by Isak Dinesen
In order, now, to give Isabella a taste for such courts Pellegrina set to making up a big elegant doll for her. From Eudoxia she purchased lace and silk ribbons and made the doll’s frock a replica of the frock of her own greatest role. In old days she had been clever with her needle, she lost herself in embellishing the wax doll, with beads and spangles on its long train like stars on a winter sky, and in the end placed a tall golden crown on its head. She was looking forward to sending for Isabella and handing her over the doll, when, just as she was endeavoring to put the crown straight, the little girl knocked at the door. She had never come to her house alone before; she was grave, and before she spoke she smoothed the folds of her skirt with her hand.
“I have come up here, Lady,” she said, “to say good-bye to you. For I am going far away.”
“Where are you going to, Isabella?” Pellegrina asked in surprise,
“To Greccio,” Isabella answered.
Pellegrina smiled at the idea of Greccio being far away, for she could see the town from her windows. But Isabella went on gravely, informing her that in Greccio she had an aunt who was a nun, and that the nuns of Greccio ran a girls’ school. She wanted to enter that school. “And when I am big enough, in five years,” she announced, “I shall become a nun too.”
“A nun?” Pellegrina exclaimed. “What makes you want to become a nun?”
“I shall be a nun,” Isabella said, “so that I may pray all day for someone.”
“For whom?” Pellegrina asked.
“For Emanuele,” answered Isabella.
Pellegrina let her hands sink onto the doll in her lap. “How wise you are,” she said. “How wise you are, Isabella. That is the one thing of which I have not thought: that somebody must be praying for him. Surely it will help him. You are wiser than I am.”
She lifted the doll onto the table.
“Look,” she said. “I have made a doll to go with you to Greccio. Much love of mine will go with her, now that I know you are going to pray for Emanuele.”
Isabella left the doll untouched on the table, but beneath her long lashes her eyes ran like dark drops from its crown to its small shoes. She drew a long sigh of adoration.
“Maybe,” she said sadly, “I shall not be allowed to have a doll with me in Greccio, not a big, elegant doll like her.”
“But do you not see,” Pellegrina asked, “that this is no ordinary doll? It is Saint Cecilia, the patroness of music, with a heavenly crown on her head. By her all human hearts are uplifted and blessed.”
Isabella still did not move, but she looked from the doll to Pellegrina’s face.
“I am not,” said the child, “in Greccio, going to pray for Emanuele only.”
“For whom more are you going to pray, Isabella?” Pellegrina asked.
The little girl shifted her feet. “The other day,” she said, “when you told Emanuele of all the great things that happen to a great singer, and what sweet presents he gets, and how a thousand people love him, I thought by myself that maybe you could describe all these things so well because they had happened to you yourself.”
“No,” said Pellegrina gently, “all these things, dear child, have never happened to me myself. For I cannot sing. But I have in my time met many such famous singers; from that I can tell others about them.”
“I thought by myself, Lady,” the little girl went on, “that after you had seen and known all the glory of the world you had come up here to our town to find your soul again and to save it. Therefore I resolved that in Greccio, when I pray for Emanuele, I shall pray for your soul too.”
Pellegrina put her arms round the child. “Yes, Isabella,” she said. “It is all true, and pray you for my soul.”
After a moment she asked: “Does Emanuele know that you are going away, and that you want to be a nun?”
“I have told it to him,” Isabella answered.
“And what, then, did he say to you?” Pellegrina asked.
Again Isabella shifted her feet, she turned her face away a little. “He said the same as you did now,” she answered in a little sad voice as before, “that it was good. That it was wise.”
By this time it began to grow cold in the town. The days drew in, and in the mornings and evenings clouds hung heavily round the mountain tops. Pellegrina caught a cold, and for a few days was so hoarse that she could not speak. But she consoled herself: “Isabella is praying for me.”
The particular softness in the nature of her pupil, which had at times upset Pellegrina, came out as well in a fear of physical pain, unknown to her herself. It did not displease her, for by now nothing in the boy could possibly displease her, but she could not hold herself back from trying to rid him of it. One day, playing with his hand, she said to him: “I am going to prick you with my needle in three of your fingertips, till I draw a drop of blood from each of them, and you must not withdraw your hand.” Emanuele looked up at her with doleful eyes and trembling lips, but managed to keep his hand steady. She wiped the three drops of blood off on her small handkerchief, one by one, then, as she looked at the three little scarlet spots she lifted the handkerchief to her lips.
The next day Emanuele did not turn up for his lesson. Pellegrina wondered what might have happened to him, but she did not send for him, since his will was her law. She kept sitting by her window, doing a little needlework and meditating:. “It is happiness, even, to sit here and wait for him.”
When he came back on the morrow he seemed to expect an inquiry about his absence, and as it did not come he said: “I was ill yesterday.” He turned pale under his own words.
