Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (14 page)

Old Jochum Hosewinckel during the last years had been living under the growing shadow of a fate hard to bear because to him it seemed to include some kind of guilt or shame; he had never spoken about it to anyone. Yet this was no personal or individual visitation, but a share in conditions common to all the human race: when men live long enough they come to know it. He had begun to feel the burden of old age. The people of his family were long-lived; he had watched his father and his grandfather grow old in a manner both expected and respected, becoming hard of hearing and in the end stone-deaf, stiff in the back as in mode of thought, walking about as honorable and honored memorials to a long row of years and experiences. With him himself, it seemed, old age was making itself known in a different way, and in his own mind he blamed his mother’s mother, who had come from the far north of Norway, for the fact. He did not grow stiff or petrified, but the whole world, and he himself with it, day by day seemed to be losing in weight and dissolving. Matters and ideas changed color as the coat of paint on a boat that has been out in wind and weather will change color. The hues on the boat’s planks may become almost prettier than before, there will be a new play in them, but all the same it is not as it should be, and one has one’s boat painted afresh. It became difficult for him to keep his accounts and to determine whether things happening round him were of an advantageous or undesirable, of a gay or sad, nature, ay, whether in the books of his conscience they ought to be entered as credits or debits. At times it seemed to him that he could no longer rightly distinguish between past and present; his mind willingly let go its grasp of near things to run back to vanished times; childhood games and boy’s pranks
grew more alive to him than cargoes and rates of exchange. He was afraid lest his surroundings should discover the decay in him and became highly watchful in all communication with his skippers and clerks. He was least worried in front of his wife, who once for all had taken him for what he was, and now as a rule did not look much at him; but he sometimes shunned his son’s company. In himself he might at times feel happy and even buoyant in an existence without accounts, but this fact to an old man of an old family, whose struggle throughout life had been to keep assets and liabilities apart, was disquieting, and he called himself to account. It went so far with him that the suspense in the days round
Sofie Hosewinckel
’s shipwreck for a while had brought him a feeling of relief, because here one could clearly distinguish between good and bad luck.

Then Malli came into the house, a young being whose idea of the universe could not be expected to include strict border lines, and who nonetheless, against the views of competent people, had headed straight for a goal and had saved his own good ship—a child who deserved to be spoiled and jested with. A joyous understanding and confidence sprang up between the old host and the young guest, as if within the whole household those two belonged to one another. She accompanied him on his early morning walks to the harbor and the warehouses, she took the trouble to recall songs of old days and sang them to him; one time when he brought her a bird in a cage she kissed him on both cheeks.

As now she grew ill or deeply melancholy and kept back from all other people, the understanding between the two was strengthened and found a particular expression. Malli was loath to hear about matters or events of the present day, but was pleased to listen to accounts of old times, even to plain nursery tales. And her old ally and protector, with his
gentle bony face and his white whiskers, was pleased to recount to her childhood experiences and tales which more than sixty years ago had been told to him by the house’s servants, by old skippers and fishermen and by his mother’s mother. So it became a kind of tradition in the Hosewinckel house that when in the evening the ladies sat sewing by the table, its master would come in from his office, settle down in his grandfather’s chair and bring out a story to them. At such hours he did not mind being heard by his wife to indulge in queer fancies. He might imagine himself and Malli to be running, hand in hand, into a twilight, a darkness of their own. But it was not barren; it was the mighty night of northern lights, and in it things lived: heavy, shaggy bears padded and puffed, wolves whirled in long trails through the blizzard over the plains, ancient Finns, who knew witchcraft, chuckled while selling fair winds to the seamen. Old Jochum Hosewinckel sat in his chair smiling, as if in a refuge from life, to which a bad conscience was not admitted.

On this Sunday evening he entered the room with a story for Malli ready at hand, and shortly after began to tell it.

“Tonight, Malli,” he said, “I am going to tell you about a grave danger that once threatened the house in which you are sitting; God preserve it from another such. And also about my grandmother’s grandfather, Jens Aabel. I myself had the story told me when I was a small boy.”

