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Tuis series of Scanpinavian Cuassics is published
by The American-Scandinavian Foundation in the
belief that greater familiarity with the chief literary
monuments of the North will help Americans to a
better understanding of Scandinavians, and thus serve
to stimulate their sympathetic codperation to good ends

SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS
VOLUME XV

THE CHARLES MEN

. BY
VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM

PART II

THIS VOLUME IS ENDOWED BY
MR. CHARLES S. PETERSON
OF CHICAGO

THE CHARLES MEN

BY
VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM
TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH
BY CHARLES WHARTON STORK
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FREDRIK BOOK

PART II

NEW YORK
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1920

Copyright, 1920, by The —American-Scandinavian Foundation

D. B. Updike » The Merrymount Press - Boston - U.S.cA.

CONTENTS

Part II

PAGE
When the Bells Ring 3
Gustaf Celsing 22
The Stupid Swede 37
Bender 63
His Excellency 93
The General of Papers 102
Lieutenant Pinello in the Apothecary Shop 106
The Prisoners in Tobolsk III
The Lion’s Cage 124
The King’s Ride 135
Among the Swedish Skerries 172
In Marstrand’s Church 181
Katerinushka, Little Mother (Lae
The Dark Yule Service 193
Fredrikshall 204
Capture Gortz! 245
A Hero’s Funeral 265

The Ship 279

te
* ‘

ty

6, j e ie

A a A.

Y ie aa |

wee, VRE
> —t se a an

VG ‘sh ei
|e ai ye

fee

THE CHARLES MEN
PART II

THE CHARLES MEN

When the Bells Ring

N southern Smaland, just where the stony road

to Scania branches into several village paths and
a dusty slope leads up to the parish church, there
stood a mill, painted red, and with the largest wings
that any one had ever seen in all that region. The
miller was dead long since. His widow, named Ker-
stin Bure, a woman who in her childhood had seen
happier days and eaten from shining plates of pew-
ter, managed the mill after her own fashion. She
never made mention of her birth or of the love-
dealings that had enticed her from a well-to-do pas-
tor’s home to the narrow tower-room of a miller,
where the axle-beam groaned directly over her
sleeping-place; but then she did not speak of other
things either. The husband had been too poor to
possess a cottage of his own, and had instead built
a chimney straight through the roof of the mill.
There, year after year, with her sewing in her hand,
the wife had silently continued to watch the work of
the men. If at any time she was asked for advice,
she answered preferably with a nod or a shake of
the head, and she seldom went away further than
a stone’s throw from the mill. In figure she was tall
and slim with delicate hands, and her face under
the starched cap, which was always of the same in-

4 THE CHARLES MEN

variable whiteness, reminded one of Mary Mag-
dalen’s on the picture at the altar, though it was
more yellowed and shrunken. She never took wo-
men into her service, and so women in particular
accustomed themselves to passing her in silence.
They did not rightly know whether she was proud
or meek, but most of them thought that she might
well be both. When the sexton appeared with his
spokesmen and in his best Sunday attire to solicit
the hand of this woman, who was already old and
gray, she became quite confused and abashed. She
blushed to the roots of her hair, and merely shook
her head.

One morning she found an infant boy on a heap
of twigs by the spring, and as no one knew any-
thing about the parents, she took the little one in
with great tenderness.

“‘ Nobody can tell whether there lies in that heart
good or evil seed,” she said, “ but the day may come
when I may find out. You shall be called Johannes,
because you are to become devout as an angel of
God. I have been sore afflicted, but for you I shall
lay by a pretty penny, so that your life-days may
sometime counterbalance the heavy ones I have
known.”

The boy grew up, and when he prepared for con-
firmation, he surprised everybody by his pious and
godly answers. With his glossy flaxen hair hanging

over his shoulders, he afterwards sat by his foster-

WHEN THE BELLS RING 5

mother on the mill steps in the bright midsummer
evenings and read diligently in the books that he
had borrowed from the pastor of the congregation.
They sat always taciturnly and quietly, but some-
times he pointed out with his finger some line that
seemed to him more beautiful than the others and
read it aloud softly.

Hay-ricks and meadows were sending out their
perfume of harvest and pasture, and so, too, though
withered, did the clover- or trefoil-blossoms that
lay forgotten here and there between the leaves of
the books as markers. Even late at night only a
single star burned, but that was large and radiant.
Everywhere people were awake and talking, and
the cottage doors stood open.

Many whispered to one another a dark rumor of
how the Swedish army had been beaten at Poltava,
and that now the Danes were to land and complete
the entire overthrow of Sweden.

One Saturday night a rider stopped at the stairs
of the mill and asked for lodging.

Johannes looked doubtfully at his foster-mother,
and asked the stranger whether he would not rather
go on up the hill to the provost’s place.

“No,” he answered, “I want first to see to-night
how the people are getting on.”

He managed to get his horse into the walled pas-
sage under the mill, and then settled down quite

6 THE CHARLES MEN

contentedly among the others to a plate of beer-
soup and a loaf of black bread.

He had let his hair and his chin-whiskers grow,
so that he looked like a common peasant, but some-
times he pulled his mouth toward his ears and
talked harshly in the broadest Scanian, and some-
times he squeezed up his eyes and lamented in the
most sentimental Smalandish. He kept awake all
night, continuing his merry discourse. Once he took
a piece of charcoal and drew a speaking likeness of
Johannes on the wall. A little later he gave Kerstin
Bure shrewd advice as to how she should grease
the mill-axle. Or he would sing psalms and polka-
tunes, to which he himself set the words. In the
morning he took from his travelling-sack a suit with
bright soldier’s buttons. When Johannes and the
old woman peeped wonderingly through the shut-
ters to see whither he went, he was already standing
in the church square, and there was such a clatter
and hubbub among the populace that it echoed for
miles.

“That’s Mons Bock!” clamored the crowd.
“That is our valiant General Stenbock. If we have
him with us, we ’ll go out and fight for our country,
every one of us, father and son, so help us God!”

“Johannes,” said Kerstin Bure to her sixteen-
year-old foster-son, with a hardness in her voice
that he had never heard before, “you are meant to
keep devoutly to your books and some day wear

WHEN THE BELLS RING 7

a pastor’s surplice as my sainted father did, but not
to lose your blood in worldly feuds. Stick your
tinder-box and clasp-knife in your jacket and tie
your leather coat at your belt! Go then out into the
woods and keep yourself well hid there until we
have peace in the land! Before that I do not wish
to see you again. Remember that! You hear now
how the men shout in the church square, but may-
hap their mouths will soon be stopped with black
earth.”

He did as she bade, and wandered off into the
woods by unknown paths. The firs became gradu-
ally more bristling and dense, so that for a long
distance he had to push through backwards with
the leather coat over his face. In the evening he
came to a wide fen, and far out at the rim of a black
lake lay an island overgrown with alders.

“There I’ll build my den,” he thought. But the
quagmire of the swampy fen which floated over the
twofold bottom, and the dark water where not a
glimmer of daylight broke through, sank beneath
his feet, until, exhausted and half asleep, he sat
down on a ledge.

A rustling still sounded from the ridges of the
wood, but the lake lay quiet, and the little yellow
reflections of the fluffy clouds soon stood motion-
less. In the infinite distance beyond the mist of
the fen a goat-bell from time to time struck a few
short, unresonant strokes. Two herd-girls blew

8 THE CHARLES MEN

quaveringly on their cow-horns, and on the for-
gotten and dilapidated sepulchre-mound in the dip
of the valley the glow-worms kindled their lanterns
in the grass.

“Are you one of those that have run away from
war service?” a voice asked him, and when he
looked up, a goat-girl was standing among the ju-
niper bushes, knitting. She appeared to be one or
two years older than he, and her leather boots hung
on her back.

“That’s right enough; but now the fen bars my
way, and berries and ferns get to be scant fare after
a while.”

“It must be you don’t know the woods. No-
body suffers want there. Since my ninth year I’ve
spent every summer up here in the wilds with my
goats. Trim and cut down a couple of fir saplings
and tie them to your feet with withes, and you can
go on the quagmire wherever you like. Thatch your
hut with fir bark and make yourself fishing-gear.”

She carefully pulled a long basting-thread from
her jacket and tied to it a pewter pin, which she
had taken from her head-dress and bent into a
hook.

“Here you have a hook and line,” she said and
continued on her way, still knitting.

That night he did not much heed her advice,
but when the sun again shone into his eyes, he
pulled out his knife.

WHEN THE BELLS RING 9

As soon as he had trimmed himself a couple of
skis of the sort she had taught him to make, he
betook himself out on the fen to the island. When
he stamped on the grass there, the whole island
swayed like a soft feather-bed, but he opined that
this was good, because if there was moisture in the
ground, he would not need to go far to find angle-
worms. Hardly, too, had he dug under the grass-
roots with his fingers, before he found abundance.
To be sure, the fishing went badly at the start, but
after he had mystically laid two blades of sedge
crosswise on the water, it became at once a differ-
ent affair. As he carried a tinder-box in his jacket,
it was an easy matter to broil his savory capture.

Afterwards he began to build his hut with such
haste that he did not give himself leisure to sleep
in the bright summer nights. He understood that
it might easily tumble in on the swaying ground if
he made it too high. Therefore he built instead a
_ low turf-thatched roof-tree, under which he could
not stand upright but had to creep. Every morning
he fetched from the shore trimmed saplings, twigs,
and pieces of fir bark. Finally he built a hearth of
stones, where he let the juniper twigs smoulder and
glow all night to drive off the midges. During his
work he sometimes talked to himself half aloud,
pretending that he was the overseer of a whole gang
of workmen, and he called the island Wander Isle.

He met the goat-girl quite often. Her name was

10 THE CHARLES MEN

Lena. She went about with her knitting, feeding
her charges on clearings and meadows. She taught
him to set nooses and traps. Eventually they met
every morning to see whether the fortune of hunt-
ing had been favorable to them, and she made him
a good friend to all the wild animals.

“Did you see that gorgeous bird?” she asked,
pointing to a blue-black black-cock that roused
the whole wood with his thunderous wing-beats.
“Him I call the Rich Bachelor of Vaxjo, for he
asks neither after his home nor his relatives, but
just sits at the tavern in his fine dress-coat and
greases his wattles.”

“ And just hark now!” she said one night when
an owl hooted in the ravine. “ Him I call the Tax
Collector, who, when he turns his head in his white
collar and rolls his red eyes or snaps his bill,
frightens both man and beast. But if it’s a question
of the little white harmless eggs in his own nest,
then you'll see. Then he has a father’s heart in the
right place.” |

But about nothing did she know so many tradi-
tions as about the cranes.

“Never yet,” she said, “have I got a glimpse of
the long-legged, bald-headed cranes when they set
up their trumpeting from the bog and hold their
autumn assembly before taking flight. Round their
camp they have outposts that sit each with a stone in
his one uplifted claw, so that it may tumble down

WHEN THE BELLS RING II

and wake him if he falls asleep. But the most
wonderful thing is that if any human being sees
the ashen-gray birds go up, he himself begins to
flap with his arms and longs to be able to fly
with them so high that the lakes below on the earth
are only like little shimmering water-drops.”

‘“‘] want to see the cranes,” answered Johannes.

“Perhaps you may get to see them in the au-
tumn, but then you must first teach yourself a great
deal. First, you must be able to stand so quiet that
you look like a dry juniper bush, and to bend
down so that you look like a stone, and to lay your-
self flat on the ground so that no one can tell you
from a pile of rotten twigs.”

“All that I shall try to teach myself, but you
must never go on my island. It is n’t the way you
think there. I have a high fireplace and hangings
on the walls, and the floor between the rugs is so
shining and slippery that you can’t walk on it, but
have to crawl.”

The pretty stories he had read in the dean’s
books ran in his memory, and he wanted to show
the girl that he was not inferior to her, but could
in turn rouse her to wonder and curiosity.

“Tf youll let me get a sight of that house, I ’ll
go down to the settlement and fetch you a mus-
ketoon with bullets and powder-horn.”

“To my island you ’ll never come.”

“Tf youll let me get a sight of that house, I "ll

12 THE CHARLES MEN

teach you in five days to feed yourself on ferns and
roots and nothing.”

«That ’s why I’ve come hither. Keep that prom-
ise, and you shall see my house, if you can really
get there.”

With that he fastened the skis on his feet and
vanished in the mist on the fen.

“The enemy stand on the shore,” he said to his
imaginary soldiers on the island, “but they have
neither axe nor knife for making skis. We may feel
secure, if only we always remain upright and good.”

But late in the evening, when he was about to
lay fresh juniper on the hearth, he saw the goat-girl
coming on the fen with the help of twigs and dry
branches.

“The enemy thinks to take us by storm,” he
continued, “but there is a secret which I have long
suspected. I shall make the whole Wander Isle sail
to sea like a boat.”

He pressed a pole against the outermost tus-
socks of the fen, and the floating island swam sway-
ing further out on the water.

Then he laid himself calmly to sleep by the
crackling embers, but when after a while he sud-
denly opened his eyes, the goat-girl stood straight
before him and peeped in under the low roof on
which fox-skins lay spread inside out to dry. —

She asked him nothing about the high fireplace
or the hangings or the slippery floor, but merely

WHEN THE BELLS RING 13

said, “A fresh breeze has blown up, so that the
island has driven to land on the other shore. But
why do you let the dry fox-skins lie on the roof
instead of spreading them in here on the ground?
And we ought to stick in juniper around the island
so that people can’t see either us or the hut.”

He thought she spoke sensibly, and went ashore
at once to collect the juniper. When it was already
long after midnight, they still worked at the
strengthening and beautifying of his island. They
even made of birch-bark and pegs a door which
they could set before the entrance, and when they
finally shoved the island off from the land again,
they anchored it out in the water with two piles.

““ Now the drawbridge is raised,” said Johannes,
“and we must see to providing the new guests with
entertainment such as is right.”

“The cook-maids and scullery-maids are always
so slow,” she said, and turned the two fish upon the
hearth.

The heather droned, and the lake splashed, so
that the island and the sedge and all the closed
water-lilies swayed. As soon as mealtime had
passed, Johannes lay down inside nearest the hearth,
but Lena, who did not yet feel that she possessed
the right of ownership to Wander Isle, huddled
_ together outside at the entrance with one hand
as a pillow. She still heard the juniper sputter with
heart’s delight, and as she fell asleep she counted

14 THE CHARLES MEN

the small sparks that sailed forth above the chink
in the roof like stars through the night air. That
was the fifth that was the sixth—thatwas the sev-
enth. So she was put in mind of one of her songs:

It was on the seventh morn of the week,
When the prayer-bells rang, I ween,
That the bitter tears ran a-down her cheek,

Though her bride-wreath still was green.

Next day she no longer thought of leaving the
island, and the third day, without noticing it, they
began to say “our island.” Every morning they
landed at the rock, and then she went up to the
clearing with her goats or followed him to examine
nooses and traps. At last she began also to teach
him the art of feeding himself for many days on
berries and ferns and nothing, and she noticed that
he soon won even greater aptitude in this than she
had herself. He grew thin and dry as a blown-off
branch, and yet his sinews knotted themselves all
the harder. But he always remained quiet and tati-
turn, and when she asked him what weighed on his
mind, he went off on his own paths and remained
away long.

They no longer knew the names of the days,
but on the Sabbath the wind carried the distant
sound of the bells far into the wilderness, and then
Johannes put on his embroidered leather coat and
led her upon the overgrown sepulchre-mound,

WHEN THE BELLS RING 15

from which they could see over fen and lake. With
her hand in his he spoke then of God’s love, which
covered the wretchedest crevices with its fairest
bounties, and often they knelt in the grass for long
periods and prayed that He would likewise sow a
few grains of His seed in their souls.

After such conversations, however, Johannes was
always doubly heavy in mindand sought forsolitude.

The nights became ever darker, and often when
she turned back from her herd she had to light her
way with a torch between mountain walls and the
bared roots of trees. The yews, heaven high, were
like tents, where black hands sprawled out through
the ragged seams to seize her by the braids; but
she felt no fear, she thought only of one thing.
Wherever she went and whatever she busied her-
self with, she only thought that the summer would
soon be ended and that no one could know what
would then become of Johannes and her.

Then one October morning she was wakened by
Johannes.

“Do you remember the cranes you spoke of ?”
he asked. “ Now I can both stand so quiet that I
look like a dry juniper bush, and bend down so that
I look like a stone, and lie down flat on the ground
so that no one can tell me from a pile of rotten
twigs. I have taught myself more than that. I can
feed myself on berries and roots, and if those are
wanting, I can starve along on nothing.”

16 THE CHARLES MEN

She sat up and listened to a far-off noise.

“That is no crane.”

“Then I'll investigate what it is.”

He washed himself in the lake, put on his leather
coat as on a Sunday, and pushed her gently aside
when she,wanted to hold him back.

“Don’t go, Johannes!” she begged. “I won’t
let you go from me without following.”

In silence they came ashore with the island at the
ledge and went down through the woods toward the
settled land to a bare clearing, from which there was
a free outlook over the mossy heath and meadows
as far as Kerstin Bure’s mill and the church.

“Johannes!” she burst out with almost a scream,
and seized him tightly by the coat tail. “Come
back with me to our place!”

He answered her meekly: “My conscience has
pained me long enough. Do you see down there
on the heath the gray creatures with thin legs?
And the outposts that you told about are standing
there too. It’s Mons Bock, who is out again on his
recruiting. In that crane-dance I ’d like to play my-
self.”

He walked violently away from her, so that the
coat tail was torn off at the cracking seam, and be-
gan to run down to the heath between the ferns
and the charred stumps.

She followed irresolutely after him, but when
she saw how he spoke to the outposts, and stepped

WHEN THE BELLS RING 17

straight into the assembled crowd of armed peas-
ants, she went at a warm pace to get to him.

When she came into the ring, he already stood
before Mons Bock and was taking his recruit
penny.

«Where have you stuck your knapsack, Sma-
lander?” asked the general.

“‘T have no knapsack, but I can feed myself for
five days on nothing.”

Lena pressed forward between him and the gen-
eral’s dark brown horse.

“He, Johannes here, is no serving-boy, but we
have a place of our own up in the woods.”

“As to the marriage, I should much like to see
the certificate in black and white,” answered Mons
Bock, and the hot color rose and fell on his fore-
head as he spoke.

Then Lena held out in her two hands the torn-
off coat tail, and let him see that it fitted to the
leather coat.

“1 call that a parson’s certificate on real sheep-
skin,” he broke out. “The recruit money may
therefore be yours, my good young lady, but the
boy has been clean sworn in. And now, ye worthy
yeomen of Smaland, forward in Jesus’ name!
Drums we have none, but we can still in our pov-
erty stamp with wooden shoes the old Swedish
march that makes me warm at heart to hear.”

Staffs and wooden shoes banged and clattered on

18 THE CHARLES MEN

rocks and ledges. Even the riders had wooden shoes
tied fast to their feet, so that they tried in vain to
use their stirrups.

When the last farmers had vanished across the
heath, Lena went on to the mill. She dared not re-
late that Johannes had gone along to the war, but
told only of how she had met him in the woods,
exhibiting the coat tail, which was carefully in-
spected and turned over.

“That’s the right coat tail, sure enough,” said
Kerstin Bure, “and though I don’t like to see
women in my service, you may as well stay with
me till Johannes comes. I really need a pair of
strong arms, for I am well on in years and all my
men have been bitten with madne$s and have run
off with Stenbock. There is hardly an able-bodied
man left in the parish, except the sexton, the fool!”

After she had said this she spoke no more to
Lena of what had passed in the woods, and asked
nothing about Johannes, but silently continued her
occupations as was her custom. The mill stood with
unmoving wings, because there was no meal to
grind, and through the long snowy months of win-
ter there was heard in it neither steps nor voices.
Beggars who went past on the road supposed it was
unoccupied and deserted.

When the spring began to reappear, and white
trailing clouds swept across the heavens, there came

WHEN THE BELLS RING 19

one day a boy, hot and panting, who ran along the
road and to each and all whom he met shouted a
single word, until he vanished in the woods on the
other side of the heather. Some hours later a rider
came at a gallop and shouted in the same manner
on all sides until he was gone. The women gath-
ered in crowds on the church grounds— Sweden,
Sweden was saved, and Mons Bock and his goat-
boys had beaten the whole enemy’s army at the
Straits of Oresund!

Kerstin Bure alone asked nobody what had hap-
pened, but sat every noon on the mill stairs in the -
glorious sunshine and carded wool with Lena. All
at once, as they were sitting silent and busy, while
the spring freshet purled in ditches and brooks,
they heard that the bells were ringing in the neigh-
boring parishes to the south, although it was
Wednesday. Expectantly the people ranged them-
selves along the road on both sides, and from the
wide-open door of the church advanced the tot-
tering pastor of the congregation, followed by his
chaplains and in full ceremonials.

Once more the well-known march of the wooden
shoes clattered on ledges and stones, but now to
bagpipes and shawms. It was the returning army
of farmers. There were deep lines of shaggy beards
and slashed sheepskin coats and honest blue eyes.
With staves in hand, muskets in the strap, and wide
hats over their flowing hair, the homeward-bound

20 THE CHARLES MEN

troops marched back from their victory. Far in the
van the tidings-mace went from church to church
as far as the northernmost wooden chapels, where
the Lapps tied their reindeer to the bell-towers.
All the sunny springtime of Sweden was filled with
the song of praise that reéchoed from the bells.

Just in front of the hay-wagons with the wounded
rode Mons Bock in his gray overcoat with his
riding-whip instead of a sword. Calling down bless-
ings upon their saviour, the peasants hailed him
with waving aprons and caps, but he turned to his
ensigns and shouted that they should sing.

When the voices ceased, Mons Bock went on
alone and sang stanza after stanza which he him-
self had put together.

Kerstin Bure had risen on the mill stairs and
looked and looked beneath her lifted hand, but
Lena, who had broken her way through so fear-
lessly in the thickets of the wilderness, did not
dare this time to wait and look about any longer,
but stole away and threw herself sobbing among
the empty meal-sacks.

Step by step, Kerstin Bure withdrew up the
stairs until she stood at the very top with her back
against the wall of the mill. Then she pressed her
hands like opera-glasses to her eyes. In the last
wagon Johannes saton the hayamong the wounded,
as merry and quiet as always, but paler and with
bandages around his arm and shoulder.

WHEN THE BELLS RING 21

She pressed her hands even harder to her eyes.

“So after all he was what I thought him, though
to prove his soul thoroughly I commanded him
otherwise. Then,though heis Kerstin Bure’s foster-
son, he shall still keep for his life long her whom
he himself has chosen, even if she is the poorest of
goat-girls.”

But at that moment she heard how the sexton
and his ringer clattered at the trap-doors of the
steeple, and the great bell gave forth its first stroke.

She knitted her -brow and went into the mill,
saying: “I’ve no meal to grind, but if he lets his
bell sound, though he has had no son in the war,
my mill shall play, too.”

Creaking, the dust-white axle-beam began to
moveand purr, and while the peasant army marched
by singing, the empty mill kept turning its great
wings faster and faster.

Gustaf Celsing

HE sultan, who was going about the streets in
disguise with a fig basket on his head, talking
searchingly with the populace and many of the
Janisaries, met his mother in the seraglio garden.
She swept aside the veil from her wrinkled ©
forehead and threw back her arms.

“The people are minded for war,” she said.
“When will you gather them again and help my
Northern lion against the czar? Command your
soldiers to bear Mohammed’s banner above the
head of the Swedish king and follow him to the
combat!”

The sultan set the basket of figs ona stone table,
and answered: “I knew but little of him when he
came to my land as a fugitive. Soon men and
women spoke of nothing else than of him. How,
I asked myself, can a lonely, impoverished fugitive
without authority conquer a whole people so by
his mere presence? I hardly understood it, but
wished to give him my hand graciously, although
he was an infidel, and I sent my soldiers against
his enemies. The people fired salutes of welcome
and lighted lamps in the towers of the mosques.
At the river Pruth the armies met. — But hearken
to me! Peace was made. Then my grand vizier be-
held far out in the stream a man on a swimming
horse. It was the Swedish king, who had come

GUSTAF CELSING 23
spurring with his cavalry from Bender. My grand

vizier has told me all very exactly, and his voice
still trembles when he speaks of that time. With-
out saluting, the king galloped to his tent and, wet
through as he was with the water of the river, sat
down at the head of the divan under the banner
of Mohammed. He required to have at once the
newly signed treaty of peace, so that he might tear
it to pieces. There, then, hundreds of miles from his
own provinces, sat the beaten fugitive with Mo-
hammed’s banner over his bald head, and, proudly
as if his realm had extended down even to the
Arabian deserts, he commanded my armies to con-
tinue the strife. It was a windy day. The tent-cloth
flapped and beat. Now and then the banner rustled,
and when he lifted his clenched hand, he struck
his gauntlet against the sacred green tassels. — But,
I say to you, peace was made. Other times have
come. Every day I have had money and gifts of
many sorts delivered at Bender to your hero. I
have treated, him as my guest, but instead of re-
turning to his own people, he remains year after
year. My grand vizier counsels me no longer to

lavish gifts on the uninvited strangers, from whom
we have little advantage to hope. They are too poor
to be capable of any great achievement. There,
mother, you have the truth.”

It grew dark while he spoke, but that same night
the Swedish lords who had been sent to the city

24 THE CHARLES MEN

of the sultan conferred together in the house of
Thomas Funck. They spoke together in anxious
whispers, and when it began to draw towards morn-
ing, Funck pushed the candlestick across the table
to the military preacher, Agrell.

“Read something for us from the Scriptures be-
fore we disperse, for with all our deliberation we
have got nowhere. The grand vizier did indeed
conduct his soldiers to the firing line, but he set a
higher value on a full purse and pretty slave-girls
than on bullet-wounds in his white arms. At the
river Pruth he had his turban brimmed with Rus-
sian bribes. Since then the Turks are against us. But
Gustaf Celsing, with his readiness in their speech,
might easily compose a letter of complaint. Still,
who could bring it to the sultan’s own hands? He
does of course receive such letters when he rides to
the mosque on Fridays, but we all know that he
who has the foolhardiness to present such a letter
is at once arrested, and if he cannot prove point by
point the truth of the writing, he is executed with-
out mercy. And who here has the proofs ?— There-
fore, I say, let us rather hear some words from the
Scriptures, and then each and all may go home.”

Herman Tersmed took the Bible from the wall-
shelf and laid it before Agrell.

“J have a true respect for open dealing,” he said,
“but at this stage I must agree with Funck. If our
king had owned the treasury of France, he would

GUSTAF CELSING 25

have won far more provinces than he has lost. He
would by this time be the greatest and mightiest
among the princes of the earth. But poverty ties
our hands. What are we, in fact? a great power with
a beggar’s staff in our hand.”

During the whole conversation Celsing, the sec-
retary of the commission, sat at the end of the table
facing the closed window-shutters. Unknown to
the others, he had already composed beforehand a
letter of complaint to the sultan; he could feel it
under his coat with his hand, but he did not yet
know to whom he should dare to entrust his plans.
The day that is now glimmering, he thought, is a
Friday, and the sultan will then ride to the mosque.
While the dawn comes, I will carefully note which
of those present is struck by the sunbeam from the
chink between the shutters, and I pray the good
God that He may in that manner point out the man
who is most worthy to become His instrument. To
that man I shall then turn in trust and confidence.

Engrossed in his thoughts, he could only mo-
mentarily follow the words that Agrell read ina
melancholy voice by the guttering candle.

«And the woman was clad in a mantle of pur-
ple and scarlet, and she shone with precious stones.
... And I saw the woman drunken with the blood
of the saints and of the witnesses for Jesus, and I
fell into a great wonderment when I saw her.”

Celsing was inwardly ashamed at not being able

26 THE CHARLES MEN

to listen to Agrell more attentively. He continued
to sit facing away, while he shaded his pale coun-
tenance with his hand. He heard how the city
awoke, how quick steps echoed over the streets,
how oars splashed, how the first breeze stirred the
chestnut trees around the house, how the criers of
the muezzin sent forth their song.

The chinks between the shutters already glowed.
He dared not shift his hand from his cheek or
move his chair.

From the middlemost crevice the first streak of
the sun fell, bright and radiant, full into his own
eyes. )

He arose so violently that, stammering, he had
to seek for an excuse.

“ My good sirs, I do not feel quite well and am
going up to my room to rest.”

He understood that he was to seek no longer for
codperators, but was himself to be the only witness
for truth. The morning light filled all his room.
This was situated above that where the others were
gathered, and the walls and flooring of the wooden
house were so thin that he could still hear Agrell’s
voice.

He opened the chest of drawers, where a multi-
tude of Turkish costumes and cloths lay stored to
- be used by him and his comrades at any time when
they wished to be unknown. The. gold lace and
tassels glinted, and he slowly unbuttoned his Swed-

GUSTAF CELSING 27

ish coat and vest to exchange them for the foreign
habiliments. But when he saw them lying on the
bed, when he saw the rents sewed up after a sabre
cut on the sleeve, and when he recognized in the
worn lining the stitches with which his mother had
sewed in his commission and passport, he did not
want to let the old suit go out of his hands. He
threw himself prone on the bed and drewthe clothes
together in an embrace, hiding his face in the lining
of the coat as against a pillow.

‘God, God!” he whispered, “this is the mission
Thou hast given the Swedes, that they in the midst
of an evil world should show what poverty and an
open brow can avail. Was it not through their pov-
erty that they were beaten? Was it not through their
poverty that they became honored among men? If
they had money to bribe the serail and were not
ashamed to use it, all the soldiers of the sultan
would stand beneath their banners. Is it not Thy
will that where the czar pays with money, they
should pay with their lives?”

Through the floor he still heard that Agrell read
from the Bible: “ And the kings of earth who lived
with her in luxury shall weep and lament over her,
when they see the smoke of her burning, standing
at a distance out of fear at her torments, saying:
‘Alas, alas! woe for the great city of Babylon, that
in one hour thy judgment has come!’ And the
merchants of the earth shall weep and lament over

28 THE CHARLES MEN

her, for no one buys their cargoes, their cargoes of
gold and silver, of jewels and pearls, and fine linen
and purple and silk and scarlet, and all odorous
woods, and all their vessels of ivory, of costly
woods, of copper, iron, and marble, their cinnamon
and spices and ointments and incense, and wine and
oil and fine flour and wheat, and beasts and sheep
and horses, and chariots and men and slaves and
bondmen—”

Celsing saw before him the great city and the sul-
tan who approached on his horse, and he saw him-
self as he would present his letter. But with that it
seemed to him that the turbans changed to chevril
and dandelions in a garden, where bare-footed vil-
lage urchins played with a boat of bark in a stream.
On the bench up at the house his mother sat and
showed him how neatly she had sewed his commis-
sion and passport under the lining of his coat. He
rose, passed his hand over his brow, and burst out
aloud as if he were speaking to her: “ Rather than
that the Swedes should become a byword and be
hunted away like beggars, one of them might well
lose his life.”

«With whom are you talking?” asked Agrell,
whoat this moment was coming upstairstotheroom.
“You have locked the door on the inside, and left
me no bed of repose.”

Eagerly Celsing rolled up the garments in a
cloth, and knotted the bundle firmly together

GUSTAF CELSING 29

again. At one corner he fastened a slip of paper, on
which he wrote that he bequeathed everything to
his servant, on condition that no stranger should
wear his honest old Swedish uniform.

“Dear brother,” he called to Agrell, “don’t be
annoyed at my oddness, but let me still remain
alone with myself a few moments.”

Meanwhile he pulled on the wrinkled Turkish
trousers, thrust the slippers on his feet, and slipped _
his arms into the gold-embroidered jacket. As soon
as he had hidden the letter of complaint in his girdle
and put on the red turban, he cautiously opened the
window.

Agrell sat down on the highest step, but jerked
every now and then at the door-knob. Celsing is
such a shy and reserved young man, he thought,
that nobody can rightly know what he is about, but
it would little suit such a home-keeping lad as he to
throw himself into anything desperate.

He shook the door-knob yet again and said:
“You were not born to undertake any fooleries,
Brother Celsing, but in good time to settle mildly
down and honorably cultivate your cabbage. But
what does it mean that you are going back and forth
across the floor without being willing to open the
door?”

Instead of answering, Celsing opened the win-
dow and climbed quietly down to the ground on
the branches of a chestnut tree, so that the warnings

30 THE CHARLES MEN

of friends or their parting hand-grasps should not
rob him of self-command.

Among the trees a crowd of servants were going
about in light blue coats with enormous gold and
silver braid, so as outwardly to conceal the poverty
of the expedition; but these were on the other side
of the house. Without looking back, Celsing stole
through the gate, and when at last he came out on
the square between the church of St. Sophia and
the serail, he stationed himself under the great tree
among the beggars and cripples.

Here is the place, he thought, to which God has
now assigned me. You poor fellows on crutches,
you beggars who hardly have a stone to sleep on,
learn from my countrymen the way to promotion!

He did not take his eyes from the Sublime
Porte, where guarding capidgis held back the in-
quisitive with their sabres, and where, dripping after
the heavy rain of the night, two severed heads were
set on spikes in niches of the wall. Unused to the
low slippers without heels, he felt himself shorter
than usual, but when he rose on tiptoe, he could
see over the turbans into the spacious Court of the
Janisaries and beyond to the second gate, the Gate
of Prosperity. There white eunuchs disclosed be-
tween the walls a path of gold-embroidered silk
and swaying turban plumes. Bearded ulemas in
violet cloaks and blue boots, agas with sky-blue
mantles, and soldiers with high yellow caps leaned

GUSTAF CELSING 31

forward and watched the still closed door. Through
this the sultan was to come. He knew it. He re-
cited to himself from memory the final lines of the
letter which his fingers clutched under the fold of
the girdle: “This is written, not by any one’s
request, but for the sake of the truth and his op-
pressed countrymen, by the Swedish subject, Gustaf
Celsing.”

In that letter he had told of the venality of the
grand vizier and the officials, but now, as all the
gold and silk glittered in the sun, it seemed to him
that he had still said too little. He recalled the cart
with the sacks of straw on which his own sick king
had driven across the steppes. He recalled how in
Bender colonels and generals blackened the rents
. in their worn-out coats, so that their deficiencies
might not strike the Turks in the eyes. And yet he
had seen powerful ambassadors bow before these
fugitives with a reverence more sincere than that
with which the trembling onlookers now sank their
turbans.

A silence of terror spread over the sea of men,
and on high the callers-to-prayer sang from St.
‘Sophia. He heard them hail the imperial descend-
ant of Mohammed from the church whose convex
canopy of stone had been built to the sound of
psalms as a miracle of Christendom, and where the
bones of holy martyrs were immured behind every
twelfth layer of tiles. He took hold of a beggar’s

32 THE CHARLES MEN

crutch so as to raise himself. In the Gate of Pros-
perity, as it opened, he distinguished the pyramidal
head-dress and green kaftan of the grand vizier,
the light blue stable-grooms, and the dark green
agas of the sultanic stirrup. The red executioners
came with their cords; coffee-bearers and water-
bearers with their handcloths, trays, and golden
pots; and finally, shaded by silken banners, ap-
proached the sultan, Achmed ITI, the lord of bri-
dals and tulip festivals.

Celsing felt with both hands in his girdle and
pulled forth the letter.

“God be gracious to the unfortunate!” mur-
mured the beggars. “That is an insane man, who
knows not what he does.”

They grasped his jacket to hold him back, but
they were too weak and infirm. Then one of the
cripples began to beat him with a crutch, but he did
not feel it, and with the letter raised above his head
he pressed in through the Janisaries and placed
himself in the path of the sultan.

The sultan, who sat somewhat bent forward in -
the saddle, was very pale, and his eyes were like
firelight through misty panes. Without reining in
his horse, he lowered his hand and received the
letter, instantly hiding it in his pelisse of damask
bordered with black fox.

The executioners now seized upon Celsing and
led him across the Court of the Janisaries to a

GUSTAF CELSING 33

prison den which was situated under the Gate of
Prosperity.

“You have dared to deliver a letter of com-
plaint,” they said. “ May it be that you have also
satisfactory proof for what you have written?”

He came to himself and said: “ Proof? My word.
Take my life, take my blood, as proof!”

Sighing, they shook their heads and left him in
solitude, but on the prison wall fell a streak of day-
light as warm and brilliant as the sunbeam that in
the morning had determined him to sacrifice him-
self. This strengthened him in his resolve to await
the consummation of his punishment with uplifted
forehead.

He picked up a sharp piece of stone from the
ground, and shortened the long hours with cutting
words just where the sunbeam struck the wall. As
the ray slowly shifted, he followed and worked out
letter after letter. When the evening broke in, he
had already engraved in his mother speech the fol-
lowing lines on the plaster of the remote death-
prison: |

I hungered, I froze

For the hero I chose.
Right gladly we bled,
And the noblest are dead.

When he had finished the word “dead,” the beam
faded, and it was dark. Ini the distance beyond the
third and innermost gate, the Gate of Felicity,

34 THE CHARLES MEN

flutes and guitars sounded from the gardens of the
serail.

Then unrest and anguish rose again in his mind,
and-he spoke half aloud, wringing his hands: “‘ Wo-
men and gaieties I care for but littke—and food
and drink but little more. And all the bedizened
satin of life that men long for? Vanity, vanity ! What
worth does it possess when once you get it? How
well did I not sleep many a night with my old coat
rolled up under my head! But out there in the
world there is so much, so much that I went by
coldly and indifferently. If I had my freedom again,
I would be able to sit under the tree among the
beggars and point to one of the small glittering liz-
ards in the grass and rejoice at seeing it. O heart,
heart, you that knock so heavily, why did you hang
so empty in my breast when the light of day yet
shone upon my path?”

Hour after hour he remained awake in the dark-
ness, while all the more fervent grew his longing
to see again his beam of light on the wall. Through
the keyhole he could discern that pale moonlight
lay over the earth, but around him all remained
dark.

Then he threw himself down and proceeded to
think out the verses that he would cut on the wall
next morning. He believed that, if he became free,
he would repeat and interpret the verses for the
poor folk under the tree at the gate of the serail;

GUSTAF CELSING 35

but if he never saw the open sky again, perhaps
some one of his unfortunate countrymen would
take comfort in finding the Swedish words on the
wall. When he had got the whole piece finished, he
sat up and sang with a loud voice to the tune of an
Easter song that he remembered from his boyhood:

I starved and I froze
For the hero I chose.
Right gladly we bled,
And the noblest are dead.
His squadrons are taken,
The old and the young.
His stars may not waken,
With clouds overhung.

In alien places

His men of proud races
As beggars must crouch,
Of straw is his couch,
Though reckoned most royal.
Ye hungering ones,
Behold on the stones

Your monarch, ye loyal!

While he was still singing, all of a sudden a red
gleam shone through the fingers he held over his
eyes. He rose. Was that the sunrise at last? But
the red beam shifted restlessly back and forth on
the wall, and he heard ever nearer the sound of
voices. Then it grew dark again, and a bunch of
keys clattered a long time at the lock.

36 - THE CHARLES MEN

Two slaves entered with torches, and laid before
him on the ground a knotted bundle. Thereupon
one of them raised his torch and addressed him.

“The padishah greets you and says: So great is
his respect for the Swedes and their king that he
rather wishes to see you as his guest than as a pris-
oner. Your writing he will consider. Assume now
the clothing that belongs to you, and go in peace to
your house!”

Celsing knelt and opened the bundle, in which
he found his Swedish garments. He lifted his coat
up to the torch to see that it was really the right one.
When he recognized the sabre cut on the sleeve
and his mother’s sewing on the yellow lining, he
took off in the sight of the slaves the velvet Turk-
ish costume and buttoned on again his worn but
honorable uniform.

With his hat in front of him he stepped out into
the moonlight, but when at the Sublime Porte he
came to the beggars sleeping under the trees, he
caught the nearest old man by the shoulders and
kissed him.

“You do not know me,” he said; “but if you did
in truth, you would follow me to my people, and
they would teach you the way to promotion. Often
have I seen my king sleep as you do with a stone
under his head.”

The Stupid Swede

N a certain winter morning the mists lay on

the Sea of Marmora like rugged islands of
snow, but all the yellow minarets of Stamboul were
already glowing as far down as their lowest balcony.
A eunuch, who belonged to the sultan’s mother,
had betaken himself to the grave of his former mas-
ter to pray. On the way home he bought at the mar-
ket-place a white slave-girl who had attracted his
notice by her tall figure. He followed behind her at
the distance of a few steps, and from time to time
pointed out the way with his silver-ornamented
bamboo staff, but as often as not he kept shaking his
head and thinking: What they will say this time not
even a prophet could foresee. Why, she has feet
like a bearer of iron.

He conducted her past the haughty, indifferent
guards of the outer court in the serail, and turned
down toward the water. There he knocked at a little
insignificant garden gate which was almost hidden
with creeping vines.

“My child,” he said to the slave-girl while they
waited, “the old man who is now coming with his
keys is called the Deposed Messiah, and you may
as well learn first as last that he is a dangerous and
peculiar man. In his. youth, it is said, he was called
Sabathae and lived as a Jew in Smyrna. Then he
began to preach that he was the second Messiah,

38 THE CHARLES MEN

but the governor ordered the bowmen to prove his
invulnerability, and with that he renounced his ho-
liness, and instead became porter in the serail.”

