by Isak Dinesen
“Did you ever know,” he asked after a pause, “that my father had a man put to death?”
“Your father?” she asked. “A peasant?”
“Yes,” he answered, “he was a peasant.”
“I believe that they told me so,” she said, “when I was a little girl.”
“They told you so, Ulrikke,” he said. “They told an old story, a nursery tale, to a little girl. But to me it was a different tale, for my own father was in it.”
“It seems to me that I remember your father,” said she, “and that he set me on his knee and played with me. And yet that can hardly be. But Mama has talked about him many times, and has told me that he was a handsome, gallant, gay gentleman. A very fine horseman and afraid of nothing—like you.”
“My father died before I was born,” he said. “That, to me, has seemed to mean that he did, from the very beginning, wish to give all that was his into my hands.”
“You need not grieve at that,” she said and smiled.
“I need not grieve at that,” he repeated slowly. “You are thinking of his land and of his fortune. That inheritance of mine has been growing with me myself, during my minority. But he left me more. His own guilt and that of his fathers, that dark shadow which they cast wherever they walked—that, too, is an inheritance which may also have been growing until today.”
“Until today?” she asked.
He caught the vague echo of resentment in her voice—their happy day together darkened by ancient incomprehensible shadows. His heart ached a little at it.
“Listen,” he said, “I have never spoken to you of my father. Today if you would hear me, I should like to speak of him.
“I have never seen his face or heard his voice, yet in my small world when I was a child he was ever with me. His portrait on the wall showed the face of a handsome, gallant, gay gentleman, and the people round me have talked to me of him as your mother did to you, for who speaks ill to a child of his dead father? How did it then happen that this dead father came to his child, a dark figure looming over the little boy, wrapped in a black cloak of guilt, gloom and shame, formidable? Yet I was never afraid of him. It does, I believe, happen like that with children: the grown-up people will tell them of a troll or hobgoblin, and the child will become familiar with the troll and will, in its own way, make it belong to him. In the peaceful house, filled with gentle women, my father and I belonged to one another, and if he was formidable I was formidable as well.
“As I grew older,” he continued, “and on my own or by the hand of my tutor began to think and reason more abstractly, my ideas of a moral order of the world, of right and wrong and of justice, all grouped themselves round his figure as if they did indeed come to me through him. It was then that I realized the nature of our partnership. He had a claim on me; there was something that I must do for him; he required me to pay his debt.
“As then I read the story of Orestes, I reflected how much easier was his task than mine, since he had a virtuous father to avenge. As I was taught my catechism, the words that stuck in my mind were these, ‘I am in my father and my father is in me.’
“In the end, five years ago, when I was eighteen and his land and fortune were given into my hands, when I was known to the world no longer as Master Eitel but by the name of my fathers, it became clear to me what I had to do. So I made up my mind to go to foreign countries, there to study how to make the lot of the people on my land happier.
“This is what I have thought of, Ulrikke,” he continued. “The Christian religion will tell us of our duty toward our brothers and our neighbors, the people living round us today. It bids us take up the cause of the abandoned, destitute and downtrodden among them. It was first preached by artisans and fishermen.
“But there is another kind of religion which speaks not of brothers or neighbors but of fathers and sons. It proclaims our duty toward the past, and it bids us take up the cause of the dead. To that religion the nobleman is priest. And for this reason are we noblemen and bear old names, for this reason is the land given into our hands: that the past, and the dead, may put their trust in us. My brother or my neighbor, after all, if I strike him may return the blow, and the oppressed around us, if too hard tried, may rebel. But if we are not there, who will look after the past? And who will then be abandoned and destitute and in very truth downtrodden as the dead? For this reason do I bear my father’s old name, which has been known in the country for many centuries, that my dead father in his grave, who can trust in no one else, may trust in me.
“To cut away from the past,” he said very slowly, as if to himself, “to annihilate it, is the vilest of all breaches of the laws of the cosmos. It is ingratitude, and running away from your debt. It is suicide: you are annihilating yourself in it. I have heard it said, or have read somewhere,” he added and smiled a little, “that a thing is not true until it is twenty-five years old—almost my own age. I shall not, at the moment when I have become, truthfully, what I am, in cutting off my roots, turn myself into a shadow, into nothingness.
“You tell me,” he went on, “that it is not out of love for my people that I am working, and you are right. For in this I am doing the work of my father. I will him to be able to speak some day to the man he wronged, ‘Now your death has been paid for, Linnert.’ I have been told—a very long time ago, and I do not remember by whom—that for eleven years, the last eleven years of my father’s life, the peasants on his land did not speak his name, but in speaking of him used other names, of their own invention. I will them to name him again, some day, as they say, ‘The son of this man dealt fairly with us and was just to us.’
“There can be,” he said after a while, “there can be no lawful love between me and them while they do still fear and distrust my father in me. And I cannot allow them to touch me while I still know them to be shrinking from his blood within my veins. When I have paid off my father’s debt, it will be time for me to stretch out my hands and let them kiss them.”
