by Isak Dinesen
Drude.
Now this short note might strike a sober-minded reader as in more than one way somewhat out of the ordinary. For why would Drude, whom one must suppose to be inside Aunt Nathalie’s house and in a position to open the door to him, enclose the key to it in her letter? The reason for the arrangement, which was Adelaide’s reluctance to sit waiting in an empty house, the letter did not give. Why, next, did not Drude, in inviting Ib to Aunt Nathalie’s house, state that she herself meant to come there? The explanation of the evasion was that Drude was an honest girl, and, even in an intrigue like the present, averse to telling a direct lie. And was there not, lastly, an incongruity in style between the laconic note itself and its tender, pathetic farewell greeting? These peculiarities, however, with the three young people involved in the matter passed unnoticed, since they were none of them sober-minded and to all of them, at the moment, all things were out of the ordinary.
It had not often happened in the life of the brother and sister that Drude had asked Ib for advice or help; it did not occur to him to disobey.
So he brought the key with him and let himself into the house in Rosenvænget even a while before four. It might be a good thing to sit in Aunt Nathalie’s room waiting for Drude. The blinds were down, for the old lady was afraid of her covers fading in the sun, but the familiar smell of ancient books, hyacinths and the dog basket, the inhabitant of which was out with old Oline, received him as mildly and vivaciously as if it had been Aunt Nathalie herself kissing him on both cheeks. He pulled up the blinds, lighted a cigar and sat down. As he looked around the rooms it was brought home to him that they were furnished not so much with tangible objects as with the emotional experiences of an old maid’s long life: girlhood friendships, travels to Germany and Rome, two wars, possibly a virginal heartache of long ago. The things began to speak to him. “Why,” they asked, “have you and all your brothers and sisters run away from rooms furnished by the heart to halls filled with objects purchased in foreign cities, designed and manufactured after the taste of great foreign people, according to the taste of the Empress of France?” He thought for a long time of his home at Ballegaard, in which things had likewise grown up on their own.
Ib was perhaps a bit clairvoyant this afternoon. As he tried to explain matters to Aunt Nathalie’s armchairs, potted plants and sofa cushions, he viewed distant things and events with great lucidity. First, that glittering and dazzling Second Empire of France of which he had seen a glimpse when two years ago he had been on a visit to France with Leopold. The great, terrible downfall of it was to come; it was not far away; he was, he surmised, to witness it with his own eyes. Like avalanches in a mountain landslide, one thundering down on the heels of the other, the coming falls of other radiant worlds began to echo around him. The golden world of Russia, that had held his brother captive, would fall too, and it would look like the end of time. Other, later glories would follow it. The while the quiet world of simple, innocent human hearts might still remain. “Why, then,” he repeated the question put to him, “have we been running away from safe things, which wished us well, to golden halls in which we were risking our peace of heart?” He sat on for a time, smoking his cigar. “You see,” he answered, “it could not be helped; we had to go. Those golden halls did not attract my brothers and sisters or me myself, on account of their luxury and comfort, their food and wine and soft beds. For you know that we are none of us soft-skinned, and poverty to us holds nothing at all frightening. We have been drawn to the world of splendor—irresistibly like moths to the flame—not because it Was rich, but because its riches were boundless. The quality of boundlessness in any sphere would have drawn us in the same manner.”
As still Drude did not come he walked from the sitting room into the small study beside it, which during the season served as Drude’s private salon. By the window stood a lady’s escritoire with a number of old friends, framed and under glass, upon its shelves. He himself was there, a grave boy of twelve with his first gun. Drude and Adelaide were there, lanky lasses of twelve and thirteen, twined together, with their hair down their backs. As again he set away the picture, his eyes fell on a sheet of paper in Leopold’s handwriting. It was half covered by a book, as if Drude had been leaving to chance whether he should catch sight of it or not. He let his gaze run over that well-known, ever-welcome hand until it was caught by five lines of a verse:
“Qui les saura, mes secrètes amours?
Je me ris des soupçons, je me ris des discours
Quoique l’on parle et que l’on cause.
Nul ne les saura, mes secrètes amours,
Que celle qui les cause.”
He recognized it; it was an old French poem that he himself had struck upon in an ancient book of poetry; it was supposed to have been written by the King of France to a maid-of-honor, Mademoiselle de la Vallière. He had scratched it, with the diamond of the ring that Leopold was presenting to Mademoiselle Fifi, upon a pane of Leopold’s dressing room, and his cousin, who was no great reader of poetry, had been attracted by it and had questioned him about it. Why, now, had he taken it up, and what use was he making of it? Ib’s proprietorship in the verse seemed to give him a right to read the letter through.
It was a love letter, preparing an elopement. He read the burning words of longing, the vows and the ecstatic terms of adoration. “As I dare not send my own carriage, the droshky will be waiting for you by Østerport. The coachman is well known to me and loyal. Be not afraid, my wild rose, he will drive you safely to the place where he who loves you most in the world is waiting for you.” He turned the letter over and gazed at the first line and then at the signature. The letter was to Drude from Leopold.
