by Isak Dinesen
“ ‘Think no ill of us, Your Eminence,’ he said. ‘For if we allow ourselves to name a highly esteemed friend after a somewhat disregarded beast of burden, the appellation is derived from an old revered Arab legend.
“ ‘ “Do you know,” the Arab asks the foreigner, “why the dromedary, while carrying her hard and heavy loads, does still carry her head so high, and does turn it from right to left with such haughty disdain of all other creatures? I shall tell you the reason. Allah, the Almighty, confided to the Prophet the ninety-nine of his hundred names, and all these are set down in the Koran. The hundredth name, though, he withheld even from the Prophet himself, and it is known to no human being on earth. But the dromedary knows it. Therefore she gazes round with pride and keeps aloof, conscious of her superiority as keeper of the secret of Allah. She says to herself: I know the name.”
“ ‘The lady of whom we are speaking,’ he added, ‘in mien and carriage displays the pride of one initiated, of the Keeper of the Seal. And this is why we have given her the name which offends you.’
“I had been staying at the Bath for a few days when one evening a lady entered the room and at once was surrounded and greeted with joy. My orientalist and the other gentlemen gallantly and respectfully kissed her hand. The lady’s unusual height allowed of no mistake. I at once recognized Lady Flora. She had become extremely thin, and so looked still taller. She no longer had her brilliant red hair, but bore a most elegantly dressed wig. Her silk frock, costly as ever, had a choice and tasteful trimming of ribbons and lace.
“She carried herself with the same nobility and truthfulness as at our first meeting, and during the conversation of this evening I learned that her wit was as live and sparkling as ever, and that there was moreover now added to it a gentle and delicate irony, of which I had no remembrance. In the course of the evening the talk of the circle, which did generally brush everything between Heaven and Earth, a couple of times turned to events of an amorous nature. Lady Flora then joined in with a fine, gay equipoise, and promptly and pleasingly inserted quotations from a couple of poets. Alas, her full clear harmonious voice of former days was gone. But in her present broken, low and hoarse voice, like to the cackle of an old wise raven or a cockatoo, there was a new joviality, a mirthful forbearance with and benevolence toward the frailty of humanity. The bold verse of Zoram Moroni she delivered as frankly as a young boy, but at the recitation of a sublime and moving love poem a deep, delicate blush mounted to her face.
“And one thing more. I could feel no surprise at the fact that her friends at the Bath had named her Diana. When at an earlier time I had occupied myself with Lady Flora, in my thoughts I had characterized her as a person of high birth and great wealth, as a native of Britain and a great traveler, and as a mind equal or superior to my own; but hardly ever as a woman. Now through the fellowship with the libertines of Monte Scalzo she was changed; mystically she had become a maiden—an old maid.
“When her eye fell upon me, she amicably came forward to greet me, and almost at once inquired after Father Jacopo. As she learned that he had altogether retired from Rome and was now living among poor and simple people, she was silent for a while.
“ ‘Poor Father Jacopo,’ she said. ‘He took upon himself to tackle things and people that he had not been born to meddle with. However, he was a good, kind man, and I hope and trust that by now he too will be happy.’
“I could not ask her how she had come to be at Monte Scalzo, but the thought occupied me.
“One evening we were sitting on the western terrace, and together were silently watching how the air above us and around us was slowly emptied of the light of sunset, how night filled the valley, and the stars, one by one, came out in the vault of the sky.
“ ‘What a sweet and fragrant wind,’ she remarked.
“Our talk fell on poetry, and in the course of it I named the English poet Swift.
“She did not speak at once.
“ ‘I wish that he were here,’ she said. ‘I have often, lately, wanted to talk with him. A fine poet, my friend. But, alas, ill-advised to give up his noble mind and precious time to the question of size, when even persons of true genuine dullness will know every body and soul in our universe to be infinite!
“ ‘Du reste,’ she added after a moment with a little smile, ‘I love the Dean—(and lead a heart)!’
“Then she told me what had happened to her after I had last seen Father Jacopo.
“ ‘The evening before I left Rome,’ she said, ‘at a very late hour I drove to St. Peter’s. The church was empty and almost dark. Lights were burning in front of St. Peter’s figure. In the dusk it looked very big. I gazed at it for a long time, knowing that this was our last meeting. When I had stood so for a while one of the candles flickered a little; it looked as if the face of the Apostle changed, and as if his lips moved faintly, and parted. A young man in a brown cloak came into the church, went by me and kissed the foot of the statue. As he passed me I felt a smell of sweat and stable, a smell of the people. I first paid real attention to him after he had passed me, because he stood still so long with his mouth against St. Peter’s foot; in the end he walked on. He was slight of build, with a perfect gracefulness in all his movements. His face I never saw. I know not, Cardinal, what in this moment drove me to follow his example. I took a step forward and, like him, kissed St. Peter’s foot. I had thought that the bronze would be ice-cold, but it was warm from the young man’s mouth, slightly moist—and that surprised me. Like him, I held my lips against it for a long time.
