by Isak Dinesen
In those days the mail came but twice a month, and a letter was a rare event. One day in October the parson had a letter from Copenhagen. He turned it in his hands, informed me that it came from his friend the professor, and wondered what he could well have to write. But when he had read the letter through twice, he said: “I shall give you leave for the afternoon, for this gives me so much to think about that I will make but a poor teacher.” A few days after, it happened that we were out in the stable together, to look at a sick cow, for the parson always held that I had a good hand with animals, while he himself knew but little about them. When we had doctored the cow, he stood on in thought, and in the dim stable he told me what was on his mind. “I think, Vilhelm,” he said, “that your mother must have been a woman of good sense, for you have a level head, and that you did not inherit from the Squire. Now I am going to tell you what I have spoken of to no one else. The Scripture has it that wisdom may be found in the mouths of children.”
The professor, he said, wrote to him that he had, by some strange adventure, got on his hands a little girl of six, singularly and tragically situated in life, so that indeed she might be named Perdita after the heroine of Shakespeare’s tragedy. The nativity of this child he must never disclose. It was, he wrote, no wonder that the sight of a homeless and friendless child to him should call forth the picture of his friend’s happy household, wherein only a child was lacking. But he would now in no way persuade the parson to take on the girl; under the particular circumstances this would even be unseemly. He only stated that, should any Christian man or woman have pity on her, and take her as their own, they would never be interfered with by any relation or connection of the child. “And one more thing I feel it my duty to set down”—he finished the letter—“If no one can be found to take this child, her fate will, by the nature of things be highly uncertain and perilous and, in fact, I know of no human being who does more completely and pathetically answer to the proverbial saying of the brand to be snatched from the fire.” He gave the name of the child; it was Alkmene.
I listened to all this, and said that it sounded like a tale out of a book. “Yes,” said the parson. “And very likely is. For my old friend is a man of few scruples. One of those dancing and singing mamzells of Copenhagen may have sought his help to rid herself of an inopportune child, and there he goes: inventing, fabulating, weeping even, to play a trick on his simple friend, the village parson. Alkmene, now,” he went on, “will that really be the name of the child? When I was a young student, and dreamed of becoming a poet, I wrote an epic called ‘Alkmene’ and he knows of it, for I read it to him.” I quoted the Iliad, and said: “Nor Alkmene of Thebes …” “Who bore me Heracles, a child staunch of heart,” the parson finished the verse for me. “Yes. He means to call me back to Olympus.”
“Vilhelm,” he said after a while, “I shall tell you something, which I do not believe I could recount to a grown-up person. It is absurd and will make you laugh, still to me it has once been dead earnest. I have told people that I left Copenhagen on account of my health. But it was not only that. I went because I had there fallen into temptation, yea, into sin. It was not vice, or weakness either, but that graver wickedness by which the angels fell. I was working too hard in Copenhagen and had little to eat, and no natural diversions. I sat with my books, and did not speak to any human being for months. And it came to this with me: that I firmly believed myself to have been chosen by the Lord for great things; yes, I held that in the whole world all was done by the Lord with a view to my soul and my destiny. When the old mad King died I thought: ‘How does the Lord mean this to affect me?’ and when later the Emperor Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, at Moscow, I said to myself: ‘Now that man is gone who would have turned the eyes of the world from such great things as the Lord means me to accomplish.’ It was a good thing that my condition became clear to me before it was too late. I saw, with great fear, that I was on the brink of the abyss of insanity, and that I must save myself at any cost, at the cost of my studies. When, here, I came to live in the country once more, with good, simple people, my mind regained its balance. And later on my dear wife set me right. But even here, Vilhelm, even here, the old temptation has come back to me. When I have sat by the death-beds of my parishioners, and have listened to their confessions—and you will sometimes hear awful things from these peasants—and when, rightly, I should be concerned with the soul of the poor sinner only, I have sat and wondered: Why does the Lord place these things on my path? Does he mean to try my faith, by confronting it with the powers of darkness?
