Winter's Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  Within the following days the house in Bredgade, and its inhabitants with it, shrank and decreased. The people were a little confused, as after a fall, and seized by a sad sense of diffidence. For the first weeks after Jens’ burial life looked to them strangely insipid, a sorry affair, void of purport. The Vandamms were not used to being unhappy, and were not prepared for the sense of loss with which now the death of the child left them. To Jakob it seemed as if he had let down a friend, who had, after all, laughingly trusted to his strength. Now nobody had any use for it, and he saw himself as a freak, the stuffed puppet of a colossus. But with all this, after a while there was also in the survivors, as ever at the passing away of an idealist, a vague feeling of relief.

  Emilie alone of the house of Vandamms preserved, as it were, her size, and her sense of proportion. It may even be said that when the house tumbled from its site in the clouds, she upheld and steadied it. She had deemed it affected in her to go into mourning for a child who was not hers, and while she gave up the balls and parties of the Copenhagen season, she went about her domestic tasks quietly as before. Her father and her mother-in-law, sad and at a loss in their daily life, turned to her for balance, and because she was the youngest amongst them, and seemed to them in some ways like the child that was gone, they transferred to her the tenderness and concern which had formerly been the boy’s, and of which they now wished that they had given him even more. She was pale from her long watches at the sick-bed; so they consulted between them, and with her husband, on means of cheering and distracting her.

  But after some time Jakob was struck with, and scared by, her silence. It seemed at first as if, except for her household orders, she found it unnecessary to speak, and later on as if she had forgotten or lost the faculty of speech. His timid attempts to inspirit her so much appeared to surprise and puzzle her that he lacked the spirit to go on with them.

  A couple of months after Jens’ death Jakob took his wife for a drive by the road which runs from Copenhagen to Elsinore, along the Sound. It was a lovely, warm and fresh day in May. As they came to Charlottenlund he proposed to her that they should walk through the wood, and send the carriage round to meet them. So they got down by the forest-gate, and for a moment their eyes followed the carriage as it rolled away on the road.

  They came into the wood, into a green world. The beech trees had been out for three weeks, the first mysterious translucence of early May was over. But the foliage was still so young that the green of the forest world was the brighter in the shade. Later on, after midsummer, the wood would be almost black in the shade, and brilliantly green in the sun. Now, where the rays of the sun fell through the tree-crowns, the ground was colourless, dim, as if powdered with sun-dust. But where the wood lay in shadow it glowed and luminesced like green glass and jewels. The anemones were faded and gone; the young fine grass was already tall. And within the heart of the forest the woodruff was in bloom; its layer of diminutive, starry, white flowers seemed to float, round the knotty roots of the old grey beeches, like the surface of a milky lake, a foot above the ground. It had rained in the night; upon the narrow road the deep tracks of the wood-cutters’ cart were moist. Here and there, by the roadside, a grey, misty globe of a withered dandelion caught the sun; the flower of the field had come on a visit to the wood.

  They walked on slowly. As they came a little way into the wood they suddenly heard the cuckoo, quite close. They stood still and listened, then walked on. Emilie let go her husband’s arm to pick up from the road the shell of a small, pale-blue, bird’s egg, broken in two; she tried to set it together, and kept it on the palm of her hand. Jakob began to talk to her of a journey to Germany that he had planned for them, and of the places that they were to see. She listened docilely, and was silent.

  They had come to the end of the wood. From the gate they had a great view over the open landscape. After the green sombreness of the forest the outside world seemed unbelievably light, as if bleached by the luminous dimness of midday. But after a while the colours of fields, meadows and dispersed groups of trees defined themselves to the eye, one by one. There was a faint blue in the sky, and faint white cumulus clouds rose along the horizon. The young green rye on the fields was about to ear; where the finger of the breeze touched it it ran in long, gentle billows along the ground. The small thatched peasants’ houses lay like lime-white, square isles within the undulating land; round them the lilac-hedges bore up their light foliage and, on the top, clusters of pale flowers. They heard the rolling of a carriage on the road in the distance, and above their heads the incessant singing of innumerable larks.

  By the edge of the forest there lay a wind-felled tree. Emilie said: “Let us sit down here a little.”

  She loosened the ribbons of her bonnet and lay it in her lap. After a minute she said: “There is something I want to tell you,” and made a long pause. All through this conversation in the wood she behaved in the same way, with a long silence before each phrase—not exactly as if she were collecting her thoughts, but as if she were finding speech in itself laborious or deficient.