Yet he went through his scales more nobly than before; his voice to her had a new, deeper ring to it. Once more she was filled with the reverence or awe that she had felt before, and as at their first meeting, she sat on for a while in silence.
“Do you know, my little Emanuele,” she said at last, “that you are now singing with my own voice? This is my great secret. My heart is swelling on to my lips as I tell it you. You have got Pellegrina Leoni’s voice in your chest, and verily Pellegrina Leoni herself till now did not know how beautiful it was.”
She could not tell whether he was listening to her praise of him with a new, deeper attention, or whether he did not hear a word of what she said.
But as he was about to go, he lingered by the door, as he had once before done, and asked her: “Where did you get your gold ring?”
“Of what gold ring are you speaking, Emanuele?” she asked him.
He answered: “Of the gold ring which you gave to Camillo, the wagon-driver, when he brought you up here.”
She remembered the ring and called to mind that while she had bestowed many gifts on old Eudoxia and her friends, and on the poor of the priest, she had never made Emanuele a present, and she wondered if the heart of the village boy was yearning for some possession.
“Oh, I have got many rings, Emanuele,” she said, “and other things as well. Would you like a ring? Or a gold watch? Or would you like silver buttons for your coat? I shall get them for you.”
“No,” said the boy, “I want no ring. No gold watch. No silver button either. But Camillo believed that it was just a trinket you had given him, a toy to play with. Then, last week, he showed the ring to a friend of his in Rome, who is a goldsmith, and his friend told him that it was worth as much as his whole house. You have given Father Jeremiah gold too. There is nobody up here who has got things like that. There is nobody up here who would, if they had such things, give them away as you do. Where did you get your gold?”
Pellegrina, as has been told, had never troubled herself much about money; she thought his question silly and was at a loss how to answer it. She said: “I have told you that I am a rich woman. I have got a friend who gives me all I want.”
The boy shook his head. “But your friend,” he said, “has never come up here to see you. Nobody here has seen him.”
“Nay, he has not been up here,” she said. “My friend does not show himself much
to people.”
“Shall I see him?” Emanuele asked.
“Nay,” she again answered. “You will not see him. But my friends are his friends. Tell me what you want, and I will make him send it to you.”
“I want nothing from him,” said the boy.
But he still did not go away. He gazed round the room slowly, letting his eyes rest on one thing after the other, at last he looked back at her.
“What are you looking at?” she asked him.
“I was looking at this room,” he answered, “and at all the things here. At the green lamp, and the piano. I was thinking of them all.”
“What were you thinking of them?” she asked him.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that here I have been happy.”
The words in his mouth sounded so curiously grown-up that they made her laugh. He, generally so touchy at being laughed at, remained grave.
“Happier,” he said, “than in other places. I think that here I have heard my own voice coming to me from somewhere else, I know not from where.”
With a strange childish dignity he again took his glance off the room and off her.
For three days after this he did not come. This time she grew alarmed, wondering if he had really fallen ill. In the early morning of the fourth day she left her house to find him.
She went to the Podesta’s house, and was told there that he was not ill, but that he had been away on his own much these last days, and was so now. She went to the house of Pietro’s sister, whom, she knew, he was wont to visit, but he was not in her house either. She went to a small square, where she had once seen him playing ball with other boys. Boys were playing ball there still, but he was not among them. She went on from there to the houses of two or three friends of his, the names of whom she had learned from him, but he was not with any of them. She could not give up her search, but walked on at random. She had grown slim and light-footed once more up here in the mountains. When she had been a girl her walk had always been faster than that of other people; she walked so now, and the comb fell from her head so that her long hair was loosened and floated after her.
Suddenly, on the outskirts of the town, she came upon him, standing immovable, his back half-turned to her and gazing into distance. At once, at the very sight of him, order and benevolence returned to the world, and she stopped to breathe them in and let them fill her. At this moment, and just as she was going to call out his name, he unexpectedly turned and walked away, at first slowly, then quickening his step. She walked after him, as quickly as he.
A pale silvery winter sun showed itself in the sky; the varying gray tints in the house walls round her and in the landscape below them came out tardily in its light; the scarf round the fleeing boy’s neck was a burning red spot in the cool picture.
All of a sudden the slight figure before her swerved off into a steep side street ending, high up, in a flight of stone steps. She had almost caught up with him, but on the stairs her long ample skirts were in her way, and she stopped.
“Emanuele!” she cried. “Stay! It is I.”
At the sound of her voice the boy began to run.
It flashed upon her that he might really, for some reason unknown to her, have been running away from her. Although he had not turned his head, he had sensed her approach and then taken to his heels, and Pellegrina Leoni had been running through the town in pursuit of a truant pupil. The idea made her laugh where she stood.
“Nay, stay, come down, Emanuele!” she cried up to him, her voice half-stifled with laughter. “Come down, and come back with me.”
