, and this woman had already known her for several months, she succeeded a few days later in gaining access to the horse-dealer by means of a small gratuity to the warden.

But when the woman entered his room, Kohlhaas, from a seal ring that she wore on her hand and a coral chain that hung round her neck, thought that he recognized in her the very same old gipsy-woman who had handed him the paper in Jüterbock; and since probability is not always on the side of truth, it so happened that here something had occurred which we will indeed relate, but at the same time, to those who wish to question it we must accord full liberty to do so. The Chamberlain had made the most colossal blunder, and in the aged old-clothes woman, whom he had picked up in the streets of Berlin to impersonate the gipsy, he had hit upon the very same mysterious gipsy-woman whom he wished to have impersonated. At least, while leaning on her crutches and stroking the cheeks of the children who, intimidated by her singular appearance, were pressing close to their father, the woman informed the latter that she had returned to Brandenburg from Saxony some time before, and that after an unguarded question which the Chamberlain had hazarded in the streets of Berlin about the gipsy-woman who had been in Jüterbock in the spring of the previous year, she had immediately pressed forward to him, and under a false name had offered herself for the business which he wished to see done.

The horse-dealer remarked such a strange likeness between her and his dead wife Lisbeth that he might have asked the old woman whether she were his wife's grandmother; for not only did her features and her hands—with fingers still shapely and beautiful—and especially the use she made of them when speaking, remind him vividly of Lisbeth; he even noticed on her neck a mole like one with which his wife's neck was marked. With his thoughts in a strange whirl he urged the gipsy to sit down on a chair and asked what it could possibly be that brought her to him on business for the Chamberlain.

While Kohlhaas' old dog snuffed around her knees and wagged his tail as she gently patted his head, the Woman answered that she had been commissioned by the Chamberlain to inform him what the three questions of importance for the Court of Saxony were, to which the paper contained the mysterious answer; to warn him of a messenger who was then in Berlin for the purpose of gaining possession of it; and to demand the paper from him on the pretext that it was no longer safe next his heart where he was carrying it. She said that the real purpose for which she had come, however, was to tell him that the threat to get the paper away from him by strategy or by force was an absurd and empty fraud; that under the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg, in whose custody he was, he need not have the least fear for its safety; that the paper was indeed much safer with him than with her, and that he should take good care not to lose possession of it by giving it up to any one, no matter on what pretext. Nevertheless, she concluded, she considered it would be wise to use the paper for the purpose for which she had given it to him at the fair in Jüterbock, to lend a favorable ear to the offer which had been made to him on the frontier through Squire Stein, and in return for life and liberty to surrender the paper, which could be of no further use to him, to the Elector of Saxony.

Kohlhaas, who was exulting over the power which was thus afforded him to wound the heel of his enemy mortally at the very moment when it was treading him in the dust, made answer, "Not for the world, grandam, not for the world!" He pressed the old woman's hand warmly and only asked to know what sort of answers to the tremendous questions were contained in the paper. Taking on her lap the youngest child, who had crouched at her feet, the woman said, "Not for the world, Kohlhaas the horse-dealer, but for this pretty, fair-haired little lad!" and with that she laughed softly at the child, petted and kissed him while he stared at her in wide-eyed surprise, and with her withered hands gave him an apple which she had in her pocket. Kohlhaas answered, in some confusion, that the children themselves, when they were grown, would approve his conduct, and that he could do nothing of greater benefit to them and their grandchildren than to keep the paper. He asked, furthermore, who would insure him against a new deception after the experience he had been through, and whether, in the end, he would not be making a vain sacrifice of the paper to the Elector, as had lately happened in the case of the band of troops which he had collected in Lützen. "If I've once caught a man breaking his word," said he, "I never exchange another with him; and nothing but your command, positive and unequivocal, shall separate me, good grandam, from this paper through which I have been granted satisfaction in such a wonderful fashion for all I have suffered."

The woman set the child down on the floor again and said that in many respects he was right, and that he could do or leave undone what he wished; and with that she took up her crutches again and started to go. Kohlhaas repeated his question regarding the contents of the wonderful paper; she answered hastily that, of course, he could open it, although it would be pure curiosity on his part. He wished to find out about a thousand other things yet, before she left him—who she really was, how she came by the knowledge resident within her, why she had refused to give the magic paper to the Elector for whom it had been written after all, and among so many thousand people had handed it precisely to him, Kohlhaas, who had never consulted her art.

