Winter's Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  During that walk of perhaps a hundred steps, the relation between Axel and Mizzi ripened and set. As they stopped, it was cast in its final and unalterable mould. The figure of Axel Leth was gone, and Frantz, the servant, had taken his place.

  Axel realized and understood, the umbrella in his hand—with reverence, since he was now in livery—that the slave-owner’s dependency upon the slave is strong as death and cruel as the grave. The slave holds his master’s life in his hand, as he holds his umbrella. Axel Leth, with whom she was in love, might betray Mizzi; it would anger her, it might sadden her, but she was still, in her anger and melancholy, the same person. But her existence itself rested upon the loyalty of Frantz, her servant, and on his devotion, assent and support. His treachery would break the integrity of her being. If she were not, at any moment, sure that Frantz would die for her, she could not live. If, he went on in his mind, in her own house a lover annoyed her, if a jealous adorer made a scene, she would ring for Frantz, and ask him to see her guest out, and the frantic lover, who would have braved a father and a husband, would be prostrate before the power of Frantz, and follow him without a word.

  Back in his own carriage Axel thought: “If now there was to be a railway accident, she would think of my safety first of all.”

  In Stuttgart the ladies were altogether in the hands of their old servant. He went with them to the hotel, and the porter at once recognized him and handed him their keys.

  But as now the understanding between the three was established and confirmed, Axel also guessed the immediate reason for the sisters’ alarm and dread of him. They believed that he meant to follow them to their journey’s end, to run them, so to say, to earth. Their own plan would be to go away in the early morning, before anybody knew, and they trembled like two birds in a snare as they saw their freedom of disappearance threatened. Nothing had been further from his thoughts, and he grieved that they should think so ill of him. So when he had seen their luggage brought up, and found everything to be in order, he respectfully asked Miss Rabe if she had any more orders for him, as otherwise he would set out on his home journey tonight, in order to be able to receive the ladies on their arrival. He watched the deep relief in her face as she let him go. Mizzi at the moment had her back to him, but he felt that a great movement ran through her too; still she neither turned nor said a word.

  He stood down in the hall, alone—and from this evening it dated that to him the hall was ever the central room of a hotel, the place where things went on. His task was completed, and he ought to go. But everything, he thought, could not be ended here; there must be something left, a word or a glance; he must see her once more, when she should come down for dinner. As people passed into the dining room he gazed through the door, and noted with content that there were flowers on their table. The two gentlemen of Baden-Baden had come into the hall too; they were to dine in the same room as the ladies, although they had not dared to ask to join them at their table. They were waiting to accompany them in. At last the two sisters came down the stairs and Axel reflected that, in spite of all their woes, they were looking strangely, pathetically happy and at case, in harmony with life. They went in, pleasantly. So now he had seen her once more, and might go forth into the rain.

  He was already opening the front door when Mizzi’s low, clear voice called him back. “Frantz,” she said. She had come out from the dining room and was standing in the midst of the hall. There was no confusion or vexation about her now. In spite of her clothes she looked so grownup, wholly in the grand style, like a martyr. “Here is the letter, Frantz,” she said, and handed him an envelope. As he took it, their fingers met. He had kissed her hand many times, and had had his arm round her in the waltzes, but no touch had been as significant as this fugitive, momentary contact.

  Axel went from the hotel to the rooms of the theatrical dresser, where his clothes had been kept for him. The old man was not in, but his wife with a skilfull hand undressed and washed him, the while discreetly inquiring if he had won his bet. Yes, he said, he had won it. When the painful process was over, she turned him round to the glass. Here was Axel Leth back, such as he was, of no consequence to any human being, and here was Frantz gone forever. Where was Axel Leth to go? He might go anywhere! But he went to Frankfurt, out of a vague respect for the truth.

