by Isak Dinesen
She had traveled in Europe with her parents, and on promenades of watering places or in theaters of big towns, people had turned to have a second glance at the long-necked, red-lipped, light-footed girl. She had done two seasons in Copenhagen and there had worn such thin soles to her dancing shoes that she had driven home soleless in the morning. She had been demanded in marriage by the three finest épouseurs of Denmark; many other young noblemen had held themselves back because they felt her to be out of their reach. The incense burned before her had not hardened or closed up her nature; she was so young that it only made her a little bolder in her playfulness, and not a little coquettish. She accepted the exquisite compliments paid her as she accepted her exquisite clothes, and approved of her admirers as she approved of her dressmakers, modistes and shoemakers. She had dark-brown hair and very dark eyes; her short, rounded chin gave piquancy to the classic upper face, with its clear forehead and arched, expressive eyebrows that looked as if they had been painted on by the brush of an old Chinese artist.
The second of the two families was named Angel, a name not found in the Peerage of Denmark, and its home was Ballegaard, in the north of Jutland. It was a vast estate, in its own way also a kingdom. But the soil of it was poor; it held wide stretches of moors and marches, and on top of the high ridge running diagonally across it the wind-blown trees crawled laboriously along the ground. Something in the soil, hidden layers of lime or chalk, rendered the landscape exceedingly light, colorless or bleached and as if weightless. Earth and air here had become one; it was in the air that things happened and people lived, and the whole impression was one of both sparsity and grandeur. Thus the bird life of Ballegaard was exceptionally rich; infinite lines of wild geese striped its sky; at the approach of man, clouds of ducks rose from its shallow marsh lakes, and the seasons of its year were marked by dense migrations of waders on their way north or south.
There were sheep on the moors of Ballegaard and cattle in the meadows, and a great number of horses galloping all over the grassland. There was in all the work done here something which went well with the scenery, a combination of chariness and fantasticalness not uncommon in the psyche of Jutland peasants.
The manor house, like the estate in which it stood, was large, noble and bare. A low gray stone wall fenced its grounds with their draughty groves and neglected rose garden. Visitors from more civilized tracts called it “romantic.” In good keeping with the word, the long row of young people born in it, and leading a happy, wild life in its big rooms and long corridors, owed their existence to a romance.
One may imagine that a water mill, which is driven by a force ever going the same way, may feel an inclination, even an infatuation, for a windmill, which gets its orders from the four corners of the sky. Or one may imagine that a minute, indistinguishable grain of extravagance or folly in each generation of a sane and steady family, strictly subdued in everyday life, during the centuries may slowly gather into an uncontrollable power. Two hundred years ago there had been a great alchemist of the name of von Galen. In any case it happened, twenty-five years before the day of this tale, that Count Hannibal’s young half-sister by his father’s late second marriage, a pretty girl, the pet and hope of the family, not yet presented at Court, left her home one evening to drive away and marry a man outside her own sphere, and so unknown to it as to make it wonder where the maiden could possibly have met him.
To her relations and to the whole world of names and families the shock was hard. They felt that sans witchcraft nature could not have erred so preposterously, saw the figure of the seducer all coal black and shrank from the idea. The event was not even much talked about. The bewitched young lady’s brother might have had the marriage dissolved on account of her minority, and contemplated to have it done. But he was a man of facts and reflected that he would obtain little more than breaking his young sister’s heart; so he set out instead to collect information about his sinister brother-in-law. He was found to be Vitus Angel, the last of a long line of big Jutland horse-dealers, whose father, after having made a fortune on his knowledge of horseflesh, in his old age had bought Ballegaard for his only child. Vitus had been to the von Galen castle to sell its master a rare mount from his own stud; while showing the horse in the courtyard he had displayed his horsemanship to a maiden watching from a window. The family accepted what could not be undone.
The young wife brought her husband and, as they came along, her children, with her into her old circle of friends, as if innocently confident that they must love what she loved, and to their own surprise and against their own wish they came to like the stranger. He had an innate sense of soil and crops and a keen, almost uncanny eye for the quality of animals; he spoke the broad Jutland brogue of their own old nurses and keepers. It was to them as if they had been taken round behind the historic and heraldic age to which they themselves belonged, and there had been set face to face with an ancient inhabitant of Denmark, a stone-age man or a viking, the mighty, nameless ancestor. Much better, Count Galen told himself, than that his sister should have married a brilliant townsman, who would ask for an umbrella to walk out in the rain. In the course of time the happy married life of the fair young law-breaker, and in the end her early death in childbirth with her seventh child, cleansed her image of any spot of the past. She began to shine in the minds with the silvery sweetness and sadness of that heroine of an old Danish ballad who lets herself be lured away by a water-sprite.
After the death of his wife, the master of Ballegaard was but rarely seen outside his own domain; it fell to the younger generation to fulfill the reconciliation between their father’s and their mother’s world. They came forth from their realm of marshes, children of the god of flocks and pastures, playing on his traditional double-reed pipe, on life and death.
