Last Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  “All tragedies,” he said slowly, “from Phaedra and Antigone to Kabale und Liebe and Hernani, and to that promising work of a young Norwegian author, Maria Stuart in Scotland, which we saw together the other day, are determined by the idea of honor. The idea of honor does not save humanity from suffering, but it enables it to write a tragedy. An age which can prove the wounds of the hero on the battlefield to be equally painful, whether in the breast or in the back, may produce great scientists and statisticians. But a tragedy it cannot write.

  “Those very pleasant people, your grandchildren,” he went on, “at their tea party in a hundred years will have their troubles, but they will have no tragedy. They will have debts—troublesome things—but no debt of honor, on life and death. They will have suicides—troublesome things—but the hara-kiri will be forgotten, or smiled at. But they will be able to fly to the moon. They will be sitting round their tea table discussing their routes and tickets for the moon.”

  He was silent for a moment, then took up his theme again, gravely.

  “I am an artist,” he said, “I will not exchange the idea of honor for a flying ticket to the moon. I, who alone in society have no nose”—he shot a glance at the lady who had laughed when he talked about noses, a glance familiar to his pupils, who had even a name for it and called it: that Jehovah was putting out his tongue at one—“can yet speak with connoisseurship about noses, for, being an artist, I am myself the nose of society. And I thank God that the people whose portraits I paint have still got noses to their faces. I am an artist, I have no honor of my own, and can yet speak with connoisseurship about honor. In Paradise there was no idea of honor. (‘And they saw that they were naked’—that comes in later, and would by no means have been an objectionable sight to the eye of an artist.) And I thank God that the people whose portraits I paint have still in their hearts the idea of honor, by which tragedy is created.

  “Or where—” he at last concluded his long lecture, in the small, plaintive voice of a child addressing grown-up people. Two of the ladies round him by this time had got up, smiled to him and joined another group of conversationalists. “—where, this being different, would I get the black for my pictures? The noir d’ivoire, the noir de fumée, the blessed, deep noir de pêche? Look at my latest still life, the finest picture I ever painted”—so was always to him his latest picture the finest he had ever painted—“and tell me whether I should possibly have got any black into the crimson and scarlet of my lobster shells, or into the greenish-gray of my oysters, if I had not seen tragedy going on all round me?”

  At this moment the hostess, who had by now taken leave of the Prince, released Ib and served him. She had always liked the boy; moreover it had been reported to her that his adversary of the Swedish Legation had made a remark on her figure; all the same she felt that she ought not to let Ib’s irregularities pass unpunished.

  “This is a young friend of mine,” she said to other, more worthy friends round her, “who is doing penance for his deeds of blood by coming to see a fat old woman. But ought he not to give a thought to the reputation of the woman herself? It actually makes me jump to see him enter my door. Tell me, Ib Angel, when did you last see the sun rise without seeing it double?”

  “I saw it rise quite respectably single this morning, Aunt Alvilda,” he answered, addressing her in the manner used in noble circles toward one’s mother’s and grandmother’s friends, “as I was making Bella jump in the riding ground.” Bella was the mount of the old lady’s granddaughter, which he had undertaken to exercise while its young mistress was in Paris on her wedding trip.

  “I made her take the stone wall five times,” he continued, “and she did it awfully nicely, because I was thinking of you all the time, and in my mind had you on my pommel. I feel that she does now deserve a lump of sugar from your own hand, if you will so far honor her and me.”

  As the old lady handed him the bit of sugar in her two fingers, he kissed her hand. In her young days she had been the greatest horsewoman of the country. Now the touch of the young lips against her fingers was like the touch of a long-gone, dear muzzle; for a moment she felt that in the midst of her lively talking salon she and this boy belonged to each other, and she drew a little sigh, wishing that his duel had been fought for her.

