Last Tales (32 page)
A new little song was in the air of the streets too, for the country gentleman of high rank and title would preserve a clink of the dialect of his native province, and during the season promenades, theater foyers and Court halls echoed
with gay and sonorous Jutland, Funen and Langeland accents, from elegantly coated and uniformed, or starch-shirted and beribboned chests. The country maidens were distinguishable at a glance from the young bourgeoises—clear-skinned, straight and supple, fresh flowers with their roots deep in the mold, undaunted by wind or rain, disciplined and risible, lithe horsewomen and indefatigable dancers, young she-bears fresh from the lair and out to make up, within three months of candlelit fairyland existence, for long autumn months of wet rides, evening needlework and early bedtime.
With the conquest of town by country, femininity, the world of woman, rose like a tide and inundated Copenhagen.
Normally the spiritual atmosphere of the city was masculine, and had been so for fifty years. The capital of Denmark held the one university of the country and the primary See of its Church, and around these venerable institutions learned and brilliant philosophers, divines and aesthetes gathered, to solve profound problems and hold sparkling discussions. Less than twenty years before the circle had had the opportunity of sharpening its wit on the edge of the wit of Magister Soren Kirkegaard; adversaries of his were still arguing. From the time when the county had got its free constitution, Parliament had resided in Copenhagen. The upholding of intellectual values fell to Adam’s sons. Eve was to be found at her lace pillow or her household accounts or watering the flowerpots in her windows. She was the pure and demure guardian angel of the hearth; her mental color was white and her principal virtues more passive than active—innocence and patience and total ignorance of those demons of doubt and ambition which were supposed to harass the heart of her husband. The ladies of the wealthy bourgeoisie were solid and sensible women, consciously handling their domestic and social problems inside a restricted sphere of ideas. There was no Bohemia in Copenhagen, and no muses of a higher or lighter order. A great dazzling actress for
two generations had been the idol of the people, but had had to make her choice between life and death, and had become a glorious martyr to respectability. Only within the small community of rich orthodox Jews, gifted, authoritative women for half a century had acted as patronesses of the arts.
In the great country houses it was the other way. The sons of territorial magnates, with the exception of those who had adopted the diplomatic career, were open-air people; their predominant interests were hunting, with the care of the stock of game on their estates, horses, good wine, forestry and farming, and fair women. They traveled in Europe and might feel at home in Paris and Baden-Baden, but they would come back the same as they had gone away. They consented to be considered as made of grosser material than their females, since such placing released them from the books that they disliked, and set them free to take their pleasures where they found them. Their sisters, the while, were taught at home by French, English and German governesses, had piano, singing and painting lessons and were sent to finishing schools in France; and they would keep up their proficiency by reading French novels and playing the newest composers. Religious life on the big estates was exclusively the domain of the women. While the men would agree to sit under their minister only on the great feast days, they drove to church regularly on a Sunday, and when the vicar dined at the manor it was the lady who entertained him on pious and even theological matters. In a milieu where woman is looked upon as the supporter of civilization and art, the claims on her virtue are likely to be somewhat slackened. The young country girls might still be strictly supervised, but they married—most often very early in life—into freedom. A spirited and charming hostess was a precious asset to the country house; a casual slip from virtue was condoned; and venerable old ladies with deep genealogic insight would unconcernedly state that the third or fourth
child of a big house did in reality derive from the neighboring estate.
In a world to which legitimacy is the primary law and principle, woman acquires a mystic value. She is more than herself, and holds the office of the ordained priest who alone among the people possesses power to transform the grapes of common earth into that supreme fluid: the true blood. The young noble matron, at the time and in the sphere of this story, was seal-keeper to the name and ceremoniously passed it on to the coming ages (and from her mien and manner one could not tell whether she knew or knew not, that according to the world of Rome she might achieve without her lord and master what he could not achieve without her). The noble young girls were pert little priests-to-be; wise old gentlemen danced a pretty and prudent courtesy on them; they might meet them again one day as archbishops.
Thus the sex brought the season to town, and for three months Copenhagen laid aside its black trousers and put on a ball-frock. Old ladies from country castles opened their salons as arenas for fashionable competitions and set up their reception days as landmarks in the week. The carriages in the streets were not really meaningful until they contained a female of the higher world, floating on clouds, and in theaters the audience of the parterre no longer pointed out prominent, somber male figures in the parquet, but turned their eyes to its many-colored, sweet and vivacious flower bed. The fashionable florists received orders to send out bouquets right and left; it was as if the city were being bombarded with roses.
The world in which the invaders of wintry Copenhagen moved and thought was the world of the name. To a nobleman his name was the essence of his being, that immortal part of him which was to live on after other, lower elements had faded away. Individual talents and characteristics were supposed to be concerns of human beings outside his sphere. The
view did not hold water, for in actual life the genuine individualist was to be found in the country. The townsmen had been schooled to walk, as to reason, along one line or another; the people of the big estates would still ride cross-country, and move unhindered in two dimensions. They had grown up, in lonely houses with the nearest neighbor at a distance of many hours, like trees not of forests but of parks or plains, with room round them and freedom to unfold their particular nature. Here some of them had brought forth broad and generous tree-crowns, while others had wriggled into ogreish formations, or shut out highly surprising knots and excrescences, and it was in the big country houses of distant provinces that one would find oneself face to face with otherwise extinct species, and talk to old gentlemen like mammoths or plesiosauri, and old ladies like the dodo. The country nobility, however, being nothing less than introspectively inclined, stuck to their view and good-naturedly accepted Uncle Mammoth and Aunt Dodo as venerable archaic consanguinaries.
