by Isak Dinesen
She here made a pause, happy to feel that she could make up a romantic tale.
“And I should come,” she went on, “to say good-bye to her, with a broken heart—riveted but too heavy to hold together much longer—and say to my cousin Adelaide: ‘I love you.’ But you will never come to take the word of love into your mouth. You could not spell it on a piece of paper if people asked you to. For you are a fish.”
He, who used to have such a quick repartee to her quick whims, sat on in silence, as if he had not heard what she said, and had now turned his eyes away. She was inclined to let him off, for she had other things to think of. But just then, without looking up, he asked her: “Would you do that if you were me, Adelaide?”
Her thoughts had already run a bit away from him, to a new spring bonnet with cherries on it. At his words they turned and came back. Always, from the time when she had been a little girl, in their games and fancies she had come when he called her.
“Indeed I should do that,” she said.
“And what would you say then, if you were me?” Ib asked.
“I would,” she said, “I would in any case not be lying back in a chair while I was making a declaration of love to a lady. I should stand on my feet even if wavering on them, and I should say: ‘Adelaide, my love—’ ” She stopped and again went on: “ ‘My soul.’ ”
Ib had risen when he was told to, and now spoke as he had been ordered to do.
“Adelaide,” he then said, “my love. My soul.”
She once more gazed into the mirror. “I should say,” she said, “if I were you: ‘I die, Adelaide, because I cannot live without you. In my last moment I shall think of you, in my last moment I shall say to you: I thank you, Adelaide, because you existed and were so lovely, because you danced with me, because you talked to me and looked at me. Good-bye forever, my dear heart, my sweetheart. Good-bye.’ ”
She had grown really inspired, the words coming to her as if on their own, beautifully arranged. During the season she had taken part in many charades and tableaux vivants, with constant success. But none of all had been as meaningful as this. She felt herself to be as great an actress as that French star she had lately seen on the stage, and wished that she could have had a greater audience, the connoisseurs of Copenhagen and the Corps Diplomatique, to applaud her. Then again she told herself that she had Ib. She recalled their childhood when, with far greater experience of books and adventure than she had and with an infinity of ideas and plans, he had taken the leading part and had been content with her as his audience, she went on.
“I should say,” she said: “ ‘Give me your hand to kiss at this moment of farewell.’ I should even say—” she added very slowly “—yes, I should even say: ‘Give me one kiss, one only kiss, because I am going to die.’ ”
There was a pause.
“I thank you, Adelaide,” Ib said, “because you have existed and have been so lovely. Give me one kiss, one only kiss, because I am going to die.”
Adelaide stood silent for a moment; she felt that Ib was carrying her joke somewhat far. It was a way of his; he had done the same thing when they were children and had climbed a tall tree or sailed down the river on a raft together. She had liked it in him then; it was dangerous; it was part of the fun with Ib. She liked it now too. His quiet, steady glance at such moments had had a magnetic power over her; it had so now. And besides, since this was her own joke, it was loyal of him to join into it with such energy. She drew herself up a little, put her hands behind her and looked straight at him.
“Yes,” she said. “Because you are going to die.”
At this moment Drude, who during the conversation between the two had seemed to be far away, turned round toward them.
The young man knew that the girl had never been kissed in her life. But he knew too that if Drude had not been with them, her clear eyes on their faces, Adelaide would not have spoken of kisses. That kiss which to him, in the row of kisses of his life—wild or light or tender kisses—should have been the one and only kiss, Adelaide’s kiss, to her herself was the kiss in general, the abstract kiss, a thing out of ballads and romances. And since it was she who had asked him for a kiss, he would have to come in with her idea of it.
So Ib kissed Adelaide.
There was a silence in the pale-blue room; the rumbling of carriages in the street outside suddenly became loud. Then Ib turned and walked away, a little sideways as he would do at times.
