Winter's Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  Many of his rivals could offer her the kind of life to which she had been brought up. There was a Neapolitan Prince amongst them, and a young Hollander of great wealth, who owned, he was told, estates in the East Indies. The latter he liked, and reflected that he was better-looking than himself. Sometimes he believed that Mizzi thought so too.

  He was a conscientious young man; he weighed these matters in his mind in sleepless hours. If only, he thought as he turned his head on the pillow, Mizzi would for once pick up her glove, or arrange the bouquets that he brought her, and put them in water. But she just gracefully placed them on a table, and Miss Rabe put them in water.

  There was a ball given at the hotel on a Saturday night; an orchestra played the waltzes of Strauss. Axel danced with Mizzi. She looked like a flower, and he told her so. They also spoke of the stars, and he told her that there were philosophers who held them to be inhabited by live creatures, like the earth. As they were again about to take the floor they found themselves close to the Russian General. He was gazing at a waltzing couple.

  “Now, consider, my young friends,” said the General, “what a strange animal is man, and how with him the half is ever more than the whole. Here are now”—and he gave the names. “They are married a fortnight; the wedding was in all the papers. They are Romeo and Juliet! Their families have an ancient feud, and for a long time opposed the marriage. They are now on their honeymoon, at a castle in the hills, fifteen miles away. They are at last alone, free to give themselves up to the fruition of their love. And what do they do? They drive fifteen miles to dance together here because there is a fine orchestra and a good floor, and they are both famous waltzers. Some people hold that dancing is the foretaste or the substitute of love-making. Mark you, it may as well be said to be the essence of it. The half is more than the whole. But it will be so,” the General added proudly, “solely to the aristocratic mind. The bourgeois might come here from vanity. A young peasant and his wife after the first waltz would exchange the ballroom for the hayloft.”

  Here Axel and Mizzi danced out. As everything delighted Axel tonight, he also thought the General’s little lecture charming. He imagined himself and Mizzi on their honeymoon in the hills, and coming to dance at the hotel because the half is more than the whole. In the midst of the waltz he found that Mizzi was looking at him, or, as with Mizzi it was not the eyes which counted most, he found her face and mouth turned straight upon him. The face was all alive, resolute, as assertive as a challenge. But as the dance was over, and he led her back to her seat by the old English lady at the other end of the ballroom, she told him in a low, gentle voice that she and Miss Rabe were leaving Baden-Baden on Thursday. The information cast Axel down from the summit of happiness; for a moment the glittering room was dark to him. Then he reasoned that he still had three days left.

  About an hour’s walk from the watering place, in the hills and the pine forest, there stood a little wooden summer house, built in a romantic style, like a watch tower, with a battlement at the top. The stairway leading up to the roof was so decayed that nobody ventured upon it, but Axel, in passing it, had reflected that there would be a fine view from up there. To this place, on Sunday, he drove out in a cab to collect his thoughts in solitude. The afternoon was so perfectly still, so golden, that he felt as if he had found his way into a picture, some classic Italian painting, that suited him well. The fresh turpentine smell of the pines heightened the illusion. When he had sent his droschke back and ascended to the top of the tower, he was disappointed in the view; the trees had grown up so high that they hid it. But looking up he saw the blue summer sky streaked with thin white clouds. Up on the platform there was a table and a couple of chairs, much worn with sun and rain. It seemed like a dream to sit up so high and the world infinitely far away. As he looked over the battlement he saw a roe gracefully walk out of the wood, across the road, and into the bracken of the other side. On the green sward below him there was a rustic seat. He took off his hat.

