by Isak Dinesen
ONE YEAR, a century ago, spring was late in Denmark. During the last days of March, the Sound was ice-bound, and blind, from the Danish to the Swedish coast. The snow in the fields and on the roads thawed a little in the day, only to freeze again at night; the earth and the air were equally without hope or mercy.
Then one night, after a week of raw and clammy fog, it began to rain. The hard, inexorable sky over the dead landscape broke, dissolved into streaming life and became one with the ground. On all sides the incessant whisper of falling water re-echoed; it increased and grew into a song. The world stirred beneath it; things drew breath in the dark. Once more it was announced to the hills and valleys, to the woods and the chained brooks: “You are to live.”
In the parson’s house at Søllerød, his sister’s son, fifteen-year-old Peter Købke, sat by a tallow candle over his Fathers of the Church, when through the rustle of the rain his ear caught a new sound, and he left the book, got up and opened the window. How the noise of the rain rose then! But he listened to other, magic voices within the night. They came from above, out of the ether itself, and Peter lifted his face to them. The night was dark, yet this was no longer winter gloom; it was pregnant with clarity, and as he questioned it, it answered him. And over his head, called the music of wandering life in the skies. Wings sang up there; clear flutes played; shrill pipe-signals were exchanged high up beyond his head. It was the trekking birds on their way north.
He stood for a long time thinking of them; he let them pass before the eyes of his mind one by one. Here travelled long wedges of wild geese, flights of fen-duck and teal, with the shell-duck, for which one lies in wait in the late, warm evenings of August. All the pleasures of summer drew their course across the sky; a migration of hope and joy journeyed tonight, a mighty promise, set out to many voices.
Peter was a great huntsman, and his old gun was his dearest possession; his soul ascended to the sky to meet the soul of the wild birds. He knew well what was in their hearts. Now they cried: “Northward! Northward!” They pierced the Danish rain with their stretched necks, and felt it in their small clear eyes. They hastened away to the Northern summer of play and change, where the sun and the rain share the infinite vault of heaven between them; they went off to the innumerable, nameless, clear lakes and to the white summer nights of the North. They hurried forth to fight and to make love. Higher up, in the lofts of the world, perhaps big swarms of quail, thrush and snipe were on the move. Such a tremendous stream of longing, on its way to its goal, passed above his head, that Peter, down on the ground, felt his limbs ache. He flew a long way with the geese.
Peter wanted to go to sea, but the parson held him to his books. Tonight, in the open window, he slowly and solemnly thought his past and his future over, and vowed to run away and become a sailor. At this moment he forgave his books, and no longer planned to burn them all up. Let them collect dust, he thought, or fall into the hands of dusty people fit for books. He himself would live under sails, on a swinging deck, and would watch a new horizon rise with each morning’s sun. As he had taken this resolution he was filled with such deep gratitude that he folded his hands upon the window-sill. He had been piously brought up; his thanks were dedicated to God, but they strolled a little on their way, as if beaten off their course by the rain. He thanked the spring, the birds and the rain itself.
Within the parson’s house death was zealously kept in view and lectured upon, and Peter, in his survey of the future, also took the sailor’s end into consideration. His mind dwelled for some time on his last couch, at the bottom of the sea. Soberly, his brows knitted, he contemplated, as it were, his own bones upon the sand. The deep-water currents would pass through his eyes, like a row of clear, green dreams; big fish, whales even, would float above him like clouds, and a shoal of small fishes might suddenly rush along, an endless streak, like the birds tonight. It would be peaceful, he reflected, and better than a funeral at Søllerød, with his uncle in the pulpit.
The birds travelled forth over the Sound, through the stripes of grey rain. The lights of Elsinore glimmered deep below, like a fragment of the Milky Way. A salt wind met them as they came out beyond the open water of the Kattegat. Long stretches of sea and earth, of woods, wasteland and moors, swept south under them in the course of the night.
