The World Above The World

by Brian Stableford

  They waited for a few moments in silence, their eyes lowered and their hearts pounding; then midnight began to chime. At the final stroke, they slid the daggers between the pages of the holy volume, profaned by their sanguinary pact. Each one search avidly for the letter picked out by his adversary.

  “A D!” cried Bertel.

  “You have a B,” Ole replied.

  A mortal silence fell between the two enemies. Ole was the first to break it. “So be it,” he murmured, in a low hoarse voice. “I will keep my word, and you shall never hear mention of me again. How much time will you give me?”

  “Three days.”

  “That’s more than I’ll need.” Ole added, with bitter irony: “You’re generous, Bertel—let me be.”

  Bertel went back to his room, his heart gripped by an iron hand. He felt a thousand times more miserable hand before. Far from soothing the distress he was suffering, the loss of Ole added to its harsh violence. He wanted to go back to his old friend and release him from his fatal promise, but he found the other’s door locked, and when he knocked and begged him to open it, not only did he receive no response, but Madame Magnussen, woken up by the unaccustomed noise came running, hastily clad in a dressing-gown, to ask anxiously whether Bertel felt ill. The latter, disconcerted, admitted an indisposition, and was obliged to resign himself to drinking strong herbal tea and submitting to the care of the worthy and obstinate woman until the moment when he could, without implausibility, assure her that he was no longer feeling poorly and that his illness had dissipated. Only then did Madame Magnussen go back to bed, congratulating herself on the success of her cure, and not without admiring more than ever the marvelous virtue of centaury9 tea for curing stomach cramps and nervous spasms.

  The next day, Ole and Bertel went to the University arm in arm, as usual. They did not exchange a single word, but that often happened, especially when one of them had an important lesson to prepare.

  When Ole came back at midday, he found a letter; it had arrived during his absence. He opened it, and as soon as he had cast his eyes over is contents, he manifested an excessive joy.

  “Good news!” he cried. “I’m rich now! A distant relative has left me a considerable fortune: 100,000 écus. I have to leave tomorrow morning for Holstein, where my new domains are located. I swear that I shall only have one regret in leaving Copenhagen—the pain of leaving friends like you, Madame Magnussen and Mademoiselle Stierna; you too, my dear Bertel—give me the pleasure of employing with you, before leaving, the language of a brother.

  “I will write my resignation as professor, Bertel; you shall hand it to the Rector yourself, begging him to excuse me for the precipitation of my abrupt departure. You will inform him of the necessity that obliges me to leave Copenhagen immediately. I shall not take any luggage; that will permit me to go more quickly. Then I shall exchange a poor life for another—a life brilliant with pleasures, no doubt. I want to make legacies and write the testament of my agonizing poverty. Madame Magnussen will inherit my two sets of silver cutlery; Mademoiselle Stierna will accept this ring that my mother gave me; and Bertel shall have all my books, for which I shall henceforth have no further use!”

  He said this with so much gaiety and frank folly, that even Bertel wondered whether Ole’s supposed fortune might be real.

  “To table!” Ole went on. “To table! Let Mademoiselle Stierna serve us her best preserves; let French wine be brought out of the cellar, as on high holidays! Is not the great news of my fortune and my liberty a celebration for us, my friends?”

  They sat down at the table, and when the meal was over, and the two women had clinked glasses with the traveler, the latter offered a large glass of brandy to Bertel.

  “How pale you are, friend,” he said. “What? The one who is staying is sad, while the one who is going away rejoices? Away with tears and grief! Let us embrace, brother, and say farewell.”

  As he said that, he kissed Bertel on the cheeks, then hugged Madame Magnussen. Stierna, who was emotional, came forward and presented her forehead to Ole’s lips. All the young man’s false gaiety collapsed then; tears filled his eyes, sobs punctuated his voice and he almost fainted. He struggled visibly against that cruel emotion, but he soon mastered it, brushed the beautiful child’s hair with his lips, and went away precipitately.

