Winter's Tales (11 page)

She was perhaps a little fuller of bosom, and thinner in the face, than she had been six years ago, but she still moved in the same way, like one of the great Felidae, and had, in her countenance and mien, that brevity or impatience which had then charmed Frederick. Frederick rose to greet her, and Arthur, who had thought him sadly awkward amongst the elegant public of the theatre, was struck by his friend’s dignity, and, as he and Heloïse looked at each other, by the completely identical expression of deep happy earnestness in their two faces. They gave him the impression that they would have liked to kiss as they met, but were held back by something other than the presence of people round them. They kept standing up, as if they had forgotten the human faculty of sitting down.

Heloïse beamed on Frederick. “I am so happy that you have come to see me,” she said, with his hand in hers. Frederick at first could not find a word to say; in the end he asked a stupid question. “Have any of the others,” he asked, “been here to see you?” “No,” said Heloïse. “No, none of them.” Here Arthur succeeded in making them sit down, opposite each other, by his table. “You know,” said Heloïse, “that poor old Father Lamarque has died?” “No!” said Frederick. “I have not been in touch with any of them.” “Yes, he died,” said Heloïse. “When he came to Paris, then, he asked to be sent to the army. He did wonders there; he was a hero! But he got wounded, later, here in Paris, by the soldiers of Versailles. When I heard of it I ran to the hospital, but alas, it was too late.”

To make up for his countryman’s silence Arthur poured out the champagne to her with a compliment.

“Oh, they were good people,” she cried, taking her glass. “What
a fine time it was! The two old sisters, too, how good they were! And so were all of them.

“But they were not exactly very brave,” she added, setting down the glass again. “They were all in a deadly funk that night at the villa. They were already seeing the muzzles of the German rifles, pointing at them. And, good God, they were running a risk then, too, and a worse one than they ever knew themselves.”

“How do you mean?” Frederick asked.

“Yes, a worse risk to them,” said Heloïse. “For they would have made me do as the German demanded. They would have made me do it, to save their lives, if he had put it straight to them at first, or if they had been left to themselves. And then they would never have got over it. They would have repented it all their lives, and have held themselves to be great sinners. They were not the people for that kind of business, they, who had never before done a mean thing in their life. That is why it was a sad thing that they should have been so badly frightened. I tell you, my friend, for those people it would have been better to be shot than to live on with a bad conscience. They were not used to that, you see; they would not have known how to live with it.”

“How do you know all that?” asked Frederick.

“Oh, I know that kind of people well,” said Heloïse. “I was brought up amongst poor, honest people myself. My grandmother had a sister who was a nun, and it was an old poor priest, like Father Lamarque, who taught me to read.”

Frederick put his elbow on the table, and his chin in his hand, and sat and looked at her. “Then your triumph afterwards,” he said very slowly, “was really all on our behalf? Because we had behaved so well?” “You did behave well, did you not?” said she, smiling at him. “So you were a greater heroine, even,” said Frederick
in the same way, “than I knew at the time.” “My dear friend!” said she.

He asked her, “Did you believe, at the moment, that you might really be shot?” “Yes,” said she. “He might very well have had me shot, and all of you with me. That might well have been his fashion of making love. And all the same,” she added thoughtfully, “he was honest, an honest young man. He could really want a thing. Many men have not got that in them.”

She drank, had her glass refilled, and looked at Frederick. “You,” she said, “you were not like the others. If you and I had been alone there, everything would have been different. You might have made me save my life, in the way he told me, quite simply, and have thought nothing of it afterwards. I saw it, at the time. And when we drove together to the frontier, and you did not say a word, I knew it, in that fiacre. I liked it in you, and I do not know where you have learned it, seeing that after all you are an Englishman.” Frederick thought her words over. “Yes,” he said slowly, “if you had proposed it yourself, of your own free will.” Heloïse laughed at that.

“But do you know,” she suddenly cried, “what was good luck both for you and me, and for all of us? That there were no women with us at the time! A woman would have made me do it, quick, had I been ever so distressed. And where, in that case, would all our greatness have been?” “But there were women with us,” said Frederick. “There were the nuns.” “Nay, they do not count,” said Heloïse. “A nun is not a woman in that sense. No, I mean a married woman, or an old maid, an honest woman. If Madame Bellot had not had stomach-ache with fear, she would have had everything off me in no time, I can promise you. Her I could never have talked round.”

