by Isak Dinesen
The night was misty, but this was the first night after the equinox in which one felt the sweet lengthening of daylight. Peter sat still till he had seen the lamp put out in the parson’s room; then he went out. He rocked the ladder to the gable wall, raised it to Rosa’s window, and scratched his hand in the effort. When he tried the window, it was unfastened, and his heart began to beat. He swung himself into the room, and slowly and noiselessly crossed the floor. In the dark he ran his hand over the bed to make sure that the girl was in it, for she neither stirred nor said a word. Then he sat down on the bed, and for a while he was as silent as she.
The prospect of opening his mind to a friend, who would not interrupt him or laugh at him, rendered him as pensive and grateful as when he had listened to the trekking birds. He remembered that it was a long time, years perhaps, since he had talked like this to Rosa. He did not know whether the fault lay with her or with him; in either case it seemed a sad thing. Now, he reflected, it would be difficult to him to express himself. When in the end he spoke the words came tardily, one by one.
“Rosa,” he said, “you must try to understand me, even if I speak badly.” He drew in his breath deeply.
“I have been wrong all my life, Rosa,” he said, “but it has not been made clear to me till now. You know that there are people in the world called atheists, terrible blasphemers, who deny the existence of God? But I have been worse than they. I have injured God and have done Him harm; I have annihilated God.”
He spoke in a low, stifled voice, with long pauses between the phrases, hampered by his own strong emotion, and by his fear of waking up the people in the house.
“For you see, Rosa,” he said, “a man is no more than the things he makes—whether he builds ships, or makes clocks or guns or even books, I dare say. You cannot call a man fine, or great, unless what he makes is great. It is so with God as well, Rosa. If the work of God does not glorify him, how can God be glorious?—And I, I am the work of God.
“I have looked at the stars,” he went on, “at the sea and the trees, and at the beasts and birds, too. I have seen how well they come in with the ideas of God, and become what he means them to be. The sight of them must be satisfactory and encouraging to God. Just as when a boat-maker builds a boat, and she turns out a smart, seaworthy boat. I have thought, then, that the sight of me will make God sad.”
As he paused to collect his thoughts he heard Rosa draw her breath gently. He was thankful to her because she did not speak.
“I saw a fox the other day,” he took up his theme, after a long silence, “by the brook in the birch-wood. He looked at me, and moved his tail a little. I reflected, as I looked back at him, that he does excellently well at being a fox, such as God meant him to be. All that he makes or thinks is just foxlike; there is nothing in him, from his ears to his brush, which God did not wish to be there, and he will not interfere with the plan of God. If a fox were not so, a beautiful and perfect thing, God would not be beautiful and perfect cither.
“But here am I, Peter Købke,” he said. “God has made me, and may have taken some trouble about it, and I ought to do him honour, as the fox does. But I have crossed his plans instead; I have worked against him, just because the people by me, such people as are called your neighbours, have wished me to do so. I have sat in a room for years and years, and have read books, because your old father wishes me to become a clergyman. If God had wished me to be a clergyman, surely He would have made me like one; it would even have been a small matter to him, who is almighty. He can do it when He wants, you know; He has made many clergymen. But me He has not made that way. I am a slow learner; you know yourself that I am dull. I have become so stale and hard that I feel it in my own bones, an ugly thing to have in the world, in reading these Fathers of the Church. And in that way I have made God stale and ugly as well.
“Why must we try to please our neighbour?” he went on thoughtfully, after a pause. “He does not know what is great; he cannot invent the fine things of the world any more than we can ourselves. If the fox had asked people what they wanted him to be, if he had even asked the King, a poor thing he would have become. If the sea had asked people what they wanted her to be, they would have made but a muddle of her, I tell you. And what good can one do to one’s neighbour, after all, even if one tries? It is God to whom we must serve and please, Rosa. Yes, even if we could only make God glad for a moment that would be a great thing.
“If I speak badly,” he said after a silence, “you must believe me all the same. For I have thought about these things for a very long time, and I know that I am right. If I am no good, God is no good.”
