Babette's Feast and Other Stories

by Isak Dinesen

  The people made room for the old shipowner, who with bared head and in a loud, deeply moved voice addressed a few words to the girl and the assembly. Arndt laughingly shielded her against being embraced by all Christianssand. When the crowd realized that the owner of the rescued ship was taking the girl to his own house, she and her host were accompanied to the gate with cheers.

  The young sailor Ferdinand, who to the minds of the cheerers stood by the girl’s side as the hero of the great happy drama, had his home in the town with his widowed mother. He was carried to it shoulder-high.

  A little later in the evening the other shipwrecked folk, who had been set safely ashore on the island, were brought in, and people had an opportunity of remaining in their festive mood. Herr Soerensen with lightning speed conceived his position. He no longer thought of his own sufferings, but beamed in the reflection of his young disciple’s glory, and by his authoritative and powerful attitude affirmed the fact that he had created her, and that she was his. Apart from this nothing was really clear to him, and particularly not what was up and what was down in the world around him. In the course of the day he had become very hoarse; now he lost his voice altogether and spent the first few days after the shipwreck with a number of woolen scarves round his throat, in complete silence. In the town the rumor went that during the storm, at the thought of the danger to Mamzell Ross, his hair had turned white. The truth was that his chestnut wig had been whirled away into the waves from the lifeboat. He bore the loss with fine, regal calm, conscious that in exchange for a temporal possession he had won an eternal experience, and also that he would have his loss replaced when his old carpetbag was brought ashore.

  Soon also the other members of the theatrical company were landed, pale and semiconscious, but one and all proud and undaunted. In the boat Mamzell Ihlen let her long dark hair cover her like a cloak. The troupe’s fair-haired leading young man the day after the rescue wrote an Ode to the North Wind and had it accepted by the daily paper, the more weather-wise readers of which realized that a poet cannot be expected to have an insight both into versifying and the points of the compass.

  The theatrical performances for the moment had to be postponed. Yet in the course of the week some of the actors, as a foretaste, gave extracts from their programme in the smaller hall of the Hotel Harmonien. The proprietor of the hotel under the particular, moving circumstances magnanimously allowed the company to stay at reduced prices. And when it became known that costumes and set-pieces on board Sofie Hosewinckel had been damaged by salt water, a collection was started on behalf of the sufferers. It brought in a fine return, and Herr Soerensen, in his bed and his dumbness, reflected upon the public’s valuation of an artist’s efforts in art and life respectively.

  The stately house in the market-square had opened its doors to Malli, and shut them behind her, in generous heartfelt gratitude to the lonely young girl who had risked her life for one of its ships.

  Among a people that lives by and from the sea, reality and fantasy become strangely interwoven. During the first days after the girl’s arrival the faces of her housemates when turned toward her were stamped with a kind of awe. They could not tell whether the sea, that ever-present and ever-inscrutable supreme force, had really let go its grip of her. Would not the next of the long rollers which lifted high the craft in the harbor suck her back with it, so that when they sought her in her room they would find it empty, with a dark streak of sea water and weed along the floor like the ones ghosts from the sea leave behind them? After some days, however, the house felt surer about her. She then became a symbol to it: half of the ship Sofie Hosewinckel which had been in distress at sea, half of young Sofie Hosewinckel herself, who had once blossomed in its rooms.

  Malli never in her life had been inside such a magnificent house. She gazed at the crystal chandeliers in the ceiling, the lace curtains, the gold-framed family portraits on the walls and the camphor-wood chests, and felt that she ought to curtsey to them all. And in this house she was made much of; she was given coffee and buns in bed and violet-scented soap by her washbasin.

  She was still shy and did not have much to say. Of her great exploit she related no more than she had to bring out as answers to the questions of the others. But she was happy; she walked, smiling, amid smiles. She felt that the house, the day after her arrival, was surprised to see that she was pretty. She had entered it pale and dirty of face and in ugly clothes; in its embrace she became, as she herself saw in the mirror, prettier day by day. Also at this fact, that it had thought her to be plain, while in reality she was a lovely girl, the old house smiled. So Malli, with the house’s own approval, went a small step further and looked around among the people who lived in it.

