Winter's Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  THE INVINCIBLE

  SLAVE-OWNERS

  “CE PAUVRE JEAN,” said an old Russian General with a dyed beard on a summer evening of 1875 in the drawing-room of a hotel at Baden-Baden. “This poor Jean. He is really an excellent fellow, quite decidedly a most excellent person. You know Jean, of course, the waiter at my table, the oldest waiter of the hotel? Well, I shall tell you what a good fellow he is. I am in the habit of taking, every morning, a nectarine with my coffee—a nectarine, mind you, no peach or apricot for me—but it must be really good, ripe, yet not over-ripe. This morning, now, Jean came up and spoke to me. He was white, I assure you; the man was as white as a corpse. I thought that he had been taken ill. ‘Your Excellency,’ he says, ‘it is terrible,’ and then he can say no more. ‘What is terrible, my friend?’ I ask. ‘Is there a European war?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘but it is terrible; something awful has happened. Your Excellency, there are no nectarines to be had today.’ And at that two big tears do roll down his cheeks. Yes, he is a good fellow.”

  The person to whom the General spoke was a young Dane, named Axel Leth, a good-looking and well-dressed young man, who did not talk much himself, and for that reason was often chosen as a listener by the people of the watering place who had something to say.

  As the General had finished his story an old English lady came up and joined the group. For her benefit the Russian repeated the tale of Jean and the nectarine. The Englishwoman listened with the expression of scorn and contempt with which she received all communications at this time of the day.

  “A qui le dîtes-vous?” she asked. “Jean? I knew him before you ever did. Nine years ago he cut his thumb on a carving-knife while serving me a chicken, and I myself bandaged it for him. He would not let me do it. He was genuinely indignant and shocked that I should take trouble about him. I honestly believe that the fool would have preferred to lose his thumb. He would go through fire and water for me ever since, of course, would die for me, in fact.”

  She did not wait for any answer from the General, but turned to young Leth and gave him a little smile to emphasize her indifference to the Russian. “I promised you last night,” she said, “to tell you more of the review at Munich.” Axel, who had been brought up by his grandmother and had been taught to pay elderly ladies attention, put on an expectant face.

  “To me,” said the old lady, “it was particularly affecting. Because I understand King Ludwig. The swan-hermit! A French poet has addressed him: ‘Seul roi de ce siècle, salut!’ That accurately expresses my own feelings. To me his solitude at Neuschwanstein is exquisite and majestic, sublime. He cannot live at Munich. He cannot breath the air polluted by the crowd, nor bear the rank smell of it. He cannot enjoy art in the presence of the profane, so at the Residenz Theatre performances are often commanded for him alone. He is a true aristocrat. To the High Order of the Defenders of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, of which he is grand master, no candidate is eligible who cannot prove his sixty-four quarterings. But at Neuschwanstein, high above the common world, the King is happy. In that mountain air and silence he wanders, dreams and meditates. There he feels near God.”

  “He is not very popular, I am told,” said the General airily.

  “Who told you?” returned the Englishwoman with hauteur. “No one, surely, who has been to Munich. The emotion of the crowd waiting to see their King was touching to me. Few of them had seen him before; he shows himself so rarely. When he appeared, on a white horse, a storm of enthusiasm broke. It was as if the hearts were running forth to him, like a wave. Tears were streaming down these rough, tanned faces of artisans and labourers; children were lifted in hard dirty hands so that he should see them; coarse voices were breaking to the general cry of ‘Long live the King.’ An unforgettable day.”

  The General said nothing, and Axel, glancing at him, saw his face change. He was gazing with surprise and exultation towards the door. From its expression the young man guessed that an unknown, pretty woman had come in. The eyes of the English lady took the same direction, her old face, too, immediately altered. Axel turned round. Two women, whom till now he had never seen at the resort, evidently a young lady of the best society with her dame de compagnie or governess, had entered the room.