“Now my old friend here a long time ago guessed most of this matter. He once took an interest in me, and believed in my talents; he was disappointed when I ran away from Copenhagen. Is his letter not, now, a small revenge, or a joke, on me? It brings back to me the great town, and the whole sphere of the theatre, which once meant much to me. The name of Alkmene itself rings with an echo of the Greek world, with its gods and nymphs, and of my old ambition as a poet. During these last days I have reflected, as once up in my garret: What is the Lord doing to me? Does he hold that my life has been too easy, and that I stand in need of temptation? Yes, I have met again with that young, wild, distracted student, who ten years ago walked the streets of Copenhagen. And all the time I am well aware that I should be concerning myself with other things, as with the idea of the happiness of my wife. And first and foremost perhaps with the fate of this poor child, Alkmene.”
I do not remember that I made any comment to the parson’s speech. While he talked I reflected that I myself did reason much in the manner that he had described. But while it was unreasonable in him, in me it was legitimate, since I was the Squire’s son, and here at Nørholm, at least, things were done for my sake and in my interest. That night I dreamed of the child Alkmene. I met her in a field, and the big A in her name shone like silver.
A fortnight later the parson’s wife fell on my neck and told me that she and her husband had decided to take, as their own, a little girl from Copenhagen—for all the world as if she had been confiding to me that she was with child. About the secrecy of the child’s birth she did not speak. Later on she gave out to a few friends that the child was her cousin’s, an officer’s widow, and I believe that there was indeed such a person.
It was some time before travelling accommodations could be found for the child. The parson jestingly spoke of these months as his wife’s period of pregnancy. She was very happy and gentle with us all, but often strangely moved. Whenever she and I were alone, she talked of the child, and pictured how she was to be like a small sister to me. “And how, Vilhelm,” she whispered, “would you like to fetch a little wife at Hover parsonage?” The idea was ridiculous to me, and had the child been her own, Gertrud would never have hit upon it either. After Alkmene had come, however, she did never again mention it, for then, I believe, she could not bear to think that the child might ever leave her, were it to marry the King’s son.
At last, late in December, the child was to arrive in Vejle from Copenhagen, and the parson went in to fetch her. I had been to the parsonage that day, to get some books. While I was there the wind rose, and such a wild blizzard began that I did not ride home, but stayed for the night where I was. From time to time the parson’s wife and I went outside to look at the weather. The air was thick with snow; it ran along the earth like smoke, and lay so deep on the stone steps that it was hard to open the door. It was the first time that Gertrud and I were ever alone in the house. She began to talk to me of her childhood. Her father, she said, was a big cattle-dealer out westward, who worked hard and did well, until, in the state bankruptcy in 1813, he lost his money. When he was told that all his savings were worth but fifty rixdollars, the cattle-dealer’s heart broke; from then he was sunk in melancholia. His wife, to save her family, then began sheep farming, and Gertrud, the eldest of nine children, and by then eleven years old, became her assistant in the work. It was a hard life. “But what better thing,” said Gertrud, “can
be found on our earth than that hard, honest work which God set us there to do? We should not question.” Gertrud’s heart was still with the sheep. She became eager to impart her knowledge of them to me, and I learned much about lambing and shearing while we waited on this evening of the snowstorm.
Just past midnight we heard sleigh-bells, and ran to open the door to our travellers, who stumbled from the sledge all white with snow. They had been stuck in the snow drifts seven times since leaving Vejle. The parson bore the child in, and set her on the floor by the stove. She was wrapped in a large cloak. As he pulled off her cap her fair, short hair rose with it, like a flame above her head and I recalled the professor’s words of the brand to be snatched from the fire. I also reflected that my good pulpiteer and his wife would never, between them, have produced a child of such strange, striking, noble beauty. Her small face, with its grandly swung eyebrows, was as white as marble from cold and fatigue. Gertrud knelt down before her, folded her hands in her own to warm them, and patted her cheek. She blushed like a rose, trembled and smiled. “Have you had a cold journey, my poor lamb?” she asked. The pale child neither advanced nor withdrew; she stood up straight and took in the room, and the people within it, with wide-open, grave, light eyes. “And what will your name be, now, my pretty chick?” Gertrud went on. “Alkmene,” said the child.
