Winter's Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  “Yes,” Peter said slowly, “now we are at the harbour of Elsinore. And that,” he added and pointed ahead, “is the Esperance. She is riding at anchor, but she is ready to put to sea.” The Esperance was a large floe of ice, fifty feet long, and separated from the ice on which they stood by a long crevice. “Am I to board her now, Rosa?”

  Rosa crossed her arms on her breast. “Yes, we will go aboard now,” she said. “We shall be in the North Sea before anyone has got the scent of it, and near England. And then some day we will go round the Horn.” Peter cried: “Are you coming aboard with me?” “Yes,” said Rosa. “And sailing with me” he asked, “all the way, to the South Pole, are you?” “Yes,” said she. “Oh, Rosa,” said Peter, after a pause.

  They strode on to the ice floe, and Peter took Rosa’s hand and held it. They were both tired with their run on the ice, and pleased to stand still on deck.

  Peter looked in front of him, his face lifted. But the girl, after a time, turned her head to see what her native coast of Sealand would look like from so far out. Then she saw that the crevice between the floe and the land-ice had widened. A clear current of water, six feet wide, ran where they had walked. The Esperance had really put to sea. The sight terrified Rosa; she wanted to shriek out loud, and run.

  She did not shriek, though. She stood immovable, and her hand did not even tremble in Peter’s hand. For within the next moment a great calm came upon her. That fate, which all her life she had dreaded, and from which today there was no escape—that, she saw now, was death. It was nothing but death.

  For a few minutes she alone was aware of the position. She did not think much; she stood up straight and grave, accepting her destiny. Yes, they were to die here, she and Peter, to drown. Peter now would never know that she had let him down. It did no longer matter, either; she might, quite well, tell him herself. She was once more Rosa, the gift to the world, and to Peter, too. At the moment when she collected her whole being to meet death, Rosa did not grieve for herself. But she mourned, sadly, for the sake of the world, which was to lose Rosa. So much loveliness, so much inspiration, so many sweet benefactions were to go from it now.

  Peter felt the slight swaying of the ice-sheet, spun round, and saw that they were adrift. His heart gave two or three tremendous throbs; he shifted his grip from the girl’s arm to her elbow, and swung her with him to the edge of the floe. He saw, then, that he might possibly jump the channel, but that Rosa could not do it. So he again dragged her back a little, and looked round. There was clear water to all sides. The people whom they had seen on the ice were no longer in sight. The two were alone with the sea and the sky.

  Bewildered and trembling the boy tore at his hair with one hand, still holding her elbow with the other. “And I myself begged you to come with me!” he cried out.

  After a moment he turned round towards her, and this was the first time since they had come out of the house that he looked at her. Her round face was quiet; she gazed at him beneath the long eyelashes as from an ambush.

  “Now we are sailing straight to Elsinore,” she said. “It is better than that we should go home first, do you not see?”

  Peter stared at her, and slowly the blood went up in his face, till it was all aflame. Their danger, and his own guilt in bringing her here, vanished and came to nothing before the fact that a girl could be so glorious. As he kept looking at her, all his life, and his dreams of the future, passed before him. He remembered, too, that he was to have come up to her room that night, and at the thought a swift, keen pain ran through him. Yet this was more wonderful than anything else.

  “When we come to Elsinore,” Rosa said, “where the Sound is narrow, the captain of the Esperance himself will see us, and fetch us on to his ship, do you not think?”

  The boy’s heart was filled to the brim with adoration. He felt the light wind in his hair and the smell of the sea in his nostrils, and the movement of the water, which terrified Rosa, intoxicated him. It was impossible that he should not hope; it could not be that he should not have faith in his star. It seemed to him, at this moment, that for a long time, perhaps for the length of his whole life, he had been lifted from one ecstasy into another, and that this might well be the crowning miracle of it all. He had never been afraid to die, but he could not, now, give room to the idea of death, for he had not before felt life to be so mighty. At the same time, just as dream and reality seemed, on the floe, to have become one, so did the distinction between life and death seem to have been done away with. Dimly he guessed that this state of things would be what was meant by the word: immortality. So he did no more look ahead or behind; the hour held him.