He grew a little giddy in the reading; he had to read the whole note over again. This time he was well aware that he was committing a breach of the law of honesty, but the depth of dishonesty revealed justified his action. He read it all through for a third time. Then he became very pale.
Ib was in uniform, his sword by his side. It could not be but that he must feel and reason like an officer. Even before he had arranged his ideas about the extent and the consequences of the treachery, his hand went to his sword hilt, and his whole being cried out for revenge, for blood. It was a good thing that one had a sword, sharp-edged, within reach of hand. It was a good thing that one could kill, and kill soon, at once. His own blood mounted to his head, behind his eyes; Aunt Nathalie’s bookshelves, embroidered cushions and hyacinths all turned a deep scarlet.
A number of old tales of seduction, at which he and Leopold had laughed between them, came back to him. The two cousins had been hunting together in this field as in others, and had seen fair women as the noblest game of all. But the hunting of a friend’s sister, the purest and proudest maiden in the country, was no longer a gay, gallant venture, but black and base treason. The hunting of her in words borrowed from that friend himself was a breach of sworn brotherhood.
He once more took up the letter—which by now was scarlet, like the room itself—and looked at the date. It had been written on the previous day. Thus the hour of the flight, which in the letter was “tomorrow afternoon at six,” was in reality today, within two hours. Within an hour the droshky would be waiting by Østerport; if he went there he would find it. He would force the coachman to drive it to its destination, wherever that would be; in less than three hours Leopold would find himself face to face with the revenger. He should be forced to draw then, and Ib was a fine swordsman. It was a good thing to know that within two hours the world would have been cleansed of a traitor. Only the waiting time was long; how was he to make it pass? He went to the window, in need of the sight of open air.
By and by, in self-preservation his mind turned from the hideous and contemptible in search of something pure and good. He thought of Drude.
He and she had always been such friends. It could not be that she had written her note to him, to the barracks, just in order to get him out of her way. Or if it was so, what power must not he
r lover, and her passion for him, have over her! He knew that power well himself; he grieved for his sister’s sake, and his thoughts again fled from his theme. Then after a long time he found himself wondering deeply at the fact that this sister, up till now so close to him, a second self, was today in a position so different from his own.
“Women,” he reflected, “have been strangely favored in life. A young girl, solely by abandoning her honor, will be sure to find herself, even within the next hour, in the arms of the beloved.”
As in his mind he pronounced the word “arms,” and again the words “arms of the beloved,” his course of thought switched. Adelaide’s cool, slender arms, springing from the white rounded shoulders and flowing into the graceful delta of ten rosy fingertips. Smooth arms, with a silky swirl at the elbow, yet strong enough to sweep along and bear down the strongest of swimmers. “In the arms of the beloved.”
His mind felt its way as in the dark, step by step, itself wondering at the places to which it was taken. Yes, he might be in time to save his sister and kill the offender. He might be in time to prevent that embrace from which his thoughts had shrunk. To which, even while he was standing here immovable by the window, the thoughts of the lovers were turned, he himself best knew with what yearning and transport and trembling. She would never find herself in the arms of the beloved.
And what, then, would he have done for his fair sister? She would be left for the remaining years of her life—Drude—with the one remembrance: that there was nothing to remember.
Ib was no moralist; very rarely in his life had he given thought to the problems of guilt or innocence. His indignation and abhorrence at the reading of Leopold’s letter a quarter of an hour ago had been a new experience, surprising to himself. It now came upon him that he had come near to committing what is called a sin. That he had been, and that he was still, in danger of committing a sin against a higher law than that broken by Leopold. He found that he could not name this supreme law, but he knew that it was there, and must be obeyed.
When he had got so far, his hand let go of the sword hilt.
The bell of the street door rang. Still in his own thoughts he went out into the small dim hall to open the door to Kirstine, Adelaide’s maid, in a black shawl and a small black bonnet. She would, he reflected, have come with a message from Adelaide to Drude, and he would have to find, and to give her, an explanation of Drude’s absence. Ib was courteous to all women. He held open the door to her, so that she might deliver her message in the sitting room, then closed it behind her. And it was Adelaide.
The late afternoon sun for a moment came out in the dim sky. In its rays he saw her mouth and shoulders close to him.
Kirstine’s small black bonnet with its black strings, a chambermaid’s bonnet, looked queer upon Adelaide’s head. If Adelaide herself had not felt the significance of the situation so deeply, upon her entrance into the room she would have undone the strings and laid the bonnet on the table. Ib understood the negative gesture; the cataclysmic character of Adelaide’s appearance in Aunt Nathalie’s house was finally affirmed by the fact that she was looking at him, and speaking to him, beneath Kirstine’s hat.
He had not thought that he should see her again; now he saw her again. For the first time this winter he saw her and was, without any confirming testimony from other people, convinced of her absolute and indisputable reality. And together with this certainty there came upon him another, profounder conviction of the strangest kind: that on her coming here all things had—like a river which at last falls into the sea—arrived at their end and aim, and that this meeting of theirs was to last forever. All the same, since that universal solution had been brought about by her, he would have to let her speak first.
She put up Kirstine’s veil, looked him in the face and said: “I have come to beg you to forgive me.”
