by Isak Dinesen
“How is it then,” she asked, “that you come to think of it today?”
“I can tell you that too,” said he. “I have come to think of it today because this morning I was told that the grandson of the peasant Linnert had been sentenced to death for the double murder of a keeper and his boy, and is to have his head cut off in Maribo tomorrow, at noon.”
She shuddered slightly at the gruesome news. “Alas, poor creature,” said she. “But what,” she asked after a moment, “has that got to do with your father and the peasant?”
“I shall go on with my story,” said Eitel, “and tell you what it has got to do with my father and the peasant.
“As you know,” he said, “my mother was gentle and kind to everyone. She had, I believe, been grieving over this matter, although it happened ten years before she was married to my father. It came to pass about the time when I was born that Linnert’s daughter was left a widow with a babe at her breast, for the peasants, as you know, marry young, and Linnert by the time of his death had been married for ten years. My mother then may have bethought herself of the old story. For she sent for the peasant woman who like herself, was nineteen years old, and took her on as a nurse to her own child. I have been told that my mother’s lady friends did warn her, fearing that Lone might have kept her own father’s death in mind, and now might be hard to my father’s child. But my mother answered them that she thought too well of human nature to fear any such thing. If that was finely spoken, it was a fine thing as well that her trust was never betrayed. I told you, just now, that in my life I had loved one human being besides you. It was of this woman, of Lone that I was thinking.”
“Is she still alive?” Ulrikke asked. “And is it for her sake—poor woman—that you grieve today?”
“Yes,” he answered, “as far as I know she is still alive. She stayed with us until I was seven years old, and they took on a tutor for me. Then she married our parish clerk, and later on she went with him to Funen. Yes, it is for her sake too that I grieve today.
“For in telling you of Lone,” he went on, “I am, as I said just now, only going on with my story. Lone was well treated in our house, she had fine clothes and a pretty room next to the housekeeper, and among all the servants she was my mother’s favorite. And Lone repaid my mother’s kindness according to her means. Those two young widows, the mistress and the servant-woman, were, I believe, truly devoted to each other. When my mother died, Lone, they say, did not speak a word for a week, so deep was her sorrow. My mother’s friends by that time had had to take back their words of misgiving about the peasant woman: when I grew up so strong, they now said, it was Lone’s milk that I had got to thank for it, it was Linnert’s strength that she was passing on to the child she nursed, and I, too, might come to ride home a bull some day! I have not thought of Lone for a long time; today I have thought of her. She was always with me, since my mother was too delicate to have me about her, and I have seen her in my mind like a big hen covering me with her warm wings, sitting by my bedside when I was ill and concocting strange sweet and bitter medicines for me, and I have remembered the songs that she sang and the fairy tales that she told me. For in her family they all had a gift for poetry, and the young men made up ballads, as the old women preserved the myths and legends of the isle.”
“We ought to be grateful to Lone then, you and I,” Ulrikke said gently.
“Yes, we may well be so,” said Eitel, “you and I. But there is one more character in the story, and he has no reason to be grateful to anyone. Those happy years of mine were not happy to Lone’s own son.”
“Her own son?” she asked.
“Yes,” said he, “the one who is to end his life tomorrow at Maribo. I have known little about him. Lone can never have spoken his name to me; he was named after her own father: Linnert. Today I have asked people about him, and have found out more. Lone, I was told, sent him away, a long way off. She was loyal to her duties, and may have feared that the nearness of her own child might make her less zealous in fulfilling them. While he was still a child, he became shepherd boy on a farm of which they tell me that the farmhands were starved and eaten up by vermin. When he grew up he was apprenticed to a keeper at another place, and that was the ruin of him, for there he learned to handle a gun, and so took to poaching. I was told that he was ever a wild boy, given to drink and brawls. And now in the end he has become a manslayer and has forfeited his life.
“It is because of this boy that I have today dug the old peasants out of their graves and brought them with us into the wood. Or they may themselves have risen from the grave and have come with us, because this my milk-brother is so soon to join them there.
