So, with the sticky, thick ink of the Weissen Ross’l,
Sebastian wrote the letter, and Barlasch, forgetting
his scholarly acquirements, took the pen and made
a mark beneath his own name written at the foot of
it.
Then he went out, and left Sebastian to pay for the
beer.
They that are above
Have ends in everything.
A lame man was standing on the bridge that crosses
the Neuer Pregel from the Kant Strasse—which
is the centre of the city of Konigsberg—to
the island known as the Kneiphof. This bridge
is called the Kramer Brucke, and may be described
as the heart of the town. From it on either
hand diverge the narrow streets that run along the
river bank, busy with commerce, crowded with the narrow
sleighs that carry wood from the Pregel up into the
town.
The wider streets—such as the Kant Strasse,
running downhill from the royal castle to the river,
and the Kneiphof’sche Langgasse, leading southward
to the Brandenburg gate and the great world—must
needs make use of the Kramer Brucke. Here, it
may be said, every man in the town must sooner or
later pass in the execution of his daily business,
whether he go about it on foot or in a sleigh with
a pair of horses. Here the idler and those grave
professors from the University, which was still mourning
the death of the aged Kant, nearly always passed in
their thoughtful and conscientious promenades.
Here this lame man, a cobbler by trade, plying his
quiet calling in a house in the Neuer Markt, where
the lime-trees grow close to the upper windows, had
patiently kept watch for three days. He was,
like many lame men, of an abnormal width and weight.
He had a large, square, dogged face, which seemed
to promise that he would wait there till the crack
of doom rather than abandon a quest.
It was very cold—mid-winter within a few
miles of the frozen Baltic on the very verge of Russia,
at that point where old Europe stretches a long arm
out into the unknown. The cobbler was wrapped
in a sheepskin coat, which stood out all round him
with the stiffness of wood, so that he seemed to be
living inside a box. To keep himself warm he
occasionally limped across from end to end of the
bridge, but never went farther. At times he leant
his arms on the stone wall at the Kant Strasse end
of the bridge, and looked down into the Lower Fish
Market, where women from Pillau and the Baltic shores—mere
bundles of clothes—stood over their baskets
of fish frozen hard like sticks. It was a silent
market. One cannot haggle long when a minute’s
exposure to the air will give a frost-bite to the
end of the nose. The would-be purchaser can scarcely
make an effective bargain through a fringe of icicles
that rattle against his lips if he open them.
The Pregel had been frozen for three months, with
only the one temporary thaw in November which cost
Napoleon so many thousands at his broken bridge across
the Beresina. Though no water had flowed beneath
this bridge, many strange feet had passed across it.