  He had sat for a while in deep thought, from time to time taking his pencil and writing a few words, when from the forest path he heard voices which slowly came nearer. Two women were talking, but the talk was broken by the one of them sobbing pitifully, like a lost child, like Gretl in the dark wood and in the witch’s power. A few tearful words reached him out of the storm of woe. It was Mizzi’s voice. He got up. He would have rushed to her aid, and might have thrown himself from the parapet, if he had not at the next moment caught in her sobs a querulous, plaintive tone, such as he would never have expected to hear from Mizzi, like that of a child demanding to be comforted and petted. For a second he was in a storm of jealousy; then he wondered if Mizzi, in the woods, was confiding in some girl friend from the hotel. He would have liked to get away, but it was too late, now that he had heard her weep. Perhaps, he thought, they will walk on. But they had stopped, and he gathered that they were seating themselves on the bench below. It was a strange, highly dramatic staging. He sat above them like a bird of prey, lurking over a pair of doves. He could not help listening.

  “But if you love him, sweet, sweet little sister,” said the one, “that is no misfortune. He loves you. They all love you and think you lovely.”

  It was Miss Rabe’s voice. But it was a voice new to him, many years younger than he had heard it before, more sonorous and freer. It came from the speaker’s heart. At the same time it was very tired.

  After a silence Mizzi answered. This long pause was, all through the conversation, repeated before each of her phrases. “No,” she said, and her voice too was changed, free, coming from the heart; it was also, like the elder woman’s, tired. “I do not love him. One does not love a dupe, a gull. How can one love the people whom one is fooling? I am fooling them all, Lotti. I do not love any of them. No, not one.”

  “All the same, my darling,” said Miss Rabe, who out here in the wood seemed to be called Lotti, “you would be unhappy if they did not love you.”

  A pause. Then Mizzi said: “Yes, they admire me. Because they believe that I am like them—safe, rich, used to all the good things of life. Yes, he admires me, he thinks I am like a flower, so fine and sweet and pure. He thinks that I know nothing of the world. If he knew how much I know about it, would he love me? No, not he.”

  “He will never know,” said Lotti.

  “No, of course not,” said Mizzi. “The fool.” Then after a pause she went on: “But if he knew? If he was told that I have gone to market to buy cabbage and have taken it home in a basket? If he was told that I feed the chickens and clean the chicken house? If he knew that I hang up washing!”

  Axel reckoned that, now that they were seated, they would not look up. He peeped over the battlement. They sat with their backs to him, tenderly clinging to one another. Mizzi had her head upon Lotti’s shoulder; her hat lay on the seat; her marvellous hair half covered the other’s slim back.

  “You have some little pleasure here, all the same,” said Lotti. “You danced last night. I wish I could have danced.”

  “Yes,” said Mizzi haughtily and maliciously. “Are you not soon tired of being Miss Rabe?

  “And my clothes,” broke out Mizzi, in a voice hoarse with despair, “I am too big for them. Next year they will be altogether impossible. Where will I show myself then? I shall have to sink into the ground, when, then, I have no mantilla, no hat with ostrich feathers, no gown with a train on it, as other women have. They are so romantic, all of them!” she cried scornfully. “They think that I have got a string of pearls, earrings, bracelets, and that my stepmother is just wickedly keeping them from me. If they only knew that I have not got any of them, not a single one.” She burst into tears.

  “You will be lovelier in yourself, next year, in any case,” said Lotti.

  “How I hate you,” said Mizzi. “How I despise you, when you coax me as if I were a baby. You might as well say that I should be lovelier without any clothes at all.”

  “Oh, Mizzi,” said Lotti.

  “Yes,
” said Mizzi, “I know. It is a dreadful thing to say. But you might as well say that. I wish I were dead.”

  She sobbed as if her heart was breaking. Lotti fondled her and said: “Do not cry.” But it had no effect on Mizzi. At last she said: “Let us die together, Lotti. The world is too horrible. Somewhere it will be different, somewhat different. Think of how big the world is, with all the stars in it. The scientists believe that there are people on them, just as on the earth. I feel that it will be a little better there.” After a long pause she said: “That Papa must spend all that money at the Casinos!”

  “Papa had to keep up his reputation,” said Lotti.

  “Yes,” said Mizzi, in a faint voice. “Poor Papa.”

  Again they sat for a long time without talking. Then Lotti spoke, with a quiver in her voice, as if she herself realized the temerity of her statement: “Perhaps,” she said, “if Axel Leth knew everything he would love you all the same.”

