Babette's Feast and Other Stories

by Isak Dinesen

  She stood immovable, lost in thought.

  “You see, Mesdames,” she said, at last, “those people belonged to me, they were mine. They had been brought up and trained, with greater expense than you, my little ladies, could ever imagine or believe, to understand what a great artist I am. I could make them happy. When I did my very best I could make them perfectly happy.”

  She paused for a moment.

  “It was like that with Monsieur Papin too,” she said.

  “With Monsieur Papin?” Philippa asked.

  “Yes, with your Monsieur Papin, my poor lady,” said Babette. “He told me so himself: ‘It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,’ he said, ‘to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing, his second best.’ He said: ‘Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!’ ”

  Philippa went up to Babette and put her arms round her. She felt the cook’s body like a marble monument against her own, but she herself shook and trembled from head to foot.

  For a while she could not speak. Then she whispered:

  “Yet this is not the end! I feel, Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!” she added, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah, how you will enchant the angels!”

  TEMPESTS

  * * *

  I. The Vision of the Tempest

  There was an old actor and theatre director whose name was Herr Soerensen. In his young days he had played in Copenhagen theatres; he had even got so far as to appear as Aristophanes in Adam Oehlenschlaeger’s tragedy Socrates at the very Royal Theatre. But he was a man of a mighty, independent character, which demanded the creation and control of his own world around him. As a child he had been taken to stay with his mother’s relations in Norway, and he had kept a deep, undying passion for the land of fells, which in his mind loomed heaven-aspiring and windswept, as back-drop and wings for Hakon Jarl and for Macbeth’s and Ossian’s Scotland. He read the Norwegian poet Wergeland and heard tell of the Norwegian folk’s longing for great art, and his soul grew restless within him. Visions and voices filled him, a crown was indicated for him, and he received his orders to sally forth for the North. Late in life he abruptly pulled up his roots from the soft mould of Copenhagen to plant them afresh in stony ground, and at the time—about a hundred years ago—when steamers first began to ply regularly along the Norwegian coast he traveled with his own small company from town to town up and down the fjords.

  His old Copenhagen friends discussed among themselves the sad come-down it must be for a Royal Copenhagen actor to appear on provincial stages with a half-trained cast and before a half-barbarous public. But Herr Soerensen himself delighted in his freedom; his being blossomed in the swell of wind and wave, in dressing-rooms made from rough boards, in draughts and among tallow-dips. On gala nights he was the highly appreciated ambassador to the great powers, glittering with stars and royal favor, at other times, groaning away in his narrow berth and in the merciless hand of seasickness, he was their hard-tried prophet, Jonah in the belly of the whale. But always and everywhere he was the chosen one, the wanderer in his vocation.

  Herr Soerensen in his nature had a kind of duplicity which might well confuse and disturb his surroundings and might even be called demoniacal, but with which he himself managed to exist on harmonious terms. He was on the one hand a wide-awake, shrewd and untiring businessman, with eyes at the back of his head, a fine nose for profit, and a completely matter-of-fact and detached outlook on his public and humanity in general. And he was at one and the same time his art’s obedient servant, a humble old priest in the temple, with the words “Domine, non sum dignus” graven in his heart.

  He did not, in his contracts, let himself be done for as much as a farthing. While laying on his mask in front of a dim, chipped mirror he might suddenly get a bright idea which put him in a position to steal a march on other folk. He played in many coarse farces (which in his time were called Possen), giving his audience their hearts’ desire of capering, roaring and fantastic grimacing, and thanking them for their deafening applause with his hand on his heart and the sweetest of smiles on his lips—and all the time he had the evening’s accounts, down to the smallest item, in his head.

  But when, later at night, after having enjoyed his modest supper, with a little glass of schnapps thrown in, he ascended to his bedroom, candle in hand, up a staircase as steep and narrow as a hen-coop ladder, in spirit he moved as high as an old angel on Jacob’s ladder. Up there he sat down again to table with Euripides, Lopez de Vega and Molière, with the poets of his own country’s golden age, and with the one who most of all looked like a human being, with William Shakespeare himself. The immortal minds were his brethren and understood him as he them. In their circle he could let himself go, free and jubilant, or he could shed tears of deepest weltschmerz.

  Herr Soerensen at times had been characterized by business connections as a shameless speculator. But in his relations to the immortals he was as chaste as a virgin.

  Only a few close friends knew of his theory: that much which is unworthy in human life might be avoided if people would only accustom themselves to talking in verse. “It need not exactly rhyme,” he said. “Nay, it really ought not to rhyme. Rhyming verse in the long run is an underhand attack on the true being of poetry. But we should express our feelings, and communicate with one another, in blank verse. For iambics gently sway our nature’s rawness—to noble worth, and zealously divide—chatter and tripe and scandal’s overspill—from gold and silver in the human speech.” In the great moments of his existence Herr Soerensen himself thought in iambics.

  Only the Registrar-General of Births and Deaths in Copenhagen—who had shown himself highly reluctant to the idea—knew of a codicil to his will, in accordance with which his old cranium would one day be polished and through the ages to come would figure on the stage as Yorick’s skull.