  As he had Frantz’s clothes packed he took out the envelope. The letter, too, belonged to Frantz, and he had no real right to open it, but it might be that it contained a message for Axel Leth, through Frantz. There was a rose in it, a little faded, but still soft and moist, the rose that the child had given Mizzi at the station of Baden-Baden.

  When Axel came back to Baden-Baden the place was still grieving a little for Mizzi, although the melancholy would soon be dispersed by new arrivals. Axel decided that his cure was finished and fixed a day for his return to Denmark. The old English lady was the most faithful of Mizzi’s friends, and twice took him out for a drive, to talk of her. She was determined that he had proposed and been refused, and now took pleasure in turning the knife in his wound. She praised the girl as a great lady in the bud, a maiden brought up on the high principles of the old world, and undefiled by any low contact, a rose, a young swan. One could not be certain, with the present state of politics, and the rebelliousness of youth itself, whether, in a hundred years, there would still be such real ladies in the world, worthy of the worship of men, and how would man, poor unstable creature, get on then? And what skin! And what pretty legs!

  In the solitude of the terrace, Axel once wept over the emptiness of the world. Still he preserved his resigned, fatal state of mind.

  On the second day after his return he walked up to a small waterfall in the hills. The day was grey after a week’s rain, the forest roads were moist, the rush of water was like a song, an elegy, the voice of the still, wet woods, and the smell of the water was almost quenchingly fresh. He sat there and thought of Mizzi.

  What would become, he thought, of the two sisters, who had been so honest as to give life the lie, the partisans of an ideal, ever in flight from a blunt reality, the great, gentle ladies, who were incapable of living without slaves? For no slave, he reflected, could more desperately sigh and pine for his enfranchisement than they did sigh and pine for their slave, nor could freedom, to the slaves, ever be more essentially a condition of existence, the very breath of life than their slaves were to them.

  Very likely next year the parts would be interchanged; Lotti would be the slave-owner and Mizzi the slave. Lotti might then become an invalid lady of rank, in a bath-chair, since that role could be played without the jewels or feathers, the want of which Mizzi had deplored in the woods. And Mizzi would be the companion, demure in the plain attire of a nurse, patient under the whims of her mistress. It was good to think that they might still, then, in the forest, weep in each other’s arms, and kiss like sisters.

  He kept his eyes upon the waterfall. The clear stream, like a luminous column amongst the moss and the stones, held its noble outline unaltered through all the hours of day and night. In the midst of it there was a small projecting cascade, where the tumbling water struck a rock. That, too, stood out immutable, like a fresh crack in the marble of the cataract. If he returned in ten years, he would find it unchanged, in the same form, like a harmonious and immortal work of art. Still it was, each second, new particles of water hurled over the edge, rushing into a precipice and disappearing. It was a flight, a whirl, an incessant catastrophe.

  Are there, in life, he thought, similar phenomena? Is there a corresponding, paradoxal mode of existing, a poised, classic, static flight and run? In music it exists, and there it is called a Fuga:

  D’un air placide et triomphant,

  Tu passes ton chemin, majestueuse enfant.

  THE DREAMING CHILD

  IN THE FIRST HALF of the last century there lived in Sealand, in Denmark, a family of cottagers and fishermen, who were called Plejelt after their native place, and who did not seem able to do well for themselve
s in any way. Once they had owned a little land here and there, and fishing-boats, but what they had possessed they had lost, and within their new enterprises they failed. They just managed to keep out of the jails of Denmark, but they gave themselves up freely to all such sins and weaknesses—vagabondage, drink, gambling, illegitimate children and suicide—as human beings can indulge in without breaking the law. The old judge of the district said of them: “These Plejelts are not bad people; I have got many worse than they. They are pretty, healthy, likable, even talented in their way. Only they just have not got the knack of living. And if they do not promptly pull themselves together I cannot tell what may become of them, except that the rats will eat them.”

