The Marquise of O and Other Stories (17 page)

This incident, little as the horse-dealer was in fact to blame for it, nevertheless aroused throughout the land, even among the more moderate and well-disposed, a feeling that was highly prejudicial to the successful outcome of his case. The relationship now existing between him and the state seemed quite intolerable, and both privately and publicly people began to say that it would be better to do him an open wrong and dismiss the whole lawsuit again than to grant him justice in such a trivial affair, justice which he had extorted by violence, merely to satisfy his mad obstinacy. To complete the unfortunate Kohlhaas's ruin, it was the Grand Chancellor himself, with his excessive rectitude and resultant hatred of the Tronka family, who helped to intensify and spread this feeling. It was
extremely improbable that the horses now in the hands of the Dresden knacker would ever be restored to the condition in which they had left the stables at Kohlhaasenbrück; yet even assuming that with skill and persistence they could be so nursed back, the disgrace that would thereby fall on the Junker's family in consequence of the present situation was so great, and their importance in Saxony as one of the foremost and noblest houses of the land was such, that the most proper and expedient course now seemed to be that the horse-dealer should be offered a sum of money in compensation. Some days later the President, Count Kallheim, made this proposal to the Grand Chancellor in the name of the Chamberlain who was still incapacitated by his injuries. But although the Chancellor wrote to Kohlhaas, advising him not to dismiss such an offer out of hand, he nevertheless requested the President in a curt and barely civil reply to spare him any further private interventions in this affair; the Chamberlain, he wrote, should approach the horse-dealer himself, whom Count Wrede described as a very reasonable and modest man. And the horse-dealer, whose determination had indeed been weakened by the incident in the market-place, was in accordance with the Chancellor's advice only waiting for an initiative from the Junker or his relatives, fully intending to accommodate them and to forgive everything that had happened. But to take such an initiative was precisely what these proud noblemen could not stomach, and greatly incensed by the reply they had received from the Grand Chancellor they showed it to the Elector, who had visited the Chamberlain on the following morning in the room where he was lying ill from his wounds. The sick Chamberlain asked him in a weak and pathetic voice whether, now that he had risked his life to comply with his sovereign's wishes in bringing this matter to a conclusion, he was also to expose his honour to public opprobrium by appearing with a plea for reconciliation and indulgence before a man who had heaped
upon him and his family every imaginable ignominy and disgrace. When the Elector had read the letter he asked Count Kallheim with some embarrassment whether the High Court was not empowered to rely on the fact that the horses could not be restored to health and accordingly, without consulting Kohlhaas further, give judgement for mere monetary compensation, as if the horses were already dead. The Count replied: ‘Your Highness, they
are
dead: in any legal sense they are dead because they have no value, and they will be physically dead too before they can be taken from the knacker's yard to their lordships' stables.' Thereupon the Elector, putting the letter in his pocket, said that he would speak to the Chancellor himself about it, and reassuring the Chamberlain, who had struggled half upright and gratefully seized his hand, he told him to look after his health, rose from his chair most graciously and left the room.