At dawn they sank through the silvery air and descended upon a long file of flat and bare holms. The rocks shone roseate as the sun came up; little glints of light came trickling upon the wavelets. The rays of the morning refracted within the duck’s own fine necks and wings. They cackled and quacked, picked and preened their feathers, and set to sleep, with their heads under their wings.
A few days later, in the afternoon, the parson’s daughter Rosa stood by her loom, at which she had just set up a piece of red and blue cotton. She did not work at it, but looked out through the window. Her mind was balancing upon a thin ridge, from which at any moment it might tumble either into ecstasy at the new feeling of spring in the air, and at her own fresh beauty—or, on the other side, into bitter wrath against all the world.
Rosa was the youngest of three sisters; the two others had both married and gone away, one to Møen and one to Holstein. She was a spoilt child in the house, and could say and do what she liked, but she was not exactly happy. She was lonely, and in her heart she believed that some time something horrible would happen to her.
Rosa was tall for her age, with a round face, a clear skin and a mouth like Cupid’s bow. Her hair curled and crisped so obstinately that it was difficult for her to plait it, and her long eyelashes gave her the air of glancing at people from an ambush. She had on an old, faded blue winter frock, too short in the sleeves, and a pair of coarse, patched shoes. But the ease and gracefulness of her young body lent to the rough clothes a classical and pathetic majesty.
Rosa’s mother had died at her birth, and the parson’s mind was fixed upon the grave. The daily life of the parsonage, even, was run with a view to the world hereafter; the idea of mortality filled the rooms. To grow up in the house was to the young people a problem and a struggle, as if fatal influences were dragging them the other way, into the earth, and admonishing them to give up the vain and dangerous task of living. In her own way Rosa meditated upon death as much as Peter. But she disliked the thought of it; she was not even allured by the picture of paradise with her Mother in it, and she trusted that she would live a hundred years still.
All the same during this last winter she had often been so weary of, so angry with her surroundings that in order to escape and punish them she had wished to die. But as the weather changed she too had changed her mind. It was better, she thought, that the others should all die. Free from them, and alone, she would walk over the green earth, pick violets and watch the plovers flitting low over the fields; she would make pebbles leap on the water, and bathe undisturbed in the rivers and the sea. The vision of this happy world has been so vivid with her that she was surprised when she heard her father scolding Peter in the next room, and realized that they were both still with her.
This spring Rosa had a particular grudge against fate. She felt it strongly, yet she did not like to admit it to herself.
Peter, her orphan cousin, had been adopted into the house nine years ago, when both he and Rosa were six years old. She could still, if she wanted to, recall the time when he had not been there, and remember the dolls, which, with the arrival of the boy, had faded out of her existence. The two children got on well, for Peter was a good-natured creature and easy to dominate, and they had then had many great adventures together.
But two years ago Rosa grew up taller than the boy. And at the same time she came into possession of a world of her own, inaccessible to the others, as the world of music is inaccessible to the tone-deaf. Nobody could tell where her world lay; neither did the substance of it lend itself to words. The others would never understand her, were she to tell them that it was both infinite and secluded, playful and very grave, safe and dangerous. She could not explain, either, how she hers
elf was one with it, so that through the loveliness and power of her dream-world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth. Sometimes, she felt, she was expressing the nature of the dream-world in her movements and her voice, but she was then speaking a language of which they had no knowledge. Within this mystic garden of hers she was altogether out of the reach of a clumsy boy with dirty hands and scratched knees; she almost forgot her old playfellow.