“ ‘Four weeks later, as I was staying in Missolonghi, by the Bay of Patras, I discovered the sore on my lip. My English doctor, who accompanied me, at once diagnosed the disease and named it to me. I was not ignorant, I knew the name.
“ ‘I stood, Your Eminence, before the glass and looked at my mouth. Then I bethought myself of Father Jacopo. To what, I thought, does this bear a likeness? To a rose? Or to a seal?’ ”
THE BLANK PAGE
By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories.
She said:
“You want a tale, sweet lady and gentleman? Indeed I have told many tales, one more than a thousand, since that time when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes. It was my mother’s mother, the black-eyed dancer, the often-embraced, who in the end—wrinkled like a winter apple and crouching beneath the mercy of the veil—took upon herself to teach me the art of story-telling. Her own mother’s mother had taught it to her, and both were better story-tellers than I am. But that, by now, is of no consequence, since to the people they and I have become one, and I am most highly honored because I have told stories for two hundred years.”
Now if she is well paid and in good spirits, she will go on.
“With my grandmother,” she said, “I went through a hard school. ‘Be loyal to the story,’ the old hag would say to me. ‘Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.’ ‘Why must I be that, Grandmother?’ I asked her. ‘Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?’ she cried. ‘And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you my reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.’
“Who then,” she continues, “tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all—where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page.”
The old beld
ame for a while says nothing, only giggles a little and munches with her toothless mouth.
“We,” she says at last, “the old women who tell stories, we know the story of the blank page. But we are somewhat averse to telling it, for it might well, among the uninitiated, weaken our own credit. All the same, I am going to make an exception with you, my sweet and pretty lady and gentleman of the generous hearts. I shall tell it to you.”
High up in the blue mountains of Portugal there stands an old convent for sisters of the Carmelite order, which is an illustrious and austere order. In ancient times the convent was rich, the sisters were all noble ladies, and miracles took place there. But during the centuries highborn ladies grew less keen on fasting and prayer, the great dowries flowed scantily into the treasury of the convent, and today the few portionless and humble sisters live in but one wing of the vast crumbling structure, which looks as if it longed to become one with the gray rock itself. Yet they are still a blithe and active sisterhood. They take much pleasure in their holy meditations, and will busy themselves joyfully with that one particular task which did once, long, long ago, obtain for the convent a unique and strange privilege: they grow the finest flax and manufacture the most exquisite linen of Portugal.
The long field below the convent is plowed with gentle-eyed, milk-white bullocks, and the seed is skillfully sown out by labor-hardened virginal hands with mold under the nails. At the time when the flax field flowers, the whole valley becomes air-blue, the very color of the apron which the blessed virgin put on to go out and collect eggs within St. Anne’s poultry yard, the moment before the Archangel Gabriel in mighty wing-strokes lowered himself onto the threshold of the house, and while high, high up a dove, neck-feathers raised and wings vibrating, stood like a small clear silver star in the sky. During this month the villagers many miles round raise their eyes to the flax field and ask one another: “Has the convent been lifted into heaven? Or have our good little sisters succeeded in pulling down heaven to them?”
Later in due course the flax is pulled, scutched and hackled; thereafter the delicate thread is spun, and the linen woven, and at the very end the fabric is laid out on the grass to bleach, and is watered time after time, until one may believe that snow has fallen round the convent walls. All this work is gone through with precision and piety and with such sprinklings and litanies as are the secret of the convent. For these reasons the linen, baled high on the backs of small gray donkeys and sent out through the convent gate, downwards and ever downwards to the towns, is as flower-white, smooth and dainty as was my own little foot when, fourteen years old, I had washed it in the brook to go to a dance in the village.
Diligence, dear Master and Mistress, is a good thing, and religion is a good thing, but the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place outside the story itself. Thus does the linen of the Convento Velho draw its true virtue from the fact that the very first linseed was brought home from the Holy Land itself by a crusader.
In the Bible, people who can read may learn about the lands of Lecha and Maresha, where flax is grown. I myself cannot read, and have never seen this book of which so much is spoken. But my grandmother’s grandmother as a little girl was the pet of an old Jewish rabbi, and the learning she received from him has been kept and passed on in our family. So you will read, in the book of Joshua, of how Achsah the daughter of Caleb lighted from her ass and cried unto her father: “Give me a blessing! For thou hast now given me land; give me also the blessing of springs of water!” And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. And in the fields of Lecha and Maresha lived, later on, the families of them that wrought the finest linen of all. Our Portuguese crusader, whose own ancestors had once been great linen weavers of Tomar, as he rode through these same fields was struck by the quality of the flax, and so tied a bag of seeds to the pommel of his saddle.
