by Isak Dinesen
Frederick’s heart ceased to beat for a moment, with disgust or horror, and with sadness. The sentence was a distortion of his own beautiful fancies about Heloïse. The blasphemy made of the world a place of nauseating baseness, and of him an accomplice.
As to Heloïse herself, the insult changed her as if it had set fire to her. She turned straight upon the insulter, and Frederick had never seen her so abundant in vitality or arrogance; she seemed about to laugh in her adversary’s face. The sordidness of the world, he thought with deep ecstatic gratitude, did not touch her; she was above it all. Only for a moment her hand went up to the collar of her mantilla, as if, choking under the wave of her disdain, she must free herself of it. But again the next moment she stood still; her hand sank down, and with it the blood from her cheeks; she became very pale. She turned to her fellow-prisoners, and slowly let her gaze run over their white, horrified faces.
The two older officers stirred in their chairs. The young man wafted his paper at them. “Why!” he cried. “He was wounded for our transgressions! For the transgressions of my people we are stricken! With chapter and verse to it! We have a whole gang of spies before us, Sirs, with her—” he pointed a shaking finger at Heloïse, “at the head of them. Why must she come here of all places? Could she not have left us, at any rate, alone?”
He spoke to her again; he could not let go his hold of her. “Are you sure you have understood me?” he screamed. “No, I am not sure,” said she. “The French language will lend itself badly to your proposition. Will you please repeat it in German?” This was difficult for him to do; still he did it. Heloïse took off her hat, so that her golden hair shone in the lamplight. During the rest of the interview she kept it in her hands behind her slim waist, and it gave her a look of having her hands tied upon her back.
“Why do you ask me?” she said. “Ask those who are with me. These are poor people, hard-working, and used to hardships. Here is a French priest,” she went on very slowly, “the consoler of many poor souls; here are two French sisters, who have nursed the sick and dying. The two others have children in France, who will fare ill without them. Their salvation is, to each one of them, more important than mine. Let them decide for themselves if they will buy it at your price. You will be answered, by them, in French.”
The old priest took a step forward. He had been given to long speeches, in the hotel, but here he did not say a word. He only stretched his right arm upwards, and waved it to and fro. The one old nun threw herself back towards the wall, as if already facing the fusillading squad. She lifted both arms and cried: “No!” The other nun burst into terrible sobs, her legs gave way under her, she fell down upon her knees and repeated: “No. No. No.”
It was the commercial traveller who made a speech. He took a long step towards the young officer, looked up to his great height and said: “You believe that we are afraid of you? Yes, so we are. We are afraid ever to come to look as you do.” Frederick did not speak; he looked the officer in the face, and could not help smiling a little.
The German stared down at the commercial traveller, and then over his head at Heloïse. He cried out: “Then away with you. Let it have an end. Away with you all!” He called on two soldiers from the adjoining room. “Take these people down,” he commanded, “into the courtyard. For further orders.” And once more he cried to the prisoners: “You will have it your own way now. Let me have peace. Let me have peace only.” The last thing that Frederick saw in the room was his face, as Heloïse passed him and looked at him. The whole party was rushed down the stairs, and out of the house.
As they came down in the courtyard the night was clear and the stars began to show in the sky. There was a low wall running along the one side of the court, fencing the garden of the villa; from the other side of it came the smell of stock. One by one the tired refugees, ignorant of their fate, went and took their place by this wall. Heloïse, who stood bareheaded in the court, looked up to the sky, then after a while said to Frederick: “There was a falling star. You might have wished.”
When they had stood in the courtyard for half an hour three soldiers came out of the house; one of them carried a lamp. One of the others, who seemed to be a superintendent, looked round at the prisoners, went up to the old priest and handed him a paper. “This is your permission to go to Luxembourg,” he said. “It is for all of you. The trains are filled up; you will have to get a carriage in town. You had better leave at once.”
As soon as he had finished, another of the soldiers stepped forward and addressed himself to Heloïse, and they were surprised to see that he was holding a big bouquet of roses, which had been upon the table of the salon. He made a military salute. “The Colonel,” he said, “asks Madame to accept these. With his compliments. To a heroine.” Heloïse took the bouquet from him as if she did not see either him or it.
They managed to get carriages at the hotel. While they were kept waiting for them they had a hurried, spare meal of bread and wine, for none of them had eaten anything since morning. It was no renewal of their gallant supper of last night; it seemed to have no connection with it. Their existence, since then, had been set on another plane. They held one another’s hands, each of them owed his life to each of the others.
Heloïse was still the central figure of their communion, but in a new way, as an object infinitely precious to them all. Her pride, her glory was theirs, since they had been ready to die for it. She was still very pale; she looked like a child amongst the old people, and laughed at what they said to her. As she insisted on taking all her trunks and boxes with her, evidently regarding them as part of herself and not to be left in the hands of the enemy, and as Frederick had to load them up, he and she came to drive together, behind the others, and in a small fiacre, to the frontier.
