by Frank Wynne
*
As the Traveler, with the Soldier and the Condemned Man behind him, came to the first houses in the colony, the Soldier pointed to one and said, “That’s the tea house.”
On the ground floor of one of the houses was a deep, low room, like a cave, with smoke-covered walls and ceiling. On the street side it was open along its full width. Although there was little difference between the tea house and the rest of the houses in the colony, which were all very dilapidated, except for the Commandant’s palatial structure, the Traveler was struck by the impression of historical memory, and he felt the power of earlier times. Followed by his companions, he walked closer, going between the unoccupied tables, which stood in the street in front of the tea house, and took a breath of the cool, stuffy air which came from inside. “The old man is buried here,” said the Soldier; “a place in the cemetery was denied him by the chaplain. For a long time people were undecided where they should bury him. Finally they buried him here. Of course, the Officer explained none of that to you, for naturally he was the one most ashamed about it. A few times he even tried to dig up the old man at night, but he was always chased off.” “Where is the grave?” asked the Traveler, who could not believe the Soldier. Instantly both men, the Soldier and the Condemned Man, ran in front of him and with hands outstretched pointed to the place where the grave was located. They led the Traveler to the back wall, where guests were sitting at a few tables. They were presumably dock workers, strong men with short, shiny, black beards. None of them wore coats, and their shirts were torn. They were poor, oppressed people. As the Traveler came closer, a few got up, leaned against the wall, and looked at him. A whisper went up around the Traveler—“It’s a foreigner. He wants to look at the grave.” They pushed one of the tables aside, under which there was a real grave stone. It was a simple stone, low enough for it to remain hidden under a table. It bore an inscription in very small letters. In order to read it the Traveler had to kneel down. It read, “Here rests the Old Commandant. His followers, who are now not permitted to have a name, buried him in this grave and erected this stone. There exists a prophecy that the Commandant will rise again after a certain number of years and from this house will lead his followers to a re-conquest of the colony. Have faith and wait!”
When the Traveler had read it and got up, he saw the men standing around him and smiling, as if they had read the inscription with him, found it ridiculous, and were asking him to share their opinion. The Traveler acted as if he hadn’t noticed, distributed some coins among them, waited until the table was pushed back over the grave, left the tea house, and went to the harbour.
In the tea house the Soldier and the Condemned Man had come across some people they knew who detained them. However, they must have broken free of them soon, because by the time the Traveler found himself in the middle of a long staircase which led to the boats, they were already running after him. They probably wanted to force the Traveler at the last minute to take them with him. While the Traveler was haggling at the bottom of the stairs with a sailor about his passage out to the steamer, the two men were racing down the steps in silence, for they didn’t dare cry out. But as they reached the bottom, the Traveler was already in the boat, and the sailor at once cast off from shore. They could still have jumped into the boat, but the Traveler picked up a heavy knotted rope from the boat bottom, threatened them with it, and thus prevented them from jumping in.
SORROW-ACRE
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
Translated from the Danish by the author
Karen Blixen (1885–1962). Born to a family of prosperous merchants, Karen Dinesen (later Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke), better known by her penname Isak Dinesen, was a Danish author who wrote in both Danish and English. Her first book Seven Gothic Tales, written in English, was published in 1934, and the Danish edition appeared later. Criticism of her decision to write and publish in English led her to ensure that later books appeared in Danish first. If she is now most remembered for Out of Africa, a memoir of her time living British East Africa (now Kenya), she was also one of the finest short story writers of the twentieth century. Her works are not, strictly speaking, translated – Blixen freely adapted her stories, revising and changing many details between English and Danish versions. On the centenary of her birth, the Asteroid 3318 Blixen was named in her honour.
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 weathers, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and that of the other began. The thin grey line of a road, winding across the plain and up and down hills, was the fixed materialization of human longing, and of the human notion that it were 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 the 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 on 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 was the main pursuit and the joy of existence.
