The surprising way in which Van Spreckdal had just appeared to me threw me into a deep trance: "Yesterday," I said to myself as I contemplated the pile of ducats sparkling in the sunshine, "yesterday I formed the culpable intention of cutting my throat for the lack of a few miserable schillings and today good fortune smiles on me unbidden… A good job then I didn't open my razor and, if ever the temptation to do away with myself overtakes me again, I'll take care to put the thing off to the following day."
After these judicious reflexions, I sat down to finish the sketch. Four strokes of the charcoal pencil and that would be that. But here an unfathomable disappointment awaited me. I found it impossible to make these four strokes. I had lost the thread of my inspiration and the mysterious personage would not emerge from the limbo of my brain. It was in vain that I evoked it, mapped it out, went back to it — it was no more in keeping with the whole than a figure by Raphael would be in a David Teniers smoke-filled snug… I was sweating cobs.
To cap it all Rap, in accordance with his habitual good manners, opened the door without knocking, his eyes becoming glued to my pile of ducats. Then he cried out in a voice like a yelp:
"Aha! I've caught you. Will you persist in telling me now, Mr Painter, that you're short of money?…"
And his claw-like fingers advanced with that nervous trembling that the sight of gold always arouses in misers.
For a few seconds I stood there stupefied.
The memory of all the open snubs that this individual had inflicted on me, his covetous gaze, his insolent smile, everything about him exasperated me. In a single bound I seized him and, pushing him out of my bedroom with both hands, I flattened his nose with the door.
This was all done with the crack and the rapidity of a jack-in-the-box.
But outside the old usurer was shrieking like an eagle:
"I want my money! Thief! I want my money!"
The other tenants were coming out of their rooms and asking questions:
"What's wrong? What's happening?"
I opened the door again abruptly and dispatched a kick to the spine of Mister Rap that promptly sent him reeling down more than a score of stairs:
"That's what's happening!" I cried, beside myself. Then I locked the door and bolted it while the laughs of my neighbours greeted Mister Rap as he fell.
I was pleased with myself and rubbed my hands together joyfully. This adventure had put new life into me. I went back to the task in hand and was going to finish the sketch when my ears were assailed by an out of the ordinary noise.
Rifle butts were being struck against the pavement… I looked out of my window and saw three gendarmes, their carbines grounded, their cocked hats crosswise, standing on guard at the main entrance.
"Has that scoundrel Rap broken something?" I said to myself in fear and trembling.
And see what a strange thing the human mind is: I, who had wanted to cut my own throat just the previous day, shuddered to the marrow of my bones when I reflected that I might well be hanged if Rap was dead.
The stairwell filled with a hubbub of noises… There was a rising tide of muffled footfalls, the metallic clink of weapons and brief verbal exchanges.
Suddenly they tried to open my door. It was closed!
Then there was a general commotion.
"In the name of the law…open up!"
I got to my feet all of a-quiver, my legs virtually giving way under me.
"Open up!" the same voice repeated.
Seeing that flight was impossible, I stumbled towards the door and turned the key to unlock it.
Two fists instantly clamped themselves on my shoulders. A short thickset man, smelling of wine, said to me:
"I'm arresting you!"
He was wearing a bottle-green frock coat buttoned up to the chin, a stovepipe hat…had great brown sideburns…rings on all his fingers and was called Passauf…
He was the chief of police.
Five bulldog heads adorned with flat caps, with long, sharp noses and lower jaws protruding like hooks, were watching me from outside the door.
"What do you want?" I asked Passauf.
"Come downstairs with us," he shouted out abruptly, motioning to one of his men to grab me.
The latter dragged me out, more dead than alive, while the others ransacked my room from top to bottom.
I went down, held up by my armpits, like a man in the third stage of consumption…my hair flapping about my face and tripping with each step I took.
They threw me into a hansom next to two strapping fellows who were kind enough to show me the ends of two clubs attached to their wrists by a leather strap….then the carriage set off.
I could hear following on behind us the running footsteps of all the town's youngsters.
"What have I done?" I asked one of my guards.
He looked at his companion with a strange smile and said:
"Hans…he's asking what he's done!"
That smile made my blood run cold.
Soon the carriage was enveloped in deep shadow and the hooves of the horses echoed under a vault. We were entering the Raspelhaus or Penitentiary…I was escaping Rap's tender mercies only to end up in a dungeon from which not many poor devils have had the opportunity to extricate themselves.
Big dark courtyards; lines of windows just like in a hospital decked with guttering; not so much as a tuft of grass or a festoon of ivy, not even a weathervane in prospect…such were my new lodgings. It was enough to make you tear your hair out by the fistful.
The policemen, accompanied by the jailer, showed me into a temporary cell.
The jailer, if memory serves me right, was called Kasper Schlüssel and, with his grey woollen bonnet, the stem of his pipe stuck between his teeth and the bunch of keys on his belt, he came over to me like the Owl god people worship in the Caribbean. He had his great round gilded eyes that can see in the dark, his curved nose and his bull neck.
Schlüssel locked me up with a minimum of fuss like a person putting socks into a wardrobe, his mind elsewhere. As for me, my hands behind my back, head bowed, I stood there for more than ten minutes without moving from the spot. Then I looked at my cell. It had just been newly whitewashed and its walls were still empty of graffiti, apart from a gallows roughly drawn in one corner by the previous inmate. The light came through a bull's-eye window situated nine or ten feet up from the floor; the furniture consisted of a bale of straw and a bathtub.
I sat down on the straw, my hands around my knees, in a state of dejection beggaring belief….
Almost simultaneously I heard Schlüssel crossing the corridor. He re-opened the door of my cell and told me to follow him. He still had as his attendants the two shillelagh men. Resolutely I dogged his heels.
We passed through long galleries lit here and there by internal windows. I perceived behind a grille the notorious Jick-Jack who was due to be executed the following day. He was wearing a strait jacket and singing in a raucous voice:
"I am the king of these mountains!"
When he saw me, he shouted:
"Yo, comrade! I'll keep a place for you at my right hand."
The two policemen and the Owl god exchanged smiles with one another while I could feel goose bumps up and down my spine.