Rosa agreed with most of what he said. To her the surest proof of the magnificence of Providence was the fact that she was there, Rosa, by the grace of God lovely and perfect. As to his view of her neighbour, she was not certain. She held that she might do a great deal to her neighbour. Neither do men light a candle—Rosa—and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and she giveth light unto all that are in the house. Still, if Peter could speak in this way, he was a companion in the house, and might, surprisingly, be of use to her some time. She smiled a little on her pillow.
“And yet,” said Peter, in such a great outburst of passion that against his own will his voice rose and broke, “I love God beyond everything. I think of the glory of God before anything else.”
He became afraid that he had spoken too loud and kept perfectly still for a few minutes.
“Move in a little, can you,” he said to the girl, “so that I can lie there too? There is room enough for both of us.”
Without a sound Rosa withdrew to the wall, and Peter lay down beside her. The boy never washed more than strictly needed, and smelled of earth and sweat, but his breath was fresh and sweet in the dark, close to her face.
With the horizontal position calm came to him, and he spoke less wildly. “And all this,” he said very slowly, “has come about only because I have not run away.”
“Run away?” said Rosa, speaking for the first time. “Yes,” said he. “Yes. Listen. I shall run away to sea, to be a sailor. God means me to be a sailor; that is what He has made me for. I shall become a great sailor, as good as any He has ever made. To think of it, Rosa! That God made those great seas, and the storms in them, the moon shining on them—and that I have left them alone and have never gone to see them! I have sat in that room downstairs and stared at things six inches off my nose. God must have disliked looking my way.
“Nay, imagine now, Rosa,” he said after a while, “imagine only, just in order to understand what I say, that a flute-maker did make a flute, and that nobody did ever play on it. Would not that be a shame and a great pity? Then, all at once, someone takes hold of it and plays upon it, and the flute-maker hears, and says: ‘That is my flute.’ ” He once more drew in his breath deeply, and there was a long silence in the bed.
“But,” said Rosa in a small, clear voice, “I have often wished that you would go to sea.”
At this unexpected and amazing expression of sympathy, Peter became perfectly still. He had a friend in the world, then, an ally. For a long time he had failed to value his friend rightly; he had even held her to be light-headed and frivolous. And the while she had been faithful, she had thought of him, and had guessed his needs and his hopes. In this calm and fresh hour of the spring night, the sweetness of true human intercourse was, for the first time, mysteriously, revealed to him. In the end he timidly asked the girl: “How did you come to think of that?” “I do not know,” said Rosa, and really at this moment she had forgotten why she had wanted Peter to go to sea.
“Will you help me to run away, then?” he asked, lowly and giddily. “Yes,” said she, and after a while: “How am I to help you? ”
“Listen,” he said, and eagerly moved a little closer to her. “It is at Elsinore that I will get my ship. I know of a ship, the Esperance, the captain Svend Bagge, that lies at Elsinore now. She would take me. But I can not get to Elsinore! your father
would not let me go. Only you might tell him that you want to go to see your Godmother there, and that you do not care to travel alone, and then he might let me come with you.
“And when we are there, Rosa, when we are at Elsinore I shall go aboard the Esperance before anybody can know of it. I shall be on the North Sea before they get scent of it, and nearing Dover, England, Rosa. Some day I shall round the Horn.” He had to stop; he had too much to tell her, now that at last he had got himself under sail. “But I can stay here all night,” he thought. “I can easily stay here till morning.”
Rosa did not answer at once; it was as well that he should be kept in suspense a little and learn to appreciate her help. “You have thought it all out very precisely,” she said at last, with a bit of irony. He thought her words over. “No,” he said. “No, I did not exactly think it out. It all came to me on its own, suddenly. And do you know when? When I saw you standing in the window.” He was shy of telling her that she had looked like the figure-head of the Esperance itself, but there was so much joyful triumph in his whisper that Rosa understood without words.