  Now one year it happened that Herr Soerensen in doing his accounts found his last season to have been more profitable than any previous one. The old manager felt that the great powers above had looked to him kindly and that in return he ought to do something for them. He determined to put into operation a life-old dream. He would produce The Tempest and himself play the part of Prospero.

  No sooner had he taken this decision than he got up from his bed, dressed and went for a long walk in the night. He gazed at the stars above him and reflected that he had been led along strange ways. “Those wings for which all my life I have been longing and looking,” he said to himself, “have now been granted me—in order that I may fold them together! My thanks to those in whose hands I have been, and am.”

  II. A Part Assigned

  He lay wakeful through many a night, shifting his males and females here and there in the play’s cast, as if they had been pieces in a choice game of chess. At length, except for one single figure, he had the whole distribution of parts on his fingers and was pleased with it. But an Ariel he had not yet found, and he tore his hair in despair over his inability. Already in his mind he had tried his best artists in the part and in exasperation had flung them out of it again, when one day his eye fell on a young girl who had recently become a member of the troupe, and in a couple of small parts had won modest applause.

  “My Lord and Judge,” Herr Soerensen at the same instant cried out in his heart, “where have I had my eyes? Here have I been on my knees, imploring heaven to send me a serviceable air-spirit! I have been on the point of losing all hope and giving up! And all the time the most exquisite Ariel the world has ever known has been walking up and down under my nose without my recognizing him!” So moved was he that he overlooked his pupil’s sex.

  “My girl,” he said to the young actress. “You are to play Ariel in The Tempest.”

  “Am I!” she cried.

  “Yes,” said Herr Soerensen.

  The girl to whom he was talking was big, with a pair of clear, undaunt
ed eyes, but with a peculiar reserved dignity in her manner. Herr Soerensen who, so far as the morals of his young actresses went, had preserved the high traditions of the Royal Copenhagen theatre, occasionally had noticed her just because she seemed difficult to approach. She was a pretty girl and to a chivalrous nature like that of Herr Soerensen there was something moving or pathetic in her face. Still no theatre man but one with the eyes of genius would ever have imagined her in the part of Ariel.

  “She is somewhat skinny,” Herr Soerensen thought, “because she has had to live on short commons, poor child. But it becomes her because the structure of her skeleton is exceptionally noble. If it be correct—as my Copenhagen director, of blessed memory, did hold forth to me—that woman is to man what poetry is to prose, then are the womenfolk we come across from day to day poems read aloud.—They’re read aloud with taste, and please the ear—or else they’re badly read, and grate and jar.—But this my gray-eyed lassie is a song.”

  “Now then, little one,” he said, as he lit one of the fat cigars which were the only luxury he allowed himself. “Now we two will set to work, and set to work in earnest. We are here to serve Will Shakespeare, the Swan of Avon. And we are not going to think of ourselves at all, for we are nothing at all in ourselves. You are prepared to forget everything for his sake?”

  The girl thought the matter over, blushed and said: “If only I am not too big.”

  Herr Soerensen looked her over observantly from head to foot and even walked round her once in order to become certain.

  “To hell with stones and pounds,” he burst out. “I could, au contraire, wish that there was more of you. For you are light in yourself, in the way of a gas balloon: the more one fills into it the higher it will go. Besides, surely our William is man enough to do away with such a hackneyed regulation as the law of gravity.

  “And look at me now. I am a little man as I walk about on my dreary daily round. But do you think that once in the cloak of Prospero I shall look the same? Nay, the danger will then be that the stage will become too cramped for my stature; the rest of my cast will find it a bit of a tight fit. And when I order myself a new suit of clothes—which the Lord knows I need—the tailor who has had a seat in the pit will put up his price because he realizes that he will need to use extra material for my volume!

  “I am aware,” he continued after a long pause and in deep earnest, “that even among theatre managers there may be found those who have the heart—and the means—to let Ariel come swooping onto the stage on a wire from the wings. To hell with it! Such things to me are an abomination. It is the words of the poet which are to make Ariel fly. Ought we, who are our William’s servants, to rely more on a bit of steel than on his heavenly stanzas! That, on this stage, shall come to happen only over Valdemar Soerensen’s dead body!

  “You are a bit slow in your movements,” he went on. “That is as it should be. Rapid Ariel must not be, nor bustling. And when he answers Prospero:

  I drink the air before me and return

  or e’er your pulse twice beat,

  the public will believe him. Certainly they will believe him. But, it shall not be because they think: ‘Ay, maybe he can do it, the way he can hustle.’ No, they must not be in doubt even for a fraction of a second, for they must at the very moment be blissfully a-tremble in their hearts and there cry out: ‘Oh, what witchcraft!’

  “Nay, I will tell you something, wench,” Herr Soerensen took up the tale a moment after, mightily carried away by his own fantasy. “If one imagines—for one may imagine anything—that it happened that a girl had come into the world with a pair of wings to her back, and she came to me and begged for a part in a play, I should answer her: ‘In the works of the poets there is a part for every single child of man, ergo, one for you too. Indeed, one will find more than one heroine in the kind of comedies we have to put up nowadays who might profit by losing a bit of her avoir du pois! The Lord be with you, you may play one of those. But Ariel, you cannot play because already you have got wings to your back, and because, in stark reality and without any poetry at all, you are capable of flying!’ ”

  III. The Child of Love

  The girl who was to play Ariel had for some time known in her heart that she would be an actress.

