Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (9 page)

the public will believe him. Certainly they will believe him. But, it shall not be because they think: ‘Ay, maybe he can do it, the way he can hustle.’ No, they must not be in doubt even for a fraction of a second, for they must at the very moment
be blissfully a-tremble in their hearts and there cry out: ‘Oh, what witchcraft!’

“Nay, I will tell you something, wench,” Herr Soerensen took up the tale a moment after, mightily carried away by his own fantasy. “If one imagines—for one may imagine anything—that it happened that a girl had come into the world with a pair of wings to her back, and she came to me and begged for a part in a play, I should answer her: ‘In the works of the poets there is a part for every single child of man, ergo, one for you too. Indeed, one will find more than one heroine in the kind of comedies we have to put up nowadays who might profit by losing a bit of her
avoir du pois!
The Lord be with you, you may play one of those. But Ariel, you cannot play because already you have got wings to your back, and because, in stark reality and without any poetry at all, you are capable of flying!’ ”

The girl who was to play Ariel had for some time known in her heart that she would be an actress.

Her mother sewed hats for ladies in a small fjord town, and the daughter sat beside her and dizzily felt that the swell in her own heart was like that in the water. Sometimes she thought that she would die from it. But she knew no more about the soundings of the heart than about those of the sea. She picked up her thimble and scissors with a pale face.

Her father had been a Scotch ship’s captain, by name Alexander Ross, whose ship twenty years ago had suffered damage on her way to Riga and had had to lie up through the summer in the town harbor. During these summer months the big handsome man, who had sailed round the world and
taken part in an Antarctic expedition, had created much stir and unrest among the townsfolk. And he had, in haste and with a will, such as he did everything, fallen in love with and married one of their loveliest girls, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a customs officer. The young maiden had defended herself in sweet emotion and confusion, but had still become Madam Ross before she knew where she was. “It’s the sea that brought me, little heart of mine,” he had whispered to her, in his queer, broken, adorable Norwegian. “Stop wave-beat, stop heart-beat.”

Toward the end of the summer the captain’s ship was cleared, he embraced and kissed his young bride, laid a pile of gold coins on her work table and promised her to come again before Christmas to take her with him to Scotland. She stood on the quay in the fine East Indian shawl he had given her, and saw him sail away. He had been one with her: now he became one with his ship. Since that day no one had seen or heard anything of him.

The young wife next spring, after the long terrible waiting of the winter months, realized that his ship had gone down, and that she was a widow. But the townsfolk began to talk: never had Captain Ross intended to come back. A little later it was said that he already had a wife at home in Scotland; his own crew had hinted at it.

There were those in the town who blamed a maiden who had been in such a hurry to throw herself into the arms of a foreign sea captain. Others felt sympathy for the forlorn Norwegian girl and would have liked to help and comfort her. But she was sensitive to something in their help and comfort that she did not want or could not bear. Even before her child was born, with the money her lover had given her when he left she established her little milliner’s shop. She just
put one single sovereign aside, for her child was to have an heirloom of pure gold from its father. From now on she kept back from her own family and her old acquaintances in town. She had nothing against them, but they would not leave her time to think of Alexander Ross. When once more it began to show green round the fjord she gave birth to a daughter who would, she thought, in years to come, help her in the task.

Madam Ross had had her daughter christened Malli because her husband had sung a song about a Scotch girl called Malli, who was all in all complete. But she told the customers who peered at the child lying within its cradle in the shop that this was a family name among her husband’s kin; his mother had been called Malli. She ended up by believing it herself.

During the months in which she had been waiting in rising anxiety and finally, as it were, in deep darkness, the unborn child to her had been a sure proof that her husband was alive. It grew and kicked in her womb; it could not be a dead man’s child. Now, after the rumors about her husband had reached her, to her the child slowly became a just as certain proof that he was dead. For a child so healthy, beautiful and gentle could not be a deceiver’s gift to her. As Malli grew up she realized, without her mother having ever expressed it in words, nor having ever been able to express it, what a powerful, mystic, at the same time tragic and blissful importance her very existence had to that gentle, lonesome mother. So the two lived wonderfully quiet and secluded, and very happily, together.

When the girl grew older and now and then came out among people, she heard her father spoken of. She was quick-witted and had an ear for intonation and silence; she soon
got wind of the sort of name Captain Ross had in the town. No one got to know what she felt about it. But she took her mother’s side against the whole world with growing vigor. She stood guard over Madam Ross like an armed sentry, and she became exaggeratedly wise and demure in all she did. Without making it really clear even to herself, in her young heart she decided that never in the conduct of the daughter should people find any confirmation that the mother had let herself be seduced by a bad man.

But when Malli was alone she happily gave herself up to thoughts of her big, handsome father. For her he might well have been an adventurer, a privateer captain, like those one heard of in time of war—indeed even a corsair or a pirate! Below her quiet manner there lay a vital, concealed gaiety and arrogance; in her contempt for the townspeople was mingled forbearance for her own mother. She herself, and Alexander Ross, knew better than they.

Madam Ross was proud of her obedient, thoughtful child, and in the eyes of the town became somewhat ludicrous in her maternal vanity. She had Malli taught English by an old spinster who was still sitting about in the fjord town after coming there a generation ago as governess to Baron Loewenskiold’s daughters. In the dried-up, beaky-nosed Englishwoman’s small room above a grocer’s shop Malli learned her father’s tongue. And up here a meeting took place, fateful for the girl; one day she also read Shakespeare. With trembling voice and with tears in her eyes the old maid read out her bard to the young one, the exiled woman asserted her lineage and her wealth, and with majestic dignity introduced the milliner’s daughter to a circle of noble and brilliant compatriots. From then on Malli saw her hero Alexander Ross as a Shakespearean hero. In her heart she cried out with Philip Faulconbridge:

Malli as a child had been tall for her age, but she was late in developing into womanhood. Even when at the age of sixteen she was confirmed she looked like a lanky boy. When she grew up she grew beautiful. No human being has a richer experience than the unlovely, awkward girl who in the course of a few months turns into a beautiful young maiden. It is both a glorious surprise and a fulfilled expectation, both a favor and a well-deserved promotion. The ship has been becalmed, or has tossed in stormy currents; now the white sails fill and she stands out for open sea. The speed itself gives an even keel.