In the eyes of their mother’s friends and relations, they were pretty and graceful, and at the same time weird, and even formidable. They were indisputably legitimate, made under the law, but the ambiguity of their birth might be more ominous than plain bastardy. They went about in society like fresh and clean carriers of some grim social bacillus threatening their softer, more exposed, pure-bred playfellows. No old uncle or aunt could help wishing them well; but was it proper, was it morally right to wish them well? The prosperity in life of these young people would imply a breach with the law concerning the sins of fathers; then why not with that concerning the merits of great-grandfathers? Even upon the straightest and firmest of high roads a film of the quagmire of lawlessness seemed to be clinging to the soles of these light feet.
The particular blood mixture had proved particularly true to breed. Among the children of Ballegaard there was an almost pathetic likeness, more of substance than of form—not homogeneous upheapings of heterogeneous atoms, but heterogeneous upheapings of homogeneous atoms, the likeness of the acorn to the oak leaf and the oaken chest. Two or three strong and strange characteristics ran through the nature of the whole brood.
One of these was a great, wild happiness at being alive, what in French is called la joie de vivre. Each single thing included in daily human existence—drawing breath, waking up or falling asleep, running, dancing and whistling, food and wine, animals and the four elements themselves—called forth in them a rapture like that of a very young animal, the ecstasy of a foal let loose in a paddock. They would count a flight of geese against the sun, the hours to a coming ball or their last coins of money at the gambling table, with the same intense fervor, and lose themselves in a friend’s sad love tale or in the putting together of a fishing rod with the energy of a person throwing himself into the sea. They were natural connoisseurs of wine and food, but munched with equal delight the dry black bread carried about in their pockets for feeding their horses. They were quiet in their manners and least of all self-centered, but they radiated a turbulent content, and their pride in being alive was almost vainglorious. Inspired by some hidden source of energy in life, they did in their turn inspire their surroundings, and on this account
were popular with the young people of their own age; the children of the law fell in love with the children of love. To their more obtuse friends amongst the nobility it was a pleasant thing to have existence proved to be a privilege; they would need to have their conviction of the fact brushed up from time to time and thus could not very well for a long time do without their mad young kinsmen of the north. When, a short time before the opening of this story, the Jockey Club of Copenhagen was founded as an Olympus for the supremely favored, it was at first stipulated that only young men of pure noble blood should be admissible, but on realizing that such a rule would exclude the brothers of Ballegaard, the committee had the paragraph altered. A good many years after the end of this tale a baldheaded old gentleman, who on account of his love of the second-eldest girl, Drude, for fifty years had remained a bachelor in his fine big castle, stated to a young girl of the family, Drude’s goddaughter: “After there were no longer any Angels of Ballegaard amongst us, neither the great autumn battues, nor the hunts or hunt balls, nor the Christmas parties at the manor houses were worth participating in.”
It is likely that the young Angels owed their gaiety of heart mainly to their almost perfect physique. Each organ of their bodies was flawless, so that there would be few such hearts or lungs, kidneys or bowels to be found in Denmark. Their five senses were as keen as those of wild animals. They were fine dancers, shots and anglers; from their horse-dealing ancestors they had inherited a particular relationship with horses, and on horseback would evoke the idea of a centaur even to people without a classic education. They were proof against wind and weather, could go without sleep for a week, drink deep and sleep off their drink like a bear in his lair, to wake up fresh, with a sweet breath.
They were good-looking people as well, the eldest brother almost ideally handsome and two of the sisters recognized beauties. The girls were a little over average height, the boys not tall, but exceptionally harmoniously built. All had long hands and eyelashes, short feet and teeth, a wide span between the eyebrows, and narrow hips, and all of them were light, as if airy, in their movements. Their eyelids lay loosely over the eye, casting a shade along the upper part of the iris and giving a rare limpidity and depth to the glance, such as one will see in the eyes of a young lion cub in contrast to those of the sheep, goat or hare, where the eyelid seems to be tightly drawn upon the eyeball. Five years ago, when young Princess Dagmar traveled to Russia to marry the Czarevitch Alexander, the eldest Angel brother, who was an officer in the guards, had been sent to escort her. Such a nomination against rules and reasonableness—since the young man possessed neither name, rank nor fortune—would have to be put down to his good looks, as if the Danish nation, after having delivered ah exquisite specimen of its womanhood, wanted to display before its mighty neighbor and ally a fine sample of its young manhood. The officers of the Russian guards were instructed to entertain their guest; the boy came back to Copenhagen as from a dream. He might indeed, on his own and without effort, have made up such a world of bear hunts, champagne, gypsy music and gypsy girls. Now that he had seen it existing round him, sovereign and magnificently tangible, he seemed unable to take himself away from it again; he moved about in Copenhagen society, still a figure of striking beauty, to some a Tannhäuser out of the Venusberg of St. Petersburg, to others a Münchhausen of the Siberian steppes. At the time of this story he was out of Denmark, at the riding school of St. Cyr.