Now it happened that, just at that moment, a noise was heard, caused by several police officials who were mounting the stairway, so that the woman, seized with sudden apprehension at being found by them in these quarters, exclaimed, "Good-by for the present, Kohlhaas, good-by for the present. When we meet again you shall not lack information concerning all these things." With that she turned toward the door, crying, "Farewell, children, farewell!" Then she kissed the little folks one after the other, and went off.

In the mean time the Elector of Saxony, abandoned to his wretched thoughts, had called in two astrologers, Oldenholm and Olearius by name, who at that time enjoyed a great reputation in Saxony, and had asked their advice concerning the mysterious paper which was of such importance to him and all his descendants. After making a profound investigation of several days' duration in the tower of the Dresden palace, the men could not agree as to whether the prophecy referred to remote centuries or, perhaps, to the present time, with a possible reference to the King of Poland, with whom the relations were still of a very warlike nature. The disquietude, not to say the despair, in which the unhappy sovereign was plunged, was only increased by such learned disputes, and finally was so intensified as to seem to his soul wholly intolerable. In addition, just at this time the Chamberlain charged his wife that before she left for Berlin, whither she was about to follow him, she should adroitly inform the Elector, that, after the failure of an attempt, which he had made with the help of an old woman who had kept out of sight ever since, there was but slight hope of securing the paper in Kohlhaas' possession, inasmuch as the death sentence pronounced against the horse-dealer had now at last been signed by the Elector of Brandenburg after a minute examination of all the legal documents, and the day of execution already set for the Monday after Palm Sunday. At this news the Elector, his heart torn by grief and remorse, shut himself up in his room like a man in utter despair and, tired of life, refused for two days to take food; on the third day he suddenly disappeared from Dresden after sending a short communication to the Government Office with word that he was going to the Prince of Dessau's to hunt. Where he actually did go and whether he did wend his way toward Dessau, we shall not undertake to say, as the chronicles—which we have diligently compared before reporting events—at this point contradict and offset one another in a very peculiar manner. So much is certain: the Prince of Dessau was incapable of hunting, as he was at this time lying ill in Brunswick at the residence of his uncle, Duke Henry, and it is also certain that Lady Heloise on the evening of the following day arrived in Berlin at the house of her husband, Sir Kunz, the Chamberlain, in the company of a certain Count von Königstein whom she gave out to be her cousin.

In the mean time, on the order of the Elector of Brandenburg, the death sentence was read to Kohlhaas, his chains were removed, and the papers concerning his property, to which papers his right had been denied in Dresden, were returned to him. When the councilors whom the court had dispatched to him asked what disposition he wished to have made of his property after his death, with the help of a notary he made out a will in favor of his children and appointed his honest friend, the bailiff at Kohlhaasenbrück, to be their guardian. After that, nothing could match the peace and contentment of his last days. For in consequence of a singular decree extraordinary issued by the Elector, the prison in which he was kept was soon after thrown open and free entrance was allowed day and night to all his friends, of whom he possessed a great many in the city. He even had the further satisfaction of seeing the theologian, Jacob Freising, enter his prison as a messenger from Dr. Luther, with a letter from the latter's own hand—without doubt a very remarkable document which, however, has since been lost—and of receiving the blessed Holy Communion at the hands of this reverend gentleman in the presence of two deans of Brandenburg, who assisted him in administering it.

Amid general commotion in the city, which could not even yet be weaned from the hope of seeing him saved by an electoral rescript, there now dawned the fateful Monday after Palm Sunday, on which Kohlhaas was to make atonement to the world for the all-too-rash attempt to procure justice for himself within it. Accompanied by a strong guard and conducted by the theologian, Jacob Freising, he was just leaving the gate of his prison with his two lads in his arms—for this favor he had expressly requested at the bar of the court—when among a sorrowful throng of acquaintances, who were pressing his hands in farewell, there stepped up to him, with haggard face, the castellan of the Elector's palace, and gave him a paper which he said an old woman had put in his hands for him. The latter, looking in surprise at the man, whom he scarcely knew, opened the paper. The seal pressed upon the wafer had reminded him at once of the frequently mentioned gipsy-woman, but who can describe the astonishment which filled him when he found the following information contained in it: "Kohlhaas, the Elector of Saxony is in Berlin; he has already preceded you to the place of execution, and, if you care to know, can be recognized by a hat with blue and white plumes. The purpose for which he comes I do not need to tell you. He intends, as soon as you are buried, to have the locket dug up and the paper in it opened and read. Your Lisbeth."

Kohlhaas turned to the castellan in the utmost astonishment and asked him if he knew the marvelous woman who had given him the note. But just as the castellan started to answer "Kohlhaas, the woman—" and then hesitated strangely in the middle of his sentence, the horse-dealer was borne away by the procession which moved on again at that moment, and could not make out what the man, who seemed to be trembling in every limb, finally uttered.