The lock creaked, and the door was slowly and
cautiously opened by an old man, who had a ragged
brown shawl knotted around his waist like a belt.

The eunuch condescendingly laid his black hand
on the other’s shoulder.

TJ will give you a coin of shining silver, you old
fellow, if before we go further you will tell the for-
tune of this new servant. Never have I brought a
newcomer over your threshold in more perplexity.
—Look here, woman, take my staff and draw a line
with it on the sand of the path so that this man can
interpret it and predict your future!”

As soon as the slave-girl had followed out this
command, the Deposed Messiah bent over the sand
and mumbled: “That is a straight line—it goes
crosswise over the path to the border where poison-
ous vermin slink about under the roses. It is alto-
gether straight, I say,—not a bend, not a flourish.
Keep your coin, master; such a straight line has
nothing to foretell. This woman’s fortune I cannot
predict.”

“You may then take the reward you have long
deserved, old impostor,” answered the eunuch, as
he took his staff and let it fall across the back of the
Deposed Messiah. “ Do you remember when you
preached and taught that you were a prophet of

THE STUPID SWEDE 39

God, who would one day come riding on a wild
beast with reins of seven-headed serpents?”

The Deposed Messiah stood a moment on one
foot like a crane and scratched the inside of his knee
with the other. After that he took a couple of steps
back, and his little wrinkled face was distorted while
he raised his hands and hissed, “Cuffs and blows
I get on your account, unknown woman. Be you
accursed, and may serpents and scorpions cause
your death! Now I’ve told your fortune.”

When he had said this, he again carefully locked
the gate behind them, and limped. off across the
pebbles by the water.

Meanwhile the eunuch had already taken the
slave-girl by the arm and led her up a steep stone
flight of steps between walls as high as those of a
fortress. They came up to a pleasure-garden, where
the paths were strewn with broken conch-shells
that crackled softly under their tread, and he made
a sign to her to walk slowly in reverent silence. Be-
tween the cypresses gilded cages with song-birds
hung on cords, small fountains plashed and dripped
into basins of Parian marble, and through a lon
archway of sighing myrtle and boxwood he led her
out on a promontory facing the sea.

In a circle of plane-trees stood a white kiosk with
a fluted curving roof, and crescents and stars on the
spires; and on the rug before the door a couple of
nurses babbled caressingly in low tones with some

40 THE CHARLES MEN

children whom they were teaching to walk. In the
middle of the doorway a white-haired woman in a
pelisse of sable that reached to her feet sat upon
cushions, knotting a white ribbon rosette around
the shaft of a child’s rattle of pure gold. It was the
Bee of the Rosebuds, the sultan’s mother, the won-
_ drously beautiful Greek from Retimo, who in the
bloom of her youth, when her lips were still like the
dew of spring, had made Mohammed IV mad with
submissive love.

How well the elderly a remembered the
terrible hours when the torches of the Janisaries
shone over the courts, and her dethroned husband
retired to the innermost chambers of the palace to
prepare himself with prayers and meditation on
death for imprisonment and the grave. She could
still see herself in the long years when in the serail
of Eski, the gloomy home for superannuated wo-
men of the harem, she went sleepless back and forth
over the carpets and wrung her hands, while the
son of a rival, engrossed in theological discourse
with softas and astrologers, breathed out his chill
over the citadel of the earlier sultans. Best of all,
however, she recollected the morning when a.son
of her own blood received the oath of allegiance in
the acclaim of the Janisaries, whén once more she
saw from her portable chair the Gate of Felicity
rise to the cornice, and grasped the sceptre of au-
thority with a hand as firm and tranquil as that

THE STUPID SWEDE 41

with which she now held the rattle of her grand-
child. Her countenance was yellowish and sharp,
but an infinite charm hovered over her melancholy
smile.

The eunuch threw himself down prone on the
rug, but raised himself again at a sign from her and
began to speak:

“Once upon a time in Haivanserai a child found
a great diamond of the fairest water. No one, noble
sultana, no one knew how it had come thither, but
a learned alim related that just in that place, on a
day of triumph, the crown of the Emperor Justinian
had been lost. You have doubtless also heard, noble
sultana, that a poor man once found a splendid dia-
mond on a rubbish heap close to the Gate of Egri-
kapu. So little did he suspect the value of the stone
that he exchanged it for three silver spoons, but
now that stone holds together the tuft of plumes
on your son’s turban. Precious things of all sorts
lie hidden from of old in the gravel heaps of this
city and perhaps in the ground beneath us here, but
when the treasure-seeker comes with his spade, he
searches in the wrong place, and finds only bones
and mouldered' fragments of masonry. After that
fashion, too, it often goes with me, your servant,
when I am to buy slave-girls. For a whole year I
have anxiously borne your command to provide
a tall and yellow-haired girl. The freshest spring
water has tasted brackish to me, and the softest

42 THE CHARLES MEN

sleeping-rug has seemed to me harder than one
of the stone stairs in Seven Towers, because the
thought of your desire has not granted me any
peace. To-day for the first time—just when I had
forgotten my disquiet for a short period, and was
going to pray at your husband’s grave—thegracious
God let me quite unexpectedly get sight of such
a slave as you wished.”

He lifted off the plain shawl which the slave-girl
wore over her head, and there stood a woman with
fair, tightly combed hair and a clear, open expres-
sion.

The sultana laid the rattle on her knee and an-
swered, smiling: “One night in Ramadan my son
dreamed that he saw me embrace and kiss a tall,
yellow-haired slave-girl. As there is no such in all
the serail, the dream made me inquisitive. I know
not well, though, what office we shall give to this
newly arrived servant. She is too tall and awkward
to become a dancer or to serve my son. Above all
things he loves small feet and small hands.”

“«‘ Assuredly,” answered the eunuch, as he noted
how little his purchase pleased the sultana; “but
as yet I have not by any means related to you the
-most remarkable thing about this woman. I my-
self should indeed hardly dare to believe my own
speech, if the slave-dealer had not affirmed the
truth of it on his own salvation. I know him and
know that he is an exceedingly pious and righteous

THE STUPID SWEDE 43

merchant, who has never deceived us either in re-
spect to the slaves’ ages or places of birth. Further-
more, this woman already knows many words of our
speech, and has herself attested that the slave-dealer
speaks the truth. Hear me, therefore, noble sul-
tana, and judge whether I have ever had a more
marvellous jewel to present to you! With what en-
thusiasm are you not wont to speak of your lion
at Bender, the great king of the Swedes! Now this
poor womanisa daughter of his people and was born
in his remote kingdom, where there is neither grass
nor flowers, but deep snow lies in the middle of the
summer.”

The erstwhile indifferent sultana threw the rattle
aside and rose, full of confused wonder. She forgot
her own dignity and walked around the slave-girl,
scrutinizing her carefully. She took her hands,
raised them, examined them, and let them fall
again. She opened her lips and inspected her teeth.
She felt of her hair and skin, but during all this long
investigation continued to smile steadily.

“ Everything about this woman,” she said, “is so
large—the mouth and even the chin are large.—
Girl, show me your legs!”

The slave-girl made an uncouth, awkward ges-
ture of sudden disgust and turned away, mumbling
in her own language: “ Ugh, such foolery!”

“She is quite simple-minded,” the eunuch ob-
served conciliatingly. “I noticed that at once, and

44 THE CHARLES MEN

the merchant, who would not give false testimony
as to that either, admitted that he had never come
to give her any name, but used to call her just the
Stupid Swede.”

“Then she may as well keep the name until she
deserves a better.— My child, show me now your
legs!”

The Stupid Swede became still more vexed and
bashful and held around her the long brown skirt
with both hands.

“‘Lawks! can’t you let me alone?”

“What does she say?”

“That I do not know, noble sultana. But— per-
haps she would do to carry the linen to the wash-
ing.”

“No, she shall be the caretaker for my parrots,
because none of my other attendants is able to lift
their cages. Evening Starlight, who now has charge
of the birds, is too slender and graceful a girl for
the task, and may have a great future to look for-
ward to. Meanwhile let her at the start instruct the
newcomer carefully in her office.”

The sultana, who had sated her curiosity and
wearied of the conversation, went back to the door
and called to the nurses to lead forward the chil-
dren.

So the days passed, and Evening Starlight
showed the new slave-girl how to tend and feed
the parrots. In the hour before sunset the two often

THE STUPID SWEDE 45.

sat whispering together in the pleasure-garden
among the parrot cages that had been lifted down;
and Evening Starlight, who was a little thirteen-
year-old Circassian and the youngest in the sulta-
na’s service, became devoted to the Stupid Swede.
Once the sultana commanded that they should
carry the oldest and most elegant of the parrots
down to the shore in his silver cage, so that her
favorite bird, which was sick and pining, might in-
hale the salt breeze fresh from the sea. When they
had sat down on a bench by the cage, Evening Star-
light wound her arms about her friend’s broad
shoulders, and began to question her about every-
thing imaginable.

“Tell of yourself, and I'll tell of myself.”

Little have I to tell. Asa nurse girl I followed
the wife of Major Eneberg from a city called Ny-
koping to a city called Riga. There I was married
to a brave and God-fearing soldier who was named
Andersson, but when the siege and famine came
upon us, and Andersson tried to help some of us
women to escape, I was captured by the Russians,
bound and laid in a cart,and sold to the Turkish
slave-dealer.”

“Tell me one thing. Do you know the splendid
story about the soul of the dance? No. Is there
anything more blissful on earth than to dance?”

Evening Starlight arose, dancing softly, and
turned around with eyes half closed so that her

46 THE CHARLES MEN

floating veil was like the blue-white rings of Per-
sian incense.

“The Deposed Messiah has foretold that some
day I shall get two hundred shawls and a kiosk
carpeted with red damask. I truly believe that his
words will be justified if I can but get to dance
before the sultan. Do you know, I cannot sleep
o’ nights, but just lie awake and think of all that.
Perhaps, I think every evening, perhaps even to-
morrow I shall get to dance before the sultan. As
yet he has hardly seen me.— About what do you
mostly think? I mean, what do you long for, what
do you hope for? For just nothing, you say? Can it
really be any amusement for you only to go about
and do your heavy and monotonous task with the
parrots? I’ve never yet heard any one praise that
enjoyment. I think it’s a punishment to have to sit
and feed those stupid wretches. You area strange
sister, and nobody rightly understands you.’

The Stupid Swede sat stern and morose. She
played with the ninety-year-old parrot in the cage,
and tried to teach it some words in her native speech
so as to hear a living creature utter them.

“* Now do learn to say Andersson !”’ she enjoined.

But the proud and fastidious bird gurgled and
shrieked, and would not do so.

Then she stared at the Venetian merchantman
that, with gilded lanterns on its prow and sur-
rounded by sea-gulls and caiques laden with gar-

THE STUPID SWEDE 47

den-stuff, dried its loose-hanging sails in the sun.
The pennants were so long that they reached down
to the water, and the oarsmen scrambled to catch
their tips, which were lifted by the sunset breeze.

For the first time she reflected upon her own
fate. She thought that it was absurd and ridiculous,
as if the sultana’s hunchbacked story-teller had re-
lated it in jest, and while he spoke had shaken arm-
rings, dry pods of rape-seed, parrot-feathers, and
shreds of yarn in his cap. When she saw her own
shadow stretched by the evening light over the
glittering mosaics of the stone bench, she had to
smile, as if in a sultan’s mausoleum she had struck
her knee upon Swedish settle-beds and chests of
drawers, and had found a couple of cast-off Smaland
boots of goat-skin in the sacred prayer-niche. But
to sink down in meditation with hands on knees
was not her business, and she was suddenly aroused
by steps on the paths.

There came the eye-doctor with wonder-working
salve of collyrium in an agate box, but he himself
was blind, so that he had to be led by both hands.
There behind the hyacinths fluttered the light blue
caftan of the Master of Flowers, and in portable
chairs with carefully drawn lace curtains much-
envied imperial concubines listened awhile to the
plashing waves. With almost dismal menace that
whole cloister, sanctified to earthly happiness, rose
like a mountain, to whose uppermost heights only

48 THE CHARLES MEN

the boldest cliff-scaler of fortune dared to climb in
order to pull to him its fruit or fall back a bloody
corpse. Leafy plane-trees and oaks shaded the
meadow-carpets along the shore. Above the nearest
walls, behind hedges of myrtle and laurel bushes, ex-
tended the length of the harem building, imbedded
in vines and roses, with wooden gratings before the
little windows. But highest of all, where the all-
powerful beings looked down upon their realm and
mixed their ice-cold sherbet in bowls of roughly pol-
ished turquoises, the pines and cypresses soughed
with the dusky green of a mountain forest, and the
marble kiosks shone out like snow.

“The sun is sinking,” said Evening Starlight.
“ Let us go out on the grass slope and play. Beloved
sister, what are you pondering?”

‘It is now almost a whole year that I have not
heard a single passage of God’s word.— But the air
begins to be chilly, and it’s time to carry in the sick
bird so that the poor thing may not take harm.”

“Why should we trouble about the wretched
beast? Nobody sees us. Come, beloved sister, take
my hand.”

The Stupid Swede sullenly lifted the heavy cage
instead of replying. Step by step she carried it alone
up the endless stairways to the top, and while the
song of the callers-to-prayer from St. Sophia urged
the faithful to kneel, she muttered to herself in her
own speech: “ One ought forsooth to think of one’s

THE STUPID SWEDE 49

duties, I trow, even if nobody always stands behind
the bushes and glowers.”

After that evening she was still more sulky
and cross, and the other slave-girls stared after her,
laughing, as she sought out her way through the
innumerable corridors and long verandas of the
harem, on which verandas eunuchs-in-waiting stood
without thought and beheld the remote summits
of Mount Olympus in Bithynia. Neither did little
Evening Starlight any more throw her arms about
her with the same childish fervor, but danced and
hopped in her footsteps, or called to her out of
nooks and corners: “ Look after the sick bird!”

The Stupid Swede did not sorrow over her fate.
She longed for nothing and hoped for nothing.
She desired no more of the coming day than the
past had given, but she went about in a constantly
increasing vexation with all the alien and vain life
about her. The parrots were soon the only crea-
tures that with their chattering could entice her to
answer, and in especial she took most tender care
of the feeblest and oldest bird, which had seen nine
sultans. She did this, not because it was the oldest
and most distinguished, but because it was the
most decrepit. The alabaster bowls and spoons
from which it fed could never be sufficiently pol-
_ ished, and sometimes she sat up with her birds all

night.
At last, however, the slave-girls noticed that

50 THE CHARLES MEN

she found other things than parrots to serve. One
night well on in the summer, for instance, the
eunuch had forgotten to fill the water-jug that al-
ways stood beside her sleeping-carpet, and when
she had slept very peacefully awhile, she awoke and
began to feel thirsty. Then it occurred to her that
nota single drop of rain had fallen for many weeks,
and that the tulips outside the kiosk must be as
thirsty as she. The more burning and dry her throat
became, the more clearly she imagined that she her-
self felt the torture of the flowers. Finally she rose,
took one by one the well-filled jugs of the other
sleeping slave-girls, and went out in the middle of
_ the dark night and watered the tulip-beds. There
she was seized by the eunuchs, who at first thought
she had slipped out to steal. All this was long talked
of in the harem, but the sultana continued gracious
toward her. At times she even entrusted to her the
purse, which otherwise she kept constantly under
her clothing.

Late and early the guards saw the Stupid Swede
with the food-bowls of the parrots, and to all ques-
tions alike she answered harshly. But if from the
wall she recognized the Deposed Messiah, who
stood on one leg like a crane in the splashing waves
beyond the sun-white beach of pebbles, a shudder
passed through her body.

It happened one day that the High Stewnrdess
of the palace ordered her to carry the parrot-cages

THE STUPID SWEDE 51

to the Kiosk of Peris, the nearest one to the sea,
and to be there herself at sunset.

She answered as usual by mumbling some angry
and incomprehensible words. She kept this up
while she fetched the cages. Later, at dusk, when
the tulip-beds were illuminated by countless little
glass lamps, so that the whole garden seemed to
stand out in a glow from subterranean fires, she
put on the wretched skirt which she had not worn
since the morning she stood in the slave-market.

When she entered the outer hall of the Kiosk of
Peris, all the sultan’s dancers had already assem-
bled, with small circlets of parrot feathers on their
necks and parrot feathers scattered over their skirts
of silver gauze. In the middle of the circle stood
the fattish High Stewardess with gold-mounted,
quadrangular spectacles. In her hand she held a
great roll of parchment, for she possessed great
learning, was at home in the art of writing, and
composed prettier verses and tales than any man
in the whole city of the sultan.

“Look here, my child,” she said, fastening a
little feather circlet on the Stupid Swede’s braided
hair, “we are now going to delight our noble sul-
tana, the mother of the padishah, with an ancient
merry festival that is called the Crowning of the
Parrots. All these slave-girls are skilled in the art of
dancing. You alone do not know it. For precisely
that reason you shall stand in the middle of the ring

52 THE CHARLES MEN

and try to mimic the others with your long arms and
large feet—that will be the merriest foolery of all.”

“Yes,” repeated Evening: Starlight, mimicking
the High Stewardess behind her back, “that will
be just the merriest foolery of all.”

“No, that I could n’t do,” answered the Stupid
Swede. “ But folks can dance with us, too, though
we take each other by the hand like this—and then
we dance like this—and then we stamp the time
as hard as we can like this—and then we sing like
this: The lads are coming and...”

She had caught some of the dancers by the hand
and drawn them with her, but the High Steward-
ess grew so frightened that the quadrangular spec-
tacles slipped far down on her nose. She pulled
from her pocket her short wand, which was com-
pletely covered with silver flakes and had a seal
carved in the end, and with it she rapped briskly
on the door-post.

“The sultana may at any hour whatever occupy.
the room on the other side of that curtain with her
most distinguished friends and eunuchs. The Chief
Historian is already sitting at his place in there to
record everything and describe the festival in the
Bridal Book. Are you mad that you set up sucha
disturbance? Such trampling may possibly do for
mules that have chanced to knock over a beehive ;
but it is not dancing, for dancing is, before wrieaie
thing, beautiful.”

THE STUPID SWEDE 53

The dancers laughed with their mouths full of
sugared chestnuts and bullaces. They wailed and
lamented and had to sit down on divans, and the
eunuchs hid their white teeth behind the door-
curtains.

Then the Stupid Swede no longer knew what she
did. All the vexation she had buried for weeks and
months ran suddenly together in a single flame of
wrath, and a flood of words in her harsh native
speech streamed forth unchecked from her tongue.

“ Devil’s in meif I care for you and all your ugly
blackamoors. I don’t care for you any more than
that, you there that only live in surfeiting and wan-
tonness and sin! You never talk of anything else
than of the twelve lucky ones who get to wait on the
padishah—lawk, the lucky ones, forsooth !—and
of the seven imperial concubines who get two hun-
dred shawls apiece. Is it right and decent to havea
wife in every room around the whole house ? Ugh,
ugh, ugh! Iam an honest woman; and an honest
woman, look you, you ’ve never seen before in this
abode of Satan. Ay, and now, drat me, you ’re paid
for calling me the Stupid Swede, you!”

“Very good!” said the High Stewardess, who
without understanding a word had observed her
slightest gesture. “Exceedingly good! You shall
do just so when you come inand the dance begins.
Only recite the verses in a somewhat lower voice.
A little softer ——and perhaps not quite so many

54 THE CHARLES MEN

jerks of the neck. One may show oneself a trifle
pleasant even in the comic. Take this basket in your
hands now. In it there is, as you may see, a fresh
rosebush. I have myself had the Deposed Messiah
dig it out of the earth with his fingers and plant it
in the basket, because no one is more deft than he
in such a matter. As soon as the dance is done, you
are to step forward and with a kneeling salutation
set down the basket on the mother-of-pearl table
that stands before the most distinguished of the
parrots.”

Stiff as one of the cypresses that stood before the
threshold of the kiosk, the Stupid Swede received
the basket, but everything around her grew dark
as she grasped it by the handle twisted with moss.
She had become a mockery and a laughing-stock
from the time when she had first been brought be-
fore the sultana, but she had heeded it little, and not
before now, on this starry evening, when she was
called to the kiosk to amuse the others by her mere
presence, had she felt profoundly her helplessness
and loneliness.

Pipes and drums began to sound on the other
side of the curtain, and after some delay the High
Stewardess rappedagain with her wand on the door-
post. Then the curtain was drawn aside, and the
dancers marched into the cupola hall of the kiosk,
where the flower-crowned parrots stood under a

temple of starlike lamps. Then the troop humbly

THE STUPID SWEDE 55

saluted the sultana, who lay on a bed of cushions.
The High Stewardess unrolled the parchment, and
with much elegance recited her story.

“‘ Noble parrots, ye who have received the beauty
of flowers and human voices! This is the tale of
the spirit of the dance. Not long since there lived
a begging dervish who was called Turk. He slept
on the bare ground, and went naked in the middle
of the street without other clothing than a great
turban. One day when he drank from a spring
under an oak, he saw a boy who was playing music
and dancing with a parrot, while he tried to fasten
a ring of diamonds and rubies on one of its claws.
‘Even if you are the son of a sultan,’ said Turk,
‘you ought not to think upon dancing and vanity.
Learn that more precious than the dead diamond is
the water-drop, because it can refresh your tongue;
and more precious than the ruby is the drop of
blood, because it bears the fire of life through your
limbs.’ The boy answered: ‘ Ungrateful and weary
man! My father teaches me otherwise, for he says
that the diamond and the ruby and everything fair
upon the earth is as living as the blood in our
hearts, and hangs like dew on the great tree that
overshadows all the world and is called God’s love.
When I look up into that tree, I can neither sit
nor lie, but the spirit of the dance comes over me
so that I must arise from the ground.’ When the
boy had said this, he began again to dance so charm-

56 THE CHARLES MEN

ingly and softly that the begging dervish could not
take his eyes from him, but felt that he himself
must also dance. First, however, he wished to re- |
fresh himself with yet another draught of water,
but when he bent down over the mirror of the
spring, he became ashamed of his own ugliness and
his unkempt beard, and sat there like some one
paralyzed. Then the parrot flew to him commiser-
atingly, and sat on his turban with the sparkling
ring on its foot and its white wings outspread like
a wondrously beautiful tuft of plumes. The begging
dervish again surveyed his image in the: spring.
Tremblingly he rose and danced with the boy,
while he uttered a vow that his cloister-brothers
from that day forth should thank and praise God
with music and dancing. Noble parrots, it is in
commemoration of that dance that we crown and
salute you to-night.”

As soon asthe High Stewardess had finished this
tale, theslave-girls, gently swaying, began to revolve
and dance. They moved so quietly that their steps
on the carpet were inaudible. Their costumes of
gauze spread out around them in wide rings without
making the smallest rustle, and the music sounded
muffled and remote as a song from a galley far out
on the sea.

With eyes closed, Evening Starlight raised her
arms behind her neck, blissful that in the dance
she could display and be herself conscious of her

THE STUPID SWEDE 57

mild beauty. Her foot was no larger than a hand,
and her hair hung to the bend of her knee. She
knew nothing else of the earth than that it was
sweet, and that the padishah might some day give
her a kiosk with hangings of red damask and foun-
tains of scented water.

In the midst of the softly whirling circle of hu-
man butterflies, the Stupid Swede had stood as it
was commanded her, and the ostrich eggs and tas-
sels that hung from the lamps grazed her hair. She
did not know how tall and handsome she was as
she stood there in her poor work-dress. She never
once thought of it. She felt no happy gratitude to
God because her expression was clear and open and
her hair as soft as the silk of which the women at
Brussa had woven the sultana’s money-pouch. It
never occurred to her that the earth was sweet, that
the very rejoicing of the senses might be innocent.
She had not received the spirit of the dance at birth.
She could not raise her arms instinctively as she
danced, like an inspired priestess. She could hardly
sing thanks with her lips and still less with her
limbs. God had not bestowed on her such a jewel as
a christening present. She understood that all these
Circassians and daughters of Lesbos were born in
huts as she was, and were simple as she, but that
still they possessed a knowledge which was not hers,
knowledge of the mysteries of the dance. She looked
obstinately down at the carpet, but she felt that the

58 THE CHARLES MEN

High Stewardess was all the while surveying her
over her quadrangular spectacles with impatience
and displeasure.

For a long time she tried pretending to notice
nothing: Then she started and remembered the
command to mimic, to be the fool inthe play. Sway-
ing her hips a little, she took a couple of steps. Im-
mediately she heard around her in the hall a rust-
ling and whispering, as when a puff of wind from
the doorway hurls dry winter leaves over a stone
floor.

When she looked up, she observed that it was
the onlookers, who were whispering and laughing
suppressedly, with hands before their mouths, at
her awkwardness. She had succeeded, and had sat-
isfied the High Stewardess, but shame and vexa-
tion struck her again into immobility. The reek of
the lamps and the perfume of the flowers went to
_her head. When the dance finally came to a stand-
still, and she carried the basket to the most dis-
tinguished parrot, which sat, sunken and decrepit,
blinking on its perch, she hardly saw any longer
the carpet in front of her. Her hands began to fum-
ble, and just as, kneeling, she held out her offering,
the basket slipped on the smooth mother-of-pearl
table, and the rose plant fell to the floor.

Then a whole swarm of scorpions crept over the
edge of the basket, and from the earth at the bot-
tom rose a snake with a flat, broad head.

THE STUPID SWEDE 59

For a moment the snake swayed jerkily to and
fro, as if even it had become possessed of the spirit
of the dance. Then it drew itself together with a
swift, wavy motion, and lifted its wide and hissing
jaws toward the parrot. Flapping noisily, the fright-
ened bird struck against the silver network of the
cage to get to its caretaker and find protection.
Through the whole kiosk, silent as thegrave, where
the laughter paled away, and dropped crowns of
feathers lay strewn over the carpet, it uttered,
screaming, the single word that she had most
earnestly tried to teach it:

« Andersson! Andersson! Andersson!”

“There you said summat!” muttered the Stupid
Swede. She had risen from the floor, and ina dream
she saw that moment in the cool twilight when the
Deposed Messiah had hid the snake and scorpions
in the basket under the roots of the rose. But she
no longer remembered that the terrified onlookers
stood round about her, huddled up on cushions
and divans along the walls of the hall.

Cautiously she took hold of the basket and car-
ried it to the open window. The snake turned its
. head toward her and licked the air with its tongue.
But when she drew her hand back, the snake had
coiled itself about her arm. It struck her on the
wrist so that the blood dropped down, and only
let go its bite when she pressed it to the floor and
stamped its head to pieces with her large foot. She

60 THE CHARLES MEN

took two or three steps to one side, and remained
standing with her back against the wall.

Only now did whispering and talking begin again
round her; but the proud, white-haired sultana, who
had seen the Janisaries dismember the bodies of
viziers before the serail gate, and had heard many
a night the stealthy tread of “the dumb ones” on
the shells of the garden paths, —she came forward,
and examined the bleeding arm long with practised
skill.

“My precious child,” she said quietly, as she
embraced and kissed the dying Swedish slave-girl,
“you have saved with your life my favorite bird.
But you have also given usa deep riddle to ponder.
How, pray, could your duties and your tedious
daily tasks with their constant monotony be so
dear to you that all that we strain after seemed to
you empty foolery and trifling? They have pointed
the finger at you, because you did not understand
the mysteries of the dance. — Alas! my child, they
are easier to learn than it is to interpret your riddle.
I would praise the God of our fathers, if He would
permit such mothers to suckle our sons.”

Afterwards, when the lamps were quenched, and
the night was roaring outside, little Evening Star-
light sat awake on her sleeping-carpet.— Was there,
then, really something in the world that was worth
more than shawls and jewels? Why had no one
said so before?

THE STUPID SWEDE 61

“You would not miss the dead slave-girl so bit-
terly,” whispered some of her friends, “if you had
not loved her and yet caused her sorrow. For such
things there is no remedy.”

“You would not grieve for her so,” they whis-
pered the following night, “if you had before loved
a man. Now your whole heart is hers. — You are
so passionate, you Circassians.”

But the sultana said, “ You have dark rings under
your eyes, and I counsel you to begin coloring your
lips, for if the padishah happens to see you as you
now look, you are like to wait long for your kiosk
and your red damask tapestries.”

Evening Starlight died, and was buried on the
slope above the cloister of the dancing dervishes
at Scutari under the same acacia as the Swedish
woman. The dervishes planted hyacinths around
the tree, tended it long, and called the place the
Grave of the Two Sisters.

“There lie two princesses,” they would relate,
‘who lived long, long ago. The elder believed that
God dwelt in pious employments and the younger ~
that He dwelt in the dance, but for this they were
called sisters, because they both contended in serv-
ing Him.”

When on quiet evenings the small hand-drums
and wooden flutes played in the cloister, it sounded
as if a troop of boys were amusing themselves with

toy fiddles from the bazaar, but through the open

62 THE CHARLES MEN

gate the pious dervishes now and again would come
out in their white garments, barefoot or in stock-
ings, and move about so softly and silently that
they could hear the sigh of the acacia as they
danced.

Bender

i Gow» thinning ranks that followed the king
over the steppes to the kingdom of the sultan
had pitched their camp at Bender in a charming
river valley. Many an officer continued to live in his
cart like a care-free gipsy, but the king got them
to build huts and dens in the earth against the
winter. He received daily from the sultan a suffi-
cient gift of money and the necessities of life. There
was gay commotion in the camp when the trumpets
and drums called to meals and divine service. The
pasha and his Janisariés vied with one another in
paying honor to the conquered champion, who
never tasted wine, who despised residence ina city,
and whose body-guards were never allowed to
marry. When the tillers of the soil and their wives
saw the blue horsemen gallop out among the vine-
yards, they hastened to meet them, and coins of
gold and silver rained into aprons and baskets. At
last, however, the sultan wearied of filling the
hands of his prodigal guests with gold and their
bins with hay. Ducats again became a rare Shew
Bread, and even the Turkish guard of honor which
had been stationed at the camp marched away.

The king stepped out from his tent only when
the overflowing water of the river came halfway up
on his jack-boots.

He took Colonel Grothusen by the arm: “ We

64 THE CHARLES MEN

have told them that we will not go back to Chris-
tendom before we havea following of fifty thou-
sand Turks. To that we will stick. Now that they
deny us money, we shall work wonders. The royal
household shall be kept up three times as splen-
didly as before, and besides the king’s table and
the table of the Court Marshal, there shall every day
be prepared here a plentiful board for strangers.”

After that he went out and ordered the soldiers
to build on the high bank before the straw-thatched
huts of the village of Varnitsa a royal mansion and
a whole town for warriors with streets and stone-
paved walks.

This new town on the sultan’s soil received the
name of Carlopolis. With hearty energy the scarred
warriors knotted leather aprons around their waists
in the midst of the gaping Turks and began to
forge the most elaborate locks or to fit the most
elegant doors and window-sills. Generals and colo-
nels familiar with victory took command of car-
penters, master masons, plasterers, stone-cutters,
and glass-makers in the hot sunlight, and in the
midst of them the limping king went about with
as rosy cheeks and cloudless forehead as if all the
misfortunes of the Ukraine had long since been
‘smoothed out of his remembrance.

Like a castle on the Rhine the royal mansion
rose, with its steep roof and red balcony overlook-
ing the rapid Dniester. Saddles of satin with rose

BENDER 65

diamonds and turquoises on holsters and trappings
were hung around the tile-covered attic. Richly
carved doors with brightly polished locks of brass
opened from the entry to the two halls and eight
rooms, which were adorned with French tapestries
and divans furnished in brocade. The carpets were
so thick and soft that the heaviest soldier-boots
never awakened the slightest noise, and on the roof
at evening flickered reddish lamps, as if to illumi-
nate dancing slaves. Outside, streets extended be-
tween the droll little haphazard castles of the officers
and officials. A handsome wooden bridge in the
colors of the rainbow led over a deep ditch to Var-
nitsa, and around all the impudent-looking camp
were thrown up walls and entrenchments. All this
fortified town, then, did the diligent Swedes build
as soon as they were without money. The unwit-
ting beggar who went past along the river believed
that the kindly country-folk had chosen one of
their shepherds as king and had raised his capital
city there in the midst of a realm of vineyards and
cattle-calls and bird-twittering. |

Outside the door of the royal mansion lay tame
deer and roes, gazing on the threshold, ready to fol-
low the king whenever he went out, and large-winged
butterflies set themselves calmly to reston the yellow
flag of headquarters, which with the strange three
crowns in its coat-of-arms stood stuck into the
ground in front of the drums and muskets of the

66 THE CHARLES MEN

guard. In the shade of the mulberry trees on the
slopes, which were overgrown with grass and flowers,
naked and bathing warriors sat by the water with-
out a thought of their former hardships, for they
forgot the pain of their wounds on the same day
they were healed and cicatrized. Others laughingly
tried their muskets on snipe and hares, or strolled
out around the plain among the cotton-plants and
feeding herds of buffalo toward the rugged, far-
stretching mountains that embraced the whole beau-
tiful region with their dark blue wreath. Still feel-
ing twinges of their severe wounds, Hard and Gierta
lay in their shirt-sleeves beside a flask of wine on
the greensward between the huts and played at dére
with the noisy Axel Sparre. Kasten Feif hung up
on the walls under his low roof the etchings of the
new castle which had been sent from Stockholm.
Without ever winning his point, he disputed there
every morning with the king, who, more strict even
than Tessin, would not hear of any statues or un-
_ necessary adornments in architecture, but approved
only noble lines and large surfaces. French Mons,
who had now become so Turkish that only the
most expensive tobacco was good enough for him,
was sitting therewith his pipe, but he had to hold and
fill it with the same hand, because his left arm was
shot away. The body physician, Skraggenstjerna,
pounded powder in a kettle, while in the doorway
above him hung jars and phials of plantain wood.

BENDER 67

Captain Konrad Sparre, who with his comrades,
Loos and Gyllenskip, had just come back from
a pilgrimage to the Nile and Jerusalem, had all his
hut filled with images, mummies, and stuffed croc-
odiles. At a gesture there had grown up a dwarf
city with its collections and offices, but many pal-
aces were of such a height that the owners could
stand and lean their elbows on the roof. The in-
habitants awoke and went to sleep to the blare of
trumpets, and early every morning, when the mist
lifted, appeared a kind-looking man, who in stiff
braided uniform, with his shoulders raised and lips
drawn together in an expression of importance,
rowed out on the river against the stream. It was
Hultman, who was going with a tall pewter pot
to fetch the clearest drinking water for his royal
master.

Just where in autumn the long streak of migra-
tory birds was wont to pass stood the gloomy, gray-
ish-yellow fortress of Bender, with its quadrangle
of pointed tower-hoods, and from it streamed daily
a train of Janisaries, Tartars, Armenians, and gip-
sies. They jostled among the earthen huts of the
Zaporogeans down by the river, where Mazeppa
had died with his head on the knees of his women,
and when they had got their camels and asses safely
bound to trees, they stared inquisitively into the
cook-house and at Brandklipper’s ice-gray flank in
the foremost box-stall of the stable. They offered

68 THE CHARLES MEN

on all sides their bunches of grapes, their sheep and
fowls, and were at times held back with bayonets
when a foreign emissary arrived to pay the Swedish
king his respects in the midst of his exile and mis-
fortune. Now and then they met a courier with a
mail-bag, or a poor shoeless Pomeranian peasant,
who had voluntarily walked the long distance across
Europe to deliver to his king a hundred ducats
for travel money. Thickest, however, did the tar-
booshes and turbans swarm below the royal man-
sion, on whose balcony thirty musicians played on
violins, lutes,and oboes. Assoon as they were silent,
the Turks below struck up with brazen cymbals,
shawms, and drums. During all this the Janisaries
embraced their Swedish friends or sat down con-
tentedly and reflectively on the ground and stared
at the open windows of the chancellery, where two
odd figures bent, eagerly writing, over a table.
Whenever the two gentlemen wished to look each
other in the face, they had to turn their whole
bodies, because neither had more than one eye. He
who continually stuck his quill pen crosswise be-
tween his lips was the nap-worn Court Chancellor
von Miller. The other, on the contrary, who had
his pocket full of tidbits and every now and then
laid a bit of candy on his tongue, was Colonel Gro-
thusen. He sat enveloped in a crimson dressing-
gown of silk. His neck-cloth of French lace and
his curling, raven-black wig swayed and swelled,

BENDER 69

but on his feet he had a pair of heavy military boots,
for one night the king had stolen in to him through
the window and stuffed his satin slippers into a
heap of embers. His face was yellower than a dried
lemon, but his good eye glistened and blinked, and
as soon as he opened his mouth, Miller began to
bob on his chair and laugh.

Soon, however, clouds massed themselves over
the mountains, and the soldiers drove sleighs in
a merry-go-round with the Turks on the frozen
Dniester, so that the turbans rolled along the ice.
The windows were shut, and one lowering morn-
ing Grothusen threw his goose-quill pen from him
with such vigor that it was blown over the table by
the draught through the chinks and remained lying
on the floor.

“ Miller,” said he, “for lack of hay we have now
had to shoot nineteen fine led horses. If I can’t
quickly get together the loan of a thousand more
purses, we ’re done for. In all Carlopolis there will
soon be not so much as a horseshoe nail that can
be called ours, no matter how I chaffer with both
Christians and heathens. Credit is finished. Good !
Away with the bank! We went off, not. to gather
money, but rather to abolish its worth.”

He lifted his wig and passed his hand over his
hot head, but Miller only wrote on, and inquired
in a plaintive voice, “And His Majesty?”

“At the present moment he is sitting in the din-

70 THE CHARLES MEN

ing-room reading Corneille, but he has a trick up
each of his sleeves, and is holding in his sides, as he
always does when he has just come to some daring
resolution. He is so happy over it that he warms
one’s sinful heart before one really knows what it
is about. There is one thing, brother, that vexes me
continually. The world is full of admirers who bawl
His Majesty’s praise, because he can sleep on a
snow-drift and drink water from a wooden goblet.
And in truth he is such a man, and rouses our as-
tonishment every day with such things. I would
only say that into the bargain he is something still
greater. There are not only soldier crotchets under
his hat. Listen to him disputing with Feif about
the fine arts or with me about philosophy! And
yet along with it are these—saving his honor —
veritable little slovenlinesses, as that he can hardly
scrawl a legible letter. Don’t you recognize in all
this the spiritual gifts of the Swede in their most
brilliant form? A glittering web of the most gor-
geous cloth-of-gold—with here and there great
dark rents through which one can thrust his hand!
Is it any wonder that the Swedes go to death for
such a man as for themselves? Don’t ask him to
traipse home full of remorse like the prodigal son
to show his empty trouser pockets. Tell me, rather,
where the deuce are we to get money?”

Miller now stuck his pen behind his ear.

“The favorites both of Our Lord and our princes

BENDER 71

are sore beset with the envy of their fellow men, and
you and your borrowing are discussed in the camp
here with greater heat than you suspect. You ’ll find
out. Shut your account book in a hurry, hang your
dressing-gown on the nail, and put on your old
colonel’s uniform, for in a couple of days we’re
going to have a row. Even day before yesterday,
when the pasha from Bender came riding up, cut the
air with his sabre, and ordered us in the name of his
great master to pack off home, I comprehended
that His Majesty would come to a terrible resolu-
tion. And have you noticed that his sword is always
three inches out of the scabbard exactly as in the
old days?”

“Well, then, we’ll slash and cut—that’s the
only outcome. Hard longs for it so that his eyes
flash.— Come in, come in!”

Grothusen turned about, and saluted the three
men who crossed the threshold. One was named
Axel Roos. He was a slim, brown-curled dragoon
of the royal guard, and for him there was nothing
else in the world than the honor of his country and
his king. One of his comrades was Lieutenant Olof
Aberg. His whole face, which was of a manful ugli-
ness, was scarred with sword-cuts, and a shell splin-
ter had broken both his front teeth. The last man,
on the contrary, was but a plain life-guardsman, who
was called Seved Tolvslag, but he was known as the
strongest and tallest soldier in Carlopolis, and he

72 THE CHARLES MEN

could bend a horseshoe or squeeze together a pew-
ter plate as an arm-cloth. Nobody had ever heard
him laugh. With his sunburned, almost black face,
he stood with equally terrible sternness, whether it
was a question of a psalm or a game, and his great-
est enjoyment in life was to go on duty alone and
silent on cold nights with his hands stuck into his
coat-sleeves.

“T have had you summoned,” said Grothusen,
throwing back his head, “‘ because we consider you,
without distinction of rank, our three bravest men.
Go diligently about among officers and soldiers
according to your various ranks, and inspire the
wavering with courage. Soon we are likely to behold
an affair that is going to surpass everything we have
hitherto experienced. We have reached the bounds
of the possible.”

While he spoke, he changed his clothes. When
he had hooked on his sword-belt in the most ap-
proved style, the window was darkened by a rider,
who tapped on the pane.

It was the king.

He sat there as radiant as if he had just emptied
a magic draught of eternal youth. His attire was as
simple as always, but spotless, and his thin hair even
was tied into a knot on his neck. The boy leaped
up in his eyes, and he tapped yet again on the pane
with his riding-whip.

“‘Grothusen, now we must go in to Bender.”

