ANECDOTES OF DESTINY

    _Anecdotes of Destiny_, like the stories of the great Russian
    and French writers of the nineteenth century, are tales
    deceptively simple in style. This mannered simplicity, however,
    conceals an approach to, and treatment of, the subjects chosen
    which is penetratingly modern. Whether Isak Dinesen is writing
    of pride long-hidden and finally, ironically, triumphant as in
    ‘Babette’s Feast,’ or of legends and plays enacted in reality
    and subjected to the unforeseen quirks of destiny, as in ‘The
    Immortal Story’ and ‘Tempests,’ she achieves an unforgettable
    result which is outside the main strength of contemporary
    writing and artistically well above most of it.






                        =_Also by Isak Dinesen_=

                   S E V E N   G O T H I C   T A L E S
                        O U T   O F   A F R I C A
                            (_Karen Blixen_)
                       W I N T E R ’ S   T A L E S
                           L A S T   T A L E S




                              ISAK DINESEN

                               ANECDOTES
                              OF  DESTINY

                                 London
                            MICHAEL  JOSEPH




                          _First published by_
                          _MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD_
                         _26 Bloomsbury Street_
                            _London, W.C.1_
                                 _1958_
                   _© copyright 1958 by Isak Dinesen_

  _Set and printed in Great Britain by Tonbridge Printers Ltd, Peach_
  _Hall Works, Tonbridge, Kent, in Janson ten on thirteen point, on_
  _paper made by Henry Bruce at Currie, Midlothian, and bound by_
                     _James Burn at Esher, Surrey_




                                CONTENTS

              THE DIVER                                    9

              BABETTE’S FEAST                             25

              TEMPESTS                                    67

              THE IMMORTAL STORY                         141

              THE RING                                   211




                               THE DIVER






MIRA JAMA told this story.

In Shiraz lived a young student of theology by the name of Saufe, who
was highly gifted and pure of heart. As he read and re-read the Koran he
became so absorbed in the thought of the angels that his soul dwelt with
them more than with his mother or his brothers, his teachers or
fellow-students or any other people of Shiraz.

He repeated to himself the words of the Holy Book: ‘. . . by the angels,
who tear forth the souls of men with violence, and by those who draw
forth the souls of others with gentleness, by those who glide swimmingly
through the air with the commands of God, by those who precede and usher
the righteous into Paradise, and by those who subordinately govern the
affairs of this world . . .’

‘The throne of God,’ he thought, ‘will needs be placed so sky-high that
the eye of man cannot reach it, and the mind of man reels before it. But
the radiant angels move between God’s azure halls and our dark houses
and schoolrooms. It should be possible for us to see them and
communicate with them.’

‘Birds,’ he reflected, ‘must be, of all creatures, most like angels.
Says not the Scripture: “Whatever moveth both in heaven and on earth
worshippeth God, and the angels also”—and surely the birds move both in
heaven and on earth. Says it not further, of the angels: “They are not
elated with pride so as to disdain their service, they sing, and perform
that which they are commanded”—and surely the birds do the same. If we
endeavour to imitate the birds in all this, we shall become more like
the angels than we are now.

‘But in addition to these things birds have got wings, as have the
angels. It would be good if men could make wings for themselves, to lift
them into high regions, where dwells a clear and eternal light. A bird,
if she strains the capacity of her wings to the utmost, may meet or pass
an angel upon one of the wild paths of the ether. Perhaps the wing of
the swallow has brushed an angel’s foot, or the gaze of the eagle, at
the moment when her strength was almost exhausted, has met the calm eyes
of one of God’s messengers.’

‘I shall,’ he decided, ‘employ my time and my learning in the task of
constructing such wings for my fellow-men.’

So he made up his mind that he would leave Shiraz to study the ways of
the winged creatures.

Till now he had, by teaching rich men’s sons, and by copying out ancient
manuscripts, supported his mother and his small brothers, and they
complained that they would become poor without him. But he argued that,
some time, his achievement would manifold compensate them for the
privations of the present. His teachers, who had foreseen a fine career
for him, came to see him, and expostulated with him that, since the
world had gone on for so long without men communicating with angels, it
must be meant to do so, and might do so in the future as well.

The young Softa respectfully contradicted them.

‘Until this day,’ he said, ‘nobody has seen the trekking-birds take
their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or the rivers
break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which
is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without
having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our
pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home. Also,’
he cried out, carried away by his own course of thought, ‘how much
better would not the world of man go, if he could consult with angels
and from them learn to understand the pattern of the universe, the which
they read with ease because they see it from above.’

So strong was his faith in his undertaking that in the end his teachers
gave up opposing him, and reflected that the fame of their pupil might,
in time to come, make them themselves famous with him.

The young Softa now for a whole year stayed with the birds. He made his
bed in the long grass of the plain, wherein the quail chirps, he climbed
the old trees, in which the ring-dove and the thrush build, found for
himself a seat in the foliage and sat so still there that he did not
disturb them at all. He wandered in high mountains and, just below the
snow-line, neighboured with a pair of eagles, watching them come and go.

He returned to Shiraz with much insight and knowledge gathered, and set
himself to work upon his wings.

In the Koran he read: ‘Praise be unto God, who maketh the angels,
furnished with two, or three, or four pairs of wings,’ and resolved to
make for himself three pairs, one for his shoulders, one for his waist
and one for his feet. During his wanderings he had collected many
hundred flight-feathers of eagles, swans and buzzards, he shut himself
up with these and worked with such zeal that for a long time he did not
see or speak to anyone. But he sang as he worked, and the passers-by
stopped and listened, and said: ‘This young Softa praises God and
performs that which is commanded.’

But when he had finished his first pair of wings, tried them on and felt
their uplifting power, he could not keep his triumph to himself, but
spoke of it to his friends.

At first the great people of Shiraz, the Divines and High Officials,
smiled at the rumour of his feat. But as the rumours spread, and were
asserted by many young people, they grew alarmed.

‘If indeed,’ they said to one another, ‘this flying boy meets and
communicates with angels, the people of Shiraz, as is their wont when
anything unusual happens, will go mad with wonder and joy. And who knows
what new and revolutionary things the angels may not tell him? For after
all,’ they remarked, ‘there may be angels in heaven.’

They pondered the matter, and the oldest amongst them, a minister to the
King, whose name was Mirzah Aghai, said: ‘This young man is dangerous,
inasmuch as he has great dreams. But he is harmless, and will be easy to
handle, inasmuch as he has neglected the study of our real world, in
which dreams are tested. We will, in one single lesson, both prove and
disprove to him the existence of angels. Or are there no young women in
Shiraz?’

The next day he sent for one of the King’s dancers, whose name was
Thusmu. He explained to her as much of the case as he thought it good
for her to know, and promised to reward her if she obeyed him. But if
she failed, another young dancing-girl, her friend, would be promoted to
her place within the royal dancing-troupe, at the festival of gathering
roses for making attar.

In this way it came to pass that one night, when the Softa had gone up
on the roof of his house, to look at the stars and calculate how fast he
might travel from one of them to the other, he heard his name softly
called behind him, and as he turned round caught sight of a slim radiant
shape in a robe of gold and silver, who stood up erect, her feet close
together, on the edge of the roof.

The young man had his mind filled with the idea of angels, he did not
doubt the identity of his visitor, and was not even much surprised, but
only overwhelmed with joy. He sent one glance to the sky, to see if the
flight of the angel had not left a shining wake therein, and the while
the people below pulled down the ladder by which the dancer had ascended
his roof. Then he fell down on his knees before her.

She bent her head kindly to him, and looked at him with dark,
thick-fringed eyes. ‘You have carried me in your heart a long time, my
servant Saufe,’ she whispered, ‘I have come now to inspect that small
lodging of mine. How long I shall stay with you in your house depends
upon your humility and upon your readiness to carry out my will.’

She then sat down cross-legged on the roof, while he still stood on his
knees, and they talked together.

‘We angels,’ she said, ‘do not really need wings to move between heaven
and earth, but our own limbs suffice. If you and I become real friends
it will be the same with you, and you may destroy the wings on which you
are working.’

All trembling with ecstasy he asked her how such flight could possibly
be performed against all laws of science. She laughed at him, with a
laughter like a little clear bell.

‘You men,’ she said, ‘love laws, and argument, and have great faith in
the words that come out through your beards. But I am going to convince
you that we have got a mouth for sweeter debates, and a sweeter mouth
for debates. I am going to teach you how angels and men arrive at
perfect understanding without argument, in the heavenly manner.’ And
this she did.

For a month the Softa’s happiness was so great that his heart gave way
beneath it. He forgot all about his work, as time after time he gave
himself up to the celestial understanding. He said to Thusmu: ‘I see now
how right was the angel Eblis, who said to God: “I am more excellent
than Adam. Thou has created him of clay only, but thou hast created me
of fire.“’ And again he quoted the Scripture to her and sighed: ‘Whoever
is an enemy to the angels is an enemy to God.’

He kept the angel in his house, for she had told him that the sight of
her loveliness would blind the uninitiated people of Shiraz. Only in the
night did she go with him to the house-top, and together they looked at
the new moon.

Now it happened that the dancer became very fond of the theologian, for
he had a lovely face, and his unexpended vigour made him a great lover.
She began to believe him capable of anything. Also she had gathered from
her talk with the old minister that he held the boy and his wings in
fear, as perilous to himself, his colleagues and the state, and she
reflected that she would like to see the old minister, his colleagues
and the state perish. Her tenderness for her young friend made her heart
almost as soft as his.

When the moon grew full and all the town lay bathed in her light, the
two sat close together on the roof. He let his hands run over her and
said: ‘Since I met you, my hands have acquired a life of their own. I
realise that God, when he gave men hands, showed them as great a
loving-kindness as if he had given them wings.’ And he lifted up his
hands and looked at them.

‘Blaspheme not,’ said she and sighed a little. ‘It is not I but you who
are an angel, and indeed your hands have got wonderful strength and life
in them. Let me feel so once more, and then show me, tomorrow, the grand
things which you have made with them.’

To please her he brought her, the next day, all veiled, to his workshop.
Then he saw that rats had eaten his eagles’ flight-feathers, and that
the frame of his wings were broken and scattered about. He looked at
them, and remembered the time when he had worked upon them. But the
dancer wept.

‘I did not know that this was what he meant to do,’ she cried, ‘and is
not Mirzah Aghai a bad man!’

Astounded the Softa asked her what she meant, and in her sorrow and
indignation she told him all.

‘And oh my love,’ she said, ‘I cannot fly, although they tell me that
when I dance I am of an extraordinary lightness. Be not angry with me,
but remember that Mirzah Aghai and his friends are great people, against
whom a poor girl can do nothing. And they are rich, and own lovely
things. And you cannot expect a dancing-girl to be an angel.’

At that he fell upon his face and did not speak a word. Thusmu sat down
beside him and her tears dropped in his hair as she wound it round her
fingers.

‘You are such a wonderful boy,’ she said, ‘with you everything is great
and sweet and truly heavenly, and I love you. So do not worry, dear.’

He lifted his head, looked at her and said: ‘God has appointed none but
angels to preside over Hell-fire.’

‘There is nobody,’ said she, ‘who recites from the Holy Book as
beautifully as you.’

Again he looked at her. ‘And if,’ he said, ‘thou didst behold when, the
angels cause the unbelievers to die. They strike their faces and say
unto them: “Taste ye pain of burning, this shall ye suffer for what your
hands have done.“’

After a while she said: ‘Perhaps you can still repair the wings, and
they may be as good as new.’

‘I cannot repair them,’ he said, ‘and now that your work is done you
must go, since it will be dangerous to you to stay with me. For Mirzah
Aghai and his friends are great men. And you are to dance at the
festival of gathering roses for making attar.’

‘Do you forget Thusmu,’ said she.

‘No,’ said he.

‘Will you come and see me dance?’ she asked.

‘Yes, if I can,’ he answered.

‘I shall always,’ she said gravely, as she got up, ‘hope that you will
come. For without hope one cannot dance.’

And with that she went away sadly.

Saufe now could not stay in his house, he left the door of his workshop
open, and wandered about in the town. But he could not stay in the town,
so went away to the woods and the plains. But he could not bear the
sight or song of the birds and soon returned to the streets. Here at
times he stopped in his wanderings in front of a bird-seller’s shop and
for a long while watched the birds in their cages.

When his friends talked to him he did not recognise them. But when boys
in the streets laughed at him and cried: ‘Behold the Softa who believed
Thusmu to be an angel,’ he stood still, looked at them and said: ‘I
believe so still. It is not my faith in the dancer that I have lost, but
my faith in the angels. Today I cannot remember how, when I was young, I
imagined the angels to look. I feel that they will be terrible to
behold. Whoever is an enemy to the angels is an enemy to God, and
whoever is an enemy to God has no hope left. I have no hope, and without
hope you cannot fly. This is what makes me restless.’

In this way the unfortunate Softa roamed about for a year. I myself,
when I was a small boy, have met him in the streets, wrapped in his
shabby black cloak, and in a darker cloak of everlasting loneliness.

At the end of the year he went away, and was no more seen in Shiraz.



‘This,’ said Mira Jama, ‘is the first part of my story.’



But it befell, many years later, when as a youth I first began to tell
tales to delight the world and make it wiser, that I travelled to the
sandy sea-shores, to the villages of the pearl-fishers, in order to hear
the adventures of these men, and to make them mine.

For many things happen to those who dive to the bottom of the sea.
Pearls in themselves are things of mystery and adventure—if you follow
the career of a single pearl it will give you material for a hundred
tales. And pearls are like poets’ tales: disease turned into loveliness,
at the same time transparent and opaque, secrets of the depths brought
to light to please young women, who will recognise in them the deeper
secrets of their own bosoms.

Later in life I have recounted to Kings, with much success, the stories
which were first told me by these meek and simple fishermen.

Now within their narratives a name came back so often that I grew
curious, and begged them to tell me more about the person who wore it.
Then they informed me that the man had become famous amongst them
because of his audacity and of his exceptional and inexplicable luck. In
fact the name, Elnazred, which they had given him, in their dialect
meant ‘the successful’ or ‘the happy and content’ person. He would dive
down into greater depths and stay down there longer than any other
fisherman, and he never failed to bring up such oysters as contained the
finest pearls. It was believed in the pearl-fishers’ villages that he
had got, in the deep water, a friend—maybe some fair young mermaid or
maybe again some demon of the sea—to guide him. While the other
fishermen were exploited by their trading-companies and would remain
poor all their time, the happy person had made a neat fortune for
himself, had purchased a house and a garden inland, brought his mother
to live there, and married off his brothers. But he still kept for his
own use a small hut on the beach. In spite of his demoniacal reputation
he was, it seemed, on dry land and in daily life, a peaceful man.

I am a poet, and something in these reports brought back to me tales of
long ago. I resolved to look up this successful person and to make him
tell me about himself. First I sought him in vain in his pleasant house
and garden, then one night I walked along the beach to his hut.

The moon was full in the sky, the long grey waves came in one by one,
and everything around me seemed to agree to keep a secret. I looked at
it all, and felt that I was going to hear, and to compose, a beautiful
story.

The man I sought was not in his hut, but was sitting on the sand, gazing
at the sea, and from time to time throwing a pebble into it. The moon
shone upon him, and I saw that he was a pretty, fat man, and that his
tranquil countenance did indeed express harmony and happiness.

I saluted him with reverence, told him my name and explained that I was
out for a walk in the clear, warm night. He returned my greeting
courteously and benevolently and informed me that I was already known to
him by repute as a youth keen to perfect himself in the art of
story-telling. He then invited me to sit down on the sand beside him. He
talked for a while of the moon and the sea. After a pause he remarked
that it was a long time since he had heard a tale told—would I, as we
were sitting so pleasantly together in the clear, warm night, tell him a
story?

I was eager to prove my skill, and also trusted that it might serve to
forward my purpose with him, so I searched my memory for a good tale.
Somehow, I do not know why, the story of the Softa Saufe had been
running in my mind. Now in a low, sweet voice, concordant with the moon
and the waves, I began:

‘In Shiraz lived a young student of theology . . .’

The happy man listened quietly and attentively. But as I came to the
passage of the lovers on the house-top and named the dancer Thusmu, he
lifted up his hand and looked at it. I had taken much trouble in
inventing this pretty moonlight-scene, and it was dear to my poet’s
heart, I recognised the gesture and in great surprise and alarm cried
out: ‘You are the Softa Saufe of Shiraz!’

‘Yes,’ said the happy man.

It is to a poet a thing of awe to find that his story is true. I was
only a boy and a novice at my art—the hair rose on my head and I nearly
got up and ran away. But something in the happy man’s voice held me to
the spot.

‘Once,’ he said, ‘I had the welfare of the Softa Saufe, of whom you have
just told me, much at heart. By this time I had almost forgotten him.
But I am pleased to know that he has got into a story, for that is
probably what he was made for, and in future I shall leave him therein
confidently. Go on with your tale, Mira Jama, story-teller, and let me
hear the end of it.’

I trembled at his demand, but again his manner fascinated me and enabled
me to take up the thread of my story. At first I felt that he was
bestowing an honour upon me and soon, as I went on, that I was bestowing
an honour upon him as well. The triumph of the story-teller filled my
heart. I told my story very movingly and when I had finished it, there
upon that lean sea-sand, with only myself and him under the full moon,
my face was bathed in tears.

The happy man comforted me and begged me not to take a story too much to
heart. So when I had regained my voice I beseeched him to tell me all
that had happened to him after he left Shiraz. For his experiences in
the deep sea, and the luck which had brought him wealth and fame amongst
men, would be sure to make as lovely a story as the one I had told him,
and a more cheerful. Princes, great ladies and dancers, I explained to
him, love a sad tale, so do the beggars by the city walls. But I meant
to be a story-teller to the whole world, and the men of business and
their wives will demand a tale that ends well.

The happy man was silent for a while.

‘What happened to me,’ he then answered me, ‘after I left Shiraz, makes
no story at all.’

‘I am famous amongst men,’ he said, ‘because I am capable of staying at
the bottom of the sea longer than they. This capacity, if you will, is a
small heritage from the Softa of whom you have told me. But that makes
no story. The fishes have been kind to me, and they betray nobody. So
that makes no story.’

All the same,’ he went on after a longer silence, ‘in return for your
tale, and so as not to discourage a young poet, although it makes no
story I shall tell you what happened to me after I left Shiraz.’ He then
began his narration and I listened to him.

‘I shall leave out the explanation of how I got away from Shiraz and
came here, and take up the account of my experiences only where it will
please the men of business and their wives.

For when I first went down to the bottom of the sea, in research of a
certain rare pearl of which at the time I thought much, an old cowfish
with horn-rimmed spectacles took me in hand. As a very small fish she
had been caught in the net of two old fishermen, and had spent a whole
night there, in the bilge-water of their boat, and listening to the talk
of these men, who must have been pious and profound people. But in the
morning, when the net was lifted ashore, she slipped through the meshes
and swam away. Since then she smiles at the others fishes’ distrust of
men. For really, she explains, if a fish knows how to behave herself,
she can easily manage them. She has even come to take an interest in the
nature and the customs of man, and often lectures upon these to an
audience of fishes. She also likes to discuss them with me.

I owe her much, for she holds a great position in the sea, and as her
protégé I have been received everywhere, I owe to her also much of the
wealth and fame which have made me, as you have been told, a happy man.
I owe her more than that, for in our long talks together she has
imparted to me the philosophy which has set me at rest.

This is what she advocates:

‘The fish,’ she proclaims, ‘amongst all creatures is the one most
carefully and accurately made in the image of the Lord. All things work
together for the good of her, and from this we may conclude that she is
called according to his purpose.

Man can move but in one plane, and is tied to the earth. Still the earth
supports him only by the narrow space under the soles of his two feet,
he must bear his own weight and sigh beneath it. He must, so I gathered
from the talk of my old fishermen, climb the hills of the earth
laboriously, it may happen to him to tumble down from them, and the
earth then receives him with hardness. Even the birds, which have got
wings to them, if they do not strain their wings are betrayed by the air
wherein they are set, and flung down.

We fish are upheld and supported to all sides. We lean confidently and
harmoniously upon our element. We move in all dimensions, and whatever
course we take, the mighty waters out of reverence for our virtue change
shape accordingly.

We have got no hands, so cannot construct anything at all, and are never
tempted by vain ambition to alter anything whatever in the universe of
the Lord. We sow not and toil not, therefore no estimates of ours will
turn out wrong, and no expectations fail. The greatest amongst us in
their spheres have reached perfect darkness. And the pattern of the
universe we read with ease, because we see it from below.

We carry with us, in these our floatings about, an account of events
excellently suited to prove to us our privileged position and to
maintain our fellow-feeling. It is known to man also and even takes up
an important place in his history, but in accordance with his infantile
conception of things in general he has but a muddled understanding of
it. I shall record it to you.

When God had created heaven and earth, the earth caused him sore
disappointment. Man, capable of falling, fell almost immediately, and
with him all that was in the dry land. And it repented the Lord that he
had made man, and the beasts of the earth, and the fowls of the air.

But the fish did not fall, and never will fall, for how or whereto would
we fall? So the Lord looked kindly at his fish and was comforted by the
sight of them, since amongst all creation they alone had not
disappointed him.

He resolved to reward the fish according to their merit. So all the
fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven
were opened, and the waters of the flood came upon the earth. And the
waters prevailed and were increased, and all the high hills that were
under the whole heaven were covered. And the waters prevailed
exceedingly, and all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl
and of cattle, and of beast and of every man. All that was on dry land
died.

I shall not, in giving you this report, dwell long upon the pleasantness
of that age and state. For I have got compassion with man, and besides
tact. You yourself, before you found your way to us, may have set your
heart upon cattle, camels and horses, or you may have kept pigeons and
pea-fowl. You are young, and may recently have been attached to some
such creature, of your own species and yet somehow like a bird, as you
name a young woman. (Although, by the way, it would be better for you if
it were not so, for I remember the words of my fishermen, that a young
woman will make her lover taste the pain of burning, and you might
otherwise come to take an interest in one of my own nieces, quite
unusually salty young creatures, who will never make a lover taste any
pain of burning.) I shall but briefly mention that we did have a hundred
and fifty days of abundance, and that blessed plenty appeared with full
horn.

I shall further—this time for my own sake—in the wise and proven
manner of the fish, pass lightly over the fact that man, although fallen
and corrupted, once more succeeded, by craft, in coming out on top.

It does, however, remain open to doubt whether, through this apparent
triumph, man obtained true welfare. How will real security be obtained
by a creature ever anxious about the direction in which he moves, and
attaching vital importance to his rising or falling? How can equilibrium
be obtained by a creature which refuses to give up the idea of hope and
risk?

We fish rest quietly, to all sides supported, within an element which
all the time accurately and unfailingly evens itself out. An element
which may be said to have taken over our personal existence, in as much
as, regardless of individual shape and of whether we be flatfish or
roundfish, our weight and body is calculated according to that quantity
of our surroundings which we displace.

Our experience has proved to us, as your own will some time do it to
you, that one may quite well float without hope, ay, that one will even
float better without it. Therefore, also, our creed states that with us
all hope is left out.

We run no risks. For our changing of place in existence never creates,
or leaves after it, what man calls a way, upon which phenomenon—in
reality no phenomenon but an illusion—he will waste inexplicable
passionate deliberation.

Man, in the end, is alarmed by the idea of time, and unbalanced by
incessant wanderings between past and future. The inhabitants of a
liquid world have brought past and future together in the maxim: _Après
nous le déluge_.’




                            BABETTE’S FEAST






                       I. TWO LADIES OF BERLEVAAG

IN Norway there is a Fjord—a long narrow arm of the sea between tall
mountains—named Berlevaag Fjord. At the foot of the mountains the small
town of Berlevaag looks like a child’s toy-town of little wooden pieces
painted grey, yellow, pink and many other colours.

Sixty-five years ago two elderly ladies lived in one of the yellow
houses. Other ladies at that time wore a bustle, and the two sisters
might have worn it as gracefully as any of them, for they were tall and
willowy. But they had never possessed any article of fashion, they had
dressed demurely in grey or black all their lives. They were christened
Martine and Philippa, after Martin Luther and his friend Philip
Melanchton. Their father had been a Dean and a Prophet, the founder of a
pious ecclesiastic party or sect, which was known and looked up to in
all the country of Norway. Its members renounced the pleasures of this
world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of
illusion, and the true reality was the New Jerusalem towards which they
were longing. They swore not at all, but their communication was yea yea
and nay nay, and they called one another Brother and Sister.

The Dean had married late in life and by now had long been dead. His
disciples were becoming fewer in number every year, whiter or balder and
harder of hearing, they were even becoming somewhat querulous and
quarrelsome, so that sad little schisms would arise in the congregation.
But they still gathered together to read and interpret the Word. They
had all known the Dean’s daughters as little girls, to them they were
even now very small sisters, precious for their dear Father’s sake. In
the yellow house they felt that their Master’s spirit was with them,
here they were at home and at peace.

These two ladies had got a French maid-of-all-work, Babette.

It was a strange thing in a couple of puritan women in a small Norwegian
town, it might even seem to call for an explanation. The people of
Berlevaag found the explanation in the sisters’ piety and kindness of
heart. For the old Dean’s daughters spent their time and their small
income in works of charity, no sorrowful or distressed creature knocked
on their door in vain. And Babette had come to that door twelve years
ago as a friendless fugitive, almost mad with grief and fear.

But the true reason for Babette’s presence in the two sisters’ house was
to be found further back in time and deeper down in the domain of human
hearts.

                          II. MARTINE’S LOVER

As young girls Martine and Philippa had been extraordinarily pretty,
with the almost supernatural fairness of flowering fruit-trees or
perpetual snow. They were never to be seen at balls or parties, but
people turned when they passed in the streets, and the young men of
Berlevaag went to church to watch them walk up the aisle. The younger
sister also had a lovely voice, which on Sundays filled the church with
sweetness. To the Dean’s congregation earthly love, and marriage with
it, were trivial matters, in themselves nothing but illusions, still it
is possible that more than one of the elderly Brothers had been prizing
the maidens far above rubies and had suggested as much to their Father.
But the Dean had declared that to him in his calling his daughters were
his right and left hand—who could want to bereave him of them? And the
fair girls had been brought up to an ideal of heavenly love, they were
all filled with it and did not let themselves be touched by the flames
of this world.

All the same they had upset the peace of heart of two gentlemen from the
great world outside Berlevaag.

There was a young officer named Lorens Loewenhielm, who had led a gay
life in his garrison-town and had run into debt. In the year of 1854,
when Martine was eighteen and Philippa seventeen, his angry Father sent
him on a month’s visit to his Aunt in her old country-house of Fossum
near Berlevaag, where he would have time to meditate and to better his
ways. One day he rode into town and met Martine in the market-place. He
looked down at the pretty girl, and she looked up at the fine horseman.
When she had passed him and disappeared he was not certain whether he
was to believe his own eyes.

In the Loewenhielm family there existed a legend to the effect that long
ago a gentleman of the name had married a Huldre, a female mountain
spirit of Norway, who is so fair that the air round her shines and
quivers. Since then from time to time members of the family had been
second-sighted. Young Lorens till now had not been aware of any
particular spiritual gift in his own nature. But at this one moment
there rose before his eyes a sudden, mighty vision of a higher and purer
life, with no creditors, dunning-letters or parental lectures, with no
secret, unpleasant pangs of conscience and with a gentle, golden-haired
angel to guide and reward him.

Through his pious Aunt he got admission to the Dean’s house, and saw
that Martine was even lovelier without a bonnet. He followed her slim
figure with adoring eyes, but he loathed and despised the figure which
he himself cut in her nearness. He was amazed and shocked by the fact
that he could find nothing at all to say, and no inspiration in the
glass of water before him. ‘Mercy and Truth, dear brethren, have met
together,’ said the Dean. ‘Righteousness and Bliss have kissed one
another.’ And the young man’s thoughts were with the moment when Lorens
and Martine should be kissing one another. He repeated his visit time
after time, and each time seemed to himself to grow smaller and more
insignificant and contemptible.

When in the evening he came back to his Aunt’s house he kicked his
shining riding-boots to the corners of his room, he even laid his head
on the table and wept.

On the last day of his stay he made a last attempt to communicate his
feelings to Martine. Till now it had been easy to him to tell a pretty
girl that he loved her, but the tender words stuck in his throat as he
looked into this maiden’s face. When he had said good-bye to the party,
Martine saw him to the door with a candlestick in her hand. The light
shone on her mouth and threw upwards the shadows of her long eyelashes.
He was about to leave in dumb despair when on the threshold he suddenly
seized her hand and pressed it to his lips.

‘I am going away for ever!’ he cried, ‘I shall never, never see you
again! For I have learned here that Fate is hard, and that in this world
there are things which are impossible!’

When he was once more back in his garrison-town he thought his adventure
over, and found that he did not like to think of it at all. While the
other young officers talked of their love-affairs he was silent upon
his. For seen from the officers’ mess, and so to say with its eyes, it
was a pitiful business. How had it come to pass that a lieutenant of the
hussars had let himself be defeated and frustrated by a set of
long-faced sectarians, in the bare-floored rooms of an old Dean’s house?

Then he got afraid, a panic came upon him. Was it the family-madness
which made him still carry with him the dream-like picture of a maiden
so fair that she made the air round her shine with purity and holiness?
He did not want to be a dreamer, he wanted to be like his
brother-officers.

So he pulled himself together, and in the greatest effort of his young
life made up his mind to forget what had happened to him in Berlevaag.
From now, he resolved, he would look forward, not back. He would
concentrate on his career, and the day was to come when he would cut a
brilliant figure in a brilliant world.

