Last Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  On the second step down her foot struck the stone that had been thrown at her. She took it up, rubbed it into the scratch on her forehead and turning once more flung it up lightly, so that it fell at the feet of the boy who had thrown it.

  “Keep it, you!” she said. “Pellegrina Leoni’s blood is upon it.”

  She began to walk back through the streets and her mind was as dumb as her breast. On the way she fumbled at her hair and wiped the blood off her face with it. At last she stood still. She gazed round her to recognize the street, then crossed it to where, on a corner, there stood a low stone trough for watering donkeys and cattle, and sat down. The leaden sky once more had closed over the town, a thin, chill wind came running along.

  Pellegrina sat on her trough for a long time and let many reflections run through her head.

  She first thought:

  “I was right. I was right when I told Niccolo that joy was my element. The people of this earth who have it in them to suffer so deeply, and to fear, will get the better of me every time. I cannot hold my own against them.” She called up before her the faces of the townspeople, one by one. Here was Eudoxia’s face, furrowed with care and worry, here were the faces of Eudoxia’s neighbors, strained and anxious, and the tallow-colored face of the parish priest, blunt and stolid, as if blind. “Joy may come to them,” she told herself, “as a surprise, for an hour or two, but none of them feels at home in it.” The idea of the overwhelming majority of unhappy people in the world closed in upon her from all sides. “I cannot stand up against all of them,” she told herself. “Not against all.”

  She next thought:

  “Emanuele was mistaken; he was all wrong. But one cannot blame him for that. I myself have been told about the mingling of blood between two people. But he has never heard of such things. To him the mingling of blood will mean the drinking of it. He saw me sucking his blood from my handkerchief, and he ran away before me in fear of his life. But it is difficult to tell, in a mingling of blood like ours, who gives and who receives. You ought to have known, Emanuele, that I should not have brought the drops of your blood to my mouth if it had not been that I was longing to give all my own blood to you.”

  She again thought:

  “And then, maybe, he was not as much mistaken as all that. Or can you honestly vow, Pellegrina, that you yourself, who have so often been begged to stay on, who have been held back and have been pursued, did not, today, take pleasure in being the pursuer?”

  She here became conscious of people passing her or coming toward her in the street, and it seemed to her that they looked at her with grief or in fear. She remembered that she had on her forehead the mark of Cain. She also remembered Niccolo’s words: that if people knew what she was thinking they would throw stones at her. She dipped her long tresses in the water of the trough and washed her face with them.

  “But it will still be there,” she reflected, “and I shall have to get up and away from here. For it must be a sorry thing to be stoned.” She called to mind how, on the evening of her coming to town, she had told herself that this was a place in which one might stay on. “But there I was wrong,” she thought.

  She wanted, before rising and going away, to think once more of Emanuele. It would, she knew, be the last time, for on parting from him she must again give up remembering. She sat gazing down in the water of the trough, but she saw his face as he had lifted it to tell her that if she died he must die too, and as he had lowered it like a small angry bull-calf when he had thrown the stone. “Must pity of human beings,” she cried in her heart, “forever be sucking the marrow out of my bones?”

  She thought at last:

  “Oh, my child, dear Brother and Lover. Be not unhappy, and fear not. It is all over between you and me. I can do you no good and I shall do you no harm. I have been too bold, venturing to play with human hands on an Aeolian harp. I beg pardon from the north wind and the south wind, from the east and west wind. But you are young. You will live to weigh more than I do, half as much again, and to prove yourself the Chosen and Elect; you may live to give to your town a priest-saint of her own. You will sing too. Only, dear heart, you will have to work hard to unlearn what you have learned from me. You will have to take great care so as not, when you are singing the Gospel, to introduce portamento effects.

  “And the voice of Pellegrina Leoni,” she concluded her long course of thought, “will not be heard again.”

  As she got up from the trough and stood on her feet she asked herself: “Shall I go to the right or to the left?”

  She bethought herself of Niccolo, who had taken trouble to give her his advice on the matter, and reflected that she ought to follow the advice once more, and go into the church. For in a church, she remembered having been told, people will not stone anybody.

  She again had to look round to find the way to the church, then walked along to it.

  She had expected to find the church empty. But the day happened to be a Sunday, as had been the day of her first visit there, and when she lifted the heavy leather curtain of the porch she saw that there were people in the room behind it. It was the latest Mass of the day, a silent Low Mass. Without making any noise she sat down close to the door, and she soon came to feel that she was already on the road again, and that the quiet in which she sat was but a pause.

  In a while the communicants, who had been up by the altar, came back and again took their seats. She cast a glance at the face of her neighbor, a very old woman, to see if there she would find any fear of her. The face had no expression at all, but she saw that the wrinkled lips and toothless gums were still moving and munching a little with the consummation of the Host.

