Last Tales (40 page)

She kept Ib company in the autumn battues, in a multicolored beechwood, and watched him bringing down the
glowing birds from the clear frosty air. Ib, a boy of fifteen, doctored the paw of her dog. Ib, out with her and Leopold to find wild raspberries in the wood, had stolen a bottle of port from the cellar and got tight on it, first wildly dancing and singing on the sward, and at last falling asleep, in the hot afternoon, in the raspberry shrub. Ib read
The Odyssey
to her, so deeply seized that he made her feel the vicissitudes of Odysseus with a palpitating heart.

One summer evening came out of the past particularly clearly. Ib had got her father’s permission to shoot a roebuck in the meadow, and she had sneaked from the castle to go with him. In the meadow the long grass was heavy with dew; soon her shoes and stockings, and her white petticoats up to the knee, had been drenched. While they waited down here, he pointed out to her the new moon, sitting like a thin silver sickle in the evening sky, and this sky’s bath of roses seemed reflected in the roseate and pale-purple flowering grasses round them as in a mirror. Ib had told her the names of the grasses: velvet grass, quaking grass, meadow foxtail, bird grass, onion couch. She had been very near a mystic experience then; never before had she come so close to being made one with the earth and the sky, the trees and the moon. Yet the miracle had not been altogether fulfilled, and now she knew why: she ought to have kissed Ib.

She looked in front of her as she walked, and there was nothing there but the flat, hard pavement of the streets. That street now was the picture of her own path in life. Flat and hard, what people name a smooth path, a walk on lifeless ground: polished floors, marble stairs, new pavements of new cities. From now she would have to follow her road; she would make a great match and be surrounded with lifeless, smooth and hard things: gold and silver, diamonds and crystal. Ib’s path in life from now would be rough. In the meadow, in the long velvet grass, bird grass and onion couch the walking was rough, in the muddy field roads the hoofs of one’s horse splashed mire and water about, and in the winter
woods the dead rustling leaves, with hoarfrost on them, through which one had to wade, lay knee-high. But the things round him would belong to the earth and would not have been made by flat, smooth and hard people. The mold in the world was left with Ib, upon his dirty boy’s hands that were sticky with fish scales as he took the trout from the hook and handed it to her, that were red with the juice of wild blackberries or stained with blood and fouling.

Once more the pain in her body mounted. For a few moments it squeezed her throat so that she did really believe that she was going to die; then it went up still higher and settled behind her eyes. It was no longer her own grief only or Ib’s grief; it was the sadness of life itself and of all living things. It pressed against her eyelids; it filled her with tears like a vessel overflowing. If she did not weep, she must die.

The agonizing ache at the back of her nose brought to her recollections of Ib’s remarkable sense of smell, keen like the sense of smell of a rare, trained dog. In their wanderings he would suddenly stand still, sniffing the air, wrinkle his nose and pass on to her its discoveries of fungi in the undergrowth not far away. At this sorry moment, in the street, it came upon her with deadly certainty, as the culmination of bereavement and forlornness: “I have lost my sense of smell! The long, long row of years lying before me will be scentless. During all of them I shall walk in vain in the lime avenues at home, or past the stock beds and the overripe strawberry beds. I shall come into the stable to feed sweet-smelling Khamar with sweet-smelling black bread, and none of them will have anything to tell me!”

She clung to the idea of smell like a drowning person to a raft for two reasons. First because she was holding on to memory as to the one thing still left to her, and among the five senses the sense of smell is the most loyal servant to memory, and will carry the past straight to the heart. “
Le nez”
it has been said,
“c’est la memoire.”
Secondly, because the scents and smells of this world cannot be described in
words, but do evade the supremacy of language, their realm in human nature lies outside that of speech or writing. And she did in this hour hate and fear words beyond all other things.