BENDER 73

The irresolute colonel ran out on the stone step.

“But Your Majesty has never before been able
to ride in there, and just now the storm-bell is
ringing. They have wearied of their distinguished
guests, and it is all over with the old friendship.
Look for yourself! There is hardly a single Turk
in the camp any longer. They hope the time is
coming to cut us all down and plunder us to the
naked body.”

The king smiled and nodded assent.

Then a merry light spread over the brow of
Grothusen, and the next moment his charger reared
beside the king’s.

Contrary to custom, the king ‘rode his horse
away over the plain at a trot. Under the projecting
thatch of the huts between the gorgeously painted
wooden pillars threatening crowds were already
standing, armed with scythes and muskets, but the
king waved to them with his glove as to underlings.
- In the muddy, unpaved streets of Bender the,
hucksters had hooked up the shutters before their
- booths, and armed soldiers and merchants were
walking back and forth. They recited from mem-
ory the sultan’s letter, which gave them the right
to compel the Swedes by force to return home.
They shouted one another down with wild war-
cries, but when unexpectedly they recognized the
king in their midst, when his horse trampled on
their mantles and caftans, they lowered their spears

74 THE CHARLES MEN

and threw themselves down with their foreheads
to the earth.

“Haha!” jubilated the younger girls behind the
grating of the harems, “his head is too small for
his body, and his body too small for his horrible
boots. Haha!”

But the wives and the older women pushed
them aside angrily.

« Allah, if we had but such a lord!”

With that they took the dried festoons of leaves
which since the summer had been fastened along
the window-sills. They threw leaves and flowers
over him, so that a withered rose remained lying
on his hat. Meanwhile the tower bells were ringing
to call the inhabitants to arms against the Swedes
and their king.

Calmly saluting as on a pleasure ride, he con-
tinued up street and down street, till the open plain
again lay before the two riders in the sunset light.

Grothusen pointed over a low stone wall.

“Look at that grass mound beside the sainted
Bishop Malmberg’s last resting-place! That is Ma-
zeppa’s grave. Two wonderful words! Mazeppa’s
grave. Thus may earthly greatness end.”

The king bent sidewise, and laid his hand famil-
iarly on his favorite’s knee. :

“Grothusen, my good fellow, if a withered leaf
falls to the ground a hundred years from to-day,
that event is a consequence of innumerable other

BENDER 75

small and unnoticed events. That moment is a link
in a chain of happenings which goes back finally to
eternity and the creating hand of God. If, too, a
leaf now falls to the ground, it is because just that
event and no other can occur at this time. If we
might see all that has happened as clearly as a row
of figures, we should also be able to reckon out all
that is to happen up to the end of the world. We
should then be able to foretell the day, the hour,
that will be our destruction. Let us not therefore
waver with anxiety!”

Half with the awe of a subject and half with the
tenderness of an enthusiastic friend, Grothusen
took the hand of the king. He had seen that with
his last brave followers among the vineyard hills of
Varnitsa, far from the small importunities of gov-
ernment, the king had celebrated perhaps his most
fortunate years, the Sabbath rest of his days, that
he had come ever nearer to his followers as a good
comrade. The cold February evening grew starry-
clear and deep. By Mazeppa’s grave Grothusen
wanted to speak, but he had no longer power over
his own voice.

“Journey home!” he whispered. “As true as I
live, a Charles XII would become great as a peace
king, and would accomplish what Christina never
could do, because she was a frivolous woman.
Journey home! There is a mutiny coming. Do not
say I don’t know the Swedes. They, like other

76 THE CHARLES MEN

men, have wives and children. If we got a great
conquering Turkish army to follow us, then indeed
we might found a Protestant confederation under
a Swedish emperor. But it’s the same with Turks
as with pearls: they cost money. Soon I shall no
longer have a single ducat for bribery. We must
bow, we must bow before our own poverty, our
ancient, heavy, pitiful poverty. It is that and not
men which has conquered us. — Ah, to see the door
wide open and be turned away because of empty
begging-sacks |”

When the king remained silent, Grothusen
leaned nearer to him in the half-dusk, then sprang
back. His own words had driven away the happy
moment when he had sat alone with his king in
rapt conversation. The friend had vanished behind
a cold, though still smiling mask.

Then Grothusen tried to joke.

“Yes, if we had money, we should strengthen
our camp with heavy cannon and make a Joms-
borg of it in the midst of the enemy’s country, and
like the guards we should all pledge ourselves never
to marry. Then we should abolish all money there
and eat at a common table, but invite Leibnitz and
other great men to sit on the bench of honor. With
them we should gather the various doctrines into
one declaration, so that our royal fortress, though
without either land or vassals, should be a perpet-
ual temple of truth and reconciliation. All that we

BENDER “5

should do.— But as things are, it remains for us
only to yield or fight.”

“Tt remains for us only to fight,” answered the
king, giving his charger the spurs with such vio-
lence that Grothusen remained there with the
empty glove in his hand.

He turned and looked at the large glove. At
length he kissed it and hid it under his coat next
his heart, as he whispered: “There it shall stay until
my bullet whistles.”

In expectation of a siege, the Swedes opened a
well a few steps from the royal mansion, where a
cool running spring filled it with crystal-clear water.
The women of Varnitsa believed that he who drank
of that water became proof against both love and
shot. They could see that best in old Grothusen,
they thought. He drank only wine, and never tasted
a single glass from the well, and he was therefore
so lovesick that whenever he met a pretty girl he
lifted his braided hat to her and chucked her under
the chin with his dexter and middle fingers. The
others of the band did not do so.

Aberg’s wrinkled and grinning face was often
mirrored in the well. With his mattock under his
arm, he drank away his thirst, and then hastened to
the soldiers at the entrenchments. Around all the
camp they threw up a breastwork of barrels, bed-
steads, carts, and the spadefuls of earth that they
could break out of the frozen ground. The king

78 THE CHARLES MEN

himself stood and twined withes and ropes between
chair-legs and wagon-wheels. Thecountry-folk fled,
so that the huts of Varnitsa became desolate, but
a great boundless host of Turks and Tartars drew
themselves up in a wide ring with their mortars
and field-pieces. Late in the frosty nights a tall
shape bent over the rim of the well and clattered
the chain of the tin drinking-can. It was Seved
Tolvslag on duty, after he had just helped some
Janisaries to smuggle in secretly their baskets of
fowls and sacks of hay. Close beside him in front
of a lantern stood Grothusen, who, with his pelf
borrowed from Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Jews,
paid for everything at three times its value, as if
he had awakened every morning with his jack-boots
full of ducats.

Sometimes the Swedish dragoons dashed out on
the plains in the bright daylight, and brought back
buffaloes and sheep right under the eyes of the
besiegers. Or, again, the king rode to the hostile
sentries and reviewed them, seeing to it that they
did their duty, as he taught them to shoulder arms
in the Swedish fashion.

In the royal mansion the windows were filled
to the height of a man with sacks of earth or barred
with palisades. Hultman and the lackeys carried
into the dining-room the long oaken chest with
the table silver, and they stowed away among the
soldiers in the attic the French tapestries and silken

BENDER 79

cushions, and the most important books and doc-
uments. Regimental rolls, Tessin’s etchings, and
French tragedies were embedded side by side under
horse-trappings overlaid with gold and precious
stones, and cartridge-boxes and muskets were dealt
out to the royal watch. All the little city of the king,
hundreds of miles from its native land, had hardly
the equipment for as many men as would be needed
to furnish a single full regiment. Even the ceremo-
nious Court Chamberlain, Diiben, with sweat on his
brow, had to drill and exercise his lackeys, scullions,
cup-bearers, and guardians of the silver. The chief
cook, Boberg, was forced to throw his ladle on the
shelf and tramp over stones with a broadsword on
his arm between Hultman and the panting kitchen
clerk. Bareheaded, hesitating, flurried, with coat-
seams worn bright and with ink on his fingers,
Miller marched at the head of his men of the chan-
cellery.

“ Look at His Majesty!” he whispered to Diben.
“Recklessness is a joy to the soul. Honor has be-
come so precious to him that if he can only keep
it untarnished, then straightway no misfortune can
trouble him any longer. But I say this, that for my
part I will lay down my sword as soon as the brown
savages outside shall storm up. Is it sense that five
hundred men should fight with twenty or thirty
thousand ?”

When the king caught sight of the Holstein

80 THE CHARLES MEN

envoy, Fabrice, who for a last time rode out from
Bender to the camp to move him to departure, he,
as if by an accident, allowed his retinue to march
forward to the Holsteiner. The Swedish gentlemen
at once hastened to deliver into the envoy’s keep-
ing their pocket-books, snuff-boxes, and purses.
When Fabrice finally rode away, he had such a
plethora of valuables under his coat that he could
not button it. Then the soldiers, too, began to hide
their possessions. The last ducat, carried about for
years, was ripped out of the vest lining and, together
with a ring of silver or horsehair that had been
given by a first sweetheart, was hidden in a fig, a
tree trunk, or in the earth. Chamberlain Klysen-
dorff himself stood with a spade in his hand among
the soldiers on the slope of the shore and buried by
a grapevine his old grandmother’s portraiton ivory.

“1 am far on in years,” he said, “and broken
with gout and infirmity. I have a foreboding that
now I shall fall. Rather, though, will I entrust my
belongings to the dark earth, whither I myself shall
soon go down, than to greedy plunderers. Grass
will come to grow and be green above the little
love gifts and savings that we poor exiles conceal
here in the alien earth.”

When he had passed on the shovel to the next
man, he heard the king’s voice and turned around.

With burning cheeks like a boy of fifteen, but
commanding to-day like an emperor over princes,

BENDER : 81

the king sat on his horse at the outer entrench-
ments, and around him gathered the most distin-
guished of the Swedes. Gierta, who had risked his
life for him at Poltava, and Hard, chieftain of the
battle-loving guardsmen, were propped on their
swords. With coaxing whispers, the court preacher,
Brenner, leaned his full, cherubic face first to one,
then to another. His coadjutor, Aurivillius, twitched
him by the cloak, but General Daldorff tore away
the shirt over his lacerated breast and spoke to the
king without fear.

“Here,” he shouted, pointing to his breast, “ be-
hold here the proof that we have always been ready
to give our last drop of blood for the land of our
fathers! We are ready now, too; but if we lay low
all the Turks that are here, we shall immediately
after have the whole might of the sultan upon us.
We all know that not only Turkey but also the sea
powers have offered to convey our king to his lands
with the greatest honor, and the way through Ger-
many is still open. The Turks have heaped gifts and
friendship on us, but in return have gotten open
contempt.”

The king answered: “The Turks sell themselves
to the highest bidder, and therefore they deserve
contempt. Of old we fought like valiant warriors,
but now you talk like poltroons. Obey, as is your
duty, and show yourselves hereafter sir as you
were heretofore.”

82 THE CHARLES MEN
With that he clapped Daldorff on the shoulder

like a good comrade, without the least rancor, and
rode to the royal mansion as the enemy’s field-
pieces began to roar.

Klysendorff, who was a timid and retiring man,
remained standing among the soldiers, speaking to
them softly.

“1 know well that the world will judge our gra-
cious king harshly for what is now likely to befall
and hold him for a madman. But the Turks are
greater madmen when they fancy they can frighten
him off by force. Even though all should abandon
him, do you show, you lesser men in the ranks,
where faithfulness lies deepest in the breast!”

Piercing cries now filled all the lovely region, and
the enemy stormed up, but Grothusen in his laced
parade hat stood at the entrenchment, and saluted
the Janisaries with the friendliest greetings and the
most whimsical bravado. He took from his knap-
sack at random ducats, Albrecht dollars, and bits
of candy. He strewed these indiscriminately on all
sides, and when he pointed toward the camp, there
shone above the royal mansion a triple rainbow, and
before the door the king sat calmly and proudly on
his steaming horse.

“No, no!” murmured the Janisaries, and swung
their sabres toward their own forces while they
marched back into the town. “ We will not attack

BENDER 83

that iron-head. We are his friends. Let him have
time for thought until to-morrow.”

It was Sunday, and in the king’s mansion the
Swedes struck up the first psalm of the morning
service as if nothing were afoot. The sacks of earth
and frozen water-barrels blocked the windows, so
that the hall was like the dark corridor of a for-
tress. Two wax candles burned on the table, which -
was covered with a white cloth, and the minister
bent far down over the Bible so that he might be
able to read the text for the day.

«« And when he went into the ship, his disciples
followed him. And behold! a great storm arose
upon the sea, so that the ship was deluged with the
waves; but he slept.”

The king stood nearest in front of the table with
his fur cap in his hand. His resolution had been
taken calmly and gladly, without debate, only with
a longing. At Poltava misfortune had fallen upon
him like a landslide in the dizziness of fever, and
before he could raise himself from his sick-bed
everything was devastated. Now he was once more
master of himself. Year by year, day by day, he
had seen the meshes breaking in the net he tried
to weave, but which could be tied only with thread
of gold. He burned with eagerness to be done at last

84 THE CHARLES MEN

with these stupid intrigues and in the full light of
day appeal to the broadsword. Riga, Pernau, Reval,
Viborg, Keksholm—each name, as it passed through
his memory, pointed to lost cities and provinces.
What more would it be if he fell? Earthly life was
short, but the glory of battle deeds is everlasting.

The minister bent once more over the Bible.

«And his disciples went forward and wakened
him, saying: Lord, help us! We perish.”

At this moment one of the first cannon-balls
struck the thick wall of the royal mansion, but
remained stuck in the soft brickwork, and the min-
ister proceeded.

«And he said unto them: O ye of little faith,
why are ye afraid?”

An officer hurried forward to the king and whis-
pered: “No one is likely to hear the words of the
text any more for the noise, and now the Turks
are storming.”

The king answered: “We do not break off our
divine service on account of shot, but each and all
of us is likely to be needed at his post.”

On the balcony of the royal mansion the musi-
cians struck up with thundering kettledrums the
Dalecarlian Polka and the Torch Dance. “Allah!
Allah!” answered Turks and Tartars, and their
white jackets fluttered, as they stormed in by thou-
sands over the entrenchments, brandishing spear
and scimitar. Some of the Janisaries, however, stuck

BENDER 85

their blades under their arms and with brotherly
persuasion handed their tobacco pouches to their
Swedish friends and acquaintances. When the king
rode with drawn sword into the mé/ée, he saw man
after man of his people lay down his arms, and he
reddened. He shouted to Grothusen and Daldorff,
but no one answered him. Then he noticed that the

strife had to do with himself alone, and those who
- were not willing to fight were likewise unworthy
to do so.

“Those who still have courage and loyalty in
their breasts may follow me,” he shouted.

Seved Tolvslag then gathered about him the
common soldiers and the scullions and lackeys
who had just been painfully drilled in the first
manual exercises. Fighting faithfully for life or death,
they surrounded the king, as he sprang from his
horse and ran his broadsword through the nearest
Turks. In front of him went Seved Tolvslag like
a swarthy berserk, presenting arms, but as soon as
the enemy pressed into his way, he made a swing
with his bayonet and cut a harvest for Death. A
pistol was levelled at the king’s temple, but as if
moved by an invisible hand, he bent his head a
finger’s breadth aside—and the ball only grazed
his face, but struck Hard, wounded, to the ground.
He saw General Axel Sparre bound and stripped.
Clashing swords and sabres cut deep notches in
each other’s edges. In a struggle with his own life-

86 THE CHARLES MEN

guardsman, Roos, and two Swedes, he was caught
about the middle with an iron grasp and carried
against his will into the royal mansion, whereupon
the door was barred.

It was not thus that he wished for sword-play.
The impatience of wrath and battle-lust kindled
fever in his blood. With eyebrows scorched away,
bleeding at the nose and ears, he mustered his band
of forty warriors in the Court Chamberlain’s apart-
ment and nodded pleasantly to old Hultman, who
with a great bandage round his head and a musket
on his shoulder stood in line beside Wolberg and
Groll and Friberg and all the bravest among the
faithful. With knitted brow and flashing eyes, his
long sword half raised, he rushed before his men
through the halls and rooms where plunderers had
already thronged in. Roos shot and fought by his
heart side. The begrimed and toothless Aberg
crouched under his arm like a grinning eunuch
and aimed his sword thrusts up at the bellies and
breasts of the Turks, but Seved Tolvslag went his
undeviating way forward, seizing man after man
by the beard and rolling him out through the win-
dow. He wrenched away weapons, broke them to
pieces under his foot, and then threw the fragments
out into the courtyard. Fire flamed and spurted
from priming powder and pipes. Oho! the song
of the crossed blades that sighed like harp-tones.

In the great hall, where the two half-consumed |

BENDER 87

wax candles still shone on the open Bible text
about the Master who awakened and rebuked the
winds, the Swedes could distinguish one another
only by their spurred boots under the thickly ris-
ing smoke. With a howl so wild that many of the
younger men shuddered, the slippers of the Janisa-
ries and the yellow half-boots and white jackets of
the Tartars suddenly began to mount, clambering
up into the very smoke, as on a stairway, and to van-
ish. Swords vainly hewed and stabbed on all sides
without longer hitting anything but empty air.

“These are witch-folk,’”’ murmured Hultman,
taking his stand beside the Bible, but the king
pushed a water cask from the window so that the
smoke streamed out. Then they discovered the
plunderers hanging on doors and mouldings, and
anew the dizzy lion hunt roared through the apart-
ments.

When at last all the enemy were driven out, the
king stationed his thirty-two surviving battle com-
rades in small groups at each window and himself
went round among the dead, emptying the bullets
and powder from the wallets on their shoulder-
belts. Still bleeding, he let his wounded hand be ban-
daged by Roos, who had just saved him by a pistol-
shot in a hand-to-hand struggle with two Turks.

“T see,” he said, “that Roos has not abandoned
me, but where, I wonder, are all the others, who
have deserted?”

88 THE CHARLES MEN

“The greater part are likely to be dead or taken
prisoners.”

The king’s glance blazed yet more at that, and
taking Roos by the hand, he led him back to the
great hall, from whose windows the muskets flung
their fire against the ever approaching enemy.
Deep dusk prevailed within, for it was already
getting on towards twilight, but between the barrels
and sacks of earth appeared the wide circle of bag-
gage wagons, doors, and wine-vats, behind which
the Turks drew nearer step by step, and the whole
expanse of the courtyard was already covered with
the fallen.

A keg of brandy was lifted down from the attic
to still the grievous thirst, and he, the king whom
no one had seen taste anything but water, went from
man to man with the glass and enjoined them not to
take more than a swallow apiece. But when finally
the strong drink no longer gave refreshment, wine
was fetched, and filling with it the same glass that
had just gone from mouth to mouth among the sol-
diery, he drained it himself like an equal.

“Tt is better,” said he, after another hour of
raging strife, “that we should defend ourselves like
valiant men to the last breath and so become im-
mortal through our courage and our valor, than
that we give ourselves up to the enemy so as to get
a little longer time of life.”

Along with the muskets’ irregular rattle, cannon-

BENDER 89

balls and bombs rained on the solitary house, and
arrows with long tails of burning tow bit themselves
fast into the shingles of the roof. Meanwhile there
spread for a moment through the smoke an unex-
pected scent of hay and fresh wood, as if the peace-
ful shepherd realm had sent a greeting from its
fields and groves. Soon, however,a chief of the Jani-
saries came forward through the crowd with hismen,
like an executioner with his red-clad attendants. On
their backs they carried bundles of hay and wood,

but he himself held a torch of pitch. When all these
combustibles had been laid on the windward side of
the house, he threw the torch on the pile. Presently
the fire leaped over the roof-trusses, and the valua-
bles in the attic were enveloped in conflagration and
smoke.

Alone and left behind among the dying, Klysen-
dorff lay on the floor in a burning room, but every
time he heard a new murmur of amazement, his
pale countenance cleared. He could still distinguish
far-off shouts from the Swedes in the courtyard.
On the ice-covered ground plundered generals and
colonels stood in only their shirts, with hands tied
behind their backs. Tartars with laced guardsmen’s
hats on their necks and yellow or black wigs tied to
their girdles were fastening the sons of Sweden’s
noblest families together on long chains and making
slaves of them. They bound them to their wagons
or drove them before with blows of the whip, and

go THE CHARLES MEN

Gierta and Konrad Sparre were led off to be fettered
by a well and water cattle. A Janisary came up to
Brandklipper and clasped his shaggy hand around
the wrought hilt of the sword which the eleventh
Charles had carried, and the pasha had already sat
down with crossed legs on the cushions in his tent
to await the end of the fight.

From the hills, from the farthest minaret, and
from the fortress of Bender, thousands of amazed
spectators stared at the flaming Hercules-pyre. They
saw how the king and the guardsmen, with coats
over their heads, pressed up among the saddles in
the attic to thrust off the shingle roof, but had to
retreat again because of the shot and smoke. From
room to room the band drew back under the totter-
ing rafters and stones, shot at from all the windows,
with their clothes on fire, and their faces and shoul-
ders bleeding. In their heated muskets the shots
went off of themselves. The Janisaries shouted to
one another that either the Swedish Charles was a
salamander or else he wanted to burn in there with
his men. The whole region murmured with joy, but
it was the joy of astonishment, not of revenge.

Dusk had fallen, but the light of the flames illu-
minated the expanse of the house, and through the
uproar sounded the clear voice of the king: “ My
dear Roos, let us now defend ourselves with the few
men we have left, until all is over!”

He himself now fought at the window with a car-

BENDER gl

bine. As if in pursuance ofa silent resolve, he at last
stepped forward to the shot-shattered bags of earth,
and stood there alone.

Roos threw himself between and, stunned by a
ball that struck the wadding out of his fur cap, sunk
into his master’s arms. Without stepping back, the
king stood unflinching as ever with his noblest
guardsman in his! embrace.

Madly the Turks once again rushed forward at
the window, but were felled to the ground, and the
glowing sound-boarding illuminated the whole
room as at a banquet.

“That Swedish Charles is having a festival,” said
the pasha. “ Poltava was the people’s day ; this is his.”

Then thedoorwas unbarred. Wrapped in sparks,
Seved Tolvslag stepped out on the stairs and pre-
sented arms.

“Make way!” he shouted. “The king, the
king!”

At the apex in front of his men the king hurried
straight out into the mé/ée, and those who could not
follow him defended themselves with backs against
the wall. The dying and dead fell at his feet, and
above his head the fighting broadswords met in a
point like a tent of shining steel. Stumbling with
his spurs, he was pressed to the ground and over-
powered, so that the weapon could finally be wrested
from his hand.

“The dance would have gone differently,” he

g2 THE CHARLES MEN

said, “if all had stood at their posts. Now it has
been nothing to talk of.”

As soon as he had risen, the flashing glance in his
eyes was extinguished, and as a reward he divided
all his ducats among the Janisaries who had been
able to disarm him. Blackened with smoke beyond
recognition, with one of the skirts torn from his
coat, which was hewn to shreds, he mounted a white
Turkish horse with a purple saddle, and witha rustle
of triumph about him as if.all the banners of Islam
had just been laid for a carpet under the hoofs of his
palfrey, he rode toward Bender and captivity.

He never once turned to look back at the flaming
pyre. All night the flames spread forth their light.
On the heaps of ashes in smoking Carlopolis the
Turks stood with their spades, but as early as the
dawn the women of Varnitsa began to fill their
pitchers at the Swedish fountain with the crystal-
pure water, which in coming times they were to
offer strangers, and which made him who drank of
it proof against both love and shot. Round about
under the mulberry trees and growing grapevines
slumbered the buried last ducats of the homeless
warriors, with the image of their hero king in the
superscription ; and even for a long time afterwards,
when the herdsmen and their wives harvested the
fruit in the stormy days of autumn, they believed
- they could discern a rumble of sword-clanging and
battle-play coming up from the earth.

His Excellency

HE shrilling of trumpets between the houses

of Moscow in their festal array saluted the
returning czar. Before him, line after line, with faded
and dusty uniforms, marched the disarmed Swed-
ish prisoners of war. On triumphal arches of brick
they saw pictures where the wrathful eagle of the
East tore in pieces the Swedish lion, which was
drowning or shot through with arrows. Every step
brought them further into the strange barbarian
city which surrounded them with its scaly ramparts.
The towers were like heaven-storming mushrooms
or oddly wrought celestial globes overstrewn with
pointed gold stars. Tables with unfamiliar dishes
and refreshments were spread in front of all the
larger houses for the czar and his lords. Candles
and lamps flickered before broad, black-bearded
heads of Christ and unknown saints, but on both
sides of the street the masses of people rushed about
like water in runnels, mocking and scoffing at the
vanquished. Widows, exhausted with weeping, and
wives or sisters prematurely gray, who had long
since been dragged off into slavery from the Swed-
ish provinces by the Baltic, recognized from the
windows their kinsmen among the prisoners. They
shouted words of comfort from the Bible, but no
one heard them among the cannon-shots, toc-
sins, and songs of victory that rolled over the city

94 THE CHARLES MEN

like the unrestrained tumult of wildfire and carni-
val.

First went the soldiers. There tramped the gray
battalions of lean Finlanders, who so often, when a
comrade beckoned them to the watch-fires, grinned
in their red beards, shaking their muskets above
the snow-drifts and repeating obstinately their in-
comprehensible “Saisumme tesse!”

“You Finnish bosom-brothers,” said the captive
women at the windows, “while your own home was
in flames, you have followed our men for life and
death and stood at your post like stunted little fir-
bushes. If we ever again drive out to a Christmas
morning service in Sweden, we shall point at the
fir-bushes that stand along the road in the snow and
say: ‘ Finlanders, Finlanders!’”’

Then marched forward the officers, from the low-
est to the colonels, and after them the captured
cannon with their spans of horses. Ona long sledge
stood the kettledrums which on so many evenings
in the dusk had gathered the bleeding squadrons
on some field of battle. On another sledge stood
the drums. How often had they not in conquered
cities forced the plunderers with a sharp roulade
to thrust the sword in the sheath a moment and
range themselves in line behind a young and con-
quering king, who sat radiant on his charger with
the bunch of surrendered keys still in his hand!
After them came the standards and banners with

HIS EXCELLENCY 95

their provincial coats of arms, but they were carried
- in reverse under the left arm and dragged in the
mud of the street. Fur mittens and hands frozen
blue were clenched over the tattered folds that still
carried spots of their defenders’ blood. Snowballs,
stones, and sand rained over the griffins of Séder-
manland and East Gotland, the royal apple of Upp-
land, the crossed spears of Dalecarlia and Narke,
over the flaming mountain of Vestmanland, the
goat of Halsingland, theleafy tree of Blekinge, and
the reindeer of West Bothnia. Ever more savagely
the people thrust aside the muskets of the guards
and shouted: “ Filth and shame on the banners of
these dogs!”

Then the Russian soldiers drew their blades,
and now appeared the Swedish king’s led horses,
improvised litter, and empty blue-covered chair.
Close behind followed the generals around the bent
form of Lewenhaupt, and after them came the Field
Marshal. But nearest before the horse of the czar
walked His Excellency Piper; he who in the ze-
nith of greatness had stood at the side of two Swed-
ish kings.

He seemed to hear and see nothing. He, who
was called the quickest-witted head of Sweden, had
to-day no answer for the guffaws and taunts that
saluted him from all mouths. It looked as though
he walked in thoughts of quite other affairs and
other destinies.

96 THE CHARLES MEN

In the evening, when he was conducted to his
quarters, and rockets pattered over the frozen river,
he sat sleeping in an armchair, and never once
awoke when the servants put on his nightcap and
folded the coverlet around him.

Again it was morning, and again the bells played.
Day followed day, and year followed year, but all
were alike heavy.

The pious works of Francke and Arndt lay on
his table. He induced the Field Marshal and Lew-
enhaupt to shake hands in reconciliation, and be-
camea fatherly helmsman for the unfortunate people
who dwelt with him in bondage. Impoverished
Swedish soldiers often met him in the early hours,
as he went along the streets with hurried step, fol-
lowed only by a little barking dog,

Thenit happened unexpectedly that he was telen
away from his house, and when, after long and anx-
ious waiting, some of his countrymen caught sight
of him under the open heavens, it was far from
Moscow, and he himself had become a broken old
man.

It was a sunny day of spring. The rivers had al-
ready begun to burst their ice and all hearts to throb
with homesickness. Petersburg had now grown up
from the conquered Swedish fenland, and on the
courtyard of the fortress of Peter-and-Paul stood
a miserable wooden hut. In front of the cabin His
Excellency Piper walked to and fro. After starving

HIS EXCELLENCY 97

for seventeen days on bread and water, he was there
able to get an hour’s fresh air. His coat was worn
and hung in deep folds. The cane trembled and
tottered in the hand which aforetime had been
kissed by the king and queen of Poland, and which
so many times, before the name was inscribed under
a commission or an ordinance, had received silver
boxes or snuff-holders filled with ducats and glit-
tering with diamonds.

At a few steps’ distance stood the guards, and
His Excellency could never exchange a single word
with any oneexcept Bredenberg, the battalion chap-
lain. He by special permission had just drawn near
to the cabin. He drew forth a letter from comrades
at Moscow and read it aloud to Piper:

-,.. ©The little dog which at his hurried depart-
ure His Excellency found himself obliged to leave
behind has been tenderly looked after, but it has
crept off with pitiful whining into all sorts of dark
corners without wanting to taste either food ordrink
and has now died. Would to God that we prisoners
might, like that unreasoning animal, lay us down
in some retreat and be delivered from earthly life,
but it is our fervent desire that His Excellency may
now soon be ransomed or exchanged and be able to
return home to his wife and children. For all he has
been to us here as a fatherly guardian and Chris-
tian helper he shall ever be followed by our grateful

blessings.”

98 THE CHARLES MEN

Piper stood with his back to Bredenberg and
gazed obstinately down at the sand. He did not
brood on the severity of his guards, but his ear
distinguished from afar the embittered reprimand
of the king. Had not he, the Minister of State,
ridden voluntarily into Poltava and laid down his
sword? Did he not hear the execrations of his own
people? At home in Stockholm the windows of his
house were broken with stones. He saw his wife,
Madame Kerstin, pick up all the jewelled rings and
boxes and the many small silver ornaments in the
ante-room where of old Swedes and foreigners,
desirous of an audience, had stood and waited in
every window-recess. He could see her in the dark
of night driving away from the city on the road to
Angso. For long hours he could imagine that he
himself was sitting in a Swedish pew and hearing
the minister call down God’s punishment on Piper
who, bribed by foreigners, had misled the king,
who had advised the last wars, and had built a road
of men’s bones over the snow-drifts of the Ukraine.
His unfortunate fellow prisoners had become his
only friends. Never would the land of his fathers
own him; there was no land for which he might
long. He alone knew the absurdity of the accusa-
tions, but he could not expose his master, could not
reveal secrets of state. Broken, he stumbled to his
cabin—a prisoner who was destined to die in silence
under the calumniesof his countrymen and of stran-

HIS EXCELLENCY 99

gers, as he had seen so many a nameless soldier
fall in the ranks.

“Your Excellency,” said Bredenberg, “many
letters like that which I have just read get to Sweden
—yea, to the king—and it is reported that he is
already probably half conciliated. The czar in these
days of hunger has empowered Your Excellency
to request from the countess the payment of thirty
thousand rix-dollars for your final ransom from cap-
tivity. Feel no regret at making the decision! If you
refuse, evil tongues will say it is because of avarice.
When you are at liberty, all may once more be well
as in former years.”

Piper answered softly:

“From early years I would not borrow;
I lay on Christ my weight of sorrow.”

But in the same moment he turned, blood-red in
the forehead, and cried in a thin voice: “* What the
thousand fiends and devils do you want, anyhow?
I have secretly begged the countess to obtain the
king’s prohibition as to sending the money.—
Enough of that! I have come here with my fellow
countrymen, and with them I will also remain,
seeing it was not granted us civilians to getabullet.”

Bredenberg smiled at the heat of the old Excel-
lency, but bent his head and remained standing by
the bench.

“They say the czar intends to conduct Your

100 THE CHARLES MEN

Excellency to hard imprisonment in Schlusselburg,
and near to seventy the body is a frail vessel. Fer-
vently I beg you in my weakness: turn back to your
home, whither all our hearts long, even though
revilings bow us to the earth! Do not lay the in-
eradicable disgrace upon us that the man who stood
nearest to two of our greatest kings should perish
in hunger and rags, a banished man, unreconciled
to his people!”

Piper fumbled along the wall of the hut.

“ Bow thine head before the altar and not before
the discarded great ones of mankind! But if you
are by me at the time of dissolution, see that the
remains are laid on aromatic herbs or on salt, so
that they may be taken home. My days are soon
told. If I have served the Swedes under two mas-
ters, I may still serve them in meekness to the last
where their most unfortunate sons now are.”

When Bredenberg retired, troubled in spirit, a
crowd of Swedish officers in sheepskin coats and
capes emerged from the nearby senate house. Be-
fore them in a brown mantle went Norberg, the
chaplain of the guards, easily recognizable from his
lofty stature. They were to be exchanged and sent
home, and their beggarly belongings had already
been piled up amid sacks of meal on a ketch by
the tiver-bank.

Upon the wall of the fortress the clatter of chains
grew silent and the Swedish workman-prisoners

HIS EXCELLENCY 101

leaned out over the wheelbarrows to gaze after
their departing countrymen. Soon, however, the
wheels began again to creak and the mattocks to
ring. Those were the petty and nameless men, the
living dead, who knew nothing of their people and
who were never to knock at their cottage doors,
but to stand and pine, building day after day the
city of strangers.

Piper slowly raised his shaking hand and
pointed to the wall: “There stand my brothers,”
he said.

Bredenberg, who went to meet the released offi-
cers, gently twitched Norberg by the mantle, and
all turned toward Piper and bared their heads.
They did not go to speak with him or take along ~
a message, but Norberg stood still, so remarkable
did the scene appear to him. He felt over his heart,
and when he found his prayer-book stuck between
his coat and vest, he lifted it and pointed to the
cross on the cover.

“OQ God, thy course has been so directed,” he
whispered, “that this man has been chosen as one of
the many among the martyrs of our people ! Saved,
honored be his injured name!”

The General of Papers

T was still hardly four in the morning, but the
yellow gleam on the grove of birches outside
of Moscow foretold the dawn. General Lewenhaupt
already sat in his accustomed place by the window,
like an old owl on its branch in the woods. Two
grizzled tufts of hair rose above his brow, and he
meditatively opened and closed his great mournful
eyes. }
Roused by several scraping steps, he rose and
turned toward the interior of the room. Before him
stood a hunchbacked Russian Jew with drooping
hair.

The Jew restlessly twined his one red lock about
his finger. What legends had he not heard about old
General Marchmarch, who, with a pinch of snuff
on his thumb, had sent his psalm-singing soldiers
against the redoubts and abattis in the wastes of .
Lithuania? Never previously had he stood before a
herowho had commanded over armies. He thought
that such a person must bea terrible man, who with
an oath on his lips and hands crossed on his sword-
hilt ordered in glasses and canteens and tobacco-
pipes a yard long, until the smoke hovered so thick
that it could be cut with a sword-blow.

“JT am only a poor merchant from Tula,” he
stammered, “and I have come hither with a drove
of oxen, but the Swedish prisoners there in the city

THE GENERAL OF PAPERS 103

have requested me to bring their prayers for an
alms. Though they diligently manufacture wooden
clocks and snuff-horns, there is such need among
them that it cuts one’s heart. But the poor men also
waste much time in foolery. For whole hours every
day they sit writing and scribbling. God help him
who drops the smallest speck of tobacco on their
paper. But it is just this that no man can compre-
hend: that they toil in that way when they have ab-
solutely nothing to write about —and have scarcely
a rouble in the bottom of the chest. Warriors ought
not surely to sweat with the pen.”

Lewenhaupt lighted a tallow candle, for it was
still very dark in the room.

“Look here!” he said with kindly melancholy,
throwing the light on the long, unpainted wall-
shelves, where thick volumes of papers stood stuck
into numbered holders.

The Jew twisted still more violently at his lock
of hair, and instead of glasses and canteens he
saw closely written paper wherever he turned. On
chairs and table and on the very crown of the stove
the paper lay.—A marvellous general this, he
thought. Is that the way he looks who wins
battles? ;

“A people,” said Lewenhaupt, standing by a
shelf, “a state, my friend, means order. Here all
the prisoners are listed and their accounts duly
entered. This is our college of finance, our fiscal

104 THE CHARLES MEN

bureau. Among the Swedish clerics on the other
side of the street there is an equally long shelf.
That is our church. Even in captivity we have re-
mained a people. You, who are a Jew, you must
understand that word.”

He took down a volume and turned the pages,
reading and ciphering half aloud. Then he went into
the adjoining bedroom, and when he had set the
candle on a hassock, he opened a chest and began
carefully to count up the silver coins in various
small leather purses. All the time he continued to
talk half aloud — sometimes to himself, sometimes
to the merchant.

“T have now reckoned out how much I have the
right to send to Tula. But learn, my wise fellow,
that ingratitude and jealousy are the only returns
for effort. Jealousy, jealousy, that was the hand
of darkness which divided us so that the enemy
snatched the banners from our battalions. A fool
he who in this sordid world cries out for friends and
hearts! A comrade in arms embraces you when you
rescue him from the bayonets, but he sighs because
you did not at the same time fall transfixed, so that
he might get your empty place. A fool he who
presses toward other heights than the home of the
Eternal Father! The foe have not smitten me with
deeper wounds than my own countrymen have
done. Yet God grant that I have served my heav-
enly as faithfully as I have my earthly king!”

THE GENERAL OF PAPERS 105

His Bible lay on the coverlet behind him, and
the sword, which had been returned to him, hung
on the bed-post. For every filled purse he wrote a
line in a book and then sealed the purse. The bed-
room, too, was gradually being filled with papers,
but every sheet always lay beside the others in good
order. So the victor of Gemauerthof sat there by the
candle with the smoking sealing-wax in front of his
clear, mournful eyes, and while he was continually
grumbling about the bitterness of fate, the dawn
came softly on.

The Jewish merchant no longer understood his
speech, but twined and twisted his red lock and
mumbled: “A people, a state—even in the midst
of captivity. — That is a noble vision!”

Lieutenant Pinello in the Apothecary Shop

“eta etaenie PINELLO, the Italian, sat one
winter night in the prisoners’ apothecary shop
in Tobolsk and drank strong waters. Behind the.
counter an open door led to a dimly lighted barn,
where Ensign Kraemer worked as a tanner, turn-
ing over hides in a large vat.

Pinello was a good comrade, and between the
two white patches in his hair he had a long sabre-
scar from Poltava, where he had lain on the battle-
field among the dead for two days. But as he now
sat by his brandy tinctured with vermouth, he was
vexed at Kraemer’s obstinate diligence.

“Yes, to be sure,’” said he, “be a stuck-up devil!
Stand all night at your tanner’s vat! Don’t think
of coming in and drinking a glass of strong waters
with an old friend! Perhaps I not do honorable
service as a volunteer in the Swedish army; yes, and
here in captivity even accepted their faith, which
is cursed by the Pope. ve do you say to that,
giovane mio?”

“T keep still and tan ox-leather,” answered
Kraemer.

“Yes, you keep still and tan ox-leather, you; but
I know an ox-leather that we foreigners have had
to tan, and that be the Swedish spirit. Just awhile
ago I take handsome Lieutenant Rothlieb up with
‘ me on the mountain and say with my hands on his

LIEUTENANT PINELLO 107

breast: ‘ Rothlieb, bow your knee in this spot and
thank the kind heavens that Rothlieb had been
formed so comely and so fascinating before all
women! Isn’t he ashamed of going off and moping
in the middle of the game?’ Santa Maria! What
do you suppose the fellow does? The big fellow
begins to sigh, and I could feel how hollow the
heart rattled in his breast. Then I go to Lieuten-
ant Beck’s wife. Though she is a saint and an old
broom of fir-twigs where the needles prick harder
the longer they stay, still in any case she be a
woman. Her nose be a little freckled and her eyes
two bright blue drops of water on a very cool day in
the month of September. When I tella how I hear
all the good God’s angels sing in the sigh of the
west wind on the flower-plot, she answer with call
Lieutenant Rothlieb a bad man. Then she snivel
and get obstinate and hoity-toity, but that most
likely mean nothing else but embarrassment. When
I first swore the Swedish flag faith, the trumpet
blare like the Last Judgment around the table and
the fontange, and the excuse for the wig was that it
concealed. Now the oven is heated hot for the poor
prisoners with the quick head who play the com-
media. Ah! comrade, I have seen in my land holy
sisters breathing of lovely meekness and heavenly
love. They speak of God’s goodness, but not of
man’s wickedness. Ah! comrade, come and see the
women in my land, where they embrace their chil-

108 THE CHARLES MEN

dren or sit with their wax candle and weep on the
graves! That is to see the heart burn. What do
you say to that?”’

“T keep still and tan ox-leather.”