His mother was pleased with the result of his visit to Fossum, and in
her letters expressed her gratitude to his Aunt. She did not know by
what queer, winding roads her son had reached this happy moral
standpoint.

The ambitious young officer soon caught the attention of his superiors
and made unusually quick advancement. He was sent to France and Russia,
and on his return he married a lady-in-waiting to Queen Sophia. In these
high circles he moved with grace and ease, pleased with his surroundings
and with himself. He even in course of time benefited from words and
turns which had stuck in his mind from the Dean’s house, for piety was
now in fashion at Court.

In the yellow house of Berlevaag Philippa sometimes turned the talk to
the handsome, silent young man who had so suddenly made his appearance,
and so suddenly disappeared again. Her elder sister would then answer
her gently, with a still, clear face, and find other things to discuss.

                         III. PHILIPPA’S LOVER

A year later a more distinguished person even than Lieutenant
Loewenhielm came to Berlevaag.

The great singer Achille Papin of Paris for a week had sung at the Royal
Opera of Stockholm, and had carried away his audience there as
everywhere. One evening a lady of the Court, who had been dreaming of a
romance with the artist, had described to him the wild, grandiose
scenery of Norway. His own romantic nature was stirred by the narration,
and he had laid his way back to France round the Norwegian coast. But he
felt small in the sublime surroundings, with nobody to talk to he fell
into that melancholy in which he saw himself as an old man, at the end
of his career—till on a Sunday, when he could think of nothing else to
do, he went to church and heard Philippa sing.

Then in one single moment he knew and understood all. For here were the
snowy summits, the wild flowers and the white Nordic nights, translated
into his own language of music, and brought him in a young woman’s
voice. Like Lorens Loewenhielm he had a vision.

‘Almighty God,’ he thought, ‘thy power is without end, and thy mercy
reacheth into the clouds! And here is a Primadonna of the Opera who will
lay Paris at her feet.’

Achille Papin at this time was a handsome man of forty, with curly black
hair and a red mouth. The idolisation of nations had not spoilt him, he
was a kind-hearted person and honest towards himself.

He went straight to the yellow house, gave his name—which told the Dean
nothing—and explained that he was staying in Berlevaag for his health,
and the while would be happy to take on the young lady as a pupil.

He did not mention the Opera of Paris, but described at length how
beautifully Miss Philippa would come to sing in church, to the glory of
God.

For a moment he forgot himself, for when the Dean asked whether he was a
Roman Catholic he answered according to truth, and the old clergyman,
who had never seen a live Roman Catholic, grew a little pale. All the
same the Dean was pleased to speak French, which reminded him of his
young days, when he had studied the works of the great French Lutheran
writer Lefèvre d’Etaples. And as nobody could long withstand Achille
Papin when he had really set his heart on a matter, in the end the
Father gave his consent, and remarked to his daughter: ‘God’s paths run
across the Sea and the snowy mountains, where man’s eye sees no track.’

So the great French singer and the young Norwegian novice set to work
together. Achille’s expectation grew into certainty and his certainty
into ecstasy. He thought: ‘I have been wrong in believing that I was
growing old. My greatest triumphs are before me! The world will once
more believe in miracles when she and I sing together!’

After a while he could not keep his dreams to himself, but told Philippa
about them.

She would, he said, rise like a star above any Diva of the past or
present. The Emperor and Empress, the Princess, great ladies and
bel-esprits of Paris would listen to her, and shed tears. The common
people too would worship her, and she would bring consolation and
strength to the wronged and oppressed. When she left the Grand Opera
upon her master’s arm the crowd would unharness her horses, and
themselves draw her to the Café Anglais, where a magnificent supper
awaited her.

Philippa did not repeat these prospects to her Father or her Sister, and
this was the first time in her life that she had had a secret from them.

The teacher now gave his pupil the part of Zerlina in Mozart’s Opera
‘Don Giovanni’ to study. He himself, as often before, sang Don
Giovanni’s part.

He had never in his life sung as now. In the duet of the second
act—which is called the seduction-duet—he was swept off his feet by
the heavenly music and the heavenly voices. As the last melting note
died away he seized Philippa’s hands, drew her towards him and kissed
her solemnly, as a bridegroom might kiss his bride before the altar.
Then he let her go. For the moment was too sublime for any further word
or movement, Mozart himself was looking down on the two.

Philippa went home, told her Father that she did not want any more
singing-lessons and asked him to write and tell Monsieur Papin so.

The Dean said: ‘And God’s paths run across the rivers, my child.’

When Achille got the Dean’s letter he sat immovable for an hour. He
thought: ‘I have been wrong. My day is over. Never again shall I be the
divine Papin. And this poor weedy garden of the world has lost its
nightingale!’

A little later he thought: ‘I wonder what is the matter with that hussy?
Did I kiss her, by any chance?’

In the end he thought: ‘I have lost my life for a kiss, and I have no
remembrance at all of the kiss! Don Giovanni kissed Zerlina, and Achille
Papin pays for it! Such is the fate of the artist!’

In the Dean’s house Martine felt that the matter was deeper than it
looked, and searched her sister’s face. For a moment, slightly
trembling, she too imagined that the Roman Catholic gentleman might have
tried to kiss Philippa. She did not imagine that her sister might have
been surprised and frightened by something in her own nature.

Achille Papin took the first boat from Berlevaag.

Of this visitor from the great world the sisters spoke but little, they
lacked the words in which to discuss him.

                        IV. A LETTER FROM PARIS

Fifteen years later, on a rainy June night of 1871, the bell-rope of the
yellow house was pulled violently three times. The mistresses of the
house opened the door to a massive, dark, deadly pale woman with a
bundle on her arm, who stared at them, took a step forward and fell down
on the doorstep in a dead swoon. When the frightened ladies had restored
her to life she sat up, gave them one more glance from her sunken eyes
and, all the time without a word, fumbled in her wet clothes and brought
out a letter which she handed to them.

The letter was addressed to them all right, but it was written in
French. The sisters put their heads together and read it. It ran as
follows:

    Ladies!

    Do you remember me? Ah, when I think of you I have the heart
    filled with wild lilies-of-the-valley! Will the memory of a
    Frenchman’s devotion bend your hearts to save the life of a
    Frenchwoman?

    The bearer of this letter, Madame Babette Hersant, like my
    divine Empress herself has had to flee from Paris. Civil war has
    raged in our streets. French hands have shed French blood. The
    noble Communards, standing up for the Rights of Man have been
    crushed and annihilated. Madame Hersant’s husband and son, both
    eminent ladies’ hairdressers, have been shot. She herself was
    arrested as a Pétroleuse—(which word is used here for women who
    set fire to houses with paraffin)—and has narrowly escaped the
    bloodstained hands of General Galliffet. She has lost all she
    possessed and dares not remain in France.

    A nephew of hers is Cook to the boat _Anna Colbioernsson_, bound
    for Christiania—(as I believe the capital of Norway)—and he
    has obtained shipping opportunity for his Aunt. This is now her
    last sad resort!

    Knowing that I was once a visitor to your magnificent country
    she comes to me, asks me if there be any good people in Norway
    and begs me, if it be so, to supply her with a letter to them.
    The two words of ‘good people’ immediately bring before my eyes
    your picture, sacred to my heart. I send her to you. How she is
    to get from Christiania to Berlevaag I know not, having
    forgotten the map of Norway. But she is a Frenchwoman, and you
    will find that in her misery she has still got resourcefulness,
    majesty and true stoicism.

    I envy her in her despair: she is to see your faces.

    As you receive her mercifully, send a merciful thought back to
    France.

    For fifteen years, Miss Philippa, I have grieved that your voice
    should never fill the Grand Opera of Paris. When tonight I think
    of you, no doubt surrounded by a gay and loving family, and of
    myself: grey, lonely, forgotten by those who once applauded and
    adored me, I feel that you may have chosen the better part in
    life. What is fame? What is glory?—The grave awaits us all!

    And yet, my lost Zerlina, and yet, soprano of the snow!—as I
    write this I feel that the grave is not the end. In Paradise I
    shall hear your voice again. There you will sing, without fears
    or scruples, as God meant you to sing. There you will be the
    great artist that God meant you to be. Ah! how you will enchant
    the angels.

    Babette can cook.

    Deign to receive, my ladies, the humble homage of the friend who
    was once

                                                      Achille Papin

At the bottom of the page, as a P.S. were neatly printed the first two
bars of the duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina like this:

[Illustration: (music score)]

The two sisters till now had only kept a small servant of fifteen to
help them in the house, and they felt that they could not possibly
afford to take on an elderly, experienced housekeeper. But Babette told
them that she would serve Monsieur Papin’s good people for nothing, and
that she would take service with nobody else. If they sent her away she
must die.

Babette now remained in the house of the Dean’s daughters for twelve
years, until the time of this tale.

                             V. STILL LIFE

Babette had arrived haggard and wild-eyed like a hunted animal, but in
her new, friendly surroundings she soon acquired all the appearance of a
respectable and trusted servant. She had appeared to be a beggar, she
turned out to be a conqueror. Her quiet countenance and her steady, deep
glance had magnetic qualities: under her eyes things moved, noiselessly,
into their proper places.

Her mistresses at first had trembled a little, just as the Dean had once
done, at the idea of receiving a Papist under their roof. But they did
not like to worry a hard-tried fellow creature with catechisation,
neither were they quite sure of their French. They silently agreed that
the example of a good Lutheran life would be the best means of
converting their servant. In this way Babette’s presence in the house
became so as to say a moral spur to its inhabitants.

They had distrusted Monsieur Papin’s assertion that Babette could cook.
In France, they knew, people ate frogs. They showed Babette how to
prepare a split cod and an ale-and-bread-soup: during the demonstration
the Frenchwoman’s face became absolutely expressionless. But within a
week Babette cooked a split cod and an ale-and-bread-soup as well as
anybody born and bred in Berlevaag.

The idea of French luxury and extravagance next alarmed and dismayed the
Dean’s daughters. The first day after Babette had entered their service
they took her before them and explained to her that they were poor, and
that to them luxurious fare was sinful. Their own food must be as plain
as possible, it was the soup-pails and baskets for their poor that
signified. Babette nodded her head: as a girl, she informed her ladies,
she had been Cook to an old priest who was a saint. Upon this the
sisters resolved to surpass the French priest in ascetism. And they soon
found that from the day when Babette took over the housekeeping its cost
was miraculously reduced, and the soup-pails and baskets acquired a new,
mysterious power to stimulate and strengthen their poor and sick.

The world outside the yellow house too came to acknowledge Babette’s
excellence. The refugee never learned to speak the language of her new
country, but in her broken Norwegian she beat down the prices of
Berlevaag’s flintiest tradesmen. She was held in awe on the quay and in
the market-place.

The old Brothers and Sisters, who had first looked askance at the
foreign woman in their midst, felt a happy change in their little
Sisters’ life, rejoiced at it and benefited by it. They found that
troubles and cares had been conjured away from their existence, and that
now they had money to give away, time for the confidences and complaints
of their old friends and peace for meditating on heavenly matters. In
course of time not a few of the Brotherhood included Babette’s name in
their prayers, and thanked God for the speechless stranger, the dark
Martha in the house of their two fair Marys. The stone which the
builders had almost refused had become the head-stone of the corner.

The ladies in the yellow house were the only ones to know that their
corner-stone had a mysterious and alarming feature to it, as if it was
somehow related to the Black Stone of Mecca, the Kaaba itself.

Hardly ever did Babette refer to her past life. When in early days the
sisters had gently condoled her upon her losses, they had been met with
that majesty and stoicism of which Monsieur Papin had written. ‘What
will you ladies?’ she had answered, shrugging her shoulders, ‘it is
Fate.’

But one day she suddenly informed them that she had for many years held
a ticket in a French lottery, and that a faithful friend in Paris was
still renewing it for her every year. Some time she might win the grand
prix of ten thousand francs. At that they felt that their Cook’s old
carpet-bag was made from a magic carpet, at a given moment she might
mount it, and be carried off, back to Paris.

And it happened when Martine or Philippa spoke to Babette that they
would get no answer, and would wonder if she had even heard what they
said. They would find her in the kitchen, her elbows on the table and
her temples on her hands, lost in the study of a heavy black book which
they secretly suspected to be a popish prayer-book. Or she would sit
immovable on the three-legged kitchen-chair, her strong hands in her lap
and her dark eyes wide open, as enigmatical and fatal as a Phytia upon
her tripod. At such moments they realised that Babette was deep, and
that in the soundings of her being there were passions, there were
memories and longings of which they knew nothing at all.

A little cold shiver ran through them, and in their hearts they thought:
‘Perhaps after all she had indeed been a Pétroleuse.’

                        VI. BABETTE’S GOOD LUCK

The fifteenth of December was the Dean’s hundredth anniversary.

His daughters had long been looking forward to this day and had wished
to celebrate it, as if their dear father were still among his disciples.
Therefore it had been to them a sad and incomprehensible thing that in
this last year discord and dissension had been raising their heads in
his flock. They had endeavoured to make peace, but they were aware that
they had failed. It was as if the fine and lovable vigour of their
father’s personality had been evaporating, such as Hoffmann’s anodyne
will evaporate when left on the shelf in a bottle without a cork. And
his departure had left the door ajar to things hitherto unknown to the
two sisters, much younger than his spiritual children. From a past half
a century back, when the unshepherded sheep had been running astray in
the mountains, uninvited dismal guests pressed through the opening on
the heels of the worshippers and seemed to darken the little rooms and
to let in the cold. The sins of old brothers and sisters came, with late
piercing repentance like a toothache, and the sins of others against
them came back with bitter resentment, like a poisoning of the blood.

There were in the congregation two old women who before their conversion
had spread slander upon one another, and thereby to one another ruined a
marriage and an inheritance. Today they could not remember happenings of
yesterday or a week ago, but they remembered these forty year old wrong
and kept going through the ancient accounts—they scowled at one
another. There was an old brother who suddenly called to mind how
another brother, forty-five years ago, had cheated him in a deal, he
could have wished to dismiss the matter from his mind, but it stuck
there like a deep-seated, festering splinter. There was a grey, honest
skipper and a furrowed, pious widow, who in their young days, while she
was the wife of another man, had been sweethearts. Of late each had
begun to grieve, while shifting the burden of guilt from his own
shoulders to those of the other and back again, and to worry about the
possible terrible consequences, through all eternity, brought upon him
by one who had pretended to hold him dear. They grew pale at the
meetings in the yellow house and avoided one another’s eyes.

As the birthday drew nearer, Martine and Philippa felt the
responsibility growing heavier. Would their ever faithful father look
down to his daughters and call them by name as unjust stewards? Between
them they talked matters over and repeated their father’s saying, that
God’s paths were running even across the salt sea and the snowclad
mountains, where man’s eye sees no track.

One day of this summer the post brought a letter from France to Madame
Babette Hersant. This in itself was a surprising thing, for during these
twelve years Babette had received no letter. What, her mistresses
wondered, could it contain? They took it into the kitchen to watch her
open and read it. Babette opened it, read it, lifted her eyes from it to
her ladies’ faces and told them that her number in the French lottery
had come out. She had won ten thousand francs.

The news made such an impression on the two sisters that for a full
minute they could not speak a word. They themselves were used to
receiving their modest pension in small instalments, it was difficult to
them even to imagine the sum of ten thousand francs in a pile. Then they
pressed Babette’s hand, their own hands trembling a little. They had
never before pressed the hand of a person who the moment before had come
into possession of ten thousand francs.

After a while they realised that the happenings concerned themselves as
well as Babette. The country of France, they felt, was slowly rising
before their servant’s horizon, and correspondingly their own existence
was sinking beneath their feet. The ten thousand francs which made her
rich—how poor did they not make the house she had served! One by one
old forgotten cares and worries began to peep out at them from the four
corners of the kitchen. The congratulations died on their lips, and the
two pious women were ashamed of their own silence.

During the following days they announced the news to their friends with
joyous faces, but it did them good to see these friends’ faces grow sad
as they listened to them. Nobody, it was felt in the Brotherhood, could
really blame Babette: birds will return to their nests and human beings
to the country of their birth. But did that good and faithful servant
realise that in going away from Berlevaag she would be leaving many old
and poor people in distress? Their little sisters would have no more
time for the sick and sorrowful. Indeed, indeed, lotteries were ungodly
affairs.

In due time the money arrived through offices in Christiania and
Berlevaag. The two ladies helped Babette to count it, and gave her a box
to keep it in. They handled, and became familiar with, the ominous bits
of paper.

They dared not question Babette upon the date of her departure. Dared
they hope that she would remain with them over the fifteenth of
December?

The mistresses had never been quite certain how much of their private
conversation the Cook followed or understood. So they were surprised
when on a September evening Babette came into the drawing-room, more
humble or subdued than they had ever seen her, to ask a favour. She
begged them, she said, to let her cook a celebration-dinner on the
Dean’s birthday.

The ladies had not intended to have any dinner at all. A very plain
supper with a cup of coffee was the most sumptuous meal to which they
had ever asked any guest to sit down. But Babette’s dark eyes were as
eager and pleading as a dog’s, they agreed to let her have her way. At
this the Cook’s face lighted up.

But she had got more to say. She wanted, she said, to cook a French
dinner, a real French dinner, for this one time. Martine and Philippa
looked at one another. They did not like the idea, they felt that they
did not know what it might imply. But the very strangeness of the
request disarmed them. They had no arguments wherewith to meet the
proposition of cooking a real French dinner.

Babette drew a long sigh of happiness, but still she did not move. She
had got one more prayer to make. She begged that her mistresses would
allow her to pay for the French dinner with her own money.

‘No Babette!’ the ladies exclaimed. How could she imagine such a thing?
Did she believe that they would allow her to spend her precious money on
food and drink—or on them? No Babette, indeed.

Babette took a step forward. There was something formidable in the move,
like a wave rising. Had she stepped forth like this, in 1871, to plant a
red flag on a barricade? She spoke, in her queer Norwegian, with
classical French eloquence, her voice was like a song.

Ladies! Had she ever, during twelve years, asked you a favour? No! And
why not?—ladies, you who say your prayers every day, can you imagine
what it means to a human heart to have no prayer to make? What would
Babette have had to pray for? Nothing! Tonight she had got a prayer to
make, from the bottom of her heart. Do you not then feel tonight, my
ladies, that it becomes you to grant it her, with such joy as that with
which the good God has granted you your own?

The ladies for a while said nothing. Babette was right, it was her first
request these twelve years, very likely it would be her last. They
thought the matter over. After all, they told themselves, their Cook was
now better off than they, and a dinner could make no difference to a
person who owned ten thousand francs.

Their consent in the end completely changed Babette. They saw that as a
young woman she had been beautiful. And they wondered whether in this
hour they themselves had not, for the very first time, become to her the
‘good people’ of Achille Papin’s letter.

                            VII. THE TURTLE

In November Babette went for a journey.

She had preparations to make, she told her mistresses, and would need a
leave of a week or ten days. Her nephew, who had once got her to
Christiania, was still sailing to that town, she must see him and talk
things over with him. Babette was a bad sailor, she had spoken of her
one sea-voyage, from France to Norway, as of the most horrible
experience of her life. Now she was strangely collected, the ladies felt
that her heart was already in France.

After ten days she came back to Berlevaag.

Had she got things arranged as she wished? the ladies asked. Yes, she
answered, she had seen her nephew and given him a list of the goods
which he was to bring her from France. To Martine and Philippa this was
a dark saying, but they did not care to talk of her departure, so they
asked her no more questions.

Babette was somewhat nervous during the next weeks. But one December day
she triumphantly announced to her mistresses that the goods had come to
Christiania, had been trans-shipped there, and on this very day had
arrived at Berlevaag. She had, she added, engaged an old man with a
wheelbarrow to have them conveyed from the harbour to the house.

But what goods, Babette? the ladies asked. Why, Mesdames, Babette
replied, the ingredients for the birthday-dinner. Praise to be God, they
had all arrived in good condition from Paris.

By this time Babette, like the bottled demon of the fairy-tale, had
swelled and grown to such dimensions that her mistresses felt small
before her. They now saw the French dinner coming upon them, a thing of
incalculable nature and range. But they had never in their life broken a
promise, they gave themselves into their Cook’s hands.

All the same when Martine saw a barrow-load of bottles wheeled into the
kitchen, she stood still. She touched the bottles and lifted up one.
‘What is there in this bottle, Babette?’ she asked in a low voice, ‘not
wine?’ ‘Wine, Madame!’ Babette answered, ‘no, Madame, it is a Clos
Vougeout 1846!’ After a moment she added: ‘From Philippe, in Rue
Montorgueil!’ Martine had never suspected that wines could have names to
them, and was put to silence.

Later in the evening she opened the door to a ring, and was once more
faced with the wheelbarrow, this time with a red-haired sailor-boy
behind it, as if the old man had by this time been worn out. The youth
grinned at her as he lifted a big, undefinable object from the barrow.
In the light of the lamp it looked like some greenish-black stone, but
when sat down on the kitchen floor it suddenly shot out a snake-like
head and moved it slightly from side to side. Martine had seen pictures
of tortoises, and had even as a child owned a pet tortoise but this
thing was monstrous in size and terrible to behold. She backed out of
the kitchen without a word.

She dared not tell her sister what she had seen. She passed an almost
sleepless night, she thought of her Father and felt that on his very
birthday she and her sister were lending his house to a witches’
sabbath. When at last she fell asleep she had a terrible dream, in which
she saw Babette poisoning the old Brothers and Sisters, Philippa and
herself.

Early in the morning she got up, put on her grey cloak and went out in
the dark street. She walked from house to house, opened her heart to her
Brothers and Sisters, and confessed her guilt. She and Philippa, she
said, had meant no harm, they had granted their servant a prayer and had
not foreseen what might come of it. Now she could not tell what, on her
Father’s birthday, her guests would be given to eat or drink. She did
not actually mention the turtle, but it was present in her face and
voice.

The old people, as has already been told, had all known Martine and
Philippa as little girls, they had seen them cry bitterly over a broken
doll. Martine’s tears brought tears into their own eyes. They gathered
in the afternoon and talked the problem over.

Before they again parted they promised one another that for their little
sisters’ sake they would, on the great day, be silent upon all matters
of food and drink. Nothing that might be set before them, be it even
frogs or snails, should wring a word from their lips.

‘Even so,’ said a white-bearded brother, ‘the tongue is a little member
and boasteth great things. The tongue can no man tame, it is an unruly
evil, full of deadly poison. On the day of our master we will cleanse
our tongues of all taste and purify them of all delight or disgust of
the senses, keeping and preserving them for the higher functions of
praise and thanksgiving.’

So few things ever happened in the quiet existence of the Berlevaag
brotherhood that they were at this moment deeply moved and elevated.
They shook hands on their vow, and it was to them as if they were doing
so before the face of their master.

                             VIII. THE HYMN

On Sunday morning it began to snow. The white flakes fell fast and
thick, the small window-panes of the yellow house pasted with snow.

Early in the day a groom from Fossum brought the two sisters a note. Old
Mrs Loewenhielm still resided in her country-house. She was now ninety
years old and stone-deaf, and she had lost all sense of smell or taste.
But she had been one of the Dean’s first supporters, and neither her
infirmity nor the sledge-journey would keep her from doing honour to his
memory. Now, she wrote, her nephew, General Lorens Loewenhielm, had
unexpectedly come on a visit, he had spoken with deep veneration of the
Dean, and she begged permission to bring him with her. It would do him
good, for the dear boy seemed to be in somewhat low spirits.

Martine and Philippa at this remembered the young officer and his
visits, it relieved their present anxiety to talk of old happy days.
They wrote back that General Loewenhielm would be welcome. They also
called in Babette to inform her that there would now be twelve for
dinner, they added that their latest guest had lived in Paris for
several years. Babette seemed pleased with the news, and assured them
that there would be food enough.

The hostesses made their little preparations in the sitting-room. They
dared not set foot in the kitchen, for Babette had mysteriously nosed
out a cook’s mate from a ship in the harbour—the same boy, Martine
realised, who had brought in the turtle—to assist her in the kitchen
and to wait at table, and now the dark woman and the red-haired boy,
like some witch with her familiar spirit, had taken possession of these
regions. The ladies could not tell what fires had been burning or what
cauldrons bubbling there from before daybreak.

Table-linen and plate had been magically ironed and polished, glasses
and decanters brought, Babette only knew from where. The Dean’s house
did not possess twelve dining-room chairs, the long horse-hair covered
sofa had been moved from the parlour to the dining-room, and the
parlour, ever sparsely furnished, now looked strangely bare and big
without it.

Martine and Philippa did their best to embellish the domain left to
them. Whatever troubles might be in wait for their guests, in any case
they should not be cold, all day the sisters fed the towering old stove
with birch-knots. They hung a garland of juniper round their father’s
portrait on the wall, and placed candlesticks on their mother’s small
working-table beneath it, they burned juniper-twigs to make the room
smell nice. The while they wondered if in this weather the sledge from
Fossum would get through. In the end they put on their old black best
frocks and their confirmation gold crosses. They sat down, folded their
hands in their laps and committed themselves unto God.

The old Brothers and Sisters arrived in small groups, and entered the
room slowly and solemnly.

This low room with its bare floor and scanty furniture was dear to the
Dean’s disciples. Outside its windows lay the great world. Seen from in
here the great world in its winter-whiteness was ever prettily bordered
in pink, blue and red by the row of hyacinths on the window-sills. And
in summer, when the windows were open, the great world had a softly
moving frame of white muslin curtains to it.

Tonight the guests were met on the doorstep with warmth and sweet smell,
and they were looking into the face of their beloved Master, wreathed
with evergreen. Their hearts like their numb fingers thawed.

One very old Brother after a few moment’s silence in his trembling voice
struck up one of the Master’s own hymns:

                     ‘Jerusalem, my happy home
                     name ever dear to me . . .’

One by one the other voices fell in, thin quivering women’s voices,
ancient seafaring Brothers’ deep growls, and above them all Philippa’s
clear soprano, a little worn with age but still angelic. Unwittingly the
choir had seized one another’s hands. They sang the hymn to the end, but
could not bear to cease and joined in another:

               ‘Take not thought for food or raiment
               careful one, so anxiously . . .’

The mistresses of the house were somewhat reassured by it, the words of
the third verse:

               ‘Wouldst thou give a stone, a reptile
               to thy pleading child for food? . . .’

went straight to Martine’s heart and inspired her with hope.

In the middle of this hymn sledge-bells were heard outside, the guests
from Fossum had arrived.

Martine and Philippa went to receive them and saw them into the parlour.
Mrs Loewenhielm with age had become quite small, her face colourless
like parchment, and very still. By her side General Loewenhielm, tall,
broad and ruddy, in his bright uniform, his breast covered with
decorations, strutted and shone like an ornamental bird, a golden
pheasant or a peacock, in this sedate party of black crows and jackdaws.

                        IX. GENERAL LOEWENHIELM

General Loewenhielm had been driving from Fossum to Berlevaag in a
strange mood. He had not visited this part of the country for thirty
years, he had come now to get a rest from his busy life at Court, and he
had found no rest. The old house of Fossum was peaceful enough and
seemed somehow pathetically small after the Tuileries and the Winter
Palace. But it held one disquieting figure: young Lieutenant Loewenhielm
walked in its rooms.

General Loewenhielm saw the handsome, slim figure pass close by him. And
as he passed the boy gave the elder man a short glance and a smile, the
haughty, arrogant smile which youth gives to age. The General might have
smiled back, kindly and a little sadly, such as age smiles at youth, if
it had not been that he was really in no mood to smile, he was, as his
Aunt had written, in low spirits.

General Loewenhielm had obtained everything that he had striven for in
life and was admired and envied by everyone. Only he himself knew of a
queer fact, which jarred with his prosperous existence: that he was not
perfectly happy. Something was wrong somewhere, and he carefully felt
his mental self all over, as one feels a finger over to determine the
place of a deep-seated, invisible thorn.

He was in high favour with Royalty, he had done well in his calling, he
had friends everywhere. The thorn sat in none of these places.

His wife was a brilliant woman and still good looking. Perhaps she
neglected her own house a little for her visits and parties, she changed
her servants every three months and the General’s meals at home were
served unpunctually. The General, who valued good food highly in life,
here felt a slight bitterness against his lady, and secretly blamed her
for the indigestion from which he sometimes suffered. Still the thorn
was not here either.

Nay, but an absurd thing had lately been happening to General
Loewenhielm: he would find himself worrying about his immortal soul. Did
he have any reason for doing so? He was a moral person, loyal to his
king, his wife and his friends, an example to everybody. But there were
moments when it seemed to him that the world was not a moral, but a
mystic, concern. He looked into the mirror, examined the row of
decorations on his breast and sighed to himself: ‘Vanity, vanity, all is
vanity!’

The strange meeting at Fossum had compelled him to make out the balance
sheet of his life.

Young Lorens Loewenhielm had attracted dreams and fancies as a flower
attracts bees and butterflies. He had fought to free himself of them, he
had fled and they had followed. He had been scared of the Huldre of the
family legend and had declined her invitation to come into the mountain,
he had firmly refused the gift of second-sight.

The elderly Lorens Loewenhielm found himself wishing that one little
dream would come his way, and a grey moth of dusk look him up before
nightfall. He found himself longing for the faculty of second-sight, as
a blind man will long for the normal faculty of vision.

Can the sum of a row of victories in many years and in many countries be
a defeat? General Loewenhielm had fulfilled Lieutenant Loewenhielm’s
wishes and had more than satisfied his ambitions. It might be held that
he had gained the whole world to him. And it had come to this, that the
stately, wordly-wise older man now turned towards the naïve young figure
to ask him, gravely, even bitterly, in what he had profited? Somewhere
something had been lost.

