by Frank Wynne
After a while he walked on, and came to the new French rose garden laid out for the young mistress of the house. In England he had acquired a freer taste in gardening, and he wondered if he could liberate these blushing captives, and make them thrive outside their cut hedges. Perhaps, he meditated, the elegantly conventional garden would be a floral portrait of his young aunt from Court, whom he had not yet seen.
As once more he came to the pavilion at the end of the avenue his eyes were caught by a bouquet of delicate colours which could not possibly belong to the Danish summer morning. It was in fact his uncle himself, powdered and silk-stockinged, but still in a brocade dressing-gown, and obviously sunk in deep thought. ‘And what business, or what meditations,’ Adam asked himself, ‘drags a connoisseur of the beautiful, but three months married to a wife of seventeen, from his bed into his garden before sunrise?’ He walked up to the small slim, straight figure.
His uncle on his side showed no surprise at seeing him, but then he rarely seemed surprised at anything. He greeted him, with a compliment on his early rising, as kindly as he had on his arrival last evening. After a moment he looked to the sky and solemnly proclaimed: ‘It will be a hot day.’ Adam, as a child, had often been impressed by the grand, ceremonial manner in which the old lord would state the common happenings of existence, – it looked as if here nothing had changed, but all was what it used to be.
The uncle offered the nephew a pinch of snuff.
‘No thank you. Uncle,’ said Adam, ‘it would ruin my nose for the scent of your garden, which is as fresh as the garden of Eden, newly created.’
‘From every tree of which,’ said his uncle smiling, ‘thou, my Adam, mayest freely eat.’
They slowly walked up the avenue together.
The hidden sun was now already gilding the top of the tallest trees. Adam talked of the beauties of nature, and of the greatness of Nordic scenery less marked by the hand of man, than that of Italy. His uncle took the praise of the landscape as a personal compliment, and congratulated him because he had not, in likeness to many young travellers, in foreign countries learnt to despise his native land. No, said Adam, he had lately in England longed for the fields and woods of his Danish home. And he had there become acquainted with a new piece of Danish poetry which had enchanted him more than any English or French work. He named the author, Johannes Ewald, and quoted a few of the mighty, turbulent verses.
‘And I have wondered, while I read,’ he went on after a pause, still moved by the lines he himself had declaimed’, that we have not till now understood how much our Nordic mythology in moral greatness surpasses that of Greece and Rome. If it had not been for the physical beauty of the ancient gods, which has come down to us in marble, no modern mind could hold them worthy of worship. They were mean, capricious and treacherous. The gods of our Danish forefathers are as much more divine than they as the Druid is nobler than the Augur. For the fair gods of Asgaard did possess the sublime human virtues, they were righteous, trustworthy, benevolent and, even within a barbaric age, chivalrous.’
His uncle here for the first time appeared to take any real interest in the conversation, he stopped, his majestic nose a little in the air. ‘Ah! – it was easier to them,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, Uncle?’ Adam asked.
‘It was a great deal easier,’ said his uncle, ‘to the northern gods than to those of Greece to be, as you will have it, righteous and benevolent. To my mind it even reveals a weakness in the souls of our ancient Danes that they should consent to adore such divinities.’
‘My dear Uncle,’ said Adam smiling, ‘I have always felt that you would be familiar with the modes of Olympus. Now please give me part in your insight, and tell me why virtue should come easier to our Danish gods than to those of milder climates.’
‘They were not so powerful,’ said his uncle.
‘And does power’, Adam again asked, ‘stand in the way of virtue?’
‘Nay,’ said his uncle gravely. ‘Nay, power is in itself the supreme virtue. But the gods of which you speak were never all-powerful. They had, at all times, by their side those darker powers which they named the Jotuns, and who worked the suffering, the disasters, the ruin of our world. They might safely give themselves up to temperance and kindness. The omnipotent gods,’ he went on, ‘have no such recourse. With their omnipotence they take over the woe of the Universe.’
They had walked up the avenue till they were in view of the house. The old lord stopped and ran his eyes over it. The stately building was the same as ever, behind the two tall front windows, Adam knew, was now his young aunt’s room. His uncle turned and walked back.