  He let go his grip on Rosa’s arm, and again looked round. He went to pick up their walking-sticks which they had flung away as they came onto the Esperance. He was some time boring a hole in the ice with his knife, so as to make fast his stick in it, and in tying his big old red handkerchief to the top of the stick. Now it would serve them as a flag of distress, and be seen from far off. He tied the knife to Rosa’s stick with a bit of cord from his pocket, to turn it into a boathook—if ever the current would bear them close to the land-ice he might get a grip on to it with the hook. Rosa looked on.

  With the raising of the flag their floe became a different thing to the others round them, a ship, a home on the water for him and her. It was not cold; a silver light had come into the sky. A curious idea ran through Peter’s head; he wished that he had brought his flute, to play to her as they sailed, for till now she had never cared to hear him.

  In his pocket he had a bottle with gin in it. He dug it up, and asked Rosa to drink from it. It would do her good, he said, and he would himself have some after her. Rosa strongly disliked the smell of gin, and had before been angry with Peter for drinking it. Now, after hesitating a little, she consented to taste it, and even to drink of the bottle, for they had no glass. The few drops that she swallowed made her cough, and brought tears into her eyes, but when again she recovered her breath she said: “Gin is not really a bad thing, after all.” For Peter’s sake she even had another draught, which warmed her all through and brightened all the world to her. Peter then had a pull at the bottle himself, and set it down on the ice.

  Peter pulled off his coat and muffler, and wrapped them around Rosa, crossing the muffler over her breast, and she let him do so without a word. “Why have you put up your hair today?” he asked her. Rosa only shook her head in reply; it would take too long to explain. “Let it hang down,” he said. “Then the wind will blow in it.” “Nay, I cannot get my arms up, with your muffler on,” said Rosa. “Can I take it down?” he asked. “Yes,” said she.

  Peter with skilled fingers, trained at the rigging of the barque Rosa, undid the ribbon that held up her hair as she stood patiently, with her head a little bent, close to him. The soft, glossy mass of hair loosened and tumbled down, covering her cheeks, neck and bosom, and, just as he had foretold, the wind lifted the tresses, and gently swept them against his face.

  At that moment suddenly, without any warning, the ice broke beneath their feet, as if they had stepped on a hidden crack in it, and their combined weight had made it give way. The break threw them on to their knees, and to each other. For a minute the ice still bore them, a foot below the surface of the water. They might have saved themselves, then, if they had separated and struggled on to the two sides of the crack, but the idea did not occur to either of them.

  Peter, as he felt himself flung off his balance, and the ice-cold water round his feet, in one great movement clasped his arms round Rosa and held her to him. And at this last moment the fantastic, unknown feeling of having no ground under him in his consciousness was mingled with the unknown sense of softness, of her body against his. Rosa squeezed her face into his collar-bone, and shut her eyes.

  The current was strong; they were swept down, in each other’s arms, in a few seconds.

  A CONSOLATORY TALE

  CHARLES DESPARD, the scribe, walked into a small café in Pa
ris, and there found a friend and compatriot dining sedately at a table by the window. He sat down face to face with him, drew a deep sigh of relief and ordered an absinthe. Till he had got it and tasted it he did not speak, but listened attentively to a few commonplace remarks from his companion.

  It snowed outside. The wayfarers’ footsteps were inaudible upon the thin layer of snow on the pavement; the earth was dumb and dead. But the air was intensely alive. In the dark intervals between the street lamps the falling snow made itself known to the wanderers in a multitudinous, crystalline, icy touch on eyelashes and mouth. But around the gas-lit lantern-panes it sprang into sight, a whirl of little, transilluminated wings, which seemed to dance both up and down, a small white world-system, like a hectic, silent, elfish bee-hive. The Cathedral of Notre Dame loomed tall and grim, a rock, slanting upward infinitely into the blind night.

