Last Tales (39 page)

He had not thought that he should see her again; now he saw her again. For the first time this winter he saw her and was, without any confirming testimony from other people, convinced of her absolute and indisputable reality. And together with this certainty there came upon him another, profounder conviction of the strangest kind: that on her coming here all things had—like a river which at last falls into the sea—arrived at their end and aim, and that this meeting of theirs was to last forever. All the same, since that universal solution had been brought about by her, he would have to let her speak first.

She put up Kirstine’s veil, looked him in the face and said: “I have come to beg you to forgive me.”

It was an unexpected opening and seemed an extraordinary thing for her to say, but she would know best. He answered: “That was good of you.”

“To beg you to forgive me,” she said, “for making you speak to me in such a way. I did not know that the things I made you say to me were true.”

He very rarely needed any explanations from her; he knew of what she was talking. He said: “Yes, they were true.”

“I did not know,” she repeated.

“It is of no consequence,” he said.

“I have been thinking about it since,” said she. “I have been thinking that the best way would be to have you say the same things over again, now that I know them to be true.”

“That I came to say good-bye?” he said. “Yes, it was true, I came yesterday, to say good-bye.”

“No, not that,” said she. “The first thing you said.”

“That I love you?” he said.

“Yes,” said she.

“I love you,” he said.

There was a short silence; things grew in it.

“Do you want these words spoken for the third time?” he asked her. “They have been spoken a hundred times, a thousand times. Just now I wonder whether they are not the only words I have ever spoken.”

“Tell me more about it,” she said. “Speak to me, Ib, now that I know that you speak the truth.”

She pressed him to speak for a particular reason. She had never quite believed in the declarations of love that young men had made her. It was natural, she knew, that they should love her, yet she had never been altogether convinced that they did. The declarations, too, in themselves had been maladroit and insipid compared to those that one read in verse or heard in songs. Now with Ib it would be different. He had words of his own, much like those of verse and songs. And to know for certain that she was loved as she ought to be would make a difference in her life. All the difference.

“What will I tell you, Adelaide?” he again asked her, and laughed a little, lowly and gently. The laughter to her was not quite that of a human being, but more like a sound you will hear in the woods, without knowing where it comes from or whether it is the cooing of a wood pigeon or a rustle in the tree crowns. “I am not good at finding words. Neither you or I are good at finding words, are we? And it is nothing to speak of, either. All fine, sweet things in the world have been either signals of Adelaide’s arrival: Adelaide is coming—or
otherwise echoes of Adelaide’s presence: she has passed here. Is that any good to you?

“Once,” he went on slowly, “you had a pale-blue frock. I sailed on the bay on a summer day, and there was a gust, the boat careened, and I thought that I was going down. The water was pale blue, I thought: now Adelaide is closing over me.

“Or which are the words you want to have repeated for a third time? You ordered me yesterday to tell you that in the last moment of my life I shall thank you because you existed and were so lovely. Hear it, then, for the third time, although this is not the last moment of my life. I thank you, Adelaide, because you exist and are so lovely. And are so lovely.”

If now the two young people had gone on with a repetition of yesterday’s dialogue in the blue boudoir until they had come to the kiss, their problem would have solved itself, and no further choice would have been left them. The kiss was in the boy’s mind, unnamed but very near, the seal upon the everlasting meeting.

Undoubtedly the girl had it in her mind too; only she was not at all aware of it being there, and it was still a little away, a little ahead. She was not a tender nature and not given to caresses; she had come here to speak and was collecting her whole being on speaking.

“Nobody knows that I am here,” she said.

He did not answer her, but his face answered her.

“I could come here again,” she said in the same way. “And nobody would know.”