Frederick all his life remembered this drive, even to the curves of the road. The moon was up, and the stretch of sky between her and the low horizon was as if powdered with gold-dust. When the dew fell, Heloïse drew her shawl over her head; within its dark folds she looked like a village-girl, and still she sat enthroned, like a muse, by his side. He had read in books, before now, of heroics and heroines; the episode he had lived through and the young woman beside him were like the books, and all the same she was so gently and simply vivid, like no book in the world. Her silent, triumphant happiness was as sweet to him as the smell of the ripe cornfield through which they drove. All of a sudden she took his hand.
It was early when they passed the frontier and came to the small station of Wasserbillig, where they found the rest of their party. While they waited for the train, which was to take them into France, and once more turned their faces to Paris, his French friends, Frederick felt, became like one family, to which he no longer belonged. When the train at last came in, they seemed almost ignorant of his existence.
But at the last moment Heloïse gave him a long, deep, tender glance. It followed him from behind the window of her compartment. Then suddenly she was gone.
Frederick stood on the platform and watched the train disappear in a dim morning landscape. He felt that the curtain had gone down upon a great event in his life. His heart was aching both with happiness and with woe. The lately born artist within him, Venusti’s friend, received the adventure in a humble, ecstatic spirit, and “Domine, non sum dignus” was his response to it. But when he was once more alone, the searcher and inquirer, his old self of the universities of England took hold, craved for more than that, and demanded to be enlightened, to know and understand. There was, within the phenomena of the heroic mind, still something left uncomprehended, an unexplored, a mysterious area.
It would be, he reflected, this moment of incompleted investigation and unobtained insight, which now caused him to stand at the station of Wasserbillig with an almost choking feeling of loss or privation, as if a cup had been withdrawn from his lips before his thirst was quenched.
The true seeker is sometimes helped to his end by the hand of fate. So was Frederick in his research on the
heroic mind. He only had to wait for a while.
In England he went back to his books. He finished his treatise on the doctrine of atonement, and later on wrote another book. With time he strolled from the area of religious philosophy to that of history of religion in general. He was holding a good position amongst the young men of letters of his generation, and was engaged to a girl, whom he had known from the time when they were both children, when, five or six years after his adventure at Saarburg, he had to go to Paris to attend a course of lectures by a great French historian.
He looked up an old friend there, a brother of the boy who, in Berlin, had first given him news of the war. This young man’s name was Arthur, and he was still, as then, in the same office at the Embassy. Arthur was at a loss to know how to entertain a student of theology in Paris. He invited Frederick out to dine at a select restaurant, and, while they were dining, asked him how he liked Paris, and what he had been seeing there. Frederick answered that he had seen a multitude of beautiful things, and had been to the museums of the Louvre and Luxembourg. They talked for some time of classic and modern art. Then suddenly Arthur exclaimed: “If you like to look at beautiful things I know what we will do. We will go and see Heloïse.” “Heloïse?” said Frederick. “Not a word more,” said Arthur. “It cannot be described; it shall be seen.”
He took Frederick to a small, select and exquisite music hall. “We are just in time,” he said. Then he laughed and added: “Although you really ought to have seen her at the time of the Empire. Some people have it that she is as stupid as a goose, but you cannot believe it when you look at her legs. La jambe c’est la femme! They also tell me that her private life is quite respectable. I do not know.”
The show which they were to see was called Diana’s Revenge and affected the classic style, but was elegantly modern in its details. A great number of lovely young dancers danced and posed, as nymphs in a forest, and were all very scantily dressed. But the climax of the whole performance was the appearance of the goddess Diana herself, with nothing on at all.
As she stepped forward bending her golden bow, a noise like a long sigh went through the house. The beauty of her body came as a surprise and an ecstasy even to those who had seen her before; they hardly believed their eyes.
Arthur regarded her in his opera-glasses, then generously handed them on to Frederick. But he noticed that Frederick did not make use of them, and, after a moment, that he had become very still. He wondered if he was shocked. “C’est une chose incroyable,” he said, “que la beauté de cette femme. What do you say?”
“Yes,” said Frederick. “But I know her. I have seen her before now.” “But not in this thing?” said Arthur. “No. Not in that,” said Frederick. After a little while he added: “Perhaps she will remember me. I shall send up my card.” Arthur smiled. The page who had taken up Frederick’s card came back with a small letter for him. “Is that from her?” Arthur asked. “Yes,” said Frederick. “She remembers me. She will come and see us when the performance is over.” “Heloïse?” exclaimed Arthur. “Well, you English professors of religious philosophy! When did you meet her? Was it when you were writing upon the mysteries of the Egyptian Adonis?” “No, I was writing on another theme then,” said Frederick. Arthur ordered a table and wine and a big bouquet of roses.
Heloïse came into the theatre, and made all heads turn towards her, like a bed of sunflowers towards the sun. She was in black, with a long train and long gloves, ostrich feathers and pearls. “All that black,” sighed the house in its heart, “to cover up all that white!”
She was perhaps a little fuller of bosom, and thinner in the face, than she had been six years ago, but she still moved in the same way, like one of the great Felidae, and had, in her countenance and mien, that brevity or impatience which had then charmed Frederick. Frederick rose to greet her, and Arthur, who had thought him sadly awkward amongst the elegant public of the theatre, was struck by his friend’s dignity, and, as he and Heloïse looked at each other, by the completely identical expression of deep happy earnestness in their two faces. They gave him the impression that they would have liked to kiss as they met, but were held back by something other than the presence of people round them. They kept standing up, as if they had forgotten the human faculty of sitting down.