“You once believed, you tell me,” he said with a faint smile, “that the Lord God, were He to create a juster world, might deign to choose me to assist Him. But it looks to me now as if the Lord God, through all this, has meant to impress on me that an injustice once done can never again be rightened. My mother wished to righten an injustice when she took Linnert’s daughter into her house and made the peasant woman her friend, but all the good she did thereby was to take away the very mother’s milk from that woman’s own child. I myself have dreamt that with my own life and my own blood—a nobler blood, in spite of all—I might wash away the blood that ran under the timber-mare. But it has all come to this: that more of that same blood will be running at Maribo tomorrow. All my life I have felt my father to be a prisoner in the chains of guilt and hate, and I have believed that the moment would come when I would hear him say to me: ‘It was well that you set me loose.’ But when, now, will these words be spoken?”
“Oh, Eitel,” said Ulrikke, “we cannot tell. There may be another justice than ours, which in the end will set all things right.”
“Think you so?” he said, and after a moment: “Listen now. This morning a rumor spread that the prisoner had escaped from prison. I thought then that he might look me up, to lay his curse on me and on my father’s memory. If he had come—if he comes tonight—can I comfort him with the words with which you try to comfort me: ‘There may be another justice than ours, which in the end will set all things right?’ ”
Once more there was a long silence. In the midst of it, suddenly, the quick persistent little tap of a woodpecker was heard in a tree close by.
“I know the one of whom you are speaking,” said Ulrikke.
He tore himself from his train of thought. “You know him?” he asked in surprise.
“Aye,” she said. “Once upon a time we were friends. I was a girl of thirteen, and it was to our keeper at home that he was apprenticed. I now understand that it must have been the same boy, for his name was Linnert. I was alone at home that summer; Mama was in Weimar. He and I were often together in the wood. We searched for birds’ nests, and he taught me to imitate the cuckoo so that I could call it to me, and to troat to a buck. Nobody knew of it. I remember that I once tucked up my skirts and walked with him hand in hand down the brook, all the way from where it runs into the wood to where it comes out of it. He was strong and light of movement, and he had got the thickest, softest hair. Once,” she went on, her voice clear and happy at the memory, “he fell down from a tall tree and scratched his face, because he would not let go a wood-pigeon’s nest and eggs that I had wanted to get. We walked down to the brook, so that he could wash off the blood, and there, all of a sudden, he dropped down as if he were dead. I sat with his head in my lap, there in the wood.”
She sat sunk in her own thoughts, gazing into the distance.
“I gave him a kiss,” she said, “when he woke up. His skin was as smooth as my own. I said to him: ‘You must never cut off your hair, and you must never grow a beard.’ ”
It was as if in her words she had held a flower to her face. A queer little pang of jealousy was in the sweet smell of it. He looked at her, took in her person and poise. A hundred kisses he had had from those red lips. Well, twelve years ago the lost, bleeding boy had had one too. Tomorrow the head which had lain
in her lap was to be cut off by the hangman, he would lift it up to the crowd to see by that pretty hair which was never to be cut off.
“When I imagined,” he said, “that the hour was to come when I might say: ‘Now your death has been paid for, Linnert,’ I was thinking of the man whom my father killed. I have known nothing till today of young Linnert. I tell myself, now, that that hour will never come, but that, instead, this boy will be passing sentence on me.”
She turned toward him, gave him in one single movement her whole face, the dark smiling eyes and the trembling lips.
“On you!” she cried. “When I love you!”
She sank from the fence into his embrace, like a flower turned by the wind. They lay breast to breast, and the moment closed over their heads like a wave of the sea, washing away past and future. She lightly put two fingers under his chin and lifted up his face.
“Oh, you upholder of the past!” she said. “Soon, soon all these things round us will be things of the past. Soon, soon I shall be poor old great-grandmother Ulrikke, who is now in the churchyard, but who did once meet her lover in the wood. Did her lover love her there?”
