by Isak Dinesen
When his wife caught sight of him her face cleared up. “Oh, you have come!” she cried. He bent his head. He was about to take her hand and kiss it when she asked him: “Why are you so late?” “Am I late?” he exclaimed, highly surprised by her question, and because the idea of time had altogether gone from him. He looked at a clock upon the mantelpiece, and said: “It is only ten past seven.” “Yes, but I thought you would be here earlier!” said she. “I got up to be ready when you came.” Charlie sat down by the table. He did not answer her, for he had no idea what to say. “Is it possible,” he thought, “that she has the strength of soul to take me back in this way?”
“Will you have some coffee?” said his wife. “No, thank you,” said he, “I have had coffee.” He glanced round the room. Although it was nearly light and the blinds were up, the gas lamps were still burning, and from his childhood this had always seemed to him a great luxury. The fire on the fireplace played on a somewhat worn Brussels carpet and on the red plush chairs. His wife was eating an egg. As a little boy he had had an egg on Sunday mornings. The whole room, that smelled of coffee and fresh bread, with the white tablecloth and the shining coffee-pot, took on a sabbath-morning look. He gazed at his wife. She had on her grey travelling cloak, her bonnet was lying beside her, and her yellow hair, gathered in a net, shone in the lamplight. She was bright in her own way, a pure light came from her, and she seemed enduringly fixed on the sofa, the one firm object in a turbulent world.
An idea came to him: “She is like a lighthouse,” he thought, “the firm, majestic lighthouse that sends out its kindly light. To all ships it says: ‘Keep off.’ For where the lighthouse stands, there is shoal water, or rocks. To all floating objects the approach means death.” At this moment she looked up, and found his eyes on her. “What are you thinking of?” she asked him. He thought: “I will tell her. It is better to be honest with her, from now, and to tell her all.” So he said, slowly: “I am thinking that you are to me, in life, like a lighthouse. A steady light, instructing me how to steer my course.” She looked at him, then away, and her eyes filled with tears. He became afraid that she was going to cry, even though till now she had been so brave. “Let us go up to our own room,” he said, for it would be easier to explain things to her when they were alone.
They went up together, and the stairs, which, last night, had been so long to climb, now were so easy, that his wife said: “No, you are going up too high. We are there.” She walked ahead of him down the corridor, and opened the door to their room.
The first thing that he noticed was that there was no longer any smell of violets in the air. Had she thrown them away in anger? Or had they all faded when he went away? She came up to him and laid her hand on his shoulder and her face on it. Over her fair hair, in the net, he looked round, and stood quite still. For the dressing-table, on which, last night, he had put his letter for her, was in a new place, and so, he found, was the bed he had lain in. In the corner there was now a cheval-glass which had not been there before. This was not his room. He quickly took in more details. There was no longer a canopy to the bed, but above it a steel-engraving of the Belgian Royal family that till now he had never seen. “Did you sleep here last night?” he asked. “Yes,” said his wife. “But not well. I was worried when you did not come; I feared that you were having a bad crossing.” “Did nobody disturb you?” he asked again. “No,” she said. “My door was locked. And this is a quiet hotel, I believe.”
As Charlie now looked back on the happenings of the night, with the experienced eye of an author of fiction, they moved him as mightily as if they had been out of one of his own books. He drew in his breath deeply. “Almighty God,” he said from the bottom of his heart, “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are thy short stories higher than our short stories.”
He went through all the details slowly and surely, as a mathematician sets up and solves an equation. First he felt, like honey on his tongue, the longing and the triumph of the young man with the carnation. Then, like the grip of a hand round his throat, but with hardly less artistic enjoyment, the terror of the lady in the bed. As if he himself had possessed a pair of firm young breasts he was conscious of his heart stopping beneath them. He stood perfectly still, in his own thoughts, but his face took on such an expression of rapture, laughter and delight that his wife, who had lifted her head from his shoulder, asked him in surprise: “What are you thinking of now?”
