by Erckmann-Chatrian
[Note: Like many of the classics, this is not PC.]
The warm mineral waters of
Spinbronn, situated in the Hundsrueck, several leagues from Pirmesens, formerly
enjoyed a magnificent reputation. All who were afflicted with gout or gravel in
Germany repaired thither; the savage aspect of the country did not deter them.
They lodged in pretty cottages at the head of the defile; they bathed in the
cascade, which fell in large sheets of foam from the summit of the rocks; they
drank one or two decanters of mineral water daily, and the doctor of the place,
Daniel Haselnoss, who distributed his prescriptions clad in a great wig and
chestnut coat, had an excellent practice.
To-day the waters of Spinbronn
figure no longer in the "Codex"; in this poor village one no longer
sees anyone but a few miserable woodcutters, and, sad to say, Dr. Haselnoss has
left!
All this resulted from a series
of very strange catastrophes which lawyer Bremer of Pirmesens told me about the
other day.
You should know, Master Frantz
(said he), that the spring of Spinbronn issues from a sort of cavern, about
five feet high and twelve or fifteen feet wide; the water has a warmth of
sixty-seven degrees Centigrade; it is salt. As for the cavern, entirely covered
without with moss, ivy, and brushwood, its depth is unknown because the hot
exhalations prevent all entrance.
Nevertheless, strangely enough,
it was noticed early in the last century that birds of the
neighborhood--thrushes, doves, hawks--were engulfed in it in full flight, and
it was never known to what mysterious influence to attribute this particular.
In 1801, at the height of the
season, owing to some circumstance which is still unexplained, the spring
became more abundant, and the bathers, walking below on the greensward, saw a
human skeleton as white as snow fall from the cascade.
You may judge, Master Frantz,
of the general fright; it was thought naturally that a murder had been
committed at Spinbronn in a recent year, and that the body of the victim had
been thrown in the spring. But the skeleton weighed no more than a dozen
francs, and Haselnoss concluded that it must have sojourned more than three
centuries in the sand to have become reduced to such a state of desiccation.
This very plausible reasoning
did not prevent a crowd of patrons, wild at the idea of having drunk the saline
water, from leaving before the end of the day; those worst afflicted with gout
and gravel consoled themselves. But the overflow continuing, all the rubbish,
slime, and detritus which the cavern contained was disgorged on the following
days; a veritable bone-yard came down from the mountain: skeletons of animals
of every kind--of quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles--in short, all that one could
conceive as most horrible.
Haselnoss issued a pamphlet
demonstrating that all these bones were derived from an antediluvian world: that
they were fossil bones, accumulated there in a sort of funnel during the
universal flood--that is to say, four thousand years before Christ, and that,
consequently, one might consider them as nothing but stones, and that it was
needless to be disgusted. But his work had scarcely reassured the gouty when,
one fine morning, the corpse of a fox, then that of a hawk with all its
feathers, fell from the cascade.
It was impossible to establish
that these remains antedated the Flood. Anyway, the disgust was so great that
everybody tied up his bundle and went to take the waters elsewhere.
"How infamous!" cried
the beautiful ladies--"how horrible! So that's what the virtue of these
mineral waters came from! Oh, 'twere better to die of gravel than continue such
a remedy!"
At the end of a week there
remained at Spinbronn only a big Englishman who had gout in his hands as well
as in his feet, who had himself addressed as Sir Thomas Hawerburch, Commodore;
and he brought a large retinue, according to the usage of a British subject in
a foreign land.
This personage, big and fat,
with a florid complexion, but with hands simply knotted with gout, would have
drunk skeleton soup if it would have cured his infirmity. He laughed heartily
over the desertion of the other sufferers, and installed himself in the
prettiest _chalet_ at half price, announcing his design to pass the winter at
Spinbronn.
*
(Here lawyer Bremer slowly
absorbed an ample pinch of snuff as if to quicken his reminiscences; he shook
his laced ruff with his finger tips and continued:)
*
Five or six years before the
Revolution of 1789, a young doctor of Pirmesens, named Christian Weber, had
gone out to San Domingo in the hope of making his fortune. He had actually
amassed some hundred thousand francs m the exercise of his profession when the
negro revolt broke out.
I need not recall to you the
barbarous treatment to which our unfortunate fellow countrymen were subjected
at Haiti. Dr. Weber had the good luck to escape the massacre and to save part of
his fortune. Then he traveled in South America, and especially in French
Guiana. In 1801 he returned to Pirmesens, and established himself at Spinbronn,
where Dr. Haselnoss made over his house and defunct practice.
