The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (35 page)

My master was a printer. I was a new art, being only thirty or
forty years old, and almost unknown in Austria. Very few persons in our secluded region had ever seen a printed page, few had any
very clear idea about the art of printing, and perhaps still fewer had
any curiosity concerning it or felt any interest in it. Yet we had to
conduct our business with some degree of privacy, on account of
the Church. The Church was opposed to the cheapening of books
and the indiscriminate dissemination of knowledge. Our villagers
did not trouble themselves about our work, and had no commerce
in it; we published nothing there, and printed nothing that they
could have read, they being ignorant of abstruse sciences and the
dead languages.

We were a mixed family. My master, Heinrich Stein, was portly,
and of a grave and dignified carriage, with a large and benevolent
face and calm deep eyes-a patient man whose temper could stand
much before it broke. His head was bald, with a valance of silky
white hair hanging around it, his face was clean shaven, his raiment was good and fine, but not rich. He was a scholar, and a
dreamer or a thinker, and loved learning and study, and would have
submerged his mind all the days and nights in his books and been
pleasantly and peacefully unconscious of his surroundings, if God
had been willing. His complexion was younger than his hair; he
was four or five years short of sixty.

A large part of his surroundings consisted of his wife. She was
well along in life, and was long and lean and flat-breasted, and had
an active and vicious tongue and a diligent and devilish spirit, and
more religion than was good for her, considering the quality of it.
She hungered for money, and believed there was a treasure hid in
the black deeps of the castle somewhere; and between fretting and
sweating about that and trying to bring sinners nearer to God when
any fell in her way she was able to fill up her time and save her life
from getting uninteresting and her soul from getting mouldy.
There was old tradition for the treasure, and the word of Balthasar
Hoffman thereto. He had come from a long way off, and had
brought a great reputation with him, which he concealed in our
family the best he could, for he had no more ambition to be burnt
by the Church than another. He lived with us on light salary and
board, and worked the constellations for the treasure. He had an easy berth and was not likely to lose his job if the constellations
held out, for it was Frau Stein that hired him; and her faith in him,
as in all things she had at heart, was of the staying kind. Inside the
walls, where was safety, he clothed himself as Egyptians and magicians should, and moved stately, robed in black velvet starred and
mooned and cometed and sun'd with the symbols of his trade done
in silver, and on his head a conical tower with like symbols glinting
from it. When he at intervals went outside he left his business suit
behind, with good discretion, and went dressed like anybody else
and looking the Christian with such cunning art that St. Peter
would have let him in quite as a matter of course, and probably
asked him to take something. Very naturally we were all afraid of
him-abjectly so, I suppose I may say-though Ernest Wasserman
professed that he wasn't. Not that he did it publicly; no, he didn't;
for, with all his talk, Ernest Wasserman had a judgment in choosing the right place for it that never forsook him. He wasn't even
afraid of ghosts, if you let him tell it; and not only that but didn't
believe in them. That is to say, he said he didn't believe in them.
The truth is, he would say any foolish thing that he thought would
make him conspicuous.

