“They burned your farm last night, you know,” Brock tells Gundar gently.
“I’m not surprised,” sighs Gundar.
“Well, we’re not just going to stand for it, are we?” someone else insists.
“Please, don’t cause yourselves more trouble on my account,” Gundar replies stoically. “Winter’s not for several weeks yet. I can build another farm.”
“Who cares about your farm?” protests the other man. “I meant our beer! Winter’s only weeks away, as Herr Barrel Mouth has just observed, and that beer’s all we had to eat!”
This remark is met with cheers of outrage from the mob.
“With winter upon us and all our grain already tucked away up in the castle granaries, we have no way of brewing more!”(39) complains a third man.
“And even if we could,” a fourth man groans, “how would we survive the months required to brew it?”
“Where’s he keeping it all?” asks someone else. “That’s what I want to know. Mad Gus can’t stand beer, so he won’t have many barrels up there.”
“I have it from Hans Schloser, the carpenter,” confides a fifth man, “that Mad Gus has turned one of his granaries into a giant vat!”
“So that’s why they tore down my barn last night!” exclaims another fellow. “Without a word of explanation when they carted off the lumber!”
“Same with my tanning shed!” complains the village taxidermist.
“They’ve made a beer vat from your tanning shed?” someone asks, aghast.
“He’s poured all our different kinds of beer into a single vat?” gasps the man behind him.
“Has he no conscience?” cries a balding man with bandied legs.
“Has he no taste buds?” demands another.
“He has no soul!” booms out a third.
“It’s… sacrilege!” sputters a fourth.
“It’s psychotic sociopathy!” shrills a fifth. (40)
“It’s just too much!” shouts a nearly toothless geezer near the front. “For decades now, that monster steals our cattle with impunity! He burns our barns and houses! He drags our very wives and children from their beds at night and sells them into slavery! Okay, we can live with that stuff; life is never easy. But marching in and grabbing our beer? That crosses the line! I say the time—has come—to take—this FÜCHENMEISTER (41) DOWN!!!”
(Sudden silence, punctuated after some time by a spate of quiet throat clearing from Mr. Dourtmundschtradel.)
My… apologies, Herr Halifax, for that… outburst. Always, at this point in the story, I… This is the moment of liberation awaited by my longsuffering forefathers since even before their own births. The emotion… It is… rather distressing, ja? I… hope you will consider, possibly, deleting this embarrassing lapse in discipline from your recording?
RH: I will certainly consult my superiors, Herr Dourtmundschtradel, but I assure you, there’s no need of apology. I sympathize completely. (42)
GD: Danke, (43) Herr Halifax. Your understanding does you credit.
RH: The honor is mine, sir. Shall we continue?
GD: Of course, of course. Where were we?
RH: Er… at the, uh, dawn of Durn’s liberation, I believe?
GD: Ja, ja. Well. A respectable civic leader like Herr Brock would, of course, have found that old man’s disturbing emotional outburst as unseemly as you and I do, Herr Halifax, and perhaps have worried also about potential consequences for himself and his establishment should any of Mad Gus’s men happen to be lurking near enough to overhear the indecorous display of seditious sentiment developing inside. He quite properly insisted that the discussion be suspended immediately and taken “elsewhere.”
Now, everyone in Durn, except, of course, for Mad Gus and his various agents, knew very well what ‘elsewhere’ meant. In times of extremis, one was likely to hear that so-and-so had gone ‘elsewhere’ for a while, or that ‘the thing in question’ might be looked for ‘elsewhere.’ In Durn, elsewhere meant that secret second cellar, which I have mentioned, underneath Herr Brock’s inn. Thus, with knowing looks and crafty nonchalance, the hysterical mob sidled furtively down Brock’s cellar stairs, and passed in single file through the slyly sequestered slot behind the curtain, cleverly concealed inside a false-backed barrel into Brock’s secret second cellar to resume their rabble-rousing in greater safety.
Unfortunately, this space is said to have been no larger than eight feet in any direction, so one must assume the hysterical mob was packed inside quite tightly. The smell alone of all those rustic fellows jammed together in the darkness must have been appalling, (44) though they were likely far too angry at that moment to care much about such trivialities, ja?
At any rate, once all were pressed inside, their rebellious conversation was resumed.
“So,” Brock commences sensibly, “how exactly do you bravos think that we, without any weapons, can hope to overthrow Mad Gus with all his henchmen and that cannon he is always polishing?” (45)
“Anybody ever seen him fire it?” asks a voice from near the back. “I’ll bet it doesn’t even work, or he’d have fired it at us long ago.”
“You are volunteering, then,” Brock counters, “to stand between it and the rest of us while we find out?”
“Our cause is just!” cries the old man with hardly any teeth. “God will surely supply us with whatever weapons are required.”
I do not doubt Brock rolled his eyes, though no one would have seen it in the darkness. “And what kind of weapons do you imagine God would send us?” he asks wearily, having watched this kind of theater come and go in Durn too many times before.
A consternated silence fills their crowded refuge.
“Beehives!” someone exclaims.
“Beehives?” Brock asks. “Mad Gus’s beekeepers will have many more of those up at the castle than we’re likely to assemble here. What would we do with them anyway?”
“Doesn’t matter,” says another voice. “Don’t need the hives—just a couple tubs of honeycomb, and take it to the castle as an offering to make amends for Gundar’s blunder.”
“I told you,” Gundar protests. “I did nothing!”
“Hold your tongue, Gundar,” scolds the first voice. “I’m not finished yet. Being such greedy bastards, I bet they’ll tear into that honey right in front of us and shove it all into their faces while we look on, hungry, ja?”
“Which will accomplish what of any help to us?” asks someone else.
“Nothing,” says the first voice, ‘‘til we set the bears loose on them!”
“What bears?” asks Gundar, backed by many a concurring grunt.
“The woods are full of hungry bears this close to winter,” he replies. “We just catch five or six of them, and sic ‘em on Mad Gus and his collaborators when their greedy faces are all covered in our honey. They’ll be torn to pieces.”
“How are we to trap these bears without being mauled ourselves?” scoffs Gundar.
“And how are we to sneak them up into the castle?” asks another voice as scornfully. “Shall we hide them in our breeches while presenting Mad Gus with the honey, or just whistle for them once he has indulged this bestial sweet tooth you describe?”
“We could use weasels, then,” says a new voice. “They’re easier to catch, and small enough to hide—even in our breeches, if we have to.”