  Having arrived at the extremity of the suburb of Copenhagen, he stopped, waved his handkerchief in a gesture of farewell, and disappeared.

  He had been out of sight for a long time, but Bertel was still standing on the doorstep, motionless, pale and exhausted.

  “What a nice young man!” murmured Madame Magnussen. “And to think that we’ll never see him again!”

  “We’ll see him again!” cried Bertel. “I’ll run after him; I want to stop him from carrying his fatal journey to its conclusion.”

  He had already set forth when he heard Stierna sobbing, and saw that the young woman’s cheeks were streaming with tears.

  “It’s too late!” he said, stopping. “The carriage is carrying him away along the Holstein road.”

  Either by virtue of fatigue or emotion, the old man interrupted his narrative momentarily, but he resumed it in these terms.

  After Ole’s departure, Madame Magnussen’s house was overtaken by a profound sadness. Be it understood that the house did not lose its gaiety, for it had been very rare for the four people previously inhabiting it to have emerged from the melancholy habits that two of them owed to the loss of a father and a husband, and the others to the passions that were tormenting them, but it lost its movement and its life. Bertel proposed to the widow that he should take over, for his own use, the room left empty by Matthiesen’s absence; he offered as a pretext the impossibility of devoting himself, in his small cell, to the studies in physics that he intended to undertake. In reality, his sole objective was to prevent any other person from coming to live under the same roof as Stierna.

  By virtue of a seemingly-inexplicable contradiction, however, he had never been less inclined to seek the young woman’s company. He even seemed to be avoiding her, and let entire days go by without addressing a word to her. Sometimes, nevertheless, the naïve young woman would catch sight of Granh’s gaze furtively attached to her, without her being able to explain or understand what motives brightened that gaze with a dark and almost sinister fire. At times she wondered anxiously whether the departure of his friend might have disturbed the young man’s mind, for he was subject to strange fits that seemed not far from madness. At table, he forgot to put the food into his mouth; he let his pale head slump on to his breast, and it was necessary for Madame Magnussen to call him by name three or four times before extracting him from that waking sleep. At night, he was heard wandering around his room, and opening the window to spend entire hours gazing at the sky. He often wept, yielding to fits of despair, and Ole’s name escaped his lips convulsively.

  One morning, he came down so pale and disfigured that Stierna’s heart was moved to profound compassion. She went straight up to the young man, and stopped him when he tried to go around her and go outside.

  “Don’t run away from me like that, Dr. Bertel,” the gentle creature said, in her ineffable voice. “I need to talk to you. For a long time now, you no longer talk to me; you seem to be avoiding me. Have I offended you unwittingly? If so, tell me, in order that I can avoid committing the same fault again. Above all, forgive me, for I deeply regret having injured you.”

  “You haven’t offended me at all, Stierna. If I no longer speak to you, if I avoid you, it’s because I feel unworthy to address you, ashamed to soil you with my presence.”

  “What do you mean, Monsieur Bertel? For the sake of the friendship that my mother and I have for you, put an end to this sad mystery—explain it.”

  “When you know, Stierna, it will be you who turns away from my presence, you who will no longer want to see or hear me.”

  “Me, Bertel? The person who has lived close to you for so many years? The person who lov
es you like a brother?”

  “Like a brother, you say? Well, if that brother had committed a crime, would you not expel him from your presence forever?”

  “A crime! Oh, that’s not possible!”

  “And yet I have committed a crime! Blood soils my hands! I’m a murderer.”

  “Oh, be quiet” Be quiet! I’m afraid. Let me go away.”

  “You shall hear me out now, Stierna. Now that you’ve forced me to open the abyss, your gaze shall penetrated its depths. Listen, then! I loved a young woman; another also loved her…I staked my life against that of my rival. I won; he has killed himself.”

  “Horror! Horror!”

  “Don’t you want to know who that young woman is, Stierna?”

  “Oh no! Don’t tell me. Let me go!”