The last trait in the brood of Ballegaard was this: that they were doomed, each of them in advance marked down for ruin. It happens when a person dies young that his friends will tell themselves, strangely moved: “We knew that it would be so.” And most often in such cases the death sentence on that young head, far from appearing as a thorny crown above it or a barrier between it and the world, will have been seen as a dim rainbow halo, the sign of a particular close pact with all things alive and with Life itself. In such a way coming disaster surrounded the young Angels with a gentle and gallant glow. People showed them particular kindness and friendship; nobody but base and coarse natures envied them their youthful successes; it was as if the world told itself: “This will not last long.” Later on, when the foreboding in the case of each of the brothers and sisters had been fulfilled, their friends remembered it with wonder and sadness; the people of older generations, who had felt a misgiving concerning them and something ominous in the atmosphere round them, now felt their suspicions confirmed: they had seen the goddess Nemesis stepping forth, and the sight left them bewildered.
There was an old painter and sculptor who had observed scenery and men in all the countries of Europe, who had once come to Ballegaard to study birds and had there had the brothers and sisters, at the time not yet grown up, presented to him. He looked at them, fell into deep thought and remarked as if to himself: “This pretty litter of Ballegaard in the course of their lives will come to break most of our laws and commandments. But toward one law they will be unfailingly loyal: the law of tragedy. They have, each of them, it written in their hearts.”
One particular little characteristic of the family ought to be mentioned here: they all dreamt vividly and beautifully. The moment they fell asleep in their beds, tremendous landscapes, vast deep seas, strange animals and people created themselves within their minds. They were too well brought up to entertain strangers with their dreams, but among themselves they would recount and discuss them in detail. The eldest sister, the tallest of the lot and the finest horsewoman, toward the end of her life said to her children: “When I am dead you may write on my tombstone: ‘She saw many hard days. But her nights were glorious.’ ”
But the story-teller does not want to anticipate events. At the time of this particular Copenhagen season no dark fate had yet overtaken any of the young people; only the eldest daughter sat, far away on a big estate of the west country, curiously married to a rich man more than twice her age. The youngest children were still playing at hide-and-seek on the stairs and in the attics of Ballegaard. The second brother, lb, who was by then twenty-three years old, and the second-eldest daughter, Drude, whose twentieth birthday fell on the day of the equinox, were out on the dancing floors of Copenhagen.
Count Hannibal, who would have been pleased to see a big family of his own around him, had been kind to his sister’s children; they were as much at home in his castle as in their own house. Ib, who at the time of his mother’s death was twelve years old, and who had taken his loss much to heart, was brought up with his cousin Leopold. The Countess Louisa at first had looked upon the intimacy with misgiving, for she was the most zealous partisan of pure blood in society. But she was at the same time a passionate mother. When Leopold claimed Ib as a constant companion in his studies and pleasures and Adelaide could not live without Drude, and when she noticed what a becoming contrast Drude’s fair loveliness made to Adelaide’s dark beauty, she gave in, and benevolently adopted her nephew and niece into her own lofty family life. To her friends she talked smilingly of the sister- and brotherhood between the young people; with her children her benevolence toward the orphelins de mère often took on a sadder note—to Leopold in particular, who was much like his beautiful mother and devoted to her, she would dwell with melancholy upon the dubious status of the young Angels and the sad outcome of mésalliances in general.
During the season Drude resided, so to say officially, with her old Aunt Nathalie, a former lady-in-waiting to Princess Mariane, in the quarter of Rosenvænget. But Adelaide continually begged and implored her friend to stay overnight at the von Galen mansion, in order that, before a ball, she might get her advice upon her frock and hair ornaments, or have her maid do up Drude’s pale-golden tresses in a new striking manner, and that after the ball, while brushing their hair, the cousins might exchange confidences and laugh together at their admirers and rivals in society. The two girls were generally admitted to be the beauties of the season; the two young men were such close friends that the wits of their circle had given them but one name in common, creating a mythical figu
re which combined elegance and knowledge of the world with wild, wayward talents. The four young people rode on from crest to crest of the waves of Copenhagen revelry, the observed of all observers, in the happiest of relationships.
But lb was not happy, for he was eating his heart with unrequited love for his cousin Adelaide.
He often wondered how it came to be that, with the dagger in the heart, one might be stabbed anew twenty times a day. How did it come to be, he wondered, that a never-absent picture had in it to make a fresh, overwhelming appearance every hour, dark-eyed, white-toothed, terrible as an army with banners.
She was altogether and hopelessly outside his reach. He did not need the word of society to accept the fact; he had accepted it on his own and from the beginning. He had nothing in him of the iconoclast: the idea of Adelaide in a setting meaner than that into which she was born was revolting, was nauseating to him; he turned from it, and with even more horror from the idea that such an offense against nature should have been brought about by himself. He had heard Adelaide and her girl friends, in a discussion over their needlework, maintain the theory that the saddest effect of one’s hypothetical marriage to a commoner would be the vanishing of the coronet from one’s handkerchief. He had not contradicted them; in his heart he had agreed with them. The picture of Adelaide, from her dark, flower-adorned hair to her little foot in its silk sandal, must include the coroneted handkerchief at the tip of her slim fingers.