Charlie took her hand, his face still radiant. “I am thinking,” he said very slowly, “of the Garden of Eden, and the cherubim with the flaming sword. Nay,” he went on in the same way, “I am thinking of Hero and Leander. Of Romeo and Juliet. Of Theseus and Ariadne, and the Minotaur as well. Have you ever tried, my dear, to guess how, upon the occasion, the Minotaur was feeling?”
“So you are going to write a love story, Troubadour?” she asked, smiling back upon him. He did not answer at once, but he let go her hand, and after a while asked: “What did you say?” “I asked you if you were going to write a love story?” she repeated timidly. He went away from her, up to the table, and put his hand upon it.
The light that had fallen upon him last night was coming back, and from all sides now—from his own lighthouse as well, he thought confusedly. Only then it had shone onward, upon the infinite world, while at this moment it was turned inwards, and was lightening up the room of the Queen’s Hotel. It was very bright; it seemed that he was to see himself, within it, as God saw him, and under this test he had to steady himself by the table.
While he stood there the situation developed into a dialogue between Charlie and the Lord.
The Lord said: “Your wife asked you twice if you are going to write a love story. Do you believe that this is indeed what you are going to do?” “Yes, that is very likely,” said Charlie. “Is it,” the Lord asked, “to be a great and sweet tale, which will live in the hearts of young lovers?” “Yes, I should say so,” said Charlie. “And are you content with that?” asked the Lord.
“O Lord, what are you asking me?” cried Charlie. “How can I answer yes? Am I not a human being, and can I write a love story without longing for that love which clings and embraces, and for the softness and warmth of a young woman’s body in my arms?” “I gave you all that last night,” said the Lord. “It was you who jumped out of bed, to go to the end of the world from it.” “Yes, I did that,” said Charlie. “Did you behold it and think it very good? Are you going to repeat it on me? Am I to be, forever, he who lay in bed with the mistress of the young man with the carnation, and, by the way, what has become of her, and how is she to explain things to him? And who went off, and wrote to her: ‘I have gone away. Forgive me, if you can.” “Yes,” said the Lord.
“Nay, tell me, now that we are at it,” cried Charlie, “am I, while I write of the beauty of young women, to get, from the live women of the earth, a shilling’s worth, and no more?” “Yes,” said the Lord. “And you are to be content with that.” Charlie was drawing a pattern with his finger on the table; he said nothing. It seemed that the discourse was ended here, when again the Lord spoke.
“Who made the ships, Charlie?” he asked. “Nay, I know not,” said Charlie, “did you make them?” “Yes,” said the Lord, “I made the ships on their keels, and all floating things. The moon that sails in the sky, the orbs that swing in the universe, the tides, the generations, the fashions. You make me laugh, for I have given you all the world to sail and float in, and you have run aground here, in a room of the Queen’s Hotel to seek a quarrel.”
“Come,” said the Lord again, “I will make a covenant between me and you. I, I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books.” “Oh, indeed!” said Charlie. “What did you say?” asked the Lord. “Do you want any less than that?” “I said nothing,” said Charlie. “But you are to write the books,” said the Lord. “For it is I who want them written. Not the public, not by any means the critics, but ME!” “Can I be certain of that?” Charlie asked.
“Not always,” said the Lord. “You will not be certain of it at all times. But I tell you now that it is so. You will have to hold on to that.” “O good God,” said Charlie. “Are you going,” said the Lord, “to thank me for what I have done for you tonight?” “I think,” said Charlie, “that we will leave it at what it is, and say no more about it.”
His wife now went and opened the window. The cold, raw morning air streamed in, with the din of carriages from the street below, human voices and a great chorus of sparrows, and with the smell of smoke and horse manure.
When Charlie had finished his talk with God, and while it was still so vivid to him that he might have written it down, he went to the window and looked out. The morning colours of the grey town were fresh and delicate, and there was a faint promise of sunshine in the sky. People were about; a young woman in a blue shawl and slippers was walking away quickly; and the omnibus of the hotel, with a white horse to it, was halting below, while the porter helped out the travellers and took down their luggage. Charlie gazed down into the street, a long way under him.