For a second her total and absolute ignorance of the coarser facts of life, which was the
fine fleur
of her education and upbringing—as of the education and upbringing of all noble young girls of her day—and had been obtained with such tenacity of purpose and such continuous watchfulness as later ages cannot imagine or believe, awakened in him the reverence which was the highest product of the education of all noble young men. In the light of her dovelike purity, his
own past looked somewhat sordid; he would have to turn away his gaze from it. It was a paradoxical fact that she should stand so high above him, and that yet the responsibility in the situation should lie with him. He knew well enough what, according to the code of orthodox morality, he ought to say to her. “Adelaide,” he should say, “it is not right that you have come here; it is not right that nobody should know you to be here. Let me take you home.” But orthodox morality had become a thing of a vanished past. The law sacred to his surroundings and hers, to their community and their era sank below the horizon; the people who loved them and trusted them and on whom they were dependent sank and were gone. Here at last were Ib and Adelaide, alone in the universe. The young rich blood within his veins and hers rose like a wave to fling them together.

And then, just then, at the moment when he had quashed all outside laws, the law of his own being spoke out and passed sentence on him.

He was not well read, and his mind was not schooled in abstraction. He could never have formulated in thoughts or in words the theory: that tragedy will allow its young maiden to sacrifice her honor to her love and with quiet eyes will consent to the ruin of Gretchen, Ophelia and Héloise. He did not guess that it was in obedience to the law of tragedy that less than an hour ago he himself had consented to the ruin of his sister. No more could he have formulated in thoughts or in words the theory that tragedy forbids its young man to do the same thing.

To be a great young lady’s secret lover. To meet her in the ballrooms, in the full light of their chandeliers, and receive a furtive smile, a smile in a mirror, in remembrance of a last secret meeting.
Billets doux
written with trembling hands and sent off clandestinely by the hands of bribed servants. The trembling of her young body in his arms with the fear of discovery. His own, mean smile of triumph at the rivals dancing
with her and openly wooing the legitimate possession of her.

All these things, with the future that together they would make up for him, passed before his mind. He did not call them forth, they came on their own, one by one, and one by one he inspected them, earnestly, without bias. In the end his situation, unexpectedly, also seemed to have got a voice, it spoke to him, quoting a line from a play which a year ago he had seen with Leopold at the Comédie Française:

“Je m’appelle Ruy Blas, et je suis un laquais.”

Slowly, slowly the blood with which his face had flamed toward hers again sank back until his eyes themselves faded away.

“No, Adelaide,” he said, “I would rather die.”

One uses the phrase, in everyday life, in a light, trivial or jesting way, one says: “I would rather die than go to bed with that woman.” Here the words fell more heavily, in the way in which an axe falls. They were to be taken literally; they expressed a young man’s delicate choice on life and death.

She knew him too well to be in danger of misunderstanding him; it was the everyday conception of the phrase which to her—had anybody tried to make her accept it—would have seemed senseless. These words, which came straight from his heart with less intervention of will or reason perhaps than any he had spoken till now, went straight to hers, through it even, as it is said that a very keen, thin instrument may pierce a heart without the victim sensing it. To her herself it felt as if she had been handed an object much too heavy to hold, with no place within reach in which to set it. Till today things had happened to her as she had expected them, or most often a little more happily. She let her eyes wander round the room, vaguely, wildly. Till now there had always been in a room somebody eager to uphold and comfort her. Here there was none such.

As she did not speak or move he repeated his phrase: “I would rather die.”

She looked at him. At this one, conclusive moment she felt that if she could but speak one word or make one movement toward him she might still defeat him. But she could not speak a word or make a movement.

So, after a silence, the fair Adelaide spoke for the last time to her friend and lover.

“You,” she said slowly. “And I.”

Ib was to keep these words in his mind all his life. But they had, there, a mysterious quality to him: they evaded definition, when looked at straightly they changed and vanished. As, in Aunt Nathalie’s room, he heard them for this first time, they were a verdict, the placing of her and him with the unbridgeable distance between them. At a later time, when he thought them over, there was, surprisingly, in the word of “You,” a note of compassion and in the word of “I” a plaintive note, like the lament of a child. In Jutland, when in rainy spring nights the complaint of the curlew is heard, first from one side and then from another, the peasants will tell you that this is the dialogue of two dead lovers who long ago have forfeited their happiness and are now wailingly reproaching each other with their loss. There were hours in which Adelaide sang to Ib in the voice of the curlew. In the end, at that moment in which he was to thank her for having existed, the words took on the ring of a magic spell, uniting her and him for eternity.