Christian Weber brought with
him an old negress called Agatha: a frightful creature, with a flat nose and
lips as large as your fist, and her head tied up in three bandanas of
razor-edged colors. This poor old woman adored red; she had earrings which hung
down to her shoulders, and the mountaineers of Hundsrueck came from six leagues
around to stare at her.
As for Dr. Weber, he was a
tall, lean man, invariably dressed in a sky-blue coat with codfish tails and
deerskin breeches. He wore a hat of flexible straw and boots with bright yellow
tops, on the front of which hung two silver tassels. He talked little; his
laugh was like a nervous attack, and his gray eyes, usually calm and
meditative, shone with singular brilliance at the least sign of contradiction.
Every morning he fetched a turn round about the mountain, letting his horse
ramble at a venture, whistling forever the same tune, some negro melody or
other. Lastly, this rum chap had brought from Haiti a lot of bandboxes filled
with queer insects--some black and reddish brown, big as eggs; others little
and shimmering like sparks. He seemed to set greater store by them than by his
patients, and, from time to time, on coming back from his rides, he brought a
quantity of butterflies pinned to his hat brim.
Scarcely was he settled in
Haselnoss's vast house when he peopled the back yard with outlandish
birds--Barbary geese with scarlet cheeks, Guinea hens, and a white peacock,
which perched habitually on the garden wall, and which divided with the negress
the admiration of the mountaineers.
If I enter into these details,
Master Frantz, it's because they recall my early youth; Dr. Christian found
himself to be at the same time my cousin and my tutor, and as early as on his
return to Germany he had come to take me and install me in his house at Spinbronn.
The black Agatha at first sight inspired me with some fright, and I only got
seasoned to that fantastic visage with considerable difficulty; but she was
such a good woman--she knew so well how to make spiced patties, she hummed such
strange songs in a guttural voice, snapping her fingers and keeping time with a
heavy shuffle, that I ended by taking her in fast friendship.
Dr. Weber was naturally thick
with Sir Thomas Hawerburch, as representing the only one of his clientele then
in evidence, and I was not slow in perceiving that these two eccentrics held
long conventicles together. They conversed on mysterious matters, on the
transmission of fluids, and indulged in certain odd signs which one or the
other had picked up in his voyages--Sir Thomas in the Orient, and my tutor in
America. This puzzled me greatly. As children will, I was always lying in wait
for what they seemed to want to conceal from me; but despairing in the end of
discovering anything, I took the course of questioning Agatha, and the poor old
woman, after making me promise to say nothing about it, admitted that my tutor
was a sorcerer.
For the rest, Dr. Weber
exercised a singular influence over the mind of this negress, and this woman,
habitually so gay and forever ready to be amused by nothing, trembled like a
leaf when her master's gray eyes chanced to alight on her.
All this, Master Frantz, seems
to have no bearing on the springs of Spinbronn. But wait, wait--you shall see
by what a singular concourse of circumstances my story is connected with it.
I told you that birds darted
into the cavern, and even other and larger creatures. After the final departure
of the patrons, some of the old inhabitants of the village recalled that a
young girl named Louise Mueller, who lived with her infirm old grandmother in a
cottage on the pitch of the slope, had suddenly disappeared half a hundred
years before. She had gone out to look for herbs in the forest, and there had
never been any more news of her afterwards, except that, three or four days
later, some woodcutters who were descending the mountain had found her sickle
and her apron a few steps from the cavern.
From that moment it was evident
to everyone that the skeleton which had fallen from the cascade, on the subject
of which Haselnoss had turned such fine phrases, was no other than that of
Louise Mueller. The poor girl had doubtless been drawn into the gulf by the
mysterious influence which almost daily overcame weaker beings!
What could this influence be?
None knew. But the inhabitants of Spinbronn, superstitious like all
mountaineers, maintained that the devil lived in the cavern, and terror spread
in the whole region.
*
Now one afternoon in the middle
of the month of July, 1802, my cousin undertook a new classification of the
insects in his bandboxes. He had secured several rather curious ones the
preceding afternoon. I was with him, holding the lighted candle with one hand
and with the other a needle which I heated red-hot.
Sir Thomas, seated, his chair
tipped back against the sill of a window, his feet on a stool, watched us work,
and smoked his cigar with a dreamy air.
I stood in with Sir Thomas
Hawerburch, and I accompanied him every day to the woods in his carriage. He
enjoyed hearing me chatter in English, and wished to make of me, as he said, a
thorough gentleman.
The butterflies labeled, Dr.
Weber at last opened the box of the largest insects, and said:
"Yesterday I secured a
magnificent horn beetle, the great _Lucanus cervus_ of the oaks of the Hartz.