“Yes, you keep still and tan ox-leather, you,
but do you know why the Swedes remain a small
people, why in the midst of their victory time they
have never got to ten million souls ? Do you know
why Sweden and the Swedish speech have never
swum like seething wine over the map of Europe
and made an indivisible empire ? I tella why. They
have no claws of fire on their fingers. The Swedish
spirit was from the beginning such a hard ox-
leather that it could only be trimmed with the cold
hammer of duty. The Swedes from the beginning
could neither conquer nor fall for love, only for
duty. They do not even love one another. The
Swedes would rather be hanged than give full
justice to a countryman. Their spirit from the be-
ginning be a stony ground, but we Polish and
German and French and Italian renegades have
watered it with our adventurers’ blood where the
birds now start to sing among the leaves. Drops
of such adventurers’ blood hang on the branches
of your proudest family trees like bitter oranges
on an oak —yes, the orange often sits at the very
root, look you! Juice of the orange flows in the
veins of your own hero-king. My beloved Swedes,
hearken what I say! When you come upon our ad-

LIEUTENANT PINELLO 109

venturers’ names in your rolls, do not forget that
we have mingled blood in countless perils, that we
foreigners have been the gayest of soldiers, —have
been the flutes where you were the drums! For
love have I sworn the Swedish banner faith, and
for love I faithfully keep the vow to the last breath,
for—look you!—duty and love must at the end
become one and the same. Give your hand, com-
rade, to the little Italian and all his like! What do
you say to that?”

Kraemer dried his arms on his apron and stepped
out into the apothecary shop.

“T am not travelled and versatile as you are,
Pinello. Little I know what we were, hardly what
we are. But stay with us! Come home with me, set
yourself on the watch-tower at Brunkeberg and
shout that all those shall gather round you who
will risk their life for a deed —no matter what, no
matter if it has no meaning—no matter if you
have only to propose an emigration on ice but a
night old over the Aland Sea. Then you will grow
pale and note that you have thrown a torch. Dry
fir-twigs can burn, look you! and then there is a
smell as of oriental spices and incense.”

His hands gripped in brother fashion those of
the swarthy foreigner.

“Why then work so hard at night?” asked
the Italian.

Kraemer answered: “I tan my ox-leather so that

110 THE CHARLES MEN

as soon as it gets soft and ready I may deliver it
to Dame Beck and her school children. They are
to sew from it breast-pieces which we may wear
secretly under our coats. There’s a conspiracy on
foot among the prisoners all the way to Archangel
and Kasan. With weapon in hand, men, women,
and children mean to go back through the whole
of Russia down to the king at Bender. Such have the
Swedes become now. Will you follow us, guitar-
twanger?”’

The Prisoners in Tobolsk

N one of the empty streets of Tobolsk stood

an unpainted wooden house, and up in the
gable room were gathered some of the Swedish
prisoners of war. The table was spread with salted
pike, pancakes, and gruel; and the pious Dame
Beck, who had just helped Dame Morton instruct
the school children in sewing, had been appointed
as hostess for the evening.

Heavy steps shook the winding stairs, and the
door was constantly being opened. Captain Vreech
came with his prayer-books, and reserved Ensign
Stjernflycht, who could never be tempted into a
smile, and lively Lieutenant Kohler,—all of whom
earned their scanty bread as school-teachers. Lieu-
tenant Sprengtporten, who still bore on his wrist
the scars from the chains in the tower of Kasan,
talked so very loudly with handsome Lieutenant
Rothlieb, the lady-killer, that Dame Beck gave
them a questioning glance. Limping Captain Rub-
zoff, who had followed nearest the king at the
Memel River, and Captain Vult, who even in cap-
tivity was as well groomed as ever, fingered and
inspected the snuff-boxes, hair-bags, horse-hair
wigs, and nightcaps which Cornet Ennes and his
friends had made and were now displaying in a
basket. Captain Stralenberg came, having just risen
from the maps after he had drawn the first meridian

112 THE CHARLES MEN

over Tobolsk. Cornets Fries, Westfelt, and Toll,
who had gone about and sung in the courtyards,
came rattling their empty money-boxes. Major
Hall, who had become a dyer, swung a cornucopia
of sugar over a pancake. Major Riddarborg, who
supported himself with embroidery, drew balls of
silver thread from his knapsack and arranged them
round a platter to make them look like pretty
Easter eggs; but Lieutenant Beeth, who had be-
come a goldsmith, laid a shining ducat on the edge
of the table for exhibition—the first that any of
them had seen for two whole months.

The younger men ranged themselves bashfully
and stiffly round the walls with their hands behind
them. Haberman, the worthy student from Viborg,
who had worked as a servant and wore patched
leather breeches, kept so close to the door-jamb
in his embarrassment that Major Balck, who him-
self had but a damp brew-house for lodgings, was
obliged to drag him forward to the table. Bergman,
too, who had held the rank of cornet but was de-
graded because in the long wandering from Pol-
tava he had threatened and cursed his own supe-
riors, stuck by the edge of the stove with such
difidence that Dame Beck had to serve his food
for him and hand him the dishes.

Vreech now clapped his hands and began to
speak : “We thank thee, Heavenly Father, for Thy
goodness towards us poor miserable captives, who

‘THE PRISONERS IN TOBOLSK 113

may now every Sunday gather around a common
table as in the old days. Next to Thee we thank the
honest comrades who through the labor of their
hands have brought it about that we may also
sometimes feed our most needy and impoverished
brothers and school children. Belau, too, our faith-
ful doctor aforetime, who has just died in Moscow,
has left us his silken dressing-gown, and it has been
sold for a full seven roubles and twenty kopeks.
Albeit captivity has given us a wholesome proba-
tion, we perceive every hour that Thy hand is still
over us. We have recently heard that Erik Arm-
felt, who sat so long riveted in chains and the pil-
lory, has now been helped to freedom; and we
thank Thee that Piper, our old Excellency, has
turned to a living faith and, purified from mortal
weaknesses by a death of starvation, has now en-
tered into Thy heavenly righteousness.”

When Vreech was silent, Stjernflycht stepped
forth and continued to speak: “Before we sit us
down, we beseech Thee, O Father, for all our fel-
low countrymen who languish in the sulphur mines
and stone-pits, and yet farther off in Tartary and
in the valleys by the Chinese Wall, although they
have not otherwise transgressed than that they
have faithfully served their lord. Vouchsafe the
cup of Thy favor to Ruhl, our comrade in arms,
who for years has been lying in rags and filth in
an underground vault, where he has already seen

114 THE CHARLES MEN

his friend Taube perish in misery. Grant the re-
lease of death to Hermelin, if the rumor be true
that, hidden away in solitude, he is still pining in
a monastery at Astrakan. Strengthen with Thy con-
solation Seulenberg and Hay, who sit each in his
hut of earth far out in the wilderness, and Anders
Oxehufvud, whom a German merchant saw going
in harness before a plow. O God, our God! Doth
not Jeremiah speak, and say: ‘The children of Zion,
they that were noble, that were valued as refined
gold, they are now despised in the streets; and
they that were borne upon scarlet, they embrace
the dunghills. Swifter were our pursuers than the
eagles of heaven. The soul of our body, the Lord’s
anointed, was seized in their talons; he under
whose shadow we had thought to live among the
peoples...’”

The wind shook the panes and rustled in the
reeds outside the window.

“Worthy Dame Beck,” whispered Stjernflycht,
as he moved forward chairs for the older gentle-
men, “there is only one whom I still miss. That
is our charming friend Ferdinand von Kraemer,
the young cornet. A purer and more dutiful heart
has never beaten in a Swedish breast. When I look
at him, I have to think of a cool and clear sum-
mer night.”

Before Dame Beck had found an answer, Kraemer
had already come in by the winding stair with his

THE PRISONERS IN TOBOLSK 115

coat collar up, and had fixed his blue eyes upon
her.

“| have some one down below with me whom you
would perhaps all excuse from appearing among
you,” said he with lowered voice. “It is Leiyon.
I’m trying to entice him away from his lounging
life at the taverns. If we only accept him with a
little forbearance.— There’s nothing bad i in him
at bottom.”

“ His light way is so different from ours,” an-
swered Dame Beck with a hard tone of voice and
a mild expression.

. “You must n’t be so severe, Dame Beck!”

She busied herself at the table and set out the
plates. Then she went to the door and called down
the stairs: “‘ Kraemer is a righteous man, and none
of us will lock out him whom he can bear with.
Come up, Lieutenant Leiyon!”’

Prematurely gray, with melancholy eyes and
cheeks blood-red with frost and drink, Leiyon
stepped across the threshold and was at once offered
a chair, as if he had been one of the most distin-
guished of the company. At the beginning he sat
perfectly still, but as the meal progressed, when
the beer was poured out and no one remembered
that he was there, he quite suddenly seized Dame
Beck’s reluctant hands, kissed them, and told with
what unfeigned regard he loved her. He passed
from chair to chair with his glass, embracing and

116 THE CHARLES MEN

pressing the hands of both known and unknown.
Finally he went to the younger men, who were
still standing along the wall, and prayed them to
call him “thou,” and when he came back to his
place beside Kraemer, his glass was empty. Then
he threw his arm about Kraemer’s waist and tossed
back his gray lion’s mane from his brow.

After that he beat on the table with his free hand
so that it rang: “ What’s become of the Swedish
courage, my lads? I’m not asking for your Jesus.
—If Leiyon is to amuse you, pass along a decent
stirrup-cup! What do you say? Kraemer’s honesty!
I grant it, I grant it. But have you ever heard
any one tell of Kraemer’s cleverness? ‘A man has
his duty,’ he says. Not to laugh in misfortune —
or to do away with himself. Just to sit and wear
out his breeches for five stivers a week. No, but
do you know what? I’m thinking of doing like
Stjernkors. I’m thinking of becoming Russian,
swearing to the Russian faith, and amiably marry-
ing a Russian woman. Just tell me this, my fine,
good Madam Beck, just tell me this: Why should
life be worse here than back at home? Is the grass
there greener or the straw softer?”

““My dear friend and comrade,” answered Krae-
mer mildly: “at bottom you ’ve a good, childlike
heart, and I’m very fond of you. But homesick-
ness is the heaviest sickness of all, and my opinion
only is that if we know we’re doing our duty, then

THE PRISONERS IN TOBOLSK _ 117

we poor exiles have still something in this world
to rejoice at.”

The yellow hair was brushed smoothly back from
his clear brow.

Leiyon nodded toward him: “ Rejoice—I really
think we may. Do you know why even the Rus-
sian is fond of us Swedes? You there, it’s not only
on account of our polite manners and because we
teach his children to read and write. Can you re-
member, on the examination day I went to the
school and described for the children Krokedum-
melum, the capital of Mesopotamia, where there
was n’t a single sleeping-hall but only taverns and
hostelries, and where the wagons don’t run on
wheels but on beer-barrels and kegs? And the
dragoons and Russian fur-dealers who sat on the
benches among the children to look on submis-
sively and get to learn something useful laughed
so that Mistress Beck chased me out.— The deuce!
Therefore, look you, the Russians and the whole
world like us, because we here in the midst of our
misery can take both them and all Siberia to our
bosom and can be so merry that there is a radi-
ance around us.”

Kraemer looked him intently in the eyes. “ Ah,
you old brother and hero of the beer-mug, I per-
ceive strange emotions hidden under the gaiety of
the Swedes.”

But on towards evening Leiyon began to curse

118 THE CHARLES MEN

and thunder as if he had been the very field mar-
shal, and Dame Beck’s ice-cold hands quietly took
the beer-mug from his.

“T keep no drinking-house,” she said harshly ;
“and we have not come together to live i in surfeit-
ing and sin.’

Kraemer immediately interrupted her, so that
Leiyon might not catch the severe words, and man-
aged to get the latter down with him from the room.

“I’m going to the churchyard,” shouted Leiyon.
“ Alongside it is the best tavern. Prosperity and
gaiety give health and long life.”

“You can look down from here at the church-
yard by the frozen river yourself. There is n’t a
single house near it.”

“T’m going down to see if the grass we sowed
over Raaf’s little son has taken root.”

Kraemer shook his head and took him under the
arm. A biting norther whistled from the desolate
marsh-land, and no wanderer was visible. The snow
had whirled away from the road, and the two friends
went on in silence. While still at a distance, they
read in the twilight the white Swedign inscription
on the wooden cross.

“Stop and read it aloud, Bahia Kraemer! One
of my kinsmen is said to be lying in the Ukraine
and one at Bender.For fifteen years we have strewn
Swedish bones from the White Sea to the Archi-

pelago.”

THE PRISONERS IN TOBOLSK _ 119

Kraemer plucked at his coat. “Come along, I
tell you! This is nonsense.”

“The grass has been frozen off.— Tell me, tell
me, are n’t the dead at home? Are n’t they at home
who lie already in the earth? Talk with me, Krae-
mer. You can calm the sea, you carry such a repose
with you.”

“ Be still, be still, and let me alone! I won’t listen
to you. Don’t brood on such things, but let us in-
stead bethink us of our duties!”

“ But, ask you, shan’t we even be at home when
we dead sleep in God’s bosom? Home, home—do
you understand that word ?>—home! Shall we never,
never come home?” .

“You don’t know to whom you’re talking,
Leiyon. I am weaker than you.”

“Flome —is n’t it true that you, too, have
brooded on that word? You have gone off and re-
peated it quietly to yourself—home, home! It be-
gins when a child counts the nails and knots on the
floor. A home, look you, is something that begins
as a little seed and ends as a great tree. It begins
with the children’s room, then grows until it be-
comes many rooms and a whole house, a whole dis-
trict, a whole country; and outside of that land the
very air and water lose their refreshing taste. Can
you not assure me that our comrades who lie here
beneath us in the stony and alien earth are at
home?”

120 THE CHARLES MEN

Kraemer pulled yet more violently at his gar-
ments.

“Haha! Now I’ve just caught you finely in a
trap! But I myself.— Do you believe a jolly fellow
goes off and sorrows in earnest? Then you don’t
know my beggar song that I ’ve just composed to
sing in the courtyards, when I’m sometimes in need
of a farthing.”

He walked more and more slowly off.on the
driveway along the river, and Kraemer, who re-
mained standing by the churchyard fence, heard
him strike up his beggar chant:

Near Uppsala lying,

A cottage gleams whitely,
Where daily and nightly
The maples are sighing.

So fast the days darted:
But years have gone by now.
A captive am I now,

Who thence am departed.

The song sounded ever more distant in the storm.

My voice is but broken,

My tongue is unhandy.

I sing when I soak in

A throat-ful of brandy.

Then let there be brought seven
Glasses, red one of them!

For my lion I’ve fought seven

THE PRISONERS IN TOBOLSK _ 121

Years and am done with them.
Twelve times I was wounded.
I smiled, never swerving,
When icy winds hounded.

Since birth I’ve been starving.
My sword was the omen

Of death to twelve foemen.
But my sword’s far away, sir,
Hilt-deep in the sand

Of the Dnieper’s lone strand.
Twelve coins, then, I pray, str,
Slip into my hand,—

Best wage of your labors

And spoil of your quarrels
Each day with your neighbors. —
Hurrah for King Charles!

The voice died away, and Kraemer turned back
alone to his meagre but well-tended room, where
hardly a speck of dust could be found on the table.
He undressed and went to bed, but could not sleep.
Time and again he jumped up and listened. That’s
only the wind, he thought, and drewthe coverlet up
to his forehead; but after a while he again sat up,
awake, in his bed. It sounded as if some one had
thrown sand against the window-panes.

He put out the tallow candle, which was still
burning, and went in his night-shirt to the window.
When he had opened it, he saw on the street be-
low a little man, who beckoned to him incessantly.

122 THE CHARLES MEN
He recognized by the sheepskin pelisse and half-

boots that it was a Russian peasant.

“ Little father,” said the peasant, “I have often
met you in company with the merry Swedish Lieu-
tenant Leiyon. Never has that man caused me any-
thing but joy. It’s beena long time now that he has
lived with my wife and me. Though he never paid
for himself, we were heartily fond of him, and of
evenings he told stories of how he and the Swedish
king in the woods of Poland tore apart the jaws of
leopards and heleophants and otheranimal scourges
that had come up from hell.— To be sure he would
sometimes sit in the cellar doorway and be silent,
but if then he got only a glass or two, he became
again directly the same kindly fun-maker.”

«Ah, the Swedes!”’ muttered Kraemer.“ Haven’t
I always said: I perceive strange emotions hidden
under their gaiety?”

“Little father, when the lieutenant did not come
to us this evening, I went to the barn where he
slept. — And there he was lying, too. He had made
away with himself. His great cheerfulness, no:
doubt, became at last too much to keep up.”

The night was windy and dark. The following
morning the prisoners wrote in their diaries of
Leiyon’s death. Next to that fact they made the
entry that during the darkness Kraemer had left his
quarters. No one heard anything of him afterwards,

THE PRISONERS IN TOBOLSK 123

and no one found his remains, but the officers said
to the soldiers: “He has got safe home to his
people.”

The Lion’s Cage

UM Eppauta was the chief of the Truth-

tellers’ Brotherhood. They lived each of
them by himself in their homes as merchants or ex-
pounders of the most ancient writings, but every
year at the first new moon after the festival of
Beiram they assembled at night by torchlight in
white robes in a remote gorge.

One night when Num Eddaula was returning
from such a meeting along the stony mountain
path, he said to the servant who bore the torch:
‘“‘ We have just sworn our brotherhood vow always
to tell the truth except in one thing; namely, when
it concerns our own good deeds. These we are to
suppress or prevaricate away, and we must aspire
to die forgotten. What better mirrors the silent
greatness of eternity than oblivion? On all the
earth there is no lodging so fair as a forgotten
grave. The grasses there sigh differently. The birds
twitter differently. Hearken to me, my friend! The
Truth-tellers’ freedom of speech has so angered the
sultan that he has sworn to extirpate them with
the sword, if in recompense he does not receive my
head. That is easy to recognize from the birth-
mark beside the eye. I myself will be the man to
bear him the head. That, however, is a good action;
but will no longer remain good if it attracts re-
nown, and I have neither the desire nor the right

THE LION’S CAGE 125

to reveal it. If our band suspected my intention,
they would bind me and conceal and protect me
to the uttermost. Therefore you are to follow me
secretly, and when I have suffered my punishment,
you are to bury me in silence in an unknown place
and afterwards give out that I was seized against
my will as a cowardly fugitive.”

When the dawn appeared, the servant cast away
the torch, and they descended to the blossoming
plain by the castle of Timurtash, where the sultan
had his pleasure-camp.

Num Eddaula was confused when he saw the
splendid equipments and pavilions. He listened
eagerly to a slave who related that the Swedish king
lived at the castle with his needy court, half as
prisoner, half as guest of honor.

“Let us go up thither,” he said to his servant,
“because I myself am a weak man, and the sight
of a hero will lend me strength. Mine eyes, weary
with age, will then close with joy.”

They went through the garden, where the sum-
mer-sun shone between the fig-trees and the mul-
berries. Along the path Brandklipparen was led.to
water. When they came to the steps of the castle,
they encountered among the Turks who had just
had a glance at the king the sultan himself, dis-
guised as a Janisary. Num Eddaula squeezed him-
self against the wall and drew his loosened hair
over the birth-mark beside his eye, but he felt on

126 ° THE CHARLES MEN

his wrist the breath of the mouth which that even-
ing was to command his death. A hero, he wanted
to see a hero before him, or else even he would
begin to waver.

A door was opened. Taking a few vehement
steps forward, he bent and through a hole in a
screen surveyed the king. 3

The wide apartment, where the sultan’s dancers
often trod the carpets as they performed to the
music of flutes, was from floor to ceiling and along
the walls and windows so overspun with many-col-
ored arabesques that Num Eddaula thought he
was beholding a hall of leaves, where enchanted
spiders had fastened their golden webs among the
flowers and vines. By the farthest wall the king lay
on a small field-bed, with his shirt buttoned up to
his throat. Overmastered, without soldiers, without
power, and yet sovereign lord over a remote king-
dom, he never had money enough for the bribes
and gifts which were necessary for an audience with
the sultan. He could not humiliate himself before
the foreign ambassadors and approach the sultan
as a beaten and destitute fugitive. He blushed at
the thought of having to show himself before his
lackeys and grooms as a disarmed prisoner who had
to fit himself to another’s will, howsoever eagerly
they kept repeating that it befell by his own gra-
cious command. Instead, therefore, he had laid him-
self on his bed; what had attacked him was not a

THE LION’S CAGE 127

matter of health but of money. Ever since the
affair at Bender he had remained lying month after
month. He would not once set his foot on the
ground, but had himself carried in a sheet to a divan
when his bed was to be made. His two body phy-
sicians, Skraggenstjerne and Neuman, noted with
anxiety that his limbs were beginning to stiffen and
become paralyzed, as with a fakir who for the glory
of God has long endured in the same attitude
on a heap of rubbish. Vainly they begged him to
raise himself at least once every day and take a few
steps on the carpet.

So Num Eddaula thought he was beholding
one of those holy men who are wont to be rever-
ently saluted beneath a leafy oak or on the sunny
side of some distant mausoleum.

Coughing, the consumptive scholar, Eneman,
had just been telling of his long journey. He shook
a couple of young crocodiles from two flasks that he
had with him and showed how they spat out green
and black poison, as they were burnt alive in a
heap of embers on a brazier by the bed. The king
propped his arms on the pillows and looked down
at the creatures that were twisting in the embers.

“Could a man fell a grown crocodile with only
a sword?” he asked. “A man can do what he
will.”

The threadbare chancellor, Von Miller, who had
by now begun to serve as head cook, since there

~

128 THE CHARLES MEN

was nothing else left, stroked his faded coat tail
with a simper.

“Can one, when one will, fry pancakes without
eggs and cream?”

«A man can get what is requisite —in necessity
with his blade.”

Grothusen lifted his dark nostrils into the air
and drummed on his braided court-hat, while he
addressed himself to Miller in a low voice:.“In
the very worst case a man can get what he needs at
forty per cent.”

“The noble pashas look so cheerful. Of what
are they speaking?” asked Num Eddaula of the
nearest lackey, but the latter became very much
confused and answered conciliatingly at random:
“They are talking about one of the most beautiful
passages of the evangelists.”

Therewith he accidentally gave the screen a push
on the slippery floor. When the king caught sight
of the venerable old man, he beckoned him nearer
and commanded Grothusen to act as interpreter.

The king said: “ Assuredly you are a wise man.
Should you also have courage to stand where bul-
lets are whistling?”

Num Eddaula’ lowered his turban, and reflec-
tively stroked the white beard which reached to his
waist. “‘I belong to the Truth-tellers’ Brotherhood
and may not attribute to myself any virtue. But do
you that are a hero answer me this: If your first —

THE LION’S CAGE 129

teacher said to you, ‘Do not kill, do not kill even
on a heap of embers the ugliest and fiercest of ani-
mals’ —if the noble pashas around you and all men
should say every morning, ‘ Do not kill, for that is
a sin. Stay at home in your kingdom and watch
over the harvests, although you win no fame there-
with’—should you have courage for that? Have
you courage in misfortune to humble yourself and
admit yourself conquered and to forgive your ene-
mies and tormentors?”

The king knitted his brows: “Should not a good
soldier rather show himself staunch ?”

“You that hate lying and never wished that
others should pretend you to be more perfect than
you are, high is your forehead and noble, large are
your eyes, but you have an evil line at your tightly
pressed mouth. People think that it smiles, but it
does not smile. It is something quite other that the
lips indicate. They tempt God. They say that your
will is His. You gathered your people, and they
were smitten. When God has smitten a people, He
rolls a heavy boulder upon the grave and ordains
quietness. He desires to see once more yellow fields
and playing children. But you continue the:strife,
and against Him. The testifiers of truth—all the
steadfast ones who in prosperity are humble, in mis-
fortune are proud—these have roused themselves
from their thoughts to see you; and now they turn
away. It may be that your land has brought forth

130 THE CHARLES MEN

many great men and kings, but could any of them
from the beginning stand forth better fitted for a
warrior of light than you? You feared oblivion. A
star was to have been kindled on your grave to
burn for thousands of years. But fate was against
you, because God willed to smite you and your
people. Fulfil, then, your hero’s task! Put away
vain reputation, as you have despised the wine-cup
and women. Do it humbly or do it proudly, which-
ever you can. Go forth and set yourself in the place
of the conquered and the destitute. Go forth and
set yourself, like Job, upon a heap of ashes. You
can control your countenance; control yourself
likewise. You arecapable of more than you perform.
That is what God never forgives in a hero. Never
did He raise on His right hand a more transparent
pure jewel than you, and never did He in His
wrath fling His own handiwork so deep in the dark-
ness—and therefore I love you, because you are
human. Of all the men I have met, none have I
loved as you, no one. Beware, beware! for there are
others, too, that love you and are far more danger-
ous than your worst enemies and traducers.”’

«And who are they?”

“The fools. They have observed the line at your
mouth, and interpret it in their own speech. Fools
never turn away; they fasten themselves to the gar-
ments. Fools demand a hero-fool, a laurelled arch-
fool for all time, and for that office they wish to_

THE LION’S CAGE 131

acclaim you with jubilation. The fools inquire not
greatly of what nature you are. They love not men.
They are like the little monkeys that sit huddled
up on the stone images in the palm grove of Hedjaz
and eat dates in the sun, but that leap from bough
to bough, chattering and pursuing, when they hear
a man’s step. O king, death you fear not. God will
give it you in compassion at the time when He re-
members how your boyish hand wielded the sword
of the cherubim. More heavily will fall His verene
He gives you to the fools.”

“You go far in outspokenness.”

“JT would but search how far your courage ex-
tends, inasmuch as you are a hero. Have you
courage to die forgotten?”

The king’s forehead became still more clouded,
and he felt about for an answer. He sat sidewise in
his bed with the cover twisted around his knees
and feet.

Num Eddaula crossed his hands over his breast, .
and bowed: “‘ There is much, then, for which your
courage is too small.”

Grothusen struck his hat against the brazier.
“You that are a speaker of truth—who can say
that you do not stand here and plume yourself on
your humility? Who can say that it does not need
courage to wish to die remembered?”

Num Eddaula closed his eyes, and with his lean
fingers felt uneasily about him in the air. “ There

132 THE CHARLES MEN

you spoke truth, pasha. Fame is unclean slander,
unclean honor. It is an error and a delusion. The
_ arrogant man is called meek, the meek arrogant.
Among the world’s famous men and women since
Adam, how much of clear gold would survive if the
misleading ashes could be sifted away? And you, O
king—who read your last thought in the evening
when you fell asleep? who saw you in the solitude,
in the darkness as you lay there awake? who beside
your bier could lay hand on heart and say: ‘Such
he was’ ?— Only the fools shall dare to do that and
to say: ‘Ask us, he was as we.’ When they weary
of praising, they begin to throw stones, to bemock
you and point the finger at your heavy broadsword.
Your unrestful grave will be their favorite place of
resort. They will stand there packed so tight that
the clever folk can never come near your moulder-
ing bones. But this I say to you. Though the fools
acclaim you as theirs, if you can but rouse yourself
and gather about you the wise, the truthful, and
the steadfast —those who in prosperity are humble,
in misfortune are proud —then you have stood the
test. Then have you become a champion of God
even when you are but as a memory and a shadow.
Then have men weighed you with false weights.
Then are you he whom I will that you should be.”

Num Eddaula cast himself upon his knees with
his head upon the matting: “I am a weak man who
have gotten strength from seeing you. Much have

THE LION’S CAGE 133

I transgressed in my life, in many things have I
fallen short. If I have not scars on my head, I have
them in my soul. I want to be forgotten, forgotten.
I would sleep, would sleep. The famous man be-
comes a slave amid his fellows. According as he
suits his last master, he will either get a garland
woven into his hair or will have to endure buffet
and blow. No love has power to proclaim peace
over his dust. There, ever higher, is growing a tree
with wondrously gnarled branches and with un-
stinted restlessness and sighing in its leaves.”

No one answered him. All was still throughout
the spacious apartment. Finally there was a bang
and clatter on the brazier, and the king held outa
shining doubloon to the white-bearded soothsayer.
He crept forward on his knees to the bed, and
pressed his face to the sheet that hung down from
it, but he thrust the coin from him. “ You may live,
you may die,” he said; “there will always be strife
around you. I go to rest.”

Early next morning Num Eddaula was executed
before the tent of the sultan. The confident cer-
tainty of oblivion spread its tranquillity over his
last hour.

The servant buried his body apart between two
cypresses. When the grave was shovelled in again,
he strewed over it grains of maize for the doves,
which gathered in hundreds from grove and tree.
Soon bushes with white flowers sprang up from the

134 THE CHARLES MEN

earth. Tired soldiers and herdsmen found there a
shady spot and often lay down to rest awhile on the
grass. It was a sacred place. There slept a forgotten

man.

The King’s Ride
OYAL CuHaAnceLtor von MULLER sat on a
wooden stool before the fireplace of his room
in the house of the Swedish king at Demotika and
made pancakes. He raised one of the nap-worn
tails of his coat to the fireplace and examined it.

“The braid is still holding on to the riding-coat,”
he remarked to Colonel Grothusen, who stood near
him to warm himself, “but it ’s disgracefully black-
ened. And the rest of the Swedish retinue are be-
ginning —devil take them!— to look like a very
pack of gipsies. I can say with Fabrice: ‘I shall soon
not remember how money-pieces look, whether
they are round or square.’”

“They are so round that they roll away like
wheels,” responded Grothusen, rubbing his hands
in high spirits. “A king, a court, a whole small
army without anything but a little borrowed small-
change in their pockets —and that in a Turkish
market-town hundreds of miles from their native
land! When did you ever see the like? God forgive
me, but is n’t it as funny a sight as can be, even if
the sugar is sometimes too thin on the pancakes?
We don’t get a single purse from the Porte any
more. Though I ’ve scarcely time to sleep at night,
but am busy only with negotiating for travel-money
from all the usurers of the world, yet I hardly
comprehend how we can get decently away from

136 THE CHARLES MEN
here. I have told His Majesty that we shall have

to take a whole train of creditors with us as a rear-
guard and quarter them at Karlshamn till they are
paid. Imagine little Karlshamn filled full of Turks,
who fall on their knees at the street corners and
call upon Allah! — Whew!—If we can only get off!
We must march away with drums and trumpets,
as befits the Swedes, you understand. Luckily we
have some finery left from the summer when I
went on the embassy to the great monarch. In
point of fact, there is neither padding nor lining in
the saddle-cloths, but outside there is that much
more of gilt thread and tassels —which is the main
thing. And I myself look like a full Excellency.
What more does one want? Lace ruffles, snuff-
spoon of pure ducat gold; in the wardrobe a court
pelisse given by the sultan, a pair of slippers down —
at heel, a nightcap, and a silken dressing-gown
which Diben would be proud to wear even at High
Service. But that is the last, too, and let ’s see what
will be left of all the blessed stuff before we get
home!”

The longer Grothusen talked, the merrier he
grew. Finally he went to the window, and opened
it wide.

“What’s there?” inquired Miller, buttoning up
his coat against the cold.

“It’s a crowd of Turks that are standing about
waiting to get sight of His Majesty riding off.

THE KING’S RIDE 137

There is a heavy rain, you see, and for that reason
they know that he won’t stay indoors.”

Grothusen dug and searched in the skirt of his
coat, and when he had found two or three large
silver coins, he threw them out of the window and
cried: “'That’s how money looks. Long live the
Swedes and their great, mighty, bounteous king!”

“Ts that your own money or the king’s?”

“As if I knew!”

“Did n’t you use to have your own money in
your left coat tail and the king’s in the right?”

“But the left coat tail has graciously consented
to take a compulsory loan for necessities from the
right. My dear fellow, I render an honest reckon-
-ing. That is, every evening I count up how much
there is left in the total.”

There was a murmur of applause from the crowd,
but Miller lifted the griddle from the fire with a
surly grumble.

“You keep your light heart, brother. I never ~
believed, though, that you would become so im-
portant that you ’d get a freiherr and Royal Chan-
cellor for your cook; but I’m glad my pancakes
please the gentlemen’s taste. I ’ve often asked my-
self how we down here have been able to keep on,
all these years so willingly and joyfully.”

“That I ll explain to you. There is such a rare
fascination for men in being daily and hourly with
him who has command over their weal and woe,

138 THE CHARLES MEN

that one may inquire whether perhaps the bliss of
heaven, too, may not turn out to consist in the same
thing.”

“That would be well, if such a diversion also
made men nobler and better.”

“Thank you, brother. That remark was for me.
I know well enough that behind my back I am
little spared here among you all. Call me a frivo-
lous beggar, a—well, what you please! A skeptic,
and philosopher such as I, who oversleeps himself
badly at morning service, cannot expect much love
among you Swedes. I may console myself, though,
with the fact that the king himself is less dainty
in such things than you. At home it’s likely to be
a question of falling on the battlefield, and then you
shall see, brother, that the black wig of old Grothu-
sen will not stand behind the line.”

“At home, you say. Answer me honestly. Does
His Majesty really hope to gather fresh troops
there?”

“That he does—and he’ll get them, too. That
will make an affair in the realm such as the world
never saw the like of. I’ve nothing against that.
In the hour of need to call the money-lenders
‘my dear fellow,’ that ’s one thing—and it might
happen that chevaliers would become scarce, if no
money-lenders could be found. But one’s honor
and sword, that’s another matter.”

“‘ And is he, then, for that reason, going to de-

THE KING’S RIDE ~ 139

camp at last? I thought I noticed that he was not
quite clear as to the immediate future.”

“The further he gets toward the north, the more
clearly he comes to see it.”

“You think of the ancient enemies waiting for
him: Saxony, Russia, Poland, Prussia, Hanover,
Denmark—six hostile peoples to fight!”

«Seven. You are forgetting the latest and most
dangerous enemies.”

“Whom?”

“<The Swedes.” |

Miller arose from the stool, and the two one-
eyed men stood face to face.

“God in heaven! don’t talk like that. You used
at other times to be of those who do not despair.
This is a strange speech in your mouth.”

«Since His Majesty has got certain knowledge
that his subjects have begun to challenge and defy
him, he has come to the point of riding home with
the same fury as to a battle. What, besides, is one
to believe after the latest news? The country is
without government. The civil service is standing
as still as a mill-wheel on a dried-up brook. The
lords of the Riksdag and the Council talk of de-
thronement. We should get to see a flaming out-
break, if the Swedes were not such a law-abiding
people—and it still happens that /e is their prince.
Don’t wail and lament, my dear Miller, for all this
is just your own old song—and don’t be so dam-

140 THE CHARLES MEN

nably stingy with the sugar, but turn the whole
cornucopia over the pancakes —and hold your head
high! Adieu!”

Miiller stood in the middle of the room, flus-
tered and without an answer. The greatest astonish-
ment was depicted on his face, for through the door
he heard Grothusen call to a drummer-boy: “Au-
gust, fetch a decent drum here! Hang it in front of
you and come with me to the bazaar.”

Muller shook his head, and sat down again by
his pancakes. “In the name of the Lord Jesus
Christ, what sort of absurdities will Grothusen
commit with the drum?”

Next morning the Swedes marched out ceremo-
niously from Demotika, in order to begin at last
their homeward journey to the shore of the Baltic.
They had to struggle on for hundreds of miles
through mountain passes and forests. Ina long line
behind them rode Turks, Jews,and Armenians with
their sacks and bundles. These were their seventy-
two most pressing creditors. The king was cheerful
and brilliant, so that the citizens and their veiled
women called down the blessing of God over the
departing hero. Only Grothusen remained behind,
for his Turkish friends held him back at the door.
One of them stuck an ink-horn into his hand,
another put a pipe of tobacco into his mouth, and

THE KING’S RIDE 141

the black attendants pulled at his coat. His large
nostrils were raised aloft, and he emptied his coat
pockets into the hands of the attendants with a
magnificent flourish. He then opened the lid of his
clothes-chest.

“«« My dearest, dearest friend,” said he. “This ex-
quisite nightcap I’ve had specially made for you,
and have used it myself so that it should be a real
memorial.—And you, father! ‘These brand-new
slippers—you wonder they are so down at heel.
I myself have diligently walked in them so as to
ascertain that they would not be too hard on your
feet.— And you there, pray take this silken dress-
ing-gown!”

He jumped up on his equipage like a fugitive,
and ordered the coachman to drive on.

That evening, when the Swedes came to Timur-
tash, a pasha presented to the king as a gift from
the sultan a silken tent and a sabre with a jewelled
hilt.

“There goes my pelisse of sable,” said Grothu-
sen to the king half aloud. “No other return-gift
can be raised, and Your Majesty yourself has ab-
solutely nothing but a dusty coat and a half-dozen
rough soldier’s shirts.”

“Lend. me as well the ink-horn and pipe that
you just got,” returned the king with a roguish
twinkle in his eye. “I must also present something
to the chieftain for the escort of the Janisaries.”

142 THE CHARLES MEN

‘Give the whole old fellow Grothusen for a eu-
nuch in the great monarch’s seraglio!”’ cried Gro-
thusen jubilantly, rubbing his hands together and
becoming more light-headed, the madder the jest
became. At that moment he caught sight of his
drummer-boy, who was marching despondently
along the road with the drumsticks under his arm.

“Your drum has no tongue in her head. There’s -
stolen goods in her,” cried the boy’s comrades mock-
ingly.

When they examined the drum, they found that
it was sealed with four seals; and big tears came to
the boy’s eyes.

“Strike bravely on your discordant drum!” or-
dered Grothusen. “It was I that sealed it, as Pilate
the grave of Christ —and a little mournful music
may come in well for all the Turkish creditors
behind us, who are now riding into exile in our
stead.”

But in the evenings, when the Swedes rested a
few short hours by the camp-fire, the musicians
rapped and shook the drum, opining that it was
full of money and securities embezzled from the
king. |

“He’s a keen one!” they whispered. “It’s no
trick, is it, to empty the left pocket liberally, when
one sticks such long fingers into the right?”

As early as two o'clock at nights the king had
the trumpets blow for breaking camp. He galloped

THE KING’S RIDE 143

forward between the cliff-walls by torchlight. When
at Pitest he found himself once more on the boun-
dary of Christendom, the companies left behind at
Bender met him,and the last Zaporogeans, who had
remained faithful in so many perils, received, kneel-
ing, his words of farewell. Afterwards he went to
Grothusen.

The latter had just halted to count the guldens
that one of the guardsmen had gone ahead and
dickered for in Transylvania.

The king said to him: “My passport is now
ready. I am to be known as Captain Frisk, and shall
ride at a gallop to Stralsund with Rosen and Dir-
ing.”

“Cheah then lifted off his braided hat and his
wig and delivered them to the king.

“The slippers, nightcap, gorgeous pelisse, silken
dressing-gown— Seek them, seek them! All gone!
Now the wig and hat go. With this disguise and
a snuff-brown frock coat, Your: Majesty is so un-
recognizableand transmogrified, thatifallthe Rosen
family had not a knack with women, no tavern girl
—saving your honor—wouldever proffer the gen-
tlemen a glass of water. But for my part I’m thank-
. ful that there’s no need to offer my flesh for the
king’s ride across Europe.”

Grothusen himself, however, took his place at
once in the travelling-carriage, so as to arrive first
and be able to meet his lord at the Swedish sea,

144 THE CHARLES MEN

along whose coast the enemy were now building
their fortresses and cities.

Day and night the king exercised in wild rides
his two chosen companions and the two dragoons
who were to follow after him at a day’s interval.
When at last the hour struck in which he was to
assume his disguise and spring into the saddle, he
gave his gelding the spurs with such violence that
Diiring and Rosen were almost at once a couple of
horse’s lengths behind. He looked as on the morn-
ing before a battle. He, who in fresh and sound
health had endured months in a sick-bed so as to
avoid a humiliating audience with the sultan, and
who for years had trifled away the days ina small
Turkish town in the hope of being able to gather a
great army to follow him, now rode off impatiently
with his two comrades and without a single servant.

The hoofs rang on the stones like those of a run-
away steed, and the dazed vine-dresser sprang to
the door of his hut.

“Who’s riding there in such an alarm?’ he
asked. “Ifit’s a poor hunted deserter, he may step
‘in under my roof, and my wife and I will hide him
and let him bed on the straw.”

“Took out for the chevalier’s sword, father!”
answered During. “It is loose in its sheath to-day.
He is an officer, who has been challenged by an un-
faithful friend and relative, and who is on fire to

THE KING’S RIDE 145

meet him.” But to himself he whispered: “That
relative is the Swedish people. So that is to be our
last fight!”

Meantime, with the sealed drum on the driver’s
box among baskets and canteens, Grothusen jolted
toward Stralsund. His heart thumped like a youth’s
when for the first time he read the name of the
city on a leaning sign-post. Soon he heard the hour
strike in the church of St. Nicholas. He distin-
guished the solitary lights in the houses of wakeful
and sick folks, and on the drawbridge he sprang
from the wagon and shouted to the guard: “The
king, the king! Where is he? What news?”

The watch knew nothing, and every morning
Grothusen gazed from the wall in search of his
home-coming’ lord. With the brightest moonlight
on his face, however, the king arrived at Diker’s
house one night, and early next morning, after the
boots had been cut from his swollen feet, into his
room came Grothusen with the glad salutation:
“Your Majesty, I ’m in love.”

The king took him cordially by the hand.“ Dear-
est Grothusen, we’re likely to get other things to
attend to than serenading demoiselles.”

“But this is no demoiselle. She is assuredly both
mother and grandmother. Further than that I know
nothing about her. But now as before I beg most

146 THE CHARLES MEN

humbly that in all my fooleries I may retain Your
Majesty as my secret confidant.”