  She said: “The boy was my own child.” “What are you talking about?” Jakob asked her. “Jens,” she said, “he was my child. Do you remember telling me that when you saw him the first time you thought he was like me? He was indeed like me; he was my son.” Now Jakob might have been frightened, and have believed her to be out of her mind. But lately things had, to him, come about in unexpected ways; he was prepared for the paradoxical. So he sat quietly on the trunk, and looked down on the young beech-shoots in the ground. “My dear,” he said, “my dear, you do not know what you say,”

  She was silent for a while, as if distressed by his interruption of her course of thought. “It is difficult to other people to understand, I know,” she said at last, patiently. “If Jens had been here still, he might perhaps have made you understand, better than I. But try,” she went on, “to understand me. I have thought that you ought to know. And if I cannot speak to you I cannot speak to anyone.” She said this with a kind of grave concern, as if really threatened by total incapacity of speech. He remembered how, during these last weeks, he had felt her silence heavy on him, and had tried to make her speak of something, of anything. “No, my dear,” he said, “you speak, I shall not interrupt you.” Gently, as if thankful for his promise, she began:

  “He was my child, and Charlie Dreyer’s. You have met Charlie once in Papa’s house. But it was while you were in China that he became my lover.” At these words Jakob remembered the anonymous letter he had once received. As he recalled his own indignant scouting of the slander and the care with which he had kept it from her, it seemed to him a curious thing that after five years he was to have it repeated by her own lips.

  “When he asked me,” said Emilie, “I stood for a moment in great danger. For I had never talked with a man of this matter. Only with Aunt Malvina and with my old governess. And women, for some reason, I do not know which, will have it that such a demand be a base and selfish thing in a man, and an insult to a woman. Why do you allow us to think that of you? You, who are a man, will know that he asked me out of his love and out of his great heart, from magnanimity. He had more life in him than he himself needed. He meant to give that to me. It was life itself; yes, it was eternity that he offered me. And I, who had been taught so wrong, I might easily have rejected him. Even now, when I think of it, I am afraid, as of death. Still I need not be so, for I know for certain that if I were back at that moment again, I should behave in the same way as I did then. And I was saved from the danger. I did not send him away. I let him walk back with me, through the garden—for we were down by the garden-gate—and stay with me the night till, in the morning, he was to go so far away.”

  She again made a long pause, and went on: “All the same, because of the doubt and the fear of other people that I had in my heart, I and the child had to go through much. If I had been a poor girl, with only a hundred rixdollars in all the world, it would have been better,
for then we should have remained together. Yes, we went through much.”

  “When I found Jens again and he came home with me,” she took up her narrative after a silence, “I did not love him. You all loved him, only I myself did not. It was Charlie that I loved. Still I was more with Jens than any of you. He told me many things, which none of you heard. I saw that we could not find another such as he, that there was none so wise.” She did not know that she was quoting the Scripture, any more than the old shipowner had been aware of doing so when he ordained Jens to be buried in the field of his fathers and the cave that was therein—this was a small trick peculiar to the magic of the dead child. “I learned much from him. He was always truthful, like Charlie. He was so truthful that he made me ashamed of myself. Sometimes I thought it wrong in me to teach him to call you Papa.”

  “By the time when he was ill,” she said, “what I thought of was this: that if he died I might, at last, go into mourning for Charlie.” She lifted up her bonnet, gazed at it and again dropped it. “And then after all,” she said, “I could not do it.” She made a pause. “Still if I had told Jens about it, it would have pleased him; it would have made him laugh. He would have told me to buy grand black clothes, and long veils.”

  It was a lucky thing, Jakob reflected, that he had promised her not to interrupt her tale. For had she wanted him to speak he should not have found a word to say. As now she came to this point in her story she sat in silence for a long time, so that for a moment he believed that she had finished, and at that a choking sensation came upon him, as if all words must needs stick in his throat.

  “I thought,” she suddenly began again, “that I would have had to surfer, terribly even, for all this. But no, it has not been so. There is a grace in the world, such as none of us has known about. The world is not a hard or severe place, as people tell us. It is not even just. You are forgiven everything. The fine things of the world you cannot wrong or harm; they are much too strong for that. You could not wrong or harm Jens; no one could. And now, after he has died,” she said, “I understand everything.”

  Again she sat immovable, gently poised upon the tree-stem. For the first time during their talk she looked round her; her gaze ran slowly, almost caressingly, along the forest scenery.

  “It is difficult,” she said, “to explain what it feels like to understand things. I have never been good at finding words, I am not like Jens. But it has seemed to me ever since March, since the Spring began, that I have known well why things happened, why, for instance, they all flowered. And why the birds came. The generosity of the world; Papa’s and your kindness too! As we walked in the wood today I thought that now I have got back my sight, and my sense of smell, from when I was a little girl. All things here tell me, of their own, what they signify.” She stopped, her gaze steadying. “They signify Charlie,” she said. After a long pause she added: “And I, I am Emilie. Nothing can alter that either.”

  She made a gesture as if to pull on her gloves that lay in her bonnet, but she put them back again, and remained quiet, as before.

  “Now I have told you all,” she said. “Now you must decide what we are to do.”

  “Papa will never know,” she said gently and thoughtfully. “None of them will ever know. Only you. I have thought, if you will let me do so, that you and I, when we talk of Jens—” She made a slight pause, and Jakob thought: “She has never talked of him till today”—“might talk of all these things, too.”

  “Only in one thing,” she said slowly, “am I wiser than you. I know that it would be better, much better, and easier to both you and me if you would believe me.”

  Jakob was accustomed to take a quick summary of a situation and to make his dispositions accordingly. He waited a moment after she had ceased to talk, to do so now.