To return to Frau Stein. This masterly devil was the master's
second wife, and before that she had been the widow Vogel. She
had brought into the family a young thing by her first marriage,
and this girl was now seventeen and a blister, so to speak; for she
was a second edition of her mother-just plain galley-proof, neither
revised nor corrected, full of turned letters, wrong fonts, outs and
doubles, as we say in the printing-shop-in a word, pi, if you want
to put it remorselessly strong and yet not strain the facts. Yet if it
ever would be fair to strain facts it would be fair in her case, for she
was not loath to strain them herself when so minded. Moses Haas
said that whenever she took up an en-quad fact, just watch her and
you would see her try to cram it in where there wasn't breathingroom for a 4-m space; and she'd do it, too, if she had to take the
sheep-foot to it. Isn't it neat! Doesn't it describe it to a dot? Well, he
could say such things, Moses could-as malicious a devil as we had
on the place, but as bright as a lightning-bug and as sudden, when he was in the humor. He had a talent for getting himself hated, and
always had it out at usury. That daughter kept the name she was
born to-Maria Vogel; it was her mother's preference and her own.
Both were proud of it, without any reason, except reasons which
they invented, themselves, from time to time, as a market offered.
Some of the Vogels may have been distinguished, by not getting
hanged, Moses thought, but no one attached much importance to
what the mother and daughter claimed for them. Maria had plenty
of energy and vivacity and tongue, and was shapely enough but not
pretty, barring her eyes, which had all kinds of fire in them,
according to the mood of the moment-opal-fire, fox-fire, hellfire,
and the rest. She hadn't any fear, broadly speaking. Perhaps she
had none at all, except for Satan, and ghosts, and witches and the
priest and the magician, and a sort of fear of God in the dark, and
of the lightning when she had been blaspheming and hadn't time
to get in ayes enough to square up and cash-in. She despised
Marget Regen, the master's niece, along with Marget's mother,
Frau Regen, who was the master's sister and a dependent and
bedridden widow. She loved Gustav Fischer, the big and blonde
and handsome and good-hearted journeyman, and detested the rest
of the tribe impartially, I think. Gustav did not reciprocate.

Marget Regen was Maria's age-seventeen. She was lithe and
graceful and trim-built as a fish, and she was a blue-eyed blonde,
and soft and sweet and innocent and shrinking and winning and
gentle and beautiful; just a vision for the eyes, worshipful, adorable, enchanting; but that wasn't the hive for her. She was a kitten
in a menagerie.

She was a second edition of what her mother had been at her
age; but struck from the standing forms and needing no revising, as
one says in the printing-shop. That poor meek mother! yonder she
had lain, partially paralysed, ever since her brother my master had
brought her eagerly there a dear and lovely young widow with her
little child fifteen years before; the pair had been welcome, and had
forgotten their poverty and poor-relation estate and been happy
during three whole years. Then came the new wife with her
five-year brat, and a change began. The new wife was never able to root out the master's love for his sister, nor to drive sister and child
from under the roof, but she accomplished the rest: as soon as she
had gotten her lord properly trained to harness, she shortened his
visits to his sister and made them infrequent. But she made up for
this by going frequently herself and roasting the widow, as the
saying is.

Next was old Katrina. She was cook and housekeeper; her forbears had served the master's people and none else for three or four
generations; she was sixty, and had served the master all his life,
from the time when she was a little girl and he was a swaddled
baby. She was erect, straight, six feet high, with the port and stride
of a soldier; she was independent and masterful, and her fears were
limited to the supernatural. She believed she could whip anybody
on the place, and would have considered an invitation a favor. As
far as her allegiance stretched, she paid it with affection and reverence, but it did not extend beyond "her family"-the master, his
sister, and Marget. She regarded Frau Vogel and Maria as aliens
and intruders, and was frank about saying so.

She had under her two strapping young wenches-Sara and
Duffles (a nickname), and a manservant, Jacob, and a porter, Fritz.

Next, we have the printing force.

Adam Binks, sixty years old, learned bachelor, proofreader, poor,
disappointed, surly.

Hans Katzenyammer, 36, printer, huge, strong, freckled, redheaded, rough. When drunk, quarrelsome. Drunk when opportunity offered.

Moses Haas, 28, printer; a looker-out for himself; liable to say
acid things about people and to people; take him all around, not a
pleasant character.

Barty Langhein, 15; cripple; general-utility lad; sunny spirit;
affectionate; could play the fiddle.

Ernest Wasserman, 17, apprentice; braggart, malicious, hateful,
coward, liar, cruel, underhanded, treacherous. He and Moses had a
sort of half fondness for each other, which was natural, they having
one or more traits in common, down among the lower grades of
traits.

Gustav Fischer, 27, printer; large, well built, shapely and muscular; quiet, brave, kindly, a good disposition, just and fair; a slow
temper to ignite, but a reliable burner when well going. He was
about as much out of place as was Marget. He was the best man of
them all, and deserved to be in better company.

Last of all comes August Feldner, 16, 'prentice. This is myself.