It was an unexpected opening and seemed an extraordinary thing for her to say, but she would know best. He answered: “That was good of you.”
“To beg you to forgive me,” she said, “for making you speak to me in such a way. I did not know that the things I made you say to me were true.”
He very rarely needed any explanations from her; he knew of what she was talking. He said: “Yes, they were true.”
“I did not know,” she repeated.
“It is of no consequence,” he said.
“I have been thinking about it since,” said she. “I have been thinking that the best way would be to have you say the same things over again, now that I know them to be true.”
“That I came to say good-bye?” he said. “Yes, it was true, I came yesterday, to say good-bye.”
“No, not that,” said she. “The first thing you said.”
“That I love you?” he said.
“Yes,” said she.
“I love you,” he said.
There was a short silence; things grew in it.
“Do you want these words spoken for the third time?” he asked her. “They have been spoken a hundred times, a thousand times. Just now I wonder whether they are not the only words I have ever spoken.”
“Tell me more about it,” she said. “Speak to me, Ib, now that I know that you speak the truth.”
She pressed him to speak for a particular reason. She had never quite believed in the declarations of love that young men had made her. It was natural, she knew, that they should love her, yet she had never been altogether convinced that they did. The declarations, too, in themselves had been maladroit and insipid compared to those that one read in verse or heard in songs. Now with Ib it would be different. He had words of his own, much like those of verse and songs. And to know for certain that she was loved as she ought to be would make a difference in her life. All the difference.
“What will I tell you, Adelaide?” he again asked her, and laughed a little, lowly and gently. The laughter to her was not quite that of a human being, but more like a sound you will hear in the woods, without knowing where it comes from or whether it is the cooing of a wood pigeon or a rustle in the tree crowns. “I am not good at finding words. Neither you or I are good at finding words, are we? And it is nothing to speak of, either. All fine, sweet things in the world have been either signals of Adelaide’s arrival: Adelaide is coming—or otherwise echoes of Adelaide’s presence: she has passed here. Is that any good to you?
“Once,” he went on slowly, “you had a pale-blue frock. I sailed on the bay on a summer day, and there was a gust, the boat careened, and I thought that I was going down. The water was pale blue, I thought: now Adelaide is closing over me.
“Or which are the words you want to have repeated for a third time? You ordered me yesterday to tell you that in the last moment of my life I shall thank you because you existed and were so lovely. Hear it, then, for the third time, although this is not the last moment of my life. I thank you, Adelaide, because you exist and are so lovely. And are so lovely.”
If now the two young people had gone on with a repetition of yesterday’s dialogue in the blue boudoir until they had come to the kiss, their problem would have solved itself, and no further choice would have been left them. The kiss was in the boy’s mind, unnamed but very near, the seal upon the everlasting meeting.
Undoubtedly the girl had it in her mind too; only she was not at all aware of it being there, and it was still a little away, a little ahead. She was not a tender nature and not given to caresses; she had come here to speak and was collecting her whole being on speaking.
“Nobody knows that I am here,” she said.
He did not answer her, but his face answered her.
“I could come here again,” she said in the same way. “And nobody would know.”
For a second her total and absolute ignorance of the coarser facts of life, which was the fine fleur of her education and upbringing—as of the education and upbringing of all noble young girls of her day—and had been obtained with such tenacity of purpose and such continuous watchfulness as later ages cannot imagine
or believe, awakened in him the reverence which was the highest product of the education of all noble young men. In the light of her dovelike purity, his own past looked somewhat sordid; he would have to turn away his gaze from it. It was a paradoxical fact that she should stand so high above him, and that yet the responsibility in the situation should lie with him. He knew well enough what, according to the code of orthodox morality, he ought to say to her. “Adelaide,” he should say, “it is not right that you have come here; it is not right that nobody should know you to be here. Let me take you home.” But orthodox morality had become a thing of a vanished past. The law sacred to his surroundings and hers, to their community and their era sank below the horizon; the people who loved them and trusted them and on whom they were dependent sank and were gone. Here at last were Ib and Adelaide, alone in the universe. The young rich blood within his veins and hers rose like a wave to fling them together.
And then, just then, at the moment when he had quashed all outside laws, the law of his own being spoke out and passed sentence on him.
He was not well read, and his mind was not schooled in abstraction. He could never have formulated in thoughts or in words the theory: that tragedy will allow its young maiden to sacrifice her honor to her love and with quiet eyes will consent to the ruin of Gretchen, Ophelia and Héloise. He did not guess that it was in obedience to the law of tragedy that less than an hour ago he himself had consented to the ruin of his sister. No more could he have formulated in thoughts or in words the theory that tragedy forbids its young man to do the same thing.
To be a great young lady’s secret lover. To meet her in the ballrooms, in the full light of their chandeliers, and receive a furtive smile, a smile in a mirror, in remembrance of a last secret meeting. Billets doux written with trembling hands and sent off clandestinely by the hands of bribed servants. The trembling of her young body in his arms with the fear of discovery. His own, mean smile of triumph at the rivals dancing with her and openly wooing the legitimate possession of her.