  The first, who at once captured the attention of the assembly, was a very young beauty of such freshness, that it was as if she was sweeping with her, into the closely furnished, velvet-hung room, a sea breeze or a summer shower, and Axel remembered a reviewer’s remark about a young German actress: ‘She enters the stage with a wild landscape at her heels.’ The astonishment and admiration which her loveliness aroused were, at the next moment, accompanied by a little smile of wonder or mockery, because her slender, forceful, abundant figure was dressed up, two or three years behind her age, in the short skirt of a schoolgirl, and she wore her hair down her back. The clothes gave her a curious likeness to a doll, and inspired in onlookers the sentiment of humourous tenderness with which one looks at a big, beautiful doll.

  The girl was in herself rather tall than short, a high-stemmed rose. Indeed it looked as if she had, at the moment when her Maker was holding her up for contemplation, slid through His mighty hand, and in this movement had all her young forms gently pushed upwards. The slight calves of her delicate legs—in white stockings and neat little shoes—were set high up, so was the immature fullness of the hips, while the knees and thighs, which, in her quick walk, showed through the flounces of her frock, were narrow and straight. Her young bosom strutted just below the armpits, high above a slim waist. Her milk-white throat was long and round, strangely dignified and monumental in one so young. Her hair itself seemed averse to the law of gravitation. Behind the ribbon that held it back from the forehead it streamed out almost horizontally. This rich hair was of a rare colour, a pale, coraline red, with no yellow in it, such as is found in sea-shells. The girl’s fair, smooth, rosy face had not a lie in it, no grain of powder or paint, and not a single wrinkle. The eyes, outlined by the thin black streak of the eyelashes, were set in it without a line, like two pieces of dark-blue glass. Her cheekbones were a little high, the nose, too, had an upward tilt. But by far the most striking feature in the face was the mouth, a thick, sullen, flaming mouth, like a red rose. Looking at it one might well imagine the whole straight, proud figure to exist only in order to carry this fresh, presumptuous mouth about the world.

  She was dressed with precise neatness in a white muslin frock with a pink sash. She had a black velvet ribbon round her throat, but no ornament whatever. She walked quickly, in a defiant, disdainful gait, magnificently vital, as if at the same time, and with all her might, giving and holding back herself to the world. Axel, the dreamer, in his mind quoted a poem that he had read only a short time ago:

  D’un air placide et triomphant,

  Tu passes ton chemin, majestueuse enfant.

  The lady who followed at the girl’s heels was a distinguished person in black silk, with a thin gold watch chain down her narrow bust, and blue glasses. She was severe in all her lines, the model governess or duenna. Still she had something of her own, a cat-like suppleness of movement, and a quiet, grave determination. The two together made a picturesque group, and to accentuate the unity of it, the elder woman’s austerely plaited hair had in it a faded reflection of the red within the girl’s floating locks. It was as if the artist had found a little of the colour left upon his pallet and had been loath to waste such a glorious mixture.

  “Nom d’un chien,” said the General to Axel.

  After supper he again came up to him, with two roses in his old cheeks, rejuvenated by the quickened circulation of his imagination.

  “I can let you have,” he said, “a few facts about our beauty.” At that he gave her name, which, he explained, belonged to a very old family, and added a row of details about its history and connections. The girl’s name was Marie, but her governess called her Mizzi. Mizzi’s father, he believed, had been a famous gambler. He had, he was told, lately
married a second time. “One does not need to be told that,” the General went on, “the child is obviously the victim of a jealous stepmother—at that time of life when the venom in women inevitably strikes in and poisons their system—who would give her ratbane if she dared to, but has sent her off here instead, with that female Jesuit as a jailer. What do you think, my friend, does she birch her? It is both a deadly sin and a joke to dress up that young woman as a child; she would wear a tiara before any other woman in the room. What a walk! And what innocence! All the same she is furious with us all, and will get her own back. I wish I were your age.”