  “That young woman is named Stierna Magnussen.”

  “Take back those fatal words, Bertel—take them back, I beg you on my knees. See my anxiety, my despair! Tell me that you’re playing with me, that all this is nothing but a cruel game! I’ll be your accomplice. For me, someone would shed blood! For me, someone would commit murder! Oh, something more frightful still! An unfortunate has been reduced to suicide! He has lost his body and soul at the same time! Tell me that it isn’t true!”

  “It’s true.”

  “It’s true, and you haven’t yet fled this place? Father, in the Heaven where you reside, your gaze must be turned away from me that such shame should afflict your house and soil your child! Back, Bertel! Back, murderer! Can’t you see that you horrify me?”

  Obstinately, Bertel remained standing before the poor desperate girl. “Before repeating the order to go away and never see you again, before telling me again that you’re horrified, Stierna, listen to what I have I say: if I leave this house, it will be to die.”

  “To die?”

  “Yes. You’ve already damned one soul; you will damn another.”

  “My God! My God! What have I done that you should subject me to such cruel ordeals?”

  “Can you believe that I have struggled against my remorse, that I have repelled the thoughts of suicide that pursue me, for any other motive than the love I feel for you? In the midst of the inferno of my heart, a joy sometimes gleams that suspends its suffering. That joy is seeing you, hearing your soft voice. You’re sending me away; perhaps you’re doing the right thing, and being charitable—I shall now have the courage to die.”

  “You’re right, Monsieur—stay. You must. Since I am the involuntary cause of your crime, I must submit to its expiation, and accept my share of your remorse. Stay, and may God grant you repentance, as he has given me eternal despair.”

  “Repentance! Remorse! Oh, God did not wait for our prayer to give me that. You don’t know, then, that the nights are sleepless for me, that a slow fever is devouring me incessantly, that a name sounds incessantly in my ears? That that name is constantly on my lips, ready to escape with the confession of my crime? Remorse! If you could understand the remorse that I suffer, instead of the horror I inspire in you, you would take pity on me; you would hold out your hand to console me, and you would mingle my name in the prayers you address to God. You would cry out, saying: ‘Lord, have mercy on him!’”

  Compassion was indeed the sentiment that Stierna did not take long to experience for Bertel. After the initial moments of horror and fright, she reflected that he was unhappy, and unhappy because of her. From then on, a dangerous pity preoccupied her keenly, and kept her thoughts relentlessly fixed on the young man, day and night—for sleep had quit the maiden’s room henceforth. She was distressed by Bertel’s sin and remorse, asked God for forgiveness on his behalf, and sought by a thousand affectionate means to give the guilty man some hope in divine mercy. She lavished interest and indulgence upon him. To render his sin less burdensome, she generously took half of it upon herself, and tried to bear it with him.

  That community of secrecy and repentance, the sublime and voluntary complicity, did not take long to become a sentiment more tender than Stierna herself believed, against which she did not protect herself. No tender word ever emerged from their lips, but whenever Stierna saw Bertel paler than usual and prey to spasms of despair, she furtively took his hand and fixed her large blue eyes upon him, shining with celestial compassion.

  In the meantime, Bertel’s mother fell dangerously ill. He was obliged to leave abruptly in order to see her one last time before death separated her from her son forever. He wept so bitterly, and suffered so keenly, that Stierna promised of her own accord to write to him for as long as his absence lasted, and kept her promise. She only talked, in her letters about the dying woman, God, hope and Heaven’s forgiveness, but she nevertheless wrote every day, and, so to speak, devoted the entirety of every day to Bertel.

  When the professor returned, his mother was dead; there was no longer a single wretched person in this world to love him. Stierna tried to render that isolation less cruel—so successfully that one day, sitting next to the large fireplace in which a fire of pine-logs was blazing, forgetful of the past and their clasped hands, they found themselves talking hopefully of happiness and the future.

