Last Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  His boyhood, lonely in a strange country, in the company of a melancholy man, had shone all the same with rainbow radiance from a lost, a promised land.

  Time after time in the course of these years his father would take up the idea of going back to France. The life of the child then reflected the terrible struggle within the soul of the ordinarily collected, quiet man. He saw him. thrown off his balance, upset and stirred to the bottom of his being. The occupations of their daily life were than left and forgotten as if they had not existed. For weeks the agony would go on; the man would decide to go and give it up ten times within one night, or he would imagine them already on the way, wake up and find himself in the Canadian home, and despair. These outbreaks became a yearly returning rite, an equinoctial gale in the existence of the boy. One thing he would notice: as soon as there was any plan of going back to France the names of Haut-Mesnil and its inhabitants would disappear from the vocabulary of his father. Then, in the end, the mood passed, always in the same way, and the Baron de La Verandryé never went back to France.

  When his father fell ill, the conflict of his life suddenly dissolved itself in his plans and hopes of his son going to France when he himself should be dead. During his last months he talked much of all that the boy was to do there, with such gay hopefulness as Philippe had never known in him. The boy would find him feverish in his bed, waiting for his return to instruct him how to put out carob in a pond of Champmeslé. On his last day his mind was swarming with the names of old servants and dogs; to the son listening it was as if the world of Champmeslé were rushing out to meet him.

  Six months after his father’s death, when he had settled the affairs of their estate, Philippe started on his journey home.

  He had his first real feeling of freedom at the sight of the ocean. But one moonlight night, when he was on the deck of the ship, in the dark-brown, transparent shadow of the large sails, it was to him suddenly as if the cold gray wandering waters spoke to him, warning him not to go, but to turn back. The feeling did not last long, but he remembered it long.

  On his return to France, for a time he forgot everything.

  The promised land more than kept its promises. Strange as it was to him to travel toward his home, to meet, one after the other, the blue hills and rivers, and the towns, and to find them so much smaller than he remembered them—for in Canada the problem of distances had been one of the serious phenomena of life, but with the fertility and smooth roads of the French land all seemed to be one neighborhood and distance nonexistent, and this was much like a dream, and from the first made everything dreamlike to him—conditions were soon, in a much stranger way, changed entirely. He was no longer acting himself, but was being received and handled by something stronger than he. Just as it had come to lift up his dying father, the country came out to meet him, put its arms round him and held him. He learned that his father had been dear to people here in a way which he would never himself have guessed; they talked of him with smiles and tears. A new picture of the lonely man was here forming itself for his son.

  This extraordinary happiness of his first year in France was, even now, sometimes brought back to Philippe, unconsciously, in an old tune or a scent. And when he thus got the whole fullness of the nights and days of that year, of friendships, hunts, journeys, meals and dreams, distilled and in one draught, the strongest flavor within it was still that feeling of belonging to something, and of having been taken into, and made one with, a life outside himself, in which he had still a more perfect freedom than he had known before. It had the sweetness of a first union of love. Consciously he could never recall it, it had lasted too briefly.

  In due time he also called at Haut-Mesnil. There he found things much changed, for the master of the house had died, his widow was a second wife, whom his father had never known, and the present head of the family, her son, was a boy of ten. The daughter of the first marriage, with whose name he was familiar, was in a convent at Pirigueux. But he was received as kindly there as everywhere, and in time, in spite of the place being so unlike the Haut-Mesnil of his childhood dreams, he came to feel more at home there than in any other house. So much power is there in lifeless things, in houses, roads, trees and bridges. Also there was a particular influence at work in the place, for which, later on, he came to find a name.

  From the Countess he learned a thing which surprised him, namely, that the heads of the houses of Haut-Mesnil and Champmeslé had not been on friendly terms. This did not affect the benevolence of the Countess toward him; in fact it seemed that this lady had made it a line of conduct to take, in life, the opposite side from her husband. Thus she had taken, on her marriage, the side of her stepdaughter against her father, and even, when her own son appeared on the stage and was made much fuss about, against him. She did not come from Dordogne, but from the Province of Geneva; she was a highly bigoted, dry woman, with little knowledge of the world or the heart, no imagination and no faculty for loving. Life was dull to her, and she welcomed, with a passionate gratitude, the few phenomena in it which were capable of awakening her imagination. Probably it was her grudge against her husband that he had never been able to do so—even her son, when he had once been born, had failed. For scandal she had no taste; the world of sentiment lay too far off her domain. Religion had often shown a fatal tendency to dry up under her hands, from the ecstasy which, upon the best of authorities she had expected of it, into sawdust of moral principle. But adventure she appreciated. When Philippe would talk to little Childerique of red Indians, of bear-hunts, or of canoe expeditions, she would listen, as spellbound as the child; for these last she had even a particular preference, being terrified of water herself. Something of the picture of the little boy who had grown up, motherless, far from France, in the company of wild red-skinned men, struck her heart and brought out one of the rare little wells of feeling in it. Philippe found in the narrow-minded woman, who could not love, a rare talent for being a friend, which, toward him, lasted all her life.