“I shall thank the Lord for one thing all the same,” he thought. “That I did not lay my hand on anything that belonged to my brother, the young man with the carnation. It was within my reach, but I did not touch it.” He stood for a while in the window and saw the omnibus drive away. Where, he wondered, amongst the houses in the pale morning, was now the young man of last night?
“O the young man,” he thought. “Ah, le pauvre jeune homme à l’œillet.”
SORROW-ACRE
THE LOW, undulating Danish landscape was silent and serene, mysteriously wide-awake in the hour before sunrise. There was not a cloud in the pale sky, not a shadow along the dim, pearly fields, hills and woods. The mist was lifting from the valleys and hollows, the air was cool, the grass and the foliage dripping wet with morning-dew. Unwatched by the eyes of man, and undisturbed by his activity, the country breathed a timeless life, to which language was inadequate.
All the same, a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had been formed by its soil and weather, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and the other began. The thin grey line of a road, winding across the plain and up and down hills, was the fixed materialisation of human longing, and of the human notion that it is better to be in one place than another.
A child of the country would read this open landscape like a book. The irregular mosaic of meadows and cornlands was a picture, in timid green and yellow, of the people’s struggle for its daily bread; the centuries had taught it to plough and sow in this way. On a distant hill the immovable wings of a windmill, in a small blue cross against the sky, delineated a later stage in the career of bread. The blurred outline of thatched roofs—a low, brown growth of the earth—where the huts of the village thronged together, told the history, from his cradle to his grave, of the peasant, the creature nearest to the soil and dependent on it, prospering in a fertile year and dying in years of drought and pests.
A little higher up, with the faint horizontal line of the white cemetery-wall round it, and the vertical contour of tall poplars by its side, the red-tiled church bore witness, as far as the eye reached, that this was a Christian country. The child of the land knew it as a strange house, inhabited only for a few hours every seventh day, but with a strong, clear voice in it to give out the joys and sorrows of the land: a plain, square embodiment of the nation’s trust in the justice and mercy of heaven. But where, amongst cupular woods and groves, the lordly, pyramidal silhouette of the cut lime avenues rose in the air, there a big country house lay.
The child of the land would read much within these elegant, geometrical ciphers on the hazy blue. They spoke of power, the lime trees paraded round a stronghold. Up here was decided the destiny of the surrounding land and of the men and beasts upon it, and the peasant lifted his eyes to the green pyramids with awe. They spoke of dignity, decorum and taste. Danish soil grew no finer flower than the mansion to which the long avenue led. In its lofty rooms life and death bore themselves with stately grace. The country house did not gaze upward, like the church, nor down to the ground like the huts; it had a wider earthly horizon than they, and was related to much noble architecture all over Europe. Foreign artisans had been called in to panel and stucco it, and its own inhabitants travelled and brought back ideas, fashions and things of beauty. Paintings, tapestries, silver and glass from distant countries had been made to feel at home here and now formed part of Danish country life.
The big house stood as firmly rooted in the soil of Denmark as the peasants’ huts, and was as faithfully allied to her four winds and her changing seasons, to her animal life, trees and flowers. Only its interests lay in a higher plane. Within the domain of the lime trees it was no longer cows, goats and pigs on which the minds and the talk ran, but horses and dogs. The wild fauna, the game of the land, that the peasant shook his fist at, when he saw it on his young green rye or in his ripening wheat field, to the residents of the country houses were the main pursuit and the joy of existence.
The writing in the sky solemnly proclaimed continuance, a worldly immortality. The great country houses had held their ground through many generations. The families who lived in them revered the past as they honoured themselves, for the history of Denmark was their own history.