When Mrs Loewenhielm had told her nephew of the Dean’s anniversary and
he had made up his mind to go with her to Berlevaag, his decision had
not been an ordinary acception of a dinner invitation.

He would, he resolved, tonight make up his account with young Lorens
Loewenhielm, who had felt himself to be a shy and sorry figure in the
house of the Dean, and who in the end had shaken its dust off his
riding-boots. He would let the youth prove to him, one and for all, that
thirty-one years ago he had made the right choice. The low rooms, the
haddock and the glass of water on the table before him should all be
called in to bear evidence that in their milieu the existence of Lorens
Loewenhielm would soon have become sheer misery.

He let his mind stray far away. In Paris he had once won a _concours
hippique_ and had been fêted by high French cavalry officers, princes
and dukes among them. A dinner had been given in his honour at the
finest restaurant of the city. Opposite him at table was a noble lady, a
famous beauty whom he had long been courting. In the midst of dinner she
had lifted her dark velvet eyes above the rim of her champagne glass and
without words had promised to make him happy. In the sledge he now all
of a sudden remembered that he had then, for a second, seen Martine’s
face before him and had rejected it.

For a while he listened to the tinkling of the sledge-bells, then he
smiled a little as he reflected how he would tonight come to dominate
the conversation round that same table by which young Lorens Loewenhielm
had sat mute.

Large snowflakes fell densely, behind the sledge the tracks were wiped
out quickly. General Loewenhielm sat immovable by the side of his aunt,
his chin sunk in the high fur-collar of his coat.

                          X. BABETTE’S DINNER

As Babette’s red-haired familiar opened the door to the dining-room, and
the guests slowly crossed the threshold, they let go one another’s hands
and became silent. But the silence was sweet, for in spirit they still
held hands and were still singing.

Babette had set a row of candles down the middle of the table, the small
flames shone on the black coats and frocks and on the one scarlet
uniform, and were reflected in clear, moist eyes.

General Loewenhielm saw Martine’s face in the candle-light as he had
seen it when the two parted, thirty years ago. What traces would thirty
years of Berlevaag-life have left on it? The golden hair was now
streaked with silver, the flower-like face had slowly been turned into
alabaster. But how serene was the forehead, how quietly trustful the
eyes, how pure and sweet the mouth, as if no hasty word had ever passed
its lips.

When all were seated, the eldest member of the congregation said grace
in the Dean’s own words:

              ‘May my food my body maintain,
              may my body my soul sustain,
              may my soul in deed and word
              give thanks for all things to the Lord.’

At the word of ‘food’ the guests, with their old heads bent over their
folded hands, remembered how they had vowed not to utter a word about
the subject, and in their hearts they reinforced the vow: they would not
even give it a thought! They were sitting down to a meal, well, so had
people done at the wedding of Cana. And grace has chosen to manifest
itself there, in the very wine, as fully as anywhere.

Babette’s boy filled a small glass before each of the party. They lifted
it to their lips gravely, in confirmation of their resolution.

General Loewenhielm, somewhat suspicious of his wine, took a sip of it,
startled, raised the glass first to his nose and then to his eyes, and
sat down bewildered. ‘This is very strange!’ he thought, ‘Amontillado!
And the finest Amontillado that I have ever tasted.’ After a moment, in
order to test his senses, he took a small spoonful of his soup, took a
second spoonful and laid down his spoon. ‘This is exceedingly strange!’
he said to himself, ‘for surely I am eating turtle-soup—and what
turtle-soup!’ He was seized by a queer kind of panic and emptied his
glass.

Usually in Berlevaag people did not speak much while they were eating.
But somehow this evening tongues had been loosened. An old Brother told
the story of his first meeting with the Dean. Another went through that
sermon which sixty years ago had brought about his conversion. An aged
woman, the one to whom Martine had first confided her distress, reminded
her friends how in all afflictions any Brother or Sister was ready to
share the burden of any other.

General Loewenhielm, who was to dominate the conversation of the
dinner-table, related how the Dean’s collection of sermons was a
favourite book of the Queen’s. But as a new dish was served he was
silenced. ‘Incredible!’ he told himself, ‘it is Blinis Demidoff!’ He
looked round at his fellow-diners. They were all quietly eating their
Blinis Demidoff, without any sign of either surprise or approval, as if
they had been doing so every day for thirty years.

A Sister on the other side of the table opened on the subject of strange
happenings which had taken place while the Dean was still amongst his
children, and which one might venture to call miracles. Did they
remember, she asked, the time when he had promised a Christmas sermon in
the village the other side of the Fiord? For a fortnight the weather had
been so bad that no skipper or fisherman would risk the crossing. The
villagers were giving up hope, but the Dean told them that if no boat
would take him, he would come to them walking upon the waves. And
behold! Three days before Christmas the storm stopped, hard frost set
in, and the Fiord froze from shore to shore—and this was a thing which
had not happened within the memory of man!

The boy once more filled the glasses. This time the Brothers and Sisters
knew that what they were given to drink was not wine, for it sparkled.
It must be some kind of lemonade. The lemonade agreed with their exalted
state of mind and seemed to lift them off the ground into a higher and
purer sphere.

General Loewenhielm again set down his glass, turned to his neighbour on
the right and said to him: ‘But surely this is a Veuve Cliquot 1860?’
His neighbour looked at him kindly, smiled at him and made a remark
about the weather.

Babette’s boy had got his instructions, he filled the glasses of the
Brotherhood only once, but he refilled the General’s glass as soon as it
was emptied. The General emptied it quickly time after time. For how is
a man of sense to behave when he cannot trust his senses? It is better
to be drunk than mad.

Most often the people in Berlevaag during the course of a good meal
would come to feel a little heavy. Tonight it was not so. The convives
grew lighter in weight and lighter of heart the more they ate and drank.
They no longer needed to remind themselves of their vow. It was, they
realised, when man has not only altogether forgotten but has firmly
renounced all ideas of food and drink that he eats and drinks in the
right spirit.

General Loewenhielm stopped eating and sat immovable. Once more he was
carried back to that dinner in Paris of which he had thought in the
sledge. An incredibly recherché and palatable dish had been served
there, he had asked its name from his fellow diner, Colonel Galliffet,
and the Colonel had smilingly told him that it was named ‘Cailles en
Sarcophage.’ He had further told him that the dish had been invented by
the chef of the very café in which they were dining, a person known all
over Paris as the greatest culinary genius of the age, and—most
surprisingly—a woman! ‘And indeed,’ said Colonel Galliffet, ‘this woman
is now turning a dinner at the Café Anglais into a kind of
love-affair—into a love-affair of the noble and romantic category in
which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite
or satiety! I have, before now, fought a duel for the sake of a fair
lady. For no woman in all Paris, my young friend, would I more willingly
shed my blood!’ General Loewenhielm turned to his neighbour on the left
and said to him: ‘But this is Cailles en Sarcophage!’ The neighbour, who
had been listening to the description of a miracle, looked at him
absent-mindedly, then nodded his head and answered: ‘Yes, Yes,
certainly. What else would it be?’

From the Master’s miracles the talk round the table had turned to the
smaller miracles of kindliness and helpfulness daily performed by his
daughters. The old Brother who had first struck up the hymn quoted the
Dean’s saying: ‘The only things which we may take with us from our life
on earth are those which we have given away!’ The guests smiled—what
Nabobs would not the poor, simple maidens become in the next world!

General Loewenhielm no longer wondered at anything. When a few minutes
later he saw grapes, peaches and fresh figs before him, he laughed to
his neighbour across the table and remarked: ‘Beautiful grapes!’ His
neighbour replied: ‘And they came on to the brook of Eshcol, and cut
down a branch with one cluster of grapes. And they bare it two upon a
staff.’

Then the General felt that the time had come to make a speech. He rose
and stood up very straight.

Nobody else by the dinner-table had stood up to speak. The old people
lifted their eyes to the face above them in high, happy expectation.
They were used to seeing sailors and vagabonds dead drunk with the crass
gin of the country, but they did not recognise in a warrior and courtier
the intoxication brought about by the noblest wine of the world.

                    XI. GENERAL LOEWENHIELM’S SPEECH

‘Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together,’ said the General.
‘Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.’

He spoke in a clear voice which had been trained in drill-grounds and
had echoed sweetly in royal halls, and yet he was speaking in a manner
so new to himself and so strangely moving that after his first sentence
he had to make a pause. For he was in the habit of forming his speeches
with care, conscious of his purpose, but here, in the midst of the
Dean’s simple congregation, it was as if the whole figure of General
Loewenhielm, his breast covered with decorations, were but a mouthpiece
for a message which meant to be brought forth.

‘Man, my friends,’ said General Loewenhielm, ‘is frail and foolish. We
have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But
in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace
to be finite. For this reason we tremble—’ Never till now had the
General stated that he trembled, he was genuinely surprised and even
shocked at hearing his own voice proclaim the fact. ‘We tremble before
making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in
fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are
opened, and we see and realise that grace is infinite. Grace, my
friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with
confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no
conditions and singles out none of us in particular, grace takes us all
to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have
chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the
same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us
abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and
bliss have kissed one another!’

The Brothers and Sisters had not altogether understood the General’s
speech, but his collected and inspired face and the sound of well-known
and cherished words had seized and moved all hearts. In this way, after
thirty-one years, General Loewenhielm succeeded in dominating the
conversation at the Dean’s dinner-table.

Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be
stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it.
They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as
if a number of small haloes had blended into one glorious radiance.
Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues, ears that for years
had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into
eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold,
and golden song flowed out into the winter air.

The two old women who had once slandered one another now in their hearts
went back a long way, past the evil period in which they had been stuck,
to those days of their early girlhood when together they had been
preparing for confirmation and hand in hand had filled the roads round
Berlevaag with singing. A brother in the congregation gave another a
knock in the ribs, like a rough caress between boys, and cried out: ‘You
cheated me on that timber, you old scoundrel!’ The brother thus
addressed almost collapsed in a heavenly burst of laughter, but tears
ran from his eyes. ‘Yes, I did so, beloved brother,’ he answered. ‘I did
so.’ Skipper Halvorsen and Madam Oppegaarden suddenly found themselves
close together in a corner and gave one another that long, long kiss for
which the secret uncertain love-affair of their youth had never left
them time.

The old Dean’s flock were humble people. When later in life they thought
of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have
been exalted by their own merit. They realised that the infinite grace
of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and
they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfilment
of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved
before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it
really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.

Old Mrs Loewenhielm was the first to leave. Her nephew accompanied her,
and their hostesses lighted them out. While Philippa was helping the old
lady into her many wraps, the General seized Martine’s hand and held it
for a long time without a word. At last he said:

‘I have been with you every day of my life. You know, do you not, that
it has been so?’

‘Yes,’ said Martine, ‘I know that it has been so.’

‘And,’ he continued, ‘I shall be with you every day that is left to me.
Every evening I shall sit down, if not in the flesh, which means
nothing, in spirit, which is all, to dine with you, just like tonight.
For tonight I have learned, dear sister, that in this world anything is
possible.’

‘Yes, it is so, dear brother,’ said Martine. ‘In this world anything is
possible.’

Upon this they parted.

When at last the company broke up it had ceased to snow. The town and
the mountains lay in white, unearthly splendour and the sky was bright
with thousands of stars. In the street the snow was lying so deep that
it had become difficult to walk. The guests from the yellow house
wavered on their feet, staggered, sat down abruptly or fell forward on
their knees and hands and were covered with snow, as if they had indeed
had their sins washed white as wool, and in this regained innocent
attire were gambolling like little lambs. It was, to each of them,
blissful to have become as a small child, it was also a blessed joke to
watch old brothers and sisters, who had been taking themselves so
seriously, in this kind of celestial second childhood. They stumbled and
got up, walked on or stood still, bodily as well as spiritually hand in
hand, at moments performing the great chain of a beatified lanciers.

‘Bless you, bless you, bless you,’ like an echo of the harmony of the
spheres rang to all sides.

Martine and Philippa stood for a long time on the stone steps outside
the house. They did not feel the cold. ‘The stars have come nearer,’
said Philippa.

‘They will come every night,’ said Martine quietly. ‘Quite possibly it
will never snow again.’

In this, however, she was mistaken. An hour later it again began to
snow, and such a heavy snowfall had never been known in Berlevaag. The
next morning people could hardly push open their doors against the tall
snowdrifts. The windows of the houses were so thickly covered with snow,
it was told for years afterwards, that many good citizens of the town
did not realise that daybreak had come, but slept on till late in the
afternoon.

                         XII. THE GREAT ARTIST

When Martine and Philippa locked the door they remembered Babette. A
little wave of tenderness and pity swept through them: Babette alone had
had no share in the bliss of the evening.

So they went out into the kitchen, and Martine said to Babette: ‘It was
quite a nice dinner, Babette.’

Their hearts suddenly filled with gratitude. They realised that none of
their guests had said a single word about the food. Indeed, try as they
might, they could not themselves remember any of the dishes which had
been served. Martine bethought herself of the turtle. It had not
appeared at all, and now seemed very vague and far away—it was quite
possible that it had been nothing but a nightmare.

Babette sat on the chopping-block, surrounded by more black and greasy
pots and pans than her mistresses had ever seen in their life. She was
as white and as deadly exhausted as on the night when she had first
appeared and had fainted on their doorstep.

After a long time she looked straight at them and said: ‘I was once Cook
at the Café Anglais.’

Martine said again: ‘They all thought that it was a nice dinner.’ And
when Babette did not answer a word she added: ‘We will all remember this
evening when you have gone back to Paris, Babette.’

Babette said: ‘I am not going back to Paris.’

‘You are not going back to Paris?’ Martine exclaimed.

‘No,’ said Babette. ‘What will I do in Paris? They have all gone, I have
lost them all, Mesdames.’

The sisters’ thoughts went to Monsieur Hersant and his son, and they
said: ‘Oh, my poor Babette.’

‘Yes, they have all gone,’ said Babette. ‘The Duke of Morny, the Duke of
Decazes, Prince Narishkine, General Galliffet, Aurélien Scholl, Paul
Daru, the Princess Pauline! All!’

The strange names and titles of people lost to Babette faintly confused
the two ladies, but there was such an infinite perspective of tragedy in
her announcement that in their responsive state of mind they felt her
losses as their own, and their eyes filled with tears.

At the end of another long silence Babette suddenly smiled slightly at
them and said: ‘And how would I go back to Paris, Mesdames? I have no
money.’

‘No money?’ the sisters cried as with one mouth.

‘No,’ said Babette.

‘But the ten thousand francs?’ the sisters asked in a horrified gasp.

‘The ten thousand francs have been spent, Mesdames,’ said Babette.

The sisters sat down. For a full minute they could not speak.

‘But ten thousand francs?’ Martine slowly whispered.

‘What will you, Mesdames,’ said Babette with great dignity. ‘A dinner
for twelve at the Café Anglais would cost ten thousand francs.’

The ladies still did not find a word to say. The piece of news was
incomprehensible to them, but then many things tonight in one way or
another had been beyond comprehension.

Martine remembered a tale told by a friend of her father’s who had been
a missionary in Africa. He had saved the life of an old chief’s
favourite wife, and to show his gratitude the chief had treated him to a
rich meal. Only long afterwards the missionary learned from his own
black servant that what he had partaken of was a small fat grandchild of
the chief’s, cooked in honour of the great Christian medicine man. She
shuddered.

But Philippa’s heart was melting in her bosom. It seemed that an
unforgettable evening was to be finished off with an unforgettable proof
of human loyalty and self-sacrifice.

‘Dear Babette,’ she said softly, ‘you ought not to have given away all
you had for our sake.’

Babette gave her mistress a deep glance, a strange glance—was there not
pity, even scorn, at the bottom of it?

‘For your sake,’ she replied. ‘No. For my own.’

She rose from the chopping-block and stood up before the two sisters.

‘I am a great artist!’ she said.

She waited a moment and then repeated: ‘I am a great artist, Mesdames.’

Again for a long time there was deep silence in the kitchen.

Then Martine said: ‘So you will be poor now all your life, Babette?’

‘Poor?’ said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. ‘No. I shall never be
poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is
never poor. We have got something, Mesdames, of which other people know
nothing.’

While the elder sister found nothing more to say, in Philippa’s heart
deep, forgotten chords vibrated. For she had heard, before now, long
ago, of the Café Anglais. She had heard, before now, long ago, the names
on Babette’s tragic list. She rose and took a step towards her servant.

‘But all those people whom you have mentioned,’ she said, ‘those princes
and great people of Paris whom you named, Babette? You yourself fought
against them. You were a Communard! The General you named had your
husband and son shot! How can you grieve over them?’

Babette’s dark eyes met Philippa’s.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I was a Communard. Thanks be to God, I was a
Communard! And those people whom I named, Mesdames, were evil and cruel.
They let the people of Paris starve, they oppressed and wronged the
poor. Thanks be to God, I stood upon a barricade, I loaded the gun for
my men-folk! But all the same, Mesdames, I shall not go back to Paris,
now that those people of whom I have spoken are no longer there.’

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 wind-swept, 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 travelled with his own small
company from town to town up and down the fjords.

His old Copenhagen friends among themselves discussed 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 favour, at other times, groaning away in his narrow berth and
in the merciless hand of sea-sickness, 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 business
man, with eyes to 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 schnaps 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 characterised 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 but 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 each other, 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 recognising 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, undaunted
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 had had
to live on short commons, poor chit. 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 grey-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 realises that he will come to use extra material for
my volumen!

‘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 on to 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 either. 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, by
Jove, 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 for once in a while 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 avoirdupoids! 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 for some time had 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-harbour. 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.’

Towards 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, realised 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 had already got 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
set up 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 her 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 rumours about her
husband had reached her, the child to her 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
realised, 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 older 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 the wind of the sort of name
Captain Ross had in the town. No one came to know what she felt about
it. But she took her mother’s side against the whole world with growing
vigour. 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 of
the belief 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 to 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 learnt 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 Shakespearian hero. In
her heart she cried out with Philip Faulconbridge:

             ‘Madam, I would not wish a better father.
             Some sins do bear their privilege on earth,
             And so doth yours . . .’

Malli as a child had been tall for her age, but she was late in
developing into womanhood. Even when at the age of sixteen she was
confirmed she looked like a lanky boy. When she grew up she grew
beautiful. No human being has a richer experience than the unlovely,
awkward girl who in the course of a few months turns into a beautiful
young maiden. It is both a glorious surprise and a fulfilled
expectation, both a favour and a well-deserved promotion. The ship has
been becalmed, or has tossed in stormy currents, now the white sails
fill and she stands out for open sea. The speed itself gives an even
keel.

Malli sailed her high and mighty course, as daringly and surely as if
Captain Ross in person had stood at the helm. The young men turned round
to look at her in the street, and there were those who imagined that her
exceptional position would make her an easy prey. But in this they were
mistaken. The maiden might well consent to be a corsair’s daughter, but
by no means would she consent to be a corsair’s prize. As a child she
had been soft-hearted, as a young girl she was without mercy. ‘No,’ she
told herself, ‘it is they that shall be my victims.’ All the same the
unaccustomed admiration, the new defensive and offensive, brought unrest
to the first years of her youth. And as now here Malli’s story is being
written and read, one is free to imagine that had it drawn out longer
she would have become what the French call _une lionne_, a lioness. In
the story itself she is but a lion-cub, somewhat whelp-like in movement
and, up to the last chapter, uncertain in her estimation of her own
strength.

                             IV. MADAM ROSS

It so happened that one evening in the town’s small theatre, Malli saw
Herr Soerensen’s company give a performance. All the vigour and longing
in her, which for years had been forcibly mastered, were released into
perfect clarity and bliss, just as if she had been hit right in the
heart by a divine arrow. Before the performance came to an end she had
reached her irrevocable decision: she would become an actress.

As she was walking home from the theatre the street heaved and swung
beneath her and round her. In her little room she took down her books,
and the room became a starry night above Verona and a crypt there. It
grew verdant and filled with the sweet song and music of the forest of
Arden, and deep Mediterranean waves here rolled blue round Cyprus.
Secretly, with trembling heart as if she were facing doomsday, she
shortly afterwards made her way to the little hotel where Herr Soerensen
had settled in, was admitted into his presence and recited to him some
of the parts she had taught herself.

Herr Soerensen listened to her, looked at her, looked again and said to
himself: ‘There is something there!’ So much was there that he would not
let the girl go away, but took her on at a small consideration for three
months. ‘Let her,’ he thought, ‘ripen a while unnoticed in the
atmosphere of the stage. And then let’s see.’ Malli could now reveal her
decision to her mother, and the neighbours too soon got news of it.

The life and calling of an actress to the townsfolk were something
utterly foreign and in itself dubious. Also Malli’s special position
caused her to be harshly judged or ridiculed. But so sure of herself was
the girl that while till now she had at all times been accurately aware
of what the town was thinking and opining, and had kept her account of
it, she now completely overlooked it or bothered about it not at all.
She was genuinely surprised at her own mother’s dismay the day she laid
her plan before her.

Madam Ross had never needed to constrain her daughter’s nature and had
none of an ordinary mother’s authority. In her present conflict with her
daughter she became as if deranged with horror and grief, while on her
side Malli was completely unbending. It came to a couple of great wild
scenes between the two, and it might have ended with one or the other of
them walking into the fjord.

In this hour Malli received support where she could least have expected
it. Her dead or disappeared father himself became her ally.

Madam Ross had loved her man and had believed in him without ever having
understood him. Now, whether in punishment or reward, through all
eternity she must love and believe in what she did not understand. Had
Malli’s purpose lain within the scope of her own conceptions, she might
have found a means to combat it. But confronted with this wild, carefree
madness she was carried off her feet, dizzy with sweet and strange
memories and associations. During the time in which she strove against
her daughter’s obsession she inexplicably lived her short marriage over
again. It was from day to day the same surprises and emotions: a
foreign, rich and enrapturing power, that had once taken her by storm,
again surrounded her to all sides. Malli’s manner grew as insinuating
and enticing as that of her lover of twenty years ago. Madam Ross
remembered that Alexander, the strong, handsome seafarer, had knelt down
before her and had whispered up to her: ‘Nay, let me lie here. This is
the most fitting place of all.’ She fell in love with her daughter as
she had once fallen in love with the father, so that she forgot that
years had passed and that her own hair had grown grey in their passing.
She blushed and blanched in Malli’s presence and trembled when the girl
left her, she felt her own will impotent before her child’s gaze and
voice, and there was in this impotence a dream-like, resurrected bliss.

When finally in a stormy and tearful interview she gave the girl her
blessing, it was to her as if she were being wed again. From now on she
was incapable of grieving or fearing as the town expected her to do. The
day Malli went away with Herr Soerensen’s company mother and daughter
took leave of one another in full, loving understanding.

                          V. MASTER AND PUPIL

Now Malli learned Ariel’s part by heart, and Herr Soerensen took upon
himself to perfect her in it. He did not leave her in peace either day
or night. He scolded and swore, with inspired cruelty sneered at her
facial expression and her intonation, pinched her slim arms black and
blue and even one day soundly boxed her ears.

The other members of the troupe, who had been astonished witnesses of
the bashful girl’s sudden advancement and might well have been jealous
of her for it, instead took pity on her. The company’s leading lady,
Mamzell Ihlen, a beauty with long black hair, who was to play Miranda,
once or twice ventured to protest to the director on Malli’s account.
The _jeune premier_, a fair-haired young man with fine legs, more meekly
waited in the wings to comfort the novice when she came reeling off the
stage from a rehearsal. If none the less they did not, either on or off
the stage, attempt to come nearer to Herr Soerensen’s victim, and did
not even talk much about her among themselves, it was not due to lack of
sympathy—they were as uncertain in face of what went on before their
eyes as are the people who follow the growth of a young tree under the
fakir’s spell. Such a relationship may awaken admiration or uneasiness,
it baffles discussion or condemnation.

‘But Herr Soerensen himself grew happier from lesson to lesson, and
Malli understood that he was fuming for her own good and that it was all
love. It also came about that at one of her lines the old actor abruptly
halted his berserk rage and looked hard and searchingly at his pupil.
‘Say that once more,’ he begged her gently and humbly. When Malli
repeated:

              ‘I have made you mad,
              And even with such like valour, men hang
              and drown their proper selves.’

Herr Soerensen remained stock-still for a moment, like a person who
finds it hard to believe his eyes and ears, until he at last drew a deep
breath and found release in one of Prospero’s own lines:

            ‘Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou
            Performed, my Ariel.’

He nodded to her and went on with the lesson.

He would also, in exuberant pride and joy, give her a few fatherly taps
on her behind and then, more to himself than to her, develop his
theories upon female beauty.

‘How many women,’ he said, ‘have got their tails where they ought to be?
In some of them—God help them—they are coming down to their heels!
You, ducky,’ he added cheerfully with his cigar in his mouth, ‘are long
in the leg! Your trotters don’t pull you downwards—Nay, your two legs
are straight and noble columns—which proudly carry, where you walk or
stand—your whole nice little person heavenwards!’

One day he clapped his hands to his head and burst out: ‘And I meant to
have a girl like that trip about in a pair of French silk slippers!
Fool! Fool that I was, who did not know that it was a pair of
seven-league boots that fitted those legs!’

                             VI. A TEMPEST

So day by day Malli grew more Ariel, just as, day by day, Herr Soerensen
grew more Prospero, and the date of _The Tempest’s_ first performance in
Christianssand was already fixed for March 15th, when an unexpected and
fateful event overwhelmed both Herr Soerensen and Malli, and the whole
theatrical company. This event was so sensational that it did not only
become far and wide the one topic of conversation, but it also got into
print on the first page of the _Christianssand Daily News_ as follows:

                              _A Heroine_

    During the hard weather which in the past week has supervened
    along the coast, there occurred in our neighbourhood a calamity,
    which by all human reckonings must have led to a deplorable loss
    of life as well as of a good seaworthy coasting-steamer, had not
    at the very last moment, next to the mercy of providence, a
    brave girl’s pluck brought about a happier solution. We present
    to our readers a short account of the drama.

    On Wednesday, March 12th, the passenger-boat _Sofie Hosewinckel_
    left Arendal for Christianssand. The visibility was poor, with
    snow and a stiff breeze from the South-East. Late in the
    afternoon the wind rose to gale-force, and as all know, we
    experienced some of the worst weather which within the memory of
    man has ravaged our coast. _Sofie Hosewinckel_ had aboard
    sixteen passengers, among whom was the well-known and respected
    theatre-manager Herr Valdemar Soerensen with his company, on
    their way to give a performance in Christianssand.

    Our steamer with difficulty had worked her way to Kvaasefjord
    when the storm broke in all earnest. She was compelled to heave
    to, but was none the less driven in towards the skerries outside
    Randsund, without it being possible for those on board to make a
    landfall, owing to the snow-mist, and because the hull was
    ceaselessly awash from bow to stern from the heavy seas.

    At 8 o’clock in the evening sunken rocks were visible on both
    quarters, with the roaring sea breaking over them house-high.
    _Sofie Hosewinckel_ was lucky enough to slip over the outermost
    skerry into somewhat smoother water in the lee of a narrow
    islet, but here the ship ran head-on on to a sunken rock and
    immediately shipped a quantity of water. During the storm the
    captain himself, with two of his crew, had been injured, and it
    was now difficult for the mate to maintain order aboard. One of
    the steamer’s lifeboats was found to be smashed by the seas, but
    our gallant seamen succeeded in launching the other boat, which
    could hold twenty. The passengers, with as many of the crew as
    were required to manœuvre the boat, took their seats in it in
    order to row to the island. Only a nineteen-year-old girl,
    Mamzelle Ross, of Herr Soerensen’s theatrical company, made
    known her decision to remain on board, giving up, with noble
    woman’s courage, her place in the boat to one of the injured
    sailors.

    The intention was that the mate should return to the ship with
    the boat to take ashore those remaining on board. But during the
    landing on the island the fragile craft was completely
    shattered. The people who were in it came safe ashore, but it
    was now impossible to renew contact with the steamer, which
    those ashore could only glimpse through flying snow and spray.
    Soon after it became apparent to those on the island that a sea
    lifted her off her rocky bed, and one could only surmise that
    her last hour had come.

    Also on board they were clear about the imminent danger that the
    vessel would fill with water and quickly go to the bottom. The
    ten men of the crew left on her became almost panic-stricken and
    came within an ace of giving up the struggle with the elements.
    As a last possibility of saving life they thought of running the
    _Sofie Hosewinckel_ into the wind as close to shore as they
    could. This in all probability in the dense darkness would have
    brought about total loss.

    It was at this moment that Mamzelle Ross, as if at the summons
    of higher powers, lone woman on the ship in distress, by her
    very dauntlessness struck courage into the breasts of the crew.
    This quite young girl first of all went down into the stokehold
    and persuaded the chief engineer and the stokers to get up full
    steam again. She herself helped in the dangerous work of setting
    the pumps going, and after this achievement, right through the
    night while the ship lay hove-to under the breakers and with
    each hour sank deeper, she stood indefatigable by the side of
    the helmsmen of the changing watches.

    It is understandable that a maiden’s unconquerable spirit in the
    hour of need might prevail upon and strengthen our struggling
    seamen. But it is as good as inconceivable that a young female,
    unproved in seafaring life, should be found in possession of so
    great a strength. A young ordinary seaman, Ferdinand Skaeret by
    name, at this point deserves marked recognition. From the very
    first moment he stood shoulder to shoulder with Miss Ross, and
    through all the stormy night carried out each of her orders.
    Above the weather’s roaring din the girl could often be heard
    calling him aloud by name.