Then last winter Peter had suddenly, as it were, caught her up. He became the taller of the two by half a head, and this time Rosa reflected with bitterness he would remain so. He became so much stronger than she that it alarmed and offended the girl. On his own he began to play the flute. Peter was of a philosophical turn of mind, and, seven or eight years ago, when the two were walking together, he had often held forth to Rosa on the elements and order of the universe, and on the curious fact that the moon, when quite young and tender, was let out to play at the hour when the other children were put to bed, but that when she grew old and decrepit she should be chased out early in the morning, when other old people like to stay in bed. But he had never talked much in the presence of his elders, and when Rosa ceased to take an interest in his enterprises or reflections, he had withdrawn into himself. Now lately he would, uninvitedly, and before the whole household, give venture to his own fancies about the world, and many of them rang strangely in Rosa’s mind, like echoes of hers. At such moments she fixed her gaze hard on him, seized by a deep fear. She could no longer, she felt, be sure of her dream-world. Peter might find the “Sesame” which opened it, and encroach upon it, and she might meet him there any day.
It was to her as if she had been betrayed by this boy whom she had treated kindly when he was a child. His figure began to bar her outlook and to deprive her of air within her own house, to which he had really no right. From the talk of the grown-up people Rosa had guessed Peter to be an illegitimate child. This fact, if he had been a girl, would have filled her with compassion; she would have seen her playmate in the light of romance and tragedy. Now, as a boy, he came in for his part of the perfidy of that unknown seducer, his father. During the months of the long winter she had sometimes found herself wishing that he might go to sea, and there meet with sudden death before, through him, worse things should happen to her. Peter was a wild, foolhardy boy, she was free to hope.
Of all these strong emotions within the girl’s bosom Peter knew nothing at all. In his own way he had loved Rosa from the time when he first came into the parson’s house; amongst the people there she was the only one in whom he had confidence. He had suffered by her capriciousness, and yet he somehow liked it well, as he liked everything about her. Of late he was sometimes disappointed when he found it impossible to rouse her sympathy in such things as mattered to him; he then even deemed her a little shallow and silly. But on the whole, human beings, their nature and their behaviour to him, played but a small part in Peter’s sphere of thought, and there ranged only just above books. The weather, birds and ships, fish and the stars, to him were phenomena of far greater moment. On a shelf in his room he kept a barque that he had carved and rigged with much preciseness and patience. It meant more to him than the good-will or displeasure of anybody in the house. From the beginning, it is true, the barque had been named Rosa, but it would be difficult to decide whether this was meant to be a compliment to the ship or to the girl.
The girl Rosa did not weave, but looked out through the window. The garden was still winterly bare and bleak, but there was a faint silvery light in the sky; water dripped from the roof and from the boughs of every tree; and the black earth showed in the garden-paths where the snow had melted away. Rosa beheld it all, as grave and wistful as a Sibyl, but in reality she thought about nothing.
The parson’s wife, Eline, came into the room with her small son by the hand. The parson’s wife had been his housekeeper till he married her, four years ago, and the gossips of the parish thought that she had been more. She was only half her husband’s age, but she had worked hard all her life and looked older than her years. She had a brown, bony, patient face and was light of foot and movement, with a soft voice. Her life with the parson was often burdensome to her, for he had soon again repented of his infidelity to the memory of his first wife, who was his own cousin, a dean’s daughter and a virgin when he married her. In his heart he did not, either, recognize the peasant woman’s son as equal to his daughters. But Eline was a simple creature, anchored in the resigned philosophy of the peasant; she aspired to no higher position in the house than that which she had held there from the beginning. She left her husband in peace when he did not call her, and was a handmaid to her pretty stepdaughter.
Rosa in all divergencies in the household sided with the wife. She was fond of her little brother, and had instated him in the parsonage as the one person besides herself entitled to have his own ways in everything—in manner of a monarch who acclaims another: “Brother, Your Majesty.” But the child did not lend itself to be spoilt. In this house, overhung by the shadow of the grave, the other young people strove to keep alive; only the youngest inhabitant, the small, pretty child, seemed to fall in quietly with its doom, to withhold himself from life and to welcome extinction, as if he had only reluctantly consented to come into the world at all.
The parson’s wife sat down demurely on the edge of a chair, and let her industrious hands rest in her lap upon her blue apron.