  She felt most at ease in the company of the old shipowner. It was, she thought, because for such a long time she had been longing for a father that she liked being with men, and herself felt that in glance, posture and voice she had much to give them. Toward the lady of the house she was more bashful. Mrs. Hosewinckel was a stately lady in a black silk gown, with a long gold watch-chain on her bosom. She had a large, delicately pink and white face, and Malli thought that she resembled Queen Thora in Axel and Valborg. Mrs. Hosewinckel did not say much, but Queen Thora in the tragedy has but one single line, addressed to her son, “May God forgive thee!,” and yet the audience knows her to be kind and majestic, and to wish the noble characters well. Of Arndt, the son of the house, Malli only knew or thought that his face had been wondrously beautiful when he had lifted her ashore from the boat.

  VIII. The House in the Market Square

  Jochum Hosewinckel and his wife were God-fearing folk; their house was the most decorous in the town and the most charitable to the poor. They had married young and had lived together happily, but for a long time their marriage had been childless. In the Hosewinckel family it was a tradition that while paying one’s respects to Providence in church on Sunday and in the daily morning and evening prayers, one did not push oneself forward with personal petitions. Only by a strict, righteous life had the couple brought themselves and their longing to the notice of the Almighty. A small, disturbing question was concealed beneath their silence: was not the Almighty in this matter standing somewhat in His own light? Eighteen years after their wedding their unexpressed prayer was heard, their son came into the world. And gratitude they felt free to show openly. At the christening of the child large endowments were made which bore Arndt Jochumsen Hosewinckel’s name. From now on the house displayed a generous hospitality.

  But the shipowner and his wife as years went by became almost uneasy about their good fortune.

  For their son from his tenderest age was so radiantly lovely that people stood still and were stricken to silence when they saw him. And as he grew up he became intelligent, quick to learn, gallant and noble beyond other boys. When as a young man he was sent to Lübeck and Amsterdam to learn the shipping business, by his clear-headedness, his pleasant manner and his upright conduct he everywhere won the confidence and affection of those set in authority over him. At the age of twenty-one he became his father’s partner in the shipping company and there displayed a remarkably good understanding of ships and shipping. Everything he set his hand to turned out well, and both seamen and clerks were happy to serve him. He had a special love of music, and himself played and sang well.

  Within the last few years from time to time a particular shadow was cast over his parents’ happiness: it did not look as if Arndt Hosewinckel thought of marrying. In the family many had died young and unmarried, as if they had been too good and fine to mingle the world’s nature with their own. Was it going to turn out the same in the case of its last, late-born and precious child? The old people, however, were not going to worry themselves unnecessarily. After all, their son was honorable, straight and chivalrous to all young girls in Christianssand, and could make his choice from among them when he wished.

  All those who now looked at Arndt Hosewinckel, with unconscious deep delight let
their eyes dwell on the beauty, power and charm of his body, on the remarkable perfection of his features, and the peculiar expression of his face, at the same time frank and thoughtful, and reflected that this young man from Christianssand in his cradle had received everything that a human being can desire, and almost more than anyone can easily bear.

  He had received even more than they knew of. He had a receptive and reflective nature and he had made his experiences in life.

  When Arndt was fifteen years old a fisherman’s daughter from Vatne, whose name was Guro, had come as maid to his parents’ home. She was a year older than the son of the house, but the handsome boy, with wealth and the admiration of people surrounding his head like a halo, had awakened a mighty, irresistible emotion in the half-savage girl’s breast. She was incapable of hiding her passion from him; they were lovers before they knew of it. He was so young that he felt no guilt. He had never in his life feared, nor had had reason to fear, that the things he wanted by nature might possibly conflict with noble conduct or ways of thinking. An unknown sweetness and desire, a game which was all the more delightful because it was secret, had grown up between him and Guro. They smiled at each other; they wished each other well from the bottom of their hearts. Of his father and mother—if at that time they ever came into his mind at all—the boy thought: “They would not understand this.” They were so much older than he; as long as he had known them, while he had felt himself full of spirit and determination, they had been staid people. It hardly entered his head that they themselves might once have known the same game.