Heloïse beamed on Frederick. “I am so happy that you have come to see me,” she said, with his hand in hers. Frederick at first could not find a word to say; in the end he asked a stupid question. “Have any of the others,” he asked, “been here to see you?” “No,” said Heloïse. “No, none of them.” Here Arthur succeeded in making them sit down, opposite each other, by his table. “You know,” said Heloïse, “that poor old Father Lamarque has died?” “No!” said Frederick. “I have not been in touch with any of them.” “Yes, he died,” said Heloïse. “When he came to Paris, then, he asked to be sent to the army. He did wonders there; he was a hero! But he got wounded, later, here in Paris, by the soldiers of Versailles. When I heard of it I ran to the hospital, but alas, it was too late.”
To make up for his countryman’s silence Arthur poured out the champagne to her with a compliment.
“Oh, they were good people,” she cried, taking her glass. “What a fine time it was! The two old sisters, too, how good they were! And so were all of them.
“But they were not exactly very brave,” she added, setting down the glass again. “They were all in a deadly funk that night at the villa. They were already seeing the muzzles of the German rifles, pointing at them. And, good God, they were running a risk then, too, and a worse one than they ever knew themselves.”
“How do you mean?” Frederick asked.
“Yes, a worse risk to them,” said Heloïse. “For they would have made me do as the German demanded. They would have made me do it, to save their lives, if he had put it straight to them at first, or if they had been left to themselves. And then they would never have got over it. They would have repented it all their lives, and have held themselves to be great sinners. They were not the people for that kind of business, they, who had never before done a mean thing in their life. That is why it was a sad thing that they should have been so badly frightened. I tell you, my friend, for those people it would have been better to be shot than to live on with a bad conscience. They were not used to that, you see; they would not have known how to live with it.”
“How do you know all that?” asked Frederick.
“Oh, I know that kind of people well,” said Heloïse. “I was brought up amongst poor, honest people myself. My grandmother had a sister who was a nun, and it was an old poor priest, like Father Lamarque, who taught me to read.”
Frederick put his elbow on the table, and his chin in his hand, and sat and looked at her. “Then your triumph afterwards,” he said very slowly, “was really all on our behalf? Because we had behaved so well?” “You did behave well, did you not?” said she, smiling at him. “So you were a greater heroine, even,” said Frederick in the same way, “than I knew at the time.” “My dear friend!” said she.
He asked her, “Did you believe, at the moment, that you might really be shot?” “Yes,” said she. “He might very well have had me shot, and all of you with me. That might well have been his fashion of making love. And all the same,” she added thoughtfully, “he was honest, an honest young man. He could really want a thing. Many men have not got that in them.”
She drank, had her glass refilled, and looked at Frederick. “You,” she said, “you were not like the others. If you and I had been alone there, everything would have been different. You might have made me save my life, in the way he told me, quite simply, and have thought nothing of it afterwards. I saw it, at the time. And when we drove together to the frontier, and you did not say a word, I knew it, in that fiacre. I liked it in you, and I do not know where you have learned it, seeing that after all you are an Englishman.” Frederick thought her words over. “Yes,” he said slowly, “if you had proposed it yourself, of your own free will.”
Heloïse laughed at that.
“But do you know,” she suddenly cried, “what was good luck both for you and me, and for all of us? That there were no women with us at the time! A woman would have made me do it, quick, had I been ever so distressed. And where, in that case, would all our greatness have been?” “But there were women with us,” said Frederick. “There were the nuns.” “Nay, they do not count,” said Heloïse. “A nun is not a woman in that sense. No, I mean a married woman, or an old maid, an honest woman. If Madame Bellot had not had stomach-ache with fear, she would have had everything off me in no time, I can promise you. Her I could never have talked round.”
Heloïse fell into thought, with her eyes on Frederick’s face, and after a minute or two said: “What a man you have become! I believe that you have grown. You were only a boy then. We were both so much younger.” “Tonight,” said he, “it does not seem to me a long time ago.” “But it is a long time, all the same,” said she, “only to you it does not matter. You are a man, a writer, are you not? You are on the upward path. You will be writing many more books, I feel that. Do you remember, now, how when we went out for a walk, in Saarburg, you told me about the books of a Jew in Amsterdam? He had a pretty name, like a woman’s. I might have chosen it for myself, instead of the one I have got, which also a learned man selected for me. I suppose that only very learned people would know it at all. What was it, now?” “Spinoza,” said Frederick. “Yes,” said Heloïse, “Spinoza. He cut diamonds. It was very interesting. No, to you time does not matter. One is happy to meet one’s friends again,” she said, “and yet it is then that one realizes how time flies. It is we who feel it, the women. From us time takes away so much. And in the end: everything.” She looked up at Frederick, and none of the faces which the great masters paint had ever given him such a vision of life, and of the world. “How I wish, my dear friend,” she said, “that you had seen me then.”