    Towards the early hours of Thursday, March 13th, the storm
    abated somewhat. At daybreak it became possible to bring _Sofie
    Hosewinckel_ in through Christianssand Fjord and run her aground
    in sinking condition by Odder Island, from where the steamer can
    be salvaged from shore without difficulty. And at the moment
    when this paper is going to press, the owner of the steamer, our
    honoured townsman Jochum Hosewinckel, no less than the wives and
    mothers of our good seamen, from the bottom of their hearts will
    be thanking, after God, the heroic maiden for the rescue of the
    ship.

                            VII. FOR BRAVERY

During the night of storm described in the _Christianssand Daily News_
lights were lit in all rooms on the first floor of the fine yellow
wooden house in the market-square where lived the shipowner Jochum
Hosewinckel.

The shipowner himself walked up and down the rooms, halted, listened to
the storm, and walked again. His thoughts were with the ships he had at
sea that night, most of all with _Sofie Hosewinckel_ which was on her
way from Arendal. This ship was named after his favourite sister, who a
lifetime ago had died at the age of nineteen. Towards morning he fell
asleep in the grandfather’s chair by the table, and when he woke up he
felt convinced that the ship had gone to the bottom and was lost.

At that moment his son Arndt, whose rooms were in a side wing of the
house, came in, his hair and cloak all white with snow, straight from
the harbour, and told his father that the _Sofie Hosewinckel_ was saved
and was off Odder Island. A fisherman had brought in the news at
daybreak. Jochum Hosewinckel laid his head upon his folded hands on the
table, and wept.

Arndt next recounted how the ship’s rescue had been brought about. Then
was the old shipowner’s joy so great that he had to talk over the event
with his brethren of the shipping world. He took his son’s arm and
walked with him to the harbour, and from the harbour around the town.
Everywhere the news was greeted with wonder and joy, all details were
gone through time after time, and more than one glass was drunk to the
rescue of the ship and to the health of Mamzelle Ross. Jochum
Hosewinckel after the terrible, endless night became as light of heart
and head as he had not been for many a year. He sent word home to his
wife that when the noble girl arrived in town they would take her into
their own house, and would have ready for her the room which had once
been Sofie’s.

When late in the afternoon the fishing-boat from Odder Island, bringing
the shipwrecked folk into the town, stood into the harbour, half
Christianssand was present. People greeted the shipowner with happy
faces—a particular circumstance, a tradition or legend in Jochum
Hosewinckel’s family, added something almost devotional to the
salutations.

It was a wild, turbulent evening. It had ceased to snow, the sky was
dark, only along the horizon ran a faint light. As the sun went down, a
strange copper-coloured gleam fell over the deeply disturbed waters, and
the many faces on the quay became aglow with it.

The boat was received with an acclaim such as a seafaring nation accords
to its sea-heroes. All eyes searched her for the maiden who had saved
_Sofie Hosewinckel_, and who to the imagination took the form of an
angel. They did not find her at once, for she had changed her wet
clothing for a fisherman’s jersey, trousers and sea-boots, and in this
equipment, which was too big for her, looked like a ship’s boy. For a
few seconds disappointment and anxiety ran through the crowd. But a
thickset man in the boat lifted the girl up and shouted to those on
shore: ‘Here is a treasure for you!’ At the instant when the angel was
revealed in the likeness of a young seaman, one of their very own, a
hundred hearts melted as one. A tremendous cheering burst forth, caps
were waved in the air, and the whole assembly laughed towards the boat.
Yet there were many who wept at the same time.

The girl’s sou’wester had fallen off as she was lifted up, her hair,
tumbled and curly from salt water and snow, by the evening sun was
turned into a halo behind her head. She was unsteady on her feet, a
young man took her in his arms and carried her. It was Arndt
Hosewinckel. Malli stared into his face, and thought that she had never
seen so beautiful a human face. He looked into hers, it was very pale
with black rings round the eyes and a trembling mouth. He felt her body
in its coarse clothes against his own, a lock of her hair strayed into
his mouth and tasted salt: it was as if she had been slung into his
embrace by the sea itself.

One moment she was unaware of what the black mass in front of her meant,
her light, wide-open eyes sought Arndt’s. In the next instant she heard
her own name shouted, so that the air vibrated with it. At that she
surrendered herself—in the deep wave of blood which rose to her face,
in a wide, dizzy glance and in one single movement—completely to the
crowd about her, as delighted and wild with joy as the crowd itself.
Arndt had her radiant face close to his, he gave her a kiss.

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 realised 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 woollen scarves round his throat,
in complete silence. In the town the rumour went that during the storm,
at the thought of the danger to Mamzelle 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
carpet-bag was brought ashore.

Soon also the other members of the theatrical company were landed, pale
and semi-conscious, but one and all proud and undaunted. In the boat
Mamzelle 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 realised 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 towards 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 harbour suck her back with it, so that when they sought
her in her room they would find it empty, with a dark streak of seawater
and weed along the floor like the ones which 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 believed 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. Towards 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 godfearing 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 honourable,
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 one another, they wished one another 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 Mamzelle Ross. They
combined to give a ball in her honour 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 harbour, 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 learnt 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 shanty 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 realised
what he meant in the ballroom and the town, and what the lovely young
ladies at the ball, who had learnt 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, realised 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 harbour and to the warehouses there, or further 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 teacher, 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 got 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 time came for her and Arndt to say good-bye, 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 on to 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 on to 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.

He next reflected that he was now to lose his Ariel, and that the great
enterprise of his life would never materialise. At this he grieved. Why,
he asked himself, must the hideous, wet tempest in Kvasefjord break
right into the middle of his William’s _Tempest_? Could it be that it
had been brought about by the will of that forceful, fearless,
formidable child?

Yet as soon as the old director had to some extent regained the
modulated register of his voice, he paid a return visit to the
shipowner’s house. For the occasion he had purchased a pair of
lavender-coloured gloves, which stood out against his old frock-coat and
frayed top-hat, but was in harmony with his carriage and tone of voice.
His manner was so courteous and obliging that Fru Hosewinckel, who was
not accustomed to such self-effacing men of the world, became almost
bashful. He made a bow each minute and was untiring in his praise of
everything in the rooms. If he had overlooked any single object, he
hastened to make good the neglect, as if he were making the lofty
mirrors between the windows or the view over the market-place the
humblest apologies for his forgetfulness.

He burst out: ‘What glorious, magnificent possessions—collected in old
Europe at what cost!—What treasures brought from China and the
Indies!—Oh, what extremely charming chandeliers—and brilliant
paintings of majestic ships!’

Herr Soerensen and Malli for a moment were alone in the drawing-room.
Herr Soerensen put a finger to his lips, blew Malli a little kiss, and
solemnly announced: ‘My girl, you are Dame Fortune’s favourite!’ As
Malli looked back at him in a clear, firm gaze, he himself looked aside,
pulled an old silk handkerchief out of his coat pocket, mopped his
forehead, and finished up, somewhat subdued and more to himself than to
her:

                   ‘My Pegasus is slack,
                   Plays truant when he can!
                   But wait, thou ancient hack,
                   I’ll show thee who’s the man.’

When he had again taken his leave in a series of sweet bows, Malli kept
standing by the window, letting her eyes follow his figure as it strode
proudly across the square, grew smaller and disappeared.

                     XI. THE STORY OF AN ENGAGEMENT

The thought or notion that Malli, instead of continuing the journey with
Herr Soerensen and his company, might remain in the town and come to
belong to it, first arose among the people who had cheered her when her
boat came into the harbour. One might say that in the town community
this thought or notion moved in a spiral: as its rings became narrower
it constantly rose higher, both socially and emotionally. When in the
end it reached those on whom it turned, it also reached its zenith of
tension and destiny.

In a small community where not many things happen, as a rule there is
much talk. There an engagement is the supreme topic of conversation and
discussion, and the more interest beforehand existent in the young
persons who are believed to become engaged, the more lively the talk. It
may therefore be worth recording that in this case so little was said.
Arndt Hosewinckel was the town’s darling and its best match, Malli was
its heroine. But as the two drew closer together and to the mind of the
people became one, it was as if their figures eluded observation. A deep
breath of comprehension passed through the town, but the names were
spoken less often than before.

The plain people of the town took pleasure in the idea that Arndt
Hosewinckel and Mamzelle Ross might become a pair. It was once again the
happy ending, both surprising and foreseen, to the old tale in which
Cinderella marries the prince. Their town in reward for a handsome deed
handsomely gave the best it had to give. That the yellow house in the
market-place should come to open its door to a poor daughter-in-law, a
drowned skipper’s child, rejoiced and moved the sailors’ wives, and
there was in their joy no kind of malice towards the shipowner or his
lady. For had it not been proclaimed in the very harbour that the bride
was a treasure? In as much as she symbolised the sea, the bread-winner
and the fate of all, she united, even as the sea itself, the town’s
humble folk with its richest citizen.

The thought or notion climbed its spiral path to a higher and narrower
circle and gained access to the houses of the best society. Then Malli’s
good name for a day or two trembled on the brink of an abyss. For up
here one asked oneself whether the heroine was not in reality an
adventuress gambling on the town’s admiration and gratitude in order to
make a match above her station? But something in the picture of the girl
herself almost immediately tipped the balance in her favour. The old
gentlemen of the ball were the first to acquit her. Their wives, who
were honest folk and who had often trembled for ships and crews,
examined Malli’s behaviour in the night of the storm, and acknowledged
that nothing in it could be interpreted as calculation.

Possibly each single one of the young burghers’ daughters, to whose
dancing Malli had sung, reasoned that if she could not herself have
Arndt Hosewinckel, the girl from the wreck was the one to whom she could
easiest renounce him. Or perhaps those girls, who had known one another
from their days of curved combs and pantalettes, knew too much of one
another’s shortcomings. Of one young beauty, who was specially admired
for her small feet, they knew that she had her shoes made yet a size
smaller and so had acquired a corn. Of another charmer they knew that
her shining golden tresses did not all grow on her own head. Of the
stranger the fair young girls knew that she was poor, badly dressed and
too big to be elegant, and that she could not dance. But there was in
her special shy manner so much trust in, and so much recognition of, all
beauty round her, that in her presence everyone thought herself more
beautiful. It also happened that they suddenly felt the girl from the
sea to have in her a laughter different from their own. It had rung out
through a storm, or had accompanied it.

The thought or notion reached the house on the square. It found a
foothold in the servants’ hall before it rose to the first floor, and
was here felt to be of extreme importance. The servants’ hall finished
by accepting Malli, it even silently closed a ring round the house’s
young lady-to-be, who owned only one frock and three shifts, and who
sang so sweetly.

The thought or notion came up the stairs and into the drawing-room of
the paintings of majestic ships, and filled it with pregnant silence. It
had reached high in its course, in here it was the future itself.

It found the atmosphere in the drawing-room prepared or expectant, like
the tuned instrument for the melody. The old master of the house at this
time was in high spirits, with a delicate pink in his cheeks, he put on
chokers and brought home presents: lace for his lady and sugar plums for
Malli. With his ship’s miraculous rescue in the night of the storm
something romantic and heroic had come into his precisely regulated
life—a gale’s breath, the song of the wind in the sails. It was very
fitting that he himself as father-in-law should in the end be taken by
storm by a heroine. It may be considered a dangerous thing to extend
one’s enthusiasm for a heroic deed to everyday life, and the experienced
shipowner might well have been somewhat uneasy about a heroic
daughter-in-law—had she been the Maid of Orleans herself—whose
exploits had been carried out ashore. But Malli’s halo had been won at
sea, amid salt breakers and surf-spray. Jochum Hosewinckel as a very
young man had suffered shipwreck on one of his father’s ships. He would
not mind a daughter-in-law in whose presence he would once more be
eighteen years.

Malli’s obscure origin might have cast a shadow over her young figure as
it moved about the house. But since the sea had once shown itself to be
the girl’s ally, it was taken for granted that the harmony between the
two was perfect, and that Alexander Ross had gone down with his ship an
honourable man. Indeed, his daughter’s steadfastness on the _Sofie
Hosewinckel_ in some mystic way became a proof of this fact. Jochum
Hosewinckel called to mind the name of an old Swedish Commander Ross, a
friend of his father’s, who had also been of Scotch origin, and about
whose figure some mystery had also rested. The Commander could well have
been a relative of the lost ship’s captain, and one might well here have
to do with a family of heroes.

Fru Wencke Hosewinckel, ever a woman of few words, in silence wondered
at the quickness with which all men-folk seemed able to take up a
standpoint in face of life’s events. She watched her son’s face,
listened to his voice, and bided her time.

The thought or notion finally reached its close and its summit with the
two young people themselves who were to be the happy pair. It took them
both by surprise like an amazing, brilliant idea from an outside world
which they had forgotten. For some weeks they had dwelt among immortal
powers. As now the mortal world too gave them its blessing, they happily
accepted that too, and from now on their eternity could become their
every day.

For Malli this came to be the completion and perfection of her own
mighty rise. She had once been given wings, they had grown miraculously
and had been able to carry her, ever upward, to this unspeakable glory.
She stood on a dizzying height, but she could fearlessly cast herself
out from it anywhere, because anywhere Arndt’s arms would catch her and
bear her. Now she was also to become his wife, to have his name and make
his house her home, she was to

                  ‘share all that he doth possess,
                  by having him making herself no less.’

She had tremblingly dreamt of playing Juliet, now life had given her a
role as fine as Juliet’s. And she was the maid of Arendal who would not
consent to be anybody’s prize!

Arndt’s happiness was of a different kind. Promises of long ago, which
his own mind had rejected, now rose again and were fulfilled. The world
had been restless, disorganised and empty. A young girl looked at it,
and under her eyes it became united, became a cosmos.

He had received, at the harbour, the penniless, valiant girl who had
saved one of his house’s ships. Such a young maiden was the last human
being he wanted to make unhappy, he was not going to become her destiny.
He had kissed her, and to make up for the kiss had at first in his
parents’ house kept away from her. But one day Malli had looked at him
with bright, candid eyes, openly enough to make him feel that neither he
nor anyone else in the world could make this young lass unhappy. This
struck the rich youth as a jest on the part of Fate, he looked back at
the girl, approached her and spoke to her. And behold, he himself then
had a destiny—clear-eyed, generous, without _arrière pensées_.

Ay, she was a heroine, a lion-hearted maiden, as they all said. But she
was so in a manner other than they knew of. She had no need to fear, for
where she was, danger was not. There were still shipwrecks, distress and
misfortune. But shipwrecks, distress and misfortune were changed, and
became evidence of God’s omnipotence and mercy.

Later in the night he saw, strangely, the picture of himself as he had
been before she came. He thought: ‘She has power to wake the dead.’

Just before daybreak came also the picture of Guro, of whom he had not
thought for many years. And he remembered that they had been friends and
happy together, rich in desire and tenderness in the spring-nights, in
such nights as this one. He understood that in the very last spring
night the sea had taken Guro in a mighty embrace wherein there was power
and love, forgiveness and forgetfulness.

‘And sweet sprites, the burden bear!’ it echoed around him in the dim
house.

It is reasonable to assume that Arndt will have asked Malli to become
his wife in a completely ordinary suitor’s fashion, and that she will
have answered yes in the manner of an ordinary girl. But the question
was put and answered as if it was to decide his and her eternal
salvation.

They stood closely embraced, borne and elevated on the same wave. But
they did not kiss, a kiss did not fit into this instant of eternity.

A while later as they were sitting together on the sofa by the window,
she asked him lowly and gravely: ‘Are you happy?’ He answered her
slowly: ‘Yes, I am happy. But it is not happiness that you are, Malli.
It is life. I was not sure that life was to be found anywhere in the
world. People said: “That is a matter of life and death,” and I thought
“What a small matter it is.” I thought of myself that I knew about
everything, and that I portended ruin. O Malli, today I am an enigma to
myself, and a harbinger of joy to the world.’

Shortly after he had spoken she sank down before him, and as he would
raise her up she prevented him by laying her clasped hands upon his
knee.

‘Nay, let me lie here,’ she said. ‘This is the most fitting place of
all.’

Her gentle, enraptured and humble face shone up towards him.

‘Yes,’ she went on very slowly. ‘Yes. “I am the resurrection and the
life,” saith Malli. “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet
shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never
die, but have everlasting life.“’

Arndt had to go to Stavanger for the firm, owing to a sudden bankruptcy
a ship was for sale there. He set out a few days later, early in the
morning.

He had not known how much it would cost him to part from Malli, now at
the last moment he had to force himself to leave. Malli too, on her
side, had taken this separation of a few days lightly, she almost felt
that she needed to draw her breath. It was only when at his departure
she saw him so pale that she herself became very pale. Something
terrible might happen to him on the journey. She ought to have prevented
him from going away, or she ought to have gone with him in order to ward
off the misfortune that threatened him. In the chill spring morning she
stood on the front steps of the house in the East Indian shawl her
mother had given her, and watched his carriole depart.

‘My God!’ she thought. ‘If it goes with him as with Father! If he never
comes back!’

                             XII. FERDINAND

It now happened, the day after Arndt had left, that a couple of ladies
of the town were paying a call to Fru Hosewinckel, and that while they
were sitting around the coffee-table Malli came into the room in cloak
and bonnet, radiant with happiness, ready to go out. Fru Hosewinckel
asked her where she was going, and she answered that she was going to
see Ferdinand. The ladies fell silent and looked at one another. Fru
Hosewinckel got up from her chair, went towards Malli, and took her
hand.

‘My dear girl,’ she said. ‘You cannot see Ferdinand any more.’

‘Why not?’ asked Malli in amazement.

‘Alas, Ferdinand is dead,’ said Fru Hosewinckel.

‘Ferdinand!’ Malli cried aloud.

‘Yes, our poor, good Ferdinand,’ said Fru Hosewinckel.

‘Ferdinand!’ Malli cried again.

‘Such was the will of God,’ said Fru Hosewinckel.

‘Ferdinand!’ Malli cried for the third time, as if to herself.

The two ladies of the town said that they were very sorry indeed, and
then went on to report in detail what had happened to Ferdinand. On
board the _Sofie Hosewinckel_ he had, on the night of the tempest, been
struck by a falling piece of the yard-arm and had suffered severe
internal injuries. These at first had not appeared to be serious, but
yesterday he had died.

‘So after all it was the tempest,’ said one of the ladies, ‘which
brought on the death of the brave young man.’

‘The tempest!’ Malli exclaimed. ‘The tempest! No, how can you think
that? I must go to him. Then will you see that you are utterly
mistaken!’

‘Unfortunately there can be no doubt about it,’ said the other lady.
‘And it is such a very poor home. How, now, is his poor mother to get
along? Alas no, Mamzelle Ross, there is no doubt at all.’

Malli stood for a while considering.

‘Indeed yes,’ she then burst out forcefully. ‘He stood on the deck with
me, you know! We were together the whole night through. In the morning,
in the fisherman’s hut, he was the one who helped me change my clothes.
And you have seen for yourselves,’ she went on, turning to face the
ladies, ‘that he came ashore in the boat with me. No, Ferdinand is not
dead!’ Once more she was silent.

‘I must go to him at once!’ she cried. ‘God! to think that I have not
gone before!’

The ladies did not know what to do about this wild, disturbed agitation,
so remained silent and let the girl go her way.

Malli came into Ferdinand’s home just as the young seaman was being laid
in his coffin. His mother and small brothers and sisters and a few
relatives who had assisted them, stood around and in their dark clothing
filled up the small dark room. They all made way for the girl, and the
dead boy’s mother greeted her, took her by the hand and led her forward,
so that she should see Ferdinand for the last time.

Malli had sped through the streets like a gale and was panting after her
run, now she stood as if turned to stone. Ferdinand’s young face on its
pillow of shavings was as peaceful as if he were asleep. Suffering and
agony had passed over it and again away, and had left behind as it were
a deep, solemn experience. Malli had never before seen a corpse, neither
had she ever seen Ferdinand so quiet.

The strangers in the room had been about to leave when she came, they
now said good-bye to her and she shook hands with them one by one, with
wide-open, dumb eyes. Ferdinand’s mother saw the visitors out, Malli was
alone with him.

She fell on her knees by the coffin.

‘Ferdinand!’ she called out very gently. And again: ‘Ferdinand! Dear
Ferdinand!’

As he did not answer, she stretched out her hand and touched his face.
Death’s icy chill penetrated through her fingers, she felt it go right
into her heart and withdrew her hand. But a little after she laid it
back again, let it rest on the boy’s cheek until she thought that her
hand had become as cold as that cheek itself, and so began slowly to
stroke the still face. She felt the cheekbones and the eye-sockets
against the tips of her fingers. Her own face the while took on the
expression of the dead sailor-boy’s face, the two grew to resemble one
another like brother and sister.

Ferdinand’s mother came into the room again and made Malli sit down on a
chair. She began to tell about Ferdinand and about what a good son he
had always been to her. She went over his short life, relating small
traits and incidents from his childhood and boyhood, and as she did so
the tears, ran down her cheeks. But when she began to tell of how
Ferdinand had ever laid aside almost all his pay to give to his mother
when he came home, she ceased to cry. She only sighed deeply and heavily
over how hard life would now be for his small brothers and sisters, and
for herself.

‘Ferdinand,’ she said sorrowfully, ‘would have been so grieved to see
it.’

Malli listened, and deep in her heart recognised this subdued woman’s
wailing. It was her own mother’s anxiety about bread for herself and her
child. She looked about her and now also recognised the needy, narrow
room. This was the room of her own home, here she had grown up. The old
familiar bare world came back to her, so strangely gentle, and so
inescapable.

It was as if a hand—and was it Ferdinand’s own cold hand, on which hers
had just rested?—seized her by the throat, and she grew giddy and sank,
or everything round her sank. The elder woman looked at her, and with
the quiet tact of the poor changed the subject. She began to tell of
Ferdinand’s pride at being the young lady’s friend. She had from
Ferdinand’s own lips heard more of the shipwreck than anyone else, and
had followed Malli’s steps from the deck to the engine-room, and from
the engine-room to the helm. By her son’s sick-bed she had had to read
aloud to him so many times the report of the _Christianssand Daily News_
that she now knew it all by heart. A little smile broke out on her
careworn face as she explained how, to please him, she herself had had
to repeat the young lady’s cry through the din and roaring of the
tempest: ‘Ferdinand!’

At that Malli rose from her chair, pale as death. She looked at the
simple bench and table, at the one poor flower-pot in the window and at
the woman’s threadbare clothes. Lastly she turned towards the silent
face in the coffin. But now she dared not go near it. She merely for an
instant wrung her hands in its direction in a movement that was like a
shriek. Then she gave Ferdinand’s mother her hand and went away.

When she came home, she sought out Fru Hosewinckel and said to her:

‘Ay, Ferdinand is dead. And it is such a poor home. How, now, is his
mother to get along?’

Fru Hosewinckel felt sorry for the pale girl.

‘Dear Malli,’ she said. ‘We will not forget Ferdinand’s loyalty. We will
stand by this poor mother.’

Malli stared at her as if she had not understood what was said, and was
waiting to hear something she could better comprehend.

‘My dear child,’ said Fru Hosewinckel. ‘That is the happiness of
possessing wealth, that one may help where need is great.’

When next morning Malli came downstairs, she was so changed that her
housemates were frightened. She was once more the girl with the stiff,
white face and the dark rings under her eyes, paralysed in all her
joints, who had been brought in from the wreck. And she was now also
dumb, as upon that time Herr Soerensen himself. She would not go out,
but also seemed afraid to stay in, she got up from one chair to sit down
on another. Fru Hosewinckel proposed sending for the family doctor, but
Malli begged her not to with such anguish that she again gave up the
idea. The household then in perplexity left her in peace, only the lady
of the house attentively followed the distressed expressions in the
young face.

                  XIII. FRU HOSEWINCKEL GOES TO CHURCH

As long as Arndt was in the house it had been difficult to Fru
Hosewinckel, in the strong light with which her son’s love surrounded
Malli, really to catch sight of the girl. In her sober way she had
almost looked forward to his absence, during which she would have time
and peace to look at her. The sudden ominous change in Malli’s face and
manner frightened her, and she did not know what to think about it. For
some days her son was still so close to her that she saw Malli with his
eyes. The girl then was to her a precious possession, and she tried to
the best of her ability to help and console her.

Now she also reproached herself, more seriously than on the evening of
the ball, with having thoughtlessly allowed Malli to be the object of so
many people’s curiosity and homage. This very young girl had looked
death in the face, had immediately after been taken up into new, rich
surroundings, and there to all probability had had her life’s course
decided. Let good fortune be ever so sweet, the elderly woman reflected,
it takes strength to bear even that. Now there must be an end to parties
and gatherings, and Malli must remain unobserved and undisturbed under
the protection of the house.

As Fru Hosewinckel spoke of her resolve to Malli herself, it was as if
for the first time since Ferdinand’s death the girl did really grasp
what was said to her.

‘Yes, unobserved,’ whispered Malli. ‘Be subject to no sight but thine
and mine, invisible to every eyeball else! What lovely words.’

But soon afterwards she was once more white and restless in the grip of
her grief.

Arndt’s mother knew Malli so little that she could not guess what she
was grieving about. She noticed that least of all the girl could bear to
hear her son’s name mentioned, it was as if each time the sound of it
stuck at the heart. A terrible thought for a while gained hold of Fru
Hosewinckel’s mind. Was it possible that this girl was not all there?
Nobody had really known her father, and who could tell what ghosts of
old forgotten times had been admired to the house together with the
valiant maiden? Yet till now no one had noticed any derangement in
Malli, and she again dismissed her fear. There was something else
weighing on the girl’s mind, and what was it?

She called to mind that it was the news of Ferdinand’s death which had
brought Malli to despair. What could there have been between the girl
and the young sailor? While pondering on this she called to mind that
she herself, while her engagement to Jochum Hosewinckel was still a
secret, had had another suitor applying for her hand, and had been
unhappy about it. Malli in the turbulence of the storm might have given
Ferdinand a promise, and might now be grieving because she had not got
herself released from it in time. Slowly Fru Hosewinckel groped her way
further into the idea, at times amazed at the unwonted audacity of her
own fantasy. Did the girl, she wondered, now imagine that the dead young
ordinary seaman might rise from his grave and call her to account? Young
girls have strange notions and may almost die of them. But a secret
distress to be relieved must be brought into the light of day. She must
persuade or force Malli to speak.

For a few days she cautiously questioned the girl on her childhood and
her time with Herr Soerensen’s troupe. Malli artlessly answered all her
questions, in this past there were no secrets. Fru Hosewinckel went on
to mention Ferdinand’s name, and it seemed evident that Ferdinand had
never caused Malli any sorrow but his death. The elder woman almost lost
patience with the young one, who suffered and would not let herself be
helped. Then she bethought herself that in this world there are powers
stronger than the human will, and decided to turn to them with regard to
Malli’s salvation.

As already mentioned, she was unaccustomed to troubling heaven with
direct petitions, this was perhaps the first time she approached it with
a personal plea. But she did it for the sake of her only son, and
because she had now gone so far into the matter that to her there was
not retreat. Neither could she hand over her task to anyone else. Her
husband was as pious as herself, and for more than forty years the two
had said their evening prayers together. But just as Fru
Hosewinckel—although she inwardly hoped that she might be wrong—could
not quite believe that any man could attain to eternal life, she could
not quite imagine that a person of the male sex could put a matter
before God in the form of prayer.

So next Sunday she went to church and collected herself to submit her
demand. She did not ask for strength or patience, what was required of
these she must, she knew, herself supply. But she prayed for an
inspiration to find clarity in the affair and help for the sorrowing
girl, for she realised that she herself was not rich in inspiration. She
walked home from church with hope in her heart.

Fru Hosewinckel, in her gratitude for the rescue of _Sofie Hosewinckel_,
had wished to present her church with a new altar cloth, a fine piece of
drawn-thread work fitted together in squares which could be embroidered
separately and when ready joined together. She herself worked on one
such piece and had asked Malli, who had been taught needlework by her
mother, to do another, and this occupation, a return to days of old, was
the only one in which the girl seemed to be at ease; she worked on
steadily, almost without looking up. On Sunday evening the lady of the
house and its young guest were sitting together by the drawing-room
sewing, in the large, dim room the linen shone a delicate white in the
gleam of the paraffin lamp. Shortly after the master of the house came
into the room and sat down with them.

                      XIV. OLD FOLK AND OLD TALES

Old Jochum Hosewinckel during the last years had been living under the
growing shadow of a fate hard to bear because to him it seemed to
include some kind of guilt or shame—he had never spoken about it to
anyone. Yet this was no personal or individual visitation, but a share
in conditions common to all the human race: when men live long enough
they come to know it. He had begun to feel the burden of old age. The
people of his family were long-lived, he had watched his father and his
grandfather grow old in a manner both expected and respected, becoming
hard of hearing and in the end stone-deaf, stiff in the back as in mode
of thought, walking about as honourable and honoured memorials to a long
row of years and experiences. With him, it seemed, old age was making
itself known in a different way, and in his own mind he blamed his
mother’s mother, who had come from the far north of Norway, for the
fact. He did not grow stiff or petrified, but the whole world and he
himself with it, day by day seemed to be losing in weight, and
dissolving. Matters and ideas changed colour as the coat of paint on a
boat that has been out in wind and weather will change colour—the hues
on the boat’s planks may become almost prettier than before, there will
be a new play in them, but all the same it is not as it should be, and
one has one’s boat painted afresh. It became difficult to him to keep
his accounts and to determine whether things happening round him were of
an advantageous or undesirable, of a gay or sad nature, ay, whether in
the books of his conscience they ought to be entered as credits or
debits. At times it seemed to him that he could no longer rightly
distinguish between past and present, his mind willingly let go its
grasp of near things to run back to vanished times, childhood games and
boy’s pranks grew more alive to him than cargoes and rates of exchange.
He was afraid lest his surroundings should discover the decay in him,
and became highly watchful in all communication with his skippers and
clerks. He was least worried in front of his wife, who once for all had
taken him for what he was, and now as a rule did not look much at him,
but it happened that he shunned his son’s company. In himself he might
at times feel happy and even buoyant in an existence without accounts,
but this fact to an old man of an old family, whose struggle throughout
life had been to keep assets and liabilities apart, was disquieting, and
he called himself to account. It went so far with him that the suspense
in the days round _Sofie Hosewinckel’s_ shipwreck for a while had
brought him a feeling of relief, because here one could clearly
distinguish between good and bad luck.