Thus matters stood in Dresden when another and more menacing storm approached from Lützen and gathered over poor Kohlhaas; and the crafty lords were clever enough to draw its lightning down upon his luckless head. A certain Johann Nagelschmidt, one of the men recruited by the horse-dealer and then dismissed after the proclamation of the Electoral amnesty, had seen fit a few weeks later to gather some of this rabble, capable as they were of any vileness, together again on the Bohemian border, and with them to pursue on his own account the trade to which Kohlhaas had introduced him. This scoundrel styled himself Kohlhaas's deputy, partly in order to intimidate the officers sent to arrest him and partly in order to entice the peasantry into participating in his outrages as before. With the ingenuity he had learnt from his master he spread rumours alleging that the amnesty had been violated in respect of many of the men who had peacefully returned to their homes, and indeed that Kohlhaas himself, with scandalous perfidy, had been arrested on his arrival in
Dresden and placed under guard. It thus became possible, in proclamations which closely resembled those of Kohlhaas, for him to represent his gang of incendiaries as an army recruited only for the glory of God and for the purpose of safeguarding the amnesty promised to them by the Elector; although, as already mentioned, all this was done not in the least for God's glory nor out of loyalty to Kohlhaas, for whose fate they cared not a straw, but in order to burn and plunder with the greater impunity and ease under the cover of such pretensions. When the first news of this reached Dresden, the noblemen could not conceal their delight at a turn of events which gave the whole affair so different a complexion. They recalled with sage dissatisfaction what a foolish step it had been, in defiance of their urgent and repeated warnings, to grant Kohlhaas an amnesty, thus deliberately giving, as it were, the signal for all kinds of riff-raff to follow in his footsteps. Not content with lending credence to Nagelschmidt's assertion that he had only resorted to arms in order to provide his oppressed master with support and security, they even expressed the definite opinion that his whole appearance on the scene was nothing but a plot hatched by Kohlhaas to alarm the government and force the court to give judgement for him all the sooner in a form which, point for point, would satisfy his lunatic stubbornness. Indeed, in front of some country gentlemen and courtiers gathered after dinner in the Elector's antechamber, the Cupbearer Hinz went so far as to suggest that the dispersal of his horde of brigands at Lützen had been nothing more than a damnable subterfuge; and with considerable irony at the expense of the Grand Chancellor's passion for justice, he cleverly linked some circumstantial evidence together to prove that the whole lot of them were still assembled in the forests of the principality and only waiting for a sign from the horse-dealer before bursting out again with fire and sword. Prince Christiern of Meissen, much disturbed by these latest developments which threatened
to blacken his sovereign's reputation in the most injurious manner, immediately sought an audience with him at the palace; and clearly seeing that it was in the interests of the Tronka party to attempt to ruin Kohlhaas by bringing new charges, he asked the Elector's permission to have the horse-dealer interrogated without delay. Summoned by a court officer to the government headquarters, the horse-dealer appeared, in some astonishment, carrying his two little boys Heinrich and Leopold in his arms; for on the previous day Sternbald, the groom, had arrived with his five children from Mecklenburg where they had been staying, and various considerations too complex to expound here had decided him to pick up the boys and take them along with him to the hearing, as with a flood of childish tears they had begged him to do just as he was leaving them. After looking kindly at the children who had been set down beside their father, and good-naturedly asking them their ages and names, the Prince informed Kohlhaas of the liberties that were being taken in the valleys of the Erzgebirge by his former follower Nagelschmidt; and passing him the latter's so-called writs, he required him to say what he could in his own defence. Although in fact deeply alarmed by these shameful and treacherous documents, the horse-dealer nevertheless had little difficulty in satisfying a man of the Prince's integrity that the accusations made against him were groundless. He not only pointed out that, as things now stood, he needed no help from any third party to reach a favourable conclusion of his case, which was progressing to his entire satisfaction; but he was also able to demonstrate from some papers which he had with him and showed to the Prince the extreme improbability of any inclination on Nagelschmidt's part to lend him such assistance: for shortly before the disbanding of his force in Lützen he had been about to hang the fellow for rape and other outrages committed in the countryside, so that only the publication of the Electoral amnesty, which entirely
changed the situation, had saved him, and the following day he and Kohlhaas had parted as mortal enemies.

Kohlhaas now, with the Prince's approval, sat down and wrote an open letter to Nagelschmidt, in which he described his claim to have taken up arms in order to uphold the amnesty allegedly violated against him and his men as a shameless and wicked fabrication. He stated that he had neither been arrested on his arrival in Dresden nor put under guard, and that his case was going forward just as he wished; as to the acts of murder and arson committed in the Erzgebirge after publication of the amnesty, he gave Nagelschmidt over to the full vengeance of the law for these, as a warning to the rabble he had collected around him. Extracts from the criminal trial which the horse-dealer had conducted against him in Lützen Castle for the abovementioned crimes were appended to all this, for the enlightenment of the public concerning this ruffian who had been intended for the gallows and was, as already stated, only saved by the Elector's edict. The Prince accordingly reassured Kohlhaas about the suspicions which, under the pressure of circumstances, it had been necessary to express to him during this hearing. He promised that as long as
he
was in Dresden the amnesty granted to him would in no way be violated; then giving the two boys some fruit from his table, he shook hands with them again, bade farewell to Kohlhaas and let him go. The Grand Chancellor nevertheless recognized the danger hanging over the horse-dealer and did his utmost to bring his case to a conclusion before further events should complicate and confuse the issue; but such confusion was exactly what the scheming Tronka party desired and intended. Instead of tacitly, as hitherto, admitting guilt and confining their efforts to the securing of a mitigated judgement against the Junker, they now began to raise crafty and quibbling arguments amounting to categorical denial of his guilt. Either they claimed that Kohlhaas's horses had only been detained at Tronka Castle by
the arbitrary action of the warden and steward, of which the Junker knew nothing or almost nothing; or they asserted that the animals had already been suffering from an acute and dangerous coughing sickness upon their arrival, and undertook to prove this by witnesses whom they would produce; and when extensive investigations and discussions had refuted these arguments, they even dragged up an Electoral edict twelve years old which in fact forbade the importation of horse stock from Brandenburg to Saxony on account of an outbreak of cattle disease: a crystal-clear proof not only of the Junker's right but of his duty to detain the horses brought by Kohlhaas across the border.

