by Isak Dinesen
She wanted to strengthen herself in the conviction that she was behaving normally and reasonably, and decided that she would go down to the kitchen, to have her breakfast. On the steps down she heard lively voices in there, and in the kitchen she found the whole household gathered round a fish-wife from the coast, who brought fish for sale in a creel upon her back.
These fisherwomen were a brisk, hardy race; they would walk twenty miles, heavy-laden, in all kinds of weather, and come home to cook and darn for a husband and a dozen children. They were quick-witted, great newsmongers and at home in every house, and they preferred their roving outdoor profession to that of the peasant woman, tied up in the stable or by the churn, and to that of the parson’s wife. Emma, the fish-wife, had placed her creel on the floor and herself upon the chopping-block. She was drinking coffee from a saucer and giving out the news of the neighbourhood, laughing at her own tales. The lump of candy in her mouth, her scarcity of teeth and the broad dialect of her talk—mixed up with Swedish, for she was a Swede by birth as were many of the fishermen’s wives along the Sound—made it difficult to follow her tales. But the children of the parsonage could speak the dialect themselves, when they wanted to. She broke off her story to nod to the parson’s pretty daughter, and Rosa took her own cup of coffee to the chopping-block, to hear the news.
Peter caught sight of the girl, and saw or heard nothing else. After a while he came up and stood close to her, but he did not speak. When the talk and laughter were loud in the kitchen, Rosa said, without looking at him: “I have talked with my father. I may go to Elsinore, and you can come with me. Now that the snow is thawing we can go with the waggoners. We may even go today.” At her news the boy grew pale, as she herself had done when, in the early morning, in bed, she had thought of him. After a long time he said: “No. We cannot go today. I shall come up to your room again tonight; there is something more that I have to tell you. I can come, can I not?” he asked. “Yes,” said Rosa. Peter went away, to the other end of the kitchen, and came back again. “The ice is breaking up,” he said. “Emma has seen it this morning. The Sound is free.” Emma, for the benefit of the girl, repeated her report. All winter the fishermen had had to walk a long way out on the ice, to take cod with a tin bait. Now the ice was breaking; the open water was in sight. In a few days they would have their boats afloat once more.
“I shall go down to see it,” said Peter. Rosa glanced at his face, and then could not take her eyes off it again—it was so strangely solemn and radiant—and he knew, she thought, nothing at all of what she did know. “Come with me, Rosa,” he exclaimed in a great, happy seizure, as if he could not let her out of his sight. “Yes,” said Rosa.
The little boy, when he heard that they were going to see the ice break up, wanted to come with them. Rosa lifted him up. “No, you cannot come,” she said to him. “It is too far away for you. I shall tell you about it when I come back.” The child gravely put his hands to her face. “No, you will never tell me,” he said. Eline tried to hold back the girl, and told her that it was too far away for her as well. “Nay, I want to go far away,” said Rosa. She put on an old cloak, and a pair of scabby furred gloves that belonged to her father, and went out with Peter.
As they came out of the house they saw that the snow was gone from the fields, but that all the same the world was lighter than before, for the air was filled with blurred, resplendent clarity. It almost blinded them. They strove to get up their eyelids against it. To all sides they heard the sound of dripping and running water. The walking was heavy; the melting snow had made the road slippery. Peter set off at a quick pace, and then had to wait impatiently for the girl, who in her old shoes slid and stumbled on the path. She caught up with him, warm with the exertion, and giddy, like himself, with the air and the light.
He stood still “Listen,” he said, “that is the lark.” They kept immovable, close to one another, and did indeed hear, high over their heads, the incessant, triumphant jingle of a lark’s song, a rain of ecstasy.
A little farther on, in the forest, they came upon a couple of wood-cutters, and Peter stopped to talk with them while he chose and cut a long stick for himself and one for Rosa, from two young beeches. An old man looked at Rosa, asked if she was the parson’s girl at Søllerød, and remarked on how much she had grown. It was rare that the children of the parsonage had talk with outside people. Now, with Emma and the old wood-cutter, Rosa felt the world to be opening up to her.