Then Malli came into the house, a young being whose idea of the universe
could not be expected to include strict border lines, and who none the
less, against the views of competent people, had headed straight for a
goal and had saved his own good ship—a child who deserved to be spoiled
and jested with. A joyous understanding and confidence sprang up between
the old host and the young guest, as if within the whole household those
two belonged to one another. She accompanied him on his early morning
walks to the harbour and the warehouses, she took trouble to recall
songs of old days and sang them to him, one time when he had brought her
a bird in a cage she kissed him on both cheeks.

As now she grew ill or deeply melancholy and kept back from all other
people, the understanding between the two was strengthened and found a
particular expression. Malli was loath to hear about matters or events
of the present day, but was pleased to listen to accounts of old times,
even to plain nursery tales. And her old ally and protector, with his
gentle, bony face and his white whiskers, was pleased to recount to her
childhood-experiences, and tales which more than sixty years ago had
been told himself by the house’s servants, by old skippers and fishermen
and by his mother’s mother. So it became a kind of tradition in the
Hosewinckel house that when in the evening the ladies sat sewing by the
table, its master would come in from his office, settle down in his
grandfather’s chair and bring out a story to them. At such hours he did
not mind being heard by his wife to indulge in queer fancies. He might
imagine himself and Malli to be running, hand in hand, into a twilight,
a darkness of their own. But it was not barren, it was the mighty night
of Northern lights, and in it things lived: heavy, shaggy bears padded
and puffed, wolves whirled in long trails through the blizzard over the
plains, ancient Finns, who knew witchcraft, chuckled while selling fair
winds to the seamen. Old Jochum Hosewinckel sat in his chair smiling, as
if on a refuge in life, to which a bad conscience was not admitted.

On this Sunday evening he entered the room with a story for Malli ready
at hand, and shortly after set to tell it.

‘Tonight, Malli,’ he said, ‘I am going to tell you about a grave danger
that once threatened the house in which you are sitting—God preserve it
from another such. And also about my grandmother’s grandfather, Jens
Aabel. I myself had the story told me when I was a small boy.’

               XV. JENS AABEL’S STORY AND HIS GOOD ADVICE

‘This old Jens Guttormsen Aabel,’ he began his tale, the light from the
lamp, which did not reach his face, falling upon his big old folded
hands, ‘had come here from Saeterdalen, where the folk at that time were
still half heathen, but he himself was a good Christian. He was a
well-to-do man held in respect by the whole town, and already getting on
in years, when in the month of February 1717 the great fire broke out in
Christianssand.

It was a grave disaster, in six hours more than thirty houses were burnt
to ashes. It was reported that the mighty glow from the fire on the sky
could be seen from Lillesand and from ships lying off Mandal. That night
it blew a gale from the north-west, so that the fire, which first sprang
up in Lillegade, ran straight towards my great-great-grand-father’s
house and warehouses in Vestergade, and it looked as if they were
doomed.

Already Jens Guttormsen’s servants and shop-assistants had begun to
bring out money-chests and ledgers. Many people had gathered at the
other end of the street, and some of them wept for the good man who was
to see all that he had collected in life brought to nothing. So close
was the fire, old people of the town have been telling, that in the
midst of winter it was as hot in the street as in a bake-house.

‘Then, my girl,’ the old shipowner went on, ‘Jens Aabel came out of his
gate with his scales in his right hand and his yardstick in his left. He
took his stand in the street and spoke in a loud voice so that all heard
it. He said: ‘Here stand I, Jens Guttormsen Aabel, merchant of this
town, with my scales and my measure. If in my day I have made wrong use
of any of them, then, wind and fire, proceed against my house! But if I
have used these righteous things righteously, then you two wild servants
of God spare my house, so that in years to come it may serve men and
women of Christianssand as before.’

‘And at that moment,’ Jochum Hosewinckel recounted, ‘just when he had
spoken, all people in the street saw the wind waver and for a moment
cease altogether, so that smoke and sparks swept down over them. But
immediately after it changed and shifted from north-west to due north,
and the fire swerved off Vestergade and down towards the market-place.
Jens Aabel’s house in this way was out of danger, and the things which
had just been brought out could be brought in again.’

The big clock in the room slowly struck eight, and the old narrator and
the listening girl remained silent, absorbed in the story, as if they
had stood together in Vestergade on that winter’s night.

‘You will have seen, Malli,’ Jochum Hosewinckel, who could not all at
once bring himself to return to everyday life, took up the tale again,
‘you will have seen the big Bible lying on the table in my office. That
is Jens Aabel’s Bible, which has come into the family through my
father’s mother. And it has got this quality to it, that if anyone in
the house, uncertain as to what he ought to do, goes to it to ask advice
from it and lets it fall open where it chooses, he will get from it the
right answer to what he is seeking.’

Fru Hosewinckel looked across the table at Malli, and at that moment it
seemed to her that her prayer was being answered. She sat still on her
sofa, but she followed the conversation closely.

‘I can tell you,’ said her husband, ‘how I myself did once ask Jens
Aabel’s Bible for advice. But you must then take a candle and fetch it
in here, so that I can find the right text. It is heavy, you will have
to carry it on both arms and to leave the candle standing till you have
laid the book back again.’

Malli went away with the candle and came back with the book, carrying it
on both arms, and laid it on the table in front of the old gentleman who
was waiting for it.

He took up his glasses, hesitated a moment, sat back in his chair and
related:

‘One time many years ago my cousin Jonas came to me to make me go halves
with him in the purchase of a ship. For the sake of my good aunt, his
mother, I was loath to say no, but when I considered the man himself I
was even more unwilling to say yes, for he was an unsafe man in all his
dealings and had duped me before. As now he sat on the sofa, impatient
to get my answer, and I walked up and down the floor sadly uncertain
about it, my eyes fell on our Bible.

‘“Why, yes,” I thought, “give me your advice, Jens Aabel,“’ and I went
and opened it, as if I were looking for something among the papers on
the table.

‘It was, that time, at the book of Ecclesiasticus that it fell open, the
29th chapter. And I shall read to you now what I read to myself that
evening, more than thirty years ago.’

He put on his glasses and wetted his finger to turn the pages of the
book, and when he found his place he read out slowly:

“Many have reckoned a loan as a windfall, and have given trouble to
those that helped them.”

‘“Just so,” I thought, “that fits cousin Jonas, here behind my back,
well enough.” And then came further:

“And when payment is due he will prolong the time, and return words of
heaviness, and complain of the times.”

‘“Just so,” I thought again. I was about to close the book and turn
round to him, when the next verse came in as of its own accord, and it
went:

“Howbeit with a man in poor estate be long suffering, and let him not
wait for thine alms. Lose thy money for a brother and friend, and it
shall profit thee more than gold.”

‘Then for a moment I stood stock-still. “Say you that? Say you that,
Jens Aabel?” I asked.

‘And now, my girl, I can finish off my tale by telling you that this
good ship _The Attempt_, the which Jonas and I bought together, on her
very first trip made an exceptional catch of herring and paid me my
money back then and there.’

‘But on her second journey,’ the old man concluded after a short
silence, and with a new expression running over his face, or indeed with
a new face, the story-teller’s face, ‘it happened that cousin Jonas went
overboard off Bodoe after a merry evening ashore. His mother in this way
was spared any further distress on his account.’

The old gentleman for a while sat lost in his recollections.

‘You will bear the book back where it belongs, Malli,’ he said, ‘for
Arndt, too, must be able to find advice in it one day, when somebody
wants to trick him, and all the same with a person in poor estate he
should be long-suffering.’

Fru Hosewinckel’s gaze again rose to Malli’s young figure, as she stood
up, and followed it through the door.

A few minutes later husband and wife in the drawing-room heard a heavy
fall to the floor in the next room. They found the girl lying in front
of the table as if she were dead, and the book open upon it.

Fru Hosewinckel never forgot that in that moment she seemed to hear her
son’s voice: ‘Is this what you wanted?’

They lifted up Malli and laid her on the horsehair-covered sofa. She
opened her eyes, but appeared to see nothing. In a while she raised her
hand and stroked the old man’s face. ‘I felt dizzy, Arndt,’ she
whispered.

Fru Hosewinckel rang for the maids and with their help supported Malli
upstairs and had her put to bed.

When she came down into the office again her husband stood where she had
left him, gazing into the candle by the open Bible on the table. He
looked up at her and closed the book. She made a movement to stop him,
but he went on to fasten the heavy clasp.

                         XVI. PUPIL AND MASTER

Early next morning, before the Hosewinckel household were awake, Malli
got up quietly, dressed and went down the back-stairs, and through the
back-door out into the side street. As late as the day before she would
have had to look round for the way to Herr Soerensen’s hotel, now she
steered straight to it like a homing-pigeon to its cot.

For many long hours of the night she had longed for dawn. As now she
hurried along she saw the world about her slowly regain light and
colour. Scents met her, and a gentle breeze, and she thought:
‘Everything here is different to what it was when I first came, that is
because spring has come. Later comes summer.’ She suddenly called to
mind, almost word to word, Arndt’s plan of how in the summer, in one of
his father’s ships, he and she would go north to where the sun never
sets.

While her thoughts ran thus, she had come through the gateway of the
hotel and up Herr Soerensen’s small staircase, and without knocking, as
if she had known she was expected, had opened the door.

Herr Soerensen as usual was up before other people and busy with his
meticulous morning-toilet. When he saw Malli enter he withdrew behind a
screen and from there instructed her to sit down on a chair by the
window. She did not, however, settle down at once, but looked round the
room, at a picture of the coronation of King Carl Johan and at Herr
Soerensen’s old carpet-bag propped against a wardrobe. Then she slowly
took off her hat and coat as if to show that she had come to stay, and
sank down on the chair pointed out to her.

Herr Soerensen popped his head over the screen three times in various
stages of lathering and shaving, observing her attentively. But he said
not a word.

In the end he came out into the room freshly shaved and with his wig on,
in a dressing-gown of which the wadding stuck out here and there. Malli
got up and threw herself in his arms, she was trembling so violently
that she could not speak. Herr Soerensen made no attempt to calm her and
did not even put his arms round her, but let her cling to him like a
drowning person to a piece of timber.

During the conversation that followed she in turns drew back from him in
order to watch his face, and again pressed against him as if she sought
a dark shelter where she did not need to see anything.

She first of all cried out lowly and hoarsely at his breast: ‘Ferdinand
is dead!’

‘Yes,’ Herr Soerensen said gently and gravely. ‘Yes, he is dead.’

‘Did you know?’ she cried out as before. ‘Had you heard of it? Did you
believe it?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I did so.’

She steadied herself and regained control of her voice, let go of him
and stood back a step.

‘Arndt Hosewinckel loves me!’ she cried in full, ringing tones.

Herr Soerensen’s glance followed the change in her face.

‘And do you love him too?’ he asked. Because the question lay close to a
line in a beloved tragedy, he repeated it, this second time in the
tragedy’s own words:

              ‘And lovest thou him too, pure maiden?’

The tragedy’s cues were also retained in Malli’s heart, she immediately
cried back to him with great force:

          ‘—sun and moon,
          The starry host, the angels, God himself and men
          may hear it: I am steadfast in my love for him!’

‘Well,’ said Herr Soerensen.

‘Well,’ he said again after a silence. ‘And what now Malli?’

‘Now?’ Malli wailed in a cry of distress like a seabird in the breakers.
‘Now I must go away. God, I must go away before I make them all
unhappy.’

She wrung her hands hanging down before her.

‘I will not make people unhappy,’ she said. ‘I will not! I will not! God
himself knows that I was not aware I was doing so! I thought, Herr
Soerensen, that I had told no lies, and made no mistakings.’

‘Now I must go away, I cannot stay here any longer,’ she cried again,
abruptly, as if it were some quite new decision of which she was
informing him. ‘I cannot, you know that I cannot, go back into that
house on the square, unless I know that soon, as soon as I can, I shall
be leaving it again. For I have been shown the door of it, Herr
Soerensen. A righteous man, who has never made a wrong use of his scales
or his measure, showed me the door yesterday evening. Righteous people
can halt a gale, so that it changes from north-west to due north. But
I!’ she lamented. ‘Our gale of Kvasefjord came straight to where I was.
Yet I never prayed God to send it, I swear that I never did.’

‘My old grandmother’s sister,’ she suddenly began, as if she was seeking
a fresh course of thought, but once more found herself up against the
misery of the preceding one, ‘was so angry with her for marrying Father,
that she would not set foot in her house. But one day she met me in the
street, made me come into her room, and spoke to me of Father. She said:
‘Your father, Malli, did not come from Scotland, and was no normal
seaman. He was one of whom many people have heard, and for whom they
have got a name. He was “The Flying Dutchman”—Do you think that is
true, Herr Soerensen?’

After some consideration Herr Soerensen answered: ‘No, I don’t.’

Malli for a moment seemed to find consolation in his assurance, then a
returning wave of despair again engulfed her.

‘All the same,’ she cried, ‘I betray them all, as Father betrayed
Mother!’

Again Herr Soerensen considered for a while, then said: ‘Whom have you
betrayed, Malli?’

‘Ferdinand!’ cried Malli. ‘Arndt!’

‘When I am far away,’ she said, ‘then I shall have the courage to write
to Arndt how matters stand with me. But I cannot, I dare not tell him to
his face.’

At the thought of this face she grew silent for a while. Then she once
more wrung her hands.

‘I must go away,’ she said. ‘If I do not go away I shall bring
misfortune upon him. Oh, misfortune and misery, Herr Soerensen!’

Here she took one of her short steps backwards and looked him in the
face with clear, wide-open eyes.

‘You may well believe me, Herr Soerensen,’ she said. ‘For I speak as one
that has a familiar spirit, out of the ground.’

There was a long silence in the room.

‘Well, yes,’ said Herr Soerensen. ‘I can believe you all right, Malli.
For see you, little Malli, I have been married myself.’

‘Married?’ Malli repeated in surprise.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In Denmark. To a good, lovable woman.’

‘Where is she now?’ Malli asked and looked around bewildered, as if the
lost Madam Soerensen could be found in the small room.

‘Thanks be to God,’ said Herr Soerensen. ‘Thanks be to God, she is
married now. To a good man. In Denmark. They have children together. She
and I had no children.’

‘I went away,’ he continued, ‘without letting her know, in secret. The
last evening we sat together in our little home—we had a beautiful
little home, Malli, with curtains and a carpet—she said to me:
“Everything you do in life, Valdemar, you do to make me happy. That is
so sweet of you.“’

‘O, yes,’ the girl cried out, as if struck to the heart. ‘That is how
they talk to us, that is what they believe about us.’

Herr Soerensen for the third time stood deep in thought, then took
Malli’s hand, said: ‘My girl,’ and was silent as before.

‘Let us sit down and talk together,’ he at last said, and led her to a
small sofa with broken webbing. They sat down side by side without it
coming to any talk between them. But after a while Malli in her need of
human sympathy and as if to appease a judge, or as in an attempt to
comfort another unhappy person under the same sentence as herself, began
to fumble over Herr Soerensen’s shoulders, neck and head. She let her
fingers run through his wig, so that a lock or two of it stood right on
end. And as, while beseeching or caressing him she did not look up at
him, in order to avoid getting the imploring fingers in his eyes or his
mouth he had to take aim with his head and butt it gently in the air to
the right and left.

Herr Soerensen, who was accustomed to being obeyed and admired, but not
to being caressed, allowed the situation to prolong itself for several
minutes, and remained sitting as before, even after Malli had let fall
her hands. He at first felt that their group was taking form like that
of the old unhappy king and his loving daughter. But presently the
centre of gravity was shifted and he became fully conscious of his
authority and responsibility: he was no fugitive, it was his young
disciple who had fled to him for help. He once more became the man
powerful above others: Prospero. And with Prospero’s mantle round his
shoulders, without lessening his pity of the despairing girl by his
side, he was aware of a growing, happy consciousness of fulfillment and
reunion. He was not to abandon his precious possession, but she was
still his and would remain with him, and he was to see his life’s great
project realised.

At long last he spoke:

          ‘. . . now I arise.
          Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.’

He rose, and erect and with firm steps walked to a small rickety table
by the other window in the room, which served him as writing-table. He
took papers out of the drawer and buried himself in them, sorting them,
making notes, putting some of them back and taking out others. It lasted
a long time, and as once Malli stirred, he beckoned her off without
turning his head. In the end he pushed his papers and pencils aside, but
remained sitting with his back to her.

‘I shall,’ he said, ‘give up my performances in Christianssand.’

There was no answer from Malli.

‘Ay,’ he continued in a firm voice. ‘Ay. I shall have it announced to
the town that I cancel the performance and am moving on to Bergen. Why,
of course,’ he declared as if she had been raising objections, ‘it will
be at a cost. We might have had a big, a singular success in this town.
On your account, my poor lass. It will be a loss. But not so big a loss
as I had feared. The collection of the townsfolk will make up for it not
a little. And in life, Malli, one must keep one’s profit-and-loss
account open.’

‘I myself, and you,’ he said, ‘will go away from here first, secretly.
The others, on my instructions, will follow later.’

He heard Malli get up, take a step towards him and stop.

‘When will you be going?’ her trembling voice asked behind his back.

Herr Soerensen answered: ‘I am fairly sure there is a ship on
Wednesday.’ And briefly, with the authority of an admiral on his deck,
he repeated: ‘On Wednesday.’

‘On Wednesday,’ came from Malli like a long sorrowful echo in the fells.

‘Yes,’ said Herr Soerensen.

‘The day after tomorrow!’ came in the same manner from her.

‘The day after tomorrow,’ from him.

As he gave his orders he still felt his own figure to be expanding, but
he was at the same time sensitive to her deep silence behind him, and
silence was ever a difficult thing for him to bear. As if he had had a
pair of keen eyes to the back of his head he saw her standing in the
middle of the small room, deathly pale from long hardships, as on the
evening after the shipwreck, in the boat. Within this conflict between
his consciousness of power and his compassion, he for some moments
wavered in spirit, and also rocked a little on his chair. Finally he
spun right round, and laid his arms on the back of the chair and his
chin on his arms, ready to face the sight of the whole world’s distress.

Malli loosened herself from the spot on the floor where she was
standing, and came towards him, tardively but with great strength, like
a wave running towards the coast. Everything in the following
conversation came from her very slowly, with each sentence slower, not
loudly but with clear, profound ring of a bell. She said:

             ‘I prithee
             Remember, I have done thee worthy service;
             Told thee no lies, made no mistakings, serv’d
             Without or grudge or grumblings:’

Herr Soerensen sat perfectly still, he thought: ‘God preserve me, how
that girl’s eyes shine! She is not looking at me, perhaps she does not
see me at all. But her eyes shine!’

There was a short pause, then she slowly continued:

          ‘All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
          To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,
          To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
          On the curl’d clouds: to thy strong bidding task
          Ariel and all his quality.’

Another pause. And then again:

                         ‘the elements
           Of whom your swords are, temper’d, may as well
           Wound the loud winds, or with bemock’d-at stabs
           Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
           One dowle that’s in my plume.’

Herr Soerensen was in no way taken aback by Malli skipping from one
place in the text of the drama to another, he was as much at home in the
text as she and could skip in it himself.

Now she looked straight at him, altogether collected in glance and
voice, and again spoke, so sweetly, meekly and straightforwardly that
Herr Soerensen’s heart melted in his breast and came into his eyes as
clear tears:

                 ‘Full fathom five now Malli lies,
                 Of my bones are coral made,
                 Those are pearls that were my eyes,
                 Nothing of me that doth fade,
                 But doth suffer a sea-change
                 Into something rich and strange.
                 Sea-nymphs hourly ring my knell.
                 Hark! now I hear them—ding dong bell.’

There was a last and very long silence.

But Herr Soerensen could not let himself be put out of the running like
this. He raised his head, stretched his right arm straight towards her
above the back of the chair and, slowly as she herself, spoke:

               ‘My Ariel, chick, then to the elements
               be free, and fare thou well!’

Malli stood on a while, then looked about her for her cloak and put it
on, and he noticed that it was her old cloak from home. When she had
buttoned it she turned towards him.

‘But why,’ she asked him, ‘must things go with us like that?’

‘Why?’ Herr Soerensen repeated.

‘Why must things go with us so disastrously, Herr Soerensen?’ she said.

Herr Soerensen was mightily exalted and inspired after Prospero’s last
words, he was conscious that he must now answer her out of his
experience of a long life, and said:

‘Maiden, be silent. We must never question—it is the others shall come
questioning us—it is our noble privilege to answer—O answers fine and
clear, O wondrous answers!—the questions of a baffled and
divided—humanity. And ne’er ourselves to ask.’

‘Yes,’ said Malli after a moment or two. ‘And what do we get fork?’

‘What do we get for it?’ he repeated.

‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘What do we get in return, Herr Soerensen?’

Herr Soerensen looked back over their conversation, then looked further
back over that long life out of which he was to answer her.

‘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. MALLI’S 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 one another 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
    towards 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 this 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 also 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 29th chapter, the
    1st verse which runs 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 8th 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
    boundless 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 _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 and 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 that 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 recognised 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 recognised 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 that 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 that 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, but 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 could 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 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 gained
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
harbour ready to go under weigh. 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 circumstances, 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.

When Mr Clay was seventy years old he fell ill with the gout, and for a
long time was almost paralysed. 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, grandly furnished bedroom by nine
o’clock, to sit by his 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 towards 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 sympton 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 happened 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 Frankfurt, 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 book-keeper, who
had taught him to read and write, and who had, before he died, in one
year implanted in him as much knowledge of book-keeping 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 grinded 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
learnt 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, 7,000. They were all there, and he
went to sleep.

Elishama, who despised the goods of this world, passed his time from
morning till night amongst greedy and covetous people, and had done so
all his life. This to him was as it should be. He understood to a nicety
the feelings of his surroundings and he approved of them. For out of
those feelings came, in the end, his closet with the door to it. If the
world’s desperate struggle for gold and power were ever to cease, it was
not certain that this room or this door would remain. So he used his
talents to fan and stir up the fire of ambition and greed in people
round him. He particularly fanned the fire of Mr Clay’s ambition and
greed, and watched it with an attentive eye.

Even before the time of their nocturnal readings there had existed
between Mr Clay and Elishama a kind of relation, a rare thing to both of
them. It had first begun when Elishama had drawn Mr Clay’s attention to
the fact that he was being cheated by the people who bought his horses
for him. Some unknown ancestor of Elishama’s had been a horse-dealer to
Polish Princes and Magnates, and the young book-keeper in Canton had all
this old Jew’s knowledge of horses in his blood. He would not for
anything in the world have been the owner of a horse himself, but he
encouraged Mr Clay’s vanity about his carriage and pair, from which, in
the end, his own security might benefit. Mr Clay on his side had been
struck by the young man’s insight and judgement, he had left the
superintendence of his stable to him and never been disappointed. They
had had no other direct dealings, but Mr Clay had become aware of
Elishama’s existence, as Elishama had for a long time been aware of Mr
Clay’s.

The relationship showed itself in a particular way. It might have been
observed that neither of the two ever spoke about the other to anybody
else. In both the old and the young man this was a breach of habit. For
Mr Clay constantly fretted over his young staff to his overseers, and
Elishama had such a sharp tongue that his remarks about the great and
small merchants of Canton had become proverbial in the storehouses and
the offices. In this way the master and the servant seemed to be
standing back to back, facing the rest of the world, and did indeed,
unknowingly, behave exactly as they would have behaved had they been
father and son.

In his own room Elishama now thought of Mr Clay, and put him down as a
greater fool than he had held him to be. But after a time he rose to
make a cup of tea—a luxury which he permitted himself when he came back
from his nightly readings—and while he drank it, his mind began to move
in a different way. He took up Mr Clay’s question for serious
consideration. It was possible, he reflected, that such books as Mr Clay
had asked about did really exist. He was accustomed to getting Mr Clay
the things he wanted. If these books existed, he must look out for them,
and even if they were rare he would find them in the end.

Elishama sat for a long time with his chin in his hand, then stood up
and went to the chest in the corner of the room. Out of it he took a
smaller, red-painted box which, when he first came to Canton, had
contained all that he owned in the world. He looked it through carefully
and came upon an old yellow piece of paper folded up and preserved in a
small silk bag. He read it by the candle on the table.

                      III. THE PROPHECY OF ISAIAH

In the party of Jews who in their flight from Poland had taken Elishama
with them, there had been a very old man who had died on the way. Before
he died he gave the child the piece of paper in the red bag. Elishama
tied it round his neck and managed to keep it there for many years,
mainly because during this time he rarely undressed. He could not read,
and did not know what was written on it.

But when in London he learned to read and was told that people set a
value on written matter, he took his paper out and found it to be
written in letters different to those he had been taught. His master
from time to time sent him on an errand to a dark and dirty little
pawnshop, the owner of which was an unfrocked clergyman. Elishama took
the paper to this man and asked him if it meant anything. When he was
informed that it was written in Hebrew he suggested that the pawnbroker
should translate it to him for a fee of three pence. The old man read
the paper through and recognised its contents, he looked them up in
their own place, copied them out in English and gravely accepted the
three pence. The boy from now kept both the original and the translation
in his small red bag.

In order to help Mr Clay, Elishama now took the bag from his box. Under
other circumstances he would not have done so, for it brought with it
notions of darkness and horror and the dim picture of a friend. Elishama
did not want friends any more than Mr Clay did. They were, to him,
people who suffered and perished—the word itself meant separation and
loss, tears and blood dripped from it.

Thus it came about that a few nights later, when Elishama had finished
reading the accounts to Mr Clay, and the old man growled and prepared to
send him off, the clerk took from his pocket a small dirty sheet of
paper and said: ‘Here, Mr Clay, is something that I shall read to you.’
Mr Clay turned his pale eyes to the reader’s face. Elishama read out:

    ‘The wilderness and the solitary places shall be glad for them.
    And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall
    blossom abundantly. And sing even with joy and singing. The
    glory of Lebanon shall be given to it . . .’

‘What is that?’ Mr Clay asked angrily.

Elishama laid down his paper. ‘That, Mr Clay,’ he said, ‘is what you
have asked for. Something besides the account-books, which people have
put together and written down.’ He continued:

    ‘The excellency of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory
    of the Lord. And the excellency of our God. Strengthen ye the
    weak hands. And confirm the feeble knees. Say to them . . .’

    ‘What is it? Where have you got it?’ Mr Clay again asked.

    Elishama held up his hand to impose silence, and read:

    ‘Say to them that are of a fearful heart: be strong, fear not.
    Behold, your God will come with a vengeance. Even God with a
    recompense. He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the
    blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be
    unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the
    tongue of the dumb sing. For in the wilderness shall waters
    break out. And streams in the desert. And the parched ground
    shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water, and
    the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with
    reeds and rushes.’

When Elishama had got so far, he laid down his paper and looked straight
in front of him.

Mr Clay drew in his breath asthmatically. ‘What was all that?’ he asked.

‘I have told you, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama. ‘You have heard it. This is a
thing which a man has put together and written down.’

‘Has it happened?’ asked Mr Clay.

‘No,’ answered Elishama with deep scorn.

‘Is it happening now?’ said Mr Clay.

‘No,’ said Elishama in the same way.

After a moment Mr Clay asked: ‘Who on earth has put it together?’

Elishama looked at Mr Clay and said: ‘The Prophet Isaiah.’

‘Who was that?’ Mr Clay asked sharply. ‘The Prophet—pooh! What is a
Prophet?’

Elishama said: ‘A man who foretells things.’

‘Then all these things should come to happen!’ Mr Clay remarked
disdainfully.

Elishama did not want to disavow the Prophet Isaiah, he said: ‘Yes. But
not now.’

After a while Mr Clay ordered: ‘Read again that of the lame man.’

Elishama read: ‘Then the lame man shall leap as a hart.’

Again after a moment Mr Clay ordered: ‘And that of the feeble knees.’

‘And confirm the feeble knees,’ Elishama read.

‘And of the deaf,’ said Mr Clay.

‘And the ears of the deaf,’ said Elishama, ‘shall be unstopped.’

There was a long pause. ‘Is anybody doing anything to make these things
happen?’ asked Mr Clay.

‘No,’ said Elishama with even deeper contempt than before.

When after another pause Mr Clay took up the matter, Elishama by the
tone of his voice realised that he was now wide awake.

‘Read the whole thing over again,’ he commanded.

Elishama did as he was told. When he had finished, Mr Clay asked: ‘When
did the prophet Isaiah live?’

‘I do not know, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama. ‘I think that it will have been
about a thousand years ago.’

Mr Clay’s knees were at this moment hurting badly, and he was painfully
aware of his lameness and infirmity.