It has this peculiarity--the right claw divides in five branches. It's a rare
specimen."
At the same time I offered him
the needle, and as he pierced the insect before fixing it on the cork, Sir
Thomas, until then impassive, got up, and, drawing near a bandbox, he began to
examine the crab spider of Guiana with a feeling of horror which was strikingly
portrayed on his fat vermilion face.
"That is certainly,"
he cried, "the most frightful work of the creation. The mere sight of
it--it makes me shudder!"
In truth, a sudden pallor
overspread his face.
"Bah!" said my tutor,
"all that is only a prejudice from childhood--one hears his nurse cry
out--one is afraid--and the impression sticks. But if you should consider the
spider with a strong microscope, you would be astonished at the finish of his
members, at their admirable arrangement, and even at their elegance."
"It disgusts me,"
interrupted the commodore brusquely. "Pouah!"
It had turned over in his
fingers.
"Oh! I don't know
why," he declared, "spiders have always frozen my blood!"
Dr. Weber began to laugh, and
I, who shared the feelings of Sir Thomas, exclaimed:
"Yes, cousin, you ought to
take this villainous beast out of the box--it is disgusting--it spoils all the
rest."
"Little chump," he
said, his eyes sparkling, "what makes you look at it? If you don't like
it, go take yourself off somewhere."
Evidently he had taken offense;
and Sir Thomas, who was then before the window contemplating the mountain,
turned suddenly, took me by the hand, and said to me in a manner full of good
will:
"Your tutor, Frantz, sets
great store by his spider; we like the trees better--the verdure. Come, let's
go for a walk."
"Yes, go," cried the
doctor, "and come back for supper at six o'clock."
Then raising his voice:
"No hard feelings, Sir
Hawerburch."
The commodore replied
laughingly, and we got into the carriage, which was always waiting in front of
the door of the house.
Sir Thomas wanted to drive
himself and dismissed his servant. He made me sit beside him on the same seat
and we started off for Rothalps.
While the carriage was slowly
ascending the sandy path, an invincible sadness possessed itself of my spirit.
Sir Thomas, on his part, was grave. He perceived my sadness and said:
"You don't like spiders,
Frantz, nor do I either. But thank Heaven, there aren't any dangerous ones in
this country. The crab spider which your tutor has in his box comes from French
Guiana. It inhabits the great, swampy forests filled with warm vapors, with
scalding exhalations; this temperature is necessary to its life. Its web, or
rather its vast snare, envelops an entire thicket. In it it takes birds as our
spiders take flies. But drive these disgusting images from your mind, and drink
a swallow of my old Burgundy."
Then turning, he raised the
cover of the rear seat, and drew from the straw a sort of gourd from which he
poured me a full bumper in a leather goblet.
When I had drunk all my good
humor returned and I began to laugh at my fright.
The carriage was drawn by a
little Ardennes horse, thin and nervous as a goat, which clambered up the
nearly perpendicular path. Thousands of insects hummed in the bushes. At our
right, at a hundred paces or more, the somber outskirts of the Rothalp forests
extended below us, the profound shades of which, choked with briers and foul
brush, showed here and there an opening filled with light. On our left tumbled
the stream of Spinbronn, and the more we climbed the more did its silvered
sheets, floating in the abyss, grow tinged with azure and redouble their sound
of cymbals.
I was captivated by this
spectacle. Sir Thomas, leaning back in the seat, his knees as high as his chin,
abandoned himself to his habitual reveries, while the horse, laboring with his
feet and hanging his head on his chest as a counter-weight to the carriage,
held on as if suspended on the flank of the rock. Soon, however, we reached a
pitch less steep: the haunt of the roebuck, surrounded by tremulous shadows. I
always lost my head, and my eyes too, in an immense perspective. At the
apparition of the shadows I turned my head and saw the cavern of Spinbronn
close at hand. The encompassing mists were a magnificent green, and the stream
which, before falling, extends over a bed of black sand and pebbles, was so
clear that one would have thought it frozen if pale vapors did not follow its
surface.
The horse had just stopped of
his own accord to breathe; Sir Thomas, rising, cast his eye over the
countryside.
"How calm everything
is!" said he.
Then, after an instant of
silence:
"If you weren't here,
Frantz, I should certainly bathe in the basin."
"But, Commodore,"
said I, "why not bathe? I would do well to stroll around in the
neighborhood. On the next hill is a great glade filled with wild strawberries.
I'll go and pick some. I'll be back in an hour."
"Ha! I should like to,
Frantz; it's a good idea. Dr. Weber contends that I drink too much Burgundy.