  “You too, Niccolo,” she thought, “spoke the truth on that evening when we talked together. One can. take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men. One may allow oneself many things toward Him which one cannot allow oneself toward man. And, because He is God, in doing so one will even be honoring Him.”

  New Winter’s Tales

  COUNTRY TALE

  There was a wood path running along the stone fence at the western edge of a wood. Outside the fence the open landscape lay calm and golden, already marked by the hand of autumn. The large fields were empty, the harvest was gathered in and only the rakings were left, set up here and there in low stacks. Some way off, on a field road, a last cartload was rolling toward the barn in a cloud of golden dust. The distant woods to the north and south were brownish-green, gently and gravely gilt or rusted by the sun of long summer days. The woods to the west were deep blue; from time to time a faint blue tinged the fields as well, where a flight of wood-pigeons rose from the stubble. Along the fence the last honeysuckle, upon limp stalks, was giving out its farewell fragrance, and the bramble already had scarlet leaves and black, ripe berries. But the depth of the forest was still green, a summer vault, and where the beams of the afternoon sun fell through the verdure it became luminous and filled with promise, like May foliage. The path wound in and out, and up and down, the forest slopes. It swerved toward the fence, as if it meant to unite the wood world with the open country, then shrank back again as if in fear of giving away a secret.

  A young man, bareheaded, in a riding coat, and a young lady in a white summer frock came walking along the path. Her frock, Greek in drapery like that of a dryad, with the belt just below the breasts, trailed lightly on the ground and, as she walked on, rolled a dry beechnut of last year along, as a wavelet plays with a pebble on the beach. She let her dark eyes under long lashes glide lovingly and happily over the forest scenery, like a young housewife going through her house and finding everything in good order.

  They walked along slowly and easily; they were at home in the wood and belonged to it. Their clothes and carriage told that they were a young squire and squire’s lady of the fair, rich green isle.

  Where the path took off and ran over the fence toward the fields she stood still and gazed out into the distance. To her companion, who stopped with her, it was
as if he did not himself see the landscape before them, but only through her knew that it existed, and what it meant. It became infinitely lovely within her eyes and mind, lovelier than itself, a silent poem. She did not turn toward him; she rarely did so, and very rarely on her own offered a caress. Her form and color, the fall of her rich dark hair and the lines of her shoulders, her long hands and slim knees, in themselves were caresses; her entire being and nature was to enchant, and she craved for nothing else in life. On his way to the wood he had pondered the problem of the vocation of man; now he thought: “The vocation of a rose is to exhale scent; for that reason do we plant roses in our garden. But a rose on its own exhales a sweeter scent than we could ever demand of it. It craves for nothing else in life.”

  “What are you thinking of now that you tell me not?” she asked.

  He did not answer at once, and she did not repeat her question, but, climbing the smooth-worn path across the fence, for a moment shaded her eyes with her hand against the light, then seated herself where she stood, her hands folded round her knees. From far away her frock, catching the sun, would now be visible like a golden-white flower in the green. He sat down in the shade of the trees, where his eyes could rest on her form. The air here at the edge of the wood was clear and warm, the light full and timeless, the stubble fields breathed a generous sweetness. A pale-blue moth came and settled upon a sun-baked stone beside her.

  He did not want to break up their happy hour in the wood, and remained silent for a while.

  “I was thinking,” he said at last, “of the old people who lived here before us, and who cleared and broke and plowed this land. They will have had to begin their work over and over again. In very old days they had bears and wolves to fight, then Wendish pirates and invaders and then, later again, hard and unsparing masters. But were they to rise from their graves, on a harvest day like this, and to look out over the fields and meadows before us, they might still consider that it had been worth their while.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said and looked up toward the blue sky and the clouds. “And they will,” she added, “have had real fine hunting, with those bears and those wolves.” Her voice was as clear as a bird’s, with a faint ring of the island dialect, like a melody, to it. She talked as if she played.

  “And they might then, today,” he said, “forget the wrongs done them.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said once more. “It is all a long time ago.” She smiled a little to herself. “Now you are thinking of a peasant,” she said, “since you talk of wrongs.”

  “Yes,” said he, “I was thinking of a peasant.”

  “And why,” she asked, “are you digging your old peasants out of the mold to bring them with us into the wood today?”

  “I might tell you why,” he said, but sat on silent.

  “You are a clever, wise, learned man, Eitel,” she said. “Your land is better worked and looked after than the land of your neighbors. People talk about you and your reforms and inventions. The King himself has said that he would there were more like you in his country. You give more thought to your peasants’ welfare than to your own. You have been away for years in foreign countries to study new farming systems and how to make their lot easier and happier to them. And yet you speak as if you were in debt to them even now.”

  “I may be in debt to them even now,” he said.

  “I remember,” she said thoughtfully, “that one day when we two were children and were walking together in the wood—just like now—you began telling me of the wrongs done, in old times, to the peasants in Denmark. I was older than you, but you spoke so gravely that I forgot my dolls for your tales. I almost believed, then, that the Lord God must have decided to create our whole world over again, and that you must be one of the angels whom He had chosen to assist Him in the task.”

