by Isak Dinesen
I am a poet, and something in these reports brought back to me tales of long ago. I resolved to look up this successful person and to make him tell me about himself. First, I sought him in vain in his pleasant house and garden; then one night I walked along the beach to his hut.
The moon was full in the sky, the long gray waves came in one by one, and everything around me seemed to agree to keep a secret. I looked at it all, and felt that I was going to hear, and to compose, a beautiful story.
The man I sought was not in his hut, but was sitting on the sand, gazing at the sea and from time to time throwing a pebble into it. The moon shone upon him, and I saw that he was a pretty, fat man, and that his tranquil countenance did indeed express harmony and happiness.
I saluted him with reverence, told him my name and explained that I was out for a walk in the clear, warm night. He returned my greeting courteously and benevolently and informed me that I was already known to him by repute as a youth keen to perfect himself in the art of story-telling. He then invited me to sit down on the sand beside him. He talked for a while of the moon and the sea. After a pause he remarked that it was a long time since he had heard a tale told. Would I, as we were sitting so pleasantly together in the clear, warm night, tell him a story?
I was eager to prove my skill, and also trusted that it might serve to forward my purpose with him. So I searched my memory for a good tale. Somehow, I do not know why, the story of the Softa Saufe had been running in my mind. Now in a low, sweet voice, concordant with the moon and the waves, I began:
“In Shiraz lived a young student of theology …”
The happy man listened quietly and attentively. But as I came to the passage of the lovers on the house-top and named the dancer Thusmu, he lifted up his hand and looked at it. I had taken much trouble in inventing this pretty moonlight scene, and it was dear to my poet’s heart; I recognized the gesture and in great surprise and alarm cried out: “You are the Softa of Shiraz!”
“Yes,” said the happy man.
It is to a poet a thing of awe to find that his story is true. I was only a boy and a novice at my art; the hair rose on my head and I nearly got up and ran away. But something in the happy man’s voice held me to the spot.
“Once,” he said, “I had the welfare of the Softa Saufe, of whom you have just told me, much at heart. By this time I had almost forgotten him. But I am pleased to know that he has got into a story, for that is probably what he was made for, and in future I shall leave him therein confidently. Go on with your tale, Mira Jama, story-teller, and let me hear the end of it.”
I trembled at his demand, but again his manner fascinated me and enabled me to take up the thread of my story. At first I felt that he was bestowing an honor upon me and soon, as I went on, that I was bestowing an honor upon him as well. The triumph of the story-teller filled my heart. I told my story very movingly and when I had finished it, there upon that lean sea-sand, with only myself and him under the full moon, my face was bathed in tears.
The happy man comforted me and begged me not to take a story too much to heart. So when I had regained my voice I beseeched him to tell me all that had happened to him after he left Shiraz. For his experiences in the deep sea, and the luck which had brought him wealth and fame amongst men, would be sure to make as lovely a story as the one I had told him, and a more cheerful one. Princes, great ladies, dancers, I explained to him, love a sad tale, so do the beggars by the city walls. But I meant to be a story-teller to the whole world, and the men of business and their wives will demand a tale that ends well.
The happy man was silent for a while.
“What happened to me,” he then answered me, “after I left Shiraz, makes no story at all.
“I am famous amongst men,” he said, “because I am capable of staying at the bottom of the sea longer than they. This capacity, if you will, is a small heritage from the Softa of whom you have told me. But that makes no story. The fishes have been kind to me, and they betray nobody. So that makes no story.
“All the same,” he went on after a longer silence, “in return for your tale, and so as not to discourage a young poet, although it makes no story, I shall tell you what happened to me after I left Shiraz.” He then began his narration and I listened to him.
“I shall leave out the explanation of how I got away from Shiraz and came here, and take up the account of my experiences only where it will please the men of business and their wives.
“For when I first went down to the bottom of the sea, in search of a certain rare pearl of which at the time I thought much, an old cowfish with horn-rimmed spectacles took me in hand. As a very small fish she had been caught in the net of two old fishermen, and had spent a whole night there, in the bilge water of their boat, listening to the talk of these men, who must have been pious and profound people. But in the morning, when the net was lifted ashore, she slipped through the meshes and swam away. Since then she smiles at the other fishes’ distrust of men. For really, she explains, if a fish knows how to behave herself, she can easily manage them. She has even come to take an interest in the nature and the customs of man, and often lectures upon these to an audience of fishes. She also likes to discuss them with me.
“I owe her much, for she holds a great position in the sea, and as her protégé I have been received everywhere; I owe to her also much of the wealth and fame which have made me, as you have been told, a happy man. I owe her more than that, for in our long talks together she has imparted to me the philosophy which has set me at rest.
“This is what she advocates:
“ ‘The fish,’ she proclaims, ‘amongst all creatures is the one most carefully and accurately made in the image of the Lord. All things work together for the good of her, and from this we may conclude that she is called according to his purpose.
