Without looking up from her darning needle Helga said: “Show him our new post box, M. Arnaud.”
“Directly,” Arnaud replied, but then he wandered off. I was still in that same room at supper when he finally returned.
After the remains of the meal had been cleared away, I announced that I would leave to find the post box by myself.
The fairytale collector leapt to his feet.
“Do you have your letters ready, Herr Brandling?”
I saw that the wretch was now dressed “for town,” with waistcoat and breeches of dark green velveteen, stout boots, and a broad leather belt which he now took in a notch around his narrow waist.
“I do not have stamps,” I said.
“We have stamps in beautiful colours,” said the fairytale collector. “It is for England that they are required. Two letters I think?”
You have known this all day, I thought. Soon it will be dark.
“We will need a lantern.”
“No need.”
“There will be a moon?”
“I have the eyes of a cat,” the queer man said. And we descended into the spray and chaos of the gorge.
When, minutes later, we emerged, the world was alight with golden straw. One could hear the birds again, the light clink of the chain that tethered three dwarf goats beside the stream.
“My mother was a cat,” said the fairytale collector, as if he had made the most common observation.
I made no riposte but in truth I have a horror of fairy stories not because I believe them but because I cannot stop myself imagining the evil stepmother, say, being forced to dance inside her red-hot iron shoes. What cruelties we humans practise every day.
The village turned out to be very near. I deposited Percy’s letters in an iron box with golden tassels like a General. Then we turned the corner of a lane and I beheld the quaint houses pressed together, the pointed roofs with their projecting eaves, the wooden staircases, and, drenched in the last rays of the setting sun, a glorious yellow inn, now glowing golden.
“The inn is not too far, Herr Brandling,” he said shyly, and I finally understood why he had made me wait all day.
THE COLLECTOR OF ANCIENT cruelties was a mere smidgen, a tiny creature, with a mass of curling salt- and-pepper hair. At the sawmill he had not seemed any more eccentric than anybody else, but at this village inn he cut a most unusual figure, soft-skinned, half man, half child, with his head in perfect proportion to the whole.
At the sawmill he had been completely at his ease. At the inn he was as nervous as a bird, its heart always pattering as if everything, even a single grain of wheat, might pose a mortal risk. Perhaps he saw the possibility of violence in the schnapps bottles, or perhaps it was his Protestant bones in a Catholic atmosphere, or the excessive smoke, or the fearsome physiognomies—Jews and Germans playing cards, arguing, in too many languages to count.
The mistress of the inn, a stout bustling little missus like you see in the old engravings, greeted M. Arnaud very fondly, found him a table, and brought us cheese and small beer before we had a chance to ask. I said how very nice she was.
Arnaud leaned close toward my ear.
What did I know of Herr Sumper? Why had I brought my plans to him? Why had I not commissioned a Karlsruhe clockmaker where the sort of work I wished could have been more surely done?
I thought, whoa Dobbin. I did not need my confidence undone.
I asked him how he came into Sumper’s circle.
He spilled some volatile oils onto a handkerchief and dabbed at his cartilaginous nose. In the candlelight his nostrils seemed alight with blood.
Why, he demanded, had I not asked Sumper for letters of reference?
I was perhaps naive but I saw where the road was heading: he was saying that I had made myself the quarry of a gang of criminals. He would rescue me, for a price.
As he spoke, he leaned forward, but looked down in the manner of a hen who spied a likely worm.
Had I not been troubled to learn how Herr Sumper had fled the village years before?
He did not look at me. He sipped his beer fastidiously. He said he had not taken me to be the reckless type.
I assured him I was not.
Just the same, he said, as if excusing me: Herr Sumper was a big man. People were frightened to say a word against him. It was very, very hard to find the truth.
He darted a glance across his shoulder as if he was in danger of being victimized whereas, in fact, his sole purpose was—surely—to have me as his prey.
Was HE not frightened?
Oh no. Fairytale collectors were accustomed to the most dangerous situations. It was these violent types, here, in the inn, who were frightened of Sumper. On the clockmaker’s return from England he had been “opinionated.” He had claimed to be “better qualified” which astonished those who had not previously imagined that a man would be “qualified” to be a clockmaker, no more than ride a donkey or void their bowels.
A less brutal man would not have survived, but Herr Sumper was Herr Sumper. He never went to a dance without first stuffing into his long pockets a dozen of the heavy iron axes
In order to know what he had to pay, he tore off a button each time, first off his red waistcoat, and then off his coat, and redeemed them at the end of the evening from the landlord.
As this was the man I had commissioned to save my Percy, I did not wish to hear that the site of the old sawmill was the most “backward” part of the district. The fairytale collector perhaps sensed this for now he said there could be no more perfect place to perform advanced work in secret. It was already believed that Sumper had used his isolation to hide his secret trade in blasphemous cuckoo clocks.
This did not comfort me at all. I asked him what such a thing would look like.
M. Arnaud could not guess. But it would be, he said, totally consistent with the clockmaker’s irreligious nature. As for his technical abilities—whenever Sumper’s conversations touched on matters with which Arnaud was well acquainted—metallurgy for instance—he had found Sumper to be in no sense primitive. Indeed the opposite.
Was he as “advanced” as he boasted?
Arnaud did not answer me.
Instead he told me that Sumper’s old father had been as ignorant as any saw miller and was as violent as his son. His chief pleasure consisted in rolling up into balls the tin plates used at dinner at different inns.
On the most notorious occasion, he ordered the younger Sumper not to go dancing at a wedding but to attend to the business of the sawmill instead. I would have noticed, at the mill, the logs had not been floated, but that was only because Sumper had now let the mill to Proudhonists and they could not agree on anything. Those logs should have been sent floating down the river weeks before my arrival. They would then have constituted rafts one hundred yards long—nine logs wide at the stern, three logs wide at the bow. It was in order to supervise the construction of such a raft that the father had sent Heinrich Sumper home from the wedding.
This was when the son decided to “step aboard” as the saying was. As far as anyone could gather young Sumper never said goodbye to his father or mother, and rather than guiding the raft to any customary destination, he (according to the police report) rode it down into the Rhine (which was, I soon realized, geographically impossible). He stepped ashore somewhere, with what money no one knew, and somehow made his way to England, which is where he claimed to have received his exalted education.
It was still not forgotten that logs had been stolen and his parents were left the poorer. Perhaps he repaid them with his English gold, but who can say? Later a letter from London was seen at the post office. Naturally this