‘Chivalry,’ he said, ‘chivalry, of which you were speaking, is not a virtue of the omnipotent. It will needs imply mighty rival powers for the knight to defy. With a dragon inferior to him in strength what figure will St George cut? The knight who finds no superior forces ready to hand must invent them, and combat windmills, his knighthood itself stipulates dangers, vileness, darkness on all sides of him. Nay, believe me, my nephew, in spite of his moral worth your chivalrous Odin of Asgaard as a Regent must take rank below that Jove who avowed his sovereignty, and accepted the world which he ruled. – But you are young,’ he added, ‘and the experience of the aged to you will sound pedantic.’
He stood immovable for a moment and then with deep gravity proclaimed:
‘The sun is up.’
The sun did indeed rise above the horizon. The wide landscape was suddenly animated by its splendour, and the dewy grass shone in a thousand gleams.
‘I have listened to you, Uncle,’ said Adam, ‘with great interest. But while we have talked, you yourself have seemed to me preoccupied, your eyes have rested in the field outside the garden as if something of great moment, a matter of life and death, were going on there. Now that the sun is up I see the mowers in the rye, and hear them whetting their sickles. It is, I remember you telling me, the first day of the harvest. That is a great day to a landowner and enough to take his mind away from the gods. It is very fine weather, and I wish you a full barn.’
The elder man stood still, his hands on his walking-stick. ‘There is indeed’, he said at last,’ something going on in that field, a matter of life and death. Come, let us sit down here, and I will tell you the whole story.’
They sat down on the seat that ran all along the pavilion, and while he spoke the old lord of the land did not take his eyes off the rye-field.
‘A week ago, on Thursday night,’ he said, ‘someone set fire to my barn at Rødmosegaard, – you know the place, close to the moor, – and burned it all down. For two or three days we could not lay hands on the offender. Then on Monday morning the keeper at Rødmose, with the wheelwright over there, came up to the house, they dragged with them a boy, Goske Piil, a widow’s son, and they made their Bible-oath that he had done it, they had themselves seen him sneaking round the barn at nightfall on Thursday. Goske had no good name on the farm, the keeper bore him a grudge upon an old matter of poaching, and the wheelwright did not like him either, for he did, I believe, suspect him with his young wife. The boy, when I talked to him, swore to his innocence, but he could not hold his own against the two old men. So I had him locked up, and meant to send him in to our judge of the district, with a letter.
‘The judge is a fool, and would naturally do nothing but what he thought I wished him to do. He might have the boy sent to the convict-prison for arson, or put amongst the soldiers as a bad character and a poacher. Or again, if he thought that that was what I wanted, he could let him off.
‘I was out riding in the fields, looking at the corn that was soon ripe to be mowed, when a woman, the widow, Goske’s mother, was brought up before me, and begged to speak to me. Anne-Marie is her name, you will remember her, she lives in the small house east of the village. She has not got a good name in the place either. They tell that as a girl she had a child and did away with it.
‘From five days’ weeping, her voice was so crac
ked that it was difficult to me to understand what she said. Her son, she told me at last, had indeed been over at Rødmose on Thursday, but for no ill purpose, he had gone to see someone. He was her only son, she called the Lord God to witness on his innocence, and she wrung her hands to me that I should save the boy for her.
‘We were in the rye-field that you and I are looking at now. That gave me an idea. I said to the widow: “If in one day, between sunrise and sunset, with your own hands you can mow this field, and it be well done, I will let the case drop and you shall keep your son. But if you cannot do it he must go, and it is not likely that you will then ever see him again.”
‘She stood up then and gazed over the field. She kissed my riding-boot in gratitude for the favour shown to her.’
The old lord here made a pause, and Adam said: ‘Her son meant much to her?’
‘He is her only child,’ said his uncle. ‘He means to her her daily bread and support in old age. It may be said that she holds him as dear as her own life. As,’ he added, ‘within a higher order of life, a son to his father means the name and the race, and he holds him as dear as life everlasting. Yes, her son means much to her. For the mowing of that field is a day’s work to three men, or a three days’ work to one man. Today, as the sun rose, she set on to her task. And down there, by the end of the field, you will see her now, in a blue headcloth with the man I have set to follow her and to ascertain that she does the work unassisted, and with two or three friends by her, who are comforting her.’
