Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist by Heinrich von Kleist

up, took the pot of milk on the table and dumped it out the window. Grippedwith horror, unable to believe her eyes, Toni stared at her mother. Sitting herself down again and turning to the girl, who crouched before her on her knees, Babekan picked her up off the floor and asked: “What in the course of a single night could have so muddled your thoughts? Yesterday, after giving him a footbath, did you stay with him a while longer? Did you speak much with him?” Yet Toni, whose heart heaved in her breast, held her tongue, but for a few meaningless words; her eyes cast to the floor, she stood there holding her head, lost in a dream. “A look at the bosom of my unhappy mother,” she said, bowing and kissing her hand, “reminded me of the inhumanity of the race to which that stranger belongs,” and turning around and pressing her face into her apron, she assured the old woman, “as soon as the Negro Hoango gets back you’ll see what kind of daughter you have.”
    Babekan sat lost in thought, wondering what the devil could have stirred such a strange passion in the girl, when the fugitive entered the room with a note he’d written, stuffed in the pocket of his nightgown, inviting his family to spend a few days at the plantation of the Negro Hoango. He extended a cheerful and friendly greeting to mother and daughter, handed the note to the old woman and asked that someone immediately take it to the clearing along with a few provisions for his kinfolk, as he’d been promised. Babekan stood up, and with a worried look, took the note, stuffed it into the cupboard and said: “Sir, we must ask you to immediately return to your bedroom. The highway is teeming with lone Negro troops rushing by, who’ve informed us that General Dessalines and his army are headed this way. In this house, which is open to everyone, you will find no safe haven unless you hide in your room facing theyard and shut tight the door and all the windows.” “What?” said the stunned stranger, “General Dessalines . . . ?” “Don’t ask any questions!” Babekan interrupted, knocking three times with a stick on the wooden floor. “I’ll follow you and explain everything in your room.” Hustled off by the old woman who feigned worried looks, the stranger turned and called out at the dining room door: “But won’t you at least send a messenger to my family waiting for me in the woods, informing them of that . . . ?” “It will all be attended to,” she cut him short, just as the bastard boy whom we already know came rushing in; whereupon she ordered Toni, who stood before a mirror with her back to the stranger, to take up the basket of provisions in the corner of the room; and mother, daughter, the boy, and the stranger went up to his bedroom.
    Here, easing herself slowly into a chair, the old woman told how they’d seen the fires of General Dessalines shimmering all night long on the mountains that blocked the horizon, a verifiable fact indeed, although not a single Negro from his army advancing in a southwestern direction toward Port au Prince had shown his face in the immediate surroundings. She thereby succeeded in sending the stranger into a frenzied panic, which she promptly managed to still with the assurance that, even in the worst-case scenario, if soldiers were quartered in her house, she would do everything possible to ensure his safety. And upon the latter’s imploring reminder that, under these circumstances, his family at least be furnished with provisions, she took the basket from her daughter’s hands, and handing it to the boy, instructed him to go to the clearing at the edge of the seagull pond and bring it to the officer’s family that was camped out there. “The officer himself is safe,” she told him to tell them,“friends of the whites, who, on account of their sympathies, had been made to suffer much at the