the hearth, his head propped on his hand and his face turned to the expiring glow, Erasmus put out the candle.
“Good night,” said Amadeus in a low voice.
It was now dark and quiet, only a feeble glimmer showed in the gloom from the last sods of peat; a mouse stirred gently in the reed roof. Erasmus and Aegidius had closed their eyes and breathed deep, feigning sleep. But they were not asleep, and from time to time they opened their eyes and looked furtively at the hearth. The attitude of the resting man there did not change, only now and again he stretched out his left hand to light a cigarette at the last embers. But they only saw the dark hand with a reddish shining outline, and the hand appeared strange to them and all by itself, as if it did not belong to a living body. The body did not move, not throughout the whole night.
The narrow beam of light which the setting moon cast through the small window grew longer and fainter. It traveled slowly over the clay floor, until it reached the foot end of the shakedown before the hearth. There it faded away, and the two brothers still looked at the spot, even when nothing was to be seen but the blackness of the nocturnal room. It was as quiet as if a dead man were lying there.
Erasmus was the first who could not bear it any longer. “You are not asleep, dear brother?” he asked.
“No,” replied Amadeus gently. In the darkness of the room their two voices also sounded unreal, as if there were no living hearts behind them, but as if they rose from the depths of the earth which lay silently around the house. Such voices, submerged voices as it were, are heard sometimes at night over a swamp, and the belated wanderer stops to listen, shivering in the fog that clings to his forehead.
“I will try to tell you everything now, brother,” Erasmus went on, “the little that must be told. It is better to tell it in the night than in bright daylight.”
He did not sit up, nor did he support his head with his hand. He remained lying, his arms outstretched on the blanket, and he spoke up to where his open eyes were gazing – up into the high roof of reeds above which stood the stars which could not be seen.
“When you went away,” he said, “they were at the height of their triumph. It was the era of the flourish of trumpets. They tried time and again to get me back into the army, but I refused. As a major general I could refuse, even at that time, and besides I was certainly not in good health. The doctors called it coronary disease. I made the most of it; and Aegidius had his six thousand acres, and that was more important to them than one more infantryman’s rifle.
“We went from pillar to post for your sake, brother, but it was no use. They held what they had as if in a net of steel. Aegidius volunteered . . .”
“You are to tell only the most important things,” Aegidius interrupted quickly. “Night will soon be over.”
“Just as you like, brother, though there is nothing more important than to bare one’s breast and say, ‘Ad sum! Here I am!’ as Isaac did under the knife. Nothing greater and nothing more important. Well, they only laughed. You can exchange clothes for cigarettes, they said, but not a life for a life.”
“Brother,” Aegidius begged once more.
“It is all right,” Erasmus went on.
Amadeus stretched out his hand with another cigarette to the glowing embers, and it seemed to Erasmus as if the hand were not as steady as before. But the light from the fire had become so dim that he might well be mistaken. He waited until he saw the glowing dot appear again before the hearth.
“We had a lot of trouble with mother,” he continued. “She resented it as a disgrace, just as when father went away. Not as something wrong, brother, do you understand, but as a disgrace. Something that could only happen to a Liljecrona, because they were peasants and had no feeling for greatness. For the peasant, she said, there was only the sanctity of the pitchfork, not the sanctity of the sword. She too had fallen into ‘their’ way of speaking.
“But for us she was of some use. Because of her they overlooked many things.
“By the way, when the flourish of the trumpets ceased, she went to her relatives in the Münsterland, to a castle with a moat. There her ‘equals in rank’ live as in the time of Charles the Great.
“We stayed until the tanks came. They did not allow us to leave before. We drove the cattle together and loaded the sleighs. Christoph sat on the front one – as solemnly as if he were driving to church . . .”
“Christoph . . .” whispered Amadeus.
“Yes, he was much over seventy then, perhaps he was already eighty. But his chin was clean-shaven, and he wore the great wolfskin coat which his grandfather had worn before him. There were twenty-five degrees of frost, and the east wind swept the snow over the land.
“We drove for a whole day, and then the tanks overran us. It was as dark as in a tomb, but with searchlights playing they drove over the sleighs, over the cattle, over women and children. They went forward and backward several times. It sounded as if the wheels were rolling on wet brushwood. They fired from all the guns, because some sleighs were lying in the ditches and some tried to escape into the open fields.
“We lost each other. We ran toward a wood which showed up now and again in the rays of the searchlights. We fell down – and then we ran again. In the wood we lost each other completely. We went astray and did not find the road again, not even at dawn.
“But I found Aegidius. He had been shot through the left shoulder and was freezing to death. He only told me in the evening that he had been wounded; by that time it was almost too late.
“Then we made our way slowly until we came here. It took us nearly three months. I thought that here we would find some of those who had been with us. They all knew that they were to meet here. But there was nobody.”
“The dead rise slowly today,” said Amadeus after a while. “And probably the living too.”
Erasmus was silent, then he went on in a low, changed voice: “I was no hero, dear brother,” he said. “I ought not to have run away, unless I was the last. It all depends on where one is when one runs. But probably my mind was disturbed by the noise when the caterpillar wheels rolled over the sleighs – they screamed so, brother, they screamed so terribly – even the horses screamed . . .”
“We have unlearned there, brother, the obligation to throw ourselves voluntarily under a wheel,” said Amadeus after a while. “The wheel will catch up with us, if Laima wishes it. Even if we were sitting on a steeple.”
“But they are calling,” said Erasmus in a whisper now. “I hear them calling. Every night. ‘Herr Baron,’ they call, and sometimes they say another word. ‘Yes’, I say, ‘I am coming!’ But I do not come. It is too late; I have forsaken them. Father would not have forsaken them.”
“We do not know anything about father,” said Aegidius. “We only know that he was good. To be good and to sacrifice oneself are not the same things.”
A soft, early light fell through the window, and they heard the first cuckoo call over the peat bog. It sounded like the tone of a distant bell, as if the sacrament were being carried through the early morning. All three listened, and for the first time Amadeus sank back on his cushions, folding his arms under his head.
“How different everything is for my brothers,” he thought. “How completely different . . . Those they saw were ten or twenty, struck by war as a