“ ‘Man can move but in one plane, and is tied to the earth. Still the earth supports him only by the narrow space under the soles of his two feet; he must bear his own weight and sigh beneath it. He must, so I gathered from the talk of my old fishermen, climb the hills of the earth laboriously; it may happen to him to tumble down from them, and the earth then receives him with hardness. Even the birds, which have wings to them, if they do not strain their wings are betrayed by the air wherein they are set, and flung down.
“ ‘We fish are upheld and supported on all sides. We lean confidently and harmoniously upon our element. We move in all dimensions, and whatever course we take, the mighty waters out of reverence for our virtue change shape accordingly.
“ ‘We have no hands, so cannot construct anything at all, and are never tempted by vain ambition to alter anything whatever in the universe of the Lord. We sow not and toil not; therefore no estimates of ours will turn out wrong, and no expectations fail. The greatest amongst us in their spheres have reached perfect darkness. And the pattern of the universe we read with ease, because we see it from below.
“ ‘We carry with us, in these our floatings about, an account of events excellently suited to prove to us our privileged position and to maintain our fellow-feeling. It is known to man also and even takes up an important place in his history, but in accordance with his infantile conception of things in general, he has but a muddled understanding of it. I shall record it to you.
“ ‘When God had created heaven and earth, the earth caused him sore disappointment. Man, capable of falling, fell almost immediately, and with him all that was in the dry land. And it repented the Lord that he had made man, and the beasts of the earth, and the fowls of the air.
“ ‘But the fish did not fall, and never will fall, for how or whereto would we fall? So the Lord looked kindly at His fish and was comforted by the sight of them, since amongst all creation they alone had not disappointed him.
“ ‘He resolved to reward the fish according to their merit. So all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the waters of the flood came upon the earth. And the waters prevailed and
were increased, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered. And the waters prevailed exceedingly, and all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl and of cattle, and of beast and of every man. All that was on dry land died.
“ ‘I shall not, in giving you this report, dwell long upon the pleasantness of that age and state. For I have got compassion with man, and besides tact. You yourself, before you found your way to us, may have set your heart upon cattle, camels and horses, or you may have kept pigeons and peafowl. You are young, and may recently have been attached to some such creature, of your own species and yet somehow like a bird, as you name a young woman. (Although, by the way, it would be better for you if it were not so, for I remember the words of my fishermen: that a young woman will make her lover taste the pain of burning, and you might otherwise come to take an interest in one of my own nieces, quite unusually salty young creatures, who will never make a lover taste any pain of burning.) I shall but briefly mention that we did have a hundred and fifty days of abundance, and that blessed plenty appeared with full horn.
“ ‘I shall further—this time for my own sake—in the wise and proven manner of the fish, pass lightly over the fact that man, although fallen and corrupted, once more succeeded, by craft, in coming out on top.
“ ‘It does, however, remain open to doubt whether, through this apparent triumph, man obtained true welfare. How will real security be obtained by a creature ever anxious about the direction in which he moves, and attaching vital importance to his rising or falling? How can equilibrium be obtained by a creature which refuses to give up the idea of hope and risk?
“ ‘We fish rest quietly, on all sides supported, within an element which all the time accurately and unfailingly evens itself out. An element which may be said to have taken over our personal existence, in as much as, regardless of individual shape and whether we be flat fish or round fish, our weight and body are calculated according to the quantity of our surroundings which we displace.
“ ‘Our experience has proved to us, as your own will some time do it to you, that one may quite well float without hope, ay, that one will even float better without it. Therefore, also, our creed states that with us all hope is left out.
“ ‘We run no risks. For our changing of place in existence never creates, or leaves after it, what man calls a way, upon which phenomenon—in reality no phenomenon but an illusion—he will waste inexplicable passionate deliberation.
“ ‘Man, in the end, is alarmed by the idea of time, and unbalanced by incessant wanderings between past and future. The inhabitants of a liquid world have brought past and future together in the maxim: Après nous le déluge.’ ”
I. TWO LADIES OF BERLEVAAG
IN NORWAY there is a fjord—a long narrow arm of the sea between tall mountains—named Berlevaag Fjord. At the foot of the mountains the small town of Berlevaag looks like a child’s toy-town of little wooden pieces painted gray, yellow, pink and many other colors.
Sixty-five years ago two elderly ladies lived in one of the yellow houses. Other ladies at that time wore a bustle, and the two sisters might have worn it as gracefully as any of them, for they were tall and willowy. But they had never possessed any article of fashion; they had dressed demurely in gray or black all their lives. They were christened Martine and Philippa, after Martin Luther and his friend Philip Melanchton. Their father had been a Dean and a prophet, the founder of a pious ecclesiastic party or sect, which was known and looked up to in all the country of Norway. Its members renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem toward which they were longing. They swore not at all, but their communication was yea yea and nay nay, and they called one another Brother and Sister.
The Dean had married late in life and by now had long been dead. His disciples were becoming fewer in number every year, whiter or balder and harder of hearing; they were even becoming somewhat querulous and quarrelsome, so that sad little schisms would arise in the congregation. But they still gathered together to read and interpret the Word. They had all known the Dean’s daughters as little girls; to them they were even now very small sisters, precious for their dear father’s sake. In the yellow house they felt that their Master’s spirit was with them; here they were at home and at peace.