“Did he love her there?” he whispered down into her hair. “Paradise, to him, was in her arms!”
“Alas,” she whispered back against his collarbone. There was a laughter and a sigh in the whisper. In such a way smiled and sighed the famous beauties of that great world which was hers by birthright, but which she had never known, because she was a flower grown up in the shade. In her lover’s arms, in jest, she mimicked those heroines whom her mother worshipped and imitated.
“Why does my heart sigh?” he asked.
“Alas,” she whispered once more. “Paradise! People like you will never go to Paradise, You will only be happy in Hell.”
Now it was he who tenderly forced her face up. “What do you mean, sweet?” he asked.
She looked him in the eyes solemnly and archly. “Oh, yes,” she whispered as before, “there you would be at peace to forget all about your justice. For there nothing can become any worse than it is. And there nobody will be any worse off than you yourself.”
Once more she laid her face on his shoulder. He would have spoken, but her nearness, the light weight of her body against his own, overthrew his reasoning. The silent forest depths all around him, and her own deep silence so close to his heart, became one to him, and unresistingly he let himself sink into them.
A while after she said: “I must go,” and did up her hair.
She had insisted on giving suck herself to her youngest child, her lover’s daughter, and now the child was drawing her back to it by invisible bonds.
As she put in her comb she said: “You know that Mama is staying with us?”
He said: “I shall walk with you as far as the forest gate.”
They walked together, happily, without words. By the forest gate she turned round to him. “Remember,” she said, commandingly and imploringly, her eyes at the moment of parting filled with tears, “that you are to live.”
He, who remained leaning on the gate in the deep green shade, let his gaze follow the white figure as it walked on lightly and grew smaller. “Is she thinking of me at all?” he wondered.
The great park of the house joined the wood; the tall forest trees gradually withdrew to give place to lawns, shrubs, gravel paths and flower beds. The mistress of the garden followed the path leading to the house.
Afternoon sun and shade shared the garden between them. Crimson and purple asters glowed in the beds. Two gardener’s boys were raking the paths; the old head gardener himself from a distance caught sight of his lady, took off his cap and approached to show her a big scarlet and yellow dahlia, which he himself had forced and now wanted to name after her. She praised the flower and fastened it in her fichu. By the big garden stair her small son freed himself from the hand of his nurse and, ran to meet her. As she lifted him up he grasped at the bright flower at her breast. She teased the child with the flower, brushing his face with it and holding it up out of his reach. When he sulked she pressed him to her, patted his cheek and pulled his hair. But she did not kiss him; her lips still belonged to the wood. She handed him over to his nurse and hastened on, impatient in her errand.
As an hour later she entered her mother’s rooms she found the curtains drawn, tables and chairs covered with a multitude of scattered garments, and her mother herself in violent agitation pacing the floor like a lioness in her cage. For a moment the older woman stared, as if horrified, at the younger. Immediately after she hurried toward her, broke down altogether and wailed lowly. Ulrikke looked round the room for the cause of her mother’s despair. The lovely Sibylla had put on a long, floating riding habit of black velvet with a short coat of green cloth to it, and had not been able to button the coat.
“Oh, Rikke,” the mother cried out, “I have grown old.”
In a sudden fierce movement she turned to her own image in the long, dim looking glass within the darkened room. The curls of the image were tousled and its face was swollen with weeping. Accusingly the woman of flesh and blood cried out to it in a low hoarse voice, “I was lovely once!”
Ulrikke in general would find words of comfort when her mother bewailed the loss of her great beauty. Today she said nothing, but only clasped the doleful figure in her arms, holding her so close that she could not again gaze into the glass.
“If I had grown thin!” Sibylla moaned on her daughter’s breast. “If I had become a skeleton, a skull, a memento mori to the trivial crowd, who refuse to think of time or eternity! Then I should still be an inspring figure to them! And upon my entrance into a ballroom I should still strike sparks from them all: epigrams, poems, heroic deeds—and oh, passion as well. I should at least inspire them with horror, Rikke, and I should expect to inspire horror. But I am fat!”