Malli sailed her high and mighty course, as daringly and surely as if Captain Ross in person had stood at the helm. The young men turned round to look at her in the street, and there were those who imagined that her exceptional position would make her an easy prey. But in this they were mistaken. The maiden might well consent to be a corsair’s daughter, but by no means would she consent to be a corsair’s prize. As a child she had been soft-hearted; as a young girl she was without mercy. “No,” she told herself. “It is they that shall be my victims.” All the same the unaccustomed admiration, the new defensive and offensive brought unrest to the first years of her youth. And as now here Malli’s story is being written and read, one is free to imagine that had it drawn out longer she would have become what the French call
une lionne
, a lioness. In the story itself she is but a lion cub, somewhat whelp-like in movement and, up to the last chapter, uncertain in her estimation of her own strength.

It so happened that one evening in the town’s small theatre, Malli saw Herr Soerensen’s company give a performance. All the vigor and longing in her, which for years had been forcibly mastered, were released into perfect clarity and bliss, just as if she had been struck right in the heart by a divine arrow. Before the performance came to an end she had reached her irrevocable decision: she would become an actress.

As she was walking home from the theatre the street heaved and swung beneath her and round her. In her little room she took down her books, and the room became a starry night above Verona and a crypt there. It grew verdant and filled with the sweet song and music of the forest of Arden, and deep Mediterranean waves here rolled blue round Cyprus. Secretly, with trembling heart as if she were facing doomsday, she shortly afterwards made her way to the little hotel where Herr Soerensen had settled in, was admitted into his presence and recited to him some of the parts she had taught herself.

Herr Soerensen listened to her, looked at her, looked again and said to himself: “There is something there!” So much was there that he would not let the girl go away, but took her on at a small consideration for three months. “Let her,” he thought, “ripen awhile unnoticed in the atmosphere of the stage. And then let’s see.” Malli could now reveal her decision to her mother, and the neighbors too soon got news of it.

To the townsfolk the life and calling of an actress was something utterly foreign and in itself dubious. Also Malli’s special position caused her to be harshly judged or ridiculed. But so sure of herself was the girl that while till now she had at all times been accurately aware of what the town was thinking and opining, and had kept her account of it, she
now completely overlooked it or bothered about it not at all. She was genuinely surprised at her own mother’s dismay the day she laid her plan before her.

Madam Ross had never needed to constrain her daughter’s nature and had none of an ordinary mother’s authority. In her present conflict with her daughter she became as if deranged with horror and grief, while on her side Malli was completely unbending. It came to a couple of great wild scenes between the two, and it might have ended with one or the other of them walking into the fjord.

In this hour Malli received support where she could least have expected it. Her dead or disappeared father himself became her ally.

Madam Ross had loved her man and had believed in him without ever having understood him. Now, whether in punishment or reward, through all eternity she must love and believe in what she did not understand. Had Malli’s purpose lain within the scope of her own conceptions, she might have found a means to combat it. But confronted with this wild, carefree madness she was carried off her feet, dizzy with sweet and strange memories and associations. During the time in which she strove against her daughter’s obsession she inexplicably lived her short marriage over again. It was from day to day the same surprises and emotions: a foreign, rich and enrapturing power, that had once taken her by storm, again surrounded her on all sides. Malli’s manner grew as insinuating and enticing as that of her lover of twenty years ago. Madam Ross remembered that Alexander, the strong, handsome seafarer, had knelt down before her and had whispered up to her: “Nay, let me lie here. This is the most fitting place of all.” She fell in love with her daughter as she had once fallen in love with the father, so that she forgot that years had passed and that her own hair had grown gray in
their passing. She blushed and blanched in Malli’s presence and trembled when the girl left her; she felt her own will impotent before her child’s gaze and voice, and there was in this impotence a dreamlike, resurrected bliss.

When finally in a stormy and tearful interview she gave the girl her blessing, it was to her as if she were being wed again. From now on she was incapable of grieving or fearing as the town expected her to do. The day Malli went away with Herr Soerensen’s company, mother and daughter took leave of each other in full, loving understanding.

Now Malli learned Ariel’s part by heart, and Herr Soerensen took upon himself to perfect her in it. He did not leave her in peace either by day or night. He scolded and swore, with inspired cruelty sneered at her facial expression and her intonation, pinched her slim arms black and blue and even one day soundly boxed her ears.

The other members of the troupe, who had been astonished witnesses of the bashful girl’s sudden advancement and might well have been jealous of her for it, instead took pity on her. The company’s leading lady, Mamzell Ihlen, a beauty with long black hair, who was to play Miranda, once or twice ventured to protest to the director on Malli’s account. The
jeune premier
, a fair-haired young man with fine legs, more meekly waited in the wings to comfort the novice when she came reeling off the stage from a rehearsal. If none the less they did not, either on or off the stage, attempt to come nearer to Herr Soerensen’s victim, and did not even talk much about her among themselves, it was not due to lack of sympathy; they were as uncertain in face of what went on before their
eyes as are the people who follow the growth of a young tree under the fakir’s spell. Such a relationship may awaken admiration or uneasiness; it baffles discussion or condemnation.