Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist Read Online Free PDF

which he wore at the hip, and said: “You see before you the most miserable of men, but not an ingrate and a cad!” “Who are you?” asked the old woman; she shoved a chair in his direction with her foot and ordered the girl to go to the kitchen and prepare him as good a supper as she could hastily throw together. The stranger replied: “I am an officer in the French forces, although, as you yourself will have noticed by my accent, not a Frenchman; I am Swiss by birth and my name is Gustav von der Ried. Oh, if only I had never left my native land and traded it for this godless isle! I come from Fort Dauphin, where, as you know, all the whites have been slaughtered, and it is my intention to reach Port au Prince before General Dessalines and his troops manage to surround and take the city.” “From Fort Dauphin!” cried the old woman. “And you, with the color of your face, managed to make it in one piece such a long way through a country overrun by angry blacks?” “God and all his saintsprotected me!” the stranger replied. “And I am not alone, my good little mother; my traveling companions, whom I left some distance from here, include my uncle, a noble old gentleman, with his wife and five children; not to mention several servants and maids who belong to the family; a party of twelve in all, I’ve had to drag them along with me on unspeakably difficult night marches, with the help of two tired old pack mules, as we could not show ourselves on the highway by day.” “Good heavens!” cried the old woman with a sympathetic shake of the head, taking a pinch of tobacco. “Where at the moment are your fellow travelers holed up?” “To you,” the stranger replied after a moment’s hesitation, “to you I can confide; in your complexion I can see reflected a shimmer of my own. The family, if you must know, is camped out in the wild near the seagull pond at the edge of the forest; hunger and thirst compelled us to stop there the day before yesterday. Last night we sent out the servants on a fruitless attempt to obtain a crust of bread and a swallow of wine from the locals; fear of being captured and killed kept them from risking contact, consequently I myself had to set out this morning to try my luck at the risk of my own life. Heaven led me, lest I be mistaken,” he added, pressing the old woman’s hand in his, “to kindhearted people who don’t share the murderous hatred that has gripped the people of this island. Please be so kind, in exchange for ample payment, as to fill a few baskets with food and drink; we still have five day’s journey to Port au Prince, and if you fetch us the provisions to reach this city we will be eternally grateful to you as the people who saved our lives.” “Yes, this mad hatred!” the old woman feigned sympathy. “Is it not as if the hands of the same body, or the teeth of the same mouth, were to rise up against each other justbecause the two were not made alike? What am I, whose father hails from Santiago on the island of Cuba, to make of that shimmer of light that flashes from my face at daybreak? And what does my daughter, who was conceived and born in Europe, have to do with the fact that the daylight hue of that part of the world is reflected in her face?” “What?” cried the stranger. “Do you mean that you, whose every facial feature belies your mulatto blood and your African ancestry, that you and this lovely young mestizo who opened the door for me, are doomed along with us Europeans?” “By God,” replied the old woman, plucking the spectacles from her nose, “do you think that the meager possessions we’ve managed to scrape together by the sweat of our brow over back-breaking miserable years haven’t caught the fancy of that murderous hell-bent band of thieves? If we were not able by craftiness and the very embodiment of