“This old Jens Guttormsen Aabel,” he began his tale, the light from the lamp, which did not reach his face, falling upon his big old folded hands, “had come here from Saeterdalen, where
the folk at that time were still half heathen, but he himself was a good Christian. He was a well-to-do man, held in respect by the whole town, and already getting on in years, when in the month of February, 1717, the great fire broke out in Christianssand.

“It was a grave disaster, in six hours more than thirty houses were laid in ashes. It was reported that the mighty glow from the fire on the sky could be seen from Lillesand and from ships lying off Mandal. That night it blew a gale from the northwest, so that the fire, which first sprang up in Lillegade, ran straight toward my great-great-grandfather’s house and warehouses in Vestergade, and it looked as if they were doomed.

“Already Jens Guttormsen’s servants and shop-assistants had begun to bring out money chests and ledgers. Many people had gathered at the other end of the street, and some of them wept for the good man who was to see all that he had collected in life brought to nothing. So close was the fire, old people of the town have been telling, that in the midst of winter it was as hot in the street as in a bakehouse.

“Then, my girl,” the old shipowner went on, “Jens Aabel came out of his gate with his scales in his right hand and his yardstick in his left. He took his stand in the street and spoke in a loud voice, so that all heard it. He said: ‘Here stand I, Jens Guttormsen Aabel, merchant of this town, with my scales and my measure. If in my day I have made wrong use of any of them, then, wind and fire, proceed against my house! But if I have used these righteous things righteously, then you two wild servants of God will spare my house, so that in years to come it may serve men and women of Christianssand as before.’

“And at that moment,” Jochum Hosewinckel recounted,
“just when he had spoken, all people in the street saw the wind waver and for a moment cease altogether, so that smoke and sparks swept down over them. But immediately after it changed and shifted from northwest to due north, and the fire swerved off Vestergade and down toward the marketplace. Jens Aabel’s house in this way was out of danger, and the things which had just been brought out could be brought in again.”

The big clock in the room slowly struck eight, and the old narrator and the listening girl remained silent, absorbed in the story, as if they had stood together in Vestergade on that winter’s night.

“You will have seen, Malli,” Jochum Hosewinckel, who could not all at once bring himself to return to everyday life, took up the tale again, “you will have seen the big Bible lying on the table in my office. That is Jens Aabel’s Bible, which has come into the family through my father’s mother. And it has this quality to it, that if anyone in the house, uncertain as to what he ought to do, goes to it to ask advice from it, and lets it fall open where it chooses, he will get from it the right answer to what he is asking.”

Fru Hosewinckel looked across the table at Malli, and at that moment it seemed to her that her prayer was being answered. She sat still on her sofa, but she followed the conversation closely.

“I can tell you,” said her husband, “how I myself did once ask Jens Aabel’s Bible for advice. But you must then take a candle and fetch it in here, so that I can find the right text. It is heavy, you will have to carry it on both arms and to leave the candle standing till you have laid the book back again.”

Malli went away with the candle and came back with the
book, carrying it on both arms, and laid it on the table in front of the old gentleman who was waiting for it.

He took up his glasses, hesitated a moment, sat back in his chair and related:

“One time many years ago my cousin Jonas came to me to make me go halves with him in the purchase of a ship. For the sake of my good aunt, his mother, I was loath to say no, but when I considered the man himself I was even more unwilling to say yes, for he was an unsafe man in all his dealings and had duped me before. As now he sat on the sofa, impatient to get my answer, and I walked up and down the floor sadly uncertain about it, my eyes fell on our Bible.

“ ‘Why, yes,’ I thought, ‘give me your advice, Jens Aabel,’ and I went and opened it, as if I were looking for something among the papers on the table.

“It was, that time, at the book of Ecclesiasticus that it fell open, the twenty-ninth chapter. And I shall read to you now what I read myself that evening, more than thirty years ago.”