Adelaide, who after the kiss had been left equilibrating on the top of a pole, tried to steady herself by calling out to the parting figure a quick thanks for having fetched her gloves. But already she heard the click of the door to the gallery as he closed it behind him. For a moment she stood gazing after him.
Then the two young girls stared at each other. “Why do you look like that?” Adelaide asked.
“Like what?” Drude asked back absent-mindedly.
“You are so pale,” said Adelaide. She placed a finger on Drude’s cheek as if to point out that paleness to her friend.
“Am I pale?” said Drude in the same way.
“And you look,” Adelaide said, “as if you were omnipotent.”
At this Drude seemed to come back to the actual situation. She shook her head a little. “No, I am not omnipotent,” she said.
“Omniscient then,” said Adelaide. To this Drude did not reply.
There was a long pause. Then Adelaide asked Drude: “What did he come here for?”
“My brother?” Drude asked, and the word rang strange to Adelaide’s ear.
“Ib,” Adelaide said. “What did he come here for?”
Drude turned all around toward her cousin and spoke very slowly, with her eyes on her face.
“I can tell you now,” she said. “He is going away to join the French Army. He came here today to see you before he goes, and to say good-bye to you. He is going away because he loves you. And I believe that he wants to die.”
Now Adelaide in the course of a few seconds could look the whole conversation over. She stood dead still; a couple of times she gazed at Drude and again away. An idea which before now had been vaguely in her mind came back to her with sudden force: that to this brother and sister life meant more than it did to her, and that they could draw upon some great, unknown powers of existence. There was in Drude’s deep emotion at the moment more than could be fully explained by sisterly pity. She had something else on her mind, a secret of her own. But whatever that might be, Adelaide for the time had to leave it alone; her own affairs gave her enough to think about.
She might have said to Drude, in conformity with truth: “But I knew nothing of what you now tell me, and Ib himself knows that I knew nothing of it. I am innocent of his misery now.”
But young girls do not reason in such a way. They have in their nature a particular honesty and self-respect which makes them accept the responsibility even for the sufferings brought about through them without their knowledge or consent. Adelaide before now had broken young men’s hearts and thought light of it. But she would never have excused herself by declaring: It was not I; it was my beauty; it was the music, the moon, the wine that did it. For her beauty was herself; the music, the moon and the wine were herself; and she accepted the responsibility for them all. It was, now, a cruel thing, a vulgar thing even, to make Ib pronounce in fun the declaration of love which with death in his heart he had come to make her. It was a cruel and vulgar thing to receive in the manner and mood of a great French actress on the stage his kiss on life and death.
She felt Drude’s glance still resting on her, and it was a strange glance. There was neither anger nor indignation in it, but there was grief in it; there was a deeper tenderness than Drude had ever before shown her, and there was more: an inexplicable pity. Beneath this glance Adelaide became confused, or a little giddy.
Drude suddenly said: “He has loved you all his life.”
“Me? He?” Adelaide exclaimed, the first word in sheer amazement, the second in the voi
ce of a person on whom light is dawning.
“Ill-fated Ib,” said Drude.
The unfamiliar word attached to Ib’s name, which at the moment came natural to Drude’s lips, at the moment came natural to Adelaide’s ear. In the light of it the grotesque hopelessness of Ib’s love became only pathetic; tears filled the big dark eyes which met Drude’s big, light, tearless eyes.
Now the proud Lady Adelaide was nothing if not generous. For the sake of her own dignity she must refuse ever to set foot on the defeated.
“Drude,” she said after but a short pause, “I know what we will do. You will send a letter to Ib.”
“A letter?” Drude asked. “What am I to write to him?”
“You are to write to him,” Adelaide answered, “that he must come to Aunt Nathalie’s house tomorrow, Sunday afternoon.”
“To Aunt Nathalie’s house?” Drude repeated, and at the name of that honest old woman her young blood unexpectedly rose to her face. “Aunt Nathalie will not be in tomorrow afternoon.”