  Charlie had just had a great success with a new book, and was making money. He was not good at spending it, for he had been poor all his life, and had no expensive tastes, and when he looked at other people to learn from them, the ways in which they were getting rid of their earnings most often seemed to him silly and insipid. So he left his wealth in the hands of the bankers, as with people mysteriously keen on and experienced in this side of existence, and was himself generally short of cash. By this time his wife had gone back to her own people, and he had no regular establishment, but travelled about. He felt at home in most places, but still had in his heart a constant, slight nostalgia for London, and his old life there.

  He was silent now, and shy of human society, subject to that particular sadness which is expressed in the old saying: omne animal post coitum triste. For to Charlie the pursuit of writing, and that of love-making, were closely related. It would happen to him to hear a tune, or smell a scent, and to say to himself: “I have heard this tune, or smelled that scent before, at a time when I was cither deeply in love, or at work on a book; I cannot call to mind which. But I remember that I was then, at the height of my vitality, pouring forth my being in harmony and ecstasy, and that everything seemed to be, unwontedly and blissfully, in its right place.” So he sat by the table like a man with whom a love-affair has just come to its end, chilled and exhausted, with a strong sense of the emptiness and vanity of all human ambitions. All the same, he was pleased to have met his friend, with whom he was always in good understanding.

  Charlie was a small, slight man, and looked very young for his years, but his convive was smaller than he, and of indefinable age, although the poet knew him to be ten or fifteen years older than he. He was so neatly made, with delicate hands, feet and cars, finely chiselled features, a noble little mouth, a fresh complexion and a melodious voice, that he might have passed as a miniature model of the human figure made for a museum. His clothes were well cut and decorous; his high hat lay on a shelf behind him, above his coat and umbrella.

  His name was Æneas Snell, or so he called himself, but in spite of his easy and debonair manner his origin and past life were obscure even to his friends. He was said by some to have been a cleric, and unfrocked at an early stage of that career. Later in life he had become a doctor of skin diseases, and had done well in the profession. He had travelled much in Europe, Africa and Asia, and knew many cities and men. No great events, either fortunate or sad, seemed ever to have come to him personally, but it had been his fate to have strange happenings, dramas and catastrophes take place where he was. He had been through the plague in Egypt and in the service of an Indian Prince during the mutiny, and he was secretary to the Duke of Choiseul de Praslin at the time when this nobleman murdered his wife. At the present moment he acted as bailiff to a great parvenu of Paris. His friends sometimes wondered that a man of so much talent and experience should all his life have felt content in the service of other people, but Æneas explained the case by pointing to the phlegm or passivity of his nature. He could not, he said, on his own find sufficient reason for doing a thing ever to do it, but the fact that he was being asked or told to do so by somebody else was to him quite a plausible reason for taking it on. He did well as a bailiff and had his employer’s confidence in everything. Something in his carriage and manner suggested that by taking on this work he was conferring an honour both on himself and on his master, and this trait strongly appealed to the rich French gentleman. He was a pleasant companion, an attentive, patient listener and a skilful raconteur; he would not let his own person play any big role in his tales, but he would tell even his strangest story as if it had taken place before his own eyes, which indeed it might often have done.

  When Charlie had drunk his absinthe, he became more communicative; he leaned his arm on the table and his chin in his hand, and slowly and gravely said: “Thou shalt love thy art with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy public as thyself.” And after a while he added: “All human relationships have in them something monstrous and cruel. But the relation of the artist to the public is amongst the most monstrous. Yes, it is as terrible as marriage.” At that he gave Æneas a deep, bitter and harassed glance, as if he did see, in him, his public incarnated.

