by Isak Dinesen
“But all the same I wonder,” he said after a long pause, “what is the meaning of the whole thing. Why may we not give up painting and writing, and give the public peace? What good do we do them, in the end? What good, in the end, is art to man? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”
Æneas by this time had finished his dinner, and was quietly sipping his coffee. “Monsieur Kohl, my principal,” he said, “is himself a dilettante of pictures, and keen to make a gallery in his hotel. But as he has no real knowledge of painting, and no leisure to learn about it, the selection of his pictures used to vex and trouble him. Now, however, I have on his behalf gone round to the painters, one by one, and have asked each of them to sell me the one picture which, out of all he has ever painted, he personally holds to be the best. Our gallery is growing, and it is going to be very fine.”
“He is wrong,” said Charlie gloomily. “The artist himself cannot say which is his finest work. Even if your artists be honest people, and you have not foisted upon you the picture which they cannot sell to anybody else—such as you deserve to have—they cannot tell.” “No, they cannot tell,” said Æneas. “But a collection of pictures, each of which has been picked by the painter as the finest he has ever painted, may well, in the end, tickle the curiosity of the public, and fetch its price at a sale.”
“And you yourself,” said Charlie bitterly, “you go on the errand of a rich dilettante from one artist to another. But you have never, upon your own, painted a picture, or bought one. When, in time, you quit this world of ours, you might as well not have lived.” Æneas nodded his head. “What do you nod your head at?” asked Charlie. “At what you are saying,” said Æneas. “I might as well not have lived.”
Charlie had now rid himself of the restlessness and chagrin that had beset him as he first came into the café, and he felt that it would be pleasanter to listen than to go on speaking. He also found that he was hungry, and ordered dinner. By the time when he had finished his soup he leaned back in his chair, glanced round the room as if he saw it for the first time, and in a low and languid voice, like that of a convalescent, said to Æneas: “Can you not even tell me a story?”
Æneas stirred his coffee with his spoon, and picked up the sugar left on the bottom of the cup. He put the napkin to his small mouth, folded it and laid it on the table. “Yes, I can tell you a story,” he said. He sat for a minute or two, ransacking his memory. During that time, although he kept so quiet, he was changed; the prim bailiff faded away, and in his seat sat a deep and dangerous little figure, consolidated, alert and ruthless—the story-teller of all the ages. “Yes,” he said at last, and smiled, “I can tell you a consolatory story,” and in a sweet and modulated voice he began.
When I was a young man, I was in the employ of an esteemed firm of carpet dealers in London, and was by them designated to travel to Persia, there to buy up a consignment of ancient carpets. But by the dispensations of destiny I became, for two years, during a period of political unrest and intrigue, when the English and the Russians vied for the greater influence with the Persian Court, physician in ordinary to the ruler of Persia, Mahommed Shah, a highly deserving Prince. He suffered great distress from erysipelas, a disease against which I had been happy enough to find a cure. The present Shah, Nasrud-Din Mirza, was then heir-apparent to the throne.
Nasrud-Din was a lively young Prince, keen on progress and reform, and of a willful and fantastic mind. He was ambitious to know the conditions and circumstances of his subjects, from the highest to the poorest, and gave himself or his surroundings no rest in this pursuit. He had studied the tales of the Arabian Nights, and from this reading he fancied for himself the role of the Caliph Haroun of Bagdad. So he would often, in imitation of this classical histrionic, all by himself, and in the disguise of a beggar, a peddler or a juggler, wander through his town of Teheran, and visit the market-places or the taverns of it. He listened to the talk of the labourers, water-carriers and prostitutes there, in order to get from them their true opinion on the office-holders and placemen, and upon the custody of justice in the kingdom.