  Many trials and years separated them, alas, from the day when they would be able to realize the beautiful dreams they forged. They were both too poor to be able to marry for some time to come. Bertel possessed no other fortune than his professorial salary, and he still had to pay off, with the same revenue, the rather considerable debts that his mother had left in dying. But what did time and trials matter to those in whose hearts hope had succeeded despair, and who could at least glimpse, however distantly, future felicity? The memory of Ole sometimes returned to trouble them, like a reproach, but it seemed to them nevertheless that forgiveness descended on them from the heavens, drop by drop. Before the magnificent splendor of love, the somber glow of remorse faded away.

  A year went by in that fashion, for Stierna and for Bertel, in the ecstasy of a powerful and chaste tenderness. Madame Magnussen knew and approved of the secret engagement of the two young people, although they had never taken her into their confidence. It was thus that she had loved her husband for a long time before marriage became possible. Such mystical unions are common in the North, where poverty reigns so harshly. With a noble pact of love in the heart, a young man struggles courageously against the difficulties of life, and conquers, if not a fortune, at least a measure of ease. Then he comes to kneel at the feet of the one who is waiting for him without mistrust, even when time and distance separate them.

  Uncomplainingly, Stierna and Bertel lived under the same roof, beside one another, and although they never exchanged a kiss, they looked forward desirously, but not impatiently, to the distant epoch that would bring about their marriage.

  This situation, which would seem impossible and perilous in our French mores, became quite simple and full of charm in Copenhagen. The two lovers spent their life in a sweet and mild intoxication; the body slept, only the soul lived.

  In any case, they saw one another only a little more frequently than in that past. Only meal times and the occasional family occasion brought them together.

  Bertel devoted a large part of his evenings to studies in physics—an interest inspired in him by the instruments left behind by Stierna’s father and long forgotten in a little room where things the family did not use were stored. He loved to talk about the phenomena of the science to which he was passionately devoted, and he initiated the young woman into the mysteries of that fantastic new world and that unknown nature.

  All of that was marvelous to Stierna, whom her father’s prudence had wisely left in a charming ignorance, and who only went out of the house twice a year, and even then with her mother. The past, the present, the future—real life, in sum—consisted for her of Bertel, her mother, her little house and the memory of Ole, the last of which became vaguer and more distant every day.

  The sweeter such an existence is, the more painfully the blow that overturns it strikes. Madame Magnussen fell gravely il
l, and there was soon no more hope of a recovery. According to the Gospel, a strong woman who has long been prepared for a holy death by a life of virtue only feels anxiety, in that redoubtable moment, for the child she leaves behind on Earth. That anxiety was consoled by the thought of the love she knew Bertel to have for Stierna. One morning, she summoned them to the bed in which she would soon die, and took them both by the hand.

  “Bertel Granh,” she said, in a faint but distinct voice, “you love Stierna, and Stierna loves you. I therefore leave her a protector down here, and can quit the Earth without dread. I know that you have tried to conceal many mysteries from me, my children, but I know that secrets, even the most innocent, love to remain in the darkness. May God bless you as I bless you, my son…Stierna!”

  They fell to their knees, for it was before a cadaver that they were praying and weeping.

  The day after the day on which Madame Magnussen’s mortal remains were buried in the cemetery, Stierna, leaning on Bertel’s arm, went in tears to the house of an aged female relative, to spend the period of her mourning there and await the moment when she might marry her fiancé. That moment need not be far away, for Bertel hoped to pay off all his mother’s debts within the year, and it would then only remain for him to amass the small sum necessary for him to establish a household. The lovers therefore separated on the old aunt’s threshold.

  It was agreed, before the separation, that the professor could make occasional visits to his intended. Admittedly, Bertel also promised to pass beneath Stierna’s window every day, while travelling to and from the University, and that Stierna added that she would always be at the window.

  The fiancés, therefore, saw one another twice a day, at 11 a.m., when the professor came back from the University, and at 2 p.m., when he returned for the afternoon classes. During his first departure and his second return, darkness pitilessly deprived them of that happiness.