The fatal word, actually pronounced, struck her dumb for a few moments.
“It is not death,” she again took up her theme, this time speaking slowly and solemnly, “it is not death which I do personify to them. It is dissolution and decomposition. There is an odious abundance of this body, which was once so perfect in its proportions. There is too much of these arms, these hips, these thighs—of this bosom! Rikke, my bosom makes people laugh!
“If a human being had done this to me,” she cried out suddenly, “I should have had my revenge; I should have had the men who adored me stand up to avenge such cruelty. For picture to yourself what it means: to take a young woman—happy, innocent, trustful—and slowly, slowly to draw out her teeth and her hair, dim her eyes, distort her body, crack her skin and her voice, and then to exhibit her to the world as if all naked—‘Voilà la belle Hélène!’ It is not right! It is not just! My God, there is no justice on earth!”
The aging lionne had drawn the curtains of her window, because powder and rouge no longer sufficed to hide the decay of her loveliness. She, who had loved sunlight and candlelight and the light of surprise and adoration in all human eyes that met her own, now like a hunted animal fled from all light, took cover in a dark room, and within the darkness raved about a future among the blind.
In her daughter’s arms she still held herself back, a hard-tightened knot. She felt the warmth and strength of the young body so close to her own, shut her eyes and groped for a way out of her misery. Her friends, other ladies of her own age, did find comfort, she knew, in the youth and happiness of their daughters. Could she possibly do the same thing? The answer came immediately: No. She divined that Ulrikke had a lover, and before today she had wondered whether the harmony of a youthful idyll might have power to turn her mind from the disharmony of her own stormy, insecure affairs of the heart. The answer, now as before, came immediately: No. In growing distress she asked herself whether this incapacity might be her punishment because five years ago she had deliberately sold the girl’s happiness for a short postponement of her own death sentence.
“And would I then,” she asked in her heart, “have foregone my resp
ite of five years?” Once more the answer came unappealably: No. “If today,” she said to herself, “things were what they then were, I should do as I then did. I could do nothing else. So help me God, I could not!” The old nursery tale of the vampire which gets a new lease of life by drinking the blood of young creatures ran in her mind. Bewildered by the idea she lifted her daughter’s hand and set her teeth in one of the slim fingers, then, horror-struck, dropped the hand. She opened big glassy eyes, eyes which had once been sung by great poets, and stared at Ulrikke.
“Oh, you know not,” she whispered, “what it is to have been loved with passion, with the proudest that a man has got in him! And then in the end to be loved out of pity. You too,” she added, her stiff gaze still on her daughter’s face, “you too do love me out of pity! ”
Ulrikke went on gently caressing her. Across her mind, like shadows of clouds across a sheet of water, ran the shadows of that woe and fear that seemed to darken the lives of all human beings. In her mother’s wild lament at her breast she heard an echo of her small daughter’s furious weeping an hour ago, of her lover’s melancholy monologue in the wood, and at last of the bitter loneliness, far away, of her doomed playmate. All, all of them seemed to grieve and fear. Was there so much to grieve at and to fear in the world? Was death ever sad and fearful? For the first time in her life she realized that she, too, was to die. But while to the others death seemed to look like a dark bottomless sea, to her herself, she imagined, it would be a shallow water into which she might wade, her skirts tucked up, with a serene face.
“What a goose I am,” she thought, “to give myself up to such silly fancies!”
“Oh, what a goose you are, my little Mama,” she said, loosening her arms from her mother’s form. “You are just as lovely now, when you look like the goddess Juno, as ever you were when you were as slim as a reed! Come, your stays are too tightly laced, let me undo them for you and set you loose)”
As if all the lines of the elder woman’s face had been held together by that same silk cord which her daughter was now undoing, they were suddenly smoothed out, and a little childlike smile ran over the face. At the cessation of physical torture her mental misery, too, lessened, and hope rushed to her heart. She might still be loved!