Most of the noble Danish families had a particular descriptive adjective attached to their name—the pious Reventlows, the dry and faithful Frijses, the gay Scheels—and society was at one with the young son of an ancient house himself in the conviction that by sticking to the family characteristics—be it but an inherited red-hairedness—he gave proof of a loyal nature. A young man with an old name, but with no illusions whatever as to his personal appearance or talents, would offer himself in marriage to a brilliant beauty, proudly—or humbly—confident in the soundness of this his real self. The country nobleman, in town as well as on his own land, was walking, talking, riding, dancing or making love as the personification of his name.
The land went with the name, the big fortunes and the good things of the earth. All were inherited, and were destined to be passed on as inheritance. The old propertied class had heard of—had indeed with their eyes seen—people
capable of making a fortune on their own, but they had never quite taken in a fact which to them had all the look of an abrupt, willed act of creation, a breach of the law of a cosmos wherein existence itself was obviously inherited. To be born into the world without any kind of escorting inheritance was an idea so little pleasant as to be almost unseemly; to die without leaving some sort of inheritance behind one was a sorry affair. Old unmarried daughters of great country houses would year by year lay by, out of a small—inherited—income, small amounts which might some day be flowing back into the family funds, allowing them themselves to be laid by, some day, in the family vault, with due honors.
Within this world of names and families, individual fortune or misfortune, as long as they did not touch the name, was staunchly born, and individual death had its own solemn rites as the latest repetition of a sad passus within the genealogical table. The extinction of an old name was a mournful, somehow inexplicable event, before which heads were bared and eyes for a moment turned heavenwards. The good Danish name was now up there, out of the reach of that dubious being, the individual; it had reached the ultimate, austere and immune nobility of the coral reef. But namelessness was annihilation.
A later generation will not easily conceive to what extent, to the eyes of the aristocratic classes of the past, they themselves were the one reality of the universe. Their closest vassals and dependents might be allowed into existence in the quality of retinue—and in such high quality and connection a nickname even, after all, was a sort of name—and during the season the Copenhageners in streets and theaters might come into focus as background or audience. But the vast gray masses of humanity, individuals without a name, washing beneath them and around them, remained imperceptible. The idea of the earthly pseudo-existence of such people, pervaded with want and struggle, was still acceptable to the mind. But what became of them when they died,
leaving behind them nothing but nothingness? The reluctance with which, when from time to time compelled to do so, the world of names turned its eyes to the world of namelessness, was the
horror vacui
.
The country nobility was unfailingly loyal to the King and his house. There had been a time, still remembered but better not talked about, when King Frederick’s morganatic marriage had kept ladies from Court. Now they came back, swarming like silver-winged bees to their hive, to pay homage to a royal family of solid magnificence and exemplary family life. The old aristocracy would even display their loyalty a little more than they felt it—in the spirit of the world of the marriage ritual: that whoever honors his wife honors himself. For in their blood they knew their own claim to the soil, climate and weather of Denmark, to its woods and its game, its language and customs, to be more validly legitimate than that of a Royal House, the members of which still spoke Danish with a German accent. Had the name of the new dynasty been called out in a valley of Jutland or Funen it would, they felt, have obtained a slower and lower answer from the Danish echo than their own.
This whole world, by the time of the following tale, was nearing its end; already it had one foot in the grave. Yet in this eleventh hour—as is often the case in the eleventh hour of conditions and states—it did bring forth an abundant flowering, equal to that of its rise. Danish estates and farms had lately changed over from grain production to cattle breeding; wealth was flowing into the land, and life in country houses sprang into a luxury unknown for three hundred years.
Within this world, at last, this tale turns upon two families, which, although closely bound by blood, were still socially widely parted.
The first of the two was at the same time almost unanimously recognized as the first in the country. Such vast areas of land spread before it to all sides that the domain had become
a kingdom of its own: tall forests with deer and fallow deer in them, fields and meadows with clear streams winding through them, lakes and ponds gazing sleepily up into the sky. Seven hundred copyhold farms lay on the lee side of woods and ridges of the estate; forty-two good Lutheran churches kept a pious watch on its hills. Above the tall trees of the park the copper-roofed towers of the castle caught the golden rays of the rising and the setting sun. The centuries had soldered land and name into a unity, so that today no one could tell whether the land belonged to the name or the name to the land. Mill wheels turned in the rivers for the name; plows broke its deep soil for it behind patient, shaggy horses. The lord of the land came trotting out with his attendants to inspect the work or to take a survey of the crops; he would know the plowman, and sometimes his horses, by their humbler names, and in the good proven way of his plowmen and horses would esteem the doing of a thing once to be quite a sufficient reason for doing it again. He changed his clothes according to the hours; a while ago he had sat in his saddle under a full-bottomed wig, later in a pigtail, and again in a top hat and havelock. He was the steadfast, more or less bright, center of a solar system which could no more be what it was without him than, without it, he could have been what he was. A hundred spinning wheels whirred for the name in thatched cottages, and the lady of the manor came in a coach-and-four to make up spinning accounts and give out new orders, prim and pompous in powder and whalebone, slim in Greek draperies or voluminous in crinoline and shawl. She, too, at times would recall the names of gaping children in the small dim rooms.
The lord of the land who, at the moment of this story, kept a paternally watchful eye on the trees, animals and human beings of it, and who presided at the stately dinner table, Count Theodore Hannibal von Galen, was an upright, well-balanced personality, in conformity with the family tradition a little heavy in movement and uptake, of a genuinely
patriotic and patriarchal mind. His Countess Louisa was a talented and ambitious lady, who had been a brilliant beauty and still deserved and liked compliments, and arbiter of taste and deportment to society. There were two children at the manor to serve and glorify the name, a son of twenty-four, handsome, winsome, debonair Leopold, the idolized and envied leader of Danish
jeunesse dorée
, and a daughter of nineteen: Adelaide.