“I know,” said Adelaide. “Aunt Nathalie is going to the christening of Clara’s baby tomorrow, and will be there all afternoon. Mama is going to be there as well. That is just why you must tell him to come to Aunt Nathalie’s house. You will write that you have something of great importance to talk with him about, and that he must be sure to meet you there.”
“Something of great importance to talk with him about?” Drude repeated as before, her blush deepening.
Adelaide continued, her mind concentrating on her scheme.
“I shall tell Mama,” she said, “that I am going to bed with a headache, and that I want nobody but Kirstine to come into my room.” She continued, quickening her speech, with contempt of death: “And it will be I who will meet him at Aunt Nathalie’s house. I am going to beg his pardon.
“Kirstine will help me,” she went on after a moment, forming the details of her plan. “I shall borrow her shawl and bonnet. I shall go out at the back door and make Kirstine get me a droshky for a bit of the way. And then I shall walk to Aunt Nathalie’s house.” She emphasized the word walk because she had never till now walked alone in the street.
“But I will not,” she concluded after a short pause, “sit and wait for him in an empty house. You must see to it that he comes there before me.”
The blood had again sunk from Drude’s face; she was even paler than before. “Yes,” she said. She turned away her eyes, and her slim straight torso followed the movement. “I shall not be in tomorrow afternoon myself either,” she said.
Maybe Adelaide had expected Drude to question her or to express alarm at the suggested audacious undertaking; this mute assent of hers was curiously meaningful. A recollection flashed through Adelaide’s mind. It had happened that the two cousins, riding together in the woods, had jumped a windfall at the same time, so that for a moment both had been without contact with the ground. Such experiences had united them closely. Was the approaching hour, Adelaide now wondered, to be that same thing over again, a leap taking them both off the ground, a flight in the air which, this time, was to unite them forever?
Shortly afterward the two young ladies took leave of each other.
Ib had a mistress in town, a big, handsome, savage daughter of the people named Petra, who loved him with both passion and tenderness. Her mother ran a laundry business in a basement at Christianshavn. Old Professor Sivertsen, the same who had instructed Adelaide about the heroic proportions and upheld the cause of noses at the tea party, lived on the first floor of the house. The artist, when passing the girl in the gateway, had been struck by the classic beauty of her body beneath its respectable 1870 attire, and cajoled her mother to allow her to pose for him in the nude for his big picture of Susannah. Petra had created a furore among his young painters and sculptors and had soon come to be known as the loveliest model of the town. In the atmosphere of the studio a native boldness in the girl caught headway; she came to think not a little of herself. She did not, however, fall to any of the youthful aesthetes who worshipped her, but she had run straight into the arms of the young lieutenant, by virtue of a kind of genius common to their two natures.
There was in this love affair something both grotesque and pathetic, inasmuch as Ib’s devotion to his mistress and his dependence upon her arose from the similarity between her unhappy love for him and his own unhappy love for Adelaide. The girl was not intelligent enough, or not experienced enough, to realize her situation; all the same she sensed that a sword was hanging over her happiness. It was at the moment when she gave him free rein to her alarm and grief and when she accused him of not loving her that she became indeed precious to him, for then he heard his own misfortune voiced in a fresh, coarse young mouth which gave tit for tat. When her passion did not run parallel to his own, when she accused him of having seduced her or when she tried to stir his feelings by haranguing him upon some richer lover keen to marry her, she bored him and he found it difficult to keep his attention with her. He was an honest boy; he was unpleasantly aware of his ambiguous position, and endeavored to make up for it by flatteries and kisses or by presents of gloves and silk ribbons, even once of a gold watch and chain which he could but ill afford. Then again her laments would ring true to him, as coming from the depths of his own sad heart, and he would go down on his knees before her and press her hands to his lips out of deep, genuine gratitude toward her for shedding his own salt tears.