  There had been music in the drawing room; a lady had sung, and an elderly German gentleman had played a fugue by Bach. But as the clock on the mantelpiece struck ten, the governess gave the girl a glance and a few low, respectful words, Mizzi rose at once, like a soldier on parade. On her way to the door she dropped her little handkerchief. Two young men, one in black and one in uniform, threw themselves upon it. But Mizzi did not as much as look at them. It was the lady companion who demurely took it from them and thanked them with a ceremonious little bow, before she held the door open to the girl, let her pass before her, and was gone.

  Late in the evening Axel went out on the terrace, smoked a cigar and looked at the lights of the town, and then up at the stars. He often did so.

  The cadence of the lively conversation in the drawing-room was still in his ears, and he reflected that human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker’s mind. He only knew the people of the resort from their conversations together; consequently he did not know them at all; neither did they know him. He was told by the other guests of the hotel that the General had been suspected of poisoning his wife. Of that he would not talk. But when he was alone, in his bed and his dreams: was the old General sincere, an honest murderer? He tried to imagine one after another of his acquaintances—the General, the old Englishwoman—asleep, such as they probably were at this hour. The idea was melancholy to him, and he took his thoughts off them again.

  He turned them to the young girl, whom he had seen for the first time today. She too would be asleep now, and would be rosy in her sleep, fresh as her linen, with her eyelids firmly closed and the red hair spread over her pillow, grave, sleeping in the manner of a child, to whom sleep is a task, an earnest occupation. He thought of her for a long time, and felt that he might do so without offending her; it was not otherwise than a gardener walking in a rose garden by night. She was free now, to wander where she chose, and he wondered what she would be dreaming of.

  “Could I fall in love with her?” he asked himself. He had been in love before; that had even, in part, brought him to Baden-Baden, and he was so young that he believed he could never love again. But he wished that he were her brother, or an old friend, with a right to help her, if ever she would turn to him for help. He had been depressed, ashamed of himself, for being ill and in necessity of going to a watering place. In the night air on the terrace it seemed to him that there was hope and strength in the world still. It was as if a friend of his were asleep in the hotel behind him, and when she woke up the two would understand each other.

  “And then,” he thought sadly, “we shall probably part and go each our own way without ever having spoken together. Life is like that.”

  Within a few days the bees and butterflies of the watering place were humming round the new fair, fragrant rose, and the thin black prop to which it was tied. The difficulty of approach, and something pathetic in Mizzi’s own figure, called upon the daring and chivalry of the courters. Each felt like Saint George with the dragon and the captive princess. The situation would have held infinite promise of piquancy if it had been possible to lure the princess into joining her partisans and playing a trick on the dragon. But it was found that she was unswervingly loyal to her duenna, and that not a smile, not a glance could be obtained behind Miss Rabe’s back. The governess’ distinguished figure took on an appalling aspect. Of what secret power was she possessed to hold a vigorous young person so completely in submission?

  The old English lady took the wiser course, and graciously patronized the governess. Her strategy brought her a surprise. She was genuinely struck with Miss Rabe’s tact, talents and excellent principles, and proclaimed to all the world that this was the one governess within a thousand. She was also rewarded for her trouble by being for two or three days the most important person in the park of the Casino, for she could now introduce people to Mizzi. In this enterprise she unfolded the whole craft of an ancient entremetteuse of society, and for every favour counted herself paid in compliments and attentions. On account of their old friendship, Axel was the first young man whom she smilingly presented to the girl.

  Axel, with some wonder and self irony, fell in love with Mizzi. It was a variety of love new to himself, more contemplative than possessive. He was even pleased to see her surrounded by admirers, since nothing becomes a pretty girl like success, and since she accepted the homage of the resort’s jeunesse dorée with so much simplicity and dignity, as if she took their competitive zeal to be the normal manner of young men with a maiden, she only allowed her own vitality to swell a little within this her true clement. His feelings also had in them an imaginative moment; he would often, dreamily, set the girl against a background of a book or a song or a familiar place in Denmark.