OF SEVERAL conveniences there was no lack; among them,
fire-wood and room. There was no end of room, we had it to waste.
Big or little chambers for all-suit yourself, and change when you
liked. For a kitchen we used a spacious room which was high up
over the massive and frowning gateway of the castle and looked
down the woody steeps and southward over the receding plain.

It opened into a great room with the same outlook, and this we
used as dining room, drinking room, quarreling room-in a word,
family room. Above its vast fire-place, which was flanked with
fluted columns, rose the wide granite mantel, heavily carved, to the
high ceiling. With a cart-load of logs blazing here within and a
snow-tempest howling and whirling outside, it was a heaven of a
place for comfort and contentment and cosiness, and the exchange
of injurious personalities. Especially after supper, with the lamps
going and the day's work done. It was not the tribe's custom to
hurry to bed.

The apartments occupied by the Steins were beyond this room to
the east, on the same front; those occupied by Frau Regen and
Marget were on the same front also, but to the west, beyond the
kitchen. The rooms of the rest of the herd were on the same floor,
but on the other side of the principal great interior court-away
over in the north front, which rose high in air above precipice and
river.

The printing-shop was remote, and hidden in an upper section of
a round tower. Visitors were not wanted there; and if they had tried to hunt their way to it without a guide they would have concluded
to give it up and call another time before they got through.

One cold day, when the noon meal was about finished, a most
forlorn looking youth, apparently sixteen or seventeen years old,
appeared in the door, and stopped there, timid and humble, venturing no further. His clothes were coarse and old, ragged, and lightly
powdered with snow, and for shoes he had nothing but some old
serge remnants wrapped about his feet and ancles and tied with
strings. The war of talk stopped at once and all eyes were turned
upon the apparition; those of the master, and Marget, and Gustav
Fischer, and Barty Langbein, in pity and kindness, those of Frau
Stein and the rest in varying shades of contempt and hostility.

"What do you want here?" said the Frau, sharply.

The youth seemed to wince under that. He did not raise his
head, but with eyes still bent upon the floor and shyly fumbling his
ruin of a cap which he had removed from his head, answered
meekly-

"I am friendless, gracious lady, and am so-so hungry!"

"So hungry, are you?"-mimicking him. "Who invited you?
How did you get in? Take yourself out of this!"

She half rose, as if minded to help him out with her hands.
Marget started to rise at the same moment, with her plate in her
hands and an appeal on her lips: "May I, madam?"

"No! Sit down!" commanded the Frau. The master, his face all
pity, had opened his lips-no doubt to say the kind word-but he
closed them now, discouraged. Old Katrina emerged from the
kitchen, and stood towering in the door. She took in the situation,
and just as the boy was turning sorrowfully away, she hailed him:

"Come back, child, there's room in my kitchen, and plenty to eat,
too!„

"Shut your mouth you hussy, and mind your own affairs and
keep to your own place!" screamed the Frau, rising and turning
toward Katrina, who, seeing that the boy was afraid to move, was
coming to fetch him. Katrina, answering no word, came striding on.
"Command her, Heinrich Stein! will you allow your own wife to be
defied by a servant?"

The master said "It isn't the first time," and did not seem ungratified.

Katrina came on, undisturbed; she swung unheeding past her
mistress, took the boy by the hand, and led him back to her fortress,
saying, as she crossed its threshold,

"If any of you wants this boy, you come and get him, that's all!"

Apparently no one wanted him at that expense, so no one followed. The talk opened up briskly, straightway. Frau Stein wanted
the boy turned out as soon as might be; she was willing he should
be fed, if he was so hungry as he had said he was, which was
probably a lie, for he had the look of a liar, she said, but shelter he
could have none, for in her opinion he had the look of a murderer
and a thief; and she asked Maria if it wasn't so. Maria confirmed it,
and then the Frau asked for the general table's judgment. Opinions
came freely: negatives from the master and from Marget and
Fischer, affirmatives from the rest; and then war broke out. Presently, as one could easily see, the master was beginning to lose
patience. He was likely to assert himself when that sign appeared.
He suddenly broke in upon the wrangle, and said,