With time Petra had worked out for herself the surest method of mastering her lover. They had been closest to each other and she had had, so to say, her happiest time at a period when she had been threatening to commit suicide, and when he had considered leaving the world with her as with the one human being unhappy as himself. Their melancholic plan got no further, since at his resolve to join her her reason for dying was done away with. In spite of his pity and his friendly feelings, the liaison had developed into a long row of wild scenes, so that it was only in the actual embrace, in which no personal element was staked, that the lovers melted into harmony.
She said to him: “An evening will come when I shall tell myself that all day I have not once thought of Ib. And that will be the worst misery of all.” And her words would set him wondering whether an evening would ever come when the whole day he would not once have thought of Adelaide, and he agreed with his bitter mistress that this would be the worst misery of all. She said: “I do not believe that you have ever really meant to make me miserable. But it would have been better if you had. For then in any case you would have behaved differently from what you have done, and nothing could have been harder than this!” And again he thought of Adelaide, who had never meant to make him miserable, and again in his heart admired Petra for her perspicacity.
At times he grew afraid of her because the irises of her eyes were so peculiarly small; her glance when she turned against him could be piercing as a needle.
The fair weather held, on Sunday morning the sky’s big cupola over Copenhagen was filled with sweet blurred light and with a foreboding of summer days intoxicating to all hearts. The fashionable world of the town kept indoors on Sundays; it was the people who had only this one day of leisure, who were out to take the air from Amagerport to Østerport. On this Sunday one might for the first time walk on the pavements in thin-soled shoes; after long winter months of galoshes, the promenade itself to all the young women of Copenhagen was like a polka. The walls of the houses facing south had imbibed a little warmth from the sun and gave it out again to the touch of a palm. Boys in the streets were offering garlands of woodruff for sale.
In this light air and among this light-hearted crowd, Ib crossed the Knippelsbro on his way home from a visit to Petra. He was held up by the bridge being raised to let through a tugboat with a heavy barge behind it. He looked at the name of the boat: Olivia Svendsen. There was a haze above the surface of the water as high up as pillars of the bridge, through it Olivia’s red funnel-marking shone like a wax seal on a faded letter, and gave the impression that s
he was a lusty woman. As he turned round to take a farewell look at the old borough of Christianshavn, the golden spire of Our Saviour’s Church suddenly glinted in the sun like a fish leaping in opaque water.
While he waited Ib’s thoughts were still with Petra. He had known, what the girl could not guess: that this meeting of theirs was the last. In itself it was short, for she had had to go to church with her mother in the morning; they had sat together in that small apartment of his which was their usual meeting place, he on the bed and she on the chair, talking about things. It seemed to him that in the course of this talk he had seen Petra’s face for the first time, for till now he had been, like Professor Sivertsen himself, mainly fascinated by the beauty of her body. Her coarse young face, with its thick lips and eyebrows, today had revealed a new side of her being to him; she looked, he thought, like a brent goose of the fields of Ballegaard. It was as if he had been talking not to a beautiful woman but to a young man, his friend, to whom he might confide his plans, his unhappy love and even his feeling of uneasiness about a mistress from whom he received more than he gave back. They had not, though, talked about any concerns of his, but had been discussing problems of Petra’s life, her mother’s tyranny and a project of hers to learn millinery, and, except for his regret at not being able to beg Adelaide or Drude to recommend his sweetheart to the milliner who made their own hats, the meeting had been pleasant. He had left Petra with a relief akin to that of the Copenhagen girls who had set away their galoshes. “If only,” he reflected, “one might have a guarantee that each rendezvous was the last, one might keep up a love affair almost forever.”
On his return to the barracks he was handed a letter and informed that it had been brought an hour ago by a footman in the Galen livery. It ran:
Dear Ib,
I want you to come to Aunt Nathalie’s house at four o’clock this afternoon. Aunt Nathalie will not be in, nor Oline either, so I am enclosing the front-door key, and you will let yourself in. You must be sure to come. Good-bye, my dear Ib. Your sister,
