by Isak Dinesen
“By this time I was so depressed that I thought of death with a true longing and nostalgia. I returned with Rasmus to town, to pay my debts, so that my tailor and my hatter should not talk of me when I was dead, and I walked out upon the bridge of Langebro, looking at the water and the boats lying there, some of which came from Assens. I waited until there were not so many people about. It was one of the blue April evenings of Copenhagen. A barcarole by Salvadore that I had used to sing ran into my mind. It gave me much ease, together with the thought that I would soon disappear. As I was standing there a carriage, driving by, slackened its pace, and a little later a lady dressed in black lace came up, looked around, and spoke to me in a low voice, quite out of breath. ‘You are Jonathan Mærsk?’ she asked me, and as I said yes, she came up close to me. ‘Oh, Jonathan Mærsk,’ she said, ‘I know you. I have followed you. I see what you are about. Let me die with you. I have long meant to seek death, but I dare not go alone. Let me go in your company. I am as great a sinner as Judas,’ she said, ‘like him I have betrayed, betrayed. Come, let us go.’ In the spring twilight she seized my hand and held it. I had to shake her off and run away.
“I thought: There are probably always in Copenhagen four or five women who are on the verge of suicide; perhaps there are more. If I have become the man of fashion amongst them, how shall I escape them, to die in peace? Must I die, now, in fashionable company, and give the tone of fashion to the bridge of Langebro? Must I go down to the bottom of the sea in the society of women who do not know a major from a minor key, and is my last moan to be—”
“Le dernier cri” said Miss Malin, with a truly witchlike little laugh.
“I went back to Trekroner,” said Jonathan after a short pause, “and sat in my room. I could neither eat nor drink.
“At this moment I unexpectedly received a visit from skipper Clement Mærsk of Assens. He had been away to Trankebar, and had just returned, and had looked me up.
“ ‘What is this,’ he said, ‘that I hear of you, Jonathannerl? Are they to make you a Knight of Malta? I know Malta well. As you go into the entrance and have got the Castle of San Angelo on your right hand, you have to be careful about a rock to port.’
“ ‘Father,’ I said, remembering again how we had sailed together, ‘is Baron Gersdorff my father? Do you know that man?’
“ ‘Leave the women’s business alone,’ he said. ‘Here you are, Jonathan, a seaworthy ship, whoever built you.’
“I told him then all that had happened to me.
“ ‘Little Jonathan,’ he said, ‘you have fallen amongst women.’ I said that I really did not know many women. ‘That does not signify,’ he said, ‘I have seen the men of Copenhagen. Those people who want things to happen are all of them women, masquerading in a new model of wax noses. I tell you, in regard to ships, if it were not for the women sitting in ports waiting for silks, tea, cochineal, and pepper—all things which they want for making things happen—the ships would sail on quietly, content to be on the sea and never thinking of land. Your mother,’ he went on after a little while, ‘was the only woman I ever knew who did not want things to happen.’ I said, ‘But even she, Father, did not succeed in it, and God help me now.’
“I told him how Baron Gersdorff had wanted to leave me his fortune. Father had become hard of hearing. Only after a time he said, ‘Did you speak of money? Do you want money, Jonathan? It would be curious if you did, for I know where there is a lot of it. Three years ago,’ he recounted, ‘I was becalmed off a small island near Haiti. I went ashore to see the place, and to dig up some rare plants which I meant to bring your mother, and there I struck upon the buried treasure of Captain l’Olonnais, who was one of the Filibustiers. I dug it all up, and as I wanted exercise I dug it all down again, in better order than the Captain had done. I know the exact place of it. If you want it I will get it for you some time, and if you cannot stop the Baron from giving you his money, you might make him a present of it. It is more than he has got.’
“ ‘Father!’ I cried, ‘you do not know what you say. You have not lived in this town. What a gesture that would be. It would make me a man of fashion forever—I should indeed be Timon of Assens. Bring me a parrot from Haiti, Father, but not money.’
“ ‘I believe you are unhappy, Jonathan,’ he said.
“ ‘I am unhappy, Father,’ I said. ‘I have loved this town and the people in it. I have drunk them down with delight. But they have some poison in them which I cannot stand. If I think of them now, I vomit up my soul. Do you know of a cure for me?’
“ ‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘I know of a cure for everything: salt water.’
“ ‘Salt water?’ I asked him.
“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.’
“I said: ‘I have tried sweat and tears. The salt sea I meant to try, but a woman in black lace prevented me.’
“ ‘You speak wildly, Jonathan,’ he said.
“ ‘You might come with me,’ he said after a little time. ‘I am bound for St. Petersburg.’
“ ‘No,’ I said, ‘to St. Petersburg I will not go.’
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am bound for it. But go and get well while I am there, for you are looking very sick. I will take you when I come back, into open sea.’
“ ‘I cannot stay in Copenhagen,’ I said.
“ ‘Good,’ he said, ‘go to some place of which the doctors can tell you, and I will pick you up at Hamburg.’
“And in this way, My Lord, and Miss Nat-og-Dag,” the young man said, “I was sent here, by skipper Mærsk, whether he be my father or not, to get cured by salt water.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” said Miss Malin, when the young man had finished his tale, in which she had by this time become quite absorbed. She rubbed her small hands together, as pleased as a child with a new toy. “What a story, Monsieur Timon. What a place this is! What people we are! I myself have by now become aware of my identity: I am Mademoiselle Diogenes, and this little lantern, which the fat old peasant woman left us, that is my famous lamp, by the light of which I have sought a man, and by which I have found him. You are the man, Timon! If I had searched all Europe with lamp and lantern I should not have found more precisely what I wanted.”
“What do you want me for, Madame?” Jonathan asked her.
“Oh, not for myself,” said Miss Malin. “I am not in a mood for love-making tonight. In fact, I might have had, for supper, a decoction of the tree agnus castus, of which a specimen is shown in Guinenne. I want you for Calypso.
“You see this girl?” she asked him, looking with pride and tenderness at the fair young creature by her side. “She is not my own daughter, and still, by the Holy Ghost, I am making her, as much as my old friend Baron Gersdorff ever made you. I have carried her in my heart and my mind, and sighed under her weight. Now the days are accomplished when I shall be delivered, and here we have the stable and the manger. But when I have brought her forth, I shall want a nurse; further, I shall want a governess, a tutor, a maestro for her, and you are to be all that.”
“Alas, to teach her what?” asked Jonathan.
“To teach her to be seen,” said Miss Malin. “You complain of people looking at you. But what if you were bent down by the opposite misfortune? What if nobody could or would see you, although you were, yourself, firmly convinced of your own existence? There are more martyrdoms than yours, Misanthrope of Assens. You may have read the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes, by that brilliant, rising young author, Hans Andersen. But here we have it the other way around: the Emperor is walking along in all his splendor, scepter and orb in hand, and no one in the whole town dares to see him, for they believe that they shall then be thought unfit for their offices, or impossibly dull. This is my little Emperor; the procession a bad man made, about whom I shall tell you; and you, Monsieur Timon, you are the innocent child who cries out: ‘But there is an Emperor!’
“The motto of the Nat-og-Dag family,” went on Miss Malin, �
��runs thus: ‘The sour with the sweet.’ Out of piety to my ancestors I have partaken of many of the mixed dishes of life: the giblet soup of Mr. Swedenborg, the salad of platonic love, even the sauerkraut of the divine Marquis. I have developed the palate of a true Nat-og-Dag; I have come to relish them. But the bitterness of life, that is bad nourishment, particularly to a young heart. Upon the meadows of the Westerlands they raise a sort of mutton which, fed on salt grass, produces an excellent-tasting meat known in the culinary world as pré-salé. This girl has been fed on such salt plains and on brine and bitter herbs. Her little heart has had nothing else to eat. She is indeed, spiritually, an agneau pré-salé, my salted little ewe lamb.”
The girl, who had all the time sat crouching near her old friend, drew herself up when Miss Malin began to tell her story. She sat up straight then, her amber-colored eyes below their delicate, long-drawn eyebrows that were like the markings on a butterfly’s wings, or themselves like a pair of low extended wings, were fixed on the air, too haughty to turn toward her audience. In spite of her gentle brow she was a dangerous animal, ready to spring. But at what? At life altogether.