When Gertrud had made her drink a cup of hot milk, she carried her in her arms into the bedroom. Through the door we heard her prattling and cooing to the child, and once or twice the little girl’s low, clear voice. In a while Gertrude came and stood in the doorway, she could not speak, for she was crying. “Oh, Jens,” she said at last to her husband, “she has got no shift on.” Then again she closed the door. The parson was warming a jug of coffee and rum on the stove. “The old fox,” he said to me, and laughed. “He reads women’s hearts like a book. He may well have pulled the child’s shift off with his own hands, to move the heart of my poor wife.”
This Christmas, as I was now fourteen, my father gave me a gun. I was out every day shooting, following the game-track in the snow, and except for my lessons I did not see much of the people in the parsonage. But whenever Gertrud could catch me, she would talk of Alkmene. They called the child Alkmene at first, but Gertrud thought the name outlandish, so they shortened it to Mene, and by this name the child of the parsonage became known by the neighbourhood. I remember when, that summer, there was a clergyman’s meeting at the parsonage, that an old pastor from Randers got hold of the name, and exclaimed: “Mene mene tekel upharsin!” But neither the parson nor his wife liked the joke.
To Gertrud the child was wonderful from the beginning; she held her spellbound by everything she did. The first thing she told me about her was that she seemed to be altogether without fear. Neither the bull nor the gander frightened her; she liked them best of all the farm animals. She climbed the ladder to the ridge of the barn, when they were rethatching it after the snowstorm. Gertrud was uneasy about this trait in the child. Together with the missing shift it set her fancy running; she imagined that the little girl had been so forlorn as to know of no risk in life. Perhaps she even hit on the truth. So she made it her first duty as a mother to teach her child, as in the fairy-tales, to know fear. She next confided to me that Mene did not seem to know truth from untruth. She did not tell tales in her own interest, but things to her looked different from what they did to other people, often in the most surprising way. If Gertrud had been alone with the child she could never have minded, for she had the peasants’ love of fables and inventions, but she knew that her husband judged these things differently, and endeavoured, with patience and perseverance, to correct the child’s failings. Alkmene was highly extravagant, too; she took but little care of her things and would often lose or even give away what Gertrud with great trouble had got together for her. This shocked and hurt Gertrud; she took it much to heart, and at times could not help thinking the child off her head. Still something about it impressed her as well; she had seen, or heard of, great people behaving in such a way.
When in the spring I came to the parsonage more frequently, I found it an idyl, such as one reads about in books. I think that this year and the following to my friend Gertrud were the most blissful of her life. The child called the parson and his wife Father and Mother, and after a while she seemed to have forgotten the time before she came to them, and to hold herself to belong to the parsonage. Gertrud would not let the child out of her sight, and Mene too, although she never liked to be fondled or petted, swerved round her mother neatly, like a kid with the roe. As if she had been trained by the professor himself she manifested a genuine adoration of Gertrude beauty. She often talked of it, and she strung beads for necklaces for her, and in summer made a hundred garlands of flowers for her pretty hair. Gertrud had never before been admired for her looks; nor would the parson, I think, ever have made an inventive lover. This grave and graceful courtship was a new thing to her, and although to us she laughed at it, I saw that it delighted and enchanted her. The parson taught Mene to read and write, for she had none of these accomplishments. He found her quick of apprehension, and so in every way the three together made a happy group.