  Ib’s ear here caught the well-known rustle of a frock and the stir in the room generally accompanying it. Adelaide, slim as a reed in a new brown-and-white-striped silk frock draped, brailed up and frogged, and a small neat brown hat with ostrich feathers, had entered the room with her magnificent mother all in mauve, still crinolined and in a lace-trimmed bonnet. The art of upholstery at this period had been brought almost to perfection and had gone a little to the head of the fashionable world; the rich, symmetrical curves of all sofas, chairs and causeuses were smoothly and tightly enclosed in silks and satins, and ladies were made to look as much as possible like masterpieces of the craft. Adelaide was bright-eyed, with a rose in each cheek from her drive in the fresh air, filled to the brim with two equally strong emotions: the sad anticipation of the end of the season and the intoxicating consciousness of approaching spring.

  The currents of the salon swerved and shifted about a little at her arrival. A minute after she had curtsied to her hostess—young girls of the nobility curtsied to married ladies, and thereby so clearly honored their own sex and class that young bourgeoises sighed at the sight and wished that custom would allow them to do the same—she was in the midst of a gay general chatter about the last ball and the next, and the first night of a new ballet at the Royal Theatre.

  Ib withdrew to the window circle to look at her. The sight of her happiness filled his own heart with a happiness akin to it and differing from it—the melody in major key of a young female mind turned into the minor key of that of a young man. She had a small bouquet of violets at her bosom; it was a wonderful thing, he reflected, that those few flowers should have fragrance to fill the whole room. After he had watched her for a little while he set out for the door, as was his habit these days. Adelaide had noticed this particular maneuver of his and had commented upon it to Drude. “Ib has become very grand,” she had remarked. “As soon as he sees one at a party he takes his leave, to show that the welfare of the King’s army rests on his shoulders.” Today she would not allow him such presumption, but as he passed her spoke airily over her shoulder. “It was wonderful luck to meet you, Ib,” she said. “I must have you fetch a parcel for me at the custom house. My long gloves from Paris for the ball on Monday! It is important!”

  By the door Ib was stopped by a group of elderly gentlemen, animated by the stronger refreshments served around, and was actually collared by a big figure in a red uniform, with a red face and in the midst of it a big red mustache.

  “Ho, the valiant Ib!” he cried. “How goes, fire-eater? In search of a second for the next battle? I offer” he went on, striking his broad, beribboned chest, “the bosom of a true friend in defense of the virtue of Mademoiselle Fifi!”

  Ib wanted to get home with Adelaide’s picture in his mind and was annoyed at being held back. He remembered that this high officer, at the card tables, had a reputation of peeping into his opponents’ cards.

  “There was no Mademoiselle Fifi there, Uncle Joachim,” he answered. “But hearts was trump. Von Rosen had not been keeping account of the trumps and when in the last trick I trumped his ace of spades he cried out that it was impossible that there should still be a trump in, so that I had to tell him that I had hidden my small heart amongst the diamonds. That, curiously enough, made him very angry.”

  The big man swayed a bit on his feet as if he had actually received a push, and lb, realizing that this might be the last time he saw this old friend of his, felt a little sorry at having vexed him.

  “But I may come to beg your kind offices still, Uncle Joachim,” he said. “I felt uncomfortable when the swords were drawn, and some other time shall be thankful for the assistance of a man who has never in his life been afraid.�
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  The red gentleman, who had not heard a word of Ib’s chaffing but had been swaying for other reasons, laughed.

  “Oho,” he cried, “who has never been afraid in his life?” He glanced around him quickly to make sure that there were no ladies within earshot. “When I was your age in the garrison of Rendsburg, I got crab lice, and was shaved by the hospital orderly. Then I was afraid!”

  The young man laughed at the older man’s joke and walked down the stairs, out into the open air.

  Ib next morning arrived at the Galen mansion with Adelaide’s long gloves hidden beneath his uniform coat, since officers must not carry parcels about. In the. gateway he had a short chat with the old porter, who had known him all his life and had a partiality for him, as to a talented illegitimate child of the house. Upon the stairs to the first floor he exchanged a remark with the gray-haired butler, to whom he stood in much the same relation, and from him learned that he would find the two young ladies in Countess Adelaide’s private sitting room.