This caprice of the Prince caused much alarm and distress to his old Councillors. For they thought it an untenable and paradoxical state of things that a Prince should be so au fait with the doings and sentiments of his people, and one quite likely to upset the whole ancient system of the country. They represented to him the dangers to which he exposed himself, and the injustice that, in his intrepidity, he was doing to the realm of Persia, which might thus wantonly suffer the saddest bereavement. But the more they talked the keener Prince Nasrud-Din became upon his fancy. The ministers then had recourse to other measures. They took care that he should be, wherever he went, secretly followed by armed guards; they also bribed his valets and pages to discover in what disguise he would go, and to what part of the city he would betake himself, and often the beggar or the prostitute with whom the Prince entered into talk had been pre-instructed by the judicious old men. Of this Nasrud-Din knew nothing, and the Councillors dreaded his wrath, should he find out, so that even amongst themselves they kept silent upon their wiles.
Now it came to pass, by the time when I was at Court, that the old High Minister Mirza Aghai one day sought audience with the Prince, and solemnly imparted to him news of a strange and sinister nature.
There was, he said, in the town of Teheran a man, in face, stature and voice so like the Prince Nasrud-Din that the Queen, his mother, would hardly know the one from the other. Moreover, the stranger in all his ways minutely imitated and copied the manner and habits of the Prince. This man had for some months been walking through the poorest quarters of the city, in the disguise of a beggar, similar to that which the Prince was wont to wear, had seated himself by the gates or the walls, and there questioned and held forth to the people. Did not the fact, the old Minister asked, prove the danger of the Prince’s sport? For what would lie behind it? The mystificator was either a tool in the hands of the Shah’s enemies, set by them to sow discontent and rebellion amongst the populace, or he was an impostor of unheard temerity, working upon some dark scheme of his own, and possibly nurturing the horrible plan of doing away with the heir to the throne, and of passing himself off to the people as the Prince. The old man had let all the foes of the Royal House pass muster in his mind. Before him had then risen the shadow of a great lord, cousin to the Shah and decapitated in a rebellion twenty years ago, and he remembered to have heard that a posthumous son had been born to the outlaw’s name. This youth, Mirza Aghai reflected, might well endeavour to revenge his father, and to get his own back. He begged his young lord to renounce his excursions until such time as the intriguer should have been seized and punished.
Nasrud-Din listened to the Chamberlain’s proposal and played with the silken tassels of his sword-knot. What, he asked, did this strange plotter, the double of himself, tell the people, and what impression had he made upon them? “My lord,” said Mirza Aghai, “What exactly he has told the people I cannot report, partly because his sayings seem to be deep and twofold, so that those who have heard them do not remember them, and partly because he really does not say much. But the impression which he has made is sure to be very profound. For he is not content to investigate their lot, but has set himself upon sharing it with them. He is known to have slept by the walls on winter nights, to have lived upon the leavings which the portionless paupers have spared to him, and, when they had nothing to give, to have kept fast for a whole day. He frequents the cheapest prostitutes of the city in order to convince the poor of his compassion and fellow-feeling. Yes, to insinuate, himself with the lowest of your townfolk, under your favour, he keeps company with a girl who, in the tavern of a market-place, gives performances with a donkey. And all this, my Prince, within your effigy.”
The Prince was a gay and gallant young man; it amused him to vex the old, cautious men of his father’s Court, and Mirza Aghai’s tale to him contained the promise of a rare adventure. When he had thought the matter over, he told the
Minister that he would not forego the chance of meeting his doppelganger. He would go himself to speak with him, and detect the truth about him. He forbade the old men to interfere with his plan, and this time took such precautions that it became impossible to them to impede or control him. In vain did Mirza Aghai beseech him to give up so perilous a project. The only concession which in the end they wrested from him was the promise that he would go about well armed, and that he would take with him one attendant in whom he could trust.
I was, just then, seeing much of the young Prince. For Prince Nasrud-Din had on his left cheekbone a mole, the size of a cherry. It was slightly disfiguring in itself, and it was naturally in his way when he wished to go about incognito. So after he had watched my cure of his father, the Shah, he called upon me to rid him of the nevus. The treatment was slow; I had time to entertain the Prince with the narratives that he loved, and I held, by the nature of things, a big bag of tales which belongs to our classic Western civilization, and were new to him.