If Professor Sivertsen had been present, who taught her to paint in water color and who was such an expert on tragedy and on noses, he would have said to her:

“You imagine, poor child, that you are bewailing your sense of smell, and that if you do not get it back you must die. For you are an unlearned girl—like all girls of your class—and cannot know that you are in reality grieving because tragedy has gone out of your life. You have left tragedy with your friend, in the room of Rosenvænget, and you yourself, upon a flat, smooth path of life, have been handed over to comedy, to the drawing-room play or possibly to the operetta. You are in reality at this hour feeling that if you cannot shed tears—the last tears of your life—over the loss of tragedy, you must die. But weep you, Adelaide, poor simple child, over the loss of your nose.”

But where, but in what place could Adelaide weep? If she gave course to her tears in the street the passers-by would turn, alarmed at the sight, would question her and might even possibly touch her, and the idea of people behaving in such a manner to a girl lamenting her sense of smell was terrible. If she succeeded in forcing back her tears until she was once more in her own room—which was hardly possible, for they were by now burning her brain—Kirstine, probably already nervous about the situation, would be frightened and would notify her mother, and her mother would be frightened and would send for the family doctor, and they would all of them question her and lay their hands on her shoulders and cheeks.

This, then, was what the world was like: there was no place in it for the people who must weep. The people who wanted to eat or drink would find, not far away, a place in which to eat and drink. The people who wanted to dance would find,
she knew, not far away a place in which to dance. Those who wanted to buy a new hat would find, at least tomorrow morning when the shops opened, a place wherein to buy it. But in all Copenhagen there was not a single place in which a human being could weep. The fact, when evident, to her meant death. For if she could not weep she must die.

As she was thus walking on, alone in all the world, her course took her past a churchyard which she had not noticed on her way out. She was proceeding so slowly that each step was almost a halt; as she found herself outside the churchyard gate she stood still altogether, and thought matters over, then walked in.

She had never before given much thought to churchyards. They were dreary places with dead people under the surface, stones and tablets on them, and railings and hedges fencing them in. In her day ladies did not attend funerals, and most of her relations had their family vaults near their houses. She did not remember ever to have set foot in a town churchyard. Now, surprisingly, this unknown churchyard of Copenhagen received her in silent understanding and compassion; even at the moment she came through the gate, it seemed to put its arms around her. Tears began to drip from the lashes of her half-closed eyes; soon, soon she might allow them to flow without restraint.

Since the day was Sunday, people were still walking among the graves or attending to them, clearing away the evergreen of winter and raking round the spring shoots, or laying down wreaths. Everybody here was in black, like Adelaide herself. A woman in widow’s weeds who had been weeping, at the gate was drying her last tears off with her handkerchief, so that Adelaide remembered that she too had a handkerchief. Her tears at this came quicker, but she dared not yet let out any sound. She walked on at random, gazing right and left to find an old grave to sit down on, since she was afraid to choose a grave belonging to other people, who might find her there. At length she caught sight of a grave
which to her looked altogether forgotten, grass-grown, without a flower on it, with a headstone and an iron stool. She went in there, sat down on the seat and burst into tears. So there was after all some kind of relief and happiness in the world, and she was fortunate to have found the place of it.

She was so filled with gratitude at the fact, that after a while she let herself glide from the seat down on the grass, pressed her young shoulder and her soft cheek against the hard surface of the stone and sobbed loudly and wildly. She had carried a heavy load of sorrows with her a long way—Ib and his unhappiness, her own joyless future and the sad condition of the world; she was laying them down now, at the foot of this stone, in the keeping of a friend.

A few more women in black passed her on their way out, since the churchyard would soon be closed up; when they heard her weeping they lowered their voices a little. Some children accompanying them stopped and looked at her, but were reprimanded by their mothers and ran on.

After a long time a very old gentleman came along the path, and as he passed her stone and caught sight of her crouching against it stopped for a moment. She grew deadly afraid that he might know who she was. Then she reflected that he would be more likely to know the grave, that he might even have known the person buried in it. He might be wondering that a young woman should be weeping so desperately there.

