Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist (4 page)

Meanwhile, a boy named Nanky, whom Hoango had fathered out of wedlock with a Negress, and who slept with his brother Seppy in the storehouse next door, was awakened by the barking of some yard dogs; and since he saw a man standing alone on the back stoop of the house, he promptly hastened, as he was instructed to do in such cases, to the back gate, through which said person had entered, to lock it behind him. The stranger, who had no idea what to make of all this, asked the boy, whom he recognized with a shock upon drawing near as black: “Who lives on this estate?” And upon the latter's reply: “Since the death of Monsieur Villeneuve, ownership fell to the Negro Hoango,” the white man was just about to knock the boy down, grab the key to the back gate from him and take flight, when Toni stepped outside, lantern in hand. “Quick,” she said, reaching for his hand and pulling him toward the door, “in here!” She took pains while saying this to tilt the light so that its glow lit up her face. “Who are you?” cried the stranger, stunned for more than one reason, taking in the sight of her lovely young figure. “Who lives in this house, in which, as you maintain, I am to find safe refuge?” “No one, I swear by the light of the sun,” said the girl, “but my mother and me!” and made every effort to pull him in. “No one!” cried the stranger, taking a step back and tearing his hand free. “Did that boy not just tell me that a Negro named Hoango resides here?” “I tell you, no!” said the girl, stamping her foot impatiently, “and even if the house belongs to a ruffian of that name, he's out at the moment and a good ten miles away!” Whereupon with both her hands she
drew the stranger in, instructed the boy to tell no one of his presence, and after shutting the door, took the stranger's hand and led him up the steps to her mother's room.

“So,” said the old woman, who had overheard the entire conversation from her perch at the window, and had noticed in the gleam of the light that he was an officer, “what are we to make of the rapier dangling at the ready under your arm? At the risk of our own lives,” she added, putting on her spectacles, “we granted you safe haven in our house. Did you enter, in the manner of your countrymen, to repay our kindness with betrayal?” “Heaven forbid!” replied the stranger, who strode directly in front of her chair. He reached for the old woman's hand and pressed it against his heart, and after casting a few furtive glances around the room, unbuckled the blade which he wore at the hip, and said: “You see before you the most miserable of men, but not an ingrate and a cad!” “Who are you?” asked the old woman; she shoved a chair in his direction with her foot and ordered the girl to go to the kitchen and prepare him as good a supper as she could hastily throw together. The stranger replied: “I am an officer in the French forces, although, as you yourself will have noticed by my accent, not a Frenchman; I am Swiss by birth and my name is Gustav von der Ried. Oh, if only I had never left my native land and traded it for this godless isle! I come from Fort Dauphin, where, as you know, all the whites have been slaughtered, and it is my intention to reach Port au Prince before General Dessalines and his troops manage to surround and take the city.” “From Fort Dauphin!” cried the old woman. “And you, with the color of your face, managed to make it in one piece such a long way through a country overrun by angry blacks?” “God and all his saints
protected me!” the stranger replied. “And I am not alone, my good little mother; my traveling companions, whom I left some distance from here, include my uncle, a noble old gentleman, with his wife and five children; not to mention several servants and maids who belong to the family; a party of twelve in all, I've had to drag them along with me on unspeakably difficult night marches, with the help of two tired old pack mules, as we could not show ourselves on the highway by day.” “Good heavens!” cried the old woman with a sympathetic shake of the head, taking a pinch of tobacco. “Where at the moment are your fellow travelers holed up?” “To you,” the stranger replied after a moment's hesitation, “to you I can confide; in your complexion I can see reflected a shimmer of my own. The family, if you must know, is camped out in the wild near the seagull pond at the edge of the forest; hunger and thirst compelled us to stop there the day before yesterday. Last night we sent out the servants on a fruitless attempt to obtain a crust of bread and a swallow of wine from the locals; fear of being captured and killed kept them from risking contact, consequently I myself had to set out this morning to try my luck at the risk of my own life. Heaven led me, lest I be mistaken,” he added, pressing the old woman's hand in his, “to kindhearted people who don't share the murderous hatred that has gripped the people of this island. Please be so kind, in exchange for ample payment, as to fill a few baskets with food and drink; we still have five day's journey to Port au Prince, and if you fetch us the provisions to reach this city we will be eternally grateful to you as the people who saved our lives.” “Yes, this mad hatred!” the old woman feigned sympathy. “Is it not as if the hands of the