He put on his glasses and wetted his finger to turn the pages of the book, and when he found his place he read out slowly:

“ ‘Many have reckoned a loan as a windfall, and have given trouble to those that helped them.’

“ ‘Just so,’ I thought, ‘that fits cousin Jonas, here behind my back, well enough.’ And then came further:

“ ‘And when payment is due he will prolong the time, and return words of heaviness, and complain of the times.’

“ ‘Just so,’ I thought again. I was about to close the book and turn round to him, when the next verse came in as of its own accord, and it went:

“ ‘Howbeit with a man in poor estate be long suffering, and let him not wait for thine alms. Lose thy money for a brother and friend, and it shall profit thee more than gold.’
“Then for a moment I stood stock-still. ‘Say you that? Say you that, Jens Aabel?’ I asked.

“And now, my girl, I can finish off my tale by telling you that this good ship
The Attempt
, which Jonas and I bought together, on her very first trip made an exceptional catch of herring and paid me my money back then and there.

“But on her second journey,” the old man concluded after a short silence, and with a new expression running over his face, or indeed with a new face, the story-teller’s face, “it happened that cousin Jonas went overboard off Bodoe after a merry evening ashore. His mother in this way was spared any further distress on his account.”

The old gentleman for a while sat lost in his recollections.

“You will bear the book back where it belongs, Malli,” he said, “for Arndt, too, must be able to find advice in it one day, when somebody wants to trick him, and all the same with a person in poor estate he should be long-suffering.”

Fru Hosewinckel’s gaze again rose to Malli’s young figure, as she stood up, and followed it through the door.

A few minutes later husband and wife in the drawing room heard a heavy fall to the floor in the next room. They found the girl lying in front of the table as if she were dead, and the book open upon it.

Fru Hosewinckel never forgot that in that moment she seemed to hear her son’s voice: “Is this what you wanted?”

They lifted up Malli and laid her on the horsehair-covered sofa. She opened her eyes, but appeared to see nothing. In a while she raised her hand and stroked the old man’s face. “I felt dizzy, Arndt,” she whispered.

Fru Hosewinckel rang for the maids and with their help supported Malli upstairs and had her put to bed.

When she came down into the office again her husband
stood where she had left him, gazing into the candle by the open Bible on the table. He looked up at her and closed the book. She made a movement to stop him, but he went on to fasten the heavy clasp.

Early next morning, before the Hosewinckel household was awake, Malli got up quietly, dressed and went down the backstairs, and through the back-door out into the side street. As late as the day before she would have had to look round for the way to Herr Soerensen’s hotel, now she steered straight to it like a homing-pigeon to its cote.

For many long hours of the night she had longed for dawn. As now she hurried along she saw the world about her slowly regain light and color. Scents met her, and a gentle breeze, and she thought: “Everything here is different to what it was when I first came; that is because spring has come. Later comes summer.” She suddenly called to mind, almost word for word, Arndt’s plan of how in the summer, in one of his father’s ships, he and she would go north to where the sun never sets.

While her thoughts ran thus, she had come through the gateway of the hotel and up Herr Soerensen’s small staircase, and without knocking, as if she had known she was expected, had opened the door.

Herr Soerensen as usual was up before other people and busy with his meticulous morning toilet. When he saw Malli enter he withdrew behind a screen and from there instructed her to sit down on a chair by the window. She did not, however, settle down at once, but looked round the room, at
a picture of the coronation of King Carl Johan and at Herr Soerensen’s old carpetbag propped against a wardrobe. Then she slowly took off her hat and coat as if to show that she had come to stay, and sank down on the chair pointed out to her.

Herr Soerensen popped his head over the screen three times in various stages of lathering and shaving, observing her attentively. But he said not a word.

In the end he came out into the room freshly shaved and with his wig on, in a dressing-gown of which the wadding stuck out here and there. Malli got up and threw herself in his arms; she was trembling so violently that she could not speak. Herr Soerensen made no attempt to calm her and did not even put his arms round her, but let her cling to him like a drowning person to a piece of timber.