“Agreed.”
“Are you hungry?” asked Barlasch, when the scanty meal was set out before him.
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
He laughed quite gaily now, and the meal was not without a certain air of festivity, though it consisted of nothing better than two ounces of horse and half an ounce of ham eaten in company of that rye-bread made with one-third part of straw which Rapp allowed the citizens to buy.
For Rapp had first tamed his army, and was now taming the Danzigers. He had effected discipline in his own camp by getting his regiments into shape, by establishing hospitals (which were immediately filled), and by protecting the citizens from the depredations of the starving fugitives who had been poured pell-mell into the town.
Then he turned his attention to the Danzigers, who were openly or secretly opposed to him. He seized their churches and turned them into stores; their schools he used for hospitals, their monasteries for barracks. He broke into their cellars, and took the wine for the sick. Their storehouses he placed under the strictest guard, and no man could claim possession of his own goods.
“We are,” he said in effect, with that grim Alsatian humour which the Prussians were slow to understand; “we are one united family in a narrow house, and it is I who keep the storeroom key.”
Barlasch had proved to be no false prophet. His secret store escaped the vigilance of the picket, whom he himself conducted to the cellars in the Frauengasse. Although he was sparing enough, he could always provide Désirée with anything for which she expressed a wish, and even forestalled those which she left unspoken. In return he looked for absolute obedience, and after their frugal breakfast he took her to task for depriving herself of such food as they could afford.
“See you,” he said, “a siege is a question of the stomach. It is not the Russians we have to fight; for they will not fight. They sit outside and wait for us to die of cold, of starvation, of typhus. And we are obliging them at the rate of two hundred a day. Yes, each day Rapp is relieved of the responsibility of two hundred mouths that drop open and require nothing more. Be greedy—eat all you have, and hope for release tomorrow, and you die. Be sparing—starve yourself from parsimony or for the love of someone who will eat your share and forget to thank you, and you will die of typhus. Be careful, and patient, and selfish—eat a little, take what exercise you can, cook your food carefully with salt, and you will live. I was in a siege thirty years before you were born, and I am alive yet, after many others. Obey me and we will get through the siege of Danzig, which is only just beginning.”
Then suddenly he gave way to anger, and banged his hand down on the table.
“But, sacred name of thunder, do not make me believe you have eaten when you have not,” he shouted. “Never do that.”
Carried away by the importance of this question, he said many things which cannot be set before the eyes of a generation sensitive to plainness of speech, and only tolerant of it in suggestions of impropriety.
“And the patron,” he ended abruptly, “how is he?”
“He is not very well,” answered Désirée. Which answer did not satisfy Barlasch, who insisted on taking off his boots, and going upstairs to see Sebastian.
It was a mere nothing, the invalid said. Such food did not suit him.
“You have been accustomed to live well all your life,” answered Barlasch, looking at him with the puzzled light of a baffled memory in his eye which always came when he looked at Désirée’s father. “One must see what can be done.”
And he went out forthwith to return after an hour and more with a chicken freshly killed. Désirée did not ask him where he had procured it. She had given up such inquiries, for Barlasch always confessed quite bluntly to theft, and she did not know whether to believe him or not.
But the change of diet had no beneficial effect, and the next day Désirée sent Barlasch to the house of the doctor whose practice lay in the Frauengasse. He came and shook his head bluntly. For even an old doctor may be hardened at the end of his life by an orgy, as it were, of death.
“I could cure him,” he said, “if there were no Russians outside the walls; if I could give him fresh milk and good brandy and strong soup.”
But even Barlasch could not find milk in Danzig. The brandy was forthcoming, and the fresh meat; the soup Désirée made with her own hands. Sebastian had not been the same man since the closing of the roads and the gradual death of his hopes that the Danzigers would rise against the soldiers that thronged their streets. At one time it would have been easy to carry out such a movement, and to throw themselves and their city upon the mercy of the Russians. But Danzig awoke to this possibility too late, when Rapp’s iron hand had closed in upon it. He knew his own strength so well that he treated with a contemptuous leniency such citizens as were convicted of communicating with the enemy.
Sebastian’s friends seemed to have deserted him. Perhaps it was not discreet to be seen in the company of one who had come under Napoleon’s displeasure. Some had quitted the city after hurriedly concealing their valuables in their gardens, behind the chimneys, beneath the floors, where it is to be supposed they still lie hidden. Others were among the weekly thousand or twelve hundred who were carted out by the Oliva Gate to be thrown