Heloïse fell into thought, with her eyes on Frederick’s face, and
after a minute or two said: “What a man you have become! I believe that you have grown. You were only a boy then. We were both so much younger.” “Tonight,” said he, “it does not seem to me a long time ago.” “But it is a long time, all the same,” said she, “only to you it does not matter. You are a man, a writer, are you not? You are on the upward path. You will be writing many more books, I feel that. Do you remember, now, how when we went out for a walk, in Saarburg, you told me about the books of a Jew in Amsterdam? He had a pretty name, like a woman’s. I might have chosen it for myself, instead of the one I have got, which also a learned man selected for me. I suppose that only very learned people would know it at all. What was it, now?” “Spinoza,” said Frederick. “Yes,” said Heloïse, “Spinoza. He cut diamonds. It was very interesting. No, to you time does not matter. One is happy to meet one’s friends again,” she said, “and yet it is then that one realizes how time flies. It is we who feel it, the women. From us time takes away so much. And in the end: everything.” She looked up at Frederick, and none of the faces which the great masters paint had ever given him such a vision of life, and of the world. “How I wish, my dear friend,” she said, “that you had seen me then.”

THE SAILOR-BOY’S TALE

T
HE BARQUE
Charlotte
was on her way from Marseille to Athens, in grey weather, on a high sea, after three days’ heavy gale. A small sailor-boy, named Simon, stood on the wet, swinging deck, held on to a shroud, and looked up towards the drifting clouds, and to the upper top-gallant yard of the main-mast.

A bird, that had sought refuge upon the mast, had got her feet entangled in some loose tackle-yarn of the halliard, and, high up there, struggled to get free. The boy on the deck could see her wings flapping and her head turning from side to side.

Through his own experience of life he had come to the conviction that in this world everyone must look after himself, and expect no help from others. But the mute, deadly fight kept him fascinated for more than an hour. He wondered what kind of bird it would be. These last days a number of birds had come to settle in the barque’s rigging: swallows, quails, and a pair of peregrine falcons; he believed that this bird was a peregrine falcon. He remembered how, many years ago, in his own country and near his home, he had once seen a peregrine falcon quite close, sitting on a stone and flying straight up from it. Perhaps this was the same bird. He thought: “That bird is like me. Then she was there, and now she is here.”

At that a fellow-feeling rose in him, a sense of common tragedy; he stood looking at the bird with his heart in his mouth. There were none of the sailors about to make fun of him; he began to think out how he might go up by the shrouds to help the falcon out. He brushed his hair back and pulled up his sleeves, gave the deck round him a great glance, and climbed up. He had to stop a couple of times in the swaying rigging.

It was indeed, he found when he got to the top of the mast, a peregrine falcon. As his head was on a level with hers, she gave up her struggle, and looked at him with a pair of angry, desperate
yellow eyes. He had to take hold of her with one hand while he got his knife out, and cut off the tackle-yarn. He was scared as he looked down, but at the same time he felt that he had been ordered up by nobody, but that this was his own venture, and this gave him a proud, steadying sensation, as if the sea and the sky, the ship, the bird and himself were all one. Just as he had freed the falcon, she hacked him in the thumb, so that the blood ran, and he nearly let her go. He grew angry with her, and gave her a clout on the head, then he put her inside his jacket, and climbed down again.

When he reached the deck the mate and the cook were standing there, looking up; they roared to him to ask what he had had to do in the mast. He was so tired that the tears were in his eyes. He took the falcon out and showed her to them, and she kept still within his hands. They laughed and walked off. Simon set the falcon down, stood back and watched her. After a while he reflected that she might not be able to get up from the slippery deck, so he caught her once more, walked away with her and placed her upon a bolt of canvas. A little after she began to trim her feathers, made two or three sharp jerks forward, and then suddenly flew off. The boy could follow her flight above the troughs of the grey sea. He thought: “There flies my falcon.”