Adam looked down, and did indeed see a woman in a blue headcloth, and a few other figures in the corn.
They sat for a while in silence.
‘Do you yourself’, Adam then said, ‘believe the boy to be innocent?’
‘I cannot tell,’ said his uncle, ‘there is no proof. The word of the keeper and the wheelwright stand against the boy’s word. If indeed I did believe the one thing or the other it would be merely a matter of chance, or maybe of sympathy. The boy’, he said after a moment, ‘was my son’s playmate, the only other child that I ever knew him to like, or to get on with.’
‘Do you’, Adam again asked, ‘hold it possible to her to fulfil your condition?’
‘Nay, I cannot tell,’ said the old lord, ‘to an ordinary person it would not be possible. No ordinary person would ever have taken it on at all. I chose it so. We are not quibbling with the law, Anne-Marie and I.’
Adam for a few minutes followed the movement of the small group in the rye. ‘Will you walk back?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said his uncle, ‘I think that I shall stay here till I have seen the end of the thing.’
‘Until sunset?’ Adam asked with surprise.
‘Yes,’ said the old lord.
Adam said: ‘It will be a long day.’
‘Yes,’ said his uncle, ‘a long day. – But,’ he added, as Adam rose to walk away, ‘if, as you said, you have got that tragedy of which you spoke in your pocket, be so kind as to leave it here, to keep me company.’
Adam handed him the book.
In the avenue he met two footmen who carried the old lord’s morning chocolate down to the pavilion on large silver trays.
As now the sun rose in the sky and the day grew hot, the lime-trees gave forth their exuberance of scent, and the garden was filled with unsurpassed, unbelievable sweetness. Towards the still hour of midday the long avenue reverberated like a soundboard with a low, incessant murmur: the humming of a million bees that clung to the pendulous, thronging clusters of blossoms, and were drunk with bliss.
In all the short lifetime of Danish summer there is no richer or more luscious moment than that week wherein the lime-trees flower. The heavenly scent goes to the head and to the heart, it seems to unite the fields of Denmark with those of Elysium, it contains both hay, honey and holy incense, and is half fairyland and half apothecary’s locker. The avenue was changed into a mystic edifice, a dryad’s cathedral, outward from summit to base lavishly adorned, set with multitudinous ornaments and golden in the sun. But behind the walls the vaults were benignly cool and sombre, like ambrosial sanctuaries in a dazzling and burning world, and in here the ground was still moist.
Up in the house, behind the silk curtains of the two front windows, the young mistress of the estate, from the wide bed, stuck her feet into two little high-heeled slippers. Her lace-trimmed nightgown had slid up above her knee, and down from the shoulder; her hair, done up in curling-pins for the night, was still frosty with the powder of yesterday, her round face flushed with sleep. She stepped out to the midst of the floor and stood there, looking extremely grave and thoughtful, yet she did not think at all. But through her head a long procession of pictures marched, and she was unconsciously endeavouring to put them in order, as the pictures of her existence had used to be.
She had grown up at Court, it was her world, and there was probably not in the whole country a small creature more exquisitely and innocently drilled to the stately measure of a palace. By favour of the old Dowager Queen she bore her name and that of the King’s sister, the Queen of Sweden: Sophie Magdalena. It was with a view to these things that her husband, when he wished to restore his status in high places, had chosen her as a bride, first for his son and then for himself. But her own father, who held an office in the Royal Household and belonged to the new Court-Aristocracy, in his day had done the same thing the other way round, and had married a country lady, to get a foothold within the old Nobility of Denmark. The little girl had her mother’s blood in her veins. The country to her had been an immense surprise and delight.
