Last Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  In the dusk on the shore she saw a form moving, curious to her at first. It was a woman in white, but as she was swathed in a dark shawl, the upper part of her body become one with her surroundings, the white skirt swept on as on its own. This amused Childerique; she clapped her hands. But as the lady passed out into the glade, she distinguished clearly her little dark head, the curls arranged à la coup de vent, and a great wave of tenderness and pride exalted her whole being. She knew this lady. Who was she? Immediately after she recognized the spot; it was the outskirts of the park of Haut-Mesnil, and she saw also, at that same moment, the reflection of a star, the first or the last of the summer night, shiver in the lacteal surface of the water. There was a seat in the wood; the young lady sat down on it, and leaned her head upon her folded hands at the back of the seat.

  Suddenly Childerique noticed a change in the mirror of the pond; it was broken into an outstretched pattern of little chopped, luminous ripples. And what was this? She saw it the next moment: the ducks had been disturbed by something, and came rushing across the water toward her; in the dusk she could not see their tawny bodies, but only the long lines made upon the surface by their hurried retreat. She thought: “It is early summer here; the young wild ducks are not fledged yet.” But what had disturbed them? A young man came along the forest path, from the opposite side to the woman, hastened up to her and took her in his arms; she sank into his embrace.

  At the moment when the lady gave herself up to her lover’s adoration, Childerique knew her. It was her mother, the fair and cherished Sophie, younger than herself and bright with beauty and happiness. “Oh, dear Mother,” she thought, “apple of my eye, I see you at last.” The young man must then be her father, so much younger than she remembered him, really just like Philippe when he had first come to France. Her mother, she thought, had come out to meet her father in the park. Childerique remembered her father only as a cold man, coming in silent from the work of the estate, or from hunting. How much she had wronged him; he had come back, in the old days, like this. She saw that the two wanted nothing in the world but one another; they clung together, pressed their faces together, and sought and held each other’s hands; the woman took the man’s face between her hands and lost herself in contemplation of it. Again they sank into each other and made one figure only in the half-light. The gestures were all so familiar; it was indeed as if she had seen herself and Philippe in a looking glass, younger and fairer. She had often been told that she was like her mother, and surely her father had had something of the beauty of Philippe, or it was only that all young men were alike, making love. She remembered an evening, a month perhaps after their wedding, when she herself had gone to meet her husband in the forest, and he had made love to her there, half against herself. At times then he had alarmed her by the violence of his love for her, as if there were no moment to lose, as if death were threatening to separate the two. Now she knew that that was just the way of her father and mother.

  Had she in real life come upon a pair of lovers like this, she knew that she should have turned her eyes away. Not so here, although she felt the blood in her cheeks; not so with her own mother, in this world of sweet witchcraft. Here everything had a deeper meaning and heart, and the mother and daughter could well do service to the gods hand-in-hand. Nor was she sorry that her mother did not turn and look at her, or notice her at all, although at the first moment she had felt a burning longing for that. This was a lovelier confidence and intimacy; this was as it should be.

  The picture was blurred to her as if her eyes had been filled with tears. She again found herself clinging to the wet rail of the gangway in the mill. The miller’s widow was before her, with drops of sweat in her eyebrows. Childerique sighed deeply as she realized that the visions were all gone.

  “I have shown you true pictures,” said the gypsy laboriously.

  “Yes, yes,” answered Childerique, wringing her hands as the miller’s wife had done before.

  “I shall show you more tomorrow,” said Simkie.

  “Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow,” said Childerique, feeling how long it was till tomorrow, and how the time would be filled with longing.

  Now she herself walked slowly, and she stopped on the threshold to take one more look at the room, and listen once more to the music of the water wheel.

  “The wheel has been turning on your behalf, Madame,” said the gypsy. “The water that turned it has gone a long way already, and will not come back to turn it the other way.”

  On the bridge she paused. She thought: “How much have I learned since I stood here last! How much wiser I am!”

  She looked round, and was surprised at the change in the earth and air. That high sky had paled, as if bleached, drenched of all its rich blue, so much so that the large clouds, which had appeared light against it now, without having themselves changed their hue, floated like dark, slate-colored clots on a white metal ground. It was cold. Gusts of wind rushed through the trees which swayed and bent. The dust of the road whirled up in little spires.

  As she walked through the forest, heavy drops of rain came down through the tops of the trees; they felt lukewarm in the cold air. She heard thunder in the distance, but no heavy shower followed—probably there was a great storm somewhere off. She herself, who had rushed down to the mill, now walked with difficulty, although she meant to hasten, like a honeybee, carrying the collected sweetness of moors and gardens through the rain to her hive, heavy and a little unsteady on the wing. In the darkness of the forest path she seemed to feel the nearness of a young lover, and when the twigs and tendrils caught her dress it was as if she had to stop to give him time for a sweet word or a kiss. She thought of her husband, and for the first time in her life she felt an overwhelming longing for his embrace. She calculated how long it would be until she could be in his arms, and pictures of love-making swarmed at her from all sides, like gadflies on the narrow road, and made her face glow and her knees weaken under her.