  “For,” he went on, “we are, the artist and the public, much against our own will, dependent upon one another for our very existence.” Here again Charlie’s eyes, dark with pain, fired a deadly accusation at his friend. Æneas felt the poet to be in such a dangerous state of mind that anything but a trivial remark might throw him off his balance. “If it be so,” he said, “has not your public made you a pleasant existence?” But even these words so bewildered Charlie that he sat in silence for a long time. “My God,” he said at last, “do you think that I am talking of my daily bread—of this glass, or of my coat and cravat? For the love of Christ, try to understand what I say. Nay, we are, each of us, awaiting the consent, or the co-operation of the other to be brought into existence at all. Where there is no work of art to look at, or to listen to, there can be no public either; that is clear, I suppose, even to you? And as to the work of art, now—does a painting exist at which no one looks?—does a book exist which is never read? No, Æneas, they have got to be looked at; they have got to be read. And again by the very act of being looked at, or of being read, they bring into existence that formidable being, the spectator, the which, sufficiently multiplied—and we want it multiplied, miserable creatures that we are—will become the public. And so there we are, as you see, at the mercy of it.” “In that case,” said Æneas, “do show a little mercy to one another.” “Mercy? What are you talking about?” said Charlie, and fell into deep thought. After a long pause he said, very slowly: “We cannot show mercy to one another. The public cannot be merciful to an artist; if it were merciful it would not be the public. Thank God for that, in any case. Neither can an artist be merciful to his public, or it has, at least, never been tried.

  “No,” he said, “I shall explain to you how it does stand with us. All works of art are beautiful and perfect. And all of them are, at the same time, hideous, ludicrous, complete failures. At the moment when I begin a book it is always lovely. I look at it, and I see that it is good. While I am at the first chapter of it it is so well balanced, there is such sweet agreement between the various parts, as to make its entirety a marvellous harmony and generally, at that time, the last chapter of the book is the finest of all. But it is also, from the very moment it is begun, followed by a horrible shadow, a loathsome, sickening deformity, which all the same is like it, and does at times—yes, does often—change places with it, so that I myself will not recognize my work, but will shrink from it, like the farm wife from the changeling in her cradle, and cross myself at the idea that I have ever held it to be my own flesh and bone. Yes, in short and in truth, every work of art is both the idealization and the perversion, the caricature of itself. And the public has power to make it, for good or evil, the one or the other. When the heart of the public is moved and shaken by it, so that with tears of contrition and pride they acclaim it as a masterpiece, it beco
mes that masterpiece which I did myself at first see. And when they denounce it as insipid and worthless, it becomes worthless. But when they will not look at it at all—voilà, as they say in this town, it does not exist. In vain shall I cry to them: ‘Do you see nothing there?’ They will answer me, quite correctly: ‘Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.’ Æneas, if the case of the artist be so with his public, it is not good to paint or to write books.

  “But do not imagine,” he said after a time, “that I have no compassion with the public, or am not aware of my guilt towards them. I do have compassion with them, and it weighs on my mind. I have had to read the Book of Job, to get strength to bear my responsibility at all,” “Do you see yourself in the place of Job, Charlie?” asked Æneas. “No,” said Charlie solemnly and proudly, “in the place of the Lord.

  “I have behaved to my reader,” he went on slowly, “as the Lord behaves to Job. I know, none so well, none so well as I, how the Lord needs Job as a public, and cannot do without him. Yes, it is even doubtful whether the Lord be not more dependent upon Job than Job upon the Lord. I have laid a wager with Satan about the soul of my reader. I have marred his path and turned terrors upon him, caused him to ride on the wind and dissolved his substance, and when he waited for light there was darkness. And Job does not want to be the Lord’s public any more than my public wishes to be so to me.” Charlie sighed and looked down into his glass, then lifted it to his lips and emptied it.

  “Still,” he said, “in the end the two are reconciled; it is good to read about. For the Lord in the whirlwind pleads the defense of the artist, and of the artist only. He blows up the moral scruples and the moral sufferings of his public; he does not attempt to justify his show by any argument on right and wrong. ‘Wilt thou disannul my judgment?’ asks the Lord. ‘Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Hast thou walked in the search of the depth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds? Canst thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades?’ Yes, he speaks about the horrors and abominations of existence, and airily asks his public if they, too, will play with them as with a bird, and let their young persons do the same. And Job indeed is the ideal public. Who amongst us will ever again find a public like that? Before such arguments he bows his head and foregoes his grievance; he sees that he is better off, and safer, in the hands of the artist than with any other power of the world, and he admits that he has uttered what he understood not.” Charlie made a pause. “The Lord did the same thing to me, once,” he said gravely, sighed and went on: “I have read the Book of Job many times,” Charlie concluded, “at night, when I could not sleep. And I have slept badly these last months.” He sat silent, lost in remembrance.