“No, your father will not buy the cow,” she said and sighed a little. “They would sell that brindled cow at Christiansminde for thirty rixdollars. She is a fine cow, to calve in six weeks. But your father was angry with me when I asked him for it. For how do I know, he says, but that the day of judgment and the return of Christ may be nearer than anybody suspects? We should not hoard up treasures in this world, he says. Still,” she added and sighed again, “we could do with the cow over the summer, in any case.”
Rosa frowned, but she could not collect her thoughts sufficiently to be really angry with her father. “He will have to buy her in the end,” she said coldly.
A butterfly that had kept alive through the winter and had wakened with the first rays of spring was fluttering towards the light, beating its wings on the window-pane as in a succession of little, gentle fingertaps. The child had kept his eyes on it for some time; now, in a great, steady glance he imparted his discovery to Rosa.
“My brother,” said Eline, “went to have a look at the cow. She is a good cow, and gentle. I could milk her myself.”
“Yes, that is a butterfly,” said Rosa to the child. “It is pretty. I will catch it for you.”
As she tried to take hold of it, the butterfly suddenly flew up to the top of the window. Rosa pushed off her shoes and climbed onto the window-sill. But up there, above the world, she realized that the prisoner wanted to get out, and to fly. She remembered the white butterflies of last summer, flitting over the lavender borders in the garden; her heart became light and great, and she felt sorry for the captive. “Look, we will let her out,” she said to the boy. “Then she will fly away,” She pushed the window open and wafted off the butterfly. The air outside was as fresh as a bath; she drew it in deeply.
At that moment Peter came up the garden-path from the stable. At the sight of Rosa in the window he stood dead still.
Since on the night of the rain he had resolved to run away to sea his heart had been filled with ships: schooners, barques, frigates. Now Rosa, in her stockinged feet, with the skirt of her blue frock caught back by the cross-bar of the window, was so like the figure-head of a big, fine ship that for an instant he did, so to say, see his own soul face to face. Life and death, the adventures of the seafarer, destiny herself, here stood straight up in a girl’s form. It dawned upon him that long ago, when he was a child, something similar had happened to him, and that the world did then hold much sweetness. It is often the adolescent, the being just out of childhood, who most deeply and sadly feels
the loss of that simple and mystic world. He did not speak; he was uncertain of how to address a figure-head, but as he stared at her she looked back at him, candidly and kindly, her thoughts with the butterfly. It seemed to him then as if she were promising him something, a great happiness; and within a sudden, mighty motion he decided to confide in her, and to tell her all.
Rosa stepped down from the window and into her shoes, at ease with the world. She had made a butterfly happy; she had made a child happy and a boy—were it only the silly boy Peter—all in a movement, and with a glance. They knew now that she was good, a benefactress to all living creatures. She wished that she could have stayed up there. But as this could not be, and as she saw Peter remaining immovable in the same place before her window, she went out and stood at the garden door.
The boy flushed as he saw her so close to him. He came up to her and took hold of her wrist, beneath the scanty sleeve. “Rosa,” he said, “I have got a great secret which nobody in the world must know. I will tell it to you.” “What is it?” asked Rosa. “No, I cannot tell it here,” said he. “Others might overhear us. All my life depends upon it.” They looked at each other gravely. “I shall come up to you tonight,” said Peter, “when they are all asleep.” “Nay, they will hear you, then,” said she, for her room was upstairs, in the gable of the house, and Peter’s below. “No. Listen,” he said, “I shall set the garden-ladder up to your window. Leave it open to me. I shall get in that way.” “I do not know if I will do that,” said Rosa. “Oh, do not be a fool, Rosa,” cried the boy. “Let me come in. You are the only one in the world whom I can trust.” When they were children, and had been planning some great enterprise, Peter sometimes came to Rosa’s room at night. She bethought herself of it, and for a moment there was in her heart, as in his, a longing for the lost world of childhood. “Maybe I will do it,” she said, as she freed her arm of his grip.