‘It is a foolish thing,’ he declared, ‘to foretell things which do not
begin to take place within a thousand years. People,’ he added slowly,
‘should record things which have already happened.’

‘Do you want me,’ Elishama asked, ‘to take out the books of accounts
once more?’

There was a very long pause.

‘No,’ Mr Clay said. ‘No. People can record things which have already
happened, outside of account-books. I know what such a record is called.
A story. I once heard a story myself. Do not disturb me, and I shall
remember it.’

‘When I was twenty years old,’ he said after a long silence, ‘I sailed
from England to China. And I heard this story on the night before we
touched the Cape of Good Hope. Now I remember it all well. It was a warm
night, the sea was calm, and there was a full moon. I had been sitting
for some time by myself on the afterbody, when three sailors came up and
sat down on the deck. They were so close to me that I could hear all
that they said, but they did not see me. One of the sailors told the
others a story. He recorded to them things which had happened to him
himself. I heard the story from the beginning to the end, I shall tell
it to you.’

                             IV. THE STORY

‘The sailor,’ Mr Clay began, ‘had once come ashore in a big town. I do
not remember which, but it does not matter. He was walking by himself in
a street near the harbour, when a fine costly carriage drove up to him,
and an old gentleman descended from it. This gentleman said to the
sailor: “You are a fine-looking sailor. Do you want to earn five guineas
tonight?“’

Mr Clay was so completely unaccustomed to telling a story, that it is
doubtful whether he could have gone on with this one except in the dark.
He continued with an effort and repeated: ‘Do you want to earn five
guineas tonight?’

Elishama, here, put the prophecy of Isaiah back into its bag and into
his pocket.

‘The sailor,’ Mr Clay related, ‘naturally answered yes. The rich
gentleman then told him to come with him, and drove him in his carriage
to a big and splendid house just outside the town. Within the house
everything was equally grand and sumptuous. The sailor had never
believed that such riches existed in the world, for how would a poor boy
like him ever have come inside a really great man’s house? The gentleman
gave him a fine meal and expensive wine, and the sailor recounted all
that he had had to eat and drink, but I have forgotten the names of the
courses and the wines. When they had finished this meal, the master of
the house said to the sailor: ‘I am, as you see, a very rich man, the
richest man in this town. But I am old. I have not got many years left,
and I dislike and distrust the people who will inherit what I have
collected and saved up in life. Three years ago I married a young wife.
But she has been no good to me, for I have got no child.’

Here Mr Clay made a pause to collect his thoughts.

‘With your permission,’ said Elishama, ‘I, too, can tell that story.’

‘What is that?’ exclaimed Mr Clay, very angry at the interruption.

‘I shall tell you the rest of that story, with your permission, if you
will listen, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama.

Mr Clay did not find a word to say, and Elishama went on.

‘The old gentleman,’ he recounted, ‘led the sailor to a bedroom which
was lighted by candlesticks of pure gold, five on the right side and
five on the left. Was it not so, Mr Clay? On the walls were carved
pictures of palm trees. In the room there was a bed, and a partition was
made by chains of gold before the bed, and in the bed lay a lady. The
old man said to this lady: “You know my wish. Now do your best to have
it carried out.” Then from his purse he took a piece of gold—a
five-guinea piece, Mr Clay—and handed it to the sailor, and after that
he left the room. The sailor stayed with the lady all night. But when
the day began to spring, the door of the house was opened to him by the
old man’s servant, and he left the house and went back to his ship. Was
it not so, Mr Clay?’

Mr Clay for a minute stared at Elishama, then asked: ‘How do you come to
know this story? Have you too met the sailor from my ship near the Cape
of Good Hope? He will be an old man by now, and these things happened to
him many years ago.’

‘That story, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama, ‘which you believe to have
happened to the sailor on your ship, has never happened to anyone. All
sailors know it. All sailors tell it, and each of them, because he
wishes that it had happened to him himself, tells it as if it were so.
But it is not so. All sailors, when they listen to the story, like to
have it told in that way, and expect to have it told in that way. The
sailor who tells it may vary it a little, and add a few things of his
own, as when he explains how the lady was made, and how in the night he
made love to her. But otherwise the story is always the same.’

The old man in the bed at first did not say a word, then in a voice
hoarse with anger and disappointment he asked: ‘How do you know?’

‘I shall tell you, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama. ‘You have travelled on one
ship only, out here to China, so you have heard this story only once.
But I have sailed with many ships. First I sailed from Gravesend to
Lisbon, and on the ship a sailor told the story which tonight you have
told me. I was very young then, so I almost believed it, but not quite.
Then I sailed from Lisbon to the Cape of Good Hope, and on the ship
there was a sailor who told it. Then I sailed to Singapore, and on my
way I heard a sailor tell the story. It is the story of all sailors in
the world. Even the phrases and the words are the same. But all sailors
are pleased when, once more, one of them begins to tell it.’

‘Why should they tell it,’ said Mr Clay, ‘if it were not true?’

Elishama thought the question over. ‘I shall explain that to you,’ he
said, ‘if you will listen. All people, Mr Clay, in one respect are the
same.

‘When a new financial scheme is offered for subscription, it is proved
on paper that the shareholders will make on it a hundred per cent, or
two hundred per cent, as the case may be. Such a profit is never made,
and everybody knows that it is never made, still people must see these
figures on paper in the issue of stocks, or they will have nothing to do
with the scheme.

‘It is the same, Mr Clay with the prophecy which I have read it to you.
The Prophet Isaiah, who told it, will, I believe, have been living in a
country where it rained too little. Therefore he tells you that the
parched ground becomes a pool. In England, where the ground is almost
always a pool, people do not care to write it down or to read about it.

‘The sailors who tell this story, Mr Clay, are poor men and lead a
lonely life on the sea. That is why they tell about that rich house and
that beautiful lady. But the story which they tell has never happened.’

Mr Clay said: ‘The sailor told the others that he held a five-guinea
piece on his hand, and that he felt the weight and the cold of gold upon
it.’

‘Yes, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama, ‘and do you know why he told them so? It
was because he knew, and because the other sailors knew, that such a
thing could never happen. If they had believed that it could ever
happen, they would not have told it. A sailor goes ashore from his ship,
and pays a woman in the street to let him come with her. Sometimes he
pays her ten shillings, sometimes five, and sometimes only two, and none
of these women is young, or beautiful, or rich. It might possibly
happen—although I myself doubt it—that a woman would let a sailor come
with her for nothing, but if she did so, Mr Clay, the sailor would never
tell. Here a sailor will tell you that a young, beautiful and rich
lady—such a lady as he may have seen at a distance, but has never
spoken to—has been paying him, for the same thing, five guineas. In the
story, Mr Clay, it is always five guineas. That is contrary to the law
of demand and supply, Mr Clay, and it never has happened, and it never
will happen, and that is why it is told.’

Mr Clay at this moment was so upset, puzzled and angry that he could not
speak. He was angry with Elishama, because he felt that his clerk was
taking advantage of his weakness, and was defying his authority. But he
was upset and puzzled by the prophet Isaiah, who was about to annihilate
his whole world, and him himself with it. The two of them, he felt, were
holding together against him. After a while he spoke.

His voice was harsh and grating, but as firm as when he was giving an
order in his office.

‘If this story,’ he said, ‘has never happened before, I shall make it
happen now. I do not like pretence, I do not like prophecies. It is
insane and immoral to occupy oneself with unreal things. I like facts. I
shall turn this piece of make-believe into solid fact.’

The old man when he had spoken was a little easier at heart. He felt
that he was getting the better of Elishama and the Prophet Isaiah. He
was still going to prove to them his omnipotence.

‘The story shall become reality,’ he said slowly. ‘One sailor in the
world shall tell it, from beginning to end with everything that is in
it, as it has actually, from beginning to end, happened to him.’

When Elishama walked home in the morning he said to himself: ‘Either
this old man is going mad, and nearing his end. Or otherwise he will
tomorrow be ashamed of his project of tonight, he will want to forget
it, and it will be the safest thing not to mention it to him again.’

                       V. THE MISSION OF ELISHAMA

Mr Clay, however, was not ashamed. His project of the night had seized
hold of him, the matter had become a trial of strength between him and
the insurgents. Next midnight, as the clock struck, he took up the theme
and said to Elishama: ‘Do you think that I can no longer do what I want
to do?’

This time Elishama did not contradict Mr Clay with a word, he answered:
‘No, Mr Clay. I think you can do whatever you want.’

Mr Clay said: ‘I want the story which I told you last night to happen in
real life, to real people.’

‘I shall see to it, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama. ‘Where do you want it to
happen?’

‘I want it to happen here,’ said Mr Clay, and proudly looked round his
big, richly furnished bedroom. ‘In my house. I want to be present
myself, and to see it all with my own eyes. I want to pick up the sailor
myself, in the street by the harbour. I want to dine with him myself, in
my dining-room.’

‘Yes, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama. ‘And when do you want the story to
happen, to real people?’

‘It ought to be done quickly,’ said Mr Clay after a pause. ‘It will have
to be done quickly. But I am feeling better tonight, in a week’s time I
shall be strong enough.’

‘Then,’ Elishama said, ‘I shall have everything ready within a week.’

After a while Mr Clay said: ‘It will involve expenses. I do not mind
what the expenses may come to.’

These words gave Elishama such an impression of cold and loneliness in
the old man, that it was as if they had been spoken from the grave. But
since he himself did feel at home in the grave, he and his employer were
at this moment brought closer together.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is going to cost us some money. For you will
remember that there is a young woman in the story.’

‘Yes, a woman,’ said Mr Clay. ‘The world is full of women. A young woman
one can always buy, and that will be the cheapest thing in the story.’

‘No, Mr Clay,’ said Elishama, ‘it will not be the cheapest thing in this
story. For if I bring you a woman of the town, the sailor will know her
for what she is. And he will lose his faith in the story.’

Mr Clay growled a little.

‘And a young Miss I shall not be able to get you,’ said Elishama.

‘I am paying you to do this work,’ said Mr Clay. ‘It will be part of
your work to find me a woman.’

‘I shall have to think it over,’ said Elishama.

But he had already, while they talked together, been thinking it over.

Elishama, as has been told, was well versed in book-keeping by double
entry. He saw Mr Clay with the eyes of the world, and to the eyes of the
world—had the world known of his scheme—the old man was undoubtedly
mad. At the same time he saw Mr Clay with his own eyes, and to his own
eyes his employer, with his colleagues in the tea-trade and in other
trades, had always been mad. And indeed he was not sure whether, to a
man with one foot in the grave, the pursuit of a story was not a sounder
undertaking than the pursuit of profit. Elishama at any time would side
with the individual against the world, since, however mad the individual
might be, the world in general was sure to be still more hopelessly and
wickedly idiotic. As, once more, he walked away from Mr Clay’s house, he
realised that from this moment he was indispensible to his master, and
could get out of him whatever he wanted. He did not intend to derive any
advantage from the circumstance, but the idea pleased him.

In Mr Clay’s office there was a young accountant whose name was Charley
Simpson. He was an ambitious young man and had resolved to become, in
his own time, a millionaire and Nabob like Mr Clay himself. The big
ruddy young gentleman considered himself to be Elishama’s only friend,
treated him with patronising joviality, and had lately honoured him with
his confidence.

Charley kept a mistress in town, her name was Virginie. She was, he told
his protégé, a Frenchwoman of very good family, but she had been ruined
by her amorous temperament and now lived only for passion. Virginie
wanted a French shawl. Her lover meant to make her a present of one, but
he was afraid to go into a shop to buy it, as somebody might spot him
there and report to his father in England. If Elishama would take a
collection of shawls to Virginie’s house, Charley would show his
gratitude by introducing him to the lady herself.

The lovers had had a row immediately before Elishama’s arrival with the
shawls. But the sight of these somewhat appeased Virginie. She draped
one shawl after another round her fine figure before the looking-glass,
as if the men had not been in the room, and even lifted her skirts
neatly over her knee and made a couple of _pas-de-basque’s_. Over her
shoulder she told her lover that he must now, surely, be able to see for
himself that her real calling was the theatre. If she could only raise
the money, the wisest thing she could do was to go back to France. There
the comedy, the drama and the tragedy still existed, and the great
actresses were the idols of a nation!

Elishama was not familiar with the words comedy, drama or tragedy. But
an instinct now told him that there was a connection between these
phenomena and Mr Clay’s story. The day after his last conversation with
Mr Clay he turned his steps towards Virginie’s house.

Elishama within his nature had a trait which few people would have
expected to find there. He felt a deep innate sympathy or compassion
towards all women of this world, and particularly towards all young
women.

Although, as has already been told, he did not himself want a horse, he
could fix to a penny the price of any horse shown him. And although he
did not himself in the least want a woman he could view a woman with the
eyes of other young men, and accurately determine her value. Only in the
latter case he considered the eyes of other young men to be shortsighted
or blind, the price to be erroneous, and the article itself in some sad
way underestimated and wronged.

Mysteriously, he felt the same sympathy and compassion towards birds.
The quadrupeds all left him indifferent, and horses—in spite of his
knowledge and understanding of them—he disliked. But he would take a
roundabout way to his office in order to pass the Chinese bird-sellers’
shops, and to stand for a long time in front of their piled-up
birdcages, and he knew the individual birds within them and followed
their fate with concern.

Walking along to Virginie’s house he might well feel a twofold sympathy.
For she was a young woman who reminded him of a bird. As in his thoughts
he compared her to the other young women of Canton she there took on the
aspect of a golden pheasant or a peacock within a poultry yard. She was
bigger than her sisters, nobler and more pompous of gait and feather,
strutting somewhat lonely amongst the smaller domestic fowl. At their
one meeting she had been a little downcast and fretful, like a golden
pheasant in the moulting season. But she was always a golden pheasant.

                      VI. THE HEROINE OF THE STORY

Virginie lived in a small neat Chinese house with a little garden to it
and green shutters to the windows. The old Chinese woman, who owned the
house, kept it in order and cooked for her tenant, was out today.
Elishama found the door open and went straight in.

Virginie was playing a patience on her table by the window. She looked
up and said: ‘God, is it you? What are you bringing? Shawls?’

‘No, Miss Virginie, I am bringing nothing today,’ said he.

‘What is the use of you then?’ she asked. ‘Sit down and keep me company,
in God’s name, now that you are here.’

Upon this invitation he sat down.

Virginie, in spite of her venturesome past, was still young and fresh,
with a flower-like quality in her, as if there had been a large rose in
water in the room. She was dressed in a white muslin negligée with
flounces and a train to it, but had not yet done up her rich brown hair,
which floated down to the pink sash round her waist. The golden
afternoon sun fell between the shutters into her lap.

She went on with her patience, but spoke the while. ‘Are you still with
the old devil?’ she asked.

Elishama said: ‘He is ill and cannot go out.’

‘Good,’ said Virginie, ‘is he going to die?’

‘No, Miss Virginie,’ said Elishama. ‘He is even strong enough to make up
new schemes. With your permission, I am now going to tell you one of
them. I shall begin at the beginning.’

‘Well, so long as he is too ill to go out, I can stand hearing about
him,’ said Virginie.

‘Mr Clay,’ said Elishama, ‘has heard a story told. Fifty years ago—on a
ship, one night off the Cape—he heard a story told. Now that he is ill
and cannot sleep at night, he has been pondering this story. He dislikes
pretence, he dislikes prophecies, he likes facts. He has made up his
mind to have the story happen in real life, to real people. I have been
in his service for seven years—who would he get to carry out his wish
if not me? He is the richest man in Canton, Miss Virginie, he must have
what he wants. Now I shall tell you the story.

‘There was a sailor,’ he began, ‘who went ashore from his ship in the
harbour of a big town. As he was walking by himself in a street near the
harbour, a carriage with two fine, well-paired bay horses drove up to
him, and an old gentleman stepped out of the carriage and said to him:
“You are a fine-looking sailor. Do you want to earn five guineas
tonight?” When the sailor said yes, the old gentleman drove him to his
house and gave him food and wine. He then, Miss Virginie, said to him:
“I am a merchant of immense wealth, as you will have seen for yourself,
but I am all alone in the world. The people who, when I die, are to
inherit my fortune are all silly people, continually disturbing and
distressing me. I have taken to myself a young wife, but. . .“’

Here Virginie cut short Elishama’s tale. ‘I know that story,’ she said.
‘It happened in Singapore to an English merchant-captain, a friend of
mine. Has he been telling it to you as well?’

‘No, Miss Virginie,’ said Elishama. ‘He has not told it to me, but other
sailors have told it. This is a story that lives on the ships, all
sailors have heard it, and all sailors have told it. It might have been
left on sea and never come ashore, if it had not been that Mr Clay
cannot sleep. He is now going to make it happen here in Canton, in order
that one sailor in the world may be able to tell it from beginning to
end, exactly as, from beginning to end, it has happened to him.’

‘He was sure to go mad in the end, with his sins,’ said Virginie. ‘If
now he wants to play a comedy with the Devil, it is a matter between the
two of them.’

‘Yes, a comedy,’ said Elishama. ‘I had forgotten the word. People play
in comedies and make money by it, they become the idols of nations. Now
there are three people in Mr Clay’s comedy. The old gentleman he will
play himself, and the young sailor he will himself find in the street by
the harbour, where sailors come ashore from their ships. But if an
English merchant-captain has told you this story, Miss Virginie, he will
have told you that beside these two there is also a beautiful young lady
in it. On Mr Clay’s behalf I am now looking for this beautiful young
lady. If she will come into this story, and finish it for him, Mr Clay
will pay her one hundred guineas.’

Virginie, in her chair, turned her rich young torso all round towards
Elishama, folded her arms upon her bosom and laughed to his face. ‘What
is all this?’ she inquired.

‘It is a comedy, Miss Virginie,’ said he. ‘A dream or a tragedy. It is a
story.’

‘The old man has got strange ideas of a comedy,’ said Virginie. ‘In a
comedy the actors pretend to do things, to kill one another or to die,
or to go to bed with their lovers. But they do not really do any of
these things. Indeed your master is like the Emperor Nero of Rome, who,
to amuse himself, had people eaten up by lions. But since then it has
not been done, and that is a long time ago.’

‘Was the Emperor Nero very rich?’ asked Elishama.

‘Oh, he owned all the world,’ said Virginie.

‘And were his comedies good?’ he again asked.

‘He liked them himself, I suppose,’ said Virginie. ‘But who would he
nowadays get to play in them?’

‘If he owned all the world, he would get people to play in them,’ said
he.

Virginie looked hard at Elishama, her dark eyes shining. ‘I suppose that
nobody could insult _you_, even if they tried hard?’

Elishama thought her remark over. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they could not. Why
should I let them?’

‘And if I told you,’ she said, ‘to go out of my house, you would just
go?’

‘Yes, I should go,’ he said. ‘It is your house. But when I had gone you
would sit and think of the things for which you had turned me out. It is
when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being
insulted. But why should not their own thoughts be good enough for other
people to tell them?’

Virginie kept looking at him. Early that same day she had been so
furious with her destiny that she had been planning to throw herself
into the harbour. The patience had calmed her a little. Now she suddenly
felt that she and Elishama were alone in the house and that he had not
got it in him to repeat their conversation to anybody. Under the
circumstances she might go on with it.

‘What does Mr Clay pay you for coming here and proposing this thing to
me?’ she asked. ‘_Trente pièces d’argent, n’est-ce pas? C’est le prix!_’
When Virginie’s mind moved in high spheres she thought, and expressed
herself, in French.

Elishama, who spoke French well, did not recognise her quotation, but
imagined that she was mocking him for being poorly paid in Mr Clay’s
service. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not being paid for this. I am in Mr Clay’s
employ, I cannot take on work anywhere but with him. But you, Miss
Virginie, you can go wherever you like.’

‘Yes, I presume so,’ said Virginie.

‘Yes, you presume so,’ said Elishama, ‘and you have been able to go
wherever you liked all your life. And you have gone here, Miss Virginie,
to this house.’

Virginie blushed deeply with anger, but at the same time she once more
felt, and more deeply than before, that the two were alone in the house,
with the rest of the world shut out.

                             VII. VIRGINIE

Virginie’s father had been a merchant in Canton. His motto in life,
engraved in his signet ring, had been ‘_Pourquoi pas?_’ All through his
twenty years in China his heart had still been in France, and the great
things going on there had filled and moved it.

At the time of his death Virginie had been twelve years old. She was his
eldest child and his favourite. As a little girl she was as lovely as an
angel, the proud father amused himself taking her round and showing her
off to his friends, and in a few years she had seen and learned much.
She had a talent for mimicry, at home she gave pretty little
performances imitating the scenes she had witnessed, and repeating the
remarks and the gay songs she had listened to. Her mother, who came from
an old seafaring family of Brittany and was well aware that a wife ought
to bear with her man’s exuberant spirit, would still at times gently
reprove her husband for spoiling his pretty daughter. She would get but
a kiss in return, and the laughing comment: ‘_Ah, Virginie est fine!
Elle s’y comprend, en ironie!_’

In his young days the handsome and winning gentleman had travelled much.
In Spain he had done business with, and been on friendly terms with a
very great lady, the Countess de Montijo. When later, out in China, he
learned that this lady’s daughter had married the Emperor Napoleon III
and become Empress of the French, he was as proud and pleased as if he
himself had arranged the match. With him Virginie had for many years
lived in the grand world of the French Court, in the vast radiant
ballrooms of the Tuileries, among receptions of foreign Majesties, Court
cabals, romantic love-affairs, duels and the waltzes of Strauss.

After her father’s death, during long years of poverty and hardship, and
while she herself lost the angelic grace of her childhood and grew up
too big, Virginie had secretly turned to this glorious world for
consolation. She still walked up marble stairs lighted by a thousand
candles, herself all sparkling with diamonds, to dance with Princes and
Dukes—and her companions of a lonely, monotonous existence in dreary
rooms wondered at the girl’s pluck. In the end, however, the Tuileries
themselves had faded and vanished round her.

Even when the father had endeavoured to engraft moral principles in the
daughter’s young mind he had illustrated them with little anecdotes from
the Imperial Court. One of them had impressed itself deeply in the
little girl’s heart. The lovely Mademoiselle de Montijo had informed the
Emperor Napoleon that the only way to her bedroom ran through the
Cathedral of Notre Dame. Virginie was familiar with the Cathedral of
Notre Dame, a big engraving of it hung in her parents’ drawing-room. She
had pictured to herself a bedroom of corresponding dimensions, and in
the middle of it the lovely Mademoiselle Virginie, all in lace. The
vision many times had warmed and cheered her heart.

Alas, the way to her bedroom had not run through the Cathedral of Notre
Dame! It had not even run through the little grey French Church of
Canton. Lately it had run, without much of a detour, from the offices
and counting-houses of the town. For this reason Virginie despised the
men that had come by it.

One triumph she had had in her career of disappointments, but nobody but
herself knew of it.

Her first lover had been an English merchant-captain, who had made her
run away with him to Japan, just then opened to foreign trade. On the
couple’s very first night in Japan there was an earthquake. All round
their little hotel houses cracked and tumbled down and more than a
hundred people were killed. Virginie that night had experienced
something beside terror—she had lived through the great moment of her
life. The thundering roar from heaven was directed against her
personally, the earth shook and trembled at the loss of her innocence,
the mighty breakers of the sea bewailed Virginie’s fall! Frivolous human
beings only—her lover with them—within this hour ignored the law of
cause and effect and failed to realise the extent of her ruin.

Virginie had a good deal of kindness in her nature. In her present sad
situation, after she had definitely come down from the Tuileries, she
would have liked her lovers better had they left her free to love them
in her own way, as poor pitiful people in need of sympathy. She might
have put up with her present lover, Elishama’s friend, if she could have
made him see their liaison such as she herself saw it—as two lonely
people’s attempt to make, in an unpretentious bourgeois way and by means
of a little mutual gentleness, the best of a sorry world. But Charley
was an ambitious young man who liked to see himself as a man of fashion
and his mistress as a great Demimondaine. His mistress, who knew the
real meaning of the word, in their daily life together was tried hard by
this vanity of his, and it lay at the root of most of their quarrels.

Now she sat and listened to Elishama, with her arms folded, and her
lustrous eyes half closed, like a cat watching a mouse. If at this
moment he had wanted to run away she would not have let him go.

‘Mr Clay,’ said the young man, ‘is prepared to pay you a hundred guineas
if, on a night appointed by him, you will come to his house. This, Miss
Virginie . . .’

‘To his house!’ cried Virginie and looked up quite bewildered.

‘Yes,’ said he. ‘To his house. And this, Miss Virginie . . .’

Virginie rose from her chair so violently that it tumbled over, and
struck Elishama in the face with all her might.

‘Jesus!’ she cried. ‘His house! Do you know what house that is? It is my
father’s house! I played in it when I was a little girl!’

She had a ring on her finger, when she struck him it scratched
Elishama’s face. He wiped off a drop of blood and looked at his fingers.
The sight of blood shed by her hand put Virginie into a fury beyond
words, she walked to and fro in the room so that her white gown swished
on the floor, and Elishama got an idea of the drama. She sat down on a
chair, got up, and sat down on another.

                      VIII. VIRGINIE AND ELISHAMA

‘That house,’ she said at last, ‘was the only thing left me from the
time when I was a rich, pretty and innocent girl. Every time that I have
since then walked past it I have dreamt of how I were to enter it once
more!’ She caught at her breath as she spoke, white spots sprang out on
her face.

‘So you are to enter it now, Miss Virginie,’ said Elishama. ‘So is, Miss
Virginie, the young lady of Mr Clay’s story rich, pretty and innocent.’

Virginie stared at him as if she did not see him at all, or as if she
sat gazing at a doll.

‘God,’ she said. ‘My God! Yes—“_Virginie est fine, elle s’y comprend,
en ironie!_“’ She looked away, then back at him. ‘You may hear it all
now,’ she said. ‘My father said that to me!’

She stopped her ears with her fingers for a moment, again let her hands
drop and turned straight towards him.

‘You can have it all now,’ she cried, ‘you can have it all! My father
and I used to talk—in that house—of great, splendid, noble things! The
Empress Eugenie of France wore her white satin shoes one single time
only, then made a present of them to the convent schools for the little
girls there to wear at their first communion! I was to have done the
same thing—for Papa was proud of my small feet!’ She lifted her skirt a
little and looked down at her feet, in a pair of old slippers. ‘The
Empress of France made a great unexampled career for herself, and I was
to have done the same. And the way to her bedroom—you can have it all
now, you can have it all—the way to her bedroom ran through the
Cathedral of Notre Dame! _Virginie_,’ she added slowly, ‘_s’y comprend,
en ironie!_’

Now there was a long silence.

‘Listen, Miss Virginie,’ said Elishama. ‘In the shawls . . .’

‘Shawls?’ she repeated, amazed.

‘Yes, in the shawls that I brought you,’ he continued, ‘there was a
pattern. You told your friend Mr Simpson that you liked one pattern
better than another. But there was a pattern in all of them.’

Virginie had a taste for patterns, one of the things for which she
despised the English was that to her mind they had no pattern in their
lives. She frowned a little, but let Elishama go on.

‘Only,’ he went on, ‘sometimes the lines of a pattern will run the other
way of what you expect. As in a looking-glass.’

‘As in a looking-glass,’ she repeated slowly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But for all that it is still a pattern.’

This time she looked at him in silence.

‘You told me,’ he said, ‘that the Emperor of Rome owned all the world.
So does Mr Clay own Canton and all the people of Canton’—all except
myself, he thought—‘Mr Clay, and other rich merchants like him, own it.
If you look out into the street you will see many hundred people going
north and south, east and west. How many of them would be going at all,
if they had not been told to do so by other people? And the people who
have told them, Miss Virginie, are Mr Clay and other rich merchants like
him. Now he has told you to go to his house, and you will have to go.’

‘No,’ said Virginie.

Elishama waited a moment, but as Virginie said no more he went on.

‘What Mr Clay tells people to do,’ he said, ‘that is what matters. You
struck me a little while ago, you tremble now, because of what he told
you to do. It matters very little in comparison whether you do go or
not.’

‘It was you who told me,’ she said.

‘Yes, because he has told me to do so,’ said Elishama.

There was another pause.

‘Let down your hair over your face, Miss Virginie,’ said he. ‘If one
must sit in darkness, one should sit in one’s own darkness. I can wait
for as long as you like.’

Virginie, in her very refusal to do as he advised her, furiously shook
her head. Her long hair from which, when she rushed up and down the
room, the ribbon had fallen, floated round her like a dark cloud, and as
she let her head drop, it tumbled forward and hid her face. She sat for
a while immovable in this chiaroscuro.

‘That road of which you spoke,’ said Elishama, ‘which ran through the
Cathedral of Notre Dame—it is in this pattern. Only in this pattern it
is reversed.’

From behind her veil of hair Virginie said. ‘Reversed?’

‘Yes,’ said Elishama. ‘Reversed. In this pattern the road runs the other
way. And runs on.’

The strange sweetness of his voice, against her own will, caught
Virginie’s ear.

‘You will make a career for yourself, Miss Virginie,’ said Elishama, ‘no
less than the Empress of France. Only it runs the other way. And why
not, Miss Virginie?’

Virginie, after a minute, asked: ‘Did you know my father?’

‘No, I did not know him,’ said Elishama.

‘Then,’ she asked again, ‘from where do you know that the pattern of
which you speak does run in my family, and that there it is called a
tradition?’

Elishama did not answer her, because he did not know the meaning of the
word.

After another minute she said very slowly: ‘And _pourquoi pas_?’