It's necessary to offset wine with mineral water. This little bed of sand
pleases me."
Then, having set both feet on
the ground, he hitched the horse to the trunk of a little birch and waved his
hand as if to say:
"You may go."
I saw him sit down on the moss
and draw off his boots. As I moved away he turned and called out:
"In an hour, Frantz."
They were his last words.
An hour later I returned to the
spring. The horse, the carriage, and the clothes of Sir Thomas alone met my
eyes. The sun was setting. The shadows were getting long. Not a bird's song
under the foliage, not the hum of an insect in the tall grass. A silence like
death looked down on this solitude! The silence frightened me. I climbed up on
the rock which overlooks the cavern; I looked to the right and to the left.
Nobody! I called. No answer! The sound of my voice, repeated by the echoes,
filled me with fear. Night settled down slowly. A vague sense of horror
oppressed me. Suddenly the story of the young girl who had disappeared occurred
to me; and I began to descend on the run; but, arriving before the cavern, I
stopped, seized with unaccountable terror: in casting a glance in the deep
shadows of the spring I had caught sight of two motionless red points. Then I
saw long lines wavering in a strange manner in the midst of the darkness, and
that at a depth where no human eye had ever penetrated. Fear lent my sight, and
all my senses, an unheard-of subtlety of perception. For several seconds I
heard very distinctly the evening plaint of a cricket down at the edge of the
wood, a dog barking far away, very far in the valley. Then my heart, compressed
for an instant by emotion, began to beat furiously and I no longer heard
anything!
Then uttering a horrible cry, I
fled, abandoning the horse, the carriage. In less than twenty minutes, bounding
over the rocks and brush, I reached the threshold of our house, and cried in a
stifled voice:
"Run! Run! Sir Hawerburch
is dead! Sir Hawerburch is in the cavern--!"
After these words, spoken in
the presence of my tutor, of the old woman Agatha, and of two or three people
invited in that evening by the doctor, I fainted. I have learned since that
during a whole hour I raved deliriously.
The whole village had gone in
search of the commodore. Christian Weber hurried them off. At ten o'clock in
the evening all the crowd came back, bringing the carriage, and in the carriage
the clothes of Sir Hawerburch. They had discovered nothing. It was impossible to
take ten steps in the cavern without being suffocated.
During their absence Agatha and
I waited, sitting in the chimney corner. I, howling incoherent words of terror;
she, with hands crossed on her knees, eyes wide open, going from time to time
to the window to see what was taking place, for from the foot of the mountain
one could see torches flitting in the woods. One could hear hoarse voices, in
the distance, calling to each other in the night.
At the approach of her master,
Agatha began to tremble. The doctor entered brusquely, pale, his lips
compressed, despair written on his face. A score of woodcutters followed him
tumultuously, in great felt hats with wide brims--swarthy visaged--shaking the
ash from their torches. Scarcely was he in the hall when my tutor's glittering
eyes seemed to look for something. He caught sight of the negress, and without
a word having passed between them, the poor woman began to cry:
"No! no! I don't want
to!"
"And I wish it,"
replied the doctor in a hard tone.
One would have said that the
negress had been seized by an invincible power. She shuddered from head to
foot, and Christian Weber showing her a bench, she sat down with a corpse-like
stiffness.
All the bystanders, witnesses
of this shocking spectacle, good folk with primitive and crude manners, but
full of pious sentiments, made the sign of the cross, and I who knew not then,
even by name, of the terrible magnetic power of the will, began to tremble,
believing that Agatha was dead.
Christian Weber approached the
negress, and making a rapid pass over her forehead:
"Are you there?" said
he.
"Yes, master."
"Sir Thomas
Hawerburch?"
At these words she shuddered
again.
"Do you see him?"
"Yes--yes," she
gasped in a strangling voice, "I see him."
"Where is he?"
"Up there--in the back of
the cavern--dead!"
"Dead!" said the
doctor, "how?"
"The spider--Oh! the crab
spider--Oh!--"
"Control your
agitation," said the doctor, who was quite pale, "tell us
plainly--"
"The crab spider has him
by the throat--he is there--at the back--under the rock--wound round by
webs--Ah!"
Christian Weber cast a cold
glance toward his assistants, who, crowding around, with their eyes sticking
out of their heads, were listening intently, and I heard him murmur:
"It's horrible!
horrible!"
Then he resumed:
"You see him?"
"I see him--"
"And the spider--is it
big?"
"Oh, master, never--never
have I seen such a large one--not even on the banks of the Mocaris--nor in the
lowlands of Konanama. It is as large as my head--!"
There was a long silence. All
the assistants looked at each other, their faces livid, their hair standing up.