  Now it was a queer thing that—just as if the Plejelts had been overhearing this sad prophecy and had been soundly frightened by it—in the following years they actually seemed to pull themselves together. One of them married into a respectable peasant family, another had a stroke of luck in the herring-fishery, another was converted by the new parson of the parish, and obtained the office of bell-ringer. Only one child of the clan, a girl, did not escape its fate, but on the contrary appeared to collect upon her young head the entire burden of guilt and misfortune of her tribe. In the course of her short, tragic life she was washed from the country into the town of Copenhagen, and here, before she was twenty, she died in dire misery, leaving a small son behind her. The father of the child, who is otherwise unknown to this tale, had given her a hundred rixdollars. These, together with the child, the dying mother handed over to an old washerwoman, blind in one eye, and named Madame Mahler, in whose house she had lodged. She begged Madame Mahler to provide for her baby as long as the money lasted, in the true spirit of the Plejelts, contenting herself with a brief respite.

  At the sight of the money Madame Mahler got a rose in each cheek; she had never till now set eyes on a hundred rixdollars, all in a pile. As she looked at the child she sighed deeply; then she took the task upon her shoulders, with what other burdens life had already placed there.

  The little boy, whose name was Jens, in this way first became conscious of the world, and of life, within the slums of old Copenhagen in a dark backyard like a well, a labyrinth of filth, decay and foul smell. Slowly he also became conscious of himself, and of something exceptional in his worldly position. There were other children in the backyard, a big crowd of them; they were pale and dirty as himself. But they all seemed to belong to somebody; they had a father and a mother; there was, for each of them, a group of other ragged and squalling children whom they called brothers and sisters, and who sided with them in the brawls of the yard; they obviously made part of a unity. He began to meditate upon the world’s particular attitude to himself, and upon the reason for it. Something within it responded to an apprehension within his own heart: that he did not really belong here, but somewhere else. At night he had chaotic, many-coloured dreams; in the day-time his thoughts still lingered in them; sometimes they made him laugh, all to himself, like the tinkling of a little bell, so that Madame Mahler, shaking her own head, held him to be a bit weak in his.

  A visitor came to Madame Mahler’s house, a friend of her youth, an old wry seamstress with a flat, brown face and a black wig. They called her Mamzell Ane. She had in her young days sewn in many great houses. She wore a red bow at the throat, and had many coquettish, maidenly little ways and postures. But within her sunken bosom she had also a greatness of soul, which enabled her to scorn her present misery in the memory of that splendour which in the past her eyes had beheld. Madame Mahler was a woman of small imagination; she did but reluctantly lend an ear to her friend’s grand, interminable soliloquies. After a while Mamzell Ane turned to little Jens for sympathy. Before the child’s grave attentiveness her fancy took speed; she called forth, and declaimed upon, the glory of satin, velvet and brocade, of lofty halls and marble staircases. The lady of the house was adorned for a ball by the light of multitudinous candles; her husband came in to fetch her with a star on his breast, while the carriage and pair waited in the street. There were big weddings in the cathedral, and funerals as well, with all the ladies swathed in black like magnificent, tragic columns. The children called their parents Papa and Mamma; they had dolls and hobby-horses to play with, talking parrots in gilt cages, and dogs that were taught to walk on their hind legs. Their mother kissed them, gave them bonbons and pretty pet-names. Even in winter the warm rooms behind the silk curtains were filled with the perfumes of flowers named heliotrope and oleander, and the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling were themselves made of glass in the shape of bright flowers and leaves.

  The idea of this majestic, radiant world, in the mind of little Jens merged with that of his own inexplicable isolation in life into a great dream, or fantasy. He was so lonely in Madame Mahler’s house because one of the houses of Mamzell Ane’s tales was his real home. In the long days, when Madame Mahler stood by her washtub, or brought her washing out into town, he fondled, and played with, the picture of this house and of the people who lived in it, and who loved him so dearly. Mamzell Ane, on her side, noted the effect of her épopée on the child, realized that she had at last found the ideal audience, and was further inspired by the discovery. The relation between the two developed into a kind of love-affair; for their happiness, for their very existence they had become dependent upon each other.