She flung back her hair, raised her head, and sat behind her table like
a saleswoman behind her desk. To Elishama her face looked broader and
flatter than before, as if a roller had passed over it.

‘Tell Mr Clay from me,’ she said, ‘that I will not come for the price
which he has offered me. But that I shall come for the price of three
hundred guineas. That, if you like, is a pattern. Or—in such terms as
Mr Clay will understand—it is an old debt.’

‘Is that your last word, Miss Virginie?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Virginie.

‘Your very last word?’ he asked again.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Then, if it is so,’ he said, ‘I shall now hand you over three hundred
guineas.’ He took up his wallet and laid the notes on the table.

‘Do you want a receipt?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, reflecting that this bargain would be safer without a
receipt.

Virginie swept the notes and the playing-cards, all together, into the
drawer of the table. She was not going to play any more patience today.

‘How do you know,’ she said and looked Elishama in the face, ‘that I
shall not set fire to the house in the morning, before I leave it again,
and burn your master in it?’

Elishama had been about to go, now he stood still.

‘I shall tell you one thing before I go,’ said he. ‘This story is the
end of Mr Clay.’

‘Do you believe that he is going to die with malice?’ asked Virginie.

‘No,’ said he. ‘No, I cannot tell. But one way or another, it will be
the end of him. No man in the world, not the richest man within it, can
take a story, which people have invented and told, and make it happen.’

‘How do you know?’ she asked.

He waited a moment. ‘If you add up a column of figures,’ he said slowly
so as to make the matter clear to her, ‘you begin from your right-hand
side, with the lowest figure, and move left, to the tens, the hundreds,
the thousands and the ten thousands. But if a man took into his head to
add up a column the other way, from the left, what would he find? He
would find that his total would come out wrong, and that his
account-books would be worth nothing. Mr Clay’s total will come out
wrong, and his books will be worth nothing. And what will Mr Clay do
without his books? It is not a good thing to me myself, Miss Virginie, I
have been in his employ for seven years, and I shall now lose my
situation. But there is no getting away from it.’ This was the first
time that Elishama did ever speak confidentially about his master to a
third party.

‘Where are you going now?’ Virginie asked him.

‘Me?’ he said, surprised that anybody should take an interest in his
movements. ‘I am going home now to my room.’

‘I wonder,’ said she with a kind of awe in her voice, ‘where that will
be. And what it will be like. Had you a home when you were a child?’

‘No,’ said he.

‘Had you brothers and sisters?’ she asked again.

‘No,’ said he.

‘No, I thought so,’ said Virginie. ‘For I see now who you are. When you
came in, I thought that you were a small rat, out of Mr Clay’s
storehouses. _Mais toi—tu es le Juif Errant!_’

Elishama gave her a quick deep glance from his veiled eyes and walked
away.

                       IX. THE HERO OF THE STORY

On the night which Mr Clay had destined for his story to materialise,
the full moon shone down upon the city of Canton and the Chinese Sea. It
was an April night, the air was warm and sweet, and already innumerable
bats were soundlessly swishing to and fro in it. The oleander bushes in
Mr Clay’s garden looked almost colourless in the moonlight, the wheels
of his Victoria made but low whisper on the gravel of his drive.

Mr Clay with much trouble had been dressed and got into his carriage.
Now he sat in it gravely, erect against the silk upholstering, in a
black cloak and with a London top-hat on his head. On the smaller seat
opposite to him Elishama, cutting a less magnificent figure, silently
watched his master’s face. This dying man was driving out to manifest
his omnipotence, and to do the thing that could not be done.

They passed from the rich quarters of the town, with its villas and
gardens, down into the streets by the harbour, where many people were
about and the air was filled with noises and smells. At this time of day
nobody was in a hurry, people walked about leisurely or stood still and
talked together, the carriage had to drive along slowly. Here and there
lamps in many colours were hung out from the houses, like bright jewels
in the pale evening air.

Mr Clay from his seat looked sharply at the men on the pavement. He had
never before watched the faces of men in the street, the situation was
new to him and would not be repeated.

A lonely sailor came walking up the street, gazing about him, and Mr
Clay ordered Elishama to stop the carriage and accost him. So the clerk
got out and under his master’s eye addressed the stranger.

‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘My master, in this carriage, requests me to
tell you that you are a fine-looking sailor. He asks you whether you
would like to earn five guineas tonight.’

‘What is that?’ said the sailor. Elishama repeated his phrase.

The sailor took a step towards the carriage to have a better look at the
old man in it, then turned to Elishama. ‘Say that again, will you?’ he
said.

As Elishama spoke the words for the third time, the sailor’s mouth fell
open. Suddenly he turned round and walked off as fast as he could, he
took the first turning into a side-street and disappeared.

Upon a sign from Mr Clay Elishama got back into the carriage, and
ordered the coachman to drive on.

A little further on, a square-built young man with the look of a seaman
was about to cross the street, and had to stop before the carriage, he
and Mr Clay looked one another in the face even before it halted.
Elishama once more got out, and spoke to him in the same words as to the
first sailor. This young man obviously came from a public-house, and was
somewhat unsteady on his legs. He too made the clerk repeat the sentence
to him, but before Elishama had finished it the second time he burst out
laughing and beat his thigh.

‘Why, God help me!’ he cried out. ‘This, I know, is what happens to a
good-looking sailor when he visits the land-lubbers. You need not say
any more! I am coming with you, old Master, and you have hit on the
right man, too. Jesus Christ!’

He vaulted into the carriage by Mr Clay’s side, stared at him, at
Elishama and at the coachman, and let his hand run along the seat.

‘All silk!’ he cried out laughing. ‘All silk and softness! And more to
come!’

As they drove on he began to whistle, then took off his cap to cool his
head. All at once he clapped both hands to his face and sat like that
for a moment, then without a word jumped out of the carriage, began to
run, and disappeared into a side-street just as the first sailor had
done.

Mr Clay made the carriage turn and go back along the same street, then
turn once more and drive back slowly. But he did not stop it again. He
said nothing during the drive, and Elishama, who now kept his eyes off
him, began to wonder if they were to drive like this all night. Then
suddenly Mr Clay ordered the coachman to return to the house.

They had already got out of the narrow streets near the harbour and on
to the road leading to Mr Clay’s house, when three young sailors came
straight towards them, arm in arm. As the carriage approached, the two
at the sides let go their hold of the one in the middle and ran on
leaving the last one in front of it.

Mr Clay stopped the carriage and held up his hand to Elishama.

‘I will get out myself this time,’ he said.

Slowly and laboriously he descended upon the arm of his clerk, took a
step towards the sailor, stood still before him as straight as a pillar,
and poked his stick at him. When he spoke, his voice was hard and
cracked, with a little deadly, note to it.

‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘You are a fine-looking sailor. Do you want to
earn five guineas tonight?’

The young sailor was tall, broad and large-limbed, with very big hands.
His hair was so fair and stood out so long and thick round his head,
that at first Elishama believed him to have on a white fur cap. He did
not speak or move, but looked at Mr Clay quietly and dully, somewhat in
the manner of a young bull. In his right hand he carried a big bundle,
he now shifted it over to the left and began to rub his free hand up and
down his thigh as if at the next moment he meant to strike out a blow.
But instead he reached out and took hold of Mr Clay’s hand.

The old man swallowed, and repeated his proposal. ‘You are a
fine-looking sailor, my young friend,’ he said. ‘Do you want to earn
five guineas tonight?’

The boy for a moment thought the question over. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want
to earn five guineas. I was thinking about it just now, in what way I
was to earn five guineas. I shall come with you, old gentleman.’

He spoke slowly, with a stop between each of his phrases and with a
quaint, strong accent.

‘Then,’ said Mr Clay, ‘you will get into my carriage. And when we arrive
at my house I shall tell you more.’

The sailor set down his bundle on the bottom of the carriage, but did
not get in himself. ‘No,’ he said, ‘your carriage is too fine. My
clothes are all dirty and tarred. I shall run beside, and I can go as
fast as you.’

He placed his big hand on the mudguard, and as the carriage started he
began to run. He kept pace with the two tall English horses all the way,
and when they stopped at the front door of Mr Clay’s house he did not
seem to be much out of breath.

Mr Clay’s servants came out to receive their master and to help him out
of his carriage and his cloak, and the butler of the house, a fat and
bald Chinaman all dressed in green silk, appeared on the veranda and
held up a lantern on a long pole. In the golden light of the lamp
Elishama took a look at the host and the guest.

Mr Clay had strangely come to life. It was as if the young runner by his
carriage had made his own old blood run freer, he even had a faint pink
in his cheeks, like that of a painted woman. He was satisfied with his
catch out of the harbour of Canton. And very likely there was not
another fish of just that kind to be caught there.

The sailor was little more than a boy. He had a broad tanned face and
clear light blue eyes. He was so very lean, his big bones showing
wherever his clothes did not cover him, and his young face was so grave,
that there was something uncanny about him, as about a man come from a
dungeon. He was poorly dressed, in a blue shirt and a pair of canvas
trousers, with bare feet in his old shoes. He lifted his bundle from the
carriage and slowly followed the butler with the lantern into Mr Clay’s
house.

                       X. THE SUPPER OF THE STORY

The lighted candles upon the dinner-table, in heavy silver candlesticks,
were manifoldly reflected in the gilt-framed glasses on the walls, so
that the whole long room glittered with a hundred little bright flames.
The table was laid, the food ready and the bottles drawn.

To Elishama, who had come into the room last and had sat down silently
on a chair at one end of it, the two diners and the servants going to
and fro noiselessly, waiting on them, all looked like human figures in a
picture seen at a great distance.

Mr Clay had been helped into his pillow-filled armchair by the table,
and here sat as erect as in the carriage. But the young sailor slowly
gazed round him, afraid to touch anything in the room, and had to be
invited two or three times to sit down before he did so.

The old man by a movement of his hand told his butler to pour out wine
for his companion, watched him as he drank, and all through the meal had
his glass refilled. To keep him company he did even, against his habit,
sip a little wine himself.

The first glass of wine had a quick and strong effect on the boy. As he
put down the empty glass he suddenly blushed so deeply that his eyes
seemed to water with the heat from his burning cheeks.

Mr Clay in his armchair drew one profound sigh and coughed twice. When
he began to speak his voice was low and a little hoarse, while he spoke
it became shriller and stronger. But all the time he spoke very slowly.

‘Now, my young friend,’ he said, ‘I am going to tell why I have fetched
you, a poor sailor-boy, from a street by the harbour I am going to tell
you why I have brought you to this house of mine, into which few people,
even amongst the richest merchants of Canton, are ever allowed. Wait,
and you shall hear all. For I have got many things to tell you.’

He paused a little, drew in his breath, and continued:

‘I am a rich man, I am the richest man in Canton. Some of the wealth
which in the course of a long life I have made, is here in my house,
more is in my storehouses, and more even is on the rivers and on the
sea. My name in China is worth more money than you have ever heard of.
When, in China or in England, they name me, they name a million pounds.’

Again he made a short pause.

Elishama reflected that so far Mr Clay had recorded only such facts as
had been long stored up in his mind, and he wondered how he would get on
when he should have to move from the world of reality into that of
imagination. For the old man, who in his long life had heard one story
told, in his long life had never himself told a story, and had never
pretended or dissimulated to anybody. When, however, Mr Clay again took
up his recount, the clerk understood that he had on his mind more things
of which he meant to clear it. Deep down within it there were ideas,
perceptions, emotions even, of which he had never spoken and of which he
could never have spoken, to any human being except to the nameless,
barefooted boy before him. Elishama began to realise the value of what
is named a comedy, in which a man may at last speak the truth.

‘A million pounds,’ Mr Clay repeated. ‘That million pounds is me myself.
It is my days and my years, it is my brain and my heart, it is my life.
I am alone with it in this house, I have been alone with it for many
years, and I have been happy that it should be so. For the human beings
whom in my life I have met and dealt with I have always disliked and
despised. I have allowed few of them to touch my hand, I have allowed
none of them to touch my money.

‘And I have never,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘like other rich merchants,
dreaded that my fortune should not last as long as myself. For I have
always known how to keep it tight, and how to make it multiply.

‘But then lately,’ he went on, ‘I have comprehended that I myself shall
not last as long as my fortune. The moment will come, it is approaching,
when we two shall have to part, when one half of me must go and the
other half live on. Where and with whom, then, will it live on? Am I to
let it fall into the hands which till now I have managed to keep off it,
to be fingered and meddled with by those greedy and offensive hands? I
would as soon let my body be fingered and meddled with by them. When at
night I think of it I cannot sleep.

‘I have not troubled,’ he said, ‘to look for a hand into which I might
like to deliver my possessions, for I know that no such hand exists in
the world. But it has, in the end, occurred to me that it might, give me
pleasure to leave them in a hand which I myself had caused to exist.

‘Had caused to exist,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Caused to exist, and called
forth. As I have begotten my fortune, my million pounds.

‘For it was not my limbs that ached in the tea-fields, in the mist of
morning and the burning heat of midday. It was not my hand that was
scorched on the hot iron-plates upon which the tea-leaves are dried. Not
my hands that were torn in hauling taut the braces of the clipper,
pressing her to her utmost speed. The starving coolies in the
tea-fields, the dog-tired seamen on the middle watch never knew that
they were contributing to the making of a million pounds. To them the
minutes only, the pain in their hands, the hail-showers in their faces,
and the poor copper coins of their wages had real existence. It was in
my brain and by my will that this multitude of little things were
combined and set to co-operate to make up one single thing: a million
pounds. Have I not, then, legally begotten it?

‘Thus, in combining the things of life and by making them co-operate
according to my will, I may legally beget the hand into which I can with
some pleasure leave my fortune, the lasting part of me.’

He was silent for a long time. Then he dipped his own old, skinny hand
deep into his pocket, drew it out and looked at it. ‘Have you ever seen
gold?’ he asked the sailor.

‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I have heard of it from Captains and Super-cargoes,
who have seen it. But I have not seen it myself.’

‘Hold out your hand,’ said Mr Clay.

The boy held out his big hand. On the back of it a cross, a heart and an
anchor were tattooed.

‘This,’ said Mr Clay, ‘is a five-guinea piece. The five guineas which
you are to earn. It is gold.’

The sailor kept the coin on the flat of his hand, and for a while both
looked at it concernedly. When Mr Clay took his eyes off it he drank a
little wine.

‘I myself,’ he said, ‘am hard, I am dry. I have always been so, and I
would not have it otherwise. I have a distaste for the juices of the
body. I do not like the sight of blood, I cannot drink milk, sweat is
offensive to me, tears disgust me. In such things a man’s bones are
dissolved. And in those relationships between people which they name
fellowship, friendship or love, a man’s bones are likewise dissolved. I
did away with a partner of mine because I would not allow him to become
my friend and dissolve my bones. But gold, my young sailor, is solid. It
is hard, it is proof against dissolution. Gold,’ he repeated, a shadow
of a smile passing over his face, ‘is solvency.’

‘You,’ he went on after a pause, ‘are full of the juices of life. You
have blood in you, you have, I suppose, tears. You long and yearn for
the things which dissolve people, for friendship and fellowship, for
love. Gold you have tonight seen for the first time. I can use you.

‘To you, tonight, the minutes only, the pleasure of your body and the
five guineas in your pocket will have real existence. You will not be
aware that you are contributing to a worthy piece of work of mine. To
the fine bafflement of my relations in England, who were once pleased to
get rid of me, but who have now for twenty years been on the look-out
for the legacy from China. May they sleep well on that.’

The sailor stuck the piece of gold into his pocket. He was by now
flushed with food and wine. Big and bony, with his shaggy hair and
shining eyes, he looked as strong, greedy and lusty as a bear just out
of his winter lair.

‘Say no more, old master,’ he broke out. ‘I know what you are going to
tell me. I have, before now, heard it told on the ships, every word.
This, I know, is what happens to a sailor when he comes ashore. And you,
old gentleman, are in luck tonight. If you want a strong, hearty sailor,
you are in luck. You will find none stronger on any ship. Who stood by
the pumps in the blizzard off Lofoten for eleven hours? It is hard on
you being so old and dry. As for me, I shall know well enough what I am
doing.’

Once more the boy suddenly and violently blushed crimson. He broke off
his bragging and was silent for a minute.

‘I am not,’ he said, ‘in the habit of talking to rich old people. To
tell you the truth, old master, I am not just now in the habit of
talking to anybody at all. I shall tell you the whole story. A fortnight
ago, when the schooner _Barracuda_ picked me up and took me on board, I
had not spoken a word for a whole year. For a year ago, by the middle of
March, my own ship, the bark _Amelia Scott_, went down in a storm, and
of all her crew I alone was cast ashore on an island. There was nobody
but me there. It is not, tonight, more than three weeks since I walked
there, on the beach of my island. There were many sounds on my island,
but no one ever spoke. I myself sang a song there sometimes—you may
sing to yourself. But I never spoke.’

                              XI. THE BOAT

The unexpected strain of adventure in his sailor, and in his story, came
agreeable to Mr Clay. He turned his half-closed eyes to the boy’s face
and for a moment let them rest there with approval, almost with
kindness.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘so you have starved, slept on the ground, and dressed in
rags, for a year?’ He looked proudly round the rich room. ‘Then all this
must be a change to you?’

The sailor looked round too. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This house is very
different from my island.’ As he looked back at the old man, he stuck
his hand into his hair. ‘And that is why my hair is so long,’ he said.
‘I meant to have it cut tonight. The other two promised to take me to a
barber’s shop, but they changed their mind and were going to take me to
the girls instead. It was good luck to me that I did not get there, for
then I should not have met you. I shall soon get used to talking to
people again. I have talked before, I am not such a fool as I look.’

‘A pleasant thing,’ said Mr Clay, as if to himself. ‘A highly pleasant
thing, I should say, to be all by yourself on an island, where nobody
can possibly intrude upon you.’

‘It was good in many ways,’ said the boy gravely. ‘There were birds’
eggs on the beach, and I fished there too. I had my knife with me, a
good knife, I cut a mark with it in the bark of a big tree each time
that I saw a new moon. I had cut nine marks, then I forgot about it, and
there were two or three more new moons before the _Barracuda_ came
along.’

‘You are young,’ said Mr Clay. ‘I presume that you were pleased when the
ship came and took you back to people.’

‘I was pleased,’ said the sailor, ‘for one reason. But I had got used to
the island, I had come to think that I were to remain there all my life.
I told you there were sounds on the island. All night I heard the waves,
and when the wind rose I would hear it round me to all sides. I heard
when the sea-birds woke in the morning. One time it rained for a whole
month and another time for a fortnight. Both times there were great
thunderstorms. The rain came from the sky like a song, and the thunder
like a man’s voice, like my old Captain’s voice. I was surprised. I had
not heard a voice for many months.’

‘Were the nights long?’ asked Mr Clay.

‘They were as long as the days,’ answered the sailor. ‘The day came,
then the night, then the day. The one was as long as the other. Not like
in my country, where the nights are short in summer and long in winter.’

‘What did you think of at night?’ asked Mr Clay.

‘I thought mostly of one thing,’ said the sailor. ‘I thought of a boat.
Many times I also dreamed that I had got her, that I launched her and
steered her. She was to be a good strong, seaworthy boat. But she need
not be big, not more than five lastages. A sloop would be the thing for
me, with tall bulwarks. The stern should be blue, and I should carve
stars round the cabin windows. My own home is in Marstal in Denmark. The
old shipbuilder Lars Jensen Eager was a friend of my father’s, he might
help me to build the boat. I should make her trade with corn from
Bandholm and Skelskor to Copenhagen. I did not want to die before I had
got my boat. When I was taken up by the _Barracuda_, I thought that this
was the first bit of my way to her, and that was the reason why I was
pleased, then. And when I met you, old gentleman, and you asked me if I
would earn five guineas, I knew that I had been right to come away from
the island. And that was why I went with you.’

‘You are young,’ said Mr Clay again. ‘Surely on the island you also
thought about women?’

The boy sat silent for a long time and looked straight in front of him,
as if he had in reality forgotten to speak.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘On the _Amelia Scott_, and on the _Barracuda_ too, the
others talked about their girls. I know, I know very well what you are
paying me to do tonight. I am as good as any sailor. You will have no
reason to complain of me, Master. Your lady here, waiting for me, will
have no reason to complain of me.’

Suddenly, for a third time, the blood rushed to his face—it sank back,
mounted again and kept glowing darkly through the tan of his cheeks. He
stood up from his chair, tall and broad and very grave.

‘All the same,’ he said in a new, deep voice, ‘I may as well now go back
to my ship. And you, my old gentleman, will take on another sailor for
your job.’ He stuck his hand into his pocket.

The faint rosy tinge disappeared from Mr Clay’s cheeks. ‘No,’ he said.
‘No, I do not want you to go back to your ship. You have been cast on a
desert island, you have not spoken to a human being for a year. I like
to think of that. I can use you. I shall take on no other sailor for my
job.’

Mr Clay’s guest took one step forward and there looked so big that the
old man suddenly clenched the arms of the chair with his hands. He had
before now been threatened by desperate men, and had beaten them off by
the weight of his wealth, or by the force of his cool sharp brain. But
the irate creature before him was too simple to give in to any of those
arguments. He might have stuck his hand in his pocket to draw out the
good knife of which he had just spoken. Was it, then, a matter of life
and death to make a story come true?

The sailor took from his pocket the gold coin which Mr Clay had given
him, and held it towards the old man.

‘You had better not try to hold me back,’ he said. ‘You are very old,
you have but little strength to stand up against me. Thank you, old
Master, for the food and the wine. I shall now go back to my ship. Good
night, old Gentleman.’

Mr Clay in his state of surprise and alarm could speak only lowly and
hoarsely, but he spoke.

‘And your boat, my fine young seaman,’ he said. ‘The boat which is to be
all your own? The seaworthy smack of five lastages, which is to trade
with corn from your own place to Copenhagen? What will she be, now that
you are paying back your five guineas and going away? A story only,
which you have been telling me—which will never come to be launched,
which will never come to sail!’

After a moment the boy put the coin back in his pocket.

           XII. THE SPEECH OF THE OLD GENTLEMAN IN THE STORY

While the Nabob and the sailor-boy were entertaining one another in the
brilliantly lighted dining-room, Virginie in the bedroom, where tonight
all candles had been softly shaded by rose-coloured screens, was
preparing herself for her own part, the heroine’s part, in Mr Clay’s
story.

She had sent away the little Chinese maid, who had helped her to arrange
the room and adorn it with such objects as would make it appear like an
elegant lady’s bedroom. Two or three times she had suddenly stopped the
work and informed the girl that they were both immediately going to
leave the house. Now that she was alone she no longer thought of
leaving.

The room in which she found herself had been her parents’ bedroom, where
on Sunday mornings the children were let in to play in the big bed. Her
father and mother, who for a long time had seemed far away, were with
her tonight, she had entered their old house with their consent. To them
as to her, this night would bring about the final judgment of their old
deadly enemy, the disgrace and humiliation of their daughter provided
the conclusive evidence against him. The daughter, according to her vow
of long ago, would not see his face at the verdict, but the dead father
and mother were there to watch it.

The ornaments with which Virginie had embellished her bedroom of one
night—the figurines, Chinese fans and Maquart bouquets—were all
similar to those she remembered from her childhood, and which had been
so sadly burnt or smashed up by her father before Mr Clay ever entered
the house. A few bibelots had come from her own house. In this way
Virginie had joined her gloomy existence of the last ten years with her
gay and guiltless past of long ago, and had had it recognised by
Monsieur and Madame Dupont.

She set to dress and adorn her own person. She started on the task
solemnly and darkly, such as Judith in the tent of the Babylonians
adorned her face and body for the meeting with Holofernes. But she
immediately and inevitably became absorbed in the process—such as, very
likely, Judith herself did.

Virginie was an honest person in money matters, out of Mr Clay’s three
hundred guineas she had conscientiously and generously purchased
everything belonging to her role. She had a weakness for lace, and was
at this moment floating in a cloud of Valenciennes, with a coral
necklace round her throat, pearls in her ears and a pair of pink satin
slippers on her feet. She powdered and rouged her face, blackened her
eyebrows and painted her full lips, she let down her hair in rich silky
ringlets over her smooth shoulders, and scented her neck, arms and
bosom. When all was done, she gravely went up to one after another of
the long looking-glasses in the room.

These glasses had reflected her figure as a little girl, and had told
her, then, that she was pretty and graceful. As she looked into them she
remembered how, at the age of twelve, she had entreated them to show her
what she would be like in years to come, as a lady. The child, she felt,
could never have hoped to be shown, in a sweeter or rosier light, a
lovelier, a more elegant and bewitching lady. Virginie’s love of the
dramatic art, inherited from her father and encouraged by him, came to
her aid in the hour of need. If she was not what she appeared to be,
neither had her father’s business-transactions always been quite what
they appeared to be.

During these reflections she had stepped out of her small silk slippers
and stretched her fair, slim, strong body between the smooth sheets rich
with lace, her dark silken tresses spread over the pillow-case.

She had been engrossed in the thought of her enemy, and she had become
engrossed in the vision of herself. It was not till she heard steps in
the corridor outside that she gave any thought to the third party in the
story, her unknown guest of the night. Then for a second a little cold
draught of contempt for Mr Clay’s hired and bribed puppet ran through
her mind.

When the doorknob turned she cast down her eyes, and till the door was
once more opened and shut she kept her glance fixed upon the sheet. But
in this withdrawal there was as much energy and vigour as in any direct
glance of deadly, uncompromising enmity.

Mr Clay, in his long dressing-gown of heavy Chinese silk, came into the
room leaning on his stick. Two respectful steps behind him a big,
blurred shadow slowly crossed the threshold.

The one glass of wine he had taken with his guest had acted upon the
invalid of many sleepless nights. He had also, a few minutes ago, been
frightened a little, and although in the course of his life he had
frightened many people, fear to himself was a rare experience and might
well stir his blood in a new way. But the old man was drunk with a still
stronger liquor. For tonight he was moving in a world created by his
will and at his word.

His triumph had aged him, in a few hours his hair seemed to have grown
whiter. But at the same time it had strangely rejuvenated him. He was at
this hour conquering and subjugating, he was indeed, in absorbing them
into his own being, annihilating the forces which unexpectedly had bid
defiance to him. He was materialising a fantasy and changing a fable
into fact. Dimly he felt that he was about to triumph over the person
who had attempted to upset his own idea of the world—the Prophet
Isaiah.

He smiled a little, he was a little bit unsteady on his legs. For the
first time in his life he was impressed by a woman’s beauty. He gazed
almost happily at the girl in the bed, whom his command had called to
life—and for a second the vague picture of a child, long ago shown to
him by a proud father, appeared before him, and disappeared. He nodded
his head in approval. His dolls were behaving well. The heroine of his
story was pink and white, and her downcast eyes bore witness to alarmed
modesty. The story was fetching headway.

This was the moment, Mr Clay knew, for the speech of the old gentleman
in the story. He remembered it, word for word, from the night fifty
years ago. But the consciousness of his power was somehow going to the
head of the Nabob of Canton. The Prophet Isaiah is crafty, behind a
pious mien he has knowledge of many ways and measures. Mr Clay had been
a child only a very short time, until he had learned to speak and to
understand the speech of other people. Now, as he was about to enter the
heaven of his omnipotence, the Prophet laid his hand on his head and
turned him into a child—in other words, the old stoneman was quietly
entering his second childhood. He began to play with his story, he could
not let go the theme of the dinner-table.

‘You,’ he began, poking his forefinger at the girl in the bed, ‘and
you’—without looking at him he poked it at the boy, ‘are young. You are
in fine health, your limbs do not ache, you sleep at night. And because
you can walk and move without pain, you believe that you are walking and
moving according to your own will. But it is not so. You walk and move
at my bidding. You are, in reality, two young, strong and lusty
jumping-jacks within this old hand of mine.’

He paused, the little hard smile still on his face.

‘So,’ he went on, ‘so are, as I have told you, all people jumping-jacks
in a hand stronger than their own. So are, as I have told you, the poor
jumping-jacks in the hands of the rich, the fools of this earth in the
hands of the shrewd. They dance and drop as these hands pull the
strings.

‘When I am gone,’ he finished, ‘and when you two are left to yourselves,
and believe that you are following the command of your own young blood
only, you will still be doing nothing, nothing at all, but what I have
willed you to do. You will be conforming to the plot of my story. For
tonight this room, this bed, you yourselves with this same young hot
blood in you—it is all nothing but a story turned, at my word, into
reality.’

It came hard on him to tear himself from the room. He remained standing
by the end of the bed for another minute, hung on his stick. Then with
fine dignity he turned his back on the small actors upon the stage of
his omnipotence.

As he opened the door Virginie raised her eyes.

She looked straight at the figure of her father’s murderer, and saw a
withdrawing and disappearing figure. Mr Clay’s long Chinese
dressing-gown trailed on the floor, and as he closed the door behind him
it was caught in it, he had to open and close the door a second time.

                           XIII. THE MEETING

The room remained without a sound or a stir till, in the very same
instant, the boy took two long steps forward and Virginie, in the bed,
turned her head and looked at him.

At that she was so mortally frightened that she forgot her high mission,
and for a moment wished herself back in her own house, and even under
the patronage, such as it was, of Charley Simpson. For the figure by the
end of the bed was not a casual sailor out of the streets of Canton. It
was a huge wild animal brought in to crush her beneath him.

The boy stared at her, immovable except for his broad chest slowly going
up and down with his deep regular breath. At last he said: ‘I believe
that you are the most beautiful girl in the world.’ Virginie then saw
that she had to do with a child.

He asked her. ‘How old are you?’

