Seven Gothic Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  “I took all old Van Zandten’s money then and bought her for myself, and after that we had, she and I, to keep off the respectable people of the country. What are you to do when love sets to at you? I made her a faithful lover, and she had a fine time with her loyal crew, adored and petted like a dainty lady who has her toe nails polished with henna. With me she became the fear of the Caribbean Sea, the little sea-eaglet who kept the tame birds on the stir. So I do not know for certain whether I did right or wrong. Shall not he have the fair woman who loves her most?”

  “And was she in love with you as well?” asked Eliza, laughing.

  “But who shall ask a woman if she is in love with him?” said Morten. “The question to ask about woman is this: ‘What is her price, and will you pay it?’ We should not cheat them, but should ask them courteously and pay with a good grace, whether it be cash, love, marriage, or our life or honor which they charge us; or else, if we are poor people and cannot pay, take off our hats to them and leave them for the wealthier man. That has been sound moral Latin with men and women since the world began. As to their loving us—for one thing, Can they love us?”

  “And what of the women who have no price?” said Eliza, laughing still.

  “What of those indeed, dear?” said Morten. “Whatever they ought to have been, they should not have been women. God may have them, and he may know what to do with them. They drive men into bad places, and afterward they cannot get us out even when they want to.”

  “What was the name of your ship?” asked Eliza, her eyes cast down.

  Morten looked up at her, laughing. “The name of my ship was La Belle Eliza,” he answered. “Did you not know?”

  “Yes, I knew,” said Eliza, her voice full of laughter once more. “A merchant captain of Papa’s told me, many years ago in Copenhagen, how his crew had gone mad with fear and had made him turn back into port when, off St. Thomas, they spied the topsails of a pirate ship. They were as afraid of her, he said, as of Satan himself. And he told me that the name of the ship was La Belle Eliza. I thought then that she would be your boat.”

  So this was the secret which the old maid had guarded from all the world. She had not been marble all through. Somewhere within her this little flame of happiness had been kept alive. To this purpose—for it had been to no other—had she grown up so lovely in Elsinore. A ship was in blue water, as in a bed of hyacinths, in winds and warm air, her full white sails like to a bold chalk-cliff, baked by the sun, with much sharp steel in boards, not one of the broadswords or knives not red, and the name of the ship fairly and truly La Belle Eliza. Oh, you burghers of Elsinore, did you see me dance the minuet once? To those same measures did I tread the waves.

  While he had been speaking the color had mounted to her face. She looked once more like a girl, and the white streamers of her cap were no longer the finery of an old lady, but the attire of a chaste, flaming bride.

  “Yes, she was like a swan,” Morten said, “sweet, sweet, like a song.”

  “Had I been in that merchant ship,” said Eliza, “and you had boarded her, your ship should have been mine by right, Morten.”

  “Yes,” said he, smiling at her, “and my whole matelotage. That was our custom when we took young women. You would have had an adoring seraglio.”

  “I lost her,” he said, “through my own fault, at a river mouth of Venezuela. It is a long story. One of my men betrayed her anchoring place to the British governor of Port of Spain, in Trinidad. I was not with her then. I had gone myself the sixty miles to Port of Spain in a fishing boat, to get information about a Dutch cargo boat. I saw all my crew hanged there, and saw her for the last time.

  “It was after that,” he said after a pause, “that I never slept well again. I could not get down into sleep. Whenever I tried to dive down into it I was shoved upward again, like a piece of flotsam. From that time I began to lose weight, for I had thrown overboard my ballast. It was with her. I had become too light for anything. From that time on I was somehow without body. Do you remember how Papa and Uncle Fernand used to discuss, at dinner, the wines which they had bought together, and to talk of some of them having a fine enough bouquet, but no body to them? That was the case with me, then, my dears: a bouquet I should say that I may still have had, but no body. I could not sink into friendship, or fear, or any real delight any longer. And still I could not sleep.”