same
body, or the teeth of the
same
mouth, were to rise up against each other just
because the two were not made alike? What am I, whose father hails from Santiago on the island of Cuba, to make of that shimmer of light that flashes from my face at daybreak? And what does my daughter, who was conceived and born in Europe, have to do with the fact that the daylight hue of that part of the world is reflected in her face?” “What?” cried the stranger. “Do you mean that you, whose every facial feature belies your mulatto blood and your African ancestry, that you and this lovely young
mestizo
who opened the door for me, are doomed along with us Europeans?” “By God,” replied the old woman, plucking the spectacles from her nose, “do you think that the meager possessions we've managed to scrape together by the sweat of our brow over back-breaking miserable years haven't caught the fancy of that murderous hell-bent band of thieves? If we were not able by craftiness and the very embodiment of the artful ways necessity teaches the meek to survive their persecution, the shadow of kinship that covers our face wouldn't do the trick, I assure you!” “That's not possible!” the stranger cried; “and who on this island is after you?” “The owner of this house,” said the old woman, “the black man Congo Hoango! Ever since the death of Monsieur Guillaume, the former owner of this plantation, who fell to the blackguard's hand at the start of the uprising, we, who, as the dead man's next of kin, took charge of the place, attracted his wanton outbursts of rage. Every crust of bread, every liquid refreshment we give out of kindness to one or the other of the white fugitives who sometimes pass this way, we must pay for with his curses and abuse; and he craves nothing more than to goad the wrath of the blacks against us white and Creole half-dogs, as he calls us, in part to rid himself of us who check his savagery against the whites, in part to lay
his thieving hands on the meager possessions we would leave behind.” “You poor unfortunates!” said the stranger. “You piteous souls! And where is that blackguard at the moment?” “He's gone with the other blacks from this plantation to deliver a shipment of gunpowder and lead badly needed by General Dessalines,” the old woman replied. “We're expecting him back in ten or twelve days, unless he sets out on other expeditions; and if upon his return, God forbid he should find out that we gave safe haven and shelter to a white on his way to Port au Prince, while he was busy exterminating their race on the island, I assure you we'd all soon be knocking at Heaven's door.” “Merciful Heaven above,” said the stranger, “will protect you for the kindness you have shown a suffering soul!” Taking a step closer to the old woman, he added, “And since, in defying his orders this one time, you will doubtless have drawn the Negro's eternal wrath, your subsequent subservience to his will, should you choose to return to the fold, would surely do you no good; might I then persuade you, ask what price you may, to give shelter for a day or two to my uncle and his family, worn out from the hardships of their journey, to let them recoup their strength?” “Young Sir,” said the old woman, taken aback, “do you know what you are asking? How in Heaven's name is it possible to shelter a group as large as yours in a house on the highway without being found out and denounced by one of the locals?” “Why not?” retorted the stranger with great urgency. “What if I were to set off immediately for the seagull pond and lead them back to the house before daybreak; if you hid them all, masters and servants, in the same room, and to be extra-cautious, kept the doors and windows of that room shut tight?” The old woman replied, after weighing his suggestion a while: “If the
gentleman attempted this very night to lead the group from their hideout to the plantation, on his way back he would surely fall into the hands of a troop of armed Negroes, alerted by scouts lying in wait on the highway.” “Very well then,” replied the stranger, “we'll have to make do for the moment by sending them a basket of provisions, and put off the business of bringing them back to the plantation until tomorrow night. Will you do that for me, little mother?” “Alright,” she said, amidst a flurry of kisses from the stranger's lips on her bony hands, “for the sake of the European, my daughter's father, I will do you, his countryman, this favor. Sit yourself down at daybreak and write your kin a letter inviting them to make their way to the settlement; the boy you met in the yard will take them enough provisions to tide them over for the night, and if they accept the invitation, he will lead them back here at dawn.”

