by Isak Dinesen
“In return? Alas, my little Malli,” he said, in an altogether changed voice, and this time he was not aware that he continued in his chosen, sacred tongue: “And in return we get the world’s distrust—and our dire loneliness. And nothing else.”
XVII. The Last Letter
When on Friday evening Arndt Hosewinckel came home from Stavanger they handed him a letter with a gold coin in it. The letter ran as follows:
Dear beloved Arndt,
I am writing to you with streaming tears. When you read this, I shall be far away, and we shall never see each other again. I am not the one for you, for I have deceived you and been unfaithful to you.
Yes, I had deceived you before I saw you for the first time, and you lifted me from the boat. But yet I swear to you that I did not know of it and did not understand how things were with me. And one more thing I swear to you, and this too you must believe. That as long as I live I shall love you.
I have a secret to tell you in this letter. I know, Arndt, that you love me, and maybe when I have told this secret to you, you will forgive me and tell me that it shall be as it was between you and me. But it cannot be so. For I carry my unfaithfulness toward you within myself, and wherever I am there it is too. I believed that nothing in the world was stronger than our love. But my unfaithfulness to you is stronger.
The very first time I understood this was when I heard that Ferdinand had died. For he has died, but of that you do not know in Stavanger. And when I saw him lying in his coffin and heard his poor mother’s sorrowing words, then I guessed, as if somebody had spoken it from far away, that his death would come to part you and me. Still I did not yet fully understand that things were as they were, but it seemed to me that perhaps even now everything could turn out lovely for me as before, alas, how lovely!
But there was more to it, as I went about in great sadness and uneasiness and knew not in my heart what to believe. For on Sunday evening, as we sat in the drawing room, your father to please me told me the story of Jens Aabel and the fire. Your father afterwards told me that if some person in despair wanted good advice, he must let Jens Aabel’s Bible fall open on its own, and he would then find it there. In my sorrow I betook myself to do this. But what I read was terrible.
I have tonight brought the Bible into my room here, and it is lying before me. And I have looked up the text to write it to you. In this way it is to me as if I were writing in the presence of that good, deserving man, Jens Aabel. And when you read, you must also imagine that he has been sitting by me while I wrote.
What I came upon was the Book of Isaiah, the twenty-ninth chapter, which starts thus:
“Woe to Ariel, to Ariel! … And thou shalt be brought down, and thou shalt speak out of the ground, … and thy voice shall be as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust!”
These words of the Prophet Isaiah filled me with great fear. Yet it was not until I read further that I fully understood how to me all hope was gone. For I read then the eighth verse:
“It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty; or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite.”
Yes, Arndt, this is as it would come to be with you if you kept me, and no otherwise. Therefore I tell you that you shall not think of forgiving me, because that is such a thing as cannot be done.
We are both young, and I am the younger of us two. But in what I now write I speak to you as if I were as old as the Prophet Isaiah, for that I am at this hour. And as if I were as wise as he, for that I am at this hour. And it seems to me as if, in my bottomless unhappiness, I shall yet find words that will console you a little. It shall never come to be of no avail to you, Arndt, that you have met me. And it shall never come to be of no avail to me that you grieve over me.
I will write to you too that tonight I have made a poem. I have never before made a poem, so that this one is not as it should be. Still you shall read it, and have it in your thoughts when you remember me. For it goes like this:
I have made you poor, my sweetheart dear.
I am far from you when I am near.
I have made you rich, my dearest heart.
I am near when we are far apart.
And now I have gained courage, and I will write to you the secret of which you know nothing.
You are to know then, Arndt, that when I was in the midst of the storm in Kvasefjord, on Sofie Hosewinckel, then I was not in the least afraid.
People in Christianssand call me a heroine. But a heroine is such a girl as sees the danger and is afraid of it, but defies it. But I, I saw it not, and understood not that there was danger.
Alas, Arndt, in that same hour your good father went about in great fear for Sofie Hosewinckel, and Ferdinand’s mother was in deep fear and dread for her son. And I understand now, and see well, that in a human being it is beautiful to fear, and also I see clearly that the one who does not fear is all alone, and is rejected, an outcast from among people. But I, I was not in the least afraid.
For I thought or believed something that you can never imagine on your own, but that I shall now explain to you. I thought that the storm was the storm in the play The Tempest in which I was then soon to play a part, and which I had read more than a hundred times. Therein I myself am Ariel, a spirit of the air, and a mighty magician, Prospero, is my master. And in that night I thought that if Sofie Hosewinckel went down, I could fly off and wing my way from her. When I heard the crew shout, “All lost!” then I recognized the words, and thought our shipwreck was the wreck in the first scene. And when in great distress they cried out, “Mercy on us,” I recognized these words also. And may God have mercy on me myself, I laughed aloud at them in the storm.
They tell me that in that night I called out many times for poor Ferdinand. But that too was for the same reason, and because the hero in the play is called Prince Ferdinand. And so on board the Sofie Hosewinckel it was Ariel who in the roaring gale called Prince Ferdinand to him in a loud voice.