  The sisters had no need to pretend sympathy with this misfortune. It was their own. All the De Conincks suffered from sleeplessness. When they had been children they had laughed at their father and his sisters when they greeted one another in the morning first of all with minute inquiries and accounts of how they had slept at night. Now they did not laugh; the matter meant much to them also now.

  “But when you cannot sleep at night,” said Fanny, sighing, “is it that you wake up very early, or is it that you cannot fall asleep at all?”

  “Nay, I cannot fall asleep at all,” said Morten.

  “Is it not, then,” asked Fanny, “because you are—” She would have said “cold,” but remembering where he had said he came from, she stopped herself.

  “And I have known all the time,” said Morten, who did not seem to have heard what she said to him, “that I shall never lay me down to rest until I can sleep once more on her, in her, La Belle Eliza.”

  “But you lived ashore, too,” said Fanny, her mind running after his, for she felt as if he were about to escape her.

  “Yes, I did,” said Morten. “I had for some time a tobacco plantation in Cuba. And that was a delightful place. I had a white house with pillars which you would have liked very much. The air of those islands is fine, delicate, like a glass of true rum. It was there that I had the lovely wife, the planter’s widow, and two children. There were women to dance with there, at our balls, light like the trade winds—like you two. I had a very pretty pony to ride there, named Pegasus; a little like Papa’s Zampa—Do you remember him?”

  “And you were happy there?” Fanny asked.

  “Yes, but it did not last,” said Morten. “I spent too much money. I lived beyond my means, something which Papa had always warned me against. I had to clear out of it.” He sat silent for a little while.

  “I had to sell my slaves,” he said.

  At these words he grew so deadly pale, so ashen gray, that had they not known him to be dead for long they would have been afraid that he might be going to die. His eyes, all his features, seemed to sink into his face. It became the face of a man upon the stake, when the flames take hold.

  The two women sat pale and rigid with him, in deep silence. It was as if the breath of the hoarfrost had dimmed three windows. They had no word of comfort for their brother in this situation. For no De Coninck had ever parted with a servant. It was a code to them that whoever entered their service must remain there and be looked after by them forever. They might make an exception with regard to marriage or death, but unwillingly. In fact it was the opinion of their circle of friends that in their old age the sisters had come to have only one real object in life, which was to amuse their servants.

  Also they felt that secret contempt for all men, as beings unable to raise money at any fatal moment, which belongs to fair women with their consciousness of infinite resources. The sisters De Coninck, in Cuba, would never have allowed things to come to such a tragic point. Could they not easily have sold themselves three hundred times, and made three hundred Cubans happy, and so saved the welfare of their three hundred slaves? There was, therefore, a long pause.

  “But the end,” said Fanny finally, drawing in her breath deeply, “that was not yet, then?”

  “No, no,” said Morten, “not till quite a long time after that. When I had no more money I started an old brig in the carrying trade, from Havana to New Orleans first, and then from Havana to New York. Those are difficult seas.” His sister had succeeded in turning his mind away from his distress, and as he began to explain to her the various routes of his trade he warmed to his subject. Alt
ogether he had, during the meeting, become more and more sociable and had got back all his old manner of a man who is at ease in company and is in really good understanding with the minds of his convives. “But nothing would go right for me,” he went on. “I had one run of bad luck after another. No, in the end, you see, my ship foundered near the Cay Sal bank, where she ran full of water and sank in a dead calm; and with one thing and another, in the end, if you do not mind my saying so, in Havana I was hanged. Did you know that?”

  “Yes,” said Fanny.

  “Did you mind that, I wondered, you two?” he asked.

  “No!” said his sisters with energy.

  They might have answered him with their eyes turned away, but they both looked back at him. And they thought that this might perhaps be the reason why he was wearing his collar and stock so unusually high; there might be a mark on that strong and delicate neck around which they had tied the cambric with great pains when they had been going to balls together.