  “You were the angel, I think,” he said, and smiled a little, “who had the patience to listen to the fantasies of a lonely boy.”

  They sat in silence for a while, thinking of the time of which they were talking.

  “Today,” she said, “I know a little more about the world, and I do not think that it is going to be created over again—not in our time. I do not know, either, that one must think it unjust that there are both noblemen and peasants on the earth, any more than that there are both pretty and plain people upon it. May I not brush my own hair without grieving for the sake of the women who have got thin, dull hair?”

  He looked at her long silky ringlets, and called to mind the many times that he had loosened them and wound them round his fingers.

  “But to you,” she went on, “it is as if it were all your fault that there are poverty and distress in the world. It is as if you were tied with a rope to those old peasants of whom you talk.”

  “Yes, I may be tied to them with a rope,” he said.

  She sat silent for a long time, her hands round her knees. “If I had been a peasant’s wife,” she said lowly and happily, “you would not have taken me.”

  He did not answer her. He was seized and transported, as often before, by the fact of her nature being so entirely without shame. She blushed easily, with joy or pride, but never with guilt. And that, he reflected, was why he found peace with her as with no other human being. He had heard and read, and he knew from his own experience, that a man’s love of a woman never for a long time outlives possession. But he had been the lover of this young lady, his neighbor’s wife, for two years. Her little daughter, up at her husband’s house to which the wood belonged, was his. And his desire and his tenderness were stronger today than two years ago, so strong that he had to hold himself back so as not to draw her to him or to kneel down before her and kiss her hands in sweet, wild gratitude. It would be the same, he felt, were they to live to old age. And it was not by her beauty or her gentleness that she did hold this happy and painful power over him. It was because she knew not shame nor remorse, nor rancor. After a while he also reflected that in her last words to him she had spoken the truth.

  “You,” he said at length in a changed voice, low as her own, “you have never wronged the people whose lives were in your hand. Your family, your fathers, have lived in good understanding with the peasants on their land, as with the land itself.”

  “My family and my fathers were like others, I think,” said she. “Papa had such a temper! When he had taken something into his head, it would have to be done; he did not worry much whether it was reasonable or not.”

  “But the name of your fathers,” said Eitel, “has not been loathed by the people who served you. Your harvesters have sung while they reaped their fields.”

  She thought the matter over. “Have you got the barley in, with you?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is in,” he answered, “except for a little in the lower field and a bit in ‘Milady’s Paddock.’ ”

  “It would not make much difference to you, I do not think,” she said after a moment, “whether they sang or not while they reaped for you. That is what I have been wondering about many times, Eitel: what have you gained by your toils and your travels and your studies? It has made you a stranger among your equals. You do not take much pity on your friends, be they ever so unfortunate in cards or in love. And if you sell them a horse, you will know what price to ask, and stick to it. But when you are trading with a peasant you will feel, I think, that you must give him the whole horse for nothing. And for all that, there is no great affection for the peasants in your heart.

  “Those old men,” she continued slowly, “those old lords of the land whom you cannot forget—maybe they took more pleasure in having their servants about them than you do. They felt that those people belonged to them; they made merry with them and were pleased and proud when they were comelier or shrewder than the servants of their neighbors. But you, Eitel, you do not want your own valet to touch you; you dress and undress without him; you ride about without a groom; you go out with your gun and your dog all alone. Why, when that old tenant of yours, to whom you forgave his lease, wan
ted to kiss your hand, you would not let him do so, and I had to give him mine to kiss, so as not to let him go away empty! It is not out of love for your peasants that you rack your brain and allow yourself no rest. It is out of love for something else. And what that is I know not.”

  “Nay, you are mistaken,” said he. “I love this land of mine, every acre of it. In foreign countries, in the big towns there, I have been sick with longing for this very soil and air of mine.”

  “I know,” said she, “that you love your land as if it were your wife. But you are not the less lonely for that. And I wonder, Eitel,” she added with a vague mockery or pity in her voice, “I wonder whether in all your life you have really loved any human being except just me.”

  At her words he looked back searchingly into the past. She herself, he reflected, wherever she had been had found something to love.

  “Nay,” he said once more after a while, “I have indeed loved very deeply a human being—a long, long time ago. But at the same time you are right. It is not out of love for my servants or my peasants that I do, as you say, rack my brain and allow myself no rest. It is out of love for something else. And the name of that thing is justice.”

  “Justice,” she repeated wonderingly and became silent. “Eitel,” she said at last, “we two need not worry ourselves about justice. Fate is just, God is just. Surely He will judge and retribute, without our assistance. And we human beings may leave off judging one another.”

  “And yet,” he said, “we human beings take upon ourselves to judge one another. Yet we take upon ourselves to sentence one another to death.