Grothusen laid his papers before the king, and
sometimes pointed to a column of figures, but to
make the work easy and merry he meanwhile told
the story of his adventure.

“Tt was one noon just when I was to betake
myself here to Diker. By the Kniper Gate, bathed
in sunlight, stood a house that was so white it
pricked me in the eye and forced me to glance up.
There she sat at the window.—No, now Your
Majesty is at the wrong column of figures. The
two thousand guldens that are wanting here I have
caroused away on my own account.—Yes, there
she sat at the window under a curtain with white
fringe. Her hair, too, was altogether white, but
handsomely arranged, and her face was narrow and
irradiated with an immeasurable mildness. She is
certainly over seventy, but she’s still a woman, just
the same. There is nothing so refined and noble, my
most gracious lord, as to adore an old lady. One
does not long to draw near her. She stands up at
the window like a memory, like a sacred legend.
One only salutes her reverently with one’s sword,
as one goes past with one’s troops.”

“It is pleasant to hear youagain, little Grothusen.
My old passion for lively and crack-brained folk
seems toincreasewith years. This Holsteiner Gortz,
who is to come here soon, issaidalsoto bea mightily

THE KING’S RIDE 147

agreeable and well-spoken gentleman, with great
gifts of spirit.”

“T myself have always recommended his ser-
vices to Your Majesty, though I know that with
his coming even I and Feif will have to crawl down
* nicely into the shade. Farewell, farewell! Such a
little bungler in finance as I am avails no longer in
these hard days when the whole realm is at stake.
Here there is need of a great diabolical minister of
the foreign kind. Gértz is bold and resourceful, a
warrior in statecraft, and he got money for the ad-
ministrator of Holstein like grass. He is more cun-
ning than ten little Grothusens and fifty Millers
and Feifs. But what addles my wits is the question
of how one should compose a di/let-doux to such
an elderly dame as my fair one at the Kniper Gate.”

The king again got the look of mischief in his
eye and handed Grothusen a pen.

“Stand there at the end of the table and write,
and I ’ll dictate.”

The king pondered awhile, and then began:

Nosiest Lapy—A_ powder-stained warrior fel-
low, such as I, assuredly dares not beg for an audi-
ence with such a noble lady as Madame, yet still
the noble lady might graciously send her likeness;
but it must be done quickly, for my king says that
soon we shall all go forth to fall, so that a hasty
answer with the likeness —

148 THE CHARLES MEN

Grothusen laughed and wrote and laughed, talk-
ing in between of accounts and state affairs and
Gortz. When the Jil/et was done, he folded it, kissed
the hand of his royal friend, and not long after
went down the street toward the Kniper Gate. _

Then it happened at last one day that Miller,
who after a long delay had also arrived at Stralsund,
was sitting at work with Grothusen in the king’s
ante-room.

A lackey opened the door and announced: “ The
Herr Baron Georg Heinrich von Gortz!”

One-eyed, in chevalier style, with a mother-of-
pearl hilt to his court sword and his orders on a
costly suit of velvet, Gértz stepped across the
threshold. He took the hands of Grothusen and
the confused Miller and laid them on his breast.
After that fashion the three one-eyed gentlemen
came to be standing before one another.

“Tell me frankly,” said Gortz, pointing with his
head toward the closed door of the king, “ how long
has it actually been since our hero has had a bath?”

Grothusen answered: “ Let me see! He had his
last bath last summer in Demotika. But he some-
times has a douche of cold water. About such
things Your Excellency may easily joke with him.
But one thing I would advise. Don’t talk unne-
cessarily about the Swedes!”

Gortz shut his eye, nodded, and went inside to
the king.

THE KING’S RIDE 149

A slight shadow passed across the tanned fore-
head of Grothusen, and he muttered to Miller:
«While His Majesty is signing himself over to the
devil, I think I’ll go down to the market-place
and drive away my thoughts.”

When Géortz had saluted the king, he came for-
ward to him with polite negligence and without a
single flattering word.

“It’s remarkable,” he observed, “that if you
drop a coin in a big hall, it rolls over the whole
floor till it hides itself under a cabinet.”

The king, who was still half suspicious toward
this foreign wooer of fortune, thereupon took a
ducat from his purse, which happened to be lying
open above the documents on the table, and threw
the coin on the floor. It rolled in a circle and re-
mained lying in the middle of the room in front
of him.

“Sapristi!” said Gortz. “Sapristi! If one wants
the coin to go under the wardrobe, it lays itself
down in the middle of the floor.”

At the same moment the king accidentally hap-
pened to strike his sword-hilt against the purse so
that all the ducats tumbled ringing to the floor.
Like a herd of frightened sheep they rushed with
their rounded backs in all directions and hid them-
selves under the cabinet, the table, and finally even
behind the stove.

150 THE CHARLES MEN

Now for the first time Gértz began to bowdeeply
and still more deeply.

“Behold! I am weak in matters of faith, that I
freely confess; but still I am superstitious in one
particular. A bomb may fall in the midst of a
tightly packed battalion without wounding a single
man, but it has never yet happened in the world
that a piece of bread and butter has fallen to the
ground without lying butter-side down in the dust.
There is in the air a race of small imps directed by
the Evil One himself. If they were not invisible,
they would appear like small brownish bees flying
about. They for their part never cause any evil on
a large scale, but only small vexations; yet when
the vexations are many, the affair may end with a
great misfortune. It is the invisible imps that are
vexed and enticed by the shining Swedish weapons.
If a flag be hoisted now, the cord breaks. If a
soldier goes over a frozen ditch, the ice cracks. To
put it more simply, Your Majesty is now pursued
as assiduously by bad luck as formerly by good.”

The king hummed softly:

Well, what can one do
To plant a firm shoe

On the mischievous crew?

“He who will may be the architect of his own
fortune. One scares them away. To begin with, one
dismisses from one’s neighborhoodall petty people,

THE KING'S RIDE 151

for such folk have as many invisible imps on them
as a baggage-horse has fleas. Then one draws one’s
blade against all the world and follows the star of
one’s will.”

“The Swedish lords declare that at home there
soon will not be a single farthing to collect.”

“Then one must coin new farthings. What is
money? Bonds secured by existent values. Has not
that bit of a kingdom that lies up there a value,
against which one should be able to write as many
bills of indebtedness as one chooses?”

“T have myself been long thinking of fiat money.
But would that be right? A sovereign should be
just. There must not be a stain on his honor.
Remember that!”

“«‘ Assuredly, assuredly! Fiat money, you see, is
a loan. In years of hardship one brings the genuine
money to oneself with it. In years of victory one
releases the genuine and throws the fiat coinage
into the furnace. He who would aim high must
not fear to let even Lucifer forge the arrow.”

The king’s bold thoughts burst out at once in
questions as into a hand-to-hand fight with artless
prejudices. He himself had never in the wilder-
ness put his hand into his pocket without being
able to fill it with ducats. More indifferent than a
beggar as to his coat and his lodgings, he still had
never seen an object that he really longed to buy.
His ducats had never been used for anything else

152 - THE CHARLES MEN

than to encourage and reward others. Money was
for him public funds. On the contrary, he observed
daily that as soon as he ordered others to hand
over their pelf to the army, they began to grumble
and seek evasions. His contempt for these servants
entwined itself serpent-like with his indomitable
desire for redress, for revenge on the foes that
had cast him down into such an abyss before the
eyes of the world. Was not he a king, a lord over
millions of men? Why, then, was he constantly
trammelled and hindered by these small metal
discs, in themselves worthless, which in one place
were called rix-dollars and in another guldens?
Money was an invention by which the base turned
human worth topsy-turvy and betrayed honesty
so as to live sumptuously themselves. Was it really
a sin to change around some of the screws in such
an invention? By rights money ought to be wholly
done away with.

After meditating awhile, the king said: “And
your conditions?”

“That I remain a subject of Holstein but free to
choose my assistants and responsible only to Your
Majesty. The civil service shall be remodelled for
the greater advantage of the royal power. The ©
army —”

The king straightway interrupted him: “But
not a foot-breadth of the realm inherited from our
fathers is to be surrendered to the enemy by peace

THE KING’S RIDE 153

treaty or bargaining. Rather may we all die and the
whole of Sweden burn! I never began the war. My
neighbors lay in ambush when I was still an inex-
perienced boy.”

G6értz now knelt for the first time.

“The world can never understand the hero who
would rather stand by the conditions he has sworn
to than play the cunning politician, but a coward is
he who shuns the service of such a firmness. Small
of soul were the augurs who stood by Your Ma-
jesty’s cradle. They saw, indeed, the constellation
of the Lion, but they did not read in the stars that
the conflagration of the Swedish Empire already
stood foretokened there—irrevocably without
mercy. The champion who stepped from the cairn
to assemble the Swedes for the great conflict needs
men. I am a stranger, but as trueas I live, I speak
with heart and soul. As long as my strength holds
out, I will gather stuff from east and west for a bul-
wark of the sort that, alas, can be made only with
nails of good ducat-gold.”

“That game may be daring.”

“The daring is the delightful. A good diplomat
should every day be as prepared for the block asa
warrior for his bullet. If everything goes wrong,
well, then the bulwark, too, will become a pyre
that turns the night around us to bright day and
the enemy to mere shadows and supernumeraries.
There will then remain for me only the honorable

154 THE CHARLES MEN

madness of burning on the pyre beside my Her-
cules. Our good Luther’s ‘wine, woman, and song’
has always smacked too much of the tavern for me,
and I had rather make the words:

Who loves not woman, fame, and might,

A fool is he till death's dark night.

Fired by the sincerity of the moment and his own
warmth, Gértz had forgotten to cancel the word
“woman,” but the king, not noticing it, went to
him with flashing eyes.

“My image must not be set on the fiat pieces.”

“We may plunder all Olympus for deposed
gods.”

The king stood a long time silent. He then
added softly and with faltering voice: “ Neither shall
the arms of Sweden be set on them!” Over his
frowning brows settled a deep, dark melancholy.

Surprised, irresolute, trembling, Gortz rose from
the floor and, going to the window, pointed down
at the square. “If at any time bitter thoughts over-
take Your Majesty, do but go to the window and
look at the people. Then it is not hard to get a
hearty laugh.”

. “It has been long since I laughed from my
heart.”

Down in the square, Grothusen was going back
and forth among the girls by the biscuit-stall, and

THE KING’S RIDE 155

behind him stood a drummer-boy with a sealed
drum.

“ Rattle a gallant roulade and bring the girls!”
Grothusen commanded.

The boy plied the sticks, and when all the girls
ran up inquisitively and stood around, Grothusen
broke the seals and unfastened the drumhead.
Thereupon he took from the drum all imaginable
sorts of women’s gear which he had purchased at
the bazaar the last evening in Demotika. There
were small kerchiefs and veils and mirrors and
flasks of attar-of-roses and neck-cloths with cres-
cents and coins. He waved the kerchiefs high in the
air. With head thrown back and drops of sweat on
his pepper-brown face, he cried his wares and auc-
tioned them off. For one trifle he demanded a kiss,
for another an embrace, for the third a dance in the
open square.

“ Look, look,” continued Gértz, “how our colo-
nel forces his heathenish kerchiefs on the Chris-
tian women-folk! He is a gay fellow, our friend
down there, but men of that sort are not of the
calibre to serve a Charles XII.”

The king now began to bow as a sign that Gértz
should retire.

“«Calumniators have also said that you, al
are a sad rascal. One thing I will say. When we
work together from now on, you, baron, will not

156 THE CHARLES MEN

speak ill of any one in his absence, for in that case
I always take the part of the absentee. How much
evil have they not tried to whisper ‘into my ear
about that drum down there! And what did it con-
tain? Why, harmless toys and rubbish! If, too, Gro-
thusen was an extravagant servant, he has at least
never stuck away anything in his own pouch either.
—I wish now to look over a few matters.”

Gortz bit his lip, but when he came down he
beckoned his friend Grothusen to the porte cochére .
with a lofty gesture.

“The sick and bleeding lion from the Ukraine
and Poltava has rested his paws so long that the
claws have grown longer and sharper than ever.
Press your hat down on your head and button your
coat, my good sirs, and keep yourselves in readi-
ness. The autumn storms are beginning.”

The small garrison of Stralsund soon heard the
enemy’s cannon making music before the walls.
The tocsin called the men to the ramparts or to
burning houses. Toward morning the king would
lie down with his hat over his face for an hour’s rest
on the stone pavement at the Franken Gate. Awake,
he stared into the dark crown of his hat, but the sol-
diers who lighted him with hand-lanterns discerned
only his chin and lips, on which still remained the
smile, though it was compressed and cold as if it
merely belonged to his cast of features. Then they

THE KING’S RIDE 157

whispered that ‘they had never seen a more un-
daunted hero, but off in the starlight stood many
high officers who said that only his death could save
the Swedish realm.

He knew of what they spoke, although he pre-
‘tended to notice nothing. The people for whosesake
he had dreamed his greatest dreams were already
looking for their salvation in his death. When did
fate fall upon a king more terribly? Had he been
born only to lead the Swedes in their last great con-
flict and then be cast aside like a worn-out tool? His
sister’s husband was already glancing at his crown,
and the son of his favorite, now departed, sister was
lifting his childish hand toward it.

At the Holy Communion he humbled himself
and was bathed in honest tears, but he never wept
over his own misfortunes. Were they not out-and-
out foes, which he had to meet with an avenger’s
wrath? He grew harder and colder toward his offi-
cers, and often spoke with his hands clenched, but
he also ruled more strictly over himself and his own
thoughts. To be sure, he neglected his clothes even
more than of old, so that he could wear the same
grimy shirt for fourteen days; but he controlled his
limping walk. His hair had already changed to sil-
ver, though he was hardly thirty-three, but when he
looked up, awake, into the crown of his hat, he re-
peated to himself: “This must be the will of God
that Iam following.””— Then he would rise like

158 THE CHARLES MEN

a rested youth and hand his cloak to some frozen
graybeard. But if any one named his homeland or the
Swedes, he picked at his coat buttons and was silent.

One day Grothusen was drilling his soldiers
with greater ardor than usual down below his fair
one’s window at the Kniper Gate. Motionless as a
picture, the old lady sat behind the flower-pots,
and when Grothusen lifted his hat, the new braids
gleamed.

He beckoned to his drummer.

“Your drum still has not a full speech in her
mouth. Let us open it. Here are a pair of the most
delightful little gold-embroidered shoes. Go up to
the lady and say that they are a parting gift from
Grothusen. Now the drum is empty.’

‘<Fierr general ! ! There is a Turkish gold-piece at
the bottom.”

“To be sure! It has come to a tretabting situa-
tion there. It is the king’s money. Now we are to
go out to. Riigen, where the Prussians and Danes
intend to land so as to shut us in on the sea side.
Go with the coin to the king, and ask him to accept
it as a reminder of the years when Grothusen had
the fortune to serve him in distant lands. May the
gold some day be recast in the melting-pot during
years of peace asan honest coin, on which the Swedes
may again behold both their arms and their king!
Say all that in humility from Grothusen.”

When all was arranged for decampment, Grothu-

THE KING’S RIDE 159

sen saluted with his broadsword before the seventy-
year lady. As he rode along the streets, he waved to
the inquisitive girls in the windows and shattered
booths, and, for the first time since Demotika, the
drum thundered with full voice. It roused such an
echo from the church walls that it was like the
rumble of the enemy’s field-pieces. Fearless, elated,
Diker was consulting with the king by the bottom
of the stairway. Listening to the embittered whis-
perings of Bassewitz about Gortz, Daldorff rode up
among the generals, and little Cronstedt clapped his
major of artillery on the shoulder. Now he hastened
to one side, now to the other. He glanced at his fast-
shooting cannonas a good chief groom at his horses,
and sometimes he polished with the tip of his cloak
the newly discovered Polhem sighting-screws.
“Tt will be a hard struggle,” said he, “and only
when His Majesty actually stands on Swedish
ground shall I say that the king’s ride is ended.”

The autumn storms roared over Rigen in the
twilight, wailing and moaning on beach and head-
land. No star told of God’s goodness, and when the
troops were drawn up for prayers, the vengeful words
of the Old Testament sounded from the mouth of
the preacher. The Swedes were now so short of men
that they set out tied dogs as sentries, whose mourn-
ful howling could be heard through the seething of
the surf.

160 THE CHARLES MEN

‘It’s a foreboding of death when the dogs wail,”
said the soldiers.

The country folk were armed with axes and
scythes, but the enemy, sheltered by the dense rain,
approached the shore, and finally landed more than
ten thousand men in front of the almost unguarded
village of Stresov. The gale tore away the mist, and
the moon rose bright above the desolate region. As
early as three o’clock at night, however, the ad-
vanced scouts of the enemy crept cautiously back
over the sand, and ie iaseute that the Swedes were
approaching.

The king halted a moment to unhook his cloak.
Turning to Daldorff and the Royal Guard, he said:
“The years have flown. We have had the good to-
gether. Who knows when the lead that is to be our
bane is seething in the casting-ladle?”’

Grothusen drew a yellow gauntlet from between
the coat buttons at his breast and answered: “I re-
ceived that glove from my gracious lord at Bender,
and no night of frost has been so cold that the glove
has not warmed my heart.”

Thereupon Daldorff bared his head: “ When I
get my bullet, if my, poor wounded clay could still
smile and speak, it would turn toward the depart-
ing troops and call down a grateful man’s blessing
on his true-hearted brothers in arms. Ah, that vic-
tory might yet once more shine on our way! As a
farmer finds it advisable to leave an old field fallow

THE KING’S RIDE 161

and sow a new, so God dismembers and changes
kingdoms and empires. When He has sown the
new borderlands, He permits no one to bear the
‘boundary stones back to their former place. We do
not understand His will, we perceive only that He
is against us.”

The king answered : “‘God is for us. It cannot be
Hiswillthat the Swedish Empire should be divided.
If that be so, then may He give us the token by
smiting us with death man after man!”

“That is a plain and true saying,” replied Dal-
dorff.

The officers who had whispered aside in the star-
light before the city gate of Stralsund no longer
remembered their dark thoughts. Instead, they
pressed forward among the Royal Guard so as to
march next to the king. It seemed to them that
they recognized in his person something of God’s
own hard and merciless love for the right and for
the accomplishment of His will.

The conversation died down. The trumpets
ceased to play and the drums to beat; the banners
were borne along lowered and furled. With sword
drawn, the king went before his troops. He had
barely three thousand men. They were now to fight
three against ten, surprise the enemy, and chase
them down into the sea.

He came to a standstill. “What can that be?
Here are obstructions, and off in the moonlight I

162 THE CHARLES MEN

see a redoubt. The enemy has made good use of
the time.— Forward!”

At the same instant a rowof flashes spurted along
the parapet, and the first volley broke through the
night, but the Swedes thrust aside the obstacles and
stormed up the rampart.

Cronstedt’s cannon-balls soughed over their
heads and cast up stones and sand where they
struck the entrenchments. The ground trembled,
and from all sides the fire of the musketry sent its
lightnings. There was whining and shrieking, as if
an army of hungry kites had sailed out over the
shore. Clouds of smoke shot up so high that only in
isolated places could the light of the moon break
through and paint white expanses, as of snow, on
the ground. When the din momentarily abated, the
combatants could still hear from afar the howling
of the fastened dogs, but soon the thunder grew so
violent that the soldiers could not make out the
officers’ shouts of command. With hands clenched
on their sword-hilts, the Swedes rushed forward like
berserkers to the duel. It was no longer an ordered
battle with leaders and obeying battalions. It was
the last warriors of the army that had marched
through Europe, who now in the autumn of their
achievements offered up their blood for the last time
south of the Swedish sea. It was a standing breast
to breast in a hand-to-hand, life-and-death combat

- for eternal glory or shame.

THE KING’S RIDE 163

Colonel Jacob Torstenson already lay fallen, but
his brother, Karl Ulrik, burst in over the rampart
with his guardsmen and fought his way into the
midst of the foe’s entrenchments. Forced slowly
out, his back pressed against the earthen wall and
the dying Captain Adlerfeldt between his feet, he
shouted: “ Hold on gallantly, dear comrades! My
grandfather led a whole Swedish army, and I won’t
lay down my sword before any one but the Des-
sauer himself.”

Bare-headed, with the flame of wrath and enthu-
siasm on his brow, the king hewed his way through
blades and musket-butts. He went to meet the
murdering sword-points with the autumn storms
in his breast, humbled, indifferent before wounds
and death. Again the toothless, masculinely ugly
face of Ensign Aberg grinned beside him, and Seved
Tolvslag shattered heads and weapons. Musket-
flashes spurted from all sides and singed the king’s
tattered soldier’s coat. He thrust and fired. He was
seized round the waist by rude hands, he wrestled
breast to breast with plain, swearing privates. A
Danish officer, who recognized him, caught one
hand into his thin hair and tried to wrench his
sword from him, but the king snatched a pistol
from his belt, and shot the Dane through the body,
so that he fell dead. Then new foes leaped forward,
and the Dessauer’s cavalryand field-pieces fell upon
the Swedes from the flanks, so that in the stormy

164, THE CHARLES MEN

November night they were surrounded by a ring
of stabbing swords and flashing lightnings.

Major-General Stromfelt gave the king his horse,
but in the darkness the beast became entangled in
an obstruction, was felled by a cannon-ball, and re-
mained lying on top of the king. When he tried to
work himself free, he was struck on the chest by a
spent cannon-ball so that the blood gushed from
his lips. Everything grew black before his eyes, and
he sank back unconscious and half buried in sand,
but with hand still clenched on his sword.

Lieutenant-Colonel Tranfelt fought in the midst
of a swarm of Danes. He brandished a weapon in
either hand, and beneath his torn coat and shirt
three wounds gleamed on his naked breast. When
he could no longer stand, he fought on his knee, °
until he fell and gave up the ghost.

Cronstedt, wounded and bleeding, had been
lifted upon one of his field-pieces.

“Tt is the Romans of the north,” he said, “who
are falling to-night in defence of their last prov-
inces.”

Before him lay a dead artillerist youth with port-
fire still burning, and in the midst of the roar from
the battle and the storm came from nearby the
sound of a voice in prayer. It was a chaplain, who
was bending over the wounded and dying behind
the fighters.

“Thou King of armies and of kings, cry not unto

THE KING’S RIDE 165

us as to the children of Jeroboam’s house: ‘He
that dieth in the city, him shall the dogs devour;
and he that dieth in the fields, him shall the birds
of the air devour, for thus the Lord hath spoken!’
Wherefore dost Thou refuse us a sign that Thou
art yet with us? Wherefore grantest Thou not to
me to shed the peace of victory over our men that
bleed, so that their hard bed may be made soft for
them?”

Bassewitz had already been carried dying from
the mélée on two muskets; and the veteran Dal-
dorff who, bleeding in the midst of fallen guards-
men, had saved the king’s life in so many strug-
gles, and who had led his Smaland horsemen into
the jaws of death at Holofzin, lay on his outspread
cloak with his brow pale as a corpse. The shells
threw their sudden light over the hacking and
crossing swords, and over the shadow-like fighting
soldiers. By the light from a field-piece Guardsman
Corporal Baumgarten finally recognized the king,
lifted him on his horse, and placed him in the midst
of the repulsed Swedes.

Then a persistent and violent drumming pene-
trated the ears of the king, and when he turned
sidewise to investigate it, he made out at a distance
in the gray of the dawn a drummer-boy, who with
drumsticks in hand still stayed behind, facing the
foe. Beside him an officer lay on his back with both
arms extended at full length. The large laced hat

166 THE CHARLES MEN

still rested on his head with dignity and elegance.
A neck-cloth of French lace, specked with red, flut-
tered in the wind, and round the skirt of the coat
there shone all about on the dewy heath bits of °
confectionery and silver coins.

«Who is the fallen man?” asked the king.

Major Riddarstadt answered: “That is a gallant
warrior before God, but one whom many men re-
viled. It is one of Your Majesty’ s cherished friends
—it is Grothusen.”

When Riddarstadt had given this reply, he him-
self went back into the mé/ée and met his death.

It was on the darkest of winter nights that the king
in his six-oared barge finally left Stralsund, which
was smoking beneath cannon-balls and shells. Dur-
ing, who had so unweariedly shared the hardships
of the king’s ride, had fallen in his blood before the
city wall, but his brother sat in the stern at the tiller.
Many workmen with clubs and pickaxes walked
on either side of the channel broken through theice,
and Rosen, who stood in the bow, was such a living
likeness of the king that it was to him they waved
their farewell.

Pursued by the enemy’s shot, the barge drew
near the open sea. Vainly, however, did Rosen look
for the two Swedish vessels, the Suap-up and the
Swift Sven, which had been ordered to meet them
there, but had been driven back by the storms.

THE KING’S RIDE 167

The king, then, with his two companions and a
lackey, climbed on board of a heavy freight-galley
with red patches on its wretched blackened sails,
which hoisted anchor. Where now, forsooth, was
the proud fleet swimming, on whose decks fourteen
years ago, young and confident of victory, he had
heard old Piper’s glad hand-clapping? The threat-
ening line of masts that Rosen pointed out on the
horizon was the squadron of Tordenskjold. Only
far out at sea did they meet the brigantine Sap-up,
and with wrathful orders and gloomy eyes the king
set foot on the belated ship. Was this the gracious
‘master of whom the seamen had heard tell that
he used to tuck his hat under his arm with graceful
bowings?

He raised his hand to salute the crew, but it sank
slowly, tight-clenched, and his first words under the
Swedish man-of-war’s flag were words of chastise-
ment: “The captain of the Suap-up shall be flogged ;
but as for the captain of the Swift Sven, which has
altogether failed to appear, he shall be shot!”

The storm raised the ice-floe aloft. The waves
lifted white necks above the bulwarks like the ghosts
of drowned men, but even when the darkness set-
tled down once more, the king remained standing
silently by the mast. Had he not beena prince, he
might even yet have been able to turn and seek for
himself a peaceful retreat; but as it was, men would
soon have pursued him and dragged him with them.

168 THE CHARLES MEN

He ought to have been permitted to keep a priva-
teer fleet and to have lived out his years on it amid
shot and cutlass, but as it was, his subjects com-
manded him to turn home to guard their manure-
stacks and dairies. The nearer he approached to the
shore of Scania, the more clearly it seemed to him
that it was like a landing among the enemy. He
remembered the early morning in the royal resi-
dence at Karlberg, when before his grandmother
and sisters were awake, he stole along the stairs with
Hultman and rode off to the war. He did not want
to see the well-known faces again. He did not want
to ride through the streets of Stockholm and see the
people welcome with pine torches a king driven in
by wind and weather. He saw, to be sure, that these
Swedes continually gave up their lives for him and
for the bit of land that was still theirs, but he knew
also that in their silent prayers many of them called
upon God to give him a speedy death. He saw all
that as clearly as his eyes had previously been dark-
ened. He did not think of peace and reconciliation.
He could not forget that the thousands who had
followed him had got their bullets, that the tears
and blessings of his people had made soft beds of
their overgrown graves, that they had become holy
men, whose sins were forgotten and their virtues
glorified. For a warrior there were but two ways of
reconciliation with God and man, and they were
victory or a death-wound.

THE KING’S RIDE 169

When he stepped ashore on the plain of Scania
in the streaming night-rain, he did not kneel, and
he drew no sigh of sadness or joy. Hurriedly,
without a single word, he went to a great stone
that was called the Staff Stone. He, the rider from
Demotika, the soldier who had lain down to sleep
untroubled on the snow-drift, forgot himself so
completely at that moment that he sought shelter
in the lee of a stone from a few harmless drops of
water. There he remained standing.

No bells rang in the churches. There was no
sweeping and lighting of fires at the Crown estates.
While the night-rain splashed in the roof-gutters,
- the Swedes slept in their homes and had no pre-
monition that, after fifteen years of, saga-like vic-
tories and nameless misfortunes, their king was
now treading the soil of his realm with the wrath
of failure in his soul, received and greeted by no
one. He no longer looked back, only forward.
Revenge!—that word swung his thoughts like a
hammer. Revenge on the perjurers, revenge on the
world that had made of him a fugitive weakling
without money, without power—but a great and
royal revenge! He knew that next day many of his
subjects would rejoice, but also that many tremblers
would seek to divine as to the gallows and the
block. He smiled at the thought. His exasperation
came from diffidence and wounded love. It was
because of this that in his last years he spoke of

170 THE CHARLES MEN

Sweden so evasively. He wanted to punish and con-
quer these latest enemies, but not on the place of
execution. Calmly and commandingly he meant to
tread the earth which they were almost ready to
pluck away from him. He wished to place himself
among the gloomy faces. Careless as a shepherd
amid the bushes of the wood, he wished to sleep
among the conspirators, if there were any, and com-
pel them yet again to lower their flags and go where
he went. He wished to conquer his Swedish ene-
mies by showing them that they were still faithful
to him.

Day began to glimmer, and some tillers of the
soil came out on the plain, but all the colors shone
so hard and strong! Everything seemed so cold
and strange!

“Ts this Sweden, then?” muttered Rosen behind
his turned-up coat collar. “I hardly recognize it
any more.”

“Your eyes are red with the wind,” answered the
king. Later he added: “ What if we do not recog-
nize everything here at home, as long as others
recognize us?”

He got one of the laborers to show them the
way to Trelleborg. With the most tranquil coun-
tenance he spoke of his desire to meet the learned
professors at Lund, and the great Polhem, who
was to help him build a canal across Sweden. In
the lowest corner of the realm the three gentlemen

THE KING’S RIDE 171

walked between the fences and slumbering cottages
of the small town like shipwrecked adventurers
who had become strangers in their own land, and
under the hat which he had drawn down over his
face, Rosen wept like a child.

When the king was to give the guide his fee,
he noted that all the ducats had been given away
on the journey. He found only the Turkish coin
that Grothusen had carried along in the drum and
sent him with the wish that some time, in peaceful
years, the gold might be melted into an honest
Swedish coin. It was the king’s last piece, and even
that was. not his, for it had been borrowed of a
Turkish Jew.

Without a word, he laid the foreign coin in the
hand of the Swedish peasant.

Among the Swedish Skerries

HE returning Swedish soldiers tramped from

inn to inn with dusty clothing and worn-out
shoes. On the cart in front of them jostled the Fin-
nish women whom the king had ransomed from
the Turks and married off among his soldiers, and
beside them on the straw beneath the wagon-seat
stood the cage of chameleons that Professor Ene-
man had fetched from Asia. Thecart with thewomen
was soon left behind, and the animals died, but be-
tween the sun-browned soldiers and grooms was
still led Brandklipparen, though he was weary with
years, stiff in gait, and no longer bore any conquer-
ing hero in the saddle.

A tall, thin man with restless eyes and knitted
brows always walked a trifle in front of the others.
His cheek was dusky as bark, but his teeth gleamed
from the midst of the grizzled beard which he never
took the time to cut off, since he had neither knife
nor shears. The wretchedest vagabond would have
scorned his bedraggled coat, but he carried with
him all he owned,—which was a sack and a cudgel.
At the start of the journey, to be sure, he had been
sent around to borrow money, but it had long since
been strewn to the winds. So that strangers might
not point their fingers at his poverty and his coun-
try, he called himself a plain private, but he was
a royal guardsman, and was named Ehrenskold.

AMONG THE SWEDISH SKERRIES 173

In his youth he had, one October night, stabbed a
certain Ensign Gyllenstjerne, and his wits still flut-
tered so uncertainly that, although he was the mer-
riest with the ale-can, he lay awake at night with
restless thoughts. Hardly did the dawn brighten
before he thumped on the floor of the hostelry with
his wooden staff to waken his comrades.

At evening, when the exhausted band gathered
round the table in the hall of the inn, he remained
standing and cheerily raised the can toward all the
inquisitive folk who climbed up outside the win-
dows.

“ Look, look!” whispered the beholders. “ Every
scar on that man’s face and hands is a saga of some
exploit. These are the heroes returning from Ilion!”

Later, when they saw Brandklipparen’s rigid pace
in the courtyard, they added: “And they have
brought along the wooden horse.”

Butwhen Ehrensk6ld had told thatitwas Brand-
klipparen, while high-born countesses stepped out
of the wagon with bread and sugar, so that they
might be able to tell their descendants that Brand-
klipparen had once eaten out of their hand, he emp-
' tied his can to the dregs and beat on the table asa
sign to his comrades that they should disperse.

“You don’t let us either sit or sleep, with your
homesickness,” his comrades grumbled. “Ifa meal
is laid out, you at once shout to us to get up and
go on, even before the meat is carved.”

174 THE CHARLES MEN

Then he grew mistrustful and rancorous toward
his former friends, and one morning he stole off
ahead of the others.

He hardly needed to read the sign-posts or to
ask his way. He knew that he went toward the
north, that he always turned in on the most direct
road. For year after year his homesickness had be-
come more and more overpowering, and now that
at last every step brought him nearer to the places
of which he had never spoken, but on which he
had always brooded, his longing only increased in
strength. Attimes he would stand with hands crossed
over his staff and stare at the road, but without
himself being conscious of it, and he would then
begin to walk on and on. If, on a rainy night, he
happened to be turned with harsh words from a
door where he had humbly called himself a poor
Swedish baggage-driver who prayed to be given a
piece of bread by the warm blaze, he forgot that
he was no longer in military service. If, then, in
the light of the embers, he saw through the win-
dow loaves of bread and a bowl of milk on the
table, he bent the strips of lead, pulled out two or
three small panes, and took for himself as much
of the viands as he could reach. But as soon as he
had appeased his thirst and stuffed his sack full of
fragments of bread, he remembered that he was a
good warrior, and before he departed he thrust in
his stick and brought it down on the table with

AMONG THE SWEDISH SKERRIES 175

such thundering violence that the bowls and loaves
leaped. Then the people of the house, who ran in
on all sides, understood that it was not a common
thief.

He got to Stralsund before the others, but the
city surrendered tothe enemy, and their fleets barred
the Baltic. After many adventures he at last foundin
Amsterdam a Dutch smack, which lay ready to sail
for Bohus, and into which he was received on such
terms that he had a bed on the straw in the cabin
under the skipper’s patchwork quilt.

But as soon as he heard the anchor-chain rattle,
he struck his stick against the roof of the cabin
and called to the skipper: “Good father, when you
get in sight of the Swedish skerries, you are to let
me know, so that I can fix my beard and clothes,
and go on deck.”

The skipper promised to fulfil this request, but
hardly did he get on deck before there was another
knock on the cabin roof.

“Homeward, homeward bound,” stammered
Ehrenskdld, taking the captain by the hand. “ You
have sailed the seas and experienced many things,
father. Tell me, whence comes this delusion of the
mind which determines that a man must know him-
self at home in order to be at peace with himself?
Down there among the Turks, when poor Funck
died of the fever, I had charge of the watch at the
burial; but trust me, I could hardly hold my blade

176 THE CHARLES MEN

or remember the word of command. The stones
lay so white—the cypresses stood so indifferent!
If I myself had been laid in that place, I could not
have slept in peace. I should have torn through
the earth over my head and begged “age Lord God
for pity.”

The skipper answered: “ Has not eu same Fa-
ther’s hand formed every part of the earth and
even the frail boards that now bear us in the storm?
Turn over to the wall and take a good rest! You
warriors of the land are bad sailors, and we ’re get-
ting stiff weather.”

The first thing next morning, when the captain
was standing by the steersman, he heard fresh rap-
ping on the cabin roof.

“T have a bullet here under my ribs, and I have
never rightly understood whether it is that or
homesickness which has so exhausted my strength
that now I can’t hold myself up straight without
pain. Just this time of the morning, when it is half
light, but the sun has not yet risen, is the hour of
homesickness.”

It was a restless passage, and the seas thundered.
One night the captain came upon the cabin stairs
with a horn lantern and threw the light on Ehrens-
kéld. He sat awake on the straw with the staff be-
side him and the sack as a pillow, and his hair was
now so long that it hung over his ears.

“My good sir,” began the skipper, as he fas-

AMONG THE SWEDISH SKERRIES 177

tened the lantern to the hook in the roof, “‘ we are
now at the Swedish skerries outside Uddevalla, but
the storm holds heavy, and the night is misty and
dark. We must turn and make to sea and wait for
clearer weather.”

“Yes, turn the smack, you there!”’ shouted Eh-
renskéld, so that the cabin rang. “J don’t want to
go home. No, no,—what business have I at home,
to be sure? In Kalmar church lies my father, and
his scutcheon is on the wall. My brother is in cap-
tivity. My little sisters have become tall and mar-
ried and old. They are no more the same. There are
no little sisters any more. There is no home any
more.”

With such words he replied to the captain, but
when the latter was about to go, he held him fast by
the coat-sleeve.

“Don’t listen to me!” he said. “Stick bravely to
the same course as before! A good soldier mustn’t
come home like a coward after long and honest ser-
vice with his king.”

“But the smack, my good sir! It is my only
property, and on it I command. I’m fairly sure I
see the beacon-fire in the northwest, but the coast is
dangerous here and full of pirates, who set out false
lights.”

Ehrensk6ld was no longer an enfeebled man. He
sat straight up with one leg out of the bed and
seized the captain in an iron grip.

178 THE CHARLES MEN

“Tf youve any respect for an officer’s will, then
sail ahead. It’s true I’ve nothing else to give you
but the wretched rags that I shall still wear with
honor when I go ashore; but by Kalmar Town I
have a little estate, if it has n’t been taken from me.
That you shall have in requital, if the sloop goes
to wreck.”

The skipper thought that homesickness had
quenched his wits. He well knew that if the helm
was not put down in time, they would be on the
rocks. He wrestled to free himself. His coat-sleeve
tore at the shoulder-seam, and with naked arm he
sprang to the ladder.

A blow shook the ship so violently that the
candle in the lantern fell over and went out.

“Jesus! There, master, you have the Swedish
skerries!”’

“Then may this moment be blessed! Not since
I was a child have I sprung from bed in the morn-
ing with a lighter heart.”

Ehrenskdld heard shots and a struggle. He took
the sack and stickand clambered up to the icy deck.
The seas burst over him, but the dawn broke
through the snowy mist, and he saw that the boat
had stranded on a rocky isle and that a swarm of
men were disarming the crew.

“Give us what you’ve got!’’ demanded a red-
bearded man, raising his musket. “Stranded wreck-
age belongs to the folk on the shore.”

AMONG THE SWEDISH SKERRIES 179

EhrenskGld clenched his hand on the shaft of his
stick and slung the beggar-sack in front of him.

“Take it, take it! The peace of mind that I ’ve
just found, no bullets of yours can take from me;
but if you had n’t a gun, a game of this sort should
cost you dear.—I am an officer of the Crown.”

Cautiously Red-beard lowered his musket.

On the summit of the island glowed a false bea-
con that had burned down low, and behind the
cliffs lay a galliot without a flag. Beside the extin-
guished stern-lantern sat a sickly, sallow young
man wrapped in a splendid fox-skin pelisse and
with two crutches on his knee.

“What’s this, Norcross?” he cried, with a voice
that was thin but shrilled piercingly like a whistle.
“Hurry up there, hurry up there!”

Red-beard answered, ““The man here says that
he ’s a Crown man, and in that case we might do
better to give him a bullet than to let him slip
ashore and carry the tale. Come, fellow, tell us who
you are! I see your rags well enough, but no’Crown
uniform. Have you been away so long that you
have n’t heard tell of Lassé of the Highway? There
he sits on the galliot. That ’s Commodore Gaten-
hjelm, look you!”’

“My name,” said Ehrenskdld, “ you may know
if you first get me clothing according to my rank,
but I care little for the harm you can do me, if ©
only I may tread the soil of Sweden once more in

180 THE CHARLES MEN

this earthly life. I clearly see that ye are godless
free-booters, and I recognize clearly another land
than the bright and happy one I left— but in any
case I am now home. I’m home! My life I can give
up freely, but don’t deny that I may first step down
on the Swedish island!”

“That ’s reasonable,” answered Gatenhjelm.
“But hurry up there, hurry up!” He rapped still
more impatiently on the railing with a crutch.

Ehrenskéld threw his staff on the deck like a
surrendered sword and stepped down on the island.
He walked forward slowly several paces, as if the
ground had taken fast hold of his feet. Then he
knelt, stroked and caressed the cliff with his hands
and bent down his cheek to it.

«Praise be to Thee, Heavenly Father,” he whis-
pered, “who hast led home Thy wandering son by
such long and strange paths. Thine, Thine be the
glory!”

With that Gatenhjelm gave a sign, and Nor-
cross laid the musket to his eye and from the rail-
ing shot Ehrenskéld through the head.

When the day arose, the pirates had already
steered in with their prey to the coast of Bohus,
but out on the island lay the dead warrior with his
arms round the cliff.

In Marstrand’s Church

ESTLESS burghers were talking together in
the square at Marstrand, and a fisherman
stated that Tordenskjold intended shortly to make
for the island with his ships and seize the fortress.
Martin Rosengard, the sexton, came across the
square with his bunch of keys and went his un-
deviating way to the church through the midst of
the throng without speaking to any one.

“He is old and hard of hearing,” said the folk.