Peter had walked on in a state of blissful intoxication, with the sea before him and dragging him like a magnet, and with the girl so close in his track. After his talk with the wood-cutters he had to go on speaking, but could not possibly find words for his own course of thought, so he began to tell her a story.
“I have heard a story, Rosa, you know,” he said, “of a skipper who named his ship after his wife. He had the figure-head of it beautifully carved, just like her, and the hair of it gilt. But his wife was jealous of the ship. ‘You think more of the figure-head than of me,’ she said to him. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘I think so highly of her because she is like you, yes, because she is you yourself. Is she not gallant, full-bosomed; does she not dance in the waves, like you at our wedding? In a way she is really even kinder to me than you are. She gallops along where I tell her to go, and she lets her long hair hang down freely, while you put up yours under a cap. But she turns her back to me, so that when I want a kiss I come home to Elsinore.’ Now once, when this skipper was trading at Trankebar, he chanced to help an old native King to flee from traitors in his own country. As they parted the King gave him two big blue, precious stones, and these he had set into the face of his figure-head, like a pair of eyes to it. When he came home he told his wife of his adventure, and said: ‘Now she has your blue eyes too.’ ‘You had better give me the stones for a pair of earrings,’ said she. ‘No,’ he said again, ‘I cannot do that, and you would not ask me to if you understood.’ Still the wife could not stop fretting about the blue stones, and one day, when her husband was with the skippers’ corporation, she had a glazier of the town take them out, and put two bits of blue glass into the figure-head instead, and the skipper did not find out, but sailed off to Portugal. But after some time the skipper’s wife found that her eyesight was growing bad, and that she could not see to thread a needle. She went to a wise woman, who gave her ointments and waters, but they did not help her, and in the end the old woman shook her head, and told her that this was a rare and incurable disease, and that she was going blind. ‘Oh, God,’ the wife then cried, ‘that the ship was back in the harbour of Elsinore. Then I should have the glass taken out, and the jewels put back. For did he not say that they were my eyes?’ But the ship did not come back. Instead the skipper’s wife had a letter from the Consul of Portugal, who informed her that she had been wrecked, and gone to the bottom with all hands. And it was a very strange thing, the Consul wrote, that in broad daylight she had run straight into a tall rock, rising out of the sea.”
While Peter told his tale they were walking down a hill in the wood, and in the descent Rosa felt something gently knocking against her knee. She put her hand in her pocket, and touched the handkerchief with the money in it that she had forgotten to give to Eline. She ran her fingers over it; there ought to be thirty coins there. The figure rang familiar to her mind. Thirty pieces of silver, the purchase-price of a life. She had sold a life, she thought, and had done what Judas Iscariot did once do.
The idea had perhaps been in her mind vaguely for some time, ever since she had looked at Peter in the kitchen. As now she put it into words to herself, it hit her with such awful strength that she thought she must fall headlong down the hill. She wavered on her feet, and Peter, in the midst of his story, told her to hold on to him. She heard what he said, but she could not answer, and his voice to her seemed to be followed by a dead silence. Although she kept on trudging at the boy’s heels, she heard neither their footsteps nor the sounds of the wood, but moved on like a deaf person.
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br /> So now it had come, she thought, what all her life she had feared and waited for. Here, at last, was the horror which was to kill her.
She did not exactly feel the catastrophe, or the ruin, to have been brought on her by her own fault; she had not it in her to feel so, but in all calamities would be quick to put the blame on somebody else. But she accepted it in full as her personal lot and portion. It was her fate and her doom; it was the end of her.