After a minute she said: “Many ships go down, Peter. Most sailors are drowned in the end.” He had to fetch his mind back from the picture of her in the window before he could speak. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But all people are to die some time, you know. And I think that to be drowned will be the grandest death of all.” “Why do you think that?” asked Rosa, who was herself scared of water. “Oh, I do not know,” said he, and after a moment: “It will be, perhaps, because of that great lot of water. For when you come to think of it, there is really nothing dividing the one ocean from the other. They are all one. When you drown in the sea, it is all the seas of the world that take you. It seems to me that that is grand.” “Yes, it may be,” said Rosa.
Peter, in talking of the oceans, had made a great gesture and had struck Rosa’s head. He felt her soft, crispy hair towards his palm, and beneath it her little hard, round skull. Once more he became very still. Against his own will his fingers fumbled over her head and played with and stroked her hair. He drew his hand back, and after a minute he said: “Now I must go.” “Yes,” said she. He got out of the bed and stood beside it in the dark. “Good night,” he said. “Good night” said the girl, “Sleep well,” said Peter, who had never in his life wished anybody to sleep well. “Sleep well, Peter,” said Rosa.
Peter came down the ladder in such a state of rapture and bliss that he might as well have gone the other way, heavenwards, to those well-known stars which were now hidden behind the mist. The causes of his agitation were, on the one hand, his flight and his future at sea, and on the other: Rosa. Under ordinary circumstances the two ecstasies would have seemed to be incompatible. But tonight all elements and forces of his being were swept together into an unsurpassed harmony. The sea had become a female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salt and universal as the sea. For a moment he thought of reclimbing the ladder. His soul, indeed, went up, and once more embraced Rosa in the transport of glorious fellowship. His body would have followed it if he had not, bewilderedly, realized that he did not know what to do with it, once he got it there. So he sat down on the lowest rung of the ladder, his head in his hands, in mystic concord with all the world.
After a time his thoughts began to adjust themselves. There was, after all, a distinction in his attitude towards the universe round him and that towards the girl above him.
In regard to the world, mankind in general and his own fate, he was from now on the challenger and the conqueror. They would have to give themselves up to him; if they struck he would strike back, and he would take from them what he wanted. On their side, everything was clear as daylight, bright as metal or the surface of the sea, shining with danger, adventure, victory.
But towards Rosa all his being went forth in a tremendous motion of munificence and magnanimity, in the desire to give. He had no earthly riches with which to reward her, and even if he had possessed all the treasures of the world he would have forgotten them now. It was something more absolute which he meant to yield up to her; it was himself, the essence of his nature, and at the same time it was eternity. The offering, he felt, would be the highest triumph and the utmost sacrifice of which he was capable. He could not go away until it had been consummated.
Would Rosa understand him then, would she receive him, and accept his gift? As slowly his mind swung from marine adventures and exploits to the girl, he saw that on her side everything lay in a solemn and sacred darkness, such as would be found, he thought, in the deep waters of the oceans, off sounding. It seemed that he did not know her, as she knew him. His thoughts, even, could not get quite close to her, but were held back, every time, as by an unknown law of gravitation. His wild, overwhelming longing to beatify her, and this new, strange unapproachableness of her figure in his imagination kept him awake, in his own bed, till morning. He remembered Jacob, who had wrestled all night with the angel of God. Only here he somehow appropriated to himself the part of the angel, and reversed the cry of the Patriarch’s heart. His soul called out to Rosa: “Thou shalt not let me go except I bless thee.”
In her room upstairs, Rosa, a little while after Peter had left her, turned to her side, her cheek upon her folded hands and her long plait on her bosom, such as she used to do in the evening, when she meant to fall asleep. But she felt, wonderingly, that tonight she would not sleep at all. She had read about people passing a sleepless night, but as a rule they were cither miscreants or rejected lovers, and it was, she reflected, a curious thing that one might be sleepless with content and ease as well. She kept on thinking of the hour that Peter had passed in her bed. A faint scent of his hair lingered on the pillow. She would not for all the world have moved any closer to the place where he had lain, but remained squeezed up against the wall, as she had been while he was there.