She could not find a word to say. Was it possible, now, that her great
dark tragedy was to be turned into a comedy?

The boy waited for an answer, then asked her again: ‘Are you seventeen?’

‘Yes,’ said Virginie. And as she heard her own voice pronounce the word
her face, turned towards him, softened a little.

‘Then you and I are the same age,’ said the boy.

He took another slow step and sat down on the bed.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Virginie,’ she answered.

He repeated the name twice and sat for some time looking at her. Then he
lay down gently beside her on top of the quilt. In spite of his size he
was light and easy in all his movements. She heard his deep breathing
quicken, break off, and start again with a faint moan, as if something
was giving way within him. They lay like this for a while.

‘I have got something to tell you,’ he suddenly broke out in a low
voice. ‘I have never till tonight slept with a girl. I have thought of
it, often. I have meant to do it, many times. But I have never done it.’

He was silent once more, waiting to hear what she would say to this. As
she said nothing he went on.

‘It was not all my own fault,’ he said. ‘I have been away for a long
time, in a place a long way off, where there were no girls.’

Again he stopped, and again spoke. ‘I have never told the others on the
boat,’ he said. ‘Nor my friends with whom I came ashore tonight. But I
thought that I had better tell you.’

Against her will Virginie turned her face towards him. His own face,
quite close to hers, was all aglow.

‘When I was in the place, far away from here, that I told you about,’ he
went on, ‘I sometimes fancied that I had a girl with me, who was mine. I
brought her bird’s eggs and fish, and some big sweet fruits that grew
there, but of which I do not know the name, and she was kind to me. We
slept together in a cave that I found when I had been in the place for
three months. When the full moon rose it shone into it. But I could not
think of a name for her. I did not remember any girl’s name—Virginie,’
he added very slowly. ‘Virginie.’ And one more: ‘Virginie.’

All at once he lifted the quilt and the sheet, and slid in beneath them.
Although he still kept a little away from her she sensed his body there,
big, supple, and very young. After a time he stretched out his hand and
touched her. Her lace nightgown had slipped up on her leg, as now slowly
the boy put out his hand it met her round naked knee. He started a
little, let his fingers run gently over it, then withdrew his hand and
felt his own lean and hard knee over.

A moment later Virginie cried out in fear of her life. ‘God!’ she
screamed. ‘For God’s sake! Get up, we must get up. There is an
earthquake—do you not feel the earthquake!’

‘No,’ the boy panted lowly into her face. ‘No. It is not an earthquake.
It is me.’

                            XIV. THE PARTING

When at last he fell asleep he held her close to him as in a vice, with
his face bored into her shoulder, breathing deeply and peacefully.

Virginie, who had lately thought of so many things, lay awake but could
think of nothing in the world. She had never in her life met with such
strength. It would be useless and hopeless for her, here, to try to act
on her own. She felt his mighty grip round her as a hitherto unknown
kind of reality, which made everything else seem hollow and falsified.

In the middle of the night she suddenly remembered things which her
mother had told her about her own people, the seafaring men of Brittany.
Old French songs of the sailor’s dangers, and of his homecoming, came
back to her as on their own. In the end, from far away, came the
sailor-wife’s cradlesong.

When in the course of the night the boy woke up, he behaved with the
girl in his bed like a bear with a honeycomb, growling over her in a
wild state of greed and ecstasy. A couple of times they talked together.

‘On the ships,’ he said, ‘I sometimes made a song.’

‘What were your songs about?’ she asked.

‘About the sea,’ he answered. ‘And the life of the sailors. And their
death.’

‘Say a little of them to me,’ said she.

After a moment he slowly recited:

                 As I was keeping the middle watch,
                 and the night was cold,
                 three swans flew across the moon,
                 over her round face of gold.

‘Gold,’ he repeated, somewhat uneasily. And after a pause: ‘A
five-guinea piece is like the moon. And then not at all like her.’

‘Did you make other songs?’ asked Virginie, who did not understand what
he meant, but somehow did not want him to be worried.

‘Yes, I made other songs,’ he said. ‘About my boat.’

‘Say a little of them to me, then,’ she again asked.

Again he recited slowly:

          When the sky is brown,
          and the sea yawns, three thousand fathoms down,
          and the boat runs downward like a whale,
          still Povl Velling will not turn pale.

‘Is your name Paul, then?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Povl,’ he answered. ‘It is not a bad name. My father was named
Povl, and his father too. It is the name of good seamen, faithful to
their ship. My father was drowned six months before I was born. He is
down there, in the sea.’

‘But you are not going to drown, Paul?’ she said.

‘No,’ said he. ‘Maybe not. But I have many times wondered what my father
thought of, when the sea took him at last, altogether.’

‘Do you like to think of that sort of thing?’ she asked, somewhat
alarmed.

He thought her question over. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is good to think of
the storms and the high sea. It is not bad to think of death.’

A little while after he called out, in a sudden, low cry: ‘I shall have
to go back to my ship as soon as it grows light. She sails in the
morning.’

At these words a long, sad pain ran through Virginie’s whole body. But
the next moment it was again swallowed up in his strength. Soon after
they both fell asleep in one another’s arms.

Virginie woke up when the morning showed in grey stripes between the
window curtains. The boy had loosened his grasp of her, but was still,
in his deep sleep, holding on to her hand.

The moment she woke she was gripped, as in a stranglehold, by one single
thought. Never before had one thought filled her so entirely, to the
exclusion of everything else. ‘When he sees my face in the daylight,’
she reflected, ‘it will be old, powdered and rouged. An aged, wicked
woman’s face!’

She watched the light growing stronger. She had got ten minutes yet, she
had got five minutes yet, she thought—her heart heavy, heavy in her
breast. Time was up, and she called his name twice.

When he woke she told him that he must get up in order to be back on his
ship before she sailed. He did not answer her, but clung to her hand,
and in a while pressed it to his face, moaning.

She heard a bird singing in the garden and said: ‘Listen, Paul, there is
a bird singing. The candles are burnt out, the night is over.’

Suddenly, without a sound, like an animal springing, he flung himself
out of the bed, seized her, and lifted her up with him.

‘Come!’ he cried, ‘Come with me, away from here!’

His voice was like a song, like a storm, it lifted her higher than his
arms.

‘I shall take you with me!’ he cried again, ‘to my ship. I shall hide
you there, in the hold. I shall take you home with me!’

She thrust her hands against his chest to get away from him, and felt it
going up and down like a pair of bellows, but she only made him, and
herself within his embrace, sway a little, like a tree in the wind. He
tightened his hold of her, raising her as if to throw her over his
shoulder.

‘I am not going to leave you!’ he sang out. ‘I am not going to let
anybody in the world part us—What! Now that you are mine! Never! Never!
Never!’

Virginie at this moment caught sight of their two dim figures in one of
the looking-glasses. She could not have asked for a more dramatic scene.
The boy looked superhumanly big, formidable now, like an enraged bear,
risen on his hindlegs, and swinging his right forelimb in the air—and
she herself, with her long hair hanging down, was the limp, defenceless
prey in his left arm. Writhing, she managed to get one foot to the
ground. The boy felt her tremble, he let her down, but still held her
close.

‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked, forcing her face up towards his own.
‘You do not believe that I shall let anybody take you away from me!—You
are coming home with me. You will not be afraid of the storms, or the
blizzards, or the big waves, when I am with you. You will never be
afraid in Denmark. There we shall sleep together every night. Like
tonight. Like tonight!’

Virginie’s deadly terror had nothing to do with storms, blizzards or big
waves—she did not even, at this moment, dread death. She dreaded that
he should see her face in the light of day. At first she dared not
speak, for she did not feel sure of herself, and might say anything. But
when she had stood on both feet for a minute she collected her whole
being to find a way of escape.

‘You can not do that,’ she said, ‘he has paid you.’

‘What?’ he cried out bewildered.

‘That old man has paid you!’ she repeated. ‘He has paid you to go away
at dawn. You have taken his money!’

When he grasped the meaning of her words his face grew white and he let
go his hold of her so suddenly that she swayed on her feet.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘He has paid me. And I took his money.—But at
that time’ he cried, ‘I did not know!’

He stared into the air before him, above her head. ‘I have promised
him!’ he said heavily. Letting his head drop upon her shoulders he
buried his face in her hair and her flesh. ‘Oh! oh! oh!’ he wailed.

He lifted her, carried her back on to the bed and sat down on it beside
her, his eyes closed. Time after time he raised her and pressed her body
to his own, then laid her down again. Virginie was calmer as long as he
kept his eyes closed. She looked back over their short acquaintance to
find a word to say to him.

‘You will have your boat,’ she said at last.

After a long silence he said: ‘Yes, I shall have the boat.’ And again
after a while: ‘Was that what you said: that I shall have the boat?’

Once more he lifted her and held her for a long time in his arms. ‘But
you!’ he said.

‘But you?’ he repeated, slowly, after a moment. ‘What is going to happen
to you, my girl?’

Virginie did not say a word.

‘Then I must go,’ he said, ‘I must go back to my ship.’ He listened and
added: ‘There is a bird singing. The candles are burnt out. The night is
over. I must go.’ But he did not go till a little later.

‘Good-bye, Virginie,’ he said. ‘That is your name—Virginie. I shall
name the boat after you. I shall give her both our names—“Povl and
Virginie.” She will sail with both our names on her, up through the
Storstroem and the Bay of Koege.’

‘Will you remember me?’ Virginie asked.

‘Yes,’ the sailor said. ‘Always, all my life.’ He rose.

‘I shall think of you all my life,’ he said. ‘How would I not think of
you in my boat? I shall think of you when I hoist the sails and when I
weigh anchor. And when I cast anchor. I shall think of you in the
mornings when I hear the birds singing. Of your body, of your smell. I
shall never think of any other girl, of any girl at all. Because you are
the most beautiful girl in the world.’

She followed him to the door and put her arms round his neck. Here, away
from the window, the room was still dark. Here she suddenly heard
herself weeping. ‘But I have got one minute more,’ she thought, as she
held him in her arms and they kissed.

‘Look at me,’ she begged him. ‘Look at me, Paul.’

Gravely, he looked her in the face.

‘Remember my face,’ she said. ‘Look at my face well, and remember it.
Remember that I am seventeen. Remember that I have never loved anybody
till I met you.’

‘I shall remember it all,’ he said, ‘I shall never forget your face.’

Clinging to him, her wet face lifted, she felt that he was freeing
himself of her arms.

‘Now you must go,’ she said.

                             XV. THE SHELL

By the light of that same dawn Elishama walked up Mr Clay’s gravelled
drive and entered the house, in order to be, in his quiet way, the full
stop, or the epilogue, to the story.

In the long dining-room the table was still laid, and there was still a
little wine in the glasses. The candles were burnt out, only one last
flame flickered on its candlestick.

Mr Clay, too, was still there, propped up with cushions in his deep
armchair, his feet on a stool. He had been sitting up, waiting for the
morning, to drink off at sunrise the cup of his triumph. But the cup of
triumph had been too strong for him.

Elishama stood for a long time, immovable as the old man himself,
looking at him. He had never till now seen his master asleep and from
his complaints and laments had concluded that he should never see him
so. Well, he thought, Mr Clay had been right, he had struck on the one
effective remedy against his suffering. The realisation of a story was
the thing to set a man at rest.

The old man’s eyes were slightly open—pale like pebbles—but his thin
lips were closed in a little wry smile. His face was grey like the bony
hands upon his knees. His dressing-gown hung in such deep folds that
there hardly seemed to be a body in it to connect this face and head
with these hands. The whole proud and rigid figure, envied and feared by
thousands, this morning looked like a jumping-jack when the hand which
has pulled the strings has suddenly let them go.

His servant and confidant sat down on a chair, listening for the usual
whining and snarling in the old man’s chest. But there was not a sound
in the room. Elishama repeated to himself the words of his Prophet:

             ‘And sorrow and sighing shall flee away.’

For a long time Mr Clay’s clerk sat with him, meditating upon the events
of the night, and upon human conditions in general. What had happened,
he asked himself, to the three people who, each of them, had had his or
her role in Mr Clay’s story? Could they not have done without it? It was
hard, he reflected as he had often done before, it was very hard on
people who wanted things so badly that they could not do without them.
If they could not get these things it was hard, and when they did get
them, surely it was very hard.

After a while he wondered whether he were to touch the sunken, immovable
body before him, to demonstrate, in a gesture, his intention to wake up
Mr Clay to the triumphal end of his story. But again he made up his mind
to wait a little and to watch this end himself first. He silently left
the silent room.

He went to the bedroom door, and as he waited outside it he heard
voices. Two people were talking at the same time. What had happened to
those two in the night, and what was happening to them now? Could they
not have done without it? Someone was weeping inside the room, the voice
came to the listener’s ear broken, stifled by tears. Again Elishama
quoted to himself the words of Isaiah:

    ‘In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the
    desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool.’

A little later the door was opened, two figures were embracing and
clinging to one another in the doorway. Then they severed, the one
sliding back and disappearing, the other advancing and closing the door
behind him. The sailor of last night for a few seconds stood still
outside the door and gazed round him, then moved on.

Elishama took a step forward. He was loyal to his master and felt that
he ought to get the attestation of Mr Clay’s victory from the boy’s own
lips.

The sailor looked at him gravely and said: ‘I am going away. I am going
back to my ship. You will tell the old man that I have gone.’

Elishama now saw that he had been mistaken the evening before, the boy
was not so young as he had taken him to be. It made but little
difference—it was still a long time till he would be as old as Mr Clay,
peacefully at rest in his armchair. For a long time yet he would be
unsafe, in the hands of the elements, and of his own wants.

The clerk took upon himself to settle and balance up his master’s
concern.

‘Now you can tell the story,’ he said to the boy.

‘What story?’ the boy asked.

‘The whole story,’ Elishama answered. ‘When you tell what has happened
to you, what you have seen and done, from yesterday evening till now,
you will be telling the whole story. You are the one sailor in the world
who can tell it truthfully, from beginning to end, with everything that
is in it, as it has actually, from beginning to end, happened to you.’

The boy looked at Elishama for a long time.

‘What has happened to me?’ he said at last. ‘What I have seen and done
from yesterday evening till now?’ And again after a while: ‘Why do you
call it a story?’

‘Because,’ said Elishama, ‘you yourself have heard it told as a story.
About a sailor who comes ashore from his ship in a big town. And he is
walking by himself in a street near the harbour, when a carriage drives
up, and an old gentleman steps out of it and says to him: “You are a
fine-looking sailor, do you want to earn five guineas tonight?“’

The boy did not move. But he had a curious capacity of collecting,
suddenly and imperceptibly, his great strength, and of turning it
towards the person with whom he spoke, like some threatening, like some
formidable weight, which might well make the other feel in danger of his
life. So he had puzzled Mr Clay at their first meeting in the street,
and had downright scared him later in the evening, in the dining-room.
Elishama, who had no fear in him, for a second was moved and stirred—so
that he even drew back a little from the gigantic creature before
him—not, however, with fright, but with the same strange kind of
sympathy and compassion as all his life he had felt towards women and
birds.

But the gigantic creature before him proved to be a peaceful beast. He
waited a moment, then very quietly stated: ‘But that story is not in the
least like what happened to me.’

Again he waited a little.

‘Tell it?’ he said lowly. ‘To whom would I tell it? Who in the world
would believe it if I told it?’

He laid his collected, concentrated strength and weight into a last
sentence:

‘I would not tell it,’ he said, ‘for a hundred times five guineas.’

Elishama opened the door of the house to its guest of the night.
Outside, the trees and flowers of Mr Clay’s garden were wet with dew, in
the morning light they looked new and fresh, as if they had just this
hour been created. The sky was red as a rose and there was not a cloud
in it. One of Mr Clay’s peacocks screeched on the lawn—dragging its
tail after it, it made a dark stripe in the silvery grass. From far away
came the faint noises of the awakening town.

The sailor’s eyes fell upon the bundle which last night he had left on a
lacquered table in the verandah. He took it up to carry it away with
him, then thought better of it, laid it down again and undid the knots.

‘Will you remember to do something for me?’ he asked Elishama.

‘Yes, I shall remember,’ answered Elishama.

‘A long time ago,’ said the boy, ‘I was on an island where there were
many thousand shells along the shore. Some of them were beautiful,
perhaps they were rare, perhaps they were only to be found on that same
island. I picked up a few every day, in the morning. I took some of
them, the most beautiful of them, with me. I meant to take them home to
Denmark. They are the only things I have got, to take home with me.’

He spread his collections of shells over the table, looked them over
thoughtfully, and in the end picked out one big shining pink shell. He
handed it to Elishama.

‘I shall not give her them all,’ he said. ‘She has got so many fine
things, she would not care to have a lot of shells lying about. But this
one is rare, I think. I think that perhaps there is not another one just
like it in all the world.’

He slowly felt the shell over with his fingers. ‘It is as smooth and
silky as a knee,’ he said. ‘And when you hold it to your ear there is a
sound in it, a song. Will you give it to her from me? And will you tell
her to hold it to her ear?’

He held it to his own ear, and immediately his face took on an
attentive, peaceful look. Elishama reflected that after all he had been
right last night, and that the boy was very young.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I shall remember to give it to her.’

‘And will you remember to tell her to hold it to her ear?’ asked the
boy.

‘Yes,’ said Elishama.

‘Thank you. And good-bye,’ said the sailor, and gave Elishama his big
hand.

He went down the verandah steps and along the drive with the bundle in
his hand, and disappeared.

Elishama stood and looked after him. When the big young figure was no
longer in sight, he himself lifted the shell to his ear. There was a
deep, low surge in it, like the distant roar of great breakers.
Elishama’s face took on exactly the same expression as the sailor’s face
a few moments ago. He had a strange, gentle, profound shock, from the
sound of a new voice in the house, and in the story. ‘I have heard it
before,’ he thought, ‘long ago. Long, long ago. But where?’

He let his hand sink.




                                THE RING






ON a summer morning a hundred and fifty years ago a young Danish Squire
and his wife went out for a walk on their land. They had been married a
week. It had not been easy for them to get married, for the wife’s
family was higher in rank and wealthier than the husband’s. But the two
young people, now twenty-four and nineteen years old, had been set on
their purpose for ten years; in the end her haughty parents had had to
give in to them.

They were wonderfully happy. The stolen meetings and secret, tearful
love-letters were now things of the past. To God and man they were one,
in broad daylight they could walk arm in arm and drive in the same
carriage, and they would walk and drive so till the end of their days.
Their distant paradise had descended to earth and had proved,
surprisingly, to be filled with the things of everyday life; with
jesting and railleries, with breakfasts and suppers, with dogs,
hay-making and sheep. Sigismund, the young husband, had promised himself
that from now there should be no stone in his bride’s path, nor should
any shadow fall across it. Lovisa, the wife, felt that now, every day
and for the first time in her young life, she moved and breathed in
perfect freedom because she could never have any secret from her
husband.

To Lovisa—whom her husband called Lise—the rustic atmosphere of her
new life was a matter of wonder and delight. Her husband’s fear that the
existence he could offer her might not be good enough for her filled her
heart with laughter. It was not a long time since she had played with
dolls; as now she dressed her own hair, looked over her linen press and
arranged her flowers she again lived through an enchanting and cherished
experience: one was doing everything gravely and solicitously, and all
the time one knew one was playing.

It was a lovely July morning. Little woolly clouds drifted high up in
the sky, the air was full of sweet scents. Lise had on a white muslin
frock and a large Italian straw hat. She and her husband took a path
through the park; it wound on across the meadows, between small groves
and groups of trees, to the sheep-field. Sigismund was going to show his
wife his sheep. For this reason she had not brought her small white dog,
Bijou, with her, for he would yap at the lambs and frighten them, or he
would annoy the sheep-dogs. Sigismund prided himself on his sheep, he
had studied sheep-breeding in Mecklenburg and England, and had brought
back with him Cotswold rams by which to improve his Danish stock. While
they walked he explained to Lise the great possibilities and
difficulties of the plan.

She thought: ‘How clever he is, what a lot of things he knows!’ and at
the same time: ‘What an absurd person he is, with his sheep! What a baby
he is. I am a hundred years older than he.’

But when they arrived at the sheepfold the old sheep-master Mathias met
them with the sad news that one of the English lambs was dead and two
were sick. Lise saw that her husband was grieved by the tidings; while
he questioned Mathias on the matter she kept silent and only gently
pressed his arm. A couple of boys were sent off to fetch the sick lambs,
the while master and servant went into the details of the case. It took
some time.

Lise began to gaze about her and to think of other things. Twice her own
thoughts made her blush deeply and happily, like a red rose, then slowly
her blush died away and the two men were still talking about sheep. A
little while after their conversation caught her attention. It had
turned to a sheep-thief.

This thief during the last months had broken into the sheepfolds of the
neighbourhood like a wolf, had killed and dragged away his prey like a
wolf and like a wolf had left no trace after him. Three nights ago the
shepherd and his son on an estate ten miles away had caught him in the
act. The thief had killed the man and knocked the boy senseless, and had
managed to escape. There were men sent out to all sides to catch him,
but nobody had seen him.

Lise wanted to hear more about the horrible event, and for her benefit
old Mathias went through it once more. There had been a long fight in
the sheep-house, in many places the earthen floor was soaked with blood.
In the fight the thief’s left arm was broken; all the same he had
climbed a tall fence with a lamb on his back. Mathias added that he
would like to string up the murderer with these two hands of his, and
Lise nodded her head at him gravely in approval. She remembered Red
Riding Hood’s wolf, and felt a pleasant little thrill running down her
spine.

Sigismund had his own lambs in his mind, but he was too happy in himself
to wish anything in the universe ill. After a minute he said ‘Poor
devil.’

Lise said, ‘How can you pity such a terrible man? Indeed Grandmamma was
right when she said that you were a revolutionary and a danger to
society!’ The thought of Grandmamma, and of the tears of past days,
again turned her mind away from the gruesome tale she had just heard.

The boys brought the sick lambs and the men began to examine them
carefully, lifting them up and trying to set them on their legs; they
squeezed them here and there and made the little creatures whimper. Lise
shrank from the show and her husband noticed her distress.

‘You go home, my darling,’ he said, ‘this will take some time. But just
walk ahead slowly, and I shall catch up with you.’

So she was turned away by an impatient husband to whom his sheep meant
more than his wife. If any experience could be sweeter than to be
dragged out by him to look at those same sheep, it would be this. She
dropped her large summer hat with its blue ribbons on the grass and told
him to carry it back for her, for she wanted to feel the summer air on
her forehead and in her hair. She walked on very slowly, as he had told
her to do, for she wished to obey him in everything. As she walked she
felt a great new happiness in being altogether alone, even without
Bijou. She could not remember that she had ever before in all her life
been altogether alone. The landscape around her was still, as if full of
promise, and it was hers. Even the swallows cruising in the air were
hers, for they belonged to him, and he was hers.

She followed the curving edge of the grove and after a minute or two
found that she was out of sight to the men by the sheep-house. What
could now, she wondered, be sweeter than to walk along the path in the
long flowering meadow grass, slowly, slowly, and to let her husband
overtake her there? It would be sweeter still, she reflected, to steal
into the grove and to be gone, to have vanished from the surface of the
earth from him when, tired of the sheep and longing for her company, he
should turn the bend of the path to catch up with her.

An idea struck her; she stood still to think it over.

A few days ago her husband had gone for a ride and she had not wanted to
go with him, but had strolled about with Bijou in order to explore her
domain. Bijou then, gambolling, had led her straight into the grove. As
she had followed him, gently forcing her way into the shrubbery, she had
suddenly come upon a glade in the midst of it, a narrow space like a
small alcove with hangings of thick green and golden brocade, big enough
to hold two or three people in it. She had felt at that moment that she
had come into the very heart of her new home. If today she could find
the spot again she would stand perfectly still there, hidden from all
the world. Sigismund would look for her in all directions, he would be
unable to understand what had become of her and for a minute, for a
short minute—or, perhaps, if she was firm and cruel enough, for
five—he would realise what a void, what an unendurably sad and horrible
place the universe would be when she was no longer in it. She gravely
scrutinised the grove to find the right entrance to her hiding-place,
then went in.

She took great care to make no noise at all, therefore advanced
exceedingly slowly. When a twig caught the flounces of her ample skirt
she loosened it softly from the muslin, so as not to crack it. Once a
branch took hold of one of her long golden curls; she stood still, with
her arms lifted, to free it. A little way into the grove the soil became
moist; her light steps no longer made any sound upon it. With one hand
she held her small handkerchief to her lips, as if to emphasise the
secretness of her course. She found the spot she sought and bent down to
divide the foliage and make a door to her sylvan closet. At this the hem
of her dress caught her foot and she stopped to loosen it. As she rose
she looked into the face of a man who was already in the shelter.

He stood up erect, two steps off. He must have watched her as she made
her way straight towards him.

She took him in in one single glance. His face was bruised and
scratched, his hands and wrists stained with dark filth. He was dressed
in rags, barefooted, with tatters wound round his naked ankles. His arms
hung down to his sides, his right hand clasped the hilt of a knife. He
was about her own age. The man and the woman looked at one another.

This meeting in the wood from beginning to end passed without a word,
what happened could only be rendered by pantomime. To the two actors in
the pantomime it was timeless, according to a clock it lasted four
minutes.

She had never in her life been exposed to danger. It did not occur to
her to sum up her position, or to work out the length of time it would
take to call her husband or Mathias, whom at this moment she could hear
shouting to his dogs. She beheld the man before her as she would have
beheld a forest ghost: the apparition itself, not the sequels of it,
changes the world to the human who faces it.

Although she did not take her eyes off the face before her she sensed
that the alcove had been turned into a covert. On the ground a couple of
sacks formed a couch, there were some gnawed bones by it. A fire must
have been made in the night, for there were cinders threwn on the
forest-floor.

After a while she realised that he was taking her in as she had taken in
him. He was no longer just run to earth and crouching for a spring, but
he was wondering, trying to know. At that she seemed to see herself with
the eyes of the wild animal at bay in its dark hiding-place: her
silently approaching white figure, which might mean death.

He moved his right arm till it hung down straight before him, between
his legs. Without lifting the hand he bent the wrist and slowly raised
the point of the knife till it pointed at her throat. The gesture was
mad, unbelievable. He did not smile as he made it, but his nostrils
distended, the corners of his mouth quivered a little. Then slowly he
put the knife back in the sheath by his belt.

She had no object of value about her, only the wedding-ring which her
husband had set on her finger in church, a week ago. She drew it off,
and in this movement dropped her handkerchief. She reached out her hand
with the ring towards him. She did not bargain for her life. She was
fearless by nature, and the horror with which he inspired her was not
fear of what he might do to her. She commanded him, she besought him to
vanish as he had come, to take a dreadful figure out of her life, so
that it should never have been there. In the dumb movement her young
form had the grave authoritativeness of a priestess conjuring down some
monstrous being by a sacred sign.

He slowly reached out his hand to hers, his fingers touched hers, and
her hand was steady at the touch. But he did not take the ring. As she
let it go it dropped to the ground as her handkerchief had done.

For a second the eyes of both followed it. It rolled a few inches
towards him and stopped before his bare foot. In a hardly perceivable
movement he kicked it away and again looked into her face. They remained
like that, she knew not how long, but she felt that during that time
something happened, things were changed.

He bent down and picked up her handkerchief. All the time gazing at her,
he again drew his knife and wrapped the tiny bit of cambric round the
blade. This was difficult for him to do because his left arm was broken.
While he did it his face under the dirt and sun-tan slowly grew whiter
till it was almost phosphorescent. Fumbling with both hands, he once
more stuck the knife into the sheath. Either the sheath was too big and
had never fitted the knife, or the blade was much worn—it went in. For
two or three more seconds his gaze rested on her face, then he lifted
his own face a little, the strange radiance still upon it, and closed
his eyes.

The movement was definitive and unconditional. In this one motion he did
what she had begged him to do: he vanished and was gone. She was free.

She took a step backwards, the immovable, blind face before her, then
bent as she had done to enter the hiding-place, and glided away as
noiselessly as she had come. Once outside the grove she stood still and
looked round for the meadow-path, found it and began to walk home.

Her husband had not yet rounded the edge of the grove. Now he saw her
and helloed to her gaily; he came up quickly and joined her.

The path here was so narrow that he kept half behind her and did not
touch her. He began to explain to her what had been the matter with the
lambs. She walked a step before him and thought: All is over.

After a while he noticed her silence, came up beside her to look at her
face and asked, ‘What is the matter?’

She searched her mind for something to say, and at last said, ‘I have
lost my ring.’

‘What ring?’ he asked her.

She answered, ‘My wedding-ring.’

As she heard her own voice pronounce the words she conceived their
meaning.

Her wedding ring. ‘With this ring’—dropped by the one party and kicked
away by the other—‘with this ring I thee wed.’ With this lost ring she
had wedded herself to something. To what? To poverty, persecution, total
loneliness. To the sorrows and the sinfulness of this earth. ‘And what
therefore God has joined together let man not put asunder.’

‘I will find you another ring,’ her husband said. ‘You and I are the
same as we were on our wedding day, it will do as well. We are husband
and wife today too, as much as yesterday, I suppose.’

Her face was so still that he did not know if she had heard what he
said. It touched him that she should take the loss of his ring so to
heart. He took her hand and kissed it. It was cold, not quite the same
hand as he had last kissed. He stopped to make her stop with him.

‘Do you remember where you had the ring on last?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she answered.

‘Have you any idea,’ he asked, ‘where you may have lost it?’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘I have no idea at all.’




                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.

[The end of _Anecdotes of Destiny_ by Isak Dinesen]