  Where the forest path joined the drive of Champmeslé there grew, curiously, a very old, crooked wild mulberry tree. She mused under it, and thought: “This terrible, sweet drowsiness which makes my limbs so heavy, which lies like honey on my tongue and runs so soothingly in all my veins—can it be a poison, a drug? Does the poppy-juice confuse you like this?” She remembered having spoken to her brother of the sweet taste of poisons and was surprised at her own wisdom. She thought: “I shall never get home,” and was astonished when, immediately after, she saw before her the white house of Champmeslé.

  Her husband, who had seen her approach from his window, came out to meet her. “Where have you been?” he asked her.

  Childerique breathed heavily. “Oh, do not ask me,” she exclaimed.

  “Why not?” said he, and struck by her looks he added: “My dear, you are not well.” He took her hand. “Have you got fever?” he asked her.

  “What an idea,” said she. “I walked fast to get home. I am a little chilly.”

  She was frightened herself because at the sight of her husband she felt disappointment and insecurity. It was as if he, the house and garden of Champmeslé and all the life awaiting her there were pale and cold in comparison with the world of witchcraft, as the landscape was pale and cold now compared to the glowing earth and air of an hour ago. Had the warmth and color gone from her live husband to remain with the vision lovers, even with the vision animals of a burning sky and a forest of a thousand years ago?

  “Where do you come from?” he asked her again.

  “Oh, why do you go on asking me,” she cried, “when I would rather have died than told you? I come from the mill, from the miller’s widow, Udday’s daughter. But you, you know nothing of all this.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know of Udday. What had you got to do there?”

  “Oh, she knows a thousand times more than we do,” said Childerique. She took his hand, eager to prove to herself that he was, after all, the lover of the forest path, but let it go again, staring into his face. Hi
s hand seemed to her changed, and hot; it burnt her cool fingers. He had asked her if she had got fever, but had he not fever?

  “You are quite wet,” said he, laying his hand on her shoulders and bosom. “Be sensible now for once and take off your clothes. You should go to bed, my dear. You were looking feverish last night already.”

  From her window Childerique, never thinking of changing her clothes, looked toward the horizon and at the figure of her husband, small in the foreground. He had walked onto the end of the terrace and stood there, his hands in his pockets, quite still. She found time to wonder, in the whirl of all her thoughts, what he would be thinking of. “He walks there,” she said to herself, “like a sentinel. He thinks: Will the storm come up here? It is well that I have got my wheat garnered. Will the lightning strike in the forest of Champmeslé?”

  As she followed him with her eyes her heart softened to him; tears pressed against her eyelids even while she kept moving up and down her room.

  ECHOES

  In the course of her wanderings Pellegrina Leoni, the diva who had lost her voice, came to a small mountain town near Rome. This happened at the time when she had fled from Rome and from her lover, Lincoln Forsner, whose great passion for her threatened to place her, and to hold her fast, within a definite, continued existence. She came to the town toward evening, in a cart drawn by a horse and a mule, which had carried chestnuts and wool down to the plain, and as she was about to pay her fare she found that she had brought no money with her. She did not worry, for she had never given much thought to money, and she knew that her friend, the Jew Marcus Cocozza, would before long have traced her dwelling place and would provide her with all she needed. On her left hand she had a ring with a big diamond; she took it off and gave it to the wagoner.

  It was autumn. Dark fell almost at once, and the thin mountain air cooled suddenly; the wanderer seemed to feel the breath of snow in it. The houses round her faded, as if they were withdrawing into themselves and relinquishing the world.

  Pellegrina walked through the narrow street with her small, hastily packed traveling bag in her hand. She had grown fat in Rome, on heavy, sweet food and much wine, behind walls baked by the sun and in the continuous turmoil of talk and music. She had to stop to catch her breath; as she stood still she felt the cold and the loneliness up here as a happiness. She thought: “This is a remarkable town, one feels as if one may stay on here.” In a while she felt that she was hungry after her hurried departure and her journey. As a child she had often been hungry; through the faint ache in her stomach she once more became the light-footed ferocious wench who had sniffed in smells of food in the evening air, lonely with the loneliness of very young beings, and in a strange way safe. She thought: “I shall have to find a place to sleep in tonight. I shall have, tonight, to beg bread and shelter from the people in this town.”

  She here realized that she had for some minutes been following on the heels of a huge form: a man in a cloak. He slowed up and stopped outside a small baker’s shop, which was open to the street and upon the counter of which an oil lamp was burning. She caught up with him and stood still. Before the man entered the circle of light he sighed deeply, all anonymous in the dark. But when the light fell upon him she saw that he was a very old man, heavy of body; his face was not wrinkled but hardened and as if polished, like a big old yellow bone; his eyes were pale. She reflected, in the kind of fancy which might have run through the head of the girl of twelve: “He is a dead sailor, who has been long in the water. He stands up straight because, as is the custom with dead sailors, they have tied a weight to his feet. But he is still swaying a little with the current.”

