The golden chair

Geert found the chair under his workbench. Of solid gold, small, for a middle-sized human. On the back one inscription in a language Geert did not know. Under the seat a hollow with three gold coins. Geert thought for an hour.

Geert carried the chair into the workshop, with the village smith melted one leg, paid three months rent and his debts. One leg fewer made the chair lean; he cut a wooden leg. He did not put the chair away. He set it in his doorway with a sign: «Whoever has no shoes and sits here gets shoes for nothing.»

The poor came. Geert made shoes for those without money; for others, he asked a price. The little business ran. He never melted a second leg. The coins under the seat he used only for customers with holes in their shoes that they could not pay for themselves.

Geert died in 1849. The chair went to his daughter Henrica, who left the sign in the door. Until 1923 there stood at the Beckers’s in an unnamed Guelders village a three-legged golden chair with a wooden fourth leg. In 1923 it vanished — according to the neighbour children, because a town gentleman made a good offer and the Beckers needed the money. The village holds that the Beckers had forgotten what the chair was for. The chair perhaps stands today in an Amsterdam museum, in a corner where sunlight no longer touches it.