  One thing within her in particular enchanted him—that she did blush so easily and deeply, for reasons of her own and incomprehensible to him. It was never a compliment or an ardent glance, nor a squeeze of her slim fingers at the end of a waltz, which called forth her blush. She looked her wooers quietly in the eyes, even when they themselves blushed and stuttered. But sometimes, while she sat by herself, listening to the music in the park, or while an old gentleman of the hotel entertained her with a discourse on politics, a slow, vehement flame would mount and spread all over her face, from the collar-bone to the roots of her hair, and make it glow and burn—as if she had been standing below a crimson church window—until the fire again slowly sank back and died out. It was in itself a pretty and unusual spectacle. But to Axel it was much more: a symbol and a mystery, a manifestation of her being, a mute avowal, more significant than any declaration. What forces within her own nature did the simple and strong creature suspect or dread to make all her blood change place at the apprehension?

  His fancy played with the girl’s blushes. He imagined her happy, spoiled, in the harmony of a home of her own, and wondered whether she would colour there in the same way. Over her needlework in a window, or on a walk with her husband, pausing to gaze at the view, would she suddenly redden like a morning sky? He thought: “What more divine, proud, generous, honest compliment could a newly married husband receive from his wife than this silent, unwilled rising of her blood?” It was dangerous as well. To an old husband it would be alarming; to a vain or weak man it might bode perdition. He was well aware of the hazard, since he himself, until he met her, had felt weak and worthless. And if, after five or ten years of married life, a husband should catch his wife blushing so deeply and silently at her own thoughts? What a summons, he thought, on the whole nature of a man—in a name mightier than that of the King.

  At times he believed that his young girl would colour at a particularly conventional remark in the conversation, as if she were ashamed of the pretence and falsity of her surroundings. At that he rejoiced, for he had himself suffered by the sham of his world. He thought then: This fresh peach of a girl has got a ruthless respect for the truth; she is horrified at our frivolous mode of living—and longed to talk to her of the ideas that occupied his own mind.

  All these were pleasing meditations. But there were other notions connected with Mizzi which made him heavy at heart. It happened, as in his mind he was moving the maiden about in the woods and the rooms of his home at Langeland, that the figure of Miss Rabe would accompany her, and refuse to leave the picture. The misgivings which that dark figure awoke in him were hard
er to deal with than the chimera of his day dreams, inasmuch as they were of a practical and palpable nature. For he might, he reasoned, fell the dragon and carry off Mizzi. It would be a sweet and glorious venture; it was what his rivals were all dreaming about. But he was a wise young man and looked deeper than they. When he rode away, was he sure that he would not be carrying off Miss Rabe on the pommel of his saddle?

  He was an observer; it had amused him to find that the pretty girl had not lived a day, and probably was incapable of living a day, without an attendant at her heels. She had never opened a door herself, nor pulled out a chair at table or picked up her handkerchief when she dropped it, nor put on her own hat. Her absurd childish clothes, like her own dainty person, were exquisitely arranged and kept by someone else. When one day her sash became undone she tried to fix it, blushed and stood motionless until Miss Rabe hurried up and tied the bow for her. She must be, he reflected, dressed and undressed like a doll. Her helplessness was like that of a person without hands. Her whole existence was based upon the constant, watchful, indefatigable labour of slaves. Miss Rabe was the silent and omnipresent symbol of the system; therefore he dreaded her.

  Axel was a wealthy young man, heir to a pleasant place in Denmark and in his own country a good match. But he was not rich according to the standard of the world in which he moved here. He decided, sadly, that he could not give his wife the slaves which to her were a necessity of life. He wondered whether her own freedom would fully indemnify her for their loss, whether his personal love and care would make up for their service. Or would she, within his own house, so to say within his arms, yearn for Miss Rabe herself? This was a fatal thought. Besides, he distrusted and condemned the principle. It was sweet, both droll and pathetic when represented, in Mizzi’s person, in one otherwise obviously ready to meet her destiny. But it was in itself contrary to his idea of a dignified human existence.