  He did indeed stand as still and patiently as a dead man before the counter of the shop until the ruddy baker’s wife behind the lamp turned and caught sight of him, and without wasting words on the business, as if in accordance with an old habit, reached out for a loaf of bread from the shelf, rubbed it on her bare arm and handed it to him. The old man received it, likewise without a word, placed a small coin on the counter and continued his way.

  “Good night, Niccolo,” said the baker’s wife. “Good night,” he answered in a toneless voice.

  Pellegrina, as has been told, was a baker’s daughter and would know that in a baker’s shop there may be bread left over from yesterday which is given to beggars. But since she never thought of the past she walked on. Also in the old man’s figure and bearing there had been a namelessness akin to her own. If now she added her own loneliness to his, would not the two together reach a rare, a remarkable pinnacle of loneliness? She hastened her steps a little.

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I have eaten nothing today and have no money with which to buy bread. I saw you just now buying a loaf in the baker’s shop. Will you, out of compassion with the poor of this earth, give me a piece of it?”

  The old man turned all round toward her, so helplessly surprised at being spoken to that she smiled. Her old habit of charming everybody she met got the better of her in the lonely village street in which she was begging her bread.

  “I ask for nothing more,” she said in her husky, insinuating voice. “Many people, I am told, are happy to have a bit of bread for supper. I ask for nothing else. If you have a dish of meat waiting for you in your house, I shall not claim to share it.”

  The man, who had stood immovable before her, at these words suddenly lifted his elbow, as if to deal a blow or to cover his face.

  “Do not strike me,” she said gently. “Cannot you and I be friends? Be not afraid that I shall stay too long with you. I am a woman who is always traveling farther.”

  After a silence the old man said: “Come with me.”

  They walked on side by side, all through the village, until they came to the old man’s house standing at the end of a lonely narrow road with a low wall running along it.

  Here the man stopped and opened the door to the hut.

  “Wait,” he said. “I shall light a dip. I myself most often sit in the dark. But I shall light a dip for you tonight.”

  She kept standing on the threshold while he raked the ashes from the embers on the fireplace, blew on them and lighted a tallow dip by a shaving. “Come closer to the fire,” he said slowly and hoarsely, pointing to the only chair of the room. She, however, would not take her host’s seat, but pulled a wooden stool up to the fireplace. The old man took down a heavy key from a nail and locked the door.

  “How is it,” she asked, “that you leave the door to your house open when you are out and thieves may come in, but that you lock it when you are in it yourself?”

  The old man looked at her, then looked away. “I do that,” he said.

  The small room was filled with the rank smell of goats and sheep, and was indeed only divided from the cattle-shed by a half-door. She heard the animals moving and munching in the dark. The room was so low that the head of the big man brushed the joists of the ceiling.

  Little by little the glimmering of the dip and the fire gained power over the shadows of the room, and in their light the old host stared at his guest for a long time. A fine lady in black silk in the street had asked a piece of bread from him and had sat down on the stool in his room.

  At last he asked: “Why, Lady, have you come to this town?”

  “I have come to this town,” Pellegrina answered, “because there is no reason whatever why I should come. And that is the way in which I always travel.”

  The old man said: “I have heard of many kinds of people. I have heard of unhappy, moon-stricken people, who are running from place to place for no reason. Those people one must not mock, but must give them shelter and bread. But I know not if you be one of them.”

  “No,” said Pellegrina, “I am not one of the moon-struck people, and you, and all others, are free to mock me. But you see, Niccolo, some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow f
ly.”

  “In such a way,” said the old man heavily, “the hunted and pursued travel.”

  “Yes,” said Pellegrina, “but you seamen also name it: running before a following or a fair wind.”

  “Why,” he asked, “do you call me a seaman?”

  She answered: “I am in the habit of observing the looks and ways of my friends. You walk like a seaman, and you have the eyes of a seaman, which are used to gazing over great distances.”

  “And who will your friends be, Lady?” he asked.

  “All people are my friends,” said Pellegrina. “I have not got an enemy in the world.”

  He was silent again, and a couple of times sighed as deeply as he had done in the street before the baker’s shop.

  “It is sixty-five years since I saw the sea,” he said.

  “A long time, Niccolo,” she said, “Yet surely you might see the sea again from these mountains.”

  “Yes,” said he, “I might see it. If I walk up two hours by the path behind the house, I shall see it from there. By the time when I had first got the house, and had built the chimney and the shed to it, I walked up those two hours and came to a flat bit of ground, and from there I saw it—gray.”

  “All the same,” she said, “it has had a strong grip on you, to have flung you up as high as here. You have lived in one house for sixty-five years, Niccolo, and yet you are a traveler of my own kind. And while those who travel toward a goal before them are traveling in fear of never reaching it, alas, I have myself lately left an unfortunate young man, who for a long time still will be rushing toward a goal that he will never reach, and his name, Niccolo, was Lincoln—we, who are running before the wind, may be without fear, for what will we have to fear? Therefore you must not fear me, no more than I fear you.”

  “I do not know,” he said after a pause, “how it comes to be that a hunted and pursued traveler should look so joyous?”