The writing in the sky solemnly proclaimed continuance, a wor
ldly 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 owners: – 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 lap, 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 not, 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 gravitation 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 their 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 King 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 me?’ 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 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 ability. His slight infirmity had always set him a little apart from other boys, it had, maybe, 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.
And in England, too, he had come in touch with the great new ideas of the age: of nature, of the right and freedom of man, of justice and beauty. The Universe, through them, had become infinitely wider to him, he wanted to find out still more about it and was planning to travel to America, to the New World. For a moment he felt trapped and imprisoned, as if the dead people of his name, from the family vault at home, were stretching out their parched arms for him.
But at the same time he began to dream at night of the old house and garden. He had walked in these avenues in dream, and had smelt the scent of the flowering limes. When at Ranelagh an old gipsy-woman looked in his hand and told him that a son of his was to sit in the seat of his fathers, he felt a sudden, deep satisfaction, queer in a young man who till now had never given his sons a thought.
Then, six months later, his mother again wrote to tell him that his uncle had himself married the girl intended for his dead son. The head of the family was still in his best age, not over sixty, and although Adam remembered him as a small, slight man, he was a vigorous person, it was likely that his young wife would bear him sons.
Adam’s mother in her disappointment lay the blame on him. If he had returned to Denmark, she told him, his uncle might have come to look upon him as a son, and would not have married, – nay, he might have handed the bride over to him. Adam knew better. The family estate, in difference from the neighbouring properties, had gone down from father to son ever since a man of their name first sat there. The tradition of direct succession was the pride of the clan and a sacred dogma to his uncle, he would surely call for a son of his own flesh and bone.
But at the news the young man was seized by a strange deep, aching remorse towards his old home in Denmark. It was as if he had been making light of a friendly and generous gesture, and disloyal to someone unfailingly loyal to him. It would be but just, he thought, if from now the place should disown and forget him. Nostalgia, which before he had never known, caught hold of him, for the first time he walked in the streets and parks of London as a stranger.
He wrote to his uncle and asked if he might come and stay with him, begged leave from the Legation and took ship for Denmark. He had come to the house to make his peace with it, he had slept little in the night, and was up so early and walking in the garden, to explain himself, and to be forgiven.
While he walked the still garden slowly took up its day’s work. A big snail, of the kind that his grandfather had brought back from France, and which he remembered eating in th
e house as a child, was already, with dignity, dragging a silver train down the avenue. The birds began to sing, in an old tree under which he stopped a number of them were worrying an owl, the rule of the night was over.
He stood at the end of the avenue and saw the sky lightening. An ecstatic clarity filled the world, in half an hour the sun would rise. A rye-field here ran along the garden, two roe-deer were moving in it, and looked roseate in the dawn. He gazed out over the fields, where as a small boy he had ridden his pony, and towards the wood where he had killed his first stag; he remembered the old servants who had taught him, and their names, some of them were now in their graves.
The ties which bound him to this place, he reflected, were of a mystic nature. He might never again come back to it, and it would make no difference. As long as a man of his own blood and name should sit in the house, hunt in the fields and be obeyed by the people in the huts, wherever he travelled on earth, in England or amongst the Red Indians of America, he himself would still be safe, would still have a home, and would carry weight in the world.
His eyes rested on the church. In old days, before the time of Martin Luther, younger sons of great families, he knew, had entered the Church of Rome, and had given up individual wealth and happiness to serve the greater ideals. They, too, had bestowed honour upon their homes and were remembered in its registers. In the solitude of the morning, half in jest he let his mind run as it listed, it seemed to him that he might speak to the land as to a person, as to the mother of his race. – ‘Is it only my body that you want?’ he asked her, ‘while you reject my imagination, energy and emotions? If the world might be brought to acknowledge that the virtue of our name does not belong to the past only, will it give you no satisfaction?’ The landscape was so still that he could not tell whether it answered him yes or no.