“Have you ever heard,” asked Miss Malin, “of Count August Platen-Hallermund?” At the sound of the name the girl shuddered and became pale. A threatening dusk sank over her clear eyes. “Hush,” said Miss Malin, “we shall not name him again. As he is not a man, but an angel, we shall call him the Count Seraphina. We shall sit, tonight, in a lit de justice on the Count. The truth must be told about him just this one time. When I was a little girl and was taught French,” the old lady addressed herself, above the heads of the young people, in a sudden little fit of familiarity, to the Cardinal, “the very first phrase in my reading book ran thus: Le lit est une bonne chose; si l’on n’y dort pas, l’on s’y repose. Like much else which we were taught as children, it was proved by life to be a complete fallacy. But it may still apply to the bed of justice.”
“Indeed I have read the poetry and philosophy of Count August,” said the Cardinal.
“Not I,” said Miss Malin. “When, on doomsday, I am called to account for many hours spent in the wrong places, I shall still be able to plead: ‘But I have not read the poems of Count August von Platen.’ How many poems has he written, My Lord?”
“Ah, I could not tell,” said the Cardinal. Miss Malin said: “Cinq ou six milles? C’est beaucoup. Combien en a-t-il de bons? Quinze ou seize. C’est beaucoup, dit Martin.”
“You have read, My Lord,” she went on, “of the unhappy young man who had been changed into a pug by a witch, and who could not be transformed back unless a pure virgin, who had known no man, should, upon a St. Sylvester’s night, read the poems of Gustav Pfizer without falling asleep? And his sympathetic friend, when he is told all this, answers: ‘Then, alas, I cannot help you. First of all, I am no virgin. Secondly, I never could, reading Gustav Pfizer’s poems, keep from falling into slumber.’ If Count August is turned into a pug, for exactly the same reasons I shall not be able to help him.”
“This man, then, this Count Seraphina,” she took up the thread of her tale, after her little flutter of thought, “was the uncle of this girl, and she was brought up in his house after the death of her parents. So now, my good friends, I will lighten the darkness of this night to you, by impressing upon it the deeper darkness of Calypso’s story:
“Count Seraphina,” said Miss Malin, “meditated much upon celestial matters. And, as you must be aware, who have read his poems, he was convinced that no woman was ever allowed to enter heaven. He disliked and mistrusted everything female; it gave him goose flesh.
“His idea of paradise was, then, a long row of lovely young boys, in transparent robes of white, walking two by two, singing his poems to his music, in such lovely trebles as you yourself once possessed, Mr. Jonathan, or otherwise discussing his philosophy, or absorbed in his books upon arithmetics. The estate which he owned at Angelshorn in Mechlenburg he endeavored to turn into such a heaven, a Von Platen waxwork elysium, and in the very center of it he had, most awkwardly for himself and for her, this little girl, about whom he had doubts as to whether or not she might pass as an angel.
“As long as she was a child he took pleasure in her company, for he had an eye for beauty and grace. He had her dressed up in boy’s clothes, all of velvet and lace, and he allowed her hair to grow into such hyacinthine locks as young Ganymede wore at the court of Jove. He was much occupied by the thought of showing himself to the world as a conjurer, a high white Magian, capable of transforming that drop of blood of the devil himself, a girl, into that sweet object nearest to the angels, which was a boy. Or perhaps he even dreamed of creating a being of its own kind, an object of art which was neither boy nor girl, but a pure Von Platen. There may have been times, then, when his delicate artist’s blood stirred a little in his veins at the idea. He taught the little girl Greek and Latin. He tried to convey to her the idea of the beauty of higher mathematics. But when he lectured to her upon the infinite loveliness of the circle, she asked him: if it were really so fair, what color was it—was it not blue? Ah, no, he said, it had no color at all. From that moment he began to fear that she would not become a boy.
“He kept looking at her, with terrible doubts, more and more virtuously indignant at the signs of his mistake. And when he found that there was no longer any doubt, but that his failure was a certainty, with a shiver he turned his eyes away from her forever, and annihilated her. Her girl’s beauty was her sentence of death. This happened two or three years ago. Since then she has not existed. Mr. Timon, you are free to envy her.