  There was a moment’s silence in the red room, after which Fanny and Morten began to speak at the same time.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Morten.

  “No,” said Fanny, “no. What were you going to say?”

  “I was asking about Uncle Fernand,” said Morten. “Is he still alive?”

  “Oh, no, Morten, my dear,” said Fanny, “he died in ‘thirty. He was an old man then. He was at Adrienne’s wedding, and made a speech, but he was very tired. In the evening he took me aside and said to me: ‘My dear, it is a genante fête.’ And he died only three weeks later. He left Eliza his money and furniture. In a drawer we found a little silver locket, set with rose diamonds, with a curl of fair hair, and on it was written, The hair of Charlotte Corday.’ ”

  “I see,” said Morten. “He had a fine figure, Uncle Fernand. And Aunt Adelaide, is she dead too?”

  “Yes, she died even before he did,” said Fanny. She meant to tell him something of the death of Madame Adelaide De Coninck, but did not go on. She felt depressed. These people were dead; he ought to have known of them. The loneliness of her dead brother made her a little sick at heart.

  “How she used to preach to us, Aunt Adelaide,” he said. “How many times did she say to me: This melancholy of yours, Morten, this dissatisfaction with life which you and the girls allow yourselves, makes me furious. What is good enough for me is good enough for you. You all ought to be married and have large families to look after; that would cure you.’ And you, Fanny, said to her: ‘Yes, little Aunt, that was the advice, from an auntie of his, which our Papa did follow.’ ”

  “Toward the end,” Eliza broke in, “she would not hear or think of anything that had happened since the time when she was thirty years old and her husband died. Of her grandchildren she said: ‘These are some of the new-fangled devices of my young children. They will soon find out how little there is to them.’ But she could remember all the religious scruples of Uncle Theodore, her husband, and how he had kept her awake at night with meditations upon the fall of man and original sin. Of those she was still proud.”

  “You must think me very ignorant,” Morten said. “You know so many things of which I know nothing.”

  “Oh, dear Morten,” said Fanny, “you surely know of a lot of things of which we know nothing at all.”

  “Not many, Fanny,” said Morten. “One or two, perhaps.”

  “Tell us one or two,” said Eliza.

  Morten thought over her demand for a little while.

  “I have come to know of one thing,” he said, “of which I myself had no idea once. C’est une invention très fine, très spirituelle, de la part de Dieu, as Uncle Fernand said of love. It is this: that you cannot eat your cake and have it. I should never have hit upon that on my own. It is indeed an original idea. But then, you see, he is really très fin, très spirituel, the Lord.”

  The two sisters drew themselves up slightly, as if they had received a compliment. They were, as already said, keen churchgoers, and their brother’s words had ever carried great weight with them.

  “But do you know,” said Morten suddenly, “that little snappy pug of Aunt Adelaide’s, Fingal—him I have seen.”

  “How was that?” Fanny asked. “Tell us about that.”

  “That was when I was all alone,” said Morten, “when my ship had foundered at the Cay Sal bank. We were three who got away in a boat, but we had no water. The others died, and in the end I was alone.”

  “What did you think of then?” Fanny asked.

  “Do you know, I thought of you,” said Morten.

  “What did you think of us?” Fanny asked again in a low voice.

  Morten said, “I thought: we have been amateurs in saying no, little sisters. But God can say no. Good God, how he can say no. We think that he can go on no longer, not even he. But he goes on, and says no once more.

  “I had thought of that before, quite a good deal,” Morten said, “at Elsinore, during the time before my wedding. And now I kept on thinking upon it. I thought of those great, pure, and beautiful things which say no to us. For why should they say yes to us, and tolerate our insipid caresses? Those who say yes, we get them under us, and we ruin them and leave them, and find when we have left them that they have made us sick. The earth says yes to our schemes and our work, but the sea says no; and we, we love the sea ever. And to hear God say no, in the stillness, in his own voice, that to us is very good. The starry sky came up, there, and said no to me as well. Like a noble, proud woman.”