From this circumstance originated the first privilege of the convent, which was to procure bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house.
I will inform you, dear lady and gentleman, that in the country of Portugal in very old and noble families a venerable custom has been observed. On the morning after the wedding of a daughter of the house, and before the morning gift had yet been handed over, the Chamberlain or High Steward from a balcony of the palace would hang out the sheet of the night and would solemnly proclaim: Virginem eam tenemus—“we declare her to have been a virgin.” Such a sheet was never afterwards washed or again lain on.
This time-honored custom was nowhere more strictly upheld than within the royal house itself, and it has there subsisted till within living memory.
Now for many hundred years the convent in the mountains, in appreciation of the excellent quality of the linen delivered, has held its second high privilege: that of receiving back that central piece of the snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honor of a royal bride.
In the tall main wing of the convent, which overlooks an immense landscape of hills and valleys, there is a long gallery with a black-and-white marble floor. On the walls of the gallery, side by side, hangs a long row of heavy, gilt frames, each of them adorned with a coroneted plate of pure gold, on which is engraved the name of a princess: Donna Christina, Donna Ines, Donna Jacintha Lenora, Donna Maria. And each of these frames encloses a square cut from a royal wedding sheet.
Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword—or even a heart pierced through with a sword.
In days of old it would occur that a long, stately, richly colored procession wound its way through the stone-gray mountain scenery, upwards to the convent. Princesses of Portugal, who were now queens or queen dowagers of foreign countries, Archduchesses, or Electresses, with their splendid retinue, proceeded here on a pilgrimage which was by nature both sacred and secretly gay. From the flax field upwards the road rises steeply; the royal lady would have to descend from her coach to be carried this last bit of the way in a palanquin presented to the convent for the very same purpose.
Later on, up to our own day, it has come to pass—as it comes to pass when a sheet of paper is being burnt, that after all other sparks have run along the edge and died away, one last clear little spark will appear and hurry along after them—that a very old highborn spinster undertakes the journey to Convento Velho. She has once, a long long time ago, been playmate, friend and maid-of-honor to a young princess of Portugal As she makes her way to the convent she looks round to see the view widen to all sides. Within the building a sister conducts her to the gallery and to the plate bearing the name of the princess she has once served, and there takes leave of her, aware of her wish to be alone.
Slowly, slowly a row of recollections passes through the small, venerable, skull-like head under its mantilla of black lace, and it nods to them in amicable recognition. The loyal friend and confidante looks back upon the young bride’s elevated married life with the elected royal consort. She takes stock of happy events and disappointments—coronations and jubilees, court intrigues and wars, the birth of heirs to the throne, the alliances of younger generations of princes and princesses, the rise or decline of dynasties. The old lady will remember how once, from the markings on the canvas, omens were drawn; now she will be able to compare the fulfillment to the omen, sighing a little and smiling a little. Each separate canvas with its coroneted name-plate has a story to tell, and each has been set up in loyalty to the story.
But in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner, a blank page.
I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page, and recognize the
wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
For with what eternal and unswerving loyalty has not this canvas been inserted in the row! The story-tellers themselves before it draw their veils over their faces and are dumb. Because the royal papa and mama who once ordered this canvas to be framed and hung up, had they not had the tradition of loyalty in their blood, might have left it out.
It is in front of this piece of pure white linen that the old princesses of Portugal—worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering queens, wives and mothers—and their noble old playmates, bridesmaids and maids-of-honor have most often stood still.
It is in front of the blank page that old and young nuns, with the Mother Abbess herself, sink into deepest thought.
New Gothic Tales
THE CARYATIDS,
AN UNFINISHED TALE
On a summer afternoon in the forties of the last century, two carriages and a couple of riding horses were making a halt within the glade of a forest near Sarlat in the Province of Dordogne, in France. The coachmen and grooms stood beside the horses, feeding them with bits of bread. The one carriage had four horses to it, the other was a light and elegant little phaeton. Of the saddle horses one was black and one gray.
A little river was running through the glade. Near the place where the carriages had stopped it grew wider and shallower, and the grassy banks were trodden down by the cattle that came here to drink.
The sky was high and blue; all round the horizon large, immovable, gray and delicately rosy clouds were towered up, which might forebode thunder on the morrow. But the afternoon was clear and fine. The little river came out gaily from the thicket, through the dark foliage of which the sprinklings of sunlight dropped into it like a drizzle of gold, and here in the open it reflected the blue and gray hues of the summer sky as frankly as a mirror.