  Her mother sewed hats for ladies in a small fjord town, and the daughter sat beside her and dizzily felt that the swell in her own heart was like that in the water. Sometimes she thought that she would die from it. But she knew no more about the soundings of the heart than about those of the sea. She picked up her thimble and scissors with a pale face.

  Her father had been a Scotch ship’s captain, by name Alexander Ross, whose ship twenty years ago had suffered damage on her way to Riga and had had to lie up through the summer in the town harbor. During these summer months the big handsome man, who had sailed round the world and taken part in an Antarctic expedition, had created much stir and unrest among the townsfolk. And he had, in haste and with a will, such as he did everything, fallen in love with and married one of their loveliest girls, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a customs officer. The young maiden had defended herself in sweet emotion and confusion, but had still become Madam Ross before she knew where she was. “It’s the sea that brought me, little heart of mine,” he had whispered to her, in his queer, broken, adorable Norwegian. “Stop wave-beat, stop heart-beat.”

  Toward the end of the summer the captain’s ship was cleared, he embraced and kissed his young bride, laid a pile of gold coins on her work table and promised her to come again before Christmas to take her with him to Scotland. She stood on the quay in the fine East Indian shawl he had given her, and saw him sail away. He had been one with her: now he became one with his ship. Since that day no one had seen or heard anything of him.

  The young wife next spring, after the long terrible waiting of the winter months, realized that his ship had gone down, and that she was a widow. But the townsfolk began to talk: never had Captain Ross intended to come back. A little later it was said that he already had a wife at home in Scotland; his own crew had hinted at it.

  There were those in the town who blamed a maiden who had been in such a hurry to throw herself into the arms of a foreign sea captain. Others felt sympathy for the forlorn Norwegian girl and would have liked to help and comfort her. But she was sensitive to something in their help and comfort that she did not want or could not bear. Even before her child was born, with the money her lover had given her when he left she established her little milliner’s shop. She just put one single sovereign aside, for her child was to have an heirloom of pure gold from its father. From now on she kept back from her own family and her old acquaintances in town. She had nothing against them, but they would not leave her time to think of Alexander Ross. When once more it began to show green round the fjord she gave birth to a daughter who would, she thought, in years to come, help her in the task.

  Madam Ross had had her daughter christened Malli because her husband had sung a song about a Scotch girl called Malli, who was all in all complete. But she told the customers who peered at the child lying within its cradle in the shop that this was a family name among her husband’s kin; his mother had been called Malli. She ended up by believing it herself.

  During the months in which she had been waiting in rising anxiety and finally, as it were, in deep darkness, the unborn child to her had been a sure proof that her husband was alive. It grew and kicked in her womb; it could not be a dead man’s child. Now, after the rumors about her husband had reached her, to her the child slowly became a just as certain proof that he was dead. For a child so healthy, beautiful and gentle could not be a deceiver’s gift to her. As Malli grew up she realized, without her mother having ever expressed it in words, nor having ever been able to express it, what a powerful, mystic, at the same time tragic and blissful importance her very existence had to that gentle, lonesome mother. So the two lived wonderfully quiet and secluded, and very happily, together.

  When the girl grew old
er and now and then came out among people, she heard her father spoken of. She was quick-witted and had an ear for intonation and silence; she soon got wind of the sort of name Captain Ross had in the town. No one got to know what she felt about it. But she took her mother’s side against the whole world with growing vigor. She stood guard over Madam Ross like an armed sentry, and she became exaggeratedly wise and demure in all she did. Without making it really clear even to herself, in her young heart she decided that never in the conduct of the daughter should people find any confirmation that the mother had let herself be seduced by a bad man.

  But when Malli was alone she happily gave herself up to thoughts of her big, handsome father. For her he might well have been an adventurer, a privateer captain, like those one heard of in time of war—indeed even a corsair or a pirate! Below her quiet manner there lay a vital, concealed gaiety and arrogance; in her contempt for the townspeople was mingled forbearance for her own mother. She herself, and Alexander Ross, knew better than they.

  Madam Ross was proud of her obedient, thoughtful child, and in the eyes of the town became somewhat ludicrous in her maternal vanity. She had Malli taught English by an old spinster who was still sitting about in the fjord town after coming there a generation ago as governess to Baron Loewenskiold’s daughters. In the dried-up, beaky-nosed Englishwoman’s small room above a grocer’s shop Malli learned her father’s tongue. And up here a meeting took place, fateful for the girl: one day she also read Shakespeare. With trembling voice and with tears in her eyes the old maid read out her bard to the young one, the exiled woman asserted her lineage and her wealth, and with majestic dignity introduced the milliner’s daughter to a circle of noble and brilliant compatriots. From then on Malli saw her hero Alexander Ross as a Shakespearean hero. In her heart she cried out with Philip Faulconbridge: