Seven Gothic Tales (49 page)

After the storm had passed over its head the little town gave for years the impression of someone benumbed by shock and lying very low. It had not been able to believe that such things could happen, in any case not in its very middle. It had perhaps still in its heart remnants of a loyal sympathy for the gay young Queen who had smiled at it. But to have one’s head cut off is a serious business, and it had only to look toward the place where the palace had stood to have the wages of sin brought home to it. Hard times came upon the country: wars, the loss of the fleet, bankruptcy of the state, the spirit of virtue and severe economy. The frivolous days of the eighteenth century were gone forever.

Then, about fifty or sixty years after the tragedy of the young
Queen and her premier, the town had a pleasant little renaissance.

It could not go on forever being repentant of sins in which it had in reality no part, and it could, no more than the rest of the country, live forever upon the conviction of the excellency of prudence. When one is tied down heavily enough to an existence of care, it becomes pleasant to think of careless times and people. Also, though people do not like their mothers’ virtue to be questioned, the frivolities of grandmothers may be charming things to smile at. By the time when men began to grow whiskers and ladies to wear sidecurls, the sins of people in powder began to look romantic, like passions and crimes on the stage. The time had come when poets would drive out in wagonettes from Copenhagen and board at Hirschholm to sing of the unhappy Queen Carolina Mathilda, and see her shadow, flighty on her flighty steed, galloping past them in the forest. The avenues of lime trees, planted upon the embankments in the unselfish spirit of the eighteenth century—which must have walked between sticks six feet high in order to give coming generations shade and foliage—had grown up and grown old, and within their green bowers old ladies and men who had seen, as children, the Queen ride clattering across the stone bridges with her hounds, or the King, like an elegant powdered and corseted little doll with a blank face, pass in his coach, were expanding upon the excitement of court life to pretty maidens, matrons, and youths of the town, who held their own hearts carefully in check.

At this time there lived in Hirschholm two men who distinguished themselves, in different ways, from the average burgher.

The first of these was, rightly, the prominent figure of the town, a citizen of great influence, and a man not only of property and prestige, but of the world and of great charm. His name was Mathiesen, and he had been made a
Kammerraad
, a chamber-councilor. Later a bust of him was erected, in remembrance of him, at the entrance to one of those long lime avenues in which he loved to walk.

He was at the time—that is, in the early ’thirties—between fifty-five and sixty years old, and lived quietly and contentedly in Hirschholm. But he had been younger, and had lived in other places. He had even traveled much and had been in both Germany and France during those fatal and restless times which preceded the idyll: in the days of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon. There he had seen, and probably himself played a part in, many things which the little town could not have dreamed of, and the people who had known him as a young man said of him that he had come back with other eyes—formerly they had been blue, but now they were light gray or green. If he had lost illusions out there, he was not likely now to think the loss very great, and he had surely won instead a talent for making life pleasant and himself comfortable. There is probably no better place for a sensible epicurean than a small provincial town. The councilor, who had been a widower for fifteen years, had an excellent housekeeper and a cellar which might have done honor to a Cardinal. It was said of him in Hirschholm that when alone of an evening he did needlework in cross-stitch; but then, there was no reason why, in his position, he should give up any pleasant pastime in life for the sake of conventionality.

Amongst the treasures which the Councilor had collected in the great world and brought home to Hirschholm, there was none that he valued as highly as his recollections of Weimar, where he had lived for two years, and his remembrance of having once lived in the atmosphere of the great Geheimerat Goethe. It is a great thing to have been face to face with the highest, and a law of life that one thing amongst all that we meet must impress itself deeper upon our souls than any other; and the image of that serene town and of the great poet were stamped forever on his being. Here was the ideal man—the superman, he might have thought, if the word had been invented—who combined in himself all the qualities which humanity envies and toward which it strives: the poet, philosopher, statesman, the friend and adviser
of princes and the conqueror of women. The Councilor had many times met Goethe on his morning walks, and had heard him talk with friends who accompanied him. On one occasion he had even been introduced to the great man himself, had met the glance of those Olympian and yet human eyes, and had exchanged a few words with the Giant. The poet and Herr Eckermann had been discussing a question of Nordic archeology, and Herr Eckermann had called upon the young foreigner to give evidence in the argument. Goethe then questioned him upon the matter, and courteously asked him if he could possibly procure certain information. Mathiesen had made a deep bow and had answered:

Ich bin Eurer Excellenz ehrerbietigster Diener
.

The Councilor was not an ordinary man, and had none of the ordinary man’s ambitions. He had a high opinion of his position in Hirschholm—as indeed he had reason to have—and in his daily existence he had no wants which were not well satisfied. If he did, for the rest of his days, cherish, together with a picture of the Geheimerat, an ambition to feel himself, in his smaller surroundings, a superman in miniature, it was known only to himself, and in real life played the part of ideals in general—that of an unseen directive force, which makes for balance. But he was a man of broad outlook who took a long and wide view of things. He maintained an idea of paradise, for his generation had been brought up on the thought of life everlasting, and the idea of immortality came naturally to him. His paradise was to be a Weimar—an elysium of dignity, grace, and brilliancy. Still, his feelings about another world were not of vital importance to him; he might have given them up without too much pain. But he had a very firm faith in history, and in the immortality which it may grant you. He had seen it made around him and had felt its breath upon his cheek, and he knew the great Emperor and the heroes of the Revolution to be more alive than the functionaries and tradesmen of Hirschholm who lifted their hats to him in the roughly paved streets and with whom he exchanged little pleasant
remarks every day. It was upon the arena, and in this high society of history, that he desired to live on.

It was either the deep impression which poetry had made upon him when it manifested itself with so much grandeur, or an inborn tendency in his own heart, which one might perhaps not have expected—but who can tell, seeing how little we know about hearts?—which made this art take such a great place in his scheme of things. Outside of poetry there was to him no real ideal in life, or, indeed, any satisfactory immortality. It was natural, then, that he should have tried to write poetry himself. On his return from Weimar he had produced a tragedy which took its theme from old Danish history, and later he wrote a few poems inspired by the romance of Hirschholm. But he was a judge of art, and realized, as quickly as anybody else could have done, that he was no poet. So he had been aware for some time that the poetry of his life would have to come from somewhere else, and had recognized his own part in connection with it to be that of a Mæcenas, a part for which he felt himself well fitted and which he thought would be becoming to him in that immortality toward which he was striving.

It so happened that what he was looking for had come to meet him, in the person of a young man who also lived at Hirschholm and who was at this time a district clerk and—although this was only known to the Councilor and himself—a great poet.

His name was Anders Kube, and he was twenty-four years old. He was considered not at all good-looking by the people who knew him, but at the same time an artist painting a sacred picture and looking for a model for a young angel’s face might have found it in him. He had a broad face and dark blue eyes set wide apart. For his work he used spectacles, and when he took them off and looked directly at the world his eyes had a clear and deep gaze, such as Adam’s eyes may have had when he first walked around the garden and looked at the beasts. Of a strange, slow and angular, unexpected gracefulness in all his movements, with
thick dark red hair and very big hands, he was a nearly perfect specimen of a type of Danish peasant which was then to be found amongst parish clerks and fiddlers, but which has, now that peasants are sitting in parliament, disappeared.

Of the two worlds in which he lived, the one that gave him his daily bread was very limited, made up of the whitewashed office room of the district court, his own rooms—very neatly kept by his landlady, who was fond of him—at the top of a stair and behind a large lime tree, and the woods and fields around Hirschholm, where he roamed in his free hours. He was also received into the houses of a few kind and respectable burghers of Hirschholm, to play cards and listen to political arguments, and he had friends amongst the wagoners of the great road who outspanned and supped at the inn, as well as among members of the strange tribe of charcoal burners who carted their charcoal from the great woods near Elsinore to Copenhagen. The Councilor’s house held a position of its own in his existence. Three years before, when he first came to the town, he had carried letters from a friend of the Councilor’s, old Apothecary Lerche, who had recommended him as a talented and industrious young man, and on the strength of them he had received a standing invitation for supper with the Councilor on Saturday nights. These evenings were pleasant to him, and gave him many impressions. He had never before had the chance of listening to so much wordly wisdom, such rich stock of experience, as that with which he was here regaled. Probably the Councilor did indeed speak more openly to him than to anybody else, but the youth had no idea that he himself played such a part in the life of his protector.

Neither had he any notion of a theory which the Councilor had developed on his behalf, which came to this: that the young man had to be kept in a sort of cage or coop in order to bring out his best as a poet. Perhaps this theory was based upon experiences of the Councilor’s own life; he may have felt that he himself had, in the course of events of the past, lost powers and ideals essential
to a poet. Perhaps it was entirely a matter of instinct. In any case it was a deeply rooted conviction of his heart that he had to guard his protégé. As long as he could keep him quietly in Hirschholm, treading the pavement from his lodgings to his office, or the long avenues, the great forces within him would have to come out in poetry. But if the world and its wild and incalculable influences were to get hold of him, he might be lost to literature and to his Mæcenas; he might be dragged into uproars and rebellions against that law and order of which the Councilor was himself a staunch support, and come to finish his days upon a barricade. Seeing that nobody else would have imagined young Kube upon a barricade, the theory showed, if true, a deep insight into human nature on the part of the Councilor—except that perhaps the people found on barricades may generally be those least expected there. At any rate its effect was that the old man kept an untiring eye on the youth, like a sort of unselfish lover, like a mighty and dignified Kislar Aga toward a budding beauty of the seraglio for whom he has planned great things.

On his part the Councilor could have no knowledge that he himself was, in the eyes of his protégé, encircled by a poetic halo. It had been created, at the beginning of the youth’s stay at Hirschholm, by a tale of his landlady’s, the truth of which was doubtful, and which ran as follows:

The Councilor was, as already said, a widower, but before he came to this state he had gone through much. The late Madame Mathiesen had been an heiress in a modest way. She had come from Christiansfeld, which is the seat, in Denmark, of the Hernhuten, a severe puritan sect, like the Jansenites in France, and she was a woman with a highly developed conscience. But one summer evening, two years before her death, she had suddenly lost her mind in a fit of terror of the devil, and had wanted to kill her husband or herself with a pair of scissors. They sent for the old doctor, who tried all his arts on her without doing her any good, so, as there was no hospital for that kind of patient near by,
they boarded her with the old palace gardener of Fredensborg—another royal palace at some distance from Hirschholm—and his wife, who were kind people and owed their appointment to the influence of the Councilor. There she lived, without regaining her reason, but in a happier state of mind, for she believed that she was dead and in heaven, waiting for her husband. Sometimes, though, she expressed a fear of his never getting there, for she said that he was a great sinner; but she trusted to the grace of God.

The narrator of the tale, who had at the time been a maid in Madame Mathiesen’s house, was the only person, outside of the narrow family circle, who knew how this crisis had been brought on. On that July evening, after a thunderstorm, and while a double rainbow stood burning over the landscape, the Councilor and his wife, with a young girl who was the daughter of a functionary at Court, the Councilor’s friend, and who had been sent to Hirschholm to recover from a disappointment in love, were going out for a walk. Madame Mathiesen was in her room putting on her bonnet, when, through the open window, she saw the girl pick a yellow pansy and fasten it upon the Councilor’s coat. There may be, for the Hernhuten, some magic in a yellow pansy or in the air under a double rainbow. At any rate the sight had upon Madame Mathiesen an effect which nobody else could have foreseen.