Emanuele turned round and faced her. He was trying to speak, but either he was breathless with his quick walk, or otherwise some violent emotion was holding him back, no sound came from him.
She wondered whether she had somehow overworked or scared him. He was not as hard as she; his heart was a long way from being like the nether millstone. She must be careful now; she must lure the bird back.
“You dearest child, come here with me,” she called up to him, her husky voice enticing and insinuating like a stringed instrument. “We will play the loveliest games together. I have got velvet from old Eudoxia wherewith to make you a fine new coat. I have got the flute with silver keys. I have got many new songs and airs for you to sing. Dances.”
At that he found his voice.
“No!” he cried. “No. No. No. And it is going to be no, I tell you, every time, whatever you try to make me do.”
She stood without a word. She looked up at him to take in his face, and she did not recognize it or feel sure that it was the face of the child she had taught. This face seemed to have been all flattened out, the eyes themselves washed away and half disappearing in the flatness, pale like the eyes of a blind person below his twisted brow. It was the face of a little old woman.
“No!” he shrieked out in furious triumph at being able to speak, and she felt, in her own hands, that his two hands were hard clenched, “I know who you are. You are a witch. You are a vampire. You are wanting to drink my blood.”
He stopped as if terrified by the sound of his own words, then cried on:
“You sucked my blood from your handkerchief. I saw it myself. You have got gold, diamonds, the flute with silver keys. You have sold your soul for them to the Devil.”
She tried to make his words a jest. One said such things, at times, to one’s lover.
“Oh, no, Emanuele,” she cried back. “I have never in my life sold a thing. Whatever my friend the Devil has got from me, he has got as a present.”
His answer came down as from very high up: “It is the same to me. You want my blood, all the blood that is in me. Witches live on forever by drinking children’s blood. You want the soul of me, now, to make the Devil a new present!
“Luigi told me so,” he went on. “He told me that you could not die, that you were immortal. All people thought that you were dead, but you were not dead. You had found, then, another boy whose blood you had drunk.”
He stopped, and again went on: “It is true that you are old. But there is no help to me in that. For a witch will live till she is a hundred years old. She will live till she is three thousand years.”
As now she did not answer a word, her silence stemmed his own speech. For a moment he stood dead still and closed his eyes.
“Once,” he then cried out, “I thought that I should die if I were to leave you. Now I know that I should die if I went back to you.”
She stood as still as he, for in this long wail of farewell, and of doom, his voice had rung out as it should ring when at last she had made it what it was meant to be. It was Dido’s lament, Alceste’s heroic sacrifice, in Pellegrina Leoni’s voice.
The boy again opened his eyes and stared at her. Up where he stood he could get no farther. For the steps were here barred by a stone fence with a gate to it. For a minute he was immovable, a wild animal at bay; then he fumbled among the stones of the fence by him, heaved a stone from it and pressed it to his breast.
“If you do not stay where you are,” he cried, “I shall throw the stone at you.”
She, however, would not or could not stay where she was. In a wild and blind hope that the struggle might still be turned into an embrace, with two fingers she lifted up her skirt in front and, as in a dance, took a light step upwards.
As she moved, Emanuele hurled the stone. She had seen him throw stones before, very accurately. It must be his terrible tumult of mind which now made his hand unsteady or made him misjudge the distance. The stone brushed her head, and her thick hair somewhat warded off the blow. Yet she staggered under it and came down on one knee, and she felt the warm dampness of her blood as it trickled over her forehead and her left eye.
Before she got up, a second stone whirled past her ear.
Then she became furious. She had not been angry during the thirteen empty years of her flight; now in a second she was thrown back twice that length of time. She sent her indignation upwards in the dialect of her nativ
e village, as eager for battle as a small wench with a boy using unfair means of fighting.
“You clod!” she cried. “You stumpy peasant boy! So you are throwing stones, are you! So you will be biting too, will you, when I get hold of you!
“Do you know at whom you are throwing stones!” she went on. “A thousand men, a Pope, an Emperor, Princes, gondolieri and beggars, if I but lift my voice, will be here to avenge me on you, you fool.”
She fetched her breath. “Yes, I am a witch,” she cried. “A great witch, a vampire with bat’s wings. But what are you, who dare not come down to play with a witch? What is a coward’s soul worth? Must you sit on that soul of yours as a young miss on her maidenhood, with all your wooden, squinting friends sitting round you, praying that it may be preserved! The one amongst them who knew what a soul is, you sent away. I tell you, you are being poisoned by your soul. It is a bad tooth, have it out!”
She would have gone on, and would have been happy to go on, now that she had got her strength back and her blood up. But she stopped short, for her ear had caught her own voice. What should have been the roar of a lioness was the hissing of a gander and a pain in her throat and chest. For a minute she steadied herself with a hand against the wall beside her; then she turned and walked down.