This was the last time that Adelaide ever wept. At her mother’s death, which to her was a deep grief, she shed no tear. An old relation, who had come over to Jutland for the funeral, then said: “Adelaide has always been a curious girl. I do not remember that she has ever wept, even as a child.” The old lady’s memory was deceiving her; Adelaide like other girls had wept when thwarted. But to the girl herself the Sunday of this tale drew a dividing line in her existence.
Later on she would think of her youth, up to the age of nineteen, as of the time when she had wept.

She sat on the grave for a long time, resting in the one kind of happiness still possible to her: avowing to the whole world that she was a human being who had lost all.

In the end she felt that she was getting cold and that her eyes were running dry. She took up her handkerchief and wiped off her last tears, as the lady by the gate had done. As she rose from the ground she turned toward the stone in order to get to know, before she left the place to which she would never come back, at whose bosom she had been weeping. There was still enough of the afternoon light for her to read the inscription:

Here lie the remains of

JONAS ANDERSEN TODE

Sea Captain
who died on December 31, 1815
born March 25, 1740
Loyal to his King and Country he sailed his ship steadily from coast to coast. Faithful in friendship, a helper of the afflicted, steadfast in adversity.
Through Thy precepts I get understanding
.

                                               Ps. 119

King Christian VII of Denmark (1749-1808)—son of the much-beloved Louise, daughter of George II of England, and married, at the age of seventeen, to fifteen-year-old Caroline Mathilde, sister of George III—as a boy gave promise of capacity and talent, but was both physically and mentally degenerate and did further ruin his health by debauch. At his accession to the throne, in 1766, he declared to his tutors and ministers that he would now “rage” for a year; in this task he was assisted by his mistress Katrine, a former prostitute. A few years later his mind gave way altogether, and he lived for the rest of his life almost entirely shut off from the world.

Johannes Ewald (1743-1781), now acknowledged Denmark’s greatest lyrical poet, was the son of a pietistic clergyman, but at the age of sixteen ran away from home to try his luck as a drummer and soldier in the Seven Years’ War, and later for a while led the life of a Bohemian and “cavalier” in Copenhagen. From 1773 to 1776, ill and destitute, he lived as a lodger at the inn at Rungsted, the present Rungstedlund, and there wrote some of his finest poetry.

CONVERSE AT NIGHT
IN COPENHAGEN

I
t rained in Copenhagen on a November night of the year 1767. The moon was up, and a good way gone in its second quarter; from time to time, when the rain made a short pause, as if between two verses of an endlessly long song, its pale, distressful, backward-flung mask came in sight high up in the sky, behind layer upon layer of shifting, verdigris-green mists. Then the rain tuned up again, the moon-mask withdrew into the heavens, and only the street lights and a window here and there in the dark maze below revealed themselves, like phosphoric jellyfish on the bottom of the sea.

There was still some scanty night traffic in the streets. A few steady-going sailing vessels kept their course for home, and unruly privateers and buccaneers beat up against the
wind on doubtful voyages between black rock walls down which the moisture streamed. A sedan chair was hailed, took up its load, and swayed on upon its way to some unknown goal in the town and the night. A coach with heavy, gilt ornaments and winking lamps, with coachman on box, lackeys behind and precious contents, came from an assembly, the wheels squirted rain water and street mire in all directions, and the high-stepping horses’ hoofs struck long sparks from the cobblestones.

In the small streets and alleys Copenhagen night life was still in high spirits. From them was wafted music and song, with a steady accompaniment of rowdy merriment and scuffle.

Suddenly the noise increased; a din burst out like a conflagration. There was shouting of many voices, smashed windowpanes clinked on the cobbles, and heavy objects, hurled from the first or second story, boomed and banged against them. Roars and bellows of laughter were hurled together in a whirlpool, and from the midst of it cascades of women’s squeals rose high in the air.