But after a few days we found that we could not abide that poor woman's distress, so we begged Satan to examine her several possible careers, and see if he could not change her, to her profit, to a new one.He said the longest of her careers as they now stood gave her forty-two years to live, and her shortest one twenty-nine, and that both were charged with grief and hunger and cold and pain.The only improvement he could make would be to enable her to skip a certain three minutes from now; and he asked us if he should do it.This was such a short time to decide in that we went to pieces with nervous excitement, and before we could pull ourselves together and ask for particulars he said the time would be up in a few more seconds; so then we gasped out, "Do it!""It is done," he said; "she was going around a corner; I have turned her back; it has changed her career.""Then what will happen, Satan?"
"It is happening now.She is having words with Fischer, the weaver.In his anger Fischer will straightway do what he would not have done but for this accident.He was present when she stood over her child's body and uttered those blasphemies.""What will he do?"
"He is doing it now--betraying her.In three days she will go to the stake."We could not speak; we were frozen with horror, for if we had not meddled with her career she would have been spared this awful fate.Satan noticed these thoughts, and said:
"What you are thinking is strictly human-like--that is to say, foolish.
The woman is advantaged.Die when she might, she would go to heaven.By this prompt death she gets twenty-nine years more of heaven than she is entitled to, and escapes twenty-nine years of misery here."A moment before we were bitterly making up our minds that we would ask no more favors of Satan for friends of ours, for he did not seem to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him; but the whole aspect of the case was changed now, and we were glad of what we had done and full of happiness in the thought of it.
After a little I began to feel troubled about Fischer, and asked, timidly, "Does this episode change Fischer's life-scheme, Satan?""Change it? Why, certainly.And radically.If he had not met Frau Brandt awhile ago he would die next year, thirty-four years of age.Now he will live to be ninety, and have a pretty prosperous and comfortable life of it, as human lives go."We felt a great joy and pride in what we had done for Fischer, and were expecting Satan to sympathize with this feeling; but he showed no sign and this made us uneasy.We waited for him to speak, but he didn't; so, to assuage our solicitude we had to ask him if there was any defect in Fischer's good luck.Satan considered the question a moment, then said, with some hesitation:
"Well, the fact is, it is a delicate point.Under his several former possible life-careers he was going to heaven."We were aghast."Oh, Satan! and under this one--""There, don't be so distressed.You were sincerely trying to do him a kindness; let that comfort you.""Oh, dear, dear, that cannot comfort us.You ought to have told us what we were doing, then we wouldn't have acted so."But it made no impression on him.He had never felt a pain or a sorrow, and did not know what they were, in any really informing way.He had no knowledge of them except theoretically--that is to say, intellectually.
And of course that is no good.One can never get any but a loose and ignorant notion of such things except by experience.We tried our best to make him comprehend the awful thing that had been done and how we were compromised by it, but he couldn't seem to get hold of it.He said he did not think it important where Fischer went to; in heaven he would not be missed, there were "plenty there." We tried to make him see that he was missing the point entirely; that Fischer, and not other people, was the proper one to decide about the importance of it; but it all went for nothing; he said he did not care for Fischer--there were plenty more Fischers.
The next minute Fischer went by on the other side of the way, and it made us sick and faint to see him, remembering the doom that was upon him, and we the cause of it.And how unconscious he was that anything had happened to him! You could see by his elastic step and his alert manner that he was well satisfied with himself for doing that hard turn for poor Frau Brandt.He kept glancing back over his shoulder expectantly.And, sure enough, pretty soon Frau Brandt followed after, in charge of the officers and wearing jingling chains.A mob was in her wake, jeering and shouting, "Blasphemer and heretic!" and some among them were neighbors and friends of her happier days.Some were trying to strike her, and the officers were not taking as much trouble as they might to keep them from it.
"Oh, stop them, Satan!" It was out before we remembered that he could not interrupt them for a moment without changing their whole after-lives.He puffed a little puff toward them with his lips and they began to reel and stagger and grab at the empty air; then they broke apart and fled in every direction, shrieking, as if in intolerable pain.He had crushed a rib of each of them with that little puff.We could not help asking if their life-chart was changed.
"Yes, entirely.Some have gained years, some have lost them.Some few will profit in various ways by the change, but only that few."We did not ask if we had brought poor Fischer's luck to any of them.We did not wish to know.We fully believed in Satan's desire to do us kindnesses, but we were losing confidence in his judgment.It was at this time that our growing anxiety to have him look over our life-charts and suggest improvements began to fade out and give place to other interests.