He tried to reckon out when the laborers would be likely to come. Potatoes had to be fetched for the pigs. At the most it would be another two hours; he would remain alive as long as that, surely, so that he could die in his own bed.…
But Pagel! he thought suddenly. My friend Pagel will be waiting for me. Every morning I’ve been there early and informed him of the holes—and today I don’t turn up! He’ll miss me!
Kniebusch shut his eyes. It was pleasant to feel that someone would miss him. He could hear that youthful, invariably friendly voice asking the Backs: “Where’s our old Kniebusch got to this morning? Why, he hasn’t made his report yet, Amanda!”
He smiled.
But an agonized feeling began to stir in him; he hadn’t yet made his report! Today he really had something to report, and today he failed to appear. They would soon find him, though. But this didn’t comfort him. I’m getting weaker all the time, he thought. I’m getting colder and colder. Perhaps I won’t be able to call out later on—they will find me too late.
He tried to move his head forward. He wanted to estimate, from the quantity of blood he had lost, the quantity of life which still remained to him; but he could not, it was too difficult.
A terrible struggle starts in him: the dying man wants only to lie quietly, to feel himself gently flowing away, to be at peace.… And something else tells him that he must get up and make his report. Bäumer is back again and someone else, a stranger—two dangerous people, two ravenous wolves.
I can’t get there! he groaned. I can’t walk even!
If you can’t walk, you must crawl, spoke the pitiless voice.
I never had any peace in my life; let me at least die in peace.
You will have peace in the grave—now make your report! said the voice without pity.
And the worn-out old man, the coward, the babbler, rolled over on his belly and drew up his icy limbs. Will-power, the ruthless will-power of duty—it was this which had always strengthened him against his entire nature. Now once more it drove him to a last extreme effort; old Kniebusch crawled on all fours across the forest and, coming to a sack, he took hold of it and dragged it with him, in the obscure feeling that he had snatched up some evidence.
He crawled up to the potato clamps and hopefully raised his head. No one was to be seen. “Oh, my God, my God! Will no one help me?” he wailed.
But he crawled onward. He crawled down from the clamps onto the path, and when he was alongside the park he saw in the hedge a hole and squeezed through this, to shorten his journey.… He did everything correctly, exactly, as if his brain were still functioning. But his brain was only in its twilight. Everything his mind and body could give was made possible by the massive will that forced him constantly to crawl forward. He no longer thought of Pagel, of Bäumer, of icy coldness, of wounds. He had forgotten the sack which, in the midst of torments, he went on dragging with him—he thought of nothing but that he must crawl on. Crawl—till he collapsed.
And collapse he did, in that moment when Pagel shouted to him: “My God, Kniebusch, dear Kniebusch—what have they done to you?” At that moment, hearing that familiar voice, his will gave way, his body failed him, and he stopped crawling forward. Together Amanda and he dragged the old man indoors. But they couldn’t get the sack out of his hand; it was as if his fingers had grown into the material.
III
It would certainly have been the bitterest irony in the world had Forester Kniebusch died in a strange bed without being able to make that report for which he had suffered so heroically. But Death was not so severe. Once again he was to open his eyes and see close above him his friend’s pale face and hear his kind voice. “Old Kniebusch, what a fright you gave us! Just wait a bit, the doctor will be here in a moment. He’ll patch you up again. Are you in bad pain?”
The forester moved his head angrily. Doctors and pain didn’t concern him any longer. He had been plunged into the darkness and only returned from it because he had something to settle, his report. And in disjointed words he whispered into Pagel’s ear, and Pagel nodded again and again and said: “Good, Kniebusch, good. Quietly—don’t tax yourself, I can understand everything.”
The forester went on whispering. Every word hurt him, but every word was necessary. When, however, he at last finished, he looked at Pagel with such imploring eyes that even the most callous would have understood the urgent question in that glance. And Pagel was by no means the most callous. “Good man,” he said, and gently pressed the forester’s hand. “Very good man.” Like one set free, the old forester smiled as he perhaps had never smiled in his life before. And then he seemed to sleep.
Holding the limp hand Pagel reflected on what he had heard; it was little enough, for the forester hadn’t seen one of the men, and the other he hadn’t known.
Sitting there dolefully, however, Pagel’s eye now alighted on the dirty old potato sack at his feet. For the dying man had let it fall as he groped for his friend’s hand. With his foot Pagel pushed at the sack and turned it about, and it looked to him as if, under all the dirt, there were black characters forming a name. Of course forage sacks were marked with their owner’s name.
He bent down and with his free hand laid the sack across his knee and wiped away the dirt—not letting go of the dying man’s hand. Letter by letter the writing became legible—legible with difficulty, but legible: Kowalewski.
Pagel stared dejectedly at this name. What could the old and honest overseer have to do with potato thieves and murderers? Undoubtedly it was a stolen sack.
In this moment the office door opened, and Amanda Backs came in. She had been telephoning; the doctor would come in a quarter of an hour and the police perhaps in half an hour.…
In reply Pagel lifted the sack, showed her the name and said: “They all come too late. He didn’t see his murderer and didn’t recognize the one who held him. And the name on this sack doesn’t help us further.…”
Amanda turned very pale, looked at him with large terrified eyes and began to tremble.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Do you understand what the name Kowalewski is doing on the sack?”
Amanda had laid her hand on her breast and was looking from the dying man to the sack, and from the sack to Pagel.
“Speak, Amanda! What do you know about it?”
“I know,” she whispered, “that the runaway convict is living in Sophie Kowalewski’s room.”
With a white face Pagel regarded the trembling girl.
“Yes, and I know that Liebschner has been out stealing, together with Bäumer, and so one of the pair held the forester fast, while the other hit—”
“Amanda!” he shouted.
“Yes, Amanda!” she repeated and burst into tears. “And now I’ve become an accomplice of murderers just when I thought I was quite out of the dirt.”
He listened to her sobbing. “You ought certainly to have told me about that, Amanda.”
“Yes,” she cried in despair, “I know that now. But at the time she gave me so many good words. And I couldn’t help thinking of my Hans, of Bailiff Meier, and what I should have felt like if someone had betrayed him to the police. I already helped him away from here as soon as he shot at me! You can’t let down a friend. And she told me, Sophie told me, her Liebschner is good to her and they were going away at once as soon as the fare money had been saved, that means stolen. He’s good to her! That’s why it was; because she told me he was good to her, that’s why I held my tongue.”
“But you ought to have felt, Amanda,” insisted Pagel, “that it was wrong to keep silent.”