To get into her castle court she must drive through the farmyard, through the heavy stone gateway in the barn itself, wherein the rolling of her coach for a few seconds re-echoed like thunder. She must drive past the stables and the timber-mare, from which sometimes a miscreant would follow her with sad eyes, and might here startle a long string of squalling geese, or pass the heavy, scowling bull, led on by a ring in his nose, and kneading the earth in dumb fury. At first this had been to her, every time, a slight shock and a jest. But after a while all these creatures and things, which belonged to her, seemed to become part of herself. Her mothers, the old Danish country ladies, were robust persons, undismayed by any kind of weather, now she herself had walked in the rain and had laughed and glowed in it, like a green tree.
She had taken her great new home in possession at a time when all the world was unfolding, mating and propagating. Flowers, which she had known only in bouquets and festoons, sprang from the earth round her, birds sang in all the trees. The new-born lambs seemed to her daintier than her dolls had been. From her husband’s Hanoverian stud, foals were brought to her to give names, she stood and watched them as they poked their soft noses into their mothers’ bellies to drink: of this strange process she had till now only vaguely heard. She had happened to witness, from a path in the park the rearing and screeching stallion on the mare. All this luxuriance, lust and fecundity was displayed before her eyes, as for her pleasure.
And for her own part, in the midst of it, she was given an old husband, who treated her with punctilious respect, because she was to bear him a son. Such was the compact, she had known of it from the beginning. Her husband, she found, was doing his best to fulfil his part of it, and she herself was loyal by nature and strictly brought up, she would not shirk her obligation. Only she was vaguely aware of a discord or an incompatibility within her majestic existence, which prevented her from being as happy as she had expected to be.
After a time her chagrin took a strange form: as the consciousness of an absence. Someone ought to have been with her who was not. She had no experience in analysing her feelings, there had not been time for that at Court. Now, as she was more often left to herself, she vaguely probed her own mind. She tried to set her father in that void place, her sisters, her music-master, an Italian singer whom she had admired, – but none of them would fill it for her. At times she felt lighter at heart, and believed the misfortune to have left her
. And then again it would happen, if she were alone, or in her husband’s company, and even within his embrace, that everything round her would cry out: Where? Where? so that she let her wild eyes run about the room in search for the being who should have been there, and who had not come.
When, six months ago, she was informed that her first young bridegroom had died, and that she was to marry his father in his place, she had not been sorry. Her youthful suitor, the one time she had seen him, had appeared to her infantile and insipid, the father would make a statelier consort. Now she had sometimes thought of the dead boy, and wondered whether with him life would have been more joyful. But she soon again dismissed the picture, – and that was the sad youth’s last recall on to the stage of this world.
Upon one wall of her room there hung a long mirror. As she gazed into it new images came along. The day before, driving with her husband, she had seen, at a distance, a party of village girls bathe in the river, and the sun shining on them. All her life she had moved amongst naked marble deities, but till now it had never occurred to her that the people she knew should themselves be naked under their adriennes and trains, waistcoats and satin breeches, that indeed she herself were naked within her clothes. Now, in front of the looking-glass, she tardively untied the ribbons of her nightgown, and let it drop to the floor.
The room was dim behind the drawn curtains. In the mirror her body was silvery like a white rose, only her cheeks and mouth, and the tips of her fingers and breasts had a faint carmine. Her slender torso was formed by the whalebones that had clasped it tightly from her girlhood, above the slim, dimpled knee a gentle narrowness marked the place of the garter. Her limbs were rounded as if, at whatever place they were cut through with a sharp knife, a perfectly circular transverse section would be obtained. The side and belly were so smooth that her own gaze slipped and glided, and grasped for a hold. She was not altogether like a statue, she found, and lifted her arms above her head. She turned to get a view of her back, the curves below the waistline were still blushing from the pressure of the bed. She called to mind a few tales about nymphs and goddesses, but they all seemed a long way away, so her mind returned to the peasant-girls in the river. They were, for a few minutes, idealized into playmates, or sisters even, since they belonged to her, as did the meadow and the blue river itself. And within the next moment the sense of forlornness once more came upon her, a horror vacui like a physical pain. Surely, surely someone should have been with her now, her other self, like the image in the glass, but nearer, stronger, alive. There was no one, the Universe was empty round her.