In the meantime, Kohlhaas had bought back his farm at Kohlhaasenbrück from the worthy magistrate, adding only a small sum to the price in compensation for losses incurred, and he wished to leave Dresden for a few days and return home, apparently in order to effect the legal settlement of this transaction. But his intention was, we do not doubt, connected less with this piece of business, urgent though it in fact was if the winter crop were to be sown, than with a desire to test his position under the present strange and obscure circumstances; and motives of another kind may also have been at work, which we may leave for all who know their own hearts to surmise. He therefore went to the Grand Chancellor, leaving his guard behind, and stated, showing him the magistrate's letters, that if his presence in court was not urgently required at this time, as appeared to be the case, he would like to leave the city and go to Brandenburg for a period of eight to twelve days, within which period he promised to be back. Casting down his eyes with an expression of concern and annoyance, the Chancellor said he had to confess that Kohlhaas's presence was now more necessary than ever in view of the crafty and hairsplitting defences that were being used by the other side and which meant that the court would need statements and explanations from him on a thousand and one unforeseen
points. But when Kohlhaas referred him to his lawyer who was well informed on the case, and pressed his point modestly but persistently, promising to stay away for no more than a week, the Chancellor, after a pause, said briefly as he dismissed him that he hoped he would get himself a passport for this journey from Prince Christiern of Meissen.

Kohlhaas, who could read the Grand Chancellor's face well, was only strengthened in his resolve, and sitting down immediately he wrote to the Prince of Meissen, as chief government administrator, requesting a passport to Kohlhaasenbrück for one week, without giving any reason. In reply to this letter he received an official communication, signed by the commandant Baron Siegfried von Wenk, to the effect that his application for a passport to Kohlhaasenbrück would be submitted to His Serene Highness the Elector, and that as soon as the gracious consent were forthcoming the passport would be sent to him. When Kohlhaas inquired of his lawyer why this governmental communication was signed by a Baron Siegfried von Wenk and not by Prince Christiern von Meissen to whom he had applied, he was told that the Prince had gone to his estates three days ago and in his absence government business had been transferred to the commandant Baron Siegfried von Wenk, a cousin of the gentleman of the same name whom we mentioned earlier. Kohlhaas, whose heart began to beat uneasily at all these complications, waited for several days for a decision on his request which had been submitted with such surprising circumstantiality to the person of the sovereign. But a week or more went by, and still no decision reached him, nor did the High Court pass judgement although he had been definitely assured that it would do so; on the twelfth day he therefore sat down, firmly resolved to force the government's attitude to him into the open whatever it might be, and applied again, as a matter of urgency, for the desired passport. But to his consternation, on the evening of the following day which had likewise passed without
the long-awaited reply, as he walked over to the window of his small back room, deep in thought about his present position and especially about the amnesty procured for him by Dr Luther, he glanced across to the small outbuilding in the yard which served as quarters for the bodyguard assigned to him by the Prince of Meissen on his arrival, and saw that the bodyguard was not there. When he summoned his old servant Thomas and asked him what this meant, the old man replied with a sigh: ‘Sir, things are not quite as they should be. There are more soldiers today than usual and at nightfall they stationed themselves all round the house; two are standing with shields and pikes in the street in front of the main entrance, two are at the back door in the garden, and two more are lying in the front hall on some straw and say they are going to sleep there.'