A Rosenkrantz had sat at Rosenholm, a Juel at Hverringe, a Skeel at Gammel-Estrup as long as people remembered. They had seen kings and schools of style succeed one another and, proudly and humbly, had made over their personal existence to that of their land, so that amongst their equals and with the peasants they passed by its name: Rosenholm, Hverringe, Gammel-Estrup. To the King and the country, to his family and to the individual lord of the manor himself it was a matter of minor consequence which particular Rosenkrantz, Juel or Skeel, out of a long row of fathers and sons, at the moment in his person incarnated the fields and woods, the peasants, cattle and game of the estate. Many duties rested on the shoulders of the big landowners—towards God in heaven, towards the King, his neighbour and himself—and they were all harmoniously consolidated into the idea of his duties towards his land. Highest amongst these ranked his obligation to uphold the sacred continuance, and to produce a new Rosenkrantz, Juel or Skeel for the service of Rosenholm, Hverringe and Gammel-Estrup.
Female grace was prized in the manors. Together with good hunting and fine wine it was the flower and emblem of the higher existence led there, and in many ways the families prided themselves more on their daughters than on their sons.
The ladies who promenaded in the lime avenues, or drove through them in heavy coaches with four horses, carried the future of the name in their laps and were, like dignified and debonair caryatides, holding up the houses. They were themselves conscious of their value, kept up their price, and moved in a sphere of pretty worship and self-worship. They might even be thought to add to it, on their own, a graceful, arch, paradoxical haughtiness. For how free were they, how powerful! Their lords might rule the country, and allow themselves many liberties, but when it came to that supreme matter of legitimacy which was the vital principle of their world, the centre of gravity lay with them.
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
In a long avenue that led from the house all the way to the end of the garden, where, from a small white pavilion in the classic style, there was a great view over the fields, a young man walked. He was plainly dressed in brown, with pretty linen and lace, bareheaded, with his hair tied by a ribbon. He was dark, a strong and sturdy figure with fine eyes and hands; he limped a little on one leg.
The big house at the top of the avenue, the garden and the fields had been his childhood’s paradise. But he had travelled and lived out of Denmark, in Rome and Paris, and he was at present appointed to the Danish Legation to the Court of Ki
ng George, the brother of the late, unfortunate young Danish Queen. He had not seen his ancestral home for nine years. It made him laugh to find, now, everything so much smaller than he remembered it, and at the same time he was strangely moved by meeting it again. Dead people came towards him and smiled at him; a small boy in a ruff ran past him with his hoop and kite, in passing gave him a clear glance and laughingly asked: “Do you mean to tell me that you are I?” He tried to catch him in the flight, and to answer him: “Yes, I assure you that I am you,” but the light figure did not wait for a reply.
The young man, whose name was Adam, stood in a particular relation to the house and the land. For six months he had been heir to it all; nominally he was so even at this moment. It was this circumstance which had brought him from England, and on which his mind was dwelling, as he walked along slowly.
The old lord up at the manor, his father’s brother, had had much misfortune in his domestic life. His wife had died young, and two of his children in infancy. The one son then left to him, his cousin’s playmate, was a sickly and morose boy. For ten years the father travelled with him from one watering place to another, in Germany and Italy, hardly ever in other company than that of his silent, dying child, sheltering the faint flame of life with both hands, until such time as it could be passed over to a new bearer of the name. At the same time another misfortune had struck him: he fell into disfavour at Court, where till now he had held a fine position. He was about to rehabilitate his family’s prestige through the marriage which he had arranged for his son, when before it could take place the bridegroom died, not yet twenty years old.
Adam learned of his cousin’s death, and his own changed fortune, in England, through his ambitious and triumphant mother. He sat with her letter in his hand and did not know what to think about it.
If this, he reflected, had happened to him while he was still a boy, in Denmark, it would have meant all the world to him. It would be so now with his friends and schoolfellows, if they were in his place, and they would, at this moment, be congratulating or envying him. But he was neither covetous nor vain by nature; he had faith in his own talents and had been content to know that his success in life depended on his personal ability. His slight infirmity had always set him a little apart from other boys; it had, perhaps, given him a keener sensibility of many things in life, and he did not, now, deem it quite right that the head of the family should limp on one leg. He did not even see his prospects in the same light as his people at home. In England he had met with greater wealth and magnificence than they dreamed of; he had been in love with, and made happy by, an English lady of such rank and fortune that to her, he felt, the finest estate of Denmark would look but like a child’s toy farm.