“I do not think, though,” said Ulrikke, “that any of the families round here are afraid of your father’s name or of his blood. If you had not gone away to foreign countries, while we were both so young, I think that Papa and Mama would have been well pleased to have you and me marry. I was told that they did indeed talk about it, even before you were born.”
He sat silent, once more checked in his course of thought by her mysterious light-heartedness. Her words brought him back to Germany and to the time, five years ago, when letters from home had informed him that she was married. Until that hour he had felt sure that he and she belonged to one another, and had been too simple to know or to reckon with the forces which had stepped in and had carried her off. Later on, after his return to Denmark, he had understood. Her mother, a beauty and bel-esprit of European fame, at this time had had her eyes opened to the fact that her daughter was nineteen years and sweet and graceful, and in haste—in jealousy, or in a fit of wild motherly tenderness, and in order to save that daughter from her own tempest-tossed career—had married off the maiden to an old man. Now, for a few moments, he called to mind those dark nights in which, from his wet, burning pillow, he had stormed against the gods, and had seen the playmate of his childhood as the central figure in a classic group: the white-robed virgin upon the sacrificial altar of a non-human power.
But she, who had been the dedicated victim of his picture, today sat in the wood, ever white-clad, and talked of their disaster as if it had been the tragedy of a hero and a heroine in a book. For a long time he remained silent, with the ring of her voice in his ear.
“And what was now,” she asked, “the story of your father and the peasant? I do not quite remember it. You might tell it to me.”
“I have never told it to anyone,” he answered.
“Who, then, told it to you yourself?” she asked again.
He searched his mind and was surprised to find that he could not answer her question.
“I do not remember,” he said, “that
it was ever told to me. I must have heard it when I was a very young child.”
“But it has been in your thoughts all your life,” said she. “It is time that I should hear it, here in the wood.”
It took him some time to fetch up a recollection which was stored so deep down in his being. When at last he spoke, his words came slowly, and more than once in the course of his tale he had to stop to collect his thoughts.
“There was,” he began, “on my father’s land a peasant named Linnert. He came of a very old peasant family, which had always belonged to us, and it is believed that many hundred years ago the farmstead of his people had stood where our house does today stand, and that the foundations of it were still existing deep down in the ground. Through the ages these peasants had all been handsome, ingenious and deep, and many tales were told about their extraordinary physical strength. For these reasons my own people had been proud of them—such as you said just now that the old lords of the land would be proud of their peasants—yet none of them had ever been in service in our house. This Linnert was born the same year as my father, and since my father had no brothers or sisters, the peasant boy was taken on as a playfellow to him.
“Now,” he went on slowly, “in telling you this tale of mine I can give you no explanation why things in it happened the way they did. I have tried to find an explanation. I have been wondering if there might be found, deep down, some reason for the happenings. I have imagined that there might be a woman at the bottom of them. For the maidens of that old peasant stock were cow-eyed and red-lipped, as its young men were hardy and chaste, and my father was a lusty youth, and might well have cast his eye upon a pretty girl on his own estate. But I have found nothing of the kind, nothing at all. I can only, in going through my story, state that things happened in this way—that it was so.
“There was at that time,” he took up his account, “south of the manor house and overlooked by its windows, a stretch of grassland on which the peasants’ cattle were wont to graze together with my father’s. Later on the peasants ceased to bring their cattle there, and my father had the land included into the park.
“Now one summer the rain failed, the grazing dried up, and the peasants suffered much loss. My father himself had to take home his young stock to feed it in the byre, and upon this occasion his cowmen by mistake took with them a small black bull-calf that belonged to Linnert. Linnert on the next day walked up to the manor and claimed his calf back. My father, when it was reported to him, laughed. Linnert, he declared, was a clever fellow, to charge his master’s cowmen with theft, and so increase his stock. He would have to be rewarded for his inventiveness. So my father had a fine big calf brought from his own byre and handed over to Linnert. Here, he made his people tell him, he had his calf back. But the peasant refused to take it, declaring that it was not his, and remained standing by the byre all day waiting for his own calf.
“Next morning my father had a fine young bullock led down to Linnert’s lot and once more made his cowmen tell the peasant that here he had his calf back. But it fell out as the first time. Linnert came back with the bullock on a rope. ‘This fat young bullock is not mine,’ he said. ‘There shall be justice on earth. My small calf was not half so big, nor half so handsome. Give me back the small black bull-calf of mine.’ And just as the day before, he remained standing in the farmyard till late in the evening, waiting for his calf.
“My father by that time had a very magnificent full-grown bull, which he had bought at a high price in Holstein, but the animal was vicious and had gored a cowman to death. His neighbors had warned him that he would have to part with it, but he had answered them that he did still have people on his land who could manage a bull. Now he bid three men—for a lesser number dared not take on the job— to lead the bull down to Linnert’s byre, and sent a message with them. ‘If this,’ he had the peasant told, ‘is your own animal, which I have unlawfully taken from you, it is hereby returned to you with my apology. But if it is not yours, and if you yourself are such a great man as to know that there shall be justice on earth, surely you will be great enough to bring it back to me on Sunday evening.’ For Sunday was my father’s birthday, and as was his custom he was giving a dinner party to ladies and gentlemen of the neighborhood. And he thought it not impossible that Linnert might indeed bring home the bull before the eyes of his guests.
