by Isak Dinesen
All these things, with the future that together they would make up for him, passed before his mind. He did not call them forth, they came on their own, one by one, and one by one he inspected them, earnestly, without bias. In the end his situation, unexpectedly, also seemed to have got a voice, it spoke to him, quoting a line from a play which a year ago he had seen with Leopold at the Comédie Française:
“Je m’appelle Ruy Blas, et je suis un laquais.”
Slowly, slowly the blood with which his face had flamed toward hers again sank back until his eyes themselves faded away.
“No, Adelaide,” he said, “I would rather die.”
One uses the phrase, in everyday life, in a light, trivial or jesting way, one says: “I would rather die than go to bed with that woman.” Here the words fell more heavily, in the way in which an axe falls. They were to be taken literally; they expressed a young man’s delicate choice on life and death.
She knew him too well to be in danger of misunderstanding him; it was the everyday conception of the phrase which to her—had anybody tried to make her accept it—would have seemed senseless. These words, which came straight from his heart with less intervention of will or reason perhaps than any he had spoken till now, went straight to hers, through it even, as it is said that a very keen, thin instrument may pierce a heart without the victim sensing it. To her herself it felt as if she had been handed an object much too heavy to hold, with no place within reach in which to set it. Till today things had happened to her as she had expected them, or most often a little more happily. She let her eyes wander round the room, vaguely, wildly. Till now there had always been in a room somebody eager to uphold and comfort her. Here there was none such.
As she did not speak or move he repeated his phrase: “I would rather die.”
She looked at him. At this one, conclusive moment she felt that if she could but speak one word or make one movement toward him she might still defeat him. But she could not speak a word or make a movement.
So, after a silence, the fair Adelaide spoke for the last time to her friend and lover.
“You,” she said slowly. “And I.”
Ib was to keep these words in his mind all his life. But they had, there, a mysterious quality to him: they evaded definition, when looked at straightly they changed and vanished. As, in Aunt Nathalie’s room, he heard them for this first time, they were a verdict, the placing of her and him with the unbridgeable distance between them. At a later time, when he thought them over, there was, surprisingly, in the word of “You,” a note of compassion and in the word of “I” a plaintive note, like the lament of a child. In Jutland, when in rainy spring nights the complaint of the curlew is heard, first from one side and then from another, the peasants will tell you that this is the dialogue of two dead lovers who long ago have forfeited their happiness and are now wailingly reproaching each other with their loss. There were hours in which Adelaide sang to Ib in the voice of the curlew. In the end, at that moment in which he was to thank her for having existed, the words took on the ring of a magic spell, uniting her and him for eternity.
She had no more to do here; so she walked away.
She passed him with her head high, Kirstine’s bonnet like a tiara on it, and he could not know that beneath the folds of Kirstine’s skirt her knees were failing her. As he held open the street door to her, the freshness of the spring afternoon struck them both, as if till now they had never been out of a room. She walked away, down the street, and he felt it somehow not right that he should be standing there, watching her slim, straight back moving away. He went in.
Back in the house, going from the sitting room into the study, he once more came upon Leopold’s letter—he did not remember having seen it before—took it up and read it but could not make the words make sense.
The echo of his own voice came back to him: I would rather die. “Yes, I said that,” he told himself. “I should not go about here now, wondering how it is that I am dead.” In the end he said to himself: “I shall go and see Drude.”
Now, while Ib lingered in the house of Rosenvænget—for a few minutes in a dead silence, in which no sound could break, then again, for a few minutes, with the laughing and shouting of children playing pitch-and-toss on the pavement outside very clear to his ears—in Copenhagen streets a mighty theme was being played out with full orchestration: Adelaide’s Liebesflucht.
Till today she had not walked alone in a street. On her way to Rosenvænget the walking had been an adventure and the unknown people meeting or passing her at such ludicrously close distance strangely important. On her way back she saw none of them.
While all the time walking exceedingly slowly, like an old woman, she herself believed that she was storming forth in a wild and mad flight. A flight in very truth mad and contrary to nature, since she was, at breathless speed, running away from the one place in the world where she craved to be, like a piece of iron flung off by the magnet itself. Or she was, at breathless speed, climbing to zenith and darkening the sun, a mighty thunderstorm mounting against the wind.
When she had walked about a hundred steps, all the scattered sensations of her mind consolidated into a furious wrath. She had been insulted, and she must be revenged. Or, if she was not revenged, she must die. Her thoughts ran in a course parallel to that of Ib’s thoughts an hour ago, when he had been reading the letter from her brother to his sister. She called on that brother to bring about reparation for the deadly affront she had suffered; she called on her father and the young men who adored her. She must have the offender vanish from the world, or how could she possibly live on in it? She cried out for blood, as Ib had done, and, like to Aunt Nathalie’s rooms to his eyes, the street in front of her, with its droshkies and its tired, stiff-legged horses, took on a scarlet hue.