  There was a particular scent in the air of the gallery outside the room, Adelaide’s “Violette de Parme,” and from behind the door came the sound of voices and laughter. Ib tarried a moment, to take in both, then turned the handle of the door.

  On the threshold to Adelaide’s small pale-blue, silk-upholstered boudoir he was met by a sight which during the years left to him he kept in his remembrance as the sweetest of his life. The two human beings whom he loved highest in the world stood close to each other, gracefully and playfully grouped, and very likely, on this same spring morning, in the zenith of their triumphant virginal beauty.

  The girls were back to back, straight as grenadiers, their young bosoms defiantly pushed forward, their faces somewhat painfully screwed around toward the long mirror on the wall, measuring heights. In this undertaking the whole imposing structure of whalebone, flounces, and bows at the back, below the waist, was pushed out of place and flattened, forming a fanciful silhouette. Above the waist their torsos shot up incredibly slim, for not for nothing had Countess Louisa’s private corsetière, five years ago, enjoined her to have her young ladies properly and firmly laced up and whaleboned to the armpits, since otherwise one risked that their internal parts started developing. The faces of the two cousins were demure and grave, but their chests and throats were filled with cascades of suppressed laughter. Out of the corner of their eyes they recognized the newcomer and loudly welcomed him as an arbiter of their contest.

  Ib had seated himself comfortably in a chair, so as to draw out the moment. He let himself be pressed and severely scolded before he got up from it, walked twice round the competitors and stood still, gravely suggesting that he should run his sword blade through the stair-turrets of curls and tresses that crowned the dark and the fair head. At this the group, still statuesquely immovable, became acoustically highly alive in a two-voiced indignant entreaty to show due respect of coiffures. He then asked for a ruler, but there was no ruler in the room, and in the end it was agreed upon that a long ivory knitting needle from Adelaide’s workbag would do for the purpose. The young ladies gave signs of nervousness as he slowly bored it into the masses of hair.

  “You have only yourselves to thank, wenches,” he said coolly. “One does not manage to arrive at the skull of one’s own sister or cousin for all the hair of Paris mamzelles on top of it. Still,” he pronounced, as, having got the knitting needle all through and linked the two heads together, he took a step back and half closed his eyes, “there is no doubt. You are probably, both of you, a little bit beyond the height of most girls in Copenhagen, but Drude is the taller by a quarter of an inch. You, Adelaide,” he added, “look taller than you are on account of your head being so small.”

  “It is,” Adelaide replied with much dignity, “the correct size for the head of a classic statue. Professor Sivertsen, who teaches me to paint in water color, has told me that the head should make out one-seventh of the person. That is named the heroic proportion.”

  “A serpent’s head!” said Ib. “In harmony with your serpentine curls and your serpentine back. And with that serpentine waltzing of yours at the balls.”

  “And I suppose,” she replied, her dignity taking on a tone of lofty irony, “that you yourself will, there, be figuring as the snake charmer?”

  There was nobody with whom she waltzed so well as her cousin. The two had danced together from childhood, at the balls of all Jutland country houses or at times alone in the winter dusk, in the huge hall of Ballegaard with its giant iron stove. When she slid from the arms of her other cavaliers into Ib’s embrace, she was swept into her true element, like a ship launched, and the two were united in a perfect harmony all void of thought.

  “Of course I am the snake charmer,” he said, “and you know it well enough, and will always answer to the sound of my whistle. My charms have forced the cobra to dance, inexplicably, on a single ring. A waltz is a waltz, but each of you girls will interpret it to the world in your own way. Drude dances like a wave, Sibylla like a gale, Aletta like a rocking horse. But nobody who has seen you dancing can doubt that you are a serpent. Prince Hans himself the other night remarked upon the fact.”