  This time Mizzi’s reply, in a low, harsh voice, came without delay. “I could not bear it,” she said. “I would rather die!”

  A few minutes later she said: “Come. Let us go away. People might come and see that we have not even had a cab to bring us here.”

  “I shall tell them that the doctor has ordered you to take walks,” said Lotti.

  Nevertheless they soon after got up and walked away down the path.

  When he had seen them disappear into the green pine forest closely entwined, Axel laid his arms on the table and his head on his arms. Later he did not know whether, within his own arms, he had laughed or wept.

  He lay there for nearly an hour. Then he sat up, put his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, and thought the situation over.

  He had a good sense of art. The two tragic sisters in the wood, their red locks emblazed by the sun, in their very contortions had been so harmonious that he saw them as a classic group, two maidenly Laocoöns, locked in one another’s arms, and in the deadly coils of the serpent. Never again would he see them separated. Mizzi might twist round her indignant and affrighted young face to him for a moment, but her embrace, her bosom was for Lotti. The idea of making love to one of the two was as absurd, as scandalous, as that of making love to one of the Siamese twins. The rings of the serpent themselves held them together. His last thought before he got up was this: That it was a good thing, a thing for which one should be thankful to Providence, that it had been he, and not one of the other young men from the watering place who had happened to overhear the conversation in the wood. They might have put down the Laocoön sisters as a pair of adventuresses who had come to the hotel to captivate a rich husband. Such a thing was as far as possible from their minds. They had come to Baden-Baden, as birds of passage come to their places, according to the seasons of the year, because at this time one was at Baden-Baden, or at a similar place. If they had not been here they would now have been at some other watering place. And wherever they had been, since they had to be somewhere, their situation and their problem would have remained the same. He walked away slowly, a wiser person than he had come.

  In the evening there was much affliction at the hotel over Mizzi’s near departure. A young officer, Axel believed, proposed to her that night. The old English lady questioned Miss Rabe on their plan of travel. They were going home, the governess explained, by Stuttgart. The young Hollander here remarked that he himself was going to Stuttgart, might he have the honour of accompanying the ladies so far? The Italian Prince, who had been lost in lamentations, at once exclaimed that he, too, had got business in Stuttgart, and might he share the honour? At this Miss Rabe and Mizzi exchanged a short glance, then accepted. Otherwise Mizzi herself was radiant tonight, her colour heightened, as if she was carried forth on the wave of general woe. She seemed older than before. In the course of the evening Axel two or three times found her eyes on his face, but they did not speak together.

  In the morning Axel went into town and bought a large bouquet of roses for Mizzi. On the card he wrote Goethe’s lines:

  Die Sterne, die begehrt man nicht,

  Man freut sich ihrer Pracht.

  He had meant to write more, to express his grief at not seeing her again. But he did not do so, for he was averse to telling a lie. In the afternoon while everyone in the hotel was away in the hills on a farewell picnic to Mizzi, he left word that he had been called to Frankfurt for a week, and took the train to Stuttgart.

  He had been to Stuttgart before, on his way to Italy. At his old hotel he got the address of a tailoring firm in the town, and here he ordered a long coat, and a whole outfit for a servant, to be ready the next day. He also bought a hat, and had a small cockade set in it. He knew the colours of Mizzi’s family from a game of forfeits.

  When, before, he had been to the town, he had visited the theatre in the company of a friend, and had even been introduced behind the scenes. He now looked up the dresser of the theatre, and confided to him that the matter turned on a wager of great importance: he must be done up in the role of an elderly, respectable family-servant. The old stager, an Italian, fell in with the scheme as if his own life hung on it, and immediately broke off his client’s explanations with a row of inspired suggestions. He walked round him to study his face and figure from all sides.