Martin Rosengard answered softly to himself:
“But he’s good of memory is old Martin. He is
mickle good of memory. He never forgets the day
that gave him gladness and courage for a whole
lifetime. He never forgets Baggé, though by this
the man has lain five years in his grave with a com-
mission from Bender under his pillow. He was our
teacher, and even from the mould shall he teach
us. Therefore it is that to-day we ought to remem-
ber him. He belongs to us, even though his deeds
adorned past days. In our heart is a fortress that no
enemies can take from us. Wring your hands! It is
Sunday morning, and old Martin has his affairs
to attend to.”

His withered figure became a head taller, and he
nodded with inward content, when he had locked
the church door behind him. He set blue-and-
yellow irises in the candlesticks and folded up the

182 THE CHARLES MEN

altar-cloth of Vadstena lace. A recollection from his
youth so occupied his thoughts that he almost
believed he heard voices and the clatter of spurs in
the empty church.

That had also been a Sunday, and Gyldenléw,
who with his Danes had just conquered the island,
had ordered the pastor, Fredrik Baggé, to offer the
Te Deum and read the customary Danish prayers
for King Christian and his victorious army. Gyl-
denlow himself sat in the commandant’s pew with
his officers, and in the aisles upto the door stood
foreign soldiers, so that Baggé’s mass-robe looked
faded and shabby among all the glittering uniforms.
The Swedish men and women in the farthest pews
stared fixedly ahead, and many among them whis-
pered bitingly, when they saw his tranquil face in
_ the sunlight of the open window, where sparrows
flew in.

He intoned with a clearer voice than ever
before. When mass had been celebrated, and he
stood in the pulpit, Gyldenlow softly interrupted:
“ Baggé, Baggé, see that you preach well for us!”

He proclaimed the magnitude of the victory
with such flashing zeal that the stern soldiers’
eyes grew moist, but when he came to the prayer
for the king, he clasped his hands high above his
brow, and prayed his old prayer for the king of the
Swedes. ;

Then Gyldenlow sprang from his pew, and in

IN MARSTRAND’S CHURCH 183

the little church there was such a din and cursing
and such a ringing of spurs and weapons as if there
was a hand-to-hand fight, but rising above the
clamor all the while was heard Baggé’s quiet prayer.

Soldiers thronged up on the pulpit steps and
led him down, but he kept on to the last word of
the prayer.

“If you have nothing else to say,” shouted
Gyldenléw, “then expect a sentence of death or
life imprisonment.”

“JT have still something to add.”

The sobbing in the farthest pews became still,
and the Danes held themselves back, waiting.

Then Baggé began to pray for the Swedish
army, for the humblest men in the ranks, and for
victory, victory for the Swedes, so that they might
return and set free his island.

-Gyldenléw took several violent steps to the altar
rail and snapped his gloves in the air.

“Fetch the handcuffs that hang in front of the
church door by the penance-stool!”” he commanded.

Two soldiers went out and returned dragging the
chains, which clanked against the pavement. Gyl-
denléw stopped in front of Baggé.

“J am ready to believe that you are a worthy
shepherd and that you have acted from mere zeal.
Therefore I’ll extend you pardon this once more,
as soon as you show repentance. But by God! if you
rebel again, you have nothing else to expect than

184 THE CHARLES MEN

court-martial and sentence. You have a house and
home. Consider well! I shall wait patiently, while
you examine your own mind. Release him, soldiers,
and let him yet again mount into the pulpit! And
you, good folk behind there on the benches, you
have heard my words.”

Baggé straightened his mantle as if to obey and
betake himself to the pulpit. But then he turned
again toward the congregation.

“JT have something to repent. That is rightly
said. But I can impart it here where I stand and
do not therefore need to enter the pulpit.”

Gyldenlow pushed the nearest officers back, and
set himself in his place, but his fingers played im-
patiently with his sword-hilt. All the audience by
this time stood either in the aisle or at the doors of
the pews.

Instead of clasping his hands, Baggé stretched
them out before him, and no one knew rightly what
he meant by this.

“1 repent,” he said, “that I have too long de-
layed with the prayer which perhaps lay nearest my
heart.”

With that he began to pray for the crops and the
weather, for the lumber rafts on the river and the
hay-wagons by the cottages, and for all the Swedish
land, to which he vowed his loyalty even if in
future days he should pine in the deepest and dark-
est dungeon.

IN MARSTRAND’S CHURCH 185

Then the soldiers understood why he had held
out his hands. While he was yet speaking, they
screwed on the clamps, and afterwards, in the midst
of their drawn swords, led him from the church and
up to the fortress.

Katerinushka, Little Mother

T was a winter night with the cold starlight that

causes a lonely man to weep without knowing
why. The crowned King of the Revels, who had
just been carried through the streets of Moscow,
had been acclaimed by the people more silently
than of old, and in the midst of the disbanding
holiday processions there was whispering about hate
and conspiracies andimprisonments. Wheneyer two
men met where they could not be overheard, they
execrated the czar. The priests muttered by their
censers that he ate meat on fast-days and worshipped
the gods of the Romans instead of the saints. The
Boyars lamented that they never got a chance to
sleep in peace at night, but had become toiling
slaves, who had to rebuild all Russia from the cellar
to the cap of the tower. They related that he had
gone mad. If he did not sit in his travelling-coach
or at his microscope, he cured diseases like a doc-
tor, made boots like a shoemaker, boats like a ship-
wright, and ivory chessmen like a turner, or even
cut off heads like an executioner. After such a
day’s work, they had sometimes at table seen him
go off and sit down among the musicians, where
he beat the drum with such skill that in that art as
well no one could surpass him. The merchants
at their counter grumbled about the long wars,
and the serfs pulled at their thick coats in bitter

KATERINUSHKA, LITTLE MOTHER 187

mood and hid their sacred, shorn-off beards in their
pockets.

The later the night drew on, the more sharply
glinted the stars. Alexei, the son of the czar, sat
alone in his vaulted room, which was wholly painted
inscarlet with green festoons of leaves. Round about
him on the floor lay theological works with pious
legends of the saints. He held his pen still poised
over.a half-written letter to his A ffrosinya, the red-
haired Finnish thrall; but theexertion wearied him,
and his pen sank. He forgot that they had taken
from him his sword and his right of succession to
the realm. In the stiff silken pelisse of the ancient
czars and small boots studded with turquoises, he
imagined himself to be in his secluded castle exam-
ining the work of the court goldsmith and convers-
ing with learned monks. Then he dreamed of going
down into the chapel and performing his devotions
under the staring Christ head in the crypt, but far
about him spread a realm of the ancient days, where.
thevillage bells rang,and where men arose late from
bed and early put out the light. With that, Czar
Peter’s blood leaped to his brow, and he imagined
himself ending the evening witha drinking-bout and
hurling empty pewter pots at the heads of Boyars,
who raised thankful shouts of joy.

The door opened behind him, but he supposed
it was the servants and remained sitting in his
meditation. Only when he heard steps and laugh-

188 THE CHARLES MEN

ter in the corridors did he turn his lean and grayish-
pale face with its hollow cheeks and crafty eyes. It
was his father. It was the czar, who was coming with
his guests of the night, and between them they
carried a long table on which stood ten burning
waxlights fastened into a like number of buns. How
often had Alexei taken medicine to make himself
sick and avoid appearing at his father’s banquet!
With what anguish had he gone in disguise with his
Affrosinya as far south as the vineyards of Naples,
in order to hide from this father, who was now lifting
the cane above his head! He moved back toward
the recess.

«« Alexei,” commanded the czar, “you shall be
host to-night. Sit down opposite me!”

At the same moment that they all sat down, the
czar gave his neighbor a resounding box on the
ear, and shouted: “ Let that go on round the table!
Nobody knows how well such great gentlemen as
sit with a prince deserve a box on the ear.”

The cuff proceeded heartily around the table
with blow after blow as far as Adjutant Vyasemski,
who was the czar’s nearest neighbor on the other
side. Being a very young and as yet inexperienced
officer, he grew pale, with hand half raised, and
stared at the czar. There was no one in the party
to whom the czar had taken such a liking as to this
golden-haired youth; but a rumor had been whis-
pered to-night that he had joined himself to the

KATERINUSHKA, LITTLE MOTHER 189

son and the rebels. The czar therefore wished to
test him, and with the fury of Ivan the Terrible in .
his look and the good nature of a Muscovite artisan
in his laugh, he said to him: “ Vyasemski, my lad,
soon no one will dare to name my name in my own
kingdom without cursing me. Here is my cheek.
By God and His only begotten son I enjoin you
to sincerity. If you believe the slanderers, then
strike away! In that case I deserve no better than
the others. What I require is truthfulness—and I
shall thank you.”

Vyasemski rose and moved his chair aside in
order to kneel, but with that he fixed his eyes on the
light of the candles, and whispered: “My hands
are unclean. Let me wash them first!”

The czar assented with a melancholy nod and
gazed after him. -

“‘ He, as well! I had expected otherwise.”

He held up the empty beaker in front of him,
and the czarina, who had secretly watched him all
day, entered in a simple blue dress and sat down
on the vacated seat. He laid his hand on her arm,
and turned toward Alexei.

“Well, why don’t you fill up and drink to us?
That is good, Again! And yet again! Fall into
position! Quicker! No, ye others are to sit, but
you shall stand. You shall stand up to answer. Is
it true the monks have told you that you are the
darling and hope of all the nation?”

190 THE CHARLES MEN

On the other side of the table stood Alexei,
shaken by ague, and his wrinkled face grew ashen
and old. The czar looked as if he were the son, and
at every new question Alexei twisted the long lace
neck-cloth harder about his finger, but answered
never a word.

“Ts it true that you hate me, the author of your
being, that you wait with longing for the hour of
my death so as to overthrow the labor of my days
and nights? Is it true that your father confessor
enjoined you to become a martyr for the people?
Ah! there are other martyrs in the world than those
who pour out their blood in the market-place for
the sake of the people. I would fain be a father
and benefactor to you all.— But who can say he
has fetched down a golden tablet from heaven, on
which it stands inscribed that his work was the
right one? Perhaps ye shall one day shout that this
ninny, in whose veins my blood is disgraced, is the
man whom ye needed for your salvation. But ye
shall shout in vain. The life that I kindled I can |
also quench. Katerinushka, little mother, what have
I done to be so lonely?”

With closed eyes he leaned his face on the czar-
ina’s arm and laughed sobbingly, so that one by
one the guests at the table began to rise and steal
aside behind the czarina. His laughter was so genial
and warm that they had never heard anything like
it unless in some honest hut in the country, but —

KATERINUSHKA, LITTLE MOTHER 1091

they knew from of old the mirth that brimmed up
ever higher with despair and scorn, and they feared
for their lives.

“‘Katerinushka, my child, wherever in all of
Europe they strike a medal or print a pamphlet,
there they dress me up asa fool. What have I done
to be so lonely? There is a like lonely man, who is
now gathering his troops in Sweden to lead them
against the Norwegian mountains. Strange, we
should have both come to the same thing by such
different ways!— Why does the adjutant delay? I
long to see whether among you all there is not one
who is honest enough to show me openly whether
he loves me or not. May he strike heartily!”

He raised his tear-stained, laughing face, but the
czarina stroked his curly hair gently and caress-
ingly, while in a thin voice, long since broken, she
chanted to a folk tune:

The great, with their servants and guards to attend them,
Are lonely as beggars that roam on the moor;

But the humble—at twilight the angels befriend them
And lull with soft music the sons of the poor.

“JT am concerned about Vyasemski, the adjutant.
Is he a craven who has gone off because he dares
not strike the czar? Or is he hesitating outside the
door? Or perhaps—does he love me?”

Menshikoff, who had remained sitting, arose
with his great powdered wig and his orders.

192 THE CHARLES MEN

“In the old days, when I was only a confec-
tioner’s boy who carried my tarts about the streets
of Moscow, I could make you merry, little father,
when I talked. I could so dress up my stories that
you imagined you saw horrible owls and owlets flut-
tering before you or absurd dwarfs walking on their
hands. But we have become old; both you, my bene-
factor,and I. I must obey your imperial command.”

He went out into the corridor in front of the
room, and the czar called after him: “ Why does
the adjutant tarry, I say? Were his hands so unclean
that he needed to wash them so long? I should
like to see the water.’

When Menshikoff came back, he seed a large
tin basin half full of a red fluid that was like froth-
ing wine.

“Your Adjutant Vyasemski is dead,” said Men-
shikoff. “ He washed his hands in his own heart’s
blood.”

The czar again closed his eyes and leaned against
the arm of the czarina. While she stroked his hair
and combed it between her fingers, she heard him
whisper: “He loved me not—he only feared—
Katerinushka, little mother!”

The Dark Yule Service

T was Christmas Eve. The parson’s widow sat

in the parsonage at Undenas with the account
of the deceased on her knee. Her bodice was made
of his worn and much weathered cloak, she had tied
his starched handkerchief about her head with a
knot at the nape of the neck, and her thin fingers,
blue with cold, lay stretched on the paper. In fig-
ure she was taller and leaner than other women,
and every one hated and maligned her for her ava-
rice and spitefulness. Even in good times no tallow
candle had ever been lighted in the parsonage. She
drove the servants from bed at three o’clock on
winter nights, though they could not see by the
scanty light of the torch or the fire, but sat down
to yawn and gossip in the loft. In the middle of the
road between the cow-house and the stable she
would say to the man that he must hang his wooden
shoes on his back and save them for Sunday, and
if any one was condemned to penance, she was
always supposed to be the secret informer.

It was already dusk, and through the panes,
which were half covered with snow, she stared in-
divertibly at the shingled wooden church and the
steeple. Beside her stood a man with a thick curled
wig and a reddish but ever smiling face. It was the
manager Trulsson from the mill below.

“Do you think he ’ll come?” she inquired anx-

194 THE CHARLES MEN

iously. “He was my only man, and he has stayed
away since he went into the city. Three days he
has been gone. Thrashed he ought to be. Surely he
was caught at the tavern on Monday and there-
fore taken as a soldier according to the new procla-
mation.”

“| feared that it was going ill here in the house
of sorrow,” answered Trulsson in a friendly tone.
“ For that reason I rode up here. Don’t complain,
Mother Ingebritt, because at bottom there’s not
such a great difference between happiness and mis-
fortune as we think. Both of them are what we
make them. You should only: see the fine old fel-
low, Soop, my gracious master, when he stands by
the dinner-table in the hall, erect and without say-
ing a word, counting up the great heaps of money
for his yearly taxes. Six hundred dollars of silver
coin in luxury taxes for the women’s imported silks,
sixty dollars for lace, forty for sable cloaks, twenty
for special hats and clothes, four for tea and cof-
fee, forty for the gilded fittings on the coach, forty
for all the tobacco-smokings and such trumpery,
parade tax and quota tax for property and depend-
ents. Think of it, that the iron must be offered to
the state, which has nothing to pay with, and that
in all the mill there are scarcely three able-bodied
men to send down to the forges! And yet old Soop
stands there so grand and fine, shaking Gortz’s
copper idols out of his purses. You are too greedy

THE DARK YULE SERVICE 195

after this world’s goods, Mother Ingebritt; that’s
what everybody thinks.”

“Poverty begets thrift,” she muttered harshly.
“Never has such want come upon a people. We
have eaten bark bread since November, andin order
to support a dragoon, poor Vibelius himself went
out into the fields like a farm-servant, until he sank
down and gave up the ghost. I can hardly get a
pound of sugar for five dollars or a cask of herring
for fifty, and salt costs over a hundred. To-morrow
we have Christmas Service, but no tallow for a single
candle. We have no clergyman to read the Lord’s
Word and no sexton. The horses are taken for the
baggage-train; and if the man does n’t come back,
I’m lost, for there stands the place without a man.
For God’s mercy, tell me he’s coming!”

She pressed her brow to the panes, faltering and
irresolute.

“He’s coming,’ replied Trulsson. “I hear steps
out in the snow.”

At the same moment the door was pushed open
with much clatter and noise. Several loud-mouthed
soldiers in tattered uniforms staggered across the
threshold, and behind them followed a crowd of
gaunt vagabonds, mostly young men and boys.
They were uncannily black and distorted in coun-
tenance from eating bark bread, and they had strips
of sheepskin tied around their legs and feet. She
recognized her servant in the hindmost youth, and

196 THE CHARLES MEN

comprehended that he had been taken for a soldier
and carried off with the rest.

“Serve up what the house has to offer!”’ com-
manded one of the soldiers, and blew on his stiff-
ened hands.

“ Here there ’s nothing, absolutely nothing,” she
answered without moving.

«What is n’t offered must be taken. For seven
hours we’ve wandered about in Tiveden Forest
from one deserted farm to another.”

Spurs and broadswords rang, voices murmured,
and Mother Ingebritt swayed back and forward,
and plucked with her hands at her apron. She gave
her servant a questioning glance. For a long time
he listened to the quarrel, stroking his neck with
an awkward gesture.

Finally he looked down at the floor and uttered
very softly: “You were always hard and stingy,
mother. Therefore last summer I stole four loaves
of black bread and hid them in the chest of drawers
in the porch corridor. Those I’ll divide with the
others right before your eyes, because in such need
there are no enemies.”

The soldiers noisily snatched the bunches of keys
from Mother Ingebritt’s belt. Chestsand cupboards
_ were opened. Earthen bowls were filled with hidden
delicacies, and amid swearing the soldiers thawed
out a piece of ham, where the maggots fay frozen
along the bone.

THE DARK YULE SERVICE 197

“Just be quiet, my good men!” admonished
Trulsson in a fatherly and friendly way. “As the
winter frost killed the maggots in the meat, so the
misery that is now passing over our country is kill-
ing many evil maggots that were eating at our
heart.”

While he spoke he was looking at Mother In-
gebritt, as though he had directed the words par-
ticularly at her, but she tried to silence him and
looked away.

Then he spoke ina pastorly, sermonizing tone.
With back to the fire, he stood in front of her in
the middle of the room, while he folded his hands
and continued:

“Just be quiet, my good men, and let us not eat
without praying first. Such a night of misfortune
as this is given men by Almighty God to make them
good and great, and so that a little people may
come to appear more beautiful and glorious in their
poverty than all the others in their gilded splendor.”

She went away to the opened cupboard and clat-
tered the cups back and forward, so as to escape
hearing him, but she turned toward him again.

“Trulsson, I thought you had a kindly dispo-
sition —’

“You rule with a tight hand in the cottage,
mother, but no one can take our grace in bad part.”

The wild lads ranged themselves along the wall
and folded their hands.

198 THE CHARLES MEN

Surveying Mother Ingebritt with his tranquil
eyes and dwelling on every word, he began with a
strong voice: “Our Father—”

She plucked painfully at her apron, trembled,
and tried to look away, but with his gentleness he
forced her to meet his look, and every time she
breathed more heavily. When he came at last to
the words: “Give us each day our daily bread,”
she involuntarily interrupted him.

“No more!” she muttered.

“What? Shall I not recite the Lord’s Prayer?”

“Not to-night. To-morrow we ’ll recite it.”

She caught him by the arm, and drew him with
her into the entry. “You called me stingy and
hard?” she inquired in a voice so remarkable that
not her tongue but her very heart seemed to speak.

‘hdih?

“And you said that want such as this had come
upon us to make us good and great?”

He nodded.

“Follow me, then!” she whispered, and they
stepped out into the winter night.

- The crust was so hard that it bore, and the stars
flickered over the dark stretches, where no cattle
lowed and no sheaf was set out for the sparrows.
A thundering norther swept around the corners of
the house. They pressed close along the walls of
the cow-shed on account of the wind,and when they
entered the wood, they held tightto thefir branches.

THE DARK YULE SERVICE 199

Terror has robbed her of her wits, thought he,
and he called after her through his hand, but in
the storm she did not comprehend his words. She
only peered in front of her and kept on walking.
He mistrusted that she had no good purpose
and began to be afraid, but he was ashamed to
leave a woman alone in the night, for he knew that
wolves are more plentiful after men have become
fewer.

Chilled through with cold and uneasiness, he
hastened his steps, so as to seize her around the
waist and hold her back. Then he saw that they
were come to an abandoned and dilapidated house,
whose proprietors had died in the plague and their
son on the battlefield. The granary had collapsed
into the snow-drifts, and the snow whirled between
the slats of the house porch. In the wide-open door-
way the windows of the opposite wall glistened
through the empty rooms. Overcome with dread,
he stood still.

Leaning against the cottage wall stood a frightful
apparition, a gigantic shape like to a man wrapped
in gray furs and with a great pointed crown full of
snow. Was it the peasant that had died of the pest,
who had risen from his hastily shovelled grave to
keep Christmas in the house where in the days of
Charles XI of blessed memory he had so often
bidden the loving-cups be filled and the hurdy-

gurdies resound?

200 THE CHARLES MEN

Mother Ingebritt shook with apprehension, and
pressing her hands to her eyes so as not to see, she
sprang into the cottage.

The man’s heart stood still, and he bent slowly
forward toward the apparition. He saw that it was
an elk, frozen to death. Led by the memory of
other winter nights, when it had found shelter,and
radiating warmth by the same wall, it had leaned
against the deserted dwelling, where no sleeper any
longer breathed in the deep shutter-bed, and no
embers glittered through the pane.

“God have mercy on you!” stammered Truls- .
son, and stepped into the room. “Not only men
but even the beasts of the woods are perishing.”

But Mother Ingebritt did not hear him. She
had already lifted several boards from the floor,
and in the pallid light of the snow had laid bare a
chest, which was about half an arm’s length across
and two arm’s lengths between the ends. The chest
was painted blue with white scrolls and leaves, and
it had handles of iron.

Mother Ingebritt dared not turn her back to the
alcove and the empty shutter-bed, but always placed
herself so that she had Trulsson close behind her.
He still understood nothing, but when she grasped
one handle, he grasped the other. Then, continu-
ally looking around them toward all the corners and
recesses, they carried the chest out of the cottage
and home toward the church. They set it down in

THE DARK YULE SERVICE 201

the corridor of the church several paces within the
porch.

“Go to the dwelling-house,” said Mother Inge-
britt, “and sit down at the table as host for my un-
bidden guests! I myself must stand by the chest and
ponder much and hard, for when we gather here
early to-morrow, it’s I whom God will likely choose
to hold the Christmas Service.”

He obeyed her and went across the diamond
to the parsonage, but he thought that misfortune
had quenched her understanding and that next
morning he should have to conduct her to an asy-
lum.

When it was morning, and the storm had abated,
no bells rang as heretofore, and no well-to-do par-
ishioners came up on pack-saddles over the un-
shovelled roads. From the mile-wide expanses of
gloomy, dilapidated, and abandoned farmsteads was
heard neither shout nor whip-crack. A couple of
lonely torches shone between the trees, and a few
women and infirm old men with crutches and canes
assembled in the vestibule. Of other men there
were none, and the church-goers were in all but
twelve souls. The graves were more numerous than
the mourners, and no Christmas Day had dawned
amid deeper quiet.

They put out the torches under their snow-
covered wooden shoes, and when they saw Mother
Ingebritt sitting on the chest, but not a single can-

202 THE CHARLES MEN

dle lighted, they saluted hesitatingly and wonder-
ingly. When she remained sitting with her chin in
her hands without nodding or giving them a word,
they felt that they hated her more bitterly than ever.

Gradually now the drowsy guests from the par-
sonage assembled, but no ringing was heard across
the moors, because the steeple bells had long since
been cast into a field-piece that lay disabled and
silenced at the bottom of a bog in Ditmar. No pas-
tor mounted to the pulpit. No sexton rapped with
his tuning-fork, but the servant-girl who had long
been performing his duties was already waiting at
the doorway.

Then Mother Ingebritt arose and brushed the
locks of hair from her forehead, but it was so dark
in the church that she felt with her hand to steady
herself against the pew-door. Neither the hanging
candelabrum nor the baptizing font could be dis-
cerned, neither paintings nor panelling. Only the
copper candlestick on the distant altar shone in the
snow-light.

“Yesterday,” said she, “weclosed our prayer with
the words: ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’”
Thereupon she added softly and quietly: “ Forgive
us our trespasses!”’

At this moment a spectre-like, sallow little boy
came to the church threshold with a burning torch.
By its light she opened the chest and knelt before
it on the flagstones of the graves.

THE DARK YULE SERVICE 203

“Misfortune works wonders,” she said, and it
seemed to all in that dark Christmas Service that
there was kindled over the corridor of the church
a glow more bright than that from a hundred arches
of the fairest wax candles.

Lifting out six silver cups and six silver spoons,
she divided them evenly among the soldiers and
their destitute fellows. She emptied out four big
purses of fiat coins, and counted an equal number
into each outstretched hand, so that none of those
present was neglected, and in every apron she laid
bread and salt and many finger-rings and other
articles, until the chest was empty and the torch
went out.

Fredrtkshall

HE governors of the provinces now called

the people together and counted out on the
table fifty dollars to every one who volunteered as
a cavalryman and a hundred to every one who be-
came a foot-soldier. Many refractory men hewed
off their fingers or cut themselves with knives so
as to be incapable of war service, but these were
sentenced to thirty lashes or were set to hard. labor
for life at Marstrand. Bands of deserters went
through the country, quartering themselves by vio-
lence. When the peasant heard their voices at the
road gate, he left his keys in the lock and hid
himself under the hay bales or fled to the wilds
with his household and cattle. In Stockholm the
councillors barred themselves in their rooms to
keep from being seen and interrogated. Inspectors,
accompanied by guardsmen, roamed from port to
port and broke into cellars and larders, and wolves
even ventured’in on the streets. There were no
goods in the shops; no grain in the mills, no hands
that raised a hammer, no happy voices, no cozy
winter evenings around the home firesides.

Then the whole people shuddered with a pre-
monition. At the church doors or in the barred
rooms it was said that God, who had set the crown
of martyrdom upon them, would soon let the
thorn-spikes fall away and the leaves bud in the

FREDRIKSHALL 205

green beauty of a new spring, and that the king
would now die. Day by day, folk awaited the tid-
ings that he had fallen, wondering only that they
were delayed. All knew that he fought in single
combat at gates and fences like the meanest soldier.
Most people suspended their daily occupations,
and went about in fear and gloomy expectation.
An alderman in Stockholm was already lamenting
that he did not know where they would get mourn-
ing cloth and money for the funeral. Even Gortz
was lying sleepless one morning, when his servant
came in with wood for the stove. Sweden was like
the collapsing house of the king at Bender, but
over this burning city of ruin, where the lamenta-
tion died away into waiting silence, glittering plans
for the future harmony rose like meteors, of which
distant prodigies the soothsayers foretold that only
after hundreds of years would they be realized and
understood.

At this time there lived at Uppsala a begging
scholar, who wished to become a clergyman, but
could never succeed in anything but gambling and
fighting, or in making Swedish and Latin verses
at weddings and funerals. His name was Tolle
Orasson. His hands and feet had always been
too slender and delicate for his large stature, and
however much he starved, his beardless boy-face
always bloomed equally round and pink. He did
not want to harm any one, if only they let him live

206 THE CHARLES MEN

as free as a bird, go his own ways, and sleep in
peace o’ mornings; but his comrades opined that he
could not distinguish between good and evil.
One fine Sunday, when the recruiters began their
hubbub in the town, he all at once became thor-
oughly pious and stuck himself away in a pew with
the empty covers of his Latin grammar. It was in
the Church of the Trinity. In the midst of the
service the recruiters pressed in, threatening and
clamoring, with a bunch of handcuffs on their
shoulders, but Tolle Orasson bent over his empty
book-covers. He swayed back and forward, singing
with such devotion and fervor that nobody thought
of seizing him, although he belonged precisely to
the useless students who, according to the royal
proclamation, were to be taken out for the army.
From that moment, however, he found it most
advisable to hang his wallet on his back and go on
adventures. He gazed about him with terror in the
dear land of his fathers, which war and pestilence
had so ravaged and transformed. Was this Sweden,
the realm his fathers had made and guarded as the
apple of their eye, the mighty empire of the north,
beloved and feared? On the roads he came upon
lamenting peasants, who were forced to convey
their grain by long journeys to the headquarters in
Norway or as far up as the redoubt of Jarpe in
Jamtland. Overturned loads and dead horses lay
on every slope. Up in the deserted forest region

FREDRIKSHALL 207

tattered vagabonds peeped from the cottage win-
dows, and he always carried his money hidden in
the leg of his boot. Lined up on the grass plots
by the peasants’ houses were settle-beds, wagons,
and domestic animals, and amid weeping and shout-
ing the thump of the auctioneer’s mallet rang on
the door-jamb. In the kitchens of the gentry the
servants related that the master and mistress had
buried their silver, because Gortz had commanded
that not only all genuine money but also all uten-
sils of precious metal should be delivered up in
return for the fiat money, so that the king got the
entire property of his subjects. Tolle Orasson
found out that not even the princess at Stockholm
had enough silver for her table, and that the king
himself ate off of sheet iron. In the abandoned
smithies, outside some of which the streams rushed
unimpeded to the ocean past standing wheels and
open sluice-gates, he spoke with the single remain-
ing smith, who was too old and infirm for army
life. There he came to know that, if any iron was
forged, it had to be stored at once in the govern-
ment warehouse against the payment of certain
bags of fiat coin. For preference, however, he sat
and warmed himself in the parsonages, where his
Bible learning and Latin caused him to be well re-
garded, and the pastor would sometimes converse
with him until daybreak. There it was whispered
that there was a question of taking the appropri-

208 THE CHARLES MEN

ations for the school and the poor; yes, even the
very bank; and that there were no pens and paper,
but all official work had to be suspended, if the
gentlemen were not willing to dip their fingers into
the ink-horn and write on the bare table. One
grizzled parson told him that the governors of the
provinces had been deposed or put under super-
visors, so that nobody knew any more which of
them should command or obey. The old man de-
scribed how he himself had had to pawn his Bible
and surplice and pour small-beer into the ‘Com-
munion chalice.

After this fashion Tolle Orasson wandered from
district to district, and sometimes earned a copper
for conveying letters and official reports. The post-
men, it seemed, had been ordered to the army, and
the unruly innkeepers became postmasters. These
did not understand their business, but mothers and
orphans daily thronged about them in vain, crying
for letters from their relatives in the wilds and mines
of Siberia. In the midst of grumbling peasants in the
church of Slatthég he got the privilege of running
his fingers over one of the sultan’s gold-embroidered
coats of honor, which hung there as an altar-cloth.
In the town of Kalmar he became sworn brother to
Artillerist Edstedt, who had just married a servant-
girl, but who himself was no man but a Miss Stol-
hammar in disguise. At Visings6 he diced with the
ragged Russian prisoners; in Karlshamn he tussled

FREDRIKSHALL 209

with Polacks, Armenians, and Jews, and twitched the
turban tassels of the solemn Turkish creditors.
He even beguiled them into drinking wine, but
thereupon shattered the defiled glass, so that the
stone pavement resounded. In Lund he listened
among the armed students to the rebellious talk of
Professor Ihre, and shot at Professor Rydelius,
who wanted to allay the tumult. After roaming half
around the kingdom, he was finally standing one
evening in Goteborg, where during his journey the
king had been received as guest by the pirate Ga-
tenhjelm in his house on Stigberg Square. Dusty
and athirst, Tolle Orasson sat him down in Dorotea
Ek’s coffee house, where the loudly weeping and
guffawing citizens embraced one another and re-
lated that the terrible Madagascar pirates were now
to have permission to come with sixty richly laden
privateers and settle in the city to improve trade
conditions.

Then he could no longer keep his tongue be-
tween his teeth but let his light shine, relating the
experiences and adventures of his journey both in
Swedish and in Latin. Soon he noticed that two
men, who had sat next him with the collars of their
cloaks turned up, were themselves silent in order
to listen to his talk, and this made him even more
communicative.

“The Swedes are going to feel the iron glove as
never before since heathen days,” he said, survey-

210 THE CHARLES MEN
ing his shining nails. “The king has carried his

sword against nation after nation, and now he is
turning it against his own. Could it possibly end
otherwise? But dark forebodings are being whis-
pered about in the land. He leaves no son behind
him. What indeed would such a man want with a
son? In the councillors’ desk there lies already the
outline of an English constitution. Never shall we
bear from another what we have now voluntarily
endured. Perhaps to-morrow — perhaps this even-
ing, while we converse here—a weary soldier is sit-
ting before a heap of embers, melting lead in a cast-
ing-ladle. Perhaps at this very moment he holds
in the bullet-shears the heavy drop that shall put
to sleep forever the greatest among heroes.”

A merchant, already weighed down by years, with
the whitest of hair and the most melancholy eyes,
tapped him on the hand.

«We human beings judge everything according
to the pain in our own wounds, but now let an old
man speak! Even if our hard, iron-souled king had
never been born, our neighbors, who are ever grow-
ing stronger, would none the less have begun to
dismember the Swedish Empire. Slowly, year by
year and day by day, our children and children’s
children would have compromised and been humil-
iated and given up province after province. There
would never have been quiet, and yet never glory
either. It’s a stupid spectacle to see a bound lion

FREDRIKSHALL 211
whose blood drips away in little thimblefuls. So Id

rather once for all see the flame in the clouds and
a man in front of us. When did he order us to
offer more than he has offered ? Hasn’t he hun-
gered, hasn’t he been cold? And now there spreads
over us the foreboding that he shallalso fall with
us.”

Tolle Orasson changed his tone. He did not wish
to dissemble, but it became even more firmly fixed
in his mind that the man who had spoken last was
right.

“If I did n’t value freedom and a good. bed, I
could steal away after the king to press my lips to
his footprints in the Norwegian snow. Soon it may
be too late and the bullet be cast —

At the moment he uttered these words, the two
men who had sat next him rose at a secret mutual
sign, and his fear of a soldier’s coat was so great that
he grew pale, for he noticed shining brass buttons
under their cloaks.

“My fine lad!” they cried at his ear, and led him
out by both arms as a prisoner. “If you can talk so
elegantly, it won’t be much for you to stand near
where the bullets whistle. We ’ve now got a fat bird
on our twig. We are recruiters, we, monsieur! Do
you understand? And now, march to Norway!”

« All my days I ’ve longed for nothing else than
to become awarrior,” he answered at once, with such
a gentle and friendly firmness that even he himself

212 THE CHARLES MEN

believed his words. “Put your pretty recruiting
penny in my hat!”

So at last he had to put on the blue coat for which
he had entertained such fear, and every day he ex-
perienced new and unlooked-for adventures in the
midst of the land where of old the plough had peace-
fully cut its furrowin the earth. Scarcely had he gone
a short way beyond Strémstad, when he caught sight
of great galleys on the dry ground. He himself was
yoked to the bowwith peasants and horses and oxen
to drag the vessels two and a half miles farther over
the promontory to Idefjord. Inch by inch the ship
was pulled over corduroy roads and heaps of twigs;
by night in the light of pine torches, and by day in
the heat of the July sun. A little man in a coat of
lilac satin and a bushy wig, with broad gold buckles
on his shoes, went back and forth among the men
to encourage them. It was Emanuel Swedenborg,
for Polhem had commissioned him to execute this
unusual task. )

When he caught sight of Tolle Orasson, he
shaded his weak eyes with his hand and said: “That
fellow has the most robust and blooming health
I’ve seen in many years. My worthy corporals,
don’t go too hard with the man, for I see well that —
he has not full strength in his limbs!”

That was the first word of sympathy that Tolle
Orasson had heard since he had clinked glasses with
his comrades at Uppsala, and he was straightway

FREDRIKSHALL 213

impelled, with tears in his eyes, to stick out his
chubby hand and beg.

“Tam an, unlucky wretch,” he whispered in a
mixture of Swedish and the most scholarly Latin,
“and I shall bless and thank you fora single pinch
of snuff.”

“Snuff is one thing and serving the king is an-
other,” answered Swedenborg seriously, and went
off. But the very same evening, when the relief was
blown, he came up with his snuff-horn.

“Take the whole snuff-horn, keep it, and say no
more about it!” he whispered, and was off again
like a wanderer suddenly met on the road.

People are good, ‘Tolle Orasson thought at once,
and made an effort to come to himself in his lone-
liness. Soon, however, he used up the last copper he

‘had saved andall the contents of the snuff-horn in
bribing his way to an occasional extra hour’s sleep
in the morning. He was then immediately of the
opinion that people were bad.

When the last ship, with her gilded god of vic-
tory at the prow, finally glided out over the dark
waters of Idefjord, he was again ordered to march.
Many foreign and native officers gradually united
themselves to the band, and the long march of the
country’s last conscripts went from farm to farm.

One noon at a posting-station it happened that
Tolle Orasson was sitting asleep behind a wagon-
shed with his hat on his knee. When the drum

nee THE CHARLES MEN

rolled, and he awoke, a bright rix-dollar of hard
money lay in his hat on a piece of folded paper.

It was an unexpected sight, and he rubbed his
eyes and wondered whether he was dreaming. He
smote the coin with his knuckle and weighed it
in his hand. Finally he unfolded the paper and
read:

“In Tistedahl by the miller’s Cottage stands a
weeping birch called the Candlestick, because it has
three arms on one trunk. If His Royal Majesty
falls before the Enemy’s Shot, you will on that same
night bear witness to the Wonder that a Purse with
50 Ducats lies in the earth close to the Candle-
stick.”

“Some foreign devil has written that Swedish,”
burst out Tolle Orasson, almost wailing and moan-
ing, as he tore the paper into little bits and strewed”
them about him. He put earth on them with his
foot and trampled them down. Then he stuck the
rix-dollar into his trousers pocket in order to go
to the others, but hardly had he taken a couple of
steps, before he snatched out the coin again, as if it
had burned his body and clothing. He threw it far
away from him into the bog.

When he had tied his baggage on his back, he
began to march again with his usual boyish smile,
as if much in the world was quite wonderful and yet
of no consequence at all; but next night he dreamed
about the white birch with the three uplifted arms.

FREDRIKSHALL 215

The wooded mountain ridges became ever more
enveloped in clouds, the roads ever steeper, the
sutler’s pots ever emptier, but no hardships could
take away the flesh from Tolle Orasson’s round
cheeks and limbs. The boots fell in pieces from his
feet, and the regulation trousers, which had been
cut out for a starving army, were so inadequate for
him that he had to fasten them together at the
belt with a string. His well-conditioned and shining
forehead irritated his emaciated comrades so that
they vowed to thrash him, but because he was also
a head taller than any one else, no one finally dared
come too near him.

Although he betrayed no sign, he brooded from
morning to late at night over the strange writing.
Why did evil men wish to choose just him as their
tool? He could think of nothing else. When at last
the dusty band marched in among the tents and
brushwood huts of the headquarters at Tistedal, he
came to a halt, and without any longer knowing
what he did, pointed to a leafless weeping birch.

“The birch, there ’s the birch! That’s the Can-
dlestick! I’m sure— it must be called that.”

“Here you’re to be quiet and obey,” returned
the corporal, and stationed him directly in the line
as fugleman to be inspected.

When the corporal thereupon gripped him by
the arm, he felt that the sinews were soft and that
the tall recruit swayed powerlessly in his grasp.

216 THE CHARLES MEN

“This fellow we’d be better without,” averred
the corporal. “He’s all soft and tender.”

One November day several detachments of troops
made a halt in a mountain pass, and though the
clock only pointed to three, twilight prevailed.
Tanned by the sun of the steppes, with a Turkish
tobacco pouch at his breast, many a veteran officer
wondered at the wintry realm into whose wooded
wildernesses the army now marched to new adven-
tures. Captured sharp-shooters told wild stories of
trolls and shrieks of wood fays; and women with
flaxen hair, as tall as men, came to the camp-fires
by night and cut down the wearied and sleeping
Swedes with their axes.

It was snowing, and far below the ravine the sun
cast a yellow light over the stunted woods and over-
hanging crags of the mountain wall.

Thearmy consisted of pallid fifteen-year-olds, of
half-grown boys, who stood with their weapons in
the drift.

The little West Gotlanders, with their sharp
noses and shifting eyes, whispered to one another:
“The king will probably say that, if we don’t want
to starve, we can dig food from the Norway moun-
tains.”

“We may as well dig, then,” answered the
Smalanders in mournful, long-drawn accents.

FREDRIKSHALL 217

The Dalecarlians and Bohuslanders propped
themselves sullenly on their musket-barrels, but the
battalions of Sédermanland began togrumble. Then
Colonel Rutger Fuchs reined up his horse and came
to a stand before the front ranks. One foot was
askew in the stirrup, for at Gadebusch, where he
was carried from the field, his leg had been shat-
tered by a bullet.

“For shame, you Séderman fellows!” he cried
in his Scanian dialect. “If you don’t get plums in
your cake, you butter boys, you begin at once to
grumble. I hear you are all down-hearted, but now
it’s your duty to bear up bravely, for I tell you that
never again in time will Swedish men get to serve
such a hero as our royal master, and gladly would
I shed my blood for him. Look at me! What am
I called? Come, out with it!”

“Rika Fuchs,” answered all the soldiers with
one mouth, and their expression brightened.

“That’s correct. All my days I’ve been called
Rika Fuchs. Well, now, where are Fuchs’s riches?
He who can step forward and answer gets two
farthings.”

No one dared to advance.