  Now Mamzell Ane was a revolutionist, on her own accord, and out of some primitive, flaming visionary sight within her proud, virginal heart, for she had all her time lived amongst submissive and unreflective people. The meaning and object of existence to her was grandeur, beauty and elegance. For the life of her she would not see them disappear from the earth. But she felt it to be a cruel and scandalous state of things that so many men and women must live and die without these highest human values—yes, without the very knowledge of them—that they must be poor, wry and un-elegant. She was every day looking forward to that day of justice when the tables were to be turned, and the wronged and oppressed enter into their heaven of refinement and gracefulness. All the same she now took pains not to impart into the soul of the child any of her own bitterness or rebelliousness. For as the intimacy between them grew, she did in her heart acclaim little Jens as legitimate heir to all the magnificence for which she had herself prayed in vain. He was not to fight for it; everything was his by right, and should come to him on its own. Possibly the inspired and experienced old maid also noted that the boy had in him no talent for envy or rancour whatever. In their long, happy communications, he accepted Mamzell Ane’s world serenely and without misgiving, in the very manner—except for the fact that he had not any of it—of the happy children born within it.

  There was a short period of his life in which Jens made the other children of the backyard party to his happiness. He was, he told them, far from being the half-wit barely tolerated by old Madame Mahler; he was on the contrary the favourite of fortune. He had a Papa and Mamma and a fine house of his own, with such and such things in it, a carriage, and horses in the stable. He was spoiled, and would get everything he asked for. It was a curious thing that the children did not laugh at him, nor afterwards pursue him with mockery. They almost appeared to believe him. Only they could not understand or follow his fancies; they took but little interest in them, and after a while they altogether disregarded them. So Jens again gave up sharing the secret of his felicity with the world.

  Still some of the questions put to him by the children had set the boy’s mind working, so that he asked Mamzell Ane—for the confidence between them by this time was complete—how it had come to pass that he had lost contact with his home and had been taken into Madame Mahler’s establishment? Mamzell Ane found it difficult to answer him; she could not explain the fact to herself. It would be, she reflected, part of the confused and corrupt state of the world in general. When she had thought the matter over she solemnly, in the manner of a Sibyl, furnished him with an explanation. It was, she said, by no means unheard of, neither in life no
r in books, that a child, particularly a child in the highest and happiest circumstances, and most dearly beloved by his parents, enigmatically vanished and was lost. She stopped short at this, for even to her dauntless and proven soul the theme seemed too tragic to be further dwelt on. Jens accepted the explanation in the spirit in which it was given, and from this moment saw himself as that melancholy, but not uncommon, phenomenon: a vanished and lost child.

  But when Jens was six years old Mamzell Ane died, leaving to him her few earthly possessions: a thin-worn silver thimble, a fine pair of scissors and a little black chair with roses painted on it. Jens set a great value to these things, and every day gravely contemplated them. Just then Madame Mahler began to see the end of her hundred rixdollars. She had been piqued by her old friend’s absorption in the child, and so decided to get her own back. From now on she would make the boy useful to her in the business of the laundry. His life therefore was no longer his own, and the thimble, the scissors and the chair stood in Madame Mahler’s room, the sole tangible remnants, or proof, of the splendour which he and Mamzell Ane had known and shared.

  At the same time as these events took place in Adelgade, there lived in a stately house in Bredgade a young married couple, whose names were Jakob and Emilie Vandamm. The two were cousins, she being the only child of one of the big shipowners of Copenhagen, and he the son of that magnate’s sister—so that if it had not been for her sex, the young lady would with time have become head of the firm. The old shipowner, who was a widower, with his widowed sister, occupied the two loftier lower stories of the house. The family held closely together, and the young people had been engaged from childhood.