In this play there is also a lovely island full of tones, sounds and music sweet, on it in the end all the shipwrecked folk are rescued unharmed. And I thought, in the midst of the snowstorm, that this island was not far away.
Yes, now you know all. And it is for such a reason that you cannot keep me, for I belong elsewhere and must now go there. For it is possible, I know, that you might forget what had once happened. But it would ever be the same in all that happened between you and me. Ay, that the hungry man dreameth, and behold, he eateth; and he awaketh, and his soul is empty. And that the thirsty man dreameth, and behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and he is faint, and his soul hath appetite.
I am putting a gold coin for you in this letter, by which you shall remember me. It comes from my father, but it is pure gold.
Now I will sit quite still and wait an hour before I close my letter. So I have got one hour more in which I have disclosed nothing to you, and in which nothing is over between you and me. But I am your sweetheart, who am to be wedded to you.
Now the hour is at an end. Within it I have thought of two things.
The first of the two is this: That when soon I sail from here, I may again run into such a storm as the one in Kvasefjord. But that this time I shall clearly understand that it is not a play in the theatre, but it is death. And it seems to me that then, in the last moment before we go down, I can in all truth be yours. And I am thinking that it will be fine and great to let wave-beat cover heart-beat. And in that hour to say: “I have been saved, because I have met you and have looked at you, Arndt!”
But the other of the two is this: If now I heard your steps on the stairs from the office, and you came into the room to me! It seems to me now that those moments in which I did so hear your steps on the stairs were the happiest in my whole life. Then my arms ached so badly in their longing to lie round your neck that I co
uld have cried out for pain. Ay, how they ache!
Farewell then. Farewell. Farewell, Arndt.
Yours upon earth faithless and rejected, but in death, in the resurrection, in eternity faithful,
Malli
THE IMMORTAL STORY
* * *
I. Mr. Clay
In the sixties of the last century there lived in Canton an immensely rich tea-trader, whose name was Mr. Clay.
He was a tall, dry and close old man. He had a magnificent house and a splendid equipage, and he sat in the midst of both, erect, silent and alone.
Amongst the other Europeans of Canton Mr. Clay had the name of an iron-hard man and a miser. People kept away from him. His looks, voice and manner, more than anything actually known against him, had made him this reputation. All the same two or three stories about him, many times repeated, seemed to bear out the general opinion of the man. One of the stories ran as follows:
Fifteen years ago a French merchant, who at one time had been Mr. Clay’s partner but later, after a quarrel between them, had started on his own, was ruined by unlucky speculations. As a last chance he tried to get a consignment of tea on board the clipper Thermopylae, which lay in the harbor ready to go under way. But he owed Mr. Clay the sum of three hundred guineas, and his creditor laid hands on the tea, got his own shipment of tea off with the Thermopylae, and by this move finally ruined his rival. The Frenchman lost all, his house was sold, and he was thrown upon the streets with his family. When he saw no way out of his misfortune he committed suicide.
The French merchant had been a talented, genial man; he had had a lovely wife and a big family. Now that, in the eyes of his friends, he was contrasted with the stony figure of Mr. Clay, he began to shine with a halo of gay and gentle rays, and they started a collection of money for his widow. But owing to the rivalry between the French and English communities of Canton it did not come to much, and after a short time the French lady and her children disappeared from the horizon of their acquaintances.
Mr. Clay took over the dead man’s house, a big beautiful villa with a large garden in which peacocks strutted on the lawns. He was living in it today.
In the course of time this story had taken the character of a myth. Monsieur Dupont, it was told, on the last day of his life had called together his pretty, gentle wife and his bright young children. Since all their misery, he declared, had risen from the moment when he first set eyes on the face of Mr. Clay, he now bound them by a solemn vow never, in any place or under any circumstance, to look into that face again. It was also told that when he had been about to leave his house, of which he was very proud, he had burnt or smashed up every object of art in it, asserting that no thing made for the embellishment of life would ever consent to live with the new master of the house. But he had left in all the rooms the tall gilt-framed looking-glasses brought out from France, which till now had reflected only gay and affectionate scenes, with the words that it should be his murderer’s punishment to meet, wherever he went, a portrait of the hangman.
Mr. Clay settled in the house, and sat down to dine in solitude, face to face with his portrait. It is doubtful whether he was ever aware of the lack of friendliness in his surroundings, for the idea of friendliness had never entered into his scheme of life. If things had been left entirely to himself, he would have arranged them in the same way; it was only natural that he should believe them to be as they were because he had willed them to be so. Slowly, in his career as a nabob, Mr. Clay had come to have faith in his own omnipotence. Other great merchants of Canton held the same faith in regard to themselves and, like Mr. Clay, kept it up by ignoring that part of the world which lay outside the sphere of their power.
By the time that Mr. Clay was seventy years old he fell ill with the gout, and for a long time was almost paralyzed. The pain was so severe that he could not sleep at nights, and his nights then seemed infinitely long.
Late one night it happened that one of Mr. Clay’s young clerks came to his house with a pile of accounts that he had been revising. The old man in his bed heard him talk to the servants, he sent for him and made him go through the account books with him. When the morning came he found that this night had passed less slowly than the others. So the next evening he again sent for the young clerk, and again made him read out his books to him.