  “And did you see Fingal then?” Eliza asked.

  “Yes,” said Morten. “Just then. As I turned my head a little, Fingal was sitting with me in the boat. You know, he was an ill-tempered little dog always, and he never liked me because I teased him. He used to bite me every time he saw me. I dared not touch him there in the boat. I was afraid that he would snap at me again. Still, there he sat, and stayed with me all night.”

  “And did he go away then?” Fanny asked.

  “I do not know, my dear,” Morten said. “An American schooner, bound for Jamaica, picked me up in the early morning. There on board was a man who had bid against me at the sale in Philippsburg. In this way it came to pass that I was hanged—in the end, as you say—at Havana.”

  “Was that bad?” asked Fanny in a whisper.

  “No, my poor Fanny,” said Morten.

  “Was there anyone with you there?” Fanny whispered.

  “Yes, there was a fat young priest there,” said Morten. “He was afraid of me. They probably told him some bad things about me. But still he did his best. I asked him: ‘Can you obtain for me, now, one minute more to live in?’ He said, ‘What will you do with one minute of life, my poor son?’ I said, ‘I will think, with the halter around my neck, for one minute of La Belle Eliza.’ ”

  While they now sat in silence for a little while, they heard some people pass in the street below the window, and talk together. Through the shutters they could follow the passing flash of their lanterns.

  Morten leaned back in his chair, and he looked now to his sisters older and more worn than before. He was indeed much like their father, when the Papa De Coninck had come in from his office tired, and had taken pleasure in sitting down quietly in the company of his daughters.

  “It is very pleasant in here, in this room,” he said, “it is just like old days—do you not think so? With Papa and Mamma below. We three are not very old yet. We are good-looking people still.”

  “The circle is complete again,” said Eliza gently, using one of their old expressions.

  “Is completed, Lizzie,” said Morten, smiling back at her.

  “The vicious circle,” said Fanny automatically, quoting another of their old familiar terms.

  “You were always,” said Morten, “such a clever lass.”

  At these kind direct words Fanny impetuously caught at her breath.

  “And, oh, my girls,” Morten exclaimed, “how we did long then, with the very entrails of us, to get away from Elsinore!”


  His elder sister suddenly turned her old body all around in the chair, and faced him straight. Her face was changed and drawn with pain. The long wake and the strain began to tell on her, and she spoke to him in a hoarse and cracked voice, as if she were heaving it up from the innermost part of her chest.

  “Yes,” she cried, “yes, you may talk. But you mean to go away again and leave me. You! You have been to these great warm seas of which you talk, to a hundred countries. You have been married to five people—Oh, I do not know of it all! It is easy for you to speak quietly, to sit still. You have never needed to beat your arms to keep warm. You do not need to now!”

  Her voice failed her. She stuttered in her speech and clasped the edge of the table. “And here,” she groaned out, “I am—cold. The world is bitterly cold around me. I am so cold at night, in my bed, that my warming-pans are no good to me!”

  At this moment the tall grandfather’s clock started to strike, for Fanny had herself wound it up in the afternoon. It struck midnight in a grave and slow measure, and Morten looked quickly up at it.

  Fanny meant to go on speaking, and to lift at last all the deadly weight of her whole life off her, but she felt her chest pressed together. She could not out-talk the clock, and her mouth opened and shut twice without a sound.

  “Oh, hell,” she cried out, “to hell!”

  Since she could not speak she stretched out her arms to him, trembling. With the strokes of the clock his face became gray and blurred to her eyes, and a terrible panic came upon her. Was it for this that she had wound up the clock! She threw herself toward him, across the table.

  “Morten!” she cried in a long wail. “Brother! Stay! Listen! Take me with you!”

  As the last stroke fell, and the clock took up its ticking again, as if it meant to go on doing something, in any case, through all eternity, the chair between the sisters was empty, and at the sight Fanny’s head fell down on the table.