The name of Judas stuck in her ear, and kept on ringing there with terrible force. Yes, Judas was her equal, the only human being to whom she could really turn for sympathy or advice; he would show her her way. So strongly did the idea take hold of her that after a minute she looked round, bewildered, for a tree, such as Judas had found for himself. They were walking through a glade in the forest, where only a few tall beech-trees grew here and there, and, as she gazed about her, a buzzard, the first she had seen that year, loosened itself from a high branch and majestically sailed farther into the wood, with a silver glimmer on its broad, tawny wings. Judas, Rosa reflected, had kissed Christ when he betrayed him; they must have been such good friends that it came natural to them to kiss each other. She had not kissed Peter, and now they would never kiss, and that was the only difference between her and the accursed apostle.
She did not see the wood round her, or the pale sky above her. She was once more back in her father’s room, and at the moment when she had denounced Peter to him. The parson had spoken to her of his youth and had told her how in Copenhagen he had been assistant to the prison chaplain. There he had learned, he said, that a prison is a good, a safe place for human beings to be in; he himself still often felt that he might sleep better in a prison than in any other place. Some of the wrongdoers, he told her, had tried to break out; he had pitied their short-sightedness, and had felt it to be to their own good when they were captured and brought back. Then, a moment before with a sigh he took up the money and gave it to her, he had looked her in the face and said: “But you, Rosa, you do not want to run away; you will stay with me.” Rosa had gazed round the room; then, it had seemed to repeat the same words. It was a poor room, sparsely furnished, with a sanded floor; people laughed, she knew, at the thought that it was a clergyman’s study. Yet this room belonged to her; she had known it all her life. Why should anyone, she had thought, disown and desert it any more than she did? Now she had sided with that room, with the prison, with the grave, and had closed the doors of them on her. For she had not guessed it, then, to be her fate that, if Peter was a prisoner, she herself would no more be free. She remembered the open window of last night, after Peter had gone from her, and the fresh darkness round her pillow. She had closed that window too. She had closed all the windows in the world on her, and never again would she stand in an open window, and let everything come to Peter, on its own, at the sight of her.
Slowly she returned to the world of reality round her, to the wet brown wood, the curves of the road and Peter’s figure upon it, bareheaded, with a big old muffler round his neck. She did not quite like him, for through him her misery had come, and if he had not been there she would still have walked in the woods, beautiful, content and proud. But it was impossible to her to think of anything upon the earth but him. He stalked on lightly, a strong, straight boy, his head filled with dreams. It was as if she were tied to him with a rope, and were being dragged along after him, a bent, decrepit old woman, so much older than he as to be grieving, as to be weeping over his youth and simplicity.
They again came to the top of a hill, from where there was a view over the lower parts of the wood, blue with the spring mist. Peter stopped, and stood for a minute in silence.
“Do you remember, Rosa,” he said, “that when we were small we came here to gather wild raspberries? In many years, when we are old people, we shall come back here again. Perhaps then everything will be changed, the wood all cut down, and we shall not know the place. Then we will talk together of today.”
It was, once more, the mystic melancholy of adolescence, which will take in, at the very height of its vitality and with a grave wisdom that soon again vanishes, both past and future: time itself, in the abstract. Rosa listened to him, but could not understand him. The past she had destroyed, and she shrank from the future with horror. All that she had got in the world, she thought, was this one hour, and their walk to the sea.
In a short time they came to a steep brink, grown with straggly fir trees, and had the Sound straight in front of them.
It was a rare and wonderful sight. The ice was breaking up; a little way out from the coast it still lay solid, a white-grey plane. But already at a short distance from land, clear of the ground and dissipated into floes and sheets, it was gently rocking and swaying, and slowly turning with the current beneath it. And outside the irregular, broken white line, was the open sea, pale blue, almost as light as the air, a mighty element, still drowsy after its long winter-sleep, but free, wandering on according to its own lustful heart, and embracing all the earth.
There was hardly any wind, but in the air a faint rustle, like a low, joyful chatter, where the sheets of ice rubbed against one another, and thronged to get afloat.