Christian Weber alone seemed calm; having passed his hand several times over
the negress's forehead, he continued:
"Agatha, tell us how death
befell Sir Hawerburch."
"He was bathing in the
basin of the spring--the spider saw him from behind, with his bare back. It was
hungry, it had fasted for a long time; it saw him with his arms on the water.
Suddenly it came out like a flash and placed its fangs around the commodore's
neck, and he cried out: 'Oh! oh! my God!' It stung and fled. Sir Hawerburch
sank down in the water and died. Then the spider returned and surrounded him
with its web, and he floated gently, gently, to the back of the cavern. It drew
in on the web. Now he is all black."
The doctor, turning to me, who
no longer felt the shock, asked:
"Is it true, Frantz, that
the commodore went in bathing?"
"Yes, Cousin
Christian."
"At what time?"
"At four o'clock."
"At four o'clock--it was
very warm, wasn't it?"
"Oh, yes!"
"It's certainly so,"
said he, striking his forehead. "The monster could come out without
fear--"
He pronounced a few
unintelligible words, and then, looking toward the mountaineers:
"My friends," he
cried, "that is where this mass of debris came from--of skeletons--which spread
terror among the bathers. That is what has ruined you all--it is the crab spider!
It is there--hidden in its web--awaiting its prey in the back of the cavern!
Who can tell the number of its victims?"
And full of fury, he led the
way, shouting:
"Firewood! Firewood!"
The woodcutters followed him,
vociferating.
Ten minutes later two large
wagons laden with fagots were slowly mounting the slope. A long file of
woodcutters, their backs bent double, followed, enveloped in the somber night.
My tutor and I walked ahead, leading the horses by their bridles, and the
melancholy moon vaguely lighted this funereal march. From time to time the
wheels grated. Then the carts, raised by the irregularities of the rocky road,
fell again in the track with a heavy jolt.
As we drew near the cavern, on
the playground of the roebucks, our cortege halted. The torches were lit, and
the crowd advanced toward the gulf. The limpid water, running over the sand,
reflected the bluish flame of the resinous torches, the rays of which revealed
the tops of the black firs leaning over the rock.
"This is the place to
unload," the doctor then said. "It's necessary to block up the mouth
of the cavern."
And it was not without a
feeling of terror that each undertook the duty of executing his orders. The
fagots fell from the top of the loads. A few stakes driven down before the
opening of the spring prevented the water from carrying them away.
Toward midnight the mouth of
the cavern was completely closed. The water running over spread to both sides on
the moss. The top fagots were perfectly dry; then Dr. Weber, supplying himself
with a torch, himself lit the fire. The flames ran from twig to twig with an
angry crackling, and soon leaped toward the sky, chasing clouds of smoke before
them.
It was a strange and savage
spectacle, the great pile with trembling shadows lit up in this way.
This cavern poured forth black
smoke, unceasingly renewed and disgorged. All around stood the woodcutters,
somber, motionless, expectant, their eyes fixed on the opening; and I, although
trembling from head to foot in fear, could not tear away my gaze.
It was a good quarter of an
hour that we waited, and Dr. Weber was beginning to grow impatient, when a
black object, with long hooked claws, appeared suddenly in the shadow and
precipitated itself toward the opening.
A cry resounded about the pyre.
The spider, driven back by the
live coals, reentered its cave. Then, smothered doubtless by the smoke, it
returned to the charge and leaped out into the midst of the flames. Its long
legs curled up. It was as large as my head, and of a violet red.
One of the woodcutters, fearing
lest it leap clear of the fire, threw his hatchet at it, and with such good aim
that on the instant the fire around it was covered with blood. But soon the flames
burst out more vigorously over it and consumed the horrible destroyer.
*
Such, Master Frantz, was the
strange event which destroyed the fine reputation which the waters of Spinbronn
formerly enjoyed. I can certify the scrupulous precision of my account. But as
for giving you an explanation, that would be impossible for me to do. At the
same time, allow me to tell you that it does not seem to me absurd to admit
that a spider, under the influence of a temperature raised by thermal waters,
which affords the same conditions of life and development as the scorching
climates of Africa and South America, should attain a fabulous size. It was
this same extreme heat which explains the prodigious exuberance of the
antediluvian creation!
However that may be, my tutor,
judging that it would be impossible after this event to reestablish the waters
of Spinbronn, sold the house back to Haselnoss, in order to return to America
with his negress and collections. I was sent to board in Strasbourg, where I
remained until 1809.
The great political events of
the epoch then absorbing the attention of Germany and France explain why the
affair I have just told you about passed completely unobserved.