When the
Charlotte
came home, Simon signed aboard another ship, and two years later he was a light hand on the schooner
Hebe
lying at Bodø, high up on the coast of Norway, to buy herrings.

To the great herring-markets of Bodø ships came together from all corners of the world; here were Swedish, Finnish and Russian boats, a forest of masts, and on shore a turbulent, irregular display of life, with many languages spoken, and mighty fights. On the shore booths had been set up, and the Lapps, small yellow
people, noiseless in their movements, with watchful eyes, whom Simon had never seen before, came down to sell bead-embroidered leather-goods. It was April, the sky and the sea were so clear that it was difficult to hold one’s eyes up against them—salt, infinitely wide, and filled with bird-shrieks—as if someone were incessantly whetting invisible knives, on all sides, high up in Heaven.

Simon was amazed at the lightness of these April evenings. He knew no geography, and did not assign it to the latitude, but he took it as a sign of an unwonted good-will in the Universe, a favour. Simon had been small for his age all his life, but this last winter he had grown, and had become strong of limb. That good luck, he felt, must spring from the very same source as the sweetness of the weather, from a new benevolence in the world. He had been in need of such encouragement, for he was timid by nature; now he asked for no more. The rest he felt to be his own affair. He went about slowly, and proudly.

One evening he was ashore with land-leave, and walked up to the booth of a small Russian trader, a Jew who sold gold watches. All the sailors knew that his watches were made from bad metal, and would not go, still they bought them, and paraded them about. Simon looked at these watches for a long time, but did not buy. The old Jew had divers goods in his shop, and amongst others a case of oranges. Simon had tasted oranges on his journeys; he bought one and took it with him. He meant to go up on a hill, from where he could see the sea, and suck it there.

As he walked on, and had got to the outskirts of the place, he saw a little girl in a blue frock, standing at the other side of a fence and looking at him. She was thirteen or fourteen years old, as slim as an eel, but with a round, clear, freckled face, and a pair of long plaits. The two looked at one another.

“Who are you looking out for?” Simon asked, to say something.
The girl’s face broke into an ecstatic, presumptuous smile. “For the man I am going to marry, of course,” she said. Something in her countenance made the boy confident and happy; he grinned a little at her. “That will perhaps be me,” he said. “Ha, ha,” said the girl, “he is a few years older than you, I can tell you.” “Why,” said Simon, “you are not grown up yourself.” The little girl shook her head solemnly. “Nay,” she said, “but when I grow up I will be exceedingly beautiful, and wear brown shoes with heels, and a hat.” “Will you have an orange?” asked Simon, who could give her none of the things she had named. She looked at the orange and at him. “They are very good to eat,” said he. “Why do you not eat it yourself then?” she asked. “I have eaten so many already,” said he, “when I was in Athens. Here I had to pay a mark for it.” “What is your name?” asked she. “My name is Simon,” said he. “What is yours?” “Nora,” said the girl. “What do you want for your orange now, Simon?”

When he heard his name in her mouth Simon grew bold. “Will you give me a kiss for the orange?” he asked. Nora looked at him gravely for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “I should not mind giving you a kiss.” He grew as warm as if he had been running quickly. When she stretched out her hand for the orange he took hold of it. At that moment somebody in the house called out for her. “That is my father,” said she, and tried to give him back the orange, but he would not take it. “Then come again tomorrow,” she said quickly, “then I will give you a kiss.” At that she slipped off. He stood and looked after her, and a little later went back to his ship.

Simon was not in the habit of making plans for the future, and now he did not know whether he would be going back to her or not.

The following evening he had to stay aboard, as the other sailors were going ashore, and he did not mind that either. He
meant to sit on the deck with the ship’s dog, Balthasar, and to practise upon a concertina that he had purchased some time ago. The pale evening was all round him, the sky was faintly roseate, the sea was quite calm, like milk-and-water, only in the wake of the boats going inshore it broke into streaks of vivid indigo. Simon sat and played; after a while his own music began to speak to him so strongly that he stopped, got up and looked upwards. Then he saw that the full moon was sitting high on the sky.