Lay Down Your Arms 59

Lay Down Your Arms 59

Next day the monster died himself, and another man had to take up his

office--at that time the most laborious in the place. The post brought

nothing but sorrow--news from all quarters of the ravages of the pest;

and love letters--letters to remain for ever unanswered--from Prince

Henry, who knew nothing of what was going on. To Conrad I had sent a

single line to prepare him for the awful event--“Lilly very ill”. He

could not come immediately, the service detained him. It was not till

the fourth day that the poor fellow rushed into the house.

 

“Lilly!” he cried. “Is it true?” He had heard of the misfortune as he

was on the way.

 

We said yes.

 

He remained unnaturally still and tearless.

 

“I have loved her many years,” was all he said, low to him self. Then

aloud: “Where is she lying? In the churchyard? Good-bye. She is waiting

for me.”

 

“Shall I come with you?” some one offered.

 

“No, I prefer going alone.”

 

He went, and we saw him no more. On the grave of his sweetheart he put a

bullet through his brains.

 

So ended Conrad Count Althaus, captain-lieutenant in the Fourth Regiment

of Hussars, in his twenty-seventh year.

 

At another time the tragic nature of this event would have produced a

very shocking effect; but now, how many young officers had not the war

carried off immediately, this one only indirectly! And at the moment

when we heard of his deed a new misfortune had occurred in our midst

which called for all the anguish of our hearts. Otto, my poor father’s

adored and only son, was seized by the destroying angel. His sufferings

lasted the whole night and the next day, with alternations of hope and

despair; about 7 P.M. all was over. My father threw himself on the

corpse with such a thrilling shriek that it pealed through the whole

house. We could hardly tear him from the dead body. And oh! the cries of

agony that now ensued; for hours and hours long the old man poured out

howling, roaring, rattling shrieks of desperation. His son--his

pride--his Otto--his all!

 

To this outburst succeeded on a sudden a stiff, dumb apathy. He had not

had the strength to attend the burial of his darling. He lay on a sofa,

motionless, and, it almost seemed, unconscious. Bresser ordered him to

be undressed and put to bed.

 

After an hour he seemed to awake. Aunt Mary, Frederick and I were at his

side. For a time he looked about him with a questioning look, and then

sat up and tried to speak. He could not, however, pronounce a word and

was struggling for breath, with a puzzled face of anguish. Then he began

to shake and to throw himself about, as if he were attacked by those

terrible cramps which are the last symptoms of the cholera, though he

had not shown any of the other symptoms of it. At last he got out one

word--“Martha!”

 

I fell on my knees at his bedside.

 

“Father, my poor, dear father!”

 

He held his hands over my head.

 

“Your wish,” said he with difficulty, “may be fulfilled. I curse--I

cur----”

 

He could get no further and sank back on his pillow.

 

In the meantime, Bresser had come in, and, in answer to our anxious

questions, gave us his opinion that a spasm of the heart had caused my

father’s death.

 

“The most terrible thing,” said Aunt Mary after we had buried him, “is

that he departed with a curse on his lips.”

 

“Don’t trouble about that, aunt,” I said, to console her. “If that curse

fell from the lips of everybody--yes, of everybody--it would be a great

blessing to humanity.”

 

* * * * *

 

Such was the cholera week at Grumitz. In the space of seven days nine

inhabitants of the château had been snatched away: my father, Lilly,

Rosa, Otto, my maid Netty, the cook, the coachman, and two grooms. In

the village, during the same time, over eighty persons died.

 

Stated in this dry way all this sounds like a noteworthy statistical

fact, or if it stands recorded in a tale book, like an extravagant play

of the author’s fancy. But it is neither so dry as the one nor so

romantically terrible as the other. It is a cold, intelligible fact,

full of sadness.

 

It was not Grumitz alone in our neighbourhood that was so hardly hit.

Whoever chooses to search the annals of the neighbouring villages and

châteaux may find there plenty of similar cases of enormous calamity.

For example, there is Schloss Stockern, in the vicinity of the little

town of Horn. Of the family which inhabited it, during the time from the

9th to the 13th of August, 1866, and also after the departure of the

Prussian troops quartered there, four members of the family--Rudolf aged

twenty, his sisters Emily and Bertha, and his uncle Candide; and,

besides them, five of the servants succumbed to the plague. The youngest

daughter, Pauline von Engelshofen, was spared. She afterwards married a

Baron Suttner, and she, even now, still tells with a shudder the tale of

the cholera week at Stockern.

 

At that time such a resignation to woe and death had come over me that I

was in daily expectation that Death, whose characters had been stamped

on the land for the last two months, would carry off myself and my loved

ones. My Frederick, my Rudolf; I actually wept for them in

anticipation. And yet, along with all this, and in the midst of my

trouble, I still had sweet moments. Such were when leaning on my

husband’s breast, and encircled by his loving arms, I could pour my

tears out on his faithful heart. How gently then would he speak words to

me, not of consolation, but of fellow-feeling and love; so that my own

heart warmed and expanded to them. No, the world is not so bad, I was

compelled against my will to think. The world is not all lamentation and

cruelty. Compassion and love are alive in it--at present, it is true,

only in individual souls, not as an all-pervading law and a prevailing

normal condition. Still they are _present_; and just as these feelings

glow in us twain, sweetening, by means of their gentle contact, even

this time of suffering, just as they dwell in many other, nay, in _most_

other souls, so they will one day come to an outbreak, and will dominate

the general relations of the human family. The future belongs to

goodness.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XV.