All, she repeated in her thoughts, had come to him on its own, suddenly, when he saw her standing in the window. She vaguely remembered that she had, not long ago, distrusted her old playmate, and had meant to refuse him access to her own secret world. “You are a silly girl, Rosa,” she whispered, as when she had been scolding her dolls. The idea of his strength, which had alarmed her, was now pleasing to her mind. She recalled an incident of which she had not thought for many years. A short time after Peter had first come to the house he and she had had a great fight. She had pulled his hair with all her might while, with his tough boy’s arms round her, he had tried to fling her to the floor. She laughed at the memory, with her eyes closed. Peter, when he climbed down the ladder, had failed quite to shut the window behind him. The night-air was cold in the room. Half an hour after Peter had gone Rosa fell into a sweet, quiet sleep.
But towards morning she had a terrible dream, and woke up with her face bathed in tears. She sat up in bed, her hair sticking to her wet cheeks. She could not recollect the dream in full; she only knew that within it she had been let down and deserted by someone, and left in a cold world, from which all colour and life were gone. She tried to chase off the dream by turning to the world of realities, and to her daily life. But as she did so she remembered Peter, and the fact that he was running away to sea. At that she grew very pale.
Yes, he was running away, that was his thanks to her for letting him come into her bed, and for liking him, since last night, better than other people. She went through their night talk, sentence by sentence. She had meant to be sweet to him—before she went to sleep had she not, in her fancy, stroked his thick, glossy hair, which once she had pulled, smoothed it and twisted it round her fingers? But he was going away all the same, to far places, where she could not follow him. He did not mind what became of her, but left her here, forlorn, as in her dream.
In two or three days he would be gone. He would see the house no more, nor the garden, nor the church. He would not even hear the Danish language spoken, but some strange tongue, incomprehensible to her. And he would not think of her; she would have gone from his mind. Gone, g
one, she thought, and bit her hair that was wet with salt tears.
She was now, according to her promise, going to speak to her father, and to get leave for herself and Peter to go to Elsinore. After a while an idea rose to the surface of her mind. How easily could she not make all his great plans void? If she did tell her father of his project, there would be no ships in Peter’s life, no rounding of the Horn, no drowning in the water of all the oceans. She sat in her bed, crouching on the thought, like a hen on her eggs. Till now, it seemed to her, she had managed to keep things at a distance; today they were drawing in upon her, touching her, as she hated things to do, pressing her breast. In the end she got up and put on her old frock.
Rosa very rarely begged her father for anything. He would give her what she asked, for the reason, she had been told, that she was so like her mother, after whom she was named. But she did not like to assume, in this way, the part of a dead woman; she wanted to be herself, the young Rosa. So she might sometimes apply to him on behalf of Eline or of her child, but for herself she would not do it. Still, today she needed the support of both Father and Mother. Some time ago, to amuse herself, she had put up her hair after the fashion of her mother’s hair in her small portrait. Now, in front of the little dim mirror she again carefully did it up in the same way. Then she went down to her father’s room.
She came out from it again with a blank face, like a doll’s, and for some time stood quite still outside the room. She had her handkerchief in her hand, with a small pile of money tied up in it, the purchase price of the cow, which the parson had given her, and told her to hand over to Eline. He had been so deeply moved during their talk together, that he had even covered his face at the idea of his nephew’s ingratitude, and again lifted it, marked by tears. As she was about to go, he took her hand and looked at her.
To the parson it was a constant burden and grief that he could not quite believe in the dogma of the resurrection of the body, on which, all the same, he must preach from his pulpit, for he distrusted and feared the body. The young girl, he thought, would not be tormented by any such doubts. And indeed the flesh that he touched was fresh and clean; one might imagine that it would be admitted to paradise. He had sighed deeply, counted up the money and laid it in her cool, calm hand. To Rosa all ideas of purchase and sale were, for some reason, displeasing. She took it reluctantly, and so unconcernedly that the old man had reminded her to tie it up in her handkerchief. Now, outside the door, she put the bundle into the pocket of her skirt.