Her indignation and anger were felt physically, as an unbearable pain in the abdomen. The center of her fair body, from which sweet content should have flowed into all her limbs, was clenched like a fist, and she bent double under the pangs like a dry leaf crumbling in the frost, and with all her strength had to hold back a long cry—“Es schwindelt mir, mir brennt mein Eingeweide!”
After a further hundred steps, Ib’s face suddenly mounted before her as she had seen it when they had taken leave of each other. At that the suffering changed place and character. In a big leap it mounted to her breast, constricting her heart and sending out tentacles into her shoulders and arms, to her elbows and wrists and to her little hands.
That even more terrible pain was no longer anger or thirst for revenge, but had been turned into pity of the friend she had left. Ib must be consoled and comforted, or if he could not be consoled and comforted, she must die.
For Ib was good; he was all that was good in the world, gentle, soothing, strong and deep. It was she, it was Adelaide who was hard and sharp as a knife; it was she who must vanish from the world, in order that good things might still exist in it. Or it must be proved, if that was still possible, that she was not as hard, sharp and cold as she looked. For this task it was no good calling on the men of her name, or her admirers—to whom or to what, then, would she call for help? The present being so dark and evil, she turned to the past. But the past, the door to it once opened, ran in upon her to crush her in a hundred pictures.
She kept Ib company in the autumn battues, in a multicolored beechwood, and watched him bringing down the glowing birds from the clear frosty air. Ib, a boy of fifteen, doctored the paw of her dog. Ib, out with her and Leopold to find wild raspberries in the wood, had stolen a bottle of port from the cellar and got tight on it, first wildly dancing and singing on the sward, and at last falling asleep, in the hot afternoon, in the raspberry shrub. Ib read The Odyssey to her, so deeply seized that he made her feel the vicissitudes of Odysseus with a palpitating heart.
One summer evening came out of the past particularly clearly. Ib had got her father’s permission to shoot a roebuck in the meadow, and she had sneaked from the castle to go with him. In
the meadow the long grass was heavy with dew; soon her shoes and stockings, and her white petticoats up to the knee, had been drenched. While they waited down here, he pointed out to her the new moon, sitting like a thin silver sickle in the evening sky, and this sky’s bath of roses seemed reflected in the roseate and pale-purple flowering grasses round them as in a mirror. Ib had told her the names of the grasses: velvet grass, quaking grass, meadow foxtail, bird grass, onion couch. She had been very near a mystic experience then; never before had she come so close to being made one with the earth and the sky, the trees and the moon. Yet the miracle had not been altogether fulfilled, and now she knew why: she ought to have kissed Ib.
She looked in front of her as she walked, and there was nothing there but the flat, hard pavement of the streets. That street now was the picture of her own path in life. Flat and hard, what people name a smooth path, a walk on lifeless ground: polished floors, marble stairs, new pavements of new cities. From now she would have to follow her road; she would make a great match and be surrounded with lifeless, smooth and hard things: gold and silver, diamonds and crystal. Ib’s path in life from now would be rough. In the meadow, in the long velvet grass, bird grass and onion couch the walking was rough, in the muddy field roads the hoofs of one’s horse splashed mire and water about, and in the winter woods the dead rustling leaves, with hoarfrost on them, through which one had to wade, lay knee-high. But the things round him would belong to the earth and would not have been made by flat, smooth and hard people. The mold in the world was left with Ib, upon his dirty boy’s hands that were sticky with fish scales as he took the trout from the hook and handed it to her, that were red with the juice of wild blackberries or stained with blood and fouling.
Once more the pain in her body mounted. For a few moments it squeezed her throat so that she did really believe that she was going to die; then it went up still higher and settled behind her eyes. It was no longer her own grief only or Ib’s grief; it was the sadness of life itself and of all living things. It pressed against her eyelids; it filled her with tears like a vessel overflowing. If she did not weep, she must die.
The agonizing ache at the back of her nose brought to her recollections of Ib’s remarkable sense of smell, keen like the sense of smell of a rare, trained dog. In their wanderings he would suddenly stand still, sniffing the air, wrinkle his nose and pass on to her its discoveries of fungi in the undergrowth not far away. At this sorry moment, in the street, it came upon her with deadly certainty, as the culmination of bereavement and forlornness: “I have lost my sense of smell! The long, long row of years lying before me will be scentless. During all of them I shall walk in vain in the lime avenues at home, or past the stock beds and the overripe strawberry beds. I shall come into the stable to feed sweet-smelling Khamar with sweet-smelling black bread, and none of them will have anything to tell me!”
She clung to the idea of smell like a drowning person to a raft for two reasons. First because she was holding on to memory as to the one thing still left to her, and among the five senses the sense of smell is the most loyal servant to memory, and will carry the past straight to the heart. “Le nez” it has been said, “c’est la memoire.” Secondly, because the scents and smells of this world cannot be described in words, but do evade the supremacy of language, their realm in human nature lies outside that of speech or writing. And she did in this hour hate and fear words beyond all other things.