  The secret love affair in the shipowner’s house lasted six weeks. Then one spring night Guro threw her arms around her young lover’s neck and cried out in a storm of tears: “I am a lost creature because I have met you and have looked at you, Arndt!” On the morrow she was gone, and two days later she was found floating in the fjord.

  Arndt saw Guro again when she was carried into the house, white, ice-cold, with salt water running from her clothing and her hair. The reason for her desperate act was soon known: Guro was with child. Three days passed during which the boy believed himself to be the one who had caused the young woman’s misfortune and death. But after that time her father and mother came to the town to fetch her body home, and the house got to know that things had been wrong with the girl before she entered it. She had a sweetheart in Vatne; he had deserted her, but had since thought better of it and had twice looked her up in town, asking her to marry him. But now Guro would have nothing to do with him. The master and mistress of the house were dismayed at the dark, sorrowful tale that had come to pass under their roof. They were loath to speak of it in their young son’s hearing, but they felt it to be unavoidable, or even to be their duty, to tell him the truth quite briefly, adding a few solemn words on the wages of sin.

  This truth which Arndt had from the lips of his father and mother did away with his own guilt. But it seemed at the same time to do away with everything else, so that he himself was left with empty hands. There was nothing there but a longing which for many a day sucked at his heart, and which was less for the girl herself or the happiness she had brought him than for his own faith in her and in it. A secret felicity in life had revealed itself to him and proved its existence, then immediately afterwards had denied itself and proved that it had never been. And Guro’s farewell words rang in his ears like a fateful prophecy that it was a misfortune to meet him and to look at him, even to those for whom he wished the very best. “I am a lost creature because I have met you!” she had lamented with her tear-wet face against his own. The events had passed through his life in the course of a few months and without any living soul knowing about them. And so to him, the tenderly watched-over child, it was as if he had come to know most of what there is to know in the world in complete isolation.

  All this had happened twelve years ago. Since then he had looked around the world and had had to do with many people and circumstances. He had had friends in many countries, and had known girls who were as pretty and devoted as the fisherman’s daughter from Vatne. He thought of her no longer, and hardly remembered how it had first come about that he preferred to keep himself somewhat aloof from people, lest through him they should be lost.

  IX. A Ball in Christianssand

  Now ladies and gentlemen from the town’s best society came to the house in the square to see and pay their respects to Mamzell Ross. They combined to give a ball in her honor in the ballroom of Harmonien. Malli till that day had gone about in the rich house in her one modest frock, and had not given it a thought; a ball-frock she had never possessed. But for the ball Mrs. Hosewinckel, in all haste, had her own dressmaker make up a tulle gown with flounces and a sash for the house’s young guest. The elderly woman on the evening of the ball was surprised to see how easily and regally the milliner’s daughter wore her finery, and wondered a little whether she herself and the whole town did not do wrong to treat, in return for a heroic deed, the heroine like a toy. She might have spared herself her worry. Such treatment might have turned the head of another girl, but here one had to deal with a young person who accepted being treated as a toy with gratitude, and who could at the same time treat a whole town with its harbor, streets, town-hall and citizens as her own plaything.