Although at first I laughed at all the fuss made over a little girl from Copenhagen, after a while Alkmene and I came to pass a good deal of our time together. It began when she begged leave to go with me when I was out shooting or fishing. She was so swift of eye and movement that it was like having a small cute dog with you. Here I learned that the fearless girl was scared in the face of death. The first time that I picked up a dead bird, still warm in my hands, she was sick with horror and disgust. But she would catch snakes and carry them in her hand. And she had a fancy for all wild birds, and learned to know of their nests and eggs. Then it was pleasant to hear her, in summer, imitate and answer the ringdove and the cuckoo in the woods.
We did thus become friends in a way, I believe, unusual with a big boy and a small girl. We were indeed much like sister and brother, such as the parson’s wife had wished us to be, and still, I think, not quite in the way she had wanted. When Gertrud spoke of the girl as a wife for me, I had thought the idea laughable. Even at fourteen I understood enough of the world to decide that a parson’s daughter was no fit match for me. Later on, as she grew up so pretty, one might imagine that I should have dreamed of seducing the sweet lass of the parsonage. But that was as far from my mind as marriage. Our friendship was always chaste, and I do not remember that I did ever as much as take her hand. We quarrelled badly at times, such as friends, or brothers and sisters, will do, although we none of us quarrelled with our people at home, and once she did even, in anger, throw a stone at me. But the chief feature of our relation was a deep, silent understanding, of which the others could not know. We seemed, both of us, to be aware that we were like one another, in a world different from us. Later on I have explained the matter to myself by the assumption that we were, amongst the people of our surroundings, the only two persons of noble blood, and that hers was possibly, even by far, the noblest. In this manner, too, our companionship was mainly of the woods and the fields; it became suspended, or latent, when we were back in the house.
It was a curious trait in our friendship that I should so often dream of Alkmene, even when in the day I had not given her a thought. In my dreams she frequently disappeared, and was lost. One might imagine that these dreams, in the end, would have inspired me with a real fear of losing her. But it was not so; on the contrary, and to my own peril, they convinced me that, even when she appeared to be gone and away, she would be sure to come back when the day dawned.
Both as a child and a girl Mene was wonderfully light of movement. If she only lifted an arm to smooth her hair, it was a thing to make one gape, so favourable and faultless was it. And when she skipped in the woods she made me think of a roe, or of a fish that leaps in a brook. Later I have seen some famous dancers in the great theatres, but for sweetness and harmony of motion none of them to my mind could touch the gir
l in the parsonage. I saw this from the beginning, but I do not think that the others ever noticed it; to Gertrud it was just part of the general excellence of the child. My father, however, remarked upon it. Now in the parsonage all dancing was prohibited. Moreover, to Gertrud, the art of the dance was somehow connected with the theatre and with the child’s early years, of which she was very jealous, so that she would not hear or think of them. Alkmene, then, was never allowed to dance. But the parson taught her many other things. For a while he even set himself to teach her Greek, at which, he told me, she was quite extraordinarily quick. She could recite verses from the Greek comedies and tragedies.
During the next years Alkmene twice tried to run away from the parsonage. The first time, on a day in March, when the snow was just off the ground, she walked straight south across the fields, and had gone more than twelve miles before the parson’s cowman, who was sent out in search that way, caught up with her and brought her home. Gertrud had believed the child drowned; her distress had been pitiful. She now clasped the girl to her bosom, stared at her, and kept on asking her why she had done them this great grief. The next day, when she thought that she was alone with the child, I heard her again question her: “Why did you run away? Why did you leave us?” And still she got no answer.
Two years later, when she was eleven, the girl again ran off, and this time gave her parents a still worse fright. For there had been a band of gypsies in the village; they had left the night before with their caravan, and had gone across the moors west of my father’s land, and it was clear that Mene had gone after them. These people had a bad name in the country; it was believed that they had killed a pedlar a year ago. This time it was I who rode out and brought home the girl. I had by then finished my lessons with the parson. I had also travelled, but I still frequently came down to the parsonage.