“The Count Seraphina had a great predilection for the Middle Ages. His huge castle of Angelshorn dated from that time, and he had taken pains to bring it back inside, as outside, to the times of the Crusades. It was not constructed, no more than was the Count himself, to spread itself much on earth, but the tall towers aspired to heaven, with a flight of jackdaws like a thin smoke around their heads, and the deep vaults seemed to dig themselves down toward the pit. The daylight was let in, between fathom-thick walls, through old stained glass, like cinnamon and blood of oxen, along the sides of the rooms, where, upon faded tapestries, unicorns were killed and the Magians and their retinue carried gold and myrrh to Bethlehem. Here the Count listened to, and himself played, the viol de gamba and the viol d’amore, and practiced archery. He never read a printed book, but had his authors of the day copied by hand in ultramarine and scarlet letters.
“He liked to imagine himself the abbot of a highly exclusive monastery, whereto only fair young monks of brilliant talent and soft manners were admitted. He and his circle of young friends sat down to dinner in old sculptured oak pews, and wore cowls of purple silk. His house was an abbey upon the northern soil, a Mount Athos to which no hen or cow is allowed to come, not even the wild bees, on account of their queen bee. Aye, the Count was more zealous than the monks of Athos, for when he and his seraglio of lovely youths sometimes drank wine out of a skull, to keep present the thought of death and eternity, he took care that it should not be the skull of a lady. Oh, that the name of that man must dishonor my lips! It were better for a man that he should kill a lady, in order to procure her skull to drink his wine from, than that he should excite himself by drinking it, so to say, out of his own skull.
“In this dark castle the annihilated girl would walk about. She was the loveliest thing in the place, and would have adorned the court of Queen Venus, who would very likely have made her keeper of her doves, dove as she is herself. But here she knew that she did not exist, for nobody ever looked at her. Where, My Lord, is music bred—upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man. You talk, Timon, of Lucifer offending God by looking at him to see what he was like. That shows that you worship a male deity. A goddess would ask her worshiper first of all: ‘How am I looking?’
“You might well ask me now: ‘Did not one of the castellan’s sleek minions look for himself, and find out how swe
et she was?’ But no; this is the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, and is told to prove to you the power of human vanity. These beautiful boys were too fearful of being found impossibly dull, and unfit for their office. They were busy discussing Aristotle and lecturing upon the doctrines and mysteries of ancient and medieval scholastics.
“The Emperor himself, you will remember, believed that he was finely attired. So also the maid herself believed that she was not worth looking at. Still, in her heart she could hardly believe it, and this everlasting struggle between instinct and reason devoured her, as much as it did Hercules himself, or any other traditional hero of tragedy. Sometimes she would stand and look at the mighty coats of armor in the corridors of Angelshorn. These looked like real men. She felt that they would have been partisans of hers, had they not all been hollow. She became shy of all people, and wild, in the loneliness of the brilliant circle of the house. But she became also fierce, and might well, on a dark night, have put fire to the castle.
“In the end, as you, Timon, could not stand your existence, but meant to jump into the water from Langebro, she could no longer stand her nonexistence at Angelshorn. But your task was easier. You wanted only to disappear, while she had to create herself. She had been for such a long time brought up in the wicked heresies of those falsifiers of truth, and so thoroughly tortured and threatened with the stake, that she was by now ready to deny any god. Abu Mirrah had a ring which made him invisible, but when he wanted to marry the Princess Ebadu, and could not get it off his finger, he cut off the finger with it. In this way Calypso resolved to cut off her long hair, and to chop off her young breasts, so as to be like her acquaintances. This deed of darkness she made up her mind to commit one summer night.”
At this point of Miss Malin’s narrative, the girl, who had hitherto stared straight in front of her, turned her wild eyes toward the narrator, and began to listen with a new kind of interest, as if she herself were hearing the tale for the first time. Miss Malin had an opulent power of imagination. But still the story, correct or not, was to the heroine herself a symbol, a dressed-up image of what she had in reality gone through, and she acknowledged it by her clear deep glance at the old woman.