The Prince was also afraid of growing fat, so that at times he would cat very little. The Queen, his mother, who thought that he had never been more lovable than when, as a baby, he had been fat, took much trouble with the purveyors and the chefs of the royal household, to make them bring and prepare such rare dishes as might tempt her son’s appetite. Now she saw that when I was relating my stories to him the Prince would sit long over his food, and she graciously entreated me to keep him company at table. I told the Prince as much as I could remember of the Divina Commedia, and of a few of Shakespeare’s tragedies, together with the whole of the Mysteries of Paris, by Eugene Sue, that I had read just before I left Europe. During our talks on such works of art I gained his confidence, and when by this time he was to choose a companion in his secret expeditions he asked me to go with him.
He took pleasure in having me dressed up as a Persian beggar, in a big cloak and slippers, and with a flap over one eye. Each of us kept a poniard in his belt and a pistol in his breast; the Prince made me a present of my poniard, which had a silver hilt, set with turquoises. The old Minister Mirza Aghai then approached me, and promised me his gratitude and a permanent and lucrative office at Court should I, in the end, succeed in turning the mind of Nasrud-Din from his caprice. But I had no faith in my power to turn the mind of a Prince, nor had I any wish to do so.
We thus wandered through the streets and the slums of Teheran, during some evenings of early spring. On the terraces of the Royal Gardens the peach trees were already in blossom, and in the grass there were crocus and jonquils. But the air was sharp and the night frost not far away.
Within the city of Teheran the evenings of this season are wonderfully blue. The ancient grey walls, the planes and olive trees in the gardens, the people in their drab garments and the long, slow files of heavy-laden camels coming home through the gates—all seem to float in a delicate mist of azure.
The Prince and I visited strange places, and made the acquaintance of dancers, thieves, bawds and soothsayers. We had various long discussions on religion and love, and many times we also laughed together, for we were both young. But for a while we did not find the man on whose track we walked; neither did we, anywhere, hear much of him. Still we knew the name by which he called himself, which was the same as the Prince had used as a beggar. And in the end, one evening, we were guided by a small boy to a market-place, close to the oldest gate of the town, where, we were told, the plotter by this hour was wont to seat himself. By the well of the place the bare-legged child stopped, and pointed to a small figure sitting on the ground at some distance. He gave us a clear, steady glance, said: “I will go no farther,” and ran off.
We paused for a moment, and felt our knives and pistols. It was a poor and vile square; narrow streets led to it; the houses were pitiable and decayed; the air filled with nauseous smells; the ground broken and dusty. The ragged inhabitants of the streets had come from their work, and in the last hour of daylight were lounging and chatting in the open, or drawing water from the well. A few of them were buying wine by the counter of an open tavern, and we did so too, asking for the cheapest that the innkeeper had to sell, since we were ourselves beggars tonight. As we drank, we kept an eye on the man upon the ground.
There was an old crooked fig tree growing out from a creek in the wall, and he sat beneath it. No crowd surrounded him, as we had been led to expect. But while I watched him I saw the wayfarers slacken their pace as they passed him. One and another amongst them stood still and exchanged a few words with him before they walked on, and each of them seemed to turn his face half away from the beggar, and to hold himself, in his nearness, with reverence and awe. As slowly I took in the whole scene before me, I thought it to be in some way unusual and striking. The place was as low and miserable as any I had walked through in the town, yet there was dignity in the atmosphere of it, and a stillness as of anticipation and confidence. The children played together without fighting or crying, the women prattled and laughed lowly and gaily, and the water-drawers waited patiently for one another.