If Professor Sivertsen had been present, who taught her to paint in water color and who was such an expert on tragedy and on noses, he would have said to her:
“You imagine, poor child, that you are bewailing your sense of smell, and that if you do not get it back you must die. For you are an unlearned girl—like all girls of your class—and cannot know that you are in reality grieving because tragedy has gone out of your life. You have left tragedy with your friend, in the room of Rosenvænget, and you yourself, upon a flat, smooth path of life, have been handed over to comedy, to the drawing-room play or possibly to the operetta. You are in reality at this hour feeling that if you cannot shed tears—the last tears of your life—over the loss of tragedy, you must die. But weep you, Adelaide, poor simple child, over the loss of your nose.”
But where, but in what place could Adelaide weep? If she gave course to her tears in the street the passers-by would turn, alarmed at the sight, would question her and might even possibly touch her, and the idea of people behaving in such a manner to a girl lamenting her sense of smell was terrible. If she succeeded in forcing back her tears until she was once more in her own room—which was hardly possible, for they were by now burning her brain—Kirstine, probably already nervous about the situation, would be frightened and would notify her mother, and her mother would be frightened and would send for the family doctor, and they would all of them question her and lay their hands on her shoulders and cheeks.
This, then, was what the world was like: there was no place in it for the people who must weep. The people who wanted to eat or drink would find, not far away, a place in which to eat and drink. The people who wanted to dance would find, she knew, not far away a place in which to dance. Those who wanted to buy a new hat would find, at least tomorrow morning when the shops opened, a place wherein to buy it. But in all Copenhagen there was not a single place in which a human being could weep. The fact, when evident, to her meant death. For if she could not weep she must die.
As she was thus walking on, alone in all the world, her course took her past a churchyard which she had not noticed on her way out. She was proceeding so slowly that each step was almost a halt; as she found herself outside the churchyard gate she stood still altogether, and thought matters over, then walked in.
She had never before given much thought to churchyards. They were dreary places with dead people under the surface, stones and tablets on them, and railings and hedges fencing them in. In her day ladies did not attend funerals, and most of her relations had their family vaults near their houses. She did not remember ever to have set foot in a town churchyard. Now, surprisingly, this unknown churchyard of Copenhagen received her in silent understanding and compassion; even at the moment she came through the gate, it seemed to put its arms around her. Tears began to drip from the lashes of her half-closed eyes; soon, soon she might allow them to flow without restraint.
Since the day was Sunday, people were still walking among the graves or attending to them, clearing away the evergreen of winter and raking round the spring shoots, or laying down wreaths. Everybody here was in black, like Adelaide herself. A woman in widow’s weeds who had been weeping, at the gate was drying her last tears off with her handkerchief, so that Adelaide remembered that she too had a handkerchief. Her tears at this came quicker, but she dared not yet let out any sound. She walked on at random, gazing right and left to find an old grave to sit down on, since she was afraid to choose a grave belonging to other people, who might find her there. At length she caught sight of a grave which to her looked altogether forgotten, grass-grown, without a flower on it, with a headstone and an iron stool. She went in there, sat down on the seat and burst into tears. So there was after all some kind of relief and happiness in the world, and she was fortunate to have found the place of it.
She was so filled with gratitude at the fact, that after a while she let herself glide from the seat down on the grass, pressed her young shoulder and her soft cheek against the hard surface of the stone and sobbed loudly and wildly. She had carried a heavy load of sorrows with her a long way—Ib and his unhappiness, her own joyless future and the sad condition of the world; she was laying them down now, at the foot of this stone, in the keeping of a friend.
A few more women in black passed her on their way out, since the churchyard would soon be closed up; when they heard her weeping they lowered their voices a little. Some children accompanying them stopped and looked at her, but were reprimanded by their mothers and ran on.
After a long time a very old gentleman came along the path, and
as he passed her stone and caught sight of her crouching against it stopped for a moment. She grew deadly afraid that he might know who she was. Then she reflected that he would be more likely to know the grave, that he might even have known the person buried in it. He might be wondering that a young woman should be weeping so desperately there.
This was the last time that Adelaide ever wept. At her mother’s death, which to her was a deep grief, she shed no tear. An old relation, who had come over to Jutland for the funeral, then said: “Adelaide has always been a curious girl. I do not remember that she has ever wept, even as a child.” The old lady’s memory was deceiving her; Adelaide like other girls had wept when thwarted. But to the girl herself the Sunday of this tale drew a dividing line in her existence. Later on she would think of her youth, up to the age of nineteen, as of the time when she had wept.
She sat on the grave for a long time, resting in the one kind of happiness still possible to her: avowing to the whole world that she was a human being who had lost all.
In the end she felt that she was getting cold and that her eyes were running dry. She took up her handkerchief and wiped off her last tears, as the lady by the gate had done. As she rose from the ground she turned toward the stone in order to get to know, before she left the place to which she would never come back, at whose bosom she had been weeping. There was still enough of the afternoon light for her to read the inscription:
Here lie the remains of
JONAS ANDERSEN TODE
Sea Captain
who died on December 31, 1815
born March 25, 1740
Loyal to his King and Country he sailed his ship steadily from coast to coast. Faithful in friendship, a helper of the afflicted, steadfast in adversity.