  “Yes, my dear,” he said, “that is true.”

  ALKMENE

  MY FATHER’S ESTATE lay in a lonely part of Jutland, and I was his only child. When my mother died he did not care to send me away to school, but when I was seven years old he took on a tutor for me.

  My tutor’s name was Jens Jespersen; he was a theological student and, I believe, the most honest man I have known in my life. He was himself the son of a poor village parson; he had had to work hard to get on to the University of Copenhagen, and there the professors had been expecting great things from him. But his health had suffered during his years of study, and for that reason he had, already five years ago, left town and taken on the job as a teacher in the country.

  Under his direction I took to books more willingly than I had ever thought I would, and was quite happy both at school and in the company of our keepers and grooms. And so I managed to gather a little knowledge of mathematics and of the classics, as well as of horses and game.

  Two years later my father went off to a watering place, took me with him, and left me at a school in Holstein; but after an equal span of time he again fetched me back. During my absence our old, drunken parson of the estate had died, and my father had presented the living to my former tutor. He was now settled in the parsonage and had married the girl to whom he had been engaged for five years. From then on I continued my lessons by riding down to the parsonage every day. I also sometimes stayed there over a night or two.

  The parsonage was a ramshackle old place, and the people within it were poor, for the living was but small, and my old teacher still had heavy debts from his student days to pay off. All the same, it was a joyous place, because the parson was so happily married. His wife’s name was Gertrud. She was twelve years younger than her husband, but twelve years older than I, so that she sometimes seemed to be the contemporary of the clergyman, and sometimes of the schoolboy. She was a big young woman, who was not considered pretty by the parish, for she had a broad face, and in summer she was as freckled as a turkey’s egg. But she had clear, bright eyes—so that when in Homer I read about the lively-glancing maiden Chryseis, I thought of her—and rich reddish hair. I remember the first time that I realized how well I liked her. One summer evening a party of young people from the neighbourhood were gathered at the parsonage and were playing hide-and-seek all over the house. I had hidden in a small lumber room in the attic. While I was there the parson’s wife came rushing in, and without seeing me squeezed up behind the door. She stood there, all out of breath from her run up the stairs, and placed a finger upon her lips. Then a moment after she must have bethought herself of a better hiding-place; she swept from the room and was gone. I thought it very pretty in her to behave so neatly and gaily when she believed that she was all alone.

  One summer we had a distinguished visitor at the parsonage, a friend of the parson’s student’s days, although older than he, and now a professor at the Royal Opera, or Ballet, of Copenhagen; I do not remember which. He also visited the manor, played on our old piano, and quite enchanted my father, as he did everybody. Once he and I were alone in a room of the parsonage; he was standing by the open garden door and was looking at the parson’s wife, who picked up apples under the trees. “It is indeed a priceless thing,” he said, more to himself than to me, “that this young woman should be held by the good people of Hover parish to be lacking in looks. It is true that her head is but roughly modelled. But were she living in the great world, where ladies are more liberal in showing their charms, she would be the idol of the one sex and the envy of the other. For such a living, breathing Venus I have not set eyes on in my life. Why, she outshines Henrietta Hendel-Schutz in her ‘Morgenscenen.’ Would she then,” he went on, “still make our godly parson such a model wife? To women with a plain face and a divine body, virtue must at times appear strangely paradoxical.” This was perhaps a frivolous discourse to hold before a young boy; still I do not remember his words to have left any such impression with me. They only seemed to make it clear to me why I should feel so well in Gertrud’s company.

  But in the course of the next year the parson’s happy household became overhung by a black and horrible shadow. The gentle young ho
usewife from time to time would appear deadly pale, red-eyed with weeping, turned to stone, and would shrink from her husband as in dread or hatred. I was alarmed and grieved at the sight. I thought that the parson showed her but inadequate sympathy in her misery, and the situation to me was both mysterious and woeful.

  One day the parson, in his study, was taking me through a chapter in Genesis. When he came to the verse in which Rachel says to Jacob: “Give me children or else I die,” he laid down the book and said: “Rachel was a good woman, but she had little patience with her husband or with the Lord. You will in this house have seen, Vilhelm, how hard the lot of childlessness comes to a woman. My heart bleeds for my wife, and yet I fear that I am lacking both in Christian compassion and in knowledge of the nature of womankind. For she is a better Christian than I am, and all the same she will storm and rage against the Lord, and refuse to bow her heart to His will. I do not believe that I myself should ever be capable of grieving so vehemently, and so persistently, over a misfortune in which I was altogether without guilt. Although,” after a moment he added gravely, his hands folded, “God alone knows. It is a wise man who can say of himself: Of such a thing I could never be capable.” These last words of his I remembered, and they came back to me, later, in a sad and bloody hour.

  Again after a while he said, with a little smile: “The good man Jacob, however, was, in Jewry, in a position to prove to his wife that the fault lay not with him.”

  I was thus enlightened on Gertrud’s sorrows. Still the state of things was somewhat enigmatical to me, since I could not comprehend that anybody should desire children so ardently as to die from want of them.