Then Rika Fuchs drew his pocket-book from
his breast, opened it, and turned the leaves, while
he kept up the following discourse:

“What the devil is this talk of being rich? It’s
a matter of book-keeping, lads. Do you think,

218 THE CHARLES MEN

maybe, that all property pays interest? Well, try
it! Listen to what I read. Debts: nil. That’s the
first half of Fuchs’s riches. Here we have the de-
parted Schlippenbach’s dressing-down. Have you
quite forgot the departed Schlippenbach, your for-
_ mer colonel, who bequeathed to me both his dress-
ing-gown and his regiment, the two dearest pos-
sessions he had in this world? That dressing- gown
is so precious to me that I should n’t be willing to
sell it for less than five thousand rix-dollars. It is
therefore worth exactly that sum to me. Listen,
furthermore! Assets:

The departed Schlippenbach’s dressing-gown, five
thousand rix-dollars.

The Sddermanland regiment, ten thousand rix-
dollars.

My beloved wife Greta at home, seventy thousand
rix-dollars.

A cur from Holstein,a thousand rix-dollars.

My royal master’s favor, eighty thousand rix-
dollars.

The tavern, Golden Ass, two thousand rix-dollars.

Deuce take me if that is n’t all reckoned too low,
but then, too, it’s all I have in life. Well, what is
the tavern of the Golden Ass, anyhow?”
“That’s the gracious colonel’s sackcloth tent,”
murmured all the soldiers confusedly.
“Just so, right! At that tavern any one whoso-

FREDRIKSHALL 219

ever may breakfast gratis, for there is not a crumb
to get. Now let us add! Total assets, one hundred
and sixty-eight thousand rix-dollars. But as the nil
for debts is the half of my riches, that half of my
wealth must also then be a hundred and sixty-eight
thousand rix-dollars, too. Accordingly and demon-
strably, I haveall together three hundredand thirty-
six thousand rix-dollars. Look you, boys, that’s
what Gortz calls finance; and such an art is useful
to master, you understand. Do you but learn book-
keeping and to set a right value on everything, and
you ’ll get to see that you are finely rich and don’t
need to hang your head, evenifyour belly cries out.”

«Hurrah, hurrah for Rika Fuchs!” rang along
the line. But at the same moment all swords flew
from their scabbards, muskets were presented, and
drums thundered. In the gleam of the mountain
range strode forward the tall, magnified shadow of
a limping man, with a round fur cap on his head
and a gnarled stick in his hand.

It was the king.

He walked between the pines, followed by dra-
goons who came in a long line with broadswords
drawn, leading their horses. He himself was first,
and tramped the path in the snow. His scarred and
compressed features had become darkened by sun
and frost with the years, and between his eyebrows
lay a deep furrow. When he stuck the fur cap

under his arm and answered the salutes of the men

220 THE CHARLES MEN

in all directions, the snow fell on the bald crown
of his head. Gradually the generals collected about
him, and the guardsmen cut off a few fir boughs
with their swords and spread them on the ground.
The whole time he stood bare-headed in the snow-
storm, and the grizzled wisps of hair brushed back
along his temples were like a garland of frosted
leaves. He ordered the soldiers to stack their mus-
kets and light fires of branches, but the musicians
were placed by the cliff-wall with orders to play
until sunset.

“These Norway goats are a merry set to butt
against,” said the king. “Such men as their Kruse
and Kolbjérnsen ought to be buried in gold coffins
when they fall.”

Field Marshal Morner answered: “We have
just captured some Norwegian spies who were lying
hid in the bushes here to shoot Your Majesty. Shall
we string them up?”

“No. Give each of them a ducat for his wasted
time and tell them not to bungle in the soldiers
profession any more.”

Morner lowered his voice. “ There are, besides,
other more highly trusted bush-rangers. I have just
got from Provost Brenner a new letter of accusation
as to secret conspiracies against your crown and life.
If one might believe him, there are dangerous ene-
mies standing here even now scarcely five yards
away.” .

FREDRIKSHALL 221

“They may stand, then, unless they choose to
sit. War days are no time to investigate.”

Morner’s dwarf, Luxemburg, now advanced
with a water-flask. When the king had drunk, he
_ handed the dwarf his juniper staff, which was worn
shiny, as if to arm the little man, while he said to
him: “A Turk predicted that I must beware of
fools. You can try now whether I am afraid.”

Luxemburg took the staff and made as if to
twang it like a guitar, while he struck up a French
love-song.

Morner stepped near to the king, and whispered
behind his hat, “The men are starving.”

“A full soldier is slow at his duty.”

‘But a dead-hungry soldier drops his musket.”

“If one melts snow, it becomes water. If one
chews on a fir twig, hunger can be much dulled for
a long while.”

“The people we at least have under our eyes—
but the brains at home—They say the parsons in
the pulpits are openly calling down vengeance from
heaven. They believe that, after God has smitten
the Swedes and given a sign that their empire must
be divided, Your Majesty is fighting solely for your
own honor.”

“Have their honor and mine become two sepa-
rate things? They were insolent, and I answered.
I will force them to hold out to the uttermost. Is
it not as much for their own sakes as for mine?

222 THE CHARLES MEN ;

They say that I tempt God. I answer that I follow
Him. That is my royal word! In the name of right-
eousness, that is my vow! Who is the arbiter?”

With these words the king put on the fur cap,
turned up his cape-collar, and laid himself down
calmly to sleep on the fir boughs, as if no enemy
had existed in the world.

Diuker energetically shouted his commands to
the officers. Morner dozed as he stood leaning
against a Scotch pine, without being able to listen
further to little Cronstedt’s quips; and the cunning
Stjernroos, who had been out spying, came dis-
guised in a sheepskin jacket and wooden shoes with
a keg on his back. The king himself was already
sleeping, motionless, without a thought of letters
and menaces. He had entrusted himself to his sol-
diers.

But there were two eyes that followed him. Tolle
Orasson, who on the preceding day had been as-
signed to the Sddermanland regiment as corporal
and leader of the wood-choppers, could not force
himself to look away from the sleeper. The words
of Rika Fuchs still lay in his heart.

I ought to keep an account book, too, maybe,
he thought. Fifty ducats in the earth by the Can-
dlestick Birch!

With his clear and friendly eyes he stared off at
the king so fixedly that he did not notice how Rika
Fuchs came close up to him.

FREDRIKSHALL 223
«What ails you?” said Fuchs, clapping him

heartily on the shoulder. “‘Here’s a communica-
tion for Tistedal, since we are now to go up to the
fortress of Fredriksten and open fire. Take two
men along and a bundle of torches to light you—
and run fast! A man with such a splendid food sup-
ply under his skin does n’t need either to bivouac
or eat oftener than every third night, if he only ©
understands rightly how to husband God’s s gifts. ,

Tolle Orasson now betook himself off into the
woods with two soldiers, but still when he was a
long way off among the firs, he turned and looked
at the king.

At daybreak, when he came to the village of Tis-
tedal, he stood under the Candlestick Birch, and
stuck the last torch into the earth with the burning
end down.

“J have wandered about widely to study and
teach,” he said to the soldiers. “I have met both
good and evil men. It may be, too, that beasts and
trees can be good and evil. At every noon rest,
when I ’ve been out with the wood-choppers, I ’ve
laid me down to sleep here, but never got a wink
of sleep. There ’s a curse on this tree. Look! I ’ve
driven an axe into one of the boughs up there.
There will be a morning when I ’I set that axe to
its root.”

He remained standing while he surveyed the
expiring torch.

224 THE CHARLES MEN

“Good and evil men, I said.— Never did I see
a more glorious man than our great king, but the
years make him ever stricter and harder. He has
tenderness for the wailing of neither beast nor
man. Even a cry of agony cannot induce him to
turn his head. His winter is come, with its gradual
death. How we should have wept for him, if he
had chanced to fall in his youthful years! No age
would have acclaimed a greater or purer name than
his. See that torch, how slowly it’s dying, how it
reeks and poisons the air with its stench of burn-
ing! Why not rather with a little motion of the
hand press it deep down, quickly, without hesita-
tion—-so that it goes into the earth while it is still
glowing brightly?”

The soldiers did not understand him, but merely
answered, “May no evil befall our beloved lord
and king!”

He took a couple of steps to follow them, but
the Candlestick Birch spread its limbs above him
imploringly, and he remained standing and talking
to himself.

“Who is thinking of evil? Tolle Orasson takes
- his musket, he the despised, the outcast, who has
had to go from farm to farm and beg for charity
bread. He takes his musket and lays his finger on
the trigger. That shot will call whole peoples to
reconciliation. Even if all the cannonof Fredriksten
thunder that night, no one will hear them. The

FREDRIKSHALL 225

soldiers will think that it ’s as quiet as on a distant,
frozen mountain lake. They will only hear the
single shot. It will echo from night to night as long
as men live on the earth. When I have dug up the
fifty ducats, I will go forward to the generals, throw
all the gold-pieces over their hats and wigs,and say:
‘Bring out your handcuffs, good sirs! There’s
drink money for your pains. Drink my health in
real wine! It is I who have shot His Royal Maj-
esty. Of you nobody will speak, but as long as his
name lives, so long will mine live.’ And so the
handcuffs will be screwed on. I shall be set on the
tumbrel and drive up the Gotgata at Stockholm,
but there will not be a window, a doorstep, a roof,
that will not be black with eager folk who want to
see Tolle Orasson. And at the gentlemen’s houses
where I’ve had to eat at the kitchen table, and at
the parsonages where I’ve had to bow for a plate
of beer-soup, it will be: ‘In that chair Tolle Oras-
son sat, that was the pipe Tolle Orasson-smoked,
on that door-knob he held the finger that fired the
shot.’ The students of Uppsala, the proud, the false
friends, who finally considered themselves too good
to house me over a rainy night—they will become
old, their heads will grow white, but they will never
weary of saying: ‘We knew Tolle Orasson, we
called him by his first name.’ So it will always be.
As often as a coach drives into Stockholm Town,
one gentleman will point through the window

226 THE CHARLES MEN

and say: ‘There’s the gallows!’ There may be a
hundred executed men in the graveyard, but he’ll
only say: ‘There lies Tolle Orasson, the miserable
wretch!’ And then the other gentlemen willanswer:
‘The liberator of his people!’”

Tolle Orasson raised his arms to support him-
self, but at the same moment he laid his hand on
the smooth, cold bark, he snatched it back with a
suppressed cry of terror.

The soldiers stoppedand turnedaround. He mo-
tioned them to go on and followed them, but he
had grown as pale as a corpse.

¢

By a trench in front of the fortress on the moun-
tain ridge the king had had built for himself a hut
of boards; and thither a bed, table, and chair had
been brought. No soldiers were posted with loaded 7
muskets at the door, and the adjutant of the watch
was often sent away on various errands. The king
even overcame his former nervousness in the soli-
tude of night and no longer allowed any page to
sleep by his bed. Wearied by the exertions of the
day, he sometimes slept on the rampart between
the enemy’s cannon and the soldiers working in
the trench. Any one might have stolen out in the
dark and extinguished his life with a sword-thrust.
The sleepless and tortured nights in the Ukraine
after the first crushing blows of adversity remained

FREDRIKSHALL 227

only as scars in the lines between his eyebrows.
Had he not hardened his soul in misfortunes, as
he had his body in privations? He never brooded
a minute on danger, but he knew that its heavy
cloud hung closer than ever above his head, and
this filled him with the confident repose of his van-
ished youth. His voice had grown hard, but a mas-
terful composure kindled its rejuvenating gleam in
his eyes. All, all the gloom that misery and defeat
concealed rose around him, and, propped on his
juniper staff and often cursing impatiently, he di-
rected the soldiers’ work.

Occasionally he surveyed the heavens and
searched out the constellations he knew, but when
the mist had spread, and darkness fell deeper, he
sometimes shut his eyes and counted on his fingers:
“Three hundred, three hundred and eighty-five,
ninety, ninety-four, four hundred thousand rix-
dollars. Will Gortz really be able to collect as much
by December? How, indeed, can the army be kept
up otherwise? And would Gértz be able to get here
within two days? Was it not his expected arrival
that spread such unrest in the camp? What, though,
is to be done about it now?”

The king knew no scruples, for he had become
a highwayman who despised money and property.
Had not the Swedes called him a madman and
reached their hands toward his crown? Ah well, he
forgave it them, since he had given them their an-

,

228 ._ THE CHARLES MEN

swer, but he wanted to hold them together to the
last, even if house and foundation should burn.
Was not that the duty, was not that the divine
mission, he had sworn in his soul to fulfil? It was
no time now for ease-lovers, no matter who might
prefer to be at home in a shutter-bed. And Gortz’s
proclamation, which let his royal name be flaunted
under perjuries about peace and the good of his
subjects? Where in his campaigns had he ever seen
princes act otherwise in time of necessity ? And yet
had they not been called wise and good as long
as they succeeded? When the storm was over, he
would hold an inquiry and straighten things out.
Severity he had commanded, never conscious dis- '
honesty. The matter was now to conquer the for-
tress of Fredriksten, which, standing before him on
the mountain ridge with its gray walls and pointed
battlements, barred the road up to Norway. Had
they not already taken the outwork of Gyldenlow
with sword in hand?

With sword in hand! He shut his eyes, as he used
often to do when he was unseen, and softly repeated
the words. “ They think that I tempt Thee, O eter-
nal, wondrous God, Holy Spirit, my delight, my
joy, my refreshment! They ever say: ‘Stand half-
way up, where we stand, otherwise you are pre-
sumptuous; sit down when we grow weary, other-
wise we shall no longer call you our Gideon.’ Thou,
who art the arbiter, before Thee I humble myself

FREDRIKSHALL 229

in my need—I, a contrite sinner. If I have gone

astray on the earth, strike me down dead!”
“The king has gone to sleep at his post,” said

the soldiers, when they saw him with head sunk

and hat pulled down.

He heard them, looked up, and answered: “Not

yet.” |

On the first Sunday in Advent the king mounted
his horse and rode down through the mist to the
miller’s cottage at Tistedal. He was heavy at heart,
and to overcome his melancholy he.sat on a bench
by the fire and looked over his papers. They were
petitions and old letters and cancelled accounts from
as far back as his sojourn at Lund. His.eyes at last
paused at two half-sheets, which were fastened to-
gether with a brass pin and written full in his own

almost illegible hand. He read:

Anthropologia Physica. The natural tendency of all
living thingsis that which is called passion, or the en-
joymentof pleasure. Pleasure is of twosorts, namely,
corporeal or spiritual pleasure. That is called spirit-
ual pleasure wherein the body may have no part.
But that is called corporeal pleasure which the body
feels alike with the soul. The three parts of the body
are: the material structure, wherethrough the form
of the body with its outer and inner parts is shaped ;
the liquid matter, which consists of the blood with
what thereto appertains; and the material spiritus

230 THE CHARLES MEN

or breath, which is, as it were, the finest part of the
material being, is the strength and life of the very
blood, and receives life and feeling from the vital
breath or soul, while it conveys this throughout the
entire body. It also dies of itself, as soon as any
body or limb dies. — The reason why the soul par-
ticipates in both sorts of pleasure and that the body
only feels the pleasures of the flesh is this: that life
is in reality a property of the soul, which the body,
being itself a dead essence, receives through the
action of the spirit.—That which is commonly
reckoned under the name of the five senses consists
only in one, which is called feeling and is an effect
of the spirit, and which (according to the nature of
_eachand every one’s bodily structure) exhibits itself
in five sorts of ways... .

He rose from the bench and grasped the incom-
ing Field Marshal Morner by the belt. “If Morner
were not as bad a philosopher as he is a good econo-
mist, he should here get a hard nut to crack. No,
don’t read the writing —that is only some nonsense
I put together one evening down at Lund. I always
observe that when after an interval I see again a fab-
ric of thought which I endeavored to build, I enjoy
disguising myself asan enemy and storming my own
redoubt myself. Does the pleasure of thought lie in
the mere fighting?”

Morner answered: “ Your Majesty is a hard du-

FREDRIKSHALL 231

elist in learned disputations, and never do I hear
my gracious lord so well spoken as in such com-
bats, but I cannot offer my sword-point as could
the departed Grothusen.”

He unbuttoned his coat hastily, and handed the
king several sealed letters.‘ Bethink, Your Majesty,
that even the stupidest accusation may be true and
may strike the scythe from the hand of Death for
many years.”

The king knew beforehand these communica-
tions in printed characters without signature, which
blackened those nearest him and foretold a sudden
death. The threat of death alarmed him no more
than the whine of a bullet. Had he not since his
very boyhood days wakened nearly every morning
prepared to lie on the field among the fallen before
dark? He threw the three letters into the fire un-
opened, one by one, and stood in the lowly miller’s
cottage as tranquil as if his last army of tired
and starved youths had brought all the crowns of
Europe with them on a baggage-wagon.

«Answer me frankly!” he said after a short si-
lence. “On how many may I still depend? I don’t
mean in an engagement, but if everything goes
against us?”

“Must I answer? Is it a command?”

“Yes. On how many may I still coer

“On none.’

The drums rumbled infront of the cottage, where

232 THE CHARLES MEN

the soldiers were marching up for divine service,
and Hultman, entering, said, “I have to inform you
humbly that morning service is now to begin. The
text for the day treats of our Lord Jesus Christ’s
entry into Jerusalem.”

The king now washed off all the grime from his
face and hands, besides which he put on brand-new
clothes of blue broadcloth and new yellow gloves
of elk-skin. While his hair was powdered by Hult-
man so that it became white as an old man’s, he
supported one foot on the wood in the fire and said
very softly, as if mainly to himself: “That text is
very dear to me.— But the people spread out their
garments on the way, and others cut branches of
trees and strewed them in the way. And the people,
both they which went before him and they which
followed after, cried out, saying, Hosanna to the
son of David! Blessed be he that cometh in the
name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

“Yes, yes, most gracious lord,” answered Hult-
man almost in a whisper. “So, too, will the saints
cry whenever a righteous hero of God rides into
the heavenly Salem.”

The king then turned from the fire and went
out to the troops. With bared head he took his
place under the Candlestick Birch. The soldiers,
who were accustomed to love his juniper staff and
stained uniform, hardly recognized him.

He spent all day in the camp, and only after

FREDRIKSHALL 233

evensong, when the mist began to descend, did he
ride his horse, Englander, up the woody ridge to
the hut of boards by the trenches.

Tolle Orasson and his soldiers worked in the
outermost trench. Commanded by the Frenchman
Maigret, the Swedes crawled forward with their
spades, rolling fagots and gabions in front of them
step by step as a protection against the shot from
the fortress. The echo of the enemy’s firing thun-
dered in the mountain like the clatter of bolts and
bars, like the blows of clubs upon iron doors to
subterranean dungeons and vaults.

In order to direct their fire and protect them-
selves against surprise, the garrison set out long
stakes with burning hoops of pitch, and the fire-balls
that were hurled about cast their sudden light over
the crags. Fire and smoke spurted from the battle-
ments of Fredriksten, and above the turf-covered
Swedish rampart Tolle Orasson recognized the
king’s large hat and small head.

Hidden in shadow down in the trench, he pulled
a fallen comrade’s musket to him and, stooping,
went back for some distance toward the rampart
of earth. Only when he had come so near that he
heard the king’s words to the officers who stood
in the ditch on the other side of the rampart, did
he make a standstill.

Wonderful! he thought. Here in the approaches
many soldiers fall nearly every night. Whence, then,

234 THE CHARLES MEN

comes the power to compel hundreds of men to
stand and fall here without daring to shout to one
another the simple three words— We won’t obey?

He wanted to kneel and pray heaven for for-
giveness and to persuade himself that his deed was
righteous, but he could not. He did not know what
he himself wished, and if a child had called to him
to throw down the musket, he would have obeyed
and commended the advice. But no one addressed
him, and no one saw him, so that he feared only
to delay, to prolong his own anxious uncertainty.
He cocked the musket. He laid it to his eye. He
sighted at the man for whom he had seen his coun-
trymen fall and bleed submissively — but his finger
lay trembling and paralyzed on the trigger.

Steps approached. It was the gray-haired Hult-
man, who in buckle shoes and white stockings, his
hat respectfully stuck under his arm, was coming
over the rocks amid the whistling bullets. In front
of him he bore, covered with a napkin, the pewter
bowl which contained the king’s supper. As soon
as he had come up to the rampart, he spread the
napkin over his hat and then placed the bowl on
top while he offered it to the king, who ate stand-
ing and every now and then took his faithful ser-
vant by the coat buttons.

Tolle Orasson lowered his musket and heard him
say, “ Hultman is beginning to get as_stiff in his
gait as Brandklipparen was in his last days. But

FREDRIKSHALL 235

no one has more faithfully followed me wherever
I went, and therefore I nominate him to the place
of chief cook. With the years we get ever further
away from the good men of old times.”

“God, merciful God!” muttered Tolle Orasson,
swaying back and forth with his musket in his
grasp.

He saw how Hultman went his way again
through the rain of shot, and the king leaned over
the rampart with his chin supported on his left
hand. The moon, which was at the full, now rose
large and bright above the pine woods.

Nearby Swedish, German, Italian, and French
officers conversed in their various languages, plan-
ning how they might be able to lure the king down
from his exposed position. Maigret, who had also
joined them by now, plucked him gently by the
cloak and said: “ This is no place for Your Majesty.
Canister and musket-balls have no more respect
for a king than for the meanest soldier.”

Then Tolle Orasson once more lifted his mus-
ket in both hands.

He threw it on the ground so that it went off,
and the report was lost in the crash of the enemy’s
fire.

“Never,” he stammered, “never! A Swedish-
born man can never do it, though fifty ducats
awaited him under every birch in Norway. Better
desert or fall one’s self. What do I care for the duc-

236 THE CHARLES MEN

ats? It was his /ife 1 wanted to take—and I can’t
do it. I should never be able to do it, until I shut
my eyes. Isn’t there any foreign marksman that
can shoot a king blindfold?”

Tolle Orasson did not notice that the moon was
already shining into the trench and threw his own
shadow with its thin limbs and smiling boy’s cheeks
high up on the slope of the rampart.

«What are you doing here, my lad?” asked the
king. “Go forward, straight forward toward the
enemy!” ;

Tolle Orasson gave a start, turned on his heel,
and began to march ahead toward the fortress. Be-
hind him he heard the officers still urging the king
to step down.

The king answered, “ Have no fear!”

Then, without knowing any more what he was
doing, Tolle Orasson grasped the crown of his hat
and began to leap over gabions and fagots straight
onward toward the enemy, always onward. Many
Swedish soldiers, who saw him, rose to follow and
desert. He stood and struck at them with his hand,
and every time he turned, he recognized the king
on the rampart. Why did he’ never take a spade
and start to dig? That, to be sure, was what the king
had meant. Instead he ran ever more violently and
blindly, and at last he no longer knew whether he
did so out of obedience or to desert. He took shel-
ter behind stumps and in clefts, but he kept always

FREDRIKSHALL 237

getting nearer to the fortress. His soft limbs already
bled from three wounds, yet he did not heed the
warm drops that ran down under his glove, but re-
cited prayers and psalms, calling himself an evil-
doer eternally lost, who had been meditating a way
to sell his soul.

He came to a shattered outwork of small size,
which seemed to be abandoned; but when he heard
voices of Norwegian soldiers, he hid himself in
among the gabions.

A few paces from him, on splintered wheels,
stood a field-piece, red-brown with rust, which was
aimed at the king’s rampart. It was loaded with
gravel and old iron slugs. Init were corroded mus-
ket-balls, which a hundred years back a drunken
pirate had shaped in his bullet-scissors, while he
hummed a bawdy song for his trollop. In it were
twisted keys and nails, which had long since fallen
from a peasant’s barn, and farthest inside lay a
bent clapper, which had once rung in a cowbell on
the sunny mountain top to the call of the milk-
maids.

Long, broken clouds hurried white across the
moon, and Tolle Orasson lay in among the gabions,
bleeding and with folded hands.

«This isa night,” he stammered, “when heaven
stands wide open, and God surveys the earth with
such deep thoughts that men feel His gaze. They
may flee away, they may hide themselves, they may

238 / THE CHARLES MEN

be wretches such as I or leaders of armies, yet they
perceive His glance. A hero—what is a hero? He
is constancy to the end; constancy toward adver-
saries, toward friends. But Thou there above, Thou
art the avenger both of Thyself and of men; and
when the hour-glass of Thy mercy is run out, Thou
raisest Thy finger in omnipotence, and the hero
bows his head to the earth—and lies reconciled.”

Tolle Orasson bent aside the withes of the near-
est gabion and heard the Norwegian corporal talk
with the soldiers.

“Boys, there ’s no use wasting men and artillery
on this entrenchment; but seeing the old field-
piece is too rickety to be dragged hence, the com-
mandant has ordered me to fire it before we go.
The shot may very well do the Swedes some harm
still, if the gun does n’t burst all to bits.”

While he spoke, he carefully laid the slow-match
on the field-piece, and, followed by his men, turned
thereupon to the fortress with brisk steps—and
singing.

Tolle Orasson followed the yellowish flame of
the match with his eye, as it coiled ever nearer to
the touch-hole. He thrust aside fagots and sacks
of earth to burst his way through and pluck away
the match, and he spoke aloud as if to the night: “I
wanted to kill the man—and now I want to save
him, only because I have just seen him and heard
him speak. It’s so, then, that he makes us all his

FREDRIKSHALL 239

servants with a look. My wit is going out, and I
can think no more.”

He hewed apart the withes with his clenched
hand, but the palisade barred him out, and all the
time he saw the flame at the touch-hole. Some-
times it dwindled away and was nearly blown out,
but then it leaped up again, bright and large.

That was a sign, Tolle Orasson thought, that
men should try no more to act that night, and he
stepped down into the clefts that descended toward
the valley and the black chimneys of the burned
town of Fredrikshall. Even at that distance he saw
the flame. It burned bright for a long time over
among the gabions, but he went down still deeper
behind the rocks. Then he heard the crash of the
shot, and the cliff trembled.

His strength was exhausted, and his understand-
ing was befogged. He no longer remembered why
he had gone toward the enemy. He only feared
darkly that he might be seen and seized. He stared
up into the night, where the thunders of the for-
tress rolled over the peaks like the chariots of Thor.

He did not know how long he tottered about
among juniper bushes, nor did he know where he
went. At last he perceived the tread of heavy, iron-
shod boots, and heard gravel and stones rattle.
Twelve soldiers of the guard were coming down
the steep slope with a litter.

He kept quiet behind the junipers and waited.

24.0 THE CHARLES MEN

On the litter lay a fallen man, enveloped in two
plain soldiers’ cloaks and with a white curled pe-
_tuke pulled down over the face under the braided
hat, which was pressed down over the forehead.

“Who is it that has fallen?” he whispered, so
low that Colonel Carlberg, who supported the tilt-
ing side of the litter from in front, noticed nothing.

“The colonel says it’s a gallant officer,” an-
swered the nearest bearer, but as in so doing he
turned his head to look at the solitary night-rover,
he stumbled and sank on his knees under the
burden,

The borrowed peruke and hat slipped from the
dead man’s head, so that the moonlight fell bright
on the face with the temple shot through.

“The king! Our great beloved king!” the bear-
ers murmured, and were about to set down the
litter.

The dreaded monarch, to whom it had j juke been
whispered that he could no longer rely on any one,
lay there disarmed ; and ‘old warriors, stained with
mud and grime, twisted their rough, frost-bitten
hands over his corpse, wailing and groaning; “Our
great, our beloved king!”

The colonel had to threaten them with hard
words that they must be silent and not betray what
had happened by their lamenting.

Heavily and slowly they bore the king onward
again upon the same unplaned bier where during

FREDRIKSHALL — 241

the previous nights he had seen so many nameless
soldiers, already forgotten, who had obeyed his will
and died.

Midnight was already past when the bier was set
down on an open sward among the cottages in the
lonely village of Tistedal. After the bearers had
got three fiat coins for drink-money, they all went
off. The officer remained and sat down, brooding
and sighing deeply, on the single pole of the bier.
Volleys still rang in the distance on the wooded
ridge, but elsewhere all was hushed, and the mill-
wheel down by the river stood motionless. All the
panes were dark, and the same full moon that had
lighted the disguised horseman through the city
gate of Stralsund and to the dismal conflict at
_Rtgen shone to-night over the grass where a
lonely warrior kept watch by his fallen king.

Step by step, Tolle Orasson had stolen after and
had only come to a standstill close by the sward
under the motionless, drooping branches of the
Candlestick Birch. Talking to himself half aloud,
he went around the white trunk in ever narrowing
circles, shaking over the tussocks the big drops
from his wounded arm, in order to conjure into
eternal sleep and oblivion the evil ducats that lay
buried there.

“Sleep and be accursed!—Why don’t the
drums beat ? The bier stands off there so lonely. No
women are weeping there, no children, no faithful

242 THE CHARLES MEN

friends. Ah! you moon, that have come and gone
and beheld so much, never shall I see you above
a Swedish forest without remembering that bier.”

He pulled out the axe which was stuck in one of
the branches and which he had pointed out to the
soldiers several evenings before. Chips of wood
pattered down, and his strokes on the Candlestick
Birch resounded far through the stillness.

With that he checked his hand again, and a new
glimmer of comprehension passed through his
soul: “ Almighty, avenging God! He before whom
assassins threw down their weapons, he who went
smiling to meet innumerable deaths, —he falls as
quietly as a trampled ear of grain, when Thou hast
filled the measure of his fate. He falls nearly in sol-
itude one night on the ramparts, like a petty sol-
dier at his post. He dies by a shot from a con-
demned and rusty field-piece, on which a few sol-
diers, indifferent and singing, have thrown their
match. Or—whence, forsooth, did the bullet come
at Thy bidding? What do I know, a simple man?
I only know what I have just now witnessed and
therefore must believe. But there were so many
strange voices up there in the dark.”

All this time the officer sat on the pole of the bier
by the dead man wrapped in the soldiers’ cloaks,
and ever more wearily in the repose of night the
axe-blows fell on the thick trunk of the birch.

_ FREDRIKSHALL 243
When the tree finally plunged to earth, the un-

known wood-chopper sat down in silence on the
trunk.

The hours grew long. It was already getting
toward morning, when a couple of servants, who
had been sent for him, drew near to carry back their
fallen lord. Between them with the king’s sword
walked a captain, who related that in the moment
of death the hand had clasped the hilt so vehe-
mently that the blade was half drawn from its
sheath.

Listening to every word, Tolle Orasson bent
aside the branches of the Candlestick Birch.

“The sword—” he asked of himself. “Was
there a hardened man, a man prematurely gray, who
drew that sword against the memory of the prince
of light who once bore his name? Or may—”

He stepped forward straight in the captain’s
way and inquired in a suppressed whisper: “The
sword —against whom wasthesword drawn? Under
my blood-covered corporal’s clothes there is a like
man, one perhaps cleverer than ye, though sunken
deep from the sight of men. Don’t motion me away,
then, but answer in pity’s name!”

“My friend, I don’t understand your question.”

“ Against whom, I say? Against whom was the
sword drawn?—I know it myself now. Against
whom, do I ask? Against all. Is n’t that answer

oad Py THE CHARLES MEN

enough for us? Isn’t it so that a hero must die?
He believed in the righteousness of his own con-
duct. —Such defiance God forgives. —Such defi-

ance even men forgive.”

Capture Gortz!

O capture Gértz was to beat a fox at his own

game, but the Prince of Hesse had at head-
quarters an incomparable lackey by the name of
Pihlgren, who afterwards in his old age used to
relate how it came about. Many years after Pihl-
gren’s pious and altogether edifying death, an old
manuscript was preserved in one of the parsonages
of Varmland, where it was all recorded and de-
scribed. Nobody rightly knew whence the manu-
script had come, but the dean, who had read the
yellowed sheets carefully, used to tell it as follows:

The night when the king was shot, the Prince of
Hesse sat at table with several officers at Torpum.
Then the Frenchman, Siquier, stepped in and
whispered into the prince’s ear, and the prince whis-
pered into the ear of the man who sat next him.
When the whisper had gone round, the prince
dropped his knife and fork. He then ordered up
a horse and a lackey. Pihlgren, who was on guard
at the house of the prince that night, packed his
cloak in his saddle-bag with great haste and rode
behind the prince and the officers to the trench
where the king lay fallen.

The litter had just been fetched, and the prince
ordered the officers to lifttheir glorious masterupon
it, but the incomparable hero had seized the broad-

246 THE CHARLES MEN

sword-hilt so hard in the instant of death that the
generals had great difficulty in unclasping his fin-
gers. When the Swedish gentlemen had finally dis-
armed the great dead and gotten away the sword
which he let go so reluctantly, his hand clunga long
while to theirs, and all who stood near believed that
in that hour God Himself had sealed the hand-
clasp forever.

As soon, now, as the litter was carried away, the
prince summoned the officers to a council of war
on the spot where the king had fallen, and thirty
soldiers with torches stood round about at a little
distance.

Bomgarten, who was colonel of the Nobles’
Regiment as well as a chamberlain, finally went
aside with Lieutenant-Colonel Bjérnschidld, while
all the time he gazed furtively at Pihlgren. There-
upon Bjérnschidld came to Pihlgren and praised
his clever understanding and many accomplish-
ments, as he requested him in the prince’s name to
come with him on a long ride, concerning which he
would get instructions only when they were well
on the way.

Pihlgren became quite at a loss, but as he rode ,
in company with Bomgarten and Bjérnschiold next
morning, they said to him: “ Now we’re off to cap-
ture Gortz.”

“Tn that case,” said Pihlgren, “we must needs

CAPTURE GORTZ! 247

be nimble both with tongue and hand; but for my
share, I shall do my duty faithfully, as the gentle-
men surely know. Where, then, is the sinner?”

They said, “He is supposed to be not far off,
but if he reaches Tistedal, he ’ll be the cause of a
pretty spectacle.”

When they had travelled the roads another night
and day, at five o’clock in the dusk they met
Gortz, as he came riding in his red cloak on the
plain at Raballse.

When Pihlgren pointed to the plain, Bomgarten
and Bjérnschiold ridiculed him, crying gaily at his
ear, “ Do you think the great man would be on
horseback ?”

But Pihlgren ‘answered, “Devil take me if it
is n’t Gortz. I recognize for sure his servant Petter
Berg, who is riding by him, and is my honest old
friend and crony.”

When they had come nearer and noted that
Pihlgren spoke the truth, Bomgarten dismounted
and greeted His Excellency very humbly, while he
assured him that His Majesty had never been bet-
ter than he was at that moment.

«And whitherdo you mean to turn now?” asked ~
Gortz.

Bomgarten, who hated Gértz for all the evil he
had done him, bowed lower and lower with great
cheerfulness, so that he scraped the road with the

248 THE CHARLES MEN

hat in his hand, and then he made up a handy lie.
«I’m journeying to Goteborg to buy boots for my
regiment,” he said.

Gortz now turned to Bjérnschidld, whose Ger-
man wife was a relative of his: “ And you, cousin?”

Bjornschidld grew red in the forehead and
bravely grasped at the first lie that came to hand:
«Oh, I’m going to Goteborg about a stranded ship
on which the prince has effects.”

Bomgarten now began again to bow and scrape
and be so glad that his eyes shone, and with that he
contrived a new fib: “The remarkable thing is, that
just now we ’ve got to turn back. But we must get
us fresh horses first at Raballse. Perhaps there’sa
question of some assault. The prince has sent this
foolish lackey here after us and ordered us to re-
turn.”

When he had spoken after this fashion, he gave
a wink to Pihlgren, whom in his heart he consid-
ered a fellow as honest as he was sharp, a man worth
more than ten others. Had the colonel not had
such an artful lackey with him, Goértz would per-
haps have gone free to this day ; and who can tell
whether that denier of God, who was so much at
home both in the black arts and every sort of for-
bidden thing, would not then have known how to
lengthen his worthless and sinful existence so that
he neither grew feeble with years nor departed this
life? It was therefore surely by God’s dispensation

CAPTURE GORTZ! 249

that Pihlgren was on the alert, though the reward
he got afterwards was ingratitude.

Because Pihlgren was a crony of Petter Berg’s,
he came near to riding forward and honorably
betraying the whole plot, but in a short time he
began to hear so many untruths that he had to smile
within himself, and soon he grew as crazy as the
others.

They dared not seize Gértz out of hand in the
open, but he inquired of them with much affability,
“Where do you think to make your quarters for
the night? Will you not come on to the deanery at
Tanum and eat supper with me?”

That was water to their mill, and they accepted
with feigned gratitude, pressing their hands to their
breasts, but between themselves they thought that
they would be the guests who knew how to get the
tidbits of the goose.

Gortz nowrode forward to thedeanery at Tanum,
but a cornet and an adjutant followed him stealthily
at a distance to observe if he kept the road he had
said and did not turn off toward Glomm, for in that
case they were to shoot a bullet through his head.
Bomgarten and Bjérnschidld rejoiced meanwhile
at the good turn the affair had taken, notwithstand-
ing that they could not get any fresh horses at the
hostelry in Raballse, since they were all bespoken
to carry Gortz’s heavy baggage. Only Pihlgren
adroitly managed to find himself a horse that had

250 THE CHARLES MEN

stood in the stall for three days. The fact was, he
accosted a servant-girl and stationed himself as if he
wanted to entice her round the corner of the house
to chat with her. When, unable to withstand such
an invitation, she followed him out into the rain, he
became quite serious all at once and promised her a
pretty penny if she could immediately find him a
rested horse.

Bomgartenand Bjérnschidld were sorely amazed
when they saw Pihlgren come leading along a
white-faced nag, which was so lively that it reared
andsnorted; butthey were nowsotired out thatthey
straightway ordered Pihlgren to gallop off ahead to
the deanery and there in all secrecy beg the dean
for aroom with a fire on the hearth and a light on
the table.

It was cold, and a pouring rain fell all night.
When Pihlgren came to the deanery where Gortz
had taken quarters, he happened on the cornet and
the adjutant, who were keeping out of sight in the
dark wagon-shed. They could not believe their own
eyes when they saw his steed, which was so frisky
that they could hardly hold him, and they praised
Pihlgren, rejoicing to have with them such a clever
lackey.

There was a long delay before the others came
up with their hard-ridden beasts. Silently they fas-
tened all the horses in the wagon-shed, so that no
one in the house might discover them. Light shone

CAPTURE GORTZ! 251

at all of the windows, but deep darkness prevailed
outside, and before they went up to the room which
Pihlgren had, with much foresight, engaged in a
side-building, they each and all got ready their
pistols.

They were wet through to the skin, but were
so much excited that they did not notice it. When
they entered the room, whispering and walking
softly, Bomgarten said to the dean, “ Our errand
here is that we wish to arrest Gortz, because King
Charles has just been shot dead.”

The dean,a small, slender man with a most cheer-
ful countenance and thin white hair, took a turn
across the floor, which was covered with fir twigs,
stroking and shifting his skull-cap: “God bless
you, colonel,” said he, “if you will cut short the
power and authority of this wicked plague of our
country. He is an Achitophel, and who knows
whether the devil himself, imitating in mockery
an exalted model, has not taken human form in
his person, and so is sitting and eating this even-
ing in my own humble dwelling ? Ever since that
abandoned villain came riding through the rain,
the kitchen fire blazes and roars so that the sparks
come out of the chimney, and yet it’s as if the
flame could not warm one’s forehead, but was al-
ways cold as ice.”

Bomgarten then answered, “Be easy, my good
dean! You must now station your servants under

252 THE CHARLES MEN

the window with axes, and then Pihlgren, who is a
more cunning fellow than all of us put together, will
quietly entice Gortz’s servants in here, one by one,
till we have them all under lock and key.”

Pihlgren then went softly out and found in a
shed his old friend and crony, Petter Berg, whom
he requested to follow him and take a secret letter
to the little Duke of Holstein. Berg, who had some
business in the shed regarding the many flasks that
Gortz had brought along, offered Pihlgren a glass
of good wine and thanked him for his true and
faithful friendship from ever since they were little.
But when Berg came into the room and saw the
cornet and adjutant at the door with pistols and
naked swords, he began to weep and exclaim,
“Never should I have believed such a thing of
Pihlgren.”

Meanwhile Bomgarten inspected Berg’s pockets
and found a hundred ducats in specie, but when
the poor fellow assured him it was only drink-
money that he had received when he served with
Feif and carried letters of appointment, he was
allowed to keep them in return for confessing what-
ever else he knew.

“ Well,” he then related very softly and charily,
“there ’s really both French and Hungarian wine in
some of the flasks in the shed, but the others are
filled with Gértz’s chinking money.”

With that the dean stopped short in the middle

CAPTURE GORTZ! 253

of the floor, and smote his hands together, while
Bomgarten, rapping and drumming on the corner
of the table, shook his head and never ceased ex-
claiming, “ We’re making a better haul here than
we ever could have dreamed.”

Pihlgren now returned into the dark to catch
more fish with the same lie that he had just used,
and soon all Gértz’s lackeys were shut up in the
room, with the exception of the valet, who was in
with his master. Pihlgren found him the hardest to
get on his lime-twig, but he relied on his skill and
stationed himself before the kitchen window, which
faced the courtyard.

It was raining in torrents, and he saw that the
girl who was cooking Gértz’s dinner shifted the
saucepans back and forth over the fire without
ever getting the strongest flames to heat as they
should. By great good fortune the valet soon came
out into the kitchen, but as he was mightily
haughty in all his ways, Pihlgren understood well
how to handle him, and went no further forward °
than to the open kitchen door.