  Many things at Haut-Mesnil were explained by the strange luster which was still spread everywhere by the memory of the Countess Sophie, Childerique’s mother. The remembrance of this beautiful young woman seemed to live in all the province, like an afterglow of her rich vitality. People talked about her as if she were still alive, and little tales of her grace and generosity were hurried upon him, as if he could not be accepted as a true child of the community until he shared this creed. He heard of her curious taste for disguise, so that she would, like a neat female Haroun al Raschid, become acquainted with the poor and outcast of the land in her maid’s apron, or even dressed up as a horse-dealer’s boy, for she was an exquisite horsewoman; and of her impulsive heart, when, on finding a poor tenant’s household lamenting a dead mother and a new-born baby, she had shifted her own little daughter to the arms of the nurse, and laid the forlorn child to her full breast. The present Countess herself, who had never seen Madame Sophie, had a special feeling toward the frail figure, a mixture of admiration and pity. In Childerique, while she strove to graft into her the strictest principles of prudence, her true devotion went toward those imaginative, defying sides of her nature which recalled the dead woman.

  When Childerique came from her convent she found the new young neighbor a persona grata of Haut-Mesnil, so much the friend of her little brother that to begin with she did not like him. Philippe afterwards wondered whether the stepmother had not, before the girl’s return, planned—as much as she had it in her to plan anything in life—to unite sense and romance by marrying off her stepdaughter to the largest estate of the province as well as to the blood-brother of the Mohicans. The heart of the young man needed no encouragement; it was prepared for love for this girl as a field, plowed and harrowed, for the spring rains. Virginal and generous, Childerique seemed to him, from the beginning, the incarnation of France and of all there that he had dreamed of as a child. At times it was as if he had known her first, and as if the country were imitating the girl in sweetness and
ease of heart. Now even had the old woman and the young man been scheming together skillfully; the prey would not have been easy for them to come up to.

  Childerique was at this time intoxicated with her freedom, but not at all with her power. She had grieved as a child because she had not been born a boy; for the sake of her mother’s honor, she was indignant that her stepmother should have accomplished, without any effort, the exploit which her beloved mother had failed to achieve. She was also at this period of her life troubled by being unusually tall for her age. Toward both these worries of her existence she took up the same attitude; she seemed to feel that as the truth could not be concealed, the world might as well have it point-blank. On this account she carried herself erect in her full height and also allowed herself the full freedom of being a girl, following all her own whims and frankly keeping from the society of males. In spite of her conventual education she was a Diana of Dordogne, a kind deity, but with bow and arrows. She might well, had she been bathing in her favorite forest pool, and had Actaeon approached, sweaty from the hunt, congratulating her on her choice of a bathing place, have invited him to join her in a swim. But had she found him spying on her secretly she would not have been behind the goddess in loosing her fierce hounds on him, or in her enjoyment of the sight of his dismembering. She had no desire to be desired, and her woman’s kingdom of longing, rapture and jealousy seemed to her all too vast; she did not want to take up the scepter at all. Like a young stork which considers that it runs very well, and does not care to fly, she had to be lured into her element. But once in it she gave proof of great powers. After his first kiss and words of love, she fluttered up audaciously into flight; it was, in their honeymoon an ecstatic, easy soaring, and as the children were conceived and born a succession of majestic wing-strokes.

  They were married in the month of June, and Philippe took his young wife by her own team of four horses, which were his wedding present to her, the dreamlike easy distance from Haut-Mesnil to Champmeslé. The house to which he brought her was inferior to her old home, for the manor of Champmeslé had been burnt down during the Revolution. The family had since lived in a long white house, formerly the habitation of the inspector of the estate. But it lay very finely, surrounded by the terraces, gardens and woods of the old chateau; and within, it was richly furnished with choice old things and tasteful modern furniture.

  Up under the roof of this house there was a large room, light in itself, but darkened by shutters. Upon the day-week of his wedding the young husband, a little giddy with happiness, roaming about in the house of which many corners were still unknown to him, came up here, and on finding the place filled with old furniture, mirrors, pictures, books and papers, sat down for half a lazy hour, going through old letters in the chiaroscuro of the room, and scattering them round him. Really he was looking for some trace of the little boy Philippe who had wandered about in the same house twenty years before, and might have left a reflection in some dim and dusty old looking glass, into which no one had since gazed.

  Out of an old, tortoise-shell box, which opened by the touch of a spring, a packet of letters, tied together with a pale blue ribbon, came into his hand. They were love letters, written by a lady to her lover, by Childerique’s mother to his father. Afterwards he remembered how he had, after the first glance, got up to destroy them, when his eyes had been caught by his own name.

  The young mistress wrote: “Your clever and adorable little Philippe, who, when I sat with him on the garden seat, and had closed my eyes to think of you, poked his little finger into my face and said: ‘Light your eyes, Madame.’ ”

  Here was the child of Champmeslé then, no longer lonely; a young woman had sat with him in a garden, had smiled at him, and repeated his little sayings in a letter to her lover.

  He read all the letters through, only once, but he found later that he knew many passages of them by heart, and could have passed an examination on the correspondence of the dead lovers. The last of them was a crumpled bit of paper, unlike the others in form as well. It ran: “Dear Baron de La Verandryé. Just a word. I am sorry for what I said to you yesterday. The bearer, the gypsy Udday, has got my message and will give it to you correctly, it is too long for me to write, as I am not well. Good-bye, good-bye.”

  Philippe looked at the date, it was the day of Childerique’s birth. This letter was written to deceive anybody into whose hands it might fall; the lovers had quarreled, and unable to bear the burden of their disagreement at this moment, Sophie had sent the gypsy with a verbal message, and the little note as a credential.

  As soon as he understood the sense of the letters, Philippe got up and locked the door. It was as if he had found his father in here, defenseless and exposed to danger.

  Here, then, was the central point and the heart of his world, even from childhood, and of his father’s wanderings, exile and death, run to earth at last in the attic of Champmeslé. This sweetness and this fire had hurled people to and fro across the ocean. He looked round him, so strongly did he feel the presence of the man in the grave over the sea, and the woman in the mausoleum of Haut-Mesnil. How was it possible that he had not known till now? His heart was squeezed by pain as he thought of the companionship and comfort that he might have given his father had he only understood that when he said “France,” he meant “Sophie.”

  He made a heap of all the letters together with the same ribbon, struck a light and watched them flame up and come to ashes upon the cold fireplace.

  So Childerique was his father’s child. There was no doubt about it, the young impassionate mother had informed her lover of the happiness and danger, and had come back to it many times. It seemed natural enough, and that rare sympathy and feeling of home which he had with her was real and sprang from a source deep in their blood. He had had the sensation, when they had laughed and jested together, of being with someone whom he had known well and loved all his life, and now he understood that too: he had then been playing with his father as a child.

  He smiled at the thought that he and she were works of the same artist. He had met, in his father’s nature, a deep conflict between his sense of duty and the strong and wild inclinations of the heart. He himself was then a product of the man’s conscience, his respect of, and resignation to, outward forces, but Childerique was what his father could do when he was left free, where he wanted to be.

  Suddenly the thought of Childerique filled the room so completely that it drove away all the shadows, and he rose to go to her when he remembered that he had locked the door. He was struck by a great wave of terror. It seemed to him that he had separated himself from her forever. That gray and cold ocean upon which he had looked down from the ship, he had laid it between him and the young wife downstairs whom he had lately held in his arms, and had left arranging bouquets for their home.

  Frightened to death, he could not bear the silence. “Father!” he cried, his hands to his head, and in a moment, as there was no answer: “Sophie—Madame Sophie, what have I done?”

  Why had they not told him, but let him walk straight into this misery? Still, he knew now that his father had told him, had he only understood. But, he thought again, the day before his wedding a bridge had given way as he rode across it, and he had been in danger of his life. Why had the dead people not helped him there, and let him die? Now they had left him here, all alone.

  He sat for a long time in the room, to make up his mind. Had it been the week before, he thought, he could have told her, or he could have gone away without ever telling her; it would have been better to have done that. Now he could do nothing. In the end, before he left the room again, he had sealed his mouth and his heart forever; she should never know that anything had been changed between them. He thought: It would bring down all the world around her, the sacred memory of her dead mother, her strong faith in honor and virtue, her joy and hope about their future. Was it not then for him to guard her against such disaster? In his heart he knew well that all these reasons were of no account,
and that the true motive for his silence was that he could not, he would not suffer her to think with horror of his embrace.

  His longing for her, as he got up, was so strong that his arms and hands ached. “Let it be as it will,” he thought. “Let them even separate our souls forever, if it be as they tell us. Our bodies they shall not separate at all.”

  As life went on at Champmeslé during the following seven years, and his existence grew up on all sides, this same thought was ever with him. Their home became, round Childerique, a little world of its own, through all of which one line and spirit ran. The horses and dogs, the servants of the house, the furniture and the books of the library, the lilacs on the terrace, the drive up to the door, the silhouette of the roofs as you came home late in the dusk, and the tunes that she played—all belonged to one another, and were each of them part of a greater whole. If they were scattered by another revolution, or if, their earthly career finished, they were to meet again in another world, wherever two or three of them were gathered together they would recognize each other and cry “Hail, there is one more of us. We, too, were there. We, too, were part of Champmeslé.”

  When the first two children were born, he was glad that they were daughters. He thought that it would be wrong should a child of incest carry forth the name of La Verandryé. After the birth of his first little girl he had even gone to their old doctor to ask him whether there was any sure way of deciding the sex of children beforehand.

  The old man laughed at him. “Oh, Monsieur le Baron,” he said, “you are too impatient. Do not refuse to plant us a few roses at Champmeslé, for the joy of the province, before you graft the oak.”