  So Malli went to the ball, but she could not take a full part in it, for she had never learned to dance. One of the ladies of the committee begged her instead to sing to the party. Malli did this gladly, and all listened with pleasure to her pure, clear voice, the old gentlemen at the card tables raising their punch glasses high to her as she gave them a sea chanty from their own young days. A young girl next suggested that she should sing something they could dance to. Malli held back a little, and then, like a bird in a tree, with a long-concealed, suddenly emerging delight broke into her own song, Ariel’s song:

  “Come unto these yellow sands,

  And then take hands:

  Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d,—

  The wild waves whist,—

  Foot it featly here and there,

  And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.”

  The dance swept on in time with the song, and Malli stood in the midst of the glittering hall and watched it turning and swaying to the command of her beat.

  Ferdinand had been invited to the ball, and Malli had been happily looking forward to seeing him and talking with him, for the two had not met since the night of the storm. But he had sent word that he could not come. Now the singer fixed her eyes on Arndt Hosewinckel.

  Arndt had stood talking to some old merchants, but when Malli began to sing he listened, and when she sang for the dance he joined in the dancing. She saw how well he danced, and in one single glance realized what he meant in the ballroom and the town, and what the lovely young ladies at the ball, who had learned to dance, thought of him. But the simple girl, who had bought her entry to the only ball of her young life by risking that life itself, while watching the town’s first young man dancing, realized even more. She thought: “God! what deep need!” And again: “I can help there. I can help him in his need and save him!”

  Malli did not go to bed when she came home, but kept sitting for a long time in her filmy gown in front of her candle-lit mirror. Arndt Hosewinckel did not go to bed either, but went out of the house for a long night-walk. Not seldom did it happen that he went out at night like this to the harbor and to the warehouses there, or farther out, along the fjord.

  X. Exchange of Visits

  Malli wished to visit the sick Herr Soerensen, and Arndt Hosewinckel walked with her to show her the way to the hotel, and to pay his respects to the man who together with the girl had endured distress at sea on board the Sofie Hosewinckel.

  Herr Soerensen was out of bed in an easy-chair, but he was still as good as dumb. The relationship between the old man and the girl was so much conditioned by the boards that Malli, once she had adjusted herself to the situation, immediately turned the whole meeting into pantomime, just as if her old teache
r, because he had lost his voice, must of necessity also have become deaf. Master and pupil lighted up in each other’s company, and Malli at once understood that Arndt’s beauty strongly affected and moved the old director, and that he was thinking: “Ay, if one had only a first lover like that!” She did not know that he was at the same time wondering at her own appearance and asking himself: “How can this girl’s bosom have grown so rounded in such a short time?” All her movements were thus rounded and soft while, in pantomime, she was explaining to him with how much friendliness she had met since the two had been together.

  When the time came for her and Arndt to say goodbye, Herr Soerensen took her hand, pressed it to the best of his ability and feebly whispered or wheezed to her: “Why, that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee!” At that Malli found her voice. “And I you!” she cried aloud, without remembering that there had been no talk of parting at all.

  Herr Soerensen was left alone, and for several days remained deeply gripped and moved. He understood, or by glimpses caught, his young pupil’s attitude, and was impressed. Here was a mighty undertaking: the whole world, the everyday common life, lifted onto the stage and being made one with it. Thy will be done, William Shakespeare, as on the stage so also in the drawing room! Here in very reality his Ariel did spread out a pair of wings and did rise into the air straight before his eyes. Suddenly and strangely it was brought back to him how once, in the exuberance of heart of a young actor, he himself had dreamed of such an apotheosis. And it now also happened to him, for the first two or three nights after Malli’s visit, in regular dreams in the narrow bed of his lodging, to find himself a partner in her venture, one time as Prospero on a father-in-law visit to the young King and Queen of Naples, another time as the fool in the Hosewinckel house. But when again awake he dismissed the idea. In the course of a long life he had gained experience and insight, and to any person of experience and insight, indeed to anyone but a young actress in love, the project of lifting daily life onto the stage was paradoxical, and in its essence blasphemous. For it was more likely that daily life would drag down the stage to its own level than that the stage would succeed in maintaining it so highly elevated; and the whole world-order might well end up pell-mell.