When Kohlhaas arrived at the place of execution he found there the Elector of Brandenburg and his suite, among whom was the Arch-Chancellor, Sir Heinrich von Geusau, halting on horseback, in the midst of an innumerable crowd of people. On the sovereign's right was the Imperial attorney, Franz Müller, with a copy of the death sentence in his hand; on his left was his own attorney, the jurist Anton Zäuner, with the decree of the Court Tribunal at Dresden. In the middle of the half circle formed by the people stood a herald with a bundle of articles, and the two black horses, fat and glossy, pawing the ground impatiently. For the Arch-Chancellor, Sir Heinrich, had won the suit instituted at Dresden in the name of his master without yielding a single point to Squire Wenzel Tronka. After the horses had been made honorable once more by having a banner waved over their heads, and taken from the knacker, who was feeding them, they had been fattened by the Squire's servants and then, in the market-place in Dresden, had been turned over to the attorney in the presence of a specially appointed commission. Accordingly when Kohlhaas, accompanied by his guard, advanced to the mound where the Elector was awaiting him, the latter said, "Well, Kohlhaas, this is the day on which you receive justice that is your due. Look, I here deliver to you all that was taken from you by force at the Tronka Castle which I, as your sovereign, was bound to procure for you again; here are the black horses, the neck-cloth, the gold gulden, the linen—everything down to the very amount of the bill for medical attention furnished your groom, Herse, who fell at Mühlberg. Are you satisfied with me?"

Kohlhaas set the two children whom he was carrying in his arms down on the ground beside him, and with eyes sparkling with astonished pleasure read the decree which was handed to him at a sign from the Arch-Chancellor. When he also found in it a clause condemning Squire Wenzel Tronka to a punishment of two years' imprisonment, his feelings completely overcame him and he sank down on his knees at some distance from the Elector, with his hands folded across his breast. Rising and laying his hand on the knee of the Arch-Chancellor, he joyfully assured him that his dearest wish on earth had been fulfilled; then he walked over to the horses, examined them and patted their plump necks, and, coming back to the Chancellor, declared with a smile that he was going to present them to his two sons, Henry and Leopold!

The Chancellor, Sir Heinrich von Geusau, looking graciously down upon him from his horse, promised him in the name of the Elector that his last wish should be held sacred and asked him also to dispose of the other articles contained in the bundle, as seemed good to him. Whereupon Kohlhaas called out from the crowd Herse's old mother, whom he had caught sight of in the square, and, giving her the things, said, "Here, grandmother, these belong to you!" The indemnity for the loss of Herse was with the money in the bundle, and this he presented to her also, as a gift to provide care and comfort for her old age. The Elector cried, "Well, Kohlhaas the horse-dealer, now that satisfaction has been rendered you in such fashion, do you, for your part, prepare to give satisfaction to His Majesty the Emperor, whose attorney is standing here, for the violation of the peace he had proclaimed!" Taking off his hat and throwing it on the ground Kohlhaas said that he was ready to do so. He lifted the children once more from the ground and pressed them to his breast; then he gave them over to the bailiff of Kohlhaasenbrück, and while the latter, weeping quietly, led them away from the square, Kohlhaas advanced to the block.

He was just removing his neck-cloth and baring his chest when, throwing a hasty glance around the circle formed by the crowd, he caught sight of the familiar face of the man with blue and white plumes, who was standing quite near him between two knights whose bodies half hid him from view. With a sudden stride which surprised the guard surrounding him, Kohlhaas walked close up to the man, untying the locket from around his neck as he did so. He took out the paper, unsealed it, and read it through; then, without moving his eyes from the man with blue and white plumes, who was already beginning to indulge in sweet hopes, he stuck the paper in his mouth and swallowed it. At this sight the man with blue and white plumes was seized with convulsions and sank down unconscious. While his companions bent over him in consternation and raised him from the ground, Kohlhaas turned toward the scaffold, where his head fell under the axe of the executioner.

Here ends the story of Kohlhaas. Amid the general lamentations of the people his body was placed in a coffin, and while the bearers raised it from the ground and bore it away to the graveyard in the suburbs for decent burial, the Elector of Brandenburg called to him the sons of the dead man and dubbed them knights, telling the Arch-Chancellor that he wished them to be educated in his school for pages.

The Elector of Saxony, shattered in body and mind, returned shortly afterward to Dresden; details of his subsequent career there must be sought in history.

Some hale and happy descendants of Kohlhaas, however, were still living in Mecklenburg in the last century.