  On Thursday morning, when Axel had fetched his livery from the tailor, he found his whole attire brilliantly thought out. The Italian’s wife, evidently initiated, came in to help her husband with the finishing touches. Axel had his hair whitened, with two little mutton-chops attached, his face delicately tanned and a few wrinkles drawn on it, his eyebrows done up. It was all exquisitely done. The two artists, in the end, were carried away with pride. As, on their invitation, he glanced into the long looking-glass, he had a slight shock, so unfamiliar was the figure within it to himself. Here stood, hatted and gloved, a venerable, trusted, self-respecting old servant.

  He went back to his hotel, taking trouble to walk slowly. He practised his part in the streets of Stuttgart, and made up his experiences. He found that he was more nervous about his role in the presence of the porter of the hotel and the cabman than with the ladies and gentlemen. At the hotel he ordered rooms and dinner, with flowers upon the dinner table, for two ladies. Before noon he was back at Baden-Baden.

  When, later in life, he thought his adventure over, he was surprised that he had been so calm and certain about it. It was a grey day; a light shower fell, as if, at Baden-Baden, nature herself wept to see Mizzi go. Nobody seemed in the least to doubt the old servant’s genuineness. At the hotel he modestly introduced himself to the porter as Frantz, Mizzi’s servant, and asked him to let his lady know that Frantz had arrived and that he was waiting for her orders in the hall.

  A hotel boy took the message upstairs, and within a minute Mizzi herself came down the stairs, in a grey dust-coat and a childish straw bonnet tied under the chin, so that they met at the foot of the stairs, where he stood with his hat in his hand. She came down quickly, light of foot, but somewhat alarmed, her eyes wide open. She stopped dead at the sight of him, as if she had seen a ghost. She took him in, he felt, from head to foot; she noticed the travelling rug on his arm, and the cockade in his hat. He saw her change colour and grow deadly white; her mouth itself faded away, so that they thought she was going to fall. But with an effort she held herself up straight, came down the last two steps and stood face to face with him. At that moment two ladies of the hotel rushed in from outside, put down their little umbrellas and shook their ample skirts in order, complaining about the rain. They ran up to the girl with tender laments. “So you are leaving us today, you sweet child,” they cried. They gave Axel’s figure a glance and asked: “Is that your servant?” “Yes,” said Mizzi, quite white and bewildered with trembling lips. “You have had him up to travel with you?” the lady asked. “That is wise. It is unpleasant to women to travel alone.” Now over Mizzi’s head, at the top of the stairs, Axel caught sight of Miss Rabe. “He looks a nice old person,” said the lady. “What is
his name?” “Frantz,” said Mizzi.

  All the watering place went to see Mizzi off. Her cab was filled with bouquets. Axel followed in a cab with all the luggage. He had before taken the ladies’ tickets and reserved their seats, and he now helped them into the train. A little girl from the hotel, who had made friends with Mizzi, burst into tears and gave her a big lovely rose. Mizzi bent to kiss the child, her hair tumbling over her face, and fastened the rose at her bosom. From his own carriage window Axel saw the white handkerchiefs waving as the train glided out of Baden-Baden.

  All that day he moved and spoke quietly, like a person who knows himself to be the instrument of destiny. Even the near separation from Mizzi, which he felt like a physical pain, seemed, strangely, to steady him, and to hold him to his purpose. He talked a little with his fellow-passengers and lent a hand to a young woman with a baby and two heavy baskets. A workman gave him a newspaper, and a heated lecture on politics.

  Twice Mizzi looked at him. As the train stopped at a small station she got out and walked a little with one of her cavaliers of Baden-Baden, who held the umbrella over her. The other remained by the carriage door with Miss Rabe, since she would not venture out in the drizzle. There were some children selling fruit by the fence. Mizzi’s companion ran to buy, swiftly handing the umbrella to Axel. So here they were, close together and, so to say, alone. Mizzi did not take away her eyes, but let them tell him what she thought of him. He winced before her glance. She might well have struck him, he thought. She would have killed him if she could, for she was furious and without fear or misgiving. But she was held back from raising her voice to him, even from looking at him for more than a second or two, by a sacred symbol, mightier than herself: by the cockade in her colours on his hat. When Miss Rabe called to her, she let him walk by her, with the umbrella, all the length of the platform.