The innkeeper was talking with a donkey driver, who had brought him two big baskets of fresh beans, cabbage and lettuce. The donkey driver said: “And what do you imagine that they will be dining on at the palace tonight?” “On what will they be dining?” said the innkeeper. “That is not easy to tell. They may be having a peacock, stuffed with olives. They may eat carps’ tongues, cooked in red wine. Or they will be partaking of a fat-rumped, cinnamon-stewed sheep.” “Yes, by God,” said the ass driver. We smiled at the description of these extraordinary dishes, which were obviously dainties to the poor. Prince Nasrud-Din paid for his wine, draped his mendicant’s cloak over his head, and without a word went forth and seated himself a little way from the stranger. I took the place next to him, by the wall.
The man for whom we had so long searched, and of whom we had talked so much between us, was a still person; he did not lift his eyes to look at the newcomers. He sat on the earth with his legs crossed, his head bent, and his folded hands resting on the ground in front of him. His beggar’s bowl stood beside him, and it was empty.
He had on a large cloak, like that which the Prince wore, only more tattered and patched. It had a hood to it, which partly covered his head, but while he sat so quiet, his eyes downcast, I had time to study his face. It was true that he bore a likeness to the Prince. He was a dark, slight young man, a few years older than Nasrud-Din, of such age as the Prince would assume in his role of beggar. He had long, black eyelashes, and a small thin black beard, similar to the beard which the Prince used to put on with his beggar’s disguise, only it was really growing on his face. Upon his left cheekbone he had a brown mole, the size of a cherry, and I saw, because I had experience in that matter, that it was put on artificially, with skill. As to his countenance and manner, he was in no way like the daring and dangerous conspirator whom I had expected to meet. His face was peaceful, so that indeed I do not remember to have set eyes on a more serene human physiognomy. It was also singularly vacant of shrewdness, or even of much intelligence. That dignity and collectedness which, a moment ago, I had been surprised to find in the market-place around him, were repeated within the figure of the man himself, as if these qualities were concentrated in, or issuing from, the ragged and lean beggar’s form. Perhaps, I reflected, there are few things which will impart as great dignity to a man’s appearance as the air of complete content and self-sufficiency.
When we had thus sat together in silence for a while, it happened that a poor funeral procession came along, on its way to the burial ground outside the walls, the corpse on a litter and covered with a cloth, a few mourners following it, and some idlers of the street strolling behind. As they caught sight of the beggar under the fig tree, they again seemed to be seized with some kind of fear or veneration; they swerved a little in their course as they passed, but they did not speak to him.
When they had gone by, the beggar lifted his head, gazed at the air before him, and in a low
and gentle voice said: “Life and Death are two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other.”
The Prince started as he heard his voice, so like was his mode of speaking, even to a slight snuffle within it, to his own. After a moment, he himself spoke to the stranger. “I am a beggar like you,” he said, “and have come here to collect such alms as merciful people will give me. Let us not waste our time while we wait for them, but talk about our lives. Is your life as a beggar of so little value to you that you would be content to exchange it for death?” The beggar seemed unprepared for so energetic an address. He did not answer for a minute or two, then gently wagged his head and said: “Not at all.”
Here an old poor woman came staggering across the square towards us, approaching the beggar in the shy and submissive manner of the others, turning her face away as she spoke to him. She was pressing a loaf of bread to her bosom, and as she stopped she held it out to him in both her hands, “For the mercy of God,” she said, “take this bread and eat it. We have seen that you have sat here by the wall for two days, and have had nothing to eat. Now I am an old woman, the poorest of the poor here, and I think that you will not refuse alms from me.” The beggar softly lifted his hand to reject the gift. “Nay,” he said, “take back your bread. I will not cat tonight. For I know of a beggar, my brother in mendicancy, who sat by the town wall for three full days, and was given nothing. I will experience myself what he did then feel and think.” “Oh, God,” sighed the old woman, “if you will not eat the bread I shall not eat it myself either, but I shall give it to the cart-bullocks which come in by the gate, and are tired and hungry.” And with that she staggered away again.