  Adelaide felt that it was time to change the theme. “Why were you not at the ball yesterday?” she asked, adding with a grand gesture toward the bouquets on all tables and window sills of the room the haughty statement: “From my cotillion.”

  The girls here ordered him to take away the knitting needle, dissolved their group and, each in front of her mirror, lifted her arms to bring her hair in order. None of the two had ever been in a room with another woman with as fine a head of hair as herself, this young cousin solely excepted. The fact caused no rivalry between them because the rich hair on the two heads was so different in character: Drude’s golden, like a barley field running in long waves before the breeze, Adelaide’s very dark, with something dangerous in its rippling, like a deep, narrow river hurrying toward the cataract.

  Ib, once more seated in the chair, kept his umpire’s eye on the girls. “You are so Adelaide-ish,” he said slowly. “When on entering a room I see as much as a glove’s finger of you, I can point you out on the spot: Adelaide.”

  She asked him pertly on what occasions he had needed to point her out.

  “Nay,” he said thoughtfully, “nay, that is it. You have never in your life entered a room in which everybody has not known who was entering it: Adelaide.”

  “And have you done so?” she asked.

  “O my God, me?” he said. “Do you imagine that people in Copenhagen will knock one another in the ribs as I pass and whisper: There goes Ib Angel? My soldiers know me. But I have had to paint myself red all over with blood, you know, to have Copenhagen society see me at all. At Ballegaard of course it is different.”

  “And has Drude done so?” Adelaide asked again, wonderingly.

  “And poor Drude has done so, too, many times,” said he. “On her entering a room people will first look at her indifferently, then sit up and ask: Who is she? I have sailed with Drude from Jutland to Copenhagen, and the old ship’s captain has come up slyly to get out of me who that pretty girl was. But you,” he added, “you have never seen the face of a person who did not know about you. You cannot drive from Kongens Nytorv to Amalienborg without people in the street being aware who sits in the coach: Adelaide. You have never traveled in a ship in which the captain and the cook and the small cabin boy himself have not known: Adelaide has come on board.”

  “People who did not know who I was?” Adelaide said thoughtfully. “They must be very queer people, and silly. An old ship’s captain who did not know who I was—what on earth would I do with him?”

  “You would make him find out soon, you mean?” Ib asked.

  “No,” said she. “No. And I should never try to find out who he was either. He could remain for me among the people of his own kind, undisturbed.”

  “You see,” said Ib, “that is the difference between you and me. The world you live in
is lighted up on all sides by your presence in the center of it, but I have got to strike a match every time, in order to make humanity see my face.”

  Beneath her long eyelashes she sent him a searching, almost suspicious glance. It was not, then, outside the bounds of possibility that Ib, who belonged to her, had a world of his own into which he might retire, away from her. There had been times when she had guessed it to be so. Under the circumstances it was right to take the offensive. She turned toward him, so lovely, her face all aglow.

  “You are quite right,” she said. “You will never get into the same boat with me. You will always live in the world below the boat, at the bottom of the sea. For you are a fish. I have never known such a fish as you are.”

  “It is perhaps a good thing to be a fish,” said Ib pensively.

  “You are such an incorrigible fish,” said Adelaide, “that one wonders at you. Why do you not love me? All the others love me. I do not look at one of them without seeing them become happy or unhappy according to my way of looking. You have had more opportunity of falling in love with me than any of them. But you are a fish.”

  He had turned his eyes straight upon her face and sat looking at her without a word, and she vaguely felt that something was happening to him, and that somehow the moment was of significance. But now, she saw, the boy had become stubborn and would not answer her.

  “Do you know,” she said, her eyes even brighter than before, “do you know what I would do if I were you? I would be in love with my cousin Adelaide. I would be so much in love with her that I could not sleep at night. I should see her picture before me every moment of the day, so that I should look at other people to find out whether they did see her too, or whether perhaps she might be a Fata Morgana. At last, at the end of the season, I should make up my mind to die. I should resolve to join the army of the French, now that they are going to have a war down there.”