She had no more to do here; so she walked away.

She passed him with her head high, Kirstine’s bonnet like a tiara on it, and he could not know that beneath the folds of Kirstine’s skirt her knees were failing her. As he held open the street door to her, the freshness of the spring afternoon struck them both, as if till now they had never been out of a room. She walked away, down the street, and he felt it somehow not right that he should be standing there, watching her slim, straight back moving away. He went in.

Back in the house, going from the sitting room into the study, he once more came upon Leopold’s letter—he did not remember having seen it before—took it up and read it but could not make the words make sense.

The echo of his own voice came back to him: I would rather die. “Yes, I said that,” he told himself. “I should not go about here now, wondering how it is that I am dead.” In the end he said to himself: “I shall go and see Drude.”

Now, while Ib lingered in the house of Rosenvænget—for a few minutes in a dead silence, in which no sound could break, then again, for a few minutes, with the laughing and shouting of children playing pitch-and-toss on the pavement outside very clear to his ears—in Copenhagen streets a mighty theme was being played out with full orchestration: Adelaide’s
Liebesflucht
.

Till today she had not walked alone in a street. On her way to Rosenvænget the walking had been an adventure and the unknown people meeting or passing her at such ludicrously close distance strangely important. On her way back she saw none of them.

While all the time walking exceedingly slowly, like an old woman, she herself believed that she was storming forth in a wild and mad flight. A flight in very truth mad and contrary to nature, since she was, at breathless speed, running away from the one place in the world where she craved to be, like a piece of iron flung off by the magnet itself. Or she was, at breathless speed, climbing to zenith and darkening the sun, a mighty thunderstorm mounting against the wind.

When she had walked about a hundred steps, all the scattered sensations of her mind consolidated into a furious wrath. She had been insulted, and she must be revenged. Or, if she was not revenged, she must die. Her thoughts ran in a course parallel to that of Ib’s thoughts an hour ago, when he had been reading the letter from her brother to his sister. She called on that brother to bring about reparation for the deadly affront she had suffered; she called on her father
and the young men who adored her. She must have the offender vanish from the world, or how could she possibly live on in it? She cried out for blood, as Ib had done, and, like to Aunt Nathalie’s rooms to his eyes, the street in front of her, with its droshkies and its tired, stiff-legged horses, took on a scarlet hue.

Her indignation and anger were felt physically, as an unbearable pain in the abdomen. The center of her fair body, from which sweet content should have flowed into all her limbs, was clenched like a fist, and she bent double under the pangs like a dry leaf crumbling in the frost, and with all her strength had to hold back a long cry—
“Es schwindelt mir, mir brennt mein Eingeweide!”

After a further hundred steps, Ib’s face suddenly mounted before her as she had seen it when they had taken leave of each other. At that the suffering changed place and character. In a big leap it mounted to her breast, constricting her heart and sending out tentacles into her shoulders and arms, to her elbows and wrists and to her little hands.

That even more terrible pain was no longer anger or thirst for revenge, but had been turned into pity of the friend she had left. Ib must be consoled and comforted, or if he could not be consoled and comforted, she must die.

For Ib was good; he was all that was good in the world, gentle, soothing, strong and deep. It was she, it was Adelaide who was hard and sharp as a knife; it was she who must vanish from the world, in order that good things might still exist in it. Or it must be proved, if that was still possible, that she was not as hard, sharp and cold as she looked. For this task it was no good calling on the men of her name, or her admirers—to whom or to what, then, would she call for help? The present being so dark and evil, she turned to the past. But the past, the door to it once opened, ran in upon her to crush her in a hundred pictures.