Peter had not touched Rosa since he had played with her hair in bed; now for a second he seized her hand, and in his warm palm she felt a stream of energy and joy. Then in a few long leaps he rushed down the brink and out on the ice, and she ran after him.
If Rosa had been ten or twenty years older she might at this moment have died or gone mad with grief. Now she was so young that her despair itself had vigour in it, and bore her up. Since she had only this one hour of life left to her, she must, within it, enjoy, experience and suffer to the utmost of her capacity. She bounded on the ice as swift as the boy.
To Rosa the supreme wonder and delight of the scenery lay in the fact that everything was wet. Things had lately been dry and hard, unyielding to the touch, irresponsive to the cry of her heart. But here all flowed and fluctuated, the whole world was fluid. Near the shore there were patches of thin white ice that broke as she trod on them, so that she had to wade through pools of clear water. Her shoes soon got soaked; as she ran the water sprinkled over her skirt, and the sense of universal moisture intoxicated her. She felt as if, within a minute or two, she herself, and Peter with her, might melt and dissolve into some unknown, salt flow of delight, and become absorbed into the infinite, swaying, wet world. She seemed to see their two figures quite small upon the white plane. She did not know that her pale face became radiant as she ran on.
Here on the ice Peter waited for her patiently, and kept close to her, more collected and with more weight to him than when on the road he had been swept forward by the wild longing of his soul. They walked or ran side by side. Rosa thought: “I have gone to sea with Peter, after all.” She made him stop a moment.
“Nay, Peter,” she said. “Look, we are going to Elsinore now. That tall packing of ice out there is Godmother’s house. And that one farther out, you know, that is the harbour.”
They made straight for her Godmother’s house. On the way to it Peter said: “Is it not a strange thing about the sea, Rosa? You may look out over it as over a prairie, all the horizon round. And then, just by turning your eyes, you may look down into it as well, all the way to the bottom of it, and it holds back nothing from you. People sometimes say that the sea is treacherous and the earth trustworthy. But the earth closes itself up to one. There may be anything, just below your feet—a buried treasure, the treasure of one of the old pirates—and you can have no idea of it. And as to the air—you may gaze up into it, but you will never know how it looks from the outside. The sea is a friend.”
They stopped at Rosa’s Godmother’s house, sat down on it, and tried to make out places along the wide, hazy coastline. Two trees formed a landmark above the fishing village of Sletten; they were palmtrees upon a coral island. A glint in the air, from the copper roof of Kronborg Castle, far up north, was the first gleam of the white cliffs of Dover. To
the south, a mile away, there were people out on the ice, like themselves; they would be wild men, cannibals, whom they must avoid. “Yes,” thought Rosa, “why would he not content himself with such journeys as these? Then we might have been happy.”
As they walked farther they had, from time to time, to straddle over deep cracks in the ice, which shone green as glass; the ice was more than two feet thick. Once Rosa imagined that she felt the ground faintly moving under her, and got a strange sensation that something or someone, a third party, had joined in their sea adventure, but she said nothing to Peter. They kept running and leaping, always side by side. “Now,” Rosa cried out, “we are at the harbour of Elsinore!”
The breath of the sea here came straight into their warm, flushed faces. There was a southerly current on the still day, the sheets of ice before them were slowly travelling north.
By the coast of Sealand the wind rarely goes round north from east to west, but it will blow a long time from the east with rain and foul weather, then change and go southeast and south, to finish up in the west and let the air clear up. Sometimes a calm follows, and, while the wind dozes, the Sound slowly fills with slackened sails from many countries, like loose goose-down blown together to one side of a pond. Peter and Rosa thought of the ships they had seen gathered here in summer weather.
Now there were tuffed ducks swimming in the pale water, themselves so similar to it in colour that they could only be distinguished by their black necks and wings, an irregular, shifting group of little dark specks upon the waves.