From this time it became an established rule that the young man should make his appearance in the huge, richly furnished bedroom by nine o’clock, to sit by his old employer’s bedside and read out, by the light of a candle, the bills, contracts and estimates of Mr. Clay’s business. He had a sonorous voice, but toward morning it would grow a little hoarse. This vexed Mr. Clay, who in his young days had had sharp ears, but was now getting hard of hearing. He told his clerk that he was paying him to do this work and that, if he could not do it well, he would dismiss him and take on another reader.
When the two had come to the end of the books now in use at the office, the old man sighed and turned his head on the pillow. The clerk thought the matter over; he went to the lockers and took out books five, ten and fifteen years old, and these he read out, word for word, during the hours of the night. Mr. Clay listened attentively; the reading brought back to him schemes and triumphs of the past. But the nights were long; in the course of time the reader ran short even of such old books and had to read the same things over again.
One morning when the young man had for the third time gone through a deal of twenty years ago, and was about to go home to bed himself, Mr. Clay held him back, and seemed to have something on his mind. The workings of his master’s mind were always of great moment to the clerk; he stayed on a little to give the old man time to find words for what he wanted.
After a while Mr. Clay asked him, reluctantly and as if himself uneasy and doubtful, whether he had not heard of other kinds of books. The clerk answered no, he had no knowledge of other kinds of books, but he would find them if Mr. Clay would explain to him what he meant. Mr. Clay in the same hesitating manner told him that he had in mind books and accounts, not of deals or bargains, but of other things which people at times had put down, and which other people did at times read. The clerk reflected upon the matter and repeated, no, he had never heard of such books. Here the talk ended, and the clerk took his leave. On his way home the young man turned Mr. Clay’s question over in his mind. He felt that it had been uttered out of some deep need, half against the speaker’s own will, with bashfulness and even with shame. If the clerk had himself had any sense of shame in his nature he might have left his old employer at that, and have wiped his one slip from dignity off his memory. But since he had nothing of this quality in him he began to ponder the matter. The demand, surely, was a symptom of weakness in the old man; it might even be a foreboding of death. What would be, he reflected, the consequence to him himself of such a state of things?
II. Elishama
The young clerk who had been reading to Mr. Clay was known to the other accountants of the office as Ellis Lewis, but this was not his real name. He was named Elishama Levinsky. He had given himself a new name, not—like some other people in those days emigrating to China—in order to cover up any trespass or crime of his own, he had done it to obliterate crimes committed against himself, and a past of hard trials.
He was a Jew and had been born in Poland. His people had all been killed in the big Pogrom of 1848, at a time when he himself had been, he believed, six years old. Other Polish Jews, who had managed to escape, had happened to carry him with them among other sad and ragged bundles. Since that time, like some little parcel of goods in small demand, he had been carried and dropped, set against a wall and forgotten, and after a while once more flung about.
A lost and lonely child, wholly in the hands of chance, he had gone through strange sufferings in Frankfort, Amsterdam, London and Lisbon. Things not to be recounted and hardly to be recalled still moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind. In London chance had put him in the hands of an ingenious old
Italian bookkeeper, who had taught him to read and write, and who had, before he died, in one year implanted in him as much knowledge of bookkeeping by double entry as other people will acquire in ten years. Later the boy was lifted up and shifted eastward, where in the end he was set down in Mr. Clay’s office in Canton. Here he sat by his desk, like a tool ground upon the grindstone of life to an exceedingly sharp edge, with eyes and ears like a lynx, and without any illusions whatever of the world or of humanity.
With this equipment Elishama might have made a career for himself, and might have been a highly dangerous person to meet and deal with. But it was not so, and the reason for the apparently illogical state of things was the total lack of ambition in the boy’s own soul. Desire, in any form, had been washed, bleached and burnt out of him before he had learned to read. To look at, he was a fairly ordinary young man, small, slim and very dark, with veiled brown eyes, and might have passed as a citizen of any nation. Mentally he had nothing of a youth, but all of a precocious child or a very old man. He had no softness or fullness in him, no yearning for love or adventure, no sense of competition, no fear and no wish to fight. Outwardly and inwardly he was like some kind of insect, an ant hard to crush even to the heel of a boot.
One passion he had, if passion it may be called—a fanatical craving for security and for being left alone. In its nature this feeling was akin to homesickness or to the instinct of the homing-pigeon. His soul was concentrated upon this one request: that he might enter his closet and shut his door, with the certainty that here no one could possibly follow or disturb him.
The closet which he entered, and to which he shut the door, was a modest place, a small dark room in a narrow street. Here he slept on an old sofa rented from his landlady. But in the room there were a few objects which did really belong to him—a painted, ink-stained table, two chairs and a chest. These objects to their owner were of great significance. Sometimes, in the night, he would light a small candle to lie and gaze at them, as if they proved to him that the world was still fairly safe. He would also, at night, draw comfort from the idea of the numeral series. He went over its figures—10, 20, 7000. They were all there, and he went to sleep.