In the meantime Toni returned with a meal she'd whipped up in the kitchen, and winking at the stranger as she set the table, asked the old woman: “Mother, tell me, did the gentleman recover from the shock that gripped him at the door? Is he convinced that neither poison nor the prick of a blade await him here, and that the Negro Hoango is not home?” The mother said with a sigh: “My child, he who's been burned fears fire, as the saying goes. The gentleman would have been a fool to have ventured into the house before convincing himself of the race of its residents.” The girl came close to her mother and told her how she'd held the lantern such that its light fell full in her face. “But his mind was full of spooks and Negroes; and even had it been a pretty damsel from Paris or Marseille who'd opened the door, he'd have taken her for a Negress.” Gently slinging an arm around her waist, the stranger said, a bit embarrassed: “The
hat you had on kept me from seeing your face.” And pressing her to his breast, he went on: “Had I looked you in the eye, as I do now, even if the rest of you were black as night, I'd have drunk with you from the same cup of poison.” The mother pressed the young white man, who turned red at these words, to be seated, whereupon Toni sat down beside him, and with her arms propped on the table, watched him as he ate. The stranger asked how old she was and where she'd been born; whereupon the mother spoke up: “Toni was conceived and born in Paris fifteen years ago on a trip I took to Europe with Monsieur Villeneuve, my former master,” adding that Komar, the black man whom she later married, adopted her as his child, but that her real father was a rich Marseille merchant named Bertrand, after whom she was named Toni Bertrand. Toni asked him if he was acquainted with said gentleman in France. “No,” said the stranger, “it's a big country, and I've never crossed paths with any person of that name in the course of my sojourn in the West Indies.” The old woman added that she had it on good authority that Monsieur Bertrand no longer resided in France. “His ambitious and aspiring nature,” she said, “was not content to while away its time in staid bourgeois pursuits; at the outbreak of the Revolution he got involved with the insurgents, and in 1795, went with a French delegation to the Turkish court, from whence, to my knowledge, he has not yet returned.” Whereupon the stranger said with a smile to Toni, reaching for her hand: “Which, in that case, would make you a rich society girl.” He encouraged her to profit from the advantages and maintained that she had every reason to hope that she would one day be led down the aisle on her father's arm to live in somewhat more auspicious circumstances than she did today. “Unlikely,” remarked
the old woman with a restrained wince. “During my pregnancy in Paris, Monsieur Bertrand denied in court having fathered this child, to spare the feelings of a wealthy young bride whom he hoped to marry. I will never forget the oath he had the gall to swear in my face, a bilious fever being the consequence, along with, shortly thereafter, sixty strokes of the whip ordered by Monsieur Villeneuve, as a consequence of which I still suffer from consumption.” Toni, who lay her head thoughtfully on her hand, asked the stranger who he was, where he came from and where he was headed; whereupon the latter, following an embarrassed silence in the wake of the old woman's embittered declaration, replied that he was Monsieur Strömli, that he and his uncle's family, whom he had left behind in a clearing near the seagull pond, came from Fort Dauphin. On the girl's urging, he told in some detail of the insurrection that broke out in that city; how at midnight, when everyone was asleep, at a traitorous signal the mob of blacks fell upon the whites; how the leader of the Negroes, a sergeant in the French Pioneer Corps, had been malicious enough to set all the boats in the harbor on fire so as to cut off the escape of the whites to Europe; how his family had hardly had time enough to flee with a few necessities through the gates of the city; and how, given the simultaneous flare-up of hostilities along the coastline, they had had no other recourse but to make their way inland, with the aid of a pair of pack mules, traversing the length of the entire country, hoping to reach Port au Prince, the sole place that, for the moment at least, thanks to the protection of a strong French military presence, still put up a resistance to the advancing forces of the Negro rebels who were gaining ground everywhere else. Toni asked: “How did the whites makes themselves so hated?”
To which the stranger replied, with some hesitation: “By the nature of the relationship which they, as masters of the island, had with the blacks, and which, if truth be told, I dare not defend; a situation that had, however, been in place on this island for several centuries! The frenzy of freedom that suddenly gripped all the plantations drove the Negroes and Creoles to break the chains that held them, and the many contemptible abuses they suffered at the hands of a few malicious whites led them to wreak revenge on the entire race. I was particularly stunned and horrified,” he went on after a moment of silence, “by the actions of one young girl. At the very moment of the uprising, this girl, a young Negress, lay ill with Yellow Fever, an outbreak that doubled the misery in the city. Three years before she had been the slave of a white planter, who, because of her refusal to succumb to his advances, had badly beaten her and then sold her to a Creole planter. When the girl learned at the onset of the uprising that the planter, her former master, had fled, the wrath of the Negroes hot on his heels, and taken refuge in a nearby woodshed, remembering the mistreatment she had suffered, she sent her brother to him at dawn the next day inviting him to spend the night with her. The poor white wretch, who neither knew that she was ailing nor with what dread malady, came and wrapped her in his arms out of gratitude for saving him; but no sooner had he spent a half hour in her bed showering her with amorous caresses, than she suddenly turned to him with a fierce expression and cold fury, got up and said: “You have just kissed a plague-infected girl with death burning in her breast; go and give a gift of Yellow Fever to all your kind!” While the old woman loudly expressed her horror at this, the officer asked Toni if she would be capable of such an act. “No!”
said Toni, casting him a bewildered look. Putting the cloth on the table, the stranger responded: “By my way of thinking, no tyrannous act the whites committed could ever justify such a base and abominable betrayal. Such treachery,” he said, rising from the table with a pained expression, “undermined the wrath of God; the scandalized angels themselves will stand on the side of those who'd been unjustly treated and take up their cause to uphold the human and sacred order!” At these words he strode to the window and peered out at the storm clouds that covered the moon and stars; and since it seemed to him as if mother and daughter gave each other knowing looks, though he had not noticed them exchanging winks, he was left with an uneasy, downright queasy feeling; he turned around and asked to be led to his room to catch up on lost sleep.