“All these things happened in the month of August, and for a week the weather had been exceptionally hot and sultry.
“Already on Saturday morning, while my father was being powdered, the people in the farmyard cried out loudly: ‘Here comes Linnert riding on the Holstein bull!’ My father ran to the window to see a sight, the like of which he had never seen, for Linnert came through the farmyard gate and up the courtyard, astride the bull as if he had been a hack. The bull was covered with dust and froth, his sides went in and out like a pair of bellows, and blood ran from his nose. But Linnert sat up straight on his back, his head high. He reined up his mount in front of the tall stone stairs, just as my father came out of the front door, his head only half powdered.
“ ‘You are the bonny horseman,’ my father cried, ‘and I shall have you rechristened, for a peasant’s name no longer befits you, but you will have to be named after him who brought the wild bull of Crete alive to Peloponnesus!’ He took a step down the stairs and added: ‘But why do you come today? I bade you come tomorrow, when I should have had all the fine people of the isle here to see you.’ ‘I thought,’ Linnert answered, ‘that when your bull and I had got you to look at us, we needed no more people.’ My father went down the last steps. ‘Then this is like one of our earliest games,’ he said, ‘and I shall drink a cup of wine with you, Linnert, and have you take home the silver cup filled with rigsdalers.’ ‘And one of our last games, I think,’ said Linnert. And with that he did indeed turn the bull and make him walk down the courtyard to the byre door. My father had his powdering finished.
“But one hour later the cowherd came up from the byre and reported that the bull had died. As the herd had set him in his stall, the blood had run thicker from his nose, he had sunk on his knees, and a little later he had laid his head on the floor. And then he had died.
“ ‘And what is Linnert doing,’ my father asked, ‘for whom I have been waiting here to drink with him?’ The cowman answered that Linnert, just like the other day, was waiting in the farmyard.
“My father had Linnert brought before him.
“ ‘You have ridden a bull to death,’ he said. ‘It is a deed of which people will be talking for a hundred years to come. If now he is your own bull, it is all your own affair, and the meat and the hide will be yours. But if the bull was mine, you will have to pay me for him. To whom of us, now, did the bull belong?’ ‘It was not my bull,’ Linnert answered, ‘and I did not come up here to get a bull, but to have justice.’ ‘You shame me, Linnert,’ said my father, ‘for I thought that in you I had not only a strong man, but a shrewd one. But here you tell me that I have given you more than your due, and yet you go on asking me for what I cannot give you, seeing that it is not to be found on earth. Now I ask you again, for the last time: To whom of us did the bull belong?’ Linnert answered: ‘That big bull was yours, and it is the small black bull-calf that is mine.’ ‘Have it your own way,’ said my father. ‘You have then killed my best bull on me, and you will have to pay for it. And since you are so keen on riding, you shall ride once more today.’
“The timber-mare, which had not been used for many years, was still standing in front of the barn. My father had Linnert lifted onto it. It was a hot day, and in the course of the afternoon it grew still hotter. When the shadow of the barn reached the timber-mare, my father had it dragged out into the sun.”
Eitel for a moment stopped in his tale. “My father,” he repeated, “had it dragged out of the shadow into the sun.
“It was the habit of my father,” he again took up the story, “in the afternoon to go for a ride in the fields. As this afternoon he
passed the timber-mare and the man upon it, he pulled up his horse. ‘Say the word, Linnert,’ he said. ‘When you call to mind that the bull was yours, my men will take you down.’ Linnert answered not a word, and my father lifted his hat to him and rode out of the yard.
“Once more, as my father came back from his ride, he stopped by the timber-mare. ‘Have you had enough, Linnert?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I believe that I have had enough,’ the peasant answered. At that my father had him lifted off the timber-mare.
“ ‘Are you then,’ he asked him, ‘going down on your knees to kiss my hand and thank me for my mercy?’ ‘Nay, not that,’ answered Linnert. ‘My small black calf I could touch and smell, but I smell no mercy on your hand.’ At that same moment the clock on the stable struck six strokes. ‘Then set him up again,’ said my father, ‘and let him sit until he splits in two.’
“As now the dusk fell,” Eitel continued, “my father looked out of the window and saw that the peasant had fallen upon his face on the plank. ‘Go, Per,’ he said to his valet, ‘and have Linnert taken down.’ The valet returned. ‘They have taken down Linnert,’ he said. ‘He is dead.’
“It was found that the bull had gored Linnert and broken two of his ribs. There was blood standing under the timber-mare.
“This matter became known and talked about, and it caused my father some trouble. For things were no longer, in his days, what they had been in the days of my grandfather or my great-grandfather, when the masters could do as it pleased them with their servants. A complaint was put before the King himself. But my father had not known that the man had been gored by the bull. And so in the end no more was done about it.
“That is how it happened,” said Eitel. “I have told you the story you wished to hear.”
Both the young people were silent for a while. “But that story,” said Ulrikke, “happened many years before you were born.”
“Yes,” said Eitel. “It happened ten years before I was born.”
