This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized by Google as part of an ongoing effort to preserve the information in books and make it universally accessible. http://books.google.com VAMPIRE VAMPIRE BY HANNS HEINZ EWERS TRANSLATED BY FRITZ SALLA6AR THE JOHN DAY COMPANY NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1934, BY HANNS HEINZ EWERS KPLACIN© Q " r r 1 -2 . .• .. / ^ All Rights Reserved MANUFACTURED IN THE U. S. A. FOR THE JOHN DAY COMPANY, INC., BY H. WOLFF, NEW YORK ABOUT THE AUTHOR V Hanns Heinz Ewers was born in Diisseldorf, Germany, November 3, 1871. His varied and stormy literary career began in 1901 with the publication of a volume of rhymed satires entitled A Boo^ of Fables, written in collaboration with Theodor Etzel. This attracted considerable atten tion and led to his association with Ernst von Wol- zogen in the formation of a literary vaudeville theatre. In 1901 he founded his own vaudeville organization and, with his troupe of artists, toured Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary. This enterprise, for a time successful, eventually was abandoned be cause of its prohibitive expense and the interference of the censor. Later he travelled widely and at the outbreak of the World War was in South America. Unable to return to Germany, he came to the United States, and upon America's entry into the war, was interned here. Of his books the following have appeared in Eng lish translations: Edgar Allan Poe, an essay (1926); The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1927); The Ant People (Die Ameisen) (1927); Alraune (1929); Rider of the Night (1932). Aside from his fiction his writings in clude numerous volumes of plays, poems, critical essays, fairy tales, and books of travel. < VAMPIRE OPALS IN THE year in which the whole world went mad he started out — again. He always thought of it as going again, never counted how often he had been away before. This time he had stayed home for three years — three years in his old home: Europe. He knew perfectly well that he was sick; Europe always made him so. After a year there he himself could feel it; after two years his friends noticed it; and after three years any stranger could see it. His nerves— somehow — But he knew also what could cure him, or at least give him new strength for more years at home: to drink in deeply the torrid heat of the tropics, to breathe the solitude of the deserts, to still his longing in the cool infinity of the oceans. And he was well again — or almost well — on that day in Anto- fagasta. Only some little thing had remained in him, something strange, something soft and untamed. Frank Braun smiled about it as he flung out his arms and stretched himself to feel his old strength. Yes, he was well and he wanted to dive into the water, into the midst of the sea lions, and race with them after the schools of herring in the harbor. This was the day when a streak of lightning flashed across the sky at home, and the whole world rang with a single cry that was taken up and carried over land and under water and through the air: the wild cry of the assassination at Sarajevo. 3 In Hamburg he had boarded the steamer that was just sailing out into the world. Lying on deck when the boat was out at sea, he felt as if he were borne by the ocean and not by the ship. The ship was only the cradle in which he lay and it was rocked softly by the Almighty Mother. She sang for him and when he closed his eyes he could hear it clearly, the melody and the words. When they got to St. Paul's Riff, in the middle of the ocean, he asked the Captain to stop for a few hours and let him hunt for sharks. The Captain refused at first, but Frank Braun conspired with the chief engineer, who promised that he would make up for the time lost before they reached Montevideo. So they stopped, prepared their hooks and threw them overboard. They caught five sharks and ripped open their bellies in true seaman's fashion, but did not find anything. There is no abun dance of human meat in the middle of the Atlantic, at St. Paul's Riff. In the Straits of Magellan, off Punta Arenas, they met a dirty tramp steamer belonging to the La Plata government. They hailed the Captain and found that he was supposed to take sound ings there for his government. He was a Basque from the moun tains and seemed to have only a vague idea of what soundings were. So he sailed his steamer aimlessly from one island to the other to pass the time, and when he returned to port he got the Kosmos agent there to copy a few figures for him from a Ger man book. For these the Captain paid in skins and sent the records, carefully sealed up, to Buenos Aires. Not a soul read them there. They cruised in the Straits of Magellan, over to Terra del Fuego where they hunted otters and foxes, and back to Pata gonia to shoot guanacos. They visited the camps of poverty- stricken gold miners and watched the freezing, swearing, half- starved prospectors turn their few hard-earned pennies into drink; they explored the country with Indians, dirty, starving creatures who went naked in spite of the cold and who would sell their wretched lives for a mouthful of brandy. When the boat lay at anchor in a quiet bay, Frank Braun 4 would lie on deck, securely wrapped in warm blankets, and look at the blue glaciers that reached deep down into the sea, or watch the water for seals or penguins. He amused himself tossing pieces of bacon or small fishes overboard for the petrels and boobies and albatross that rocked themselves on the water like clumsy giant ducks. He spent the long evenings lying on the skins that were heaped on the floor of his cabin, smoking or playing chess with the Swedish mate. Sometimes he would reach for his old books and dream with them. He had only a few books with him: Jacomino of Verona, F rater Pacifius, St. Bonaventura, Jacopone da Todi. The Swede looked at them contemptuously and yet a little awed. "They never rounded Cape Horn!" he said once. "Are you sure?" Frank Braun countered. "Perhaps Magellan knew Jacopone!" He bought horses and rode through Patagonia with two In dians, climbed over the Andes and descended at Coronel. There he boarded a small whaler belonging to the Norwegian whaling station and went out harpooning whales. When they had caught two, they made back for port, slowly, at a snail's pace, in this nutshell of a boat that towed the huge whales, one on the port side and one on starboard. In Coronel he left the boat and crossed Chile by train, then turned north through the Spanish- speaking parts. From there he went back over the Andes to Bolivia where he sang and drank with German officers who were drilling the barefooted natives into some semblance of soldiers. Now he wanted to go back. The Hapag steamer was waiting in the harbor of Antofagasta. He was strong and well — or almost well. The green water in the bay was so clear that one could see many fathoms down. Frank Braun's boat made its way through a living cloud that rolled and pushed through the water, spar kling and shining like the patina on old silver — schools of her ring, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of herring. The sea lions were chasing them and driving them into the harbor, rounding them up from the ocean in a great semicircle 5 like trained beaters. One of the lions raised his great trunk above the water and shook his powerful head with the long whiskers, flapping his fin clumsily against the oar of the boat. Yes, that old fellow knows very well that he is free and well protected, that nobody can harm him on the West Coast! He peers curi ously into the boat: Who is that man who wants to leave here? Who is foolish enough to leave here — leave this blessed hunting ground of the countless herring? Fool, he thinks, fool! With a powerful stroke of his body he lifts himself further out of the water and splashes back again, throwing himself headlong into the magnificent chase after the rich spoil. As Frank Braun looked back, he could see the endless nitrate desert, this huge arid stretch of land covering thirty degrees, between the ocean and the mountains. Brown and white and yellow and red. No tree, no bush, not the smallest spear of grass. No trace of green. And the city itself, Antofagasta, parched in the heat of the sun like the desert behind it, like Arequipa, like Mollendo, Iquique and all the other towns. Germans, English men, Chileans, Croats, Syrians digging from the barren soil the stuff that would bring fertility to the soil in their homeland. Pale and parched were all the human beings, just like the desert in which they lived; it was like a single great sigh all along the West Coast: Water! And there was enough of it, of course, right in front of them, a whole huge ocean full! — The sea lion can not understand it. Flocks of white birds were setding on the cliff all along the waterfront.