 

_Summer sojourn in Switzerland.--My husband’s researches in the

history of the Geneva convention, and in international

law.--Seclusion and mourning.--Visit to Vienna.--Frederick enters a

new army, the army of peace.--Visit to Berlin.--On our way we visit

the battlefield of Sadowa on All Souls’ Day.--The emperor as a

mourner.--Aunt Cornelia: her grief and the consolations of

religion.--The army chaplain.--A military-theological

discussion.--We are summoned to Aunt Mary’s deathbed.--Retired life

at Vienna.--Minister “To-be-sure”.--Political talks.--Universal

liability to serve._

 

 

We passed the remainder of the summer in the neighbourhood of Geneva.

Dr. Bresser’s powers of persuasion had at last succeeded in moving us to

fly from the infected country. I at first strove against leaving so

quickly the graves of my family, and, as I have said, I was filled with

such a resignation to death that I had become wholly apathetic, and held

every attempt at flight to be useless; but in spite of all this Bresser

was certain to conquer when he represented to me that it was my maternal

duty to carry little Rudolf out of the way of danger as well as I could.

 

That we chose Switzerland as our place of refuge resulted from

Frederick’s wish. He wanted to become acquainted with the men who had

called the “Red Cross” into life, and to gain information on the spot

about the proceedings of the conferences which had been held, as well as

about the further aims of the convention.

 

Frederick had given in his resignation of the military service, and as

a preliminary had received half-a-year’s leave till his request should

be granted. I had now become rich, very rich. The death of my father,

and of my brother and two sisters, had put me in possession of Grumitz

and of the whole family property.

 

“Look here,” I said to Frederick, when the title deeds were delivered to

me from the notary’s, “what would you say if I were now to praise the

war which has just passed because of the advantages which have fallen to

my share from its consequences?”

 

“Why, that you would not then be my Martha. Still I understand what you

mean. The heartless egotism, which is capable of rejoicing over material

gains that proceed out of the ruin of others--this impulse which every

individual, even if he is base enough to feel it, still takes all

possible care to hide--is proudly and openly confessed by nations and

dynasties. ‘Thousands have perished in untold sufferings; but we have

thereby increased in territory and in power: so let there be praises and

thanks to Heaven for the successful war!’”

 

We lived very quietly, and retired, in a small villa situated on the

shore of the lake. I was so oppressed by the scenes through which I had

gone, that I would have absolutely no intercourse with any strangers.

Frederick respected my mourning, and made no attempt whatever to

recommend me the vulgar resource of “diversion” as a cure for it; I owed

it to the graves at Grumitz--and my tender husband saw this well--to

grieve over them for some time in perfect quiet. Those who had been

hurried so speedily and so cruelly out of this fair world should not be

equally quickly and coldly stolen also out of the place of memory which

they held in my mourning heart.

 

Frederick himself went often into the city, in order to follow up the

object of his stay here--the study of the Red Cross question. Of the

results of this study I do not retain any clear recollection. I did not

at that time keep any diary; and thus what Frederick communicated to me

of the experiences he met with has for the most part passed out of my

recollection. I only recollect clearly one impression which the whole

of my surroundings made on me--the quiet, the ease, the cheerful

activity of the people whom I happened to see, as if they were living in

a most peaceful, most good-humoured time. There was hardly anywhere even

an echo of the war that had just ended, or at the most in a

conversational tone, as if it had contributed one more interesting

event--nothing more--which might furnish pleasant matter for talk along

with the rest of European gossip: as if the awful thunder of the

cannonades on the Bohemian battlefields had had nothing more tragic in

them than a new opera by Wagner. The thing belonged now to history, and

had for its result some alterations in the atlas; but its horror had

passed out of recollection, or perhaps had never been present to these

neutrals; it was forgotten; the pain was over; it had vanished. The same

with the newspapers. I read French newspapers chiefly; all the interest

was concentrated about the Universal Exhibition in Paris which was in

preparation for 1867; about the court festivities at Compiègne; about

literary celebrities (two new geniuses had come to light who caused much

discussion, Flaubert and Zola); about the events of the drama--a new

opera by Gounod--a new leading part designed by Offenbach for Hortense

Schneider; and so forth. The little exciting duel which the Prussians

and Austrians had fought out _là bas en Bohème_ was an event that had

already become to some extent a thing of the past. Ah! what lies three

months back or at thirty miles’ distance, what is not being played out

in the domain of the Now and the Here, is a thing which the short

feelers of the human heart and the human memory cannot reach! We quitted

Switzerland towards the middle of October. We betook ourselves back to

Vienna, where the course of the business of my inheritance required my

presence. When this business was despatched, our intention was to stay

for a considerable time at Paris. Frederick had it in his mind to smooth

the way with all his power for the idea of a league of peace; and his

view was that the projected Universal Exhibition offered the best

opportunity for setting on foot a congress of friends of peace, and he also thought Paris the most appropriate place for giving actual vitality to what was a matter of international concern.