These two ladies had a French maid-of-all-work, Babette.
It was a strange thing for a couple of Puritan women in a small Norwegian town; it might even seem to call for an explanation. The people of Berlevaag found the explanation in the sisters’ piety and kindness of heart. For the old Dean’s daughters spent their time and their small income in works of charity; no sorrowful or distressed creature knocked on their door in vain. And Babette had come to that door twelve years ago as a friendless fugitive, almost mad with grief and fear.
But the true reason for Babette’s presence in the two sisters’ house was to be found further back in time and deeper down in the domain of human hearts.
II. MARTINE’S LOVER
As young girls, Martine and Philippa had been extraordinarily pretty, with the almost supernatural fairness of flowering fruit trees or perpetual snow. They were never to be seen at balls or parties, but people turned when they passed in the streets, and the young men of Berlevaag went to church to watch them walk up the aisle. The younger sister also had a lovely voice, which on Sundays filled the church with sweetness. To the Dean’s congregation earthly love, and marriage with it, were trivial matters, in themselves nothing but illusions; still it is possible that more than one of the elderly Brothers had been prizing the maidens far above rubies and had suggested as much to their father. But the Dean had declared that to him in his calling his daughters were his right and left hand. Who could want to bereave him of them? And the fair girls had been brought up to an ideal of heavenly love; they were all filled with it and did not let themselves be touched by the flames of this world.
All the same they had upset the peace of heart of two gentlemen from the great world outside Berlevaag.
There was a young officer named Lorens Loewenhielm, who had led a gay life in his garrison town and had run into debt. In the year of 1854, when Martine was eighteen and Philippa seventeen, his angry father sent him on a month’s visit to his aunt in her old country house of Fossum near Berlevaag, where he would have time to meditate and to better his ways. One day he rode into town and met Martine in the marketplace. He looked down at the pretty girl, and she looked up at the fine horseman. When she had passed him and disappeared he was not certain whether he was to believe his own eyes.
In the Loewenhielm family there existed a legend to the effect that long ago a gentleman of the name had married a Huldre, a female mountain spirit of Norway, who is so fair that the air round her shines and quivers. Since then, from time to time, members of the family had been second-sighted. Young Lorens till now had not been aware of any particular spiritual gift in his own nature. But at this one moment there rose before his eyes a sudden, mighty vision of a higher and purer life, with no creditors, dunning letters or parental lectures, with no secret, unpleasant pangs of conscience and with a gentle, golden-haired angel to guide and reward him.
Through his pious aunt he got admission to the Dean’s house, and saw that Martine was even lovelier without a bonnet. He followed her slim figure with adoring eyes, but he loathed and despised the figure which he himself cut in her nearness. He was amazed and shocked by the fact that he could find nothing at all to say, and no inspiration in the glass of water before him. “Mercy and Truth, dear brethren, have met together,” said the Dean. “Righteousness and Bliss have kissed one another.” And the young man’s thoughts were with the moment when Lorens and Martine should be kissing each other. He repeated his visit time after time, and each time seemed to himself to grow smaller and more insignificant and contemptible.
When in the evening he came back to his aunt’s house he kicked his shining riding-
boots to the corners of his room; he even laid his head on the table and wept.
On the last day of his stay he made a last attempt to communicate his feelings to Martine. Till now it had been easy for him to tell a pretty girl that he loved her, but the tender words stuck in his throat as he looked into this maiden’s face. When he had said good-bye to the party, Martine saw him to the door with a candlestick in her hand. The light shone on her mouth and threw upwards the shadows of her long eyelashes. He was about to leave in dumb despair when on the threshold he suddenly seized her hand and pressed it to his lips.
“I am going away forever!” he cried. “I shall never, never see you again! For I have learned here that Fate is hard, and that in this world there are things which are impossible!”
When he was once more back in his garrison town he thought his adventure over, and found that he did not like to think of it at all. While the other young officers talked of their love affairs, he was silent on his. For seen from the officers’ mess, and so to say with its eyes, it was a pitiful business. How had it come to pass that a lieutenant of the hussars had let himself be defeated and frustrated by a set of long-faced sectarians, in the bare-floored rooms of an old Dean’s house?
Then he became afraid; panic fell upon him. Was it the family madness which made him still carry with him the dream-like picture of a maiden so fair that she made the air round her shine with purity and holiness? He did not want to be a dreamer; he wanted to be like his brother-officers.
So he pulled himself together, and in the greatest effort of his young life made up his mind to forget what had happened to him in Berlevaag. From now on, he resolved, he would look forward, not back. He would concentrate on his career, and the day was to come when he would cut a brilliant figure in a brilliant world.
His mother was pleased with the result of his visit to Fossum, and in her letters expressed her gratitude to his aunt. She did not know by what queer, winding roads her son had reached his happy moral standpoint.