“My good sir,” he began, bowing, “I would
humbly ask whether you will be so gracious as to
follow me across the court and speak a few words
with Colonel Bomgarten?”

“Why, it’s raining,” said the valet.

Pihlgren now no longer knew what device he
should trump up, but stood out in the deluge and

254 THE CHARLES MEN

stared. “My good sir,” he said at last, “it’s surely
something about His Excellency’s flasks.”

Thereupon the valet at once made haste to fol-
low him across the court, but when he came to the
room and saw the naked swords, he wished to turn.
He burst out in wrath at Pihlgren, but the latter,
now no longer using the words “my good sir,”
went close up to him and said, “ Be quiet, will you?
I’ma remarkably honest man, and perhaps a finer,
a better, a braver—perhaps, too, a smarter—yes,
a better servant has never waited on a master.
That ’s enough!”

“A bragging groom, that’s what you are,” re-
torted the valet.

“Yes, the varlet is insufferable,” the dean said
of Pihlgren.

But Pihlgren had not meant to boast, but had
only said that of himself which was right and fair,
and Bomgarten, who. had seen what he was worth,
struck the valet on the mouth with the back of his
hand, and said aloud so that all heard it: “ Pihl-
gren is a much stauncher fellow than you, and if
you don’t keep good and still, I’ll beat you to a
jelly. —And now, worthy sirs, keep good watch and
ward over these chaps, so that they don’t slip out,
while we others get to business !”

Thereupon Pihlgren followed Bomgarten and
Bjornschidld across the court, and they saw that

CAPTURE GORTZ! 255

the light shone in the dean’s apartments, where
Gortz was sitting alone. A blue cloth was hung in
the window. The candle-light fell steady and quiet,
and no shadow moved on the cloth. The whole
deanery lay as still as if it were already late at night,
and the only sound was a subdued clatter, when the
maid now and then shifted the pans above the heat-
less flames.

Pihlgren thought of the many remarkable ad-
ventures which he had shared in his time, and it
seemed to him that this last was the most note-
worthy of all. Only now did he feel that his clothes
were wet through, and all warmth departed from
his body so suddenly that he began to freeze, and
his teeth chattered.

When they came into the entry, they stuck their
swords in the sheath and in that fashion went in
to Gortz.

“Good evening!” began Bomgarten.

G6rtz, who sat deep in thought with his spec-
tacles on, only moved his large nightcap without
lifting it off. There was a fire on the hearth, and
on the table burned two white wax candles.

Bomgarten stood in front of him in the middle
of the floor. “I order His Excellency, the privy
councillor, under arrest!”

“Whom? me?—Indeed!”

Gértz’s very fair and delicate countenance

256 THE CHARLES MEN

changed hue, he snapped his fingers, and moved
his lips: “ King Charles is dead! Does the king still
live?”

Bomgarten answered, “ When I last spoke with
him, he lived.”

But Goértz, who was no less crafty than Pihl-
gren himself, stuck to his inquiry and asked: “ Did
you see him?” To this Bomgarten replied: “I saw
him as recently as when he sat, shy and embar-
rassed in times of good fortune, in conquered Thorn
with his hat in his hand.”

“T mean,” said Gortz, “when did you see him
last?”

To which Bomgarten replied, “In the dusk of
misfortune, when he never took off his hat except
before his hungry army or at divine service.”’

Gortz then cried, full of foreboding: “The king
of the Swedes is dead.”

Bomgarten stepped forward to the table, tied to-
gether a large red handkerchief full of documents,
which Gortz had just been reading, and handed it
to Pihlgren at the door. Bjérnschidld, meanwhile,
was seeking for Gortz’s sword, which he found at
last behind him on the bench where he sat and
gave to Pihlgren. It was a sword witha large infan-
try hilt of pure ducat gold.

As soon now as Gortz had risen from the bench,
Bomgarten began to examine his clothes to see if
he had any papers, any vials of poison, or any

CAPTURE GORTZ! 257

sleeping-powder for the watch, because he was of
opinion that such a bird would need to be caged
with great precaution, if it was not to fly straight
off again. He turned his breeches pockets inside
out, but found nothing except a gold penknife case,
an antiquated dollar in specie, and one and a half
ducats. But when Gortz came to the fireplace, he
suddenly tore a document from under his clothes
and threw it on the fire, where it would at once
have become ashes, had not Pihlgren plucked it
from the embers with such haste that he burned his
fingers.

“Stop, fellow!” thundered Bomgarten, seizing
Gortz by the shoulder. “You are no longer he
whom you have been. You were my worst perse-
cutor in the realm of Sweden, but now I am your
master.”

Gortz,as he came to hear so many unaccustomed
compliments, bit his teeth, changed color many
times, and looked straight at Bomgarten with his
single eye. The dean, who was host in the house,
then came to the threshold and, touched by the
transformation he beheld, addressed Gortz in amild
voice: “Your Excellency is a denier of God and
cares far more for the heathen philosophers than
for the unhappy Swedes, whose souls may be lik-
ened to a sword laid on an open Bible. But in the |
hour of misfortune it becomes every servant of the
church to offer his consolation.”

258 THE CHARLES MEN ©

G6rtz now straightened himself up to his full
height and stood proudly, as he said, “If I do not
believe in God, yet I believe both in the Bible and
the sword. Ye rancorous and simple-witted Swedes,
little do ye understand what I believe or do not
believe.”

The dean said: “Your Excellency has built on
the favor of his earthly prince.”

Gortz replied: “ He who lived ina strange coun-
try far from your absurdities has honored me with
his favor. If you would preach, my worthy dean,
pray wait until Sunday! Man is in life a bubble,
in death food for worms.”

“Then I have nothing further to say,” declared
the dean, “but will only inquire whether Your Ex-
cellency graciously commands that dinner shall be

brought in.”
_ Bomgarten interposed and answered curtly in
Gortz’s stead: “Yes, I am right hungry. Have the
dinner brought in at once!”

When the dishes, which might well have be-
seemed thegreatest king, had been Jaid onthe board,
Bomgarten and Bjérnschidld sat downto table with
G6rtz, but, not venturing to let him use a knife,
they cut his food for him on his plate. The word
“Excellency,” which had been used in the plain at
Raballse, had been forgotten, and Bomgarten in-
quired: “The privy councillor has perhaps some
wine with him, too?”

CAPTURE GORTZ! 259

Gortz became wholly dismayed: “ Wine! Yes.
Both red and white. Both—yes.”’

Bomgarten whispered to Pihlgren in Finnish,
which no one else understood, that he should fetch
in a couple of flasks of wine and likewise flasks with
Gortz’s money, but aloud he said: “ Fetch in red
wine and white. A glass of Volnay will taste splen-
didly —and then a little golden with our sweet-
meats.”

The dean and Pihlgren now helped to lift in the
heavy and odd-looking flasks. They set them on
the floor by the table, and Bomgarten beckoned
to Pihlgren, “ My good Pihlgren, be sure to give
me a good glass of wine, because I surely need it,
and have surely deserved it, too, most particularly
to-day. And you shall take a glass yourself as well,
comrade, for without you I hardly know how things
would ‘have gone.”

Gortz, who sat at the end of the table without
knife or fork, could touch nothing, although the
best tidbits had been cut up on his plate. Then
Bomgarten again beckoned Pihlgren from the door.
“« My good Pihlgren, come here with you, sit down,
and eat. You are probably as hungry as I, and I
know you have n’t had a blessed bite since Tor-
pum. Let’s see. Petit-salé a la choucroute—doesn’t
that fall in with monsieur’s taste? Or a piece of
capon? Or a prune tart? Oh, that’s excellent. A
regular little French souper for starved lads such as

, 260 THE CHARLES MEN

we. Notfor two years have I eaten as well. Dear me,
don’t stand there scraping and shilly-shallying!”

‘T must very humbly decline such an immense
honor,” answered Pihlgren, who saw that Bom-
garten spoke in that way only to humiliate the
haughty Gortz yet further. “To boast or to make
much of myself is not at all in my mind, but the
colonel surely knows that in a question of behav-
iour and knowing his place, there is no lackey in all
the army —no, not in the whole of Sweden—no,
notin...

“Hold your gabble, you arch-prater, and sit
down!” yelled Bomgarten.

When Pihlgren, too, was treated in such a fash-
ion, he found nothing else for it than to obey, but
he smiled contentedly in spirit, for he had often
before in his time waited upon Gortz and never
had he dreamed that he himself would come to sit
at table with such a potentate.

On account of his cousinship, Bjérnschiold at
the beginning was somewhat abashed and silent,
but as none of them had had anything to eat for
two whole days, they ate as much as they needed
of the delicate fare, and straightway drank to their
hearts’ content. Gértz said not a single word, but
stared at Pihlgren, who had tied a cloth about his
injured hand. However, Pihlgren was little incon-
venienced and knew very well how to manage
knife and fork and how to hold his glass.

>

CAPTURE GORTZ! 261

At last Bomgarten gave around the sweetmeats,
and Gértz took two or three pieces, one of which
he dropped in a glass of Hungarian wine which
stood before him; but when he took the morsel into
his mouth, he had to lay it on the plate again. He
thereupon drank half the glass. That was all he
consumed that evening.

Bomgarten then got Pihlgren to open the heavi-
est of the flasks and took it in his hands. “My
dearest sirs,” he said, “we must not forget now at
the conclusion to thank the privy councillor for
this capital French meal. This which I have here
is a heavy wine that gives a big appetite and easily
goes to the head, but in our impoverished and un-
fortunate land it is now unusually rare, and is re-
puted to be assuredly the favorite drink and daily
medicine of our privy councillor.”

While he spoke in this strain, he began to tilt
the flagon, and all the bright ducats ran down into
the glass, glittering and clinking.

Gortz held his hands under the table without
answering a single word and looked straight in
front of him into the darkness between the two
candles. The dean still stood at the door, kneading
and rubbing his fingers, and the maid who had
helped Gé6rtz’s valet to set the table stood behind
him in the entry with pinned-up skirts.

Bjornschidld, however, could no longer remain
sitting pale and silent, but sprang up and grew red

262 THE CHARLES MEN

to the roots of’ his hair. He seized all the glasses,
and threw their contents back into the flagon. “ Ac-
cursed be that wine,” he cried, “and accursed each
and all that taste of such a drink!”

« Amen, amen!” said the dean.

With that they all rose from the table, and the
dean took one of the candles and lighted Gortz
to the room where he was to lie. Last of all came
Pihlgren with the costly sword and the papers |
wrapped up in the silken handkerchief.

Gortz walked with a lordly air, but threw his
wig and vest on an armchair and was then about to
lay himself in his spurred boots on the dean’s bed,
which was covered with the fairest bed-clothes.
With that the dean was ill-pleased and he there-
fore made as if he would pull off the boots, but
Bomgarten prevented him, saying, “You are too
‘just a man, my worthy dean, to pull off such dirty
boots. But if you will have your maid come here
and pull, she is welcome to.”

“Fetch in my valet!” ordered Gortz.

“T am an honorable Swede,” answered Bom-
garten, “and can get along without either valet or
groom, if need be. You may thank the dean that
he will allow his maid to pull off your boots.”

The girl came at once, but could not get off the
boots, and Bomgarten again forbade both Pihlgren
and the dean to help her. Finally she had to sit
down on them and ride them off, but that went

CAPTURE GORTZ! 263

very slowly, and Gértz grimaced and looked more
and more savage, but again did not sayasingle word.

“If the privy councillor would now like to read
his evening prayers and give thanks for a good
day’s work, there is nothing to prevent,” said Bom-
garten, pushing to him on the coverlet one of the
heathenish Cartesian Latin books that he had come
upon among Gortz’s belongings. He, however, did
not touch the book, but only whispered very softly
to himself:

Le rideau descend. Fe sors,

je sors d'une grande tragédie,

le héros et sa belle patrie,

les amants malheureux, sont morts.
Allons nous coucher, ¢ est fini!
Allons nous coucher, c’est la nuit!

“Yes, now the game is ours,” said Bomgarten.
“Early in the morning the dean’s men shall help
the servants of the Crown to convey the man to
Uddevalla and then on with cavalry to Stockholm.
But before all else we must compose a report of
the affair and send it directly to-night to the head-
quarters in Norway. There is no one but Pihlgren
_ to whom I dare entrust the letter.”

“The colonel knows,” answered Pihlgren, “that
if ever a servant faithfully took upon himself every
difficulty, and honestly and discreetly, and perhaps
boldly as well—”’

264 THE CHARLES MEN

«Can no one get that self-righteous man to keep
quiet?” whispered Bjérnschidld.

But Bomgarten, who was more sagacious, winked
at Bjornschiéld and said, “Such another fellow as
you, Pihlgren,is n’t to be found. Get a horse now —
and good-by!”

Although Pihlgren was wet through and so tor-
tured and tender that he could hardly hold himself
up straight any longer, he now mounted again to
the saddle and rode back in the dark night to Nor-
way. Bomgarten afterwards received Gortz’s great
gold sword as a recompense for his trouble, and
Bjornschidld was given a horse with full equipment;
but Pihlgren, who, so to speak, had captured Gértz
and all his retinue, never got so much as a single

farthing.

A Hero's Funeral

N the gallows hill in the outskirts of Stock-

holm, a man stood outside the executioner’s
cottage in the winter twilight and tapped on the
window. When nobody answered, he turned about
in the direction of the city and listened with hand
to ear. Then he walked forward a stretch toward
the verge of the wood, where Gértz’s foreign ser-
vants stood with their spades, whispering.

“Good evening, comrades!”’ said he. “It’s only
Duval, the chief cook. Bring forward the lantern
without fear. The executioner is away. All men are
now gathered into Stockholm to behold His Maj-
esty’s funeral procession.”

One of the servants brought out the lighted lan-
tern from under his cloak and threw the light down
upon a coffin, which stood without a lid beside the
secretly opened grave. There upon the fir twigs,
which were still green, lay a corpse in black velvet
clothing with the severed head between the feet.

Duval shook his clenched hand toward the city
and muttered between his teeth, “Ye vengeful
Swedes! These, then, are the earthly remains of
the proud Baron Gortz, our gracious master. But
remember, remember, he went to the block like a
philosopher and a knight, shrugging his shoulders
at your bloody sentence. The tool ye broke asunder,
but the king who held it in his hand, him ye bear

266 THE CHARLES MEN

at this moment under a velvet canopy to his last
resting-place. Do ye suppose that his sleep will be
tranquil?”

“‘ Now the funeral knell is beginning,” said the
servants, threatening with their spades the city,
where the glow of rush-lights already tinged the
nocturnal heavens. “‘ Hark how vainly the bells are
calling down peace!”

Duval replied, “They cannot call down peace
upon a grave where men are still disputing. Last
night I disguised myself as a groom, went into a
tavern, and said to the people, ‘Throw stones on
the funeral pall to-morrow! Are not your bleeding -
woundsstill open? Didhe not bear the sword against
his own subjects? Shout his right name over the
funeral sledge, oppressor of the people that he is
— King Heartless, King Tempter-of-God, King
Dolt!’”

“‘ And what answer did the chief cook receive?”

«<<TDo you hate him, then?’ the men answered.
What, forsooth, was I, a foreigner, to say to that?
Is it not a wonder about this prince that nobody
can hate him? Two embittered men cannot meet
and find fault with him without beginning to doubt -
their own words when they separate; and the next
time they meet, they speak of him with bared heads.
Are we, then, fools ourselves? Thousands of men
are standing hushed along the streets to-night, but
there is not one who hates him. At the first threaten-

A HERO’S FUNERAL 267

ing word, they would gatherabout the funeral sledge
and defend it, without themselves rightly knowing
wherefore. Look you, comrades, we sometimes lay
aman in one scale and all our cunning in the other,
but yet we note that the beam stands as still as
ever. Do you know what that means? That means
that there is in this man a drop of the eternal right-
eousness, because that drop is heavier than gold and
lead, and we have no weights to weigh it. Though
we pile on all the offences we believe this man com-
mitted, the drop still lies bright on his forehead
—and the beam does not move. I spoke of the
funeral pall. Should I myself have the heart to
throw a stone on that pall? What I hated was the
severity of fate against my own unhappy master.”

The servants now took off their hats, and began
to sob, “Our poor unfortunate master! Who, then,
will ring the bell for his soul ?”

“Good brothers, it’s a sorry spectacle when the
skipper dies, and all the rats jump out to gnaw in
full daylight. We will now hide our master’s earthly
remains in a portmanteau, and so convey them with
us secretly to our country. In case of necessity we
must cut off the legs at the knee. Afterwards we
will cleanse his face and lay his orders on his breast
and bury him in the grave of his fathers. There will
then be found some pitying hand that will ring for
him the bell for unhappy sinners.”

While the servants of Gértz were weeping be-

268 THE CHARLES MEN

side their spades, the fallen king lay in the midst
of waxlights at the royal abode of Karlsberg. Like
the poorest of soldiers, he lay in a clean white shirt
of rough material, but on his head with its gray hair
rested a laurel wreath. The smile had even in death
become fixed on his lips, so that the teeth were
slightly visible.

A cushion with spices was laid over his face, and
when the coffin was closed, twelve weather-beaten
colonels carried it down the steps and set it on the
black-draped sledge under a canopy of royal vel-
vet. To the right of the head walked Gierta, and
thirty dark and solemn guardsmen surrounded the
sledge with drawn partizans. Close by, among
the long black cloaks of the court servants, old
Hultman still attended his master, as he had fol-
lowed him over the snows of the Ukraine and the
ash-strewn fields of Poltava. It seemed to him that
all that was holy and great in the world had got
its death-blow, and when the night-wind roared in
the leafless lindens, he recalled the hour when,
kneeling outside the barred chamber door, he had
heard the king as a boy recite his evening prayer.
Everything grew black before him, but at the top
of the funeral pall he recognized the crown of the
realm, which he had ever seen wave in the airabove
the head of the king amid the soldiers’ coats stained
with earth and blood in the trench.

When the funeral procession passed through the

A HERO’S FUNERAL 269

gate of Karlsberg, all the rush-lights along the
Drottninggata and the bridges as far as Riddarholm
had already been lighted, but the February night
brooded over the, city, starless and cloudy. Last
among the guardsmen marched a very young man.
His rosy face with its severe brow had such a re-
semblance to the picture of St. George in the Great
Church that his comrades called him among them-
selves Brother George. On the previous day he
had dined with Councillor Tessin and had heard
many whispers of the malcontents, so that he looked
about restlessly at the spectators.

They stand hushed, he thought. It must needs
- be so. It is an unfortunate whom we bear to the
grave, a solitary, abandoned by God and men—a
hero!
When the foremost heralds became visibleon the
Drottninggata, where the townsfolk on foot had
formed a hedge, the royal household stepped out
from Wrede’s house in long cloaks, led by Duben.
He walked as stiffly as when, at Bender, he drilled
the lackeys with muskets, but when he made out
in the distance the banner, against which the wind
torewith suchviolence that it nearly sank, he bowed
his head. He walked so stoopingly that his rela-
tives at the windows did not recognize him. After
this the knights and nobles stepped out from Cron-
hjelm’s house, and the crown marshal, Per Ribbing,
who went with difficulty down the slippery stone

270 THE CHARLES MEN

stairs, turned half round and said, “I am resigned
at being childless, for otherwise I should be think-
ing to-night of the sons fallen in battle who could
not steady my faltering arm.”

But when he recognized about him the families
which were thinned like a wood where every other
tree has fallen before the axe, he added very softly
as if to himself, “If I had had sons fallen in battle,
perhaps my lonely steps would feel less heavy. Dudce
et decorum est pro patria mori!”

The light shoneon folk in windowsand on church
towers, where the ringers bent forward out of the
open shutters. Step by step, the train moved on-
ward to the rumble of discordant drums and kettle-
drums, and the funeral sledge rocked in the snow.
Around North Bridge foamed the black waters of
the river, where once Little Karin’s betrothed lover
had been cast, sewed up ina sack, and where mud
covered the sunken barges and shallops that had
formerly anchored under the oaks at Agnefit. At
Riddarholm churchyard, where the hundred-men
of the land in the old days had paid fifty marks ster-
ling to get their burial-place under the flagging,
the newly raised life-guard was drawn up. By every
seventh man wasa dark vacancy with a taper, as if a
light were burning there for the fallen and missing.
The people whispered about it, but softly and sub-
duedly. No one wept, and no one threatened. All
the Swedes divined that thousands of years would

A HERO’S FUNERAL 271

gaze back at that night. They felt that now they
buried half of their own being.

The wondrous church, around which every age
has built its various temples to departed great men,
shone as at Christmas Morning Service, and from
the tower sounded the metal which before had swung
above the highest gallery in the Three Crowns.
Brother George, who had long since forgotten to
spy about over the mass of people, seized the near-
est courtier by the cloak.

“Never did I hear a tolling that affected me so.
There is pleading joy in every tone, as if it were
for a coronation. And perhaps it is. Does he not
return to his capital to-night after eighteen years?
Isn’t it the expected, the longed-for triumphal
march?”

“ And the victory?”

“The steadfastness of his will conquered on the
night at F redrikshall when God struck him down
dead.”

“That steadfastness he turned as a scourge
against us.”

“ Are not your eyes opened yet, so as to see that
it was our own secret will and desire which he pre-
served against our own indecision, like a banner
against a rebellious guard?”

It no longer seemed to Brother George that he
followed to the grave a solitary and deserted man.
He discerned that, when the hero lay fallen and

272 THE CHARLES MEN

the duel was ended, they who had suffered worst
beneath his inflexibility lifted him up on their
arms.

When Brother George stepped in through the
church door, he was blinded by the five hundred
wax candles which, borne by gilded figures, burned
in a pyramid in the choir. He no longer remem-
bered that it was a funeral ceremony. He thought
that the music played a Christmas song, that it was
the Christmas Service, that it was the Midwinter
Festival for home, for country, for the dead or
absent kinsmen. He thought of the fallen, of the
prisoners in Siberia, and of all that which had been.

On the black tablet to the right were described
in golden characters the nine years when fortune
had attended the Swedes, but on the tablet to the
left one might read of the nine years when fortune
had continually shrunk away. Here the last surviv-
ing warriors were now assembled.

The courtiers arranged themselves according
to their rank behind the illuminated shrine where
Magnus Ladulasand Karl Knutsson lay motionless
with their sceptres of stone. Hark to the clangor of
knightly squadrons and gay tournaments, hark to
the mournful murmur of the rushes at F oglevik!

The gallant Axel Roos and his friend Aberg,
who was now so ill and weak with gout and wounds
that he supported himself on a crutch, stood on the
oldest gravestone of the Vasa race. Behold the hot-

A HERO’S FUNERAL 273

headed lords, proud, honor-lusting, well-spoken,
quick to threaten and to offer their hands again!

Every slab in the floor, every tile in the wall,
was illuminated by sagas as lanterns by their flame.
How the cope-bells tinkle through the church,
when King Albrecht, his fingers in his beard
and his red-lashed eyes half shut, surrounded
by thick-legged, swaying brothers of the cowl,
speaks in German with the Swedish Lord Con-
stable !— But who comes in the doorway before the
banner with the leopards? It is Queen Cristina
of Denmark; and her servants, emaciated as skele-
tons, carry chests of garments, tapestries, goblets
of silver, and all the precious things that cannot
quiet hunger. Trumpet-blasts shake the windows.
Pale, her hands before her eyes, she mounts on the
highest of the chests and from the choir gazes up
at the city, where, like a spring flood of melted ice
and snow, Sten Sture’s army billows down with its
round morions—and all the while the windows
rattle.

The banner stood on that side of the choir where
the knight Karl Nilsson Farla fell transfixed in the
gray long ago with a fragment of the altar-rail in
his hand, but the crown was set on the other side,
where King Gésta gave Laurentius Petri the pas-
toral staff,and where the bones of Torkel Knutsson
rested. Hark to the song, hark to the murmur in
the wilds of Karelia, where the banner of the cross

274 THE CHARLES MEN

flutters over soothsayers and sorcerers and over the
blood-smeared gray-stone images of Jumala!

Along the aisle on both sides the partizans of the
guards were pointed at the floor under which the
pious father confessor of St. Birgitta slept. Sa/ve
regina! Behold the city of Jerusalem, where thy
penitent in pilgrim’s weeds hears the harp-notes of
the angels of heaven!

The heavy ring of footsteps and spurs struck
out echoes under the slab where G6ran Persson’s
uncanny blood was entombed with his sons. How
the crows of the gallows hill peck the hand of the
priest’s son which pushed the two royal brothers
away from each other!—and yet do they not sit
together in bliss? Gray of hair, gray as to his
hanging rags, the fool stands by the prison grating,
but back and forward through the castle chapel of
Stockholm goes John with ink on his nails and a
manuscript in his belt. He is alone, and it is night;
but the master musician sits in the gallery, and the
organ plays and plays.

- The white gleam of the wax candles shone over
the darkened, the almost black visages of the war-
riors,and abovein the broken plaster of the roof were
red, ominousstreaksas of scourge-blows ona human —
head. They were the old monkish writings,—self-
menaces, judgments, scarred upon the foreheads
of the Swedes. Six have been, are, and remain

A HERO’S FUNERAL 275

the causes of Sweden’s misfortunes: Self-interest,
treacherous hate, contempt of the laws, indiffer-
ence to the common good, short-sighted inclina-
tion toward strangers, obstinate envy of fellow
countrymen. — The last words glowed blood-red,
only the words about contempt of the laws had
faded and were almost wholly obliterated. Might
it be that some day all the words would be erased?

The candle-light made its way between the black
mourning tapestries to the banners and armorial
bearings above, to the blood-red horn of the Oxen-
stjernas and the blue lion of the Lewenhaupts.
There the dead listened to the flutes and kettle-
drums. Torstenson remembered when he sat on his
litter with his battle chart, and Banér when he rode
along the front with his bride, a child who looked
down at the pommel of her saddle in fear before
the glances of so many men.— And enveloped in
that swathing of cloth of gold, which women’s hands,
wet with inconsolable tears, had arranged for the
last time, lay their king with closed eyes, and in the
psalms he heard the mild rustle of the summer
wind over laurel woods. They all realized that to-
night once again a Swedish prince was descending
to their dwelling-places.

In the darkness before the church, where the
treasurer Rafelt scattered among the silent people
the memorial coins which had with difficulty been

276 THE CHARLES MEN

procured, Cronstedt’s field-pieces thundered, and
the powder smoke penetrated in through the win-
dows.

Thus nowwas ended the hero saga of the Charles
men, and every soul was conscious of a void that
nothing could fill. Before the doors the servants
already kindled their torches to light home the
court to the royal house.

Brother George stood with wide-open and
dreaming eyes. He moved his lips and, unheard
of others, whispered, “ May we celebrate his mem-
ory with torches on stormy winter nights! Where
have I seen an epitaph as great as that which our
beaten folk is now inscribing over him: He did
not make us fortunate, and yet we weep for him
as for no other.”

The guards presented arms.

The organ and flutes and kettledrums were now
silent. It became so still that the slightest rattle
of a weapon was audible. With harsh and choked
voices the warriors raised the last funeral psalm,
and slowly, heavily, step by step, the councillors
of state bore the coffin to the vault.

The stairway to the tomb of the Charleses de-
scended at the side of the choir. Golden sceptre in
hand, with golden crown, golden apple, golden key,
golden sword—so accoutred lay the tenth Charles, |
victorious and mighty. The eleventh lay without

A HERO’S FUNERAL 277

adornment. Behold the girls with wooden shoes
dancing at Mora, hear the quiet words of law and
right and harvest and peace!— Whither did they
depart hence, those golden days? Where now were
the locked barns?

In the same space where the coffin was now set
down, Pater Hieronymus, bare-footed and followed
by a long row of the gray monks, used aforetime to
bow before the altar of St. Francis. Early before the
dawn, ever faithful and ever quiet, he invariably
came through the icy church. But one morning he
remained away. He had gone to Rome and set the
papal crown on his head. Hark to the silvern clang
of the Lateran’s bells, hark to the rustling palm
boughs of the congregation!

In such wise had tradition already hallowed this
chamber. Where the altar candles had burned be-
fore St. Francis, who preached evangelical poverty
and renunciation, and who had the earth and the
cave for his couch, there now slept the lord and
monarch who had made the poverty of the Swedes
their adornment. Oh, ye shades of what has long
passed away, of what has descended unto the earth,
of what sleeps in the starlight! Ye echoes ofa saga
sung! Do ye hear? Do ye hear who it is that knocks
to-night at your dwellings? It is a king— that ye
divine. But did ye note the yearning with which he
has long been knocking? Saga, he loved it—that

278 THE CHARLES MEN
which sleeps under the great stars. He longed to
become the echo of a sung saga.

Two slabs were lifted by their iron rings, and the
grave was closed.

The Ship

UCIDLY the summer night spread its shadow,

but far out among the islands at Kors6 gath-

ered armed country-folk and islanders from Sand-
hamn and Haro.

A winter had snowed itself away since the Sun-
day when in Tistedal the muskets had been pre-
sented the last time before the king. Many of the
oldest Charles men and those most broken with
gout, had already retired with their scanty pensions
to their little farms, where they knotted their fish-
nets by the window or looked over their old dia-
ries. Serious, God-fearing, respected, they met at
the church on Sundays; and generals and colonels,
without regard to rank, embraced with moist eyes
their brothers in arms of the long campaigns. The
terms of peace had not yet been signed. When the
cannon of the Russian fleet thundered once more
among the islands, the veterans buttoned up their
worn blue coats as tightly as before and unbuckled
the broadsword from the bed-post. Then they each
and all went out to defend hearth and home to the
uttermost.

Captain Resslof had appointed himself leader of
the band that was assembled on Kors6. Already
weary of his room, he stood among the people with
a confident bearing. His razor and scissors had
rested all winter in the drawer. His hair was so

280 THE CHARLES MEN

long, his beard was so white,and it was such a plea-
sure to look at him, that even the sullen and heavy
islanders brightened whenever he turned toward
them.

After the day’s tempest, the surf was still rolling
against the rocky seaward shore of the island, but
in the hollow by the shining sound hardly a puff
of air brushed over the pines under‘which the men,
restless and expectant, counted the distant cannon-
shots. |

With shaking voice a pastor’s son from Djuré
stepped forward. He held his cap squeezed in his
hand, and his pallor was grayer than ever in the
nocturnal light:

“Captain, you have sent the sloops that brought
us hereto the inner islands to fetch more people. Two
leaky rowboats are all we have to save ourselves in, .
if the enemy lands, but we aremore than forty men.
Conceal the truth no more! Our little band can no
longer accomplish anything here. We have heard,
of course, that Rika Fuchs with his Sodermanland-
ers has already marched to Sédra Stak to beat the
enemy or lose his life,and that Diker with his Dale-
carlians and Westmanlanders is following soon
after; but we know, too, that at Boo and along all
the coast of Varmdon and Sédertorn there will soon
be nothing to look for on the cliffs but black ashes.
Forgive my words, but we have all heardthat Trosa
is sacked, and that Nyk6ping is burning, so that

THE SHIP 281

the glare is visible away up toward Stockholm. In
Norrk6ping Swedish peasants and soldiers plunder
the wagons of the fugitives in the open street. At
Vikboland the peasantry give signals to the Rus-
sian ships with sheets and bleached cloth to show
that they surrender and swear loyalty to the czar,
and at Marstrand Tordenskjold has hoisted the
Danish flag. Whichever way we look, the air is full
of conflagration and smoke. It’s all over with Swe-
den, our home, our home.”

“T conceal nothing,” answered Resslof, “but
rely upon it that the Swedes always get help at the
eleventh hour. They seldom get it sooner.”

The pastor’s son smiled with a sneer, as he de-
parted: “It is night now, and the tenth hour has
just gone by. Let us be hopeful!”

The men pressed close about Ressléf in great
uneasiness. The cannon-shots were still thunder-
ing, but more faintly and farther out to sea.

Then the pale son of the pastor came once more
across the rocks. He stumbled and slipped. He
leaped. He pressed in among the crowd without
letting himself be checked.

“ Here ’s an uncanny thing, good people. Out at
sea there a ship is coming with a lighted lantern in
the bow, but with neither mast, nor sail, nor oars.
And not a man can I make out on deck. Nobody
is standing at the tiller. But the ship goes on just
the same, though it moves slowly, slowly.”

282 THE CHARLES MEN

A murmur of superstitious fear ran through the
peasants, but the taciturn islanders followed Ress-
l6f to the topmost cliff by the inlet. They thought
that the pastor’s son had seen the ship in a vision,
for they could not discover anything on the wide
sea, around which glowed the nocturnal heavens.

Suddenly they all uttered a cry of astonishment,
and the others, who followed them at a distance,
began once more to murmur. From behind the
rugged cape there drove forward heavily and slowly
in the surf a brigantine, without sail and rigging,
but with port-holes painted white, and at the stern
under the lighted lantern stood a golden lion with
paws raised as if to spring.

“That’s a ghost ship,” muttered the peasants.

Hesitatingly Ressl6f ordered some of the brav-
est islanders to take their muskets and accompany
him in one of the rowboats,

They neared the ship cautiously with noiseless
strokes and raised muskets, but when they hailed,
they received no answer. Some of the small panes
in the after cabin gleamed, but that was the reflec-
tion of the night, and soon they all became equally
dark. Only the bow light burned and flickered.

“God have mercy on us!” whispered Ressl6f,
pointing to the long strip of cloth which trailed in
the water from the stern. “There are our colors.
And now I can read the name. This is the brigan-
tine Swedish Lion!”

THE SHIP 283

“Yes, yes, it’s the brigantine Swedish Lion,” mur-
mured the peasants on the island.

They shipped the oars. They lay to by the helm
and climbed up ona rope of the fallen rigging, but
when they entered the empty cabin througha broken
window, they had to feel their way forward in the
darkness with their hands.

“Ts n’t there a crew of a single man here?” in-
quired Ressl6f, raising his voice. No one answered,
however, but all remained as quiet as before.

He then shoved up the hatch to the deck. Ship
rats ran freely back and forth over the planks, but
along the gunwales on both sides lay pale and mo-
tionless sailors, who had fallen at their post. He

went from man to man, bending down to convince
himself that they were all dead.

Thereupon he said to his followers, “The elev-
enth hour is come. Bring the people on board
now and make the two rowboats fast at the stern,
before the surf and current drive the brigantine
ashore. We can both bring ourselves safe to the
inner islands and salvage a vessel of the Crown
that has gone bravely through its fight.”

The old man went off across the deck and sat
down at the highest point of the stern, alone and
apart from the others.

As soon as the people had been conveyed on
board, they towed the brigantine in between the
islands. Under the softly gliding prow the bays

284 THE CHARLES MEN

and sounds, illumined by the summer night, re-
flected the golden lion.

The reports of the cannon no longer rolled in
from the sea. More slowly than a broken veteran
proceeding to his cottage on a crutch, the ship
glided between the rocky islets. Women and chil-
dren, who had hidden there under bushes and roots
of trees, stepped out of their concealment. Joyful
at hearing the words of their mother tongue from
the deck, they flocked upon the beaches and piers
with countless importunate questions.

“This is the Swedish Lion coming back from the
fight,” answered those on board.

With that the old Charles man by the flagstaff
roused himself from his melancholy and stood up.

“Tt is more than that. Give me your hands!”
he said to the younger men, drawing them close
to him. “ Hats off, good people, hats off! This de-
vastated ship is like Sweden, who conceals herself
behind her islands with her last troops and her
dead. How the prisoners longed for her, those who
have gone hundreds of miles away beside the rivers
of Siberia! Lonely, in disguise, they stood on the
deck of their whale-boat with the illimitable ex-
panse of the Arctic Ocean before their sight, call-
ing upon God every hour in their anguish that He
should not quench the flame of their life till they
were under the roof of their home. The roof of their

THE SHIP 285

home? It lies charred upon the ground. Beaten,
beaten is our people, divided is our empire, and
on our coasts the ruins are smoking. O inscruta-
ble, eternal God, will the dawn never come? —
Be silent, be silent, good people: the dawn is
coming. The captives:in Siberian cities, as they
sit dumbly at their handiwork, shall one morning
leap up and see in the square a rider waving a
white flag as a sign that peace has been declared.
Thirsty mouths shall drink from Frederick’s and
Ulrica’s gold-rimmed goblets, and the Christmas
board shall again be spread by women who are not
in mourning. Yet again the hay shall diffuse its
fragrance in Sweden. The church bells shall ring.
For a whole year they shall ring every noontide
- for peace—and for the fallen. Where, indeed, are
the old battalions with Grothusen’s drum and the
banners of Turkish silk? And he who held us
together in the great strife and never would be-
lieve the sign that God had forsaken us, he in whose
heroic nature all our yearning was concealed, —
where does he dwell? Ask the children that sing.
Alas! they go hence one by one, the old brothers
in arms. Wherever we fare through the country,
walking or by post-chaise, we shall recognize in the
mists of night the small white churches where eight
or ten strong sons have laid the slabs above their
graves. And where does there blossom in an alien
land a field so remote that we may not sit down

286 THE CHARLES MEN

on the sward and whisper: ‘Is this perchance the
place where one of ours, one who fought and bled,
is slumbering ?’ Intheir poor garments they loitered
a short while before us by the bivouac fire,and then
went away and fell. Such they were. So I recall
them. So, too, they live in memory and say amid
a grateful land: ‘ Beloved be the people that in the
decline of their greatness made their poverty to be
revered before the world!’”

THE END

PUBLICATIONS OF
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION

COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATIONS

WILL1aM Henry SCHOFIELD, Professor of Comparative Literature in
Harvard University, Chairman

WILLIAM WITHERLE LawreENcz, Professor of English in Columbia
University

CHARLES S. PeTerson, Publisher, Chicago
Henry Gopparp Lzacu, Secretary of the Foundation

SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS

I. Comedies by Holberg: Feppe of the Hill, The Politi-
cal Tinker, Erasmus Montanus
Translated by Oscar James CaMpBELL, Jr., and Freperic SCHENCK

II. Poems by Tegnér: The Children of the Lord’s Sup-
per and Frithiof’s Saga

Translated by Henry WapswortH Loncrettow and W. Lew-
ERY BLackLey

III. Poems and Songs by Bjérnstjerne Bjérnson
Translated in the original metres, with an Introduction and Notes,
by Artour Huppert Patmer

IV. Master Olof by August Strindberg

An historical play, translated, with an Introduction, by Epwin
ByORKMAN

V. The Prose Edda by Snorré Sturluson

Translated from old Icelandic, with an Introduction and Notes,
by Artur GitcurisT Bropgeur

VI. Modern Icelandic Plays by Féhann Sigurjénsson:
Eyvind of the Hills and The Hraun Farm

Translated by Hennince Kroun ScHANCHE

VII. Marie Grubbe: A Lady of the Seventeenth Cen-
tury by “Ff. P. Facobsen

An historical romance, translated, with an Introduction, by Hanna
Astrrup Larsen

VIII. Arnijot Gelline by Bjarnstjerne Bjérnson

A Norse epic, translated by Wittiam Morton Payne

IX. Anthology of Swedish Lyrics, from 1750 to 1915
Selections from the greatest of Swedish lyrists, translated by
Cartes WuartTon Stork

X & XI. Gasta Berling’s Saga by Selma Lagerlof
The English translation of Litt Tupeer, completed and care-
fully edited

XII. Sara Videbeck (Det gar an), and The Chapel, by
C.F. L. Almquist

A Sentimental Journey with a practical ending, and the Tale of
a Curate, translated, with an Introduction, by Apotex Burnett
BENSON

XIII. Niels Lyhne by ¥. P. ¥acobsen

A psychological novel, translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen

XIV. The Family at Gilje: A Domestic Story of the
Forties, by Fonas Lie

Translated by Samuet Corrin Eastman, with an Introduction by
Junius Emm Otson

XV & XVI. The Charles Men by Verner von Het
denstam

Tales from the exploits of Charles XII, translated by Cuares
Wuarrton Stork, with an Introduction by Freprix Bééx

Price $2.00 each

THE SCANDINAVIAN MONOGRAPHS
I. The Voyages of the Norsemen to America

A complete exposition, with illustrations and maps, by WitLt1am
Hovcaarp

Price $4.00

Il. Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Brit-
ain during the Eighteenth Century

A comparative study, by Sicurp Bernarp Hustvept

Price $3.00
III. The King’s Mirror

A famous treatise, translated from the Norwegian of the Thir-
teenth Century, with an Historical Introduction, by Laurence
Marcettus Larson

Price $3.00
IV. The Heroic Legends of Denmark

Revised and expanded for this edition by the author, the late AxEL
Oxrik, in collaboration with the translator, Lez M. Hotianper

Price $5.00

In Preparation
V. A Heéstory of Scandinavian Art

By Cart G. Laurin of Sweden, Emit Hannover of Denmark,
and Jens Tuus of Norway ; with a foreword by Curistian Brin-
TON

THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW

An Illustrated Magazine, presenting the progress
of life and literature in Sweden, Denmark, and
Norway

Price $2.00 a year

For information regarding the above publications, address
the
SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN
FouNDATION

25 West 45th Street, New York City

UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY

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