Winter's Tales (15 page)

With all this Jensine had much to think of, so that she half forgot about the shoemaker, and, when one morning she found his letter on the breakfast table, she for a minute took it to be a mendicant’s letter, of which she got many. The next moment she grew very pale. Her husband, opposite her, asked her what was the matter. She gave him no reply, but got up, went into her own small sitting-room, and opened the letter by the fireplace. The characters of it, carefully printed, recalled to her the old man’s face, as if he had sent her his portrait.

“Dear young Danish Missus,” the letter went.

“Yes, I put the pearl onto your necklace. I meant to give you a small surprise. You made such a fuss about your pearls, when you brought them to me, as if you were afraid that I should steal one of them from you. Old people, as well as young, must have
a little fun at times. If I have frightened you, I beg that you will forgive me all the same. This pearl I got two years ago, when I strung the English lady’s necklace. I forgot to put the one in, and only found it afterwards. It has been with me for two years, but I have no use for it. It is better that it should be with a young lady. I remember that you sat in my chair, quite young and pretty. I wish you good luck, and that something pleasant may happen to you on the very same day as you get this letter. And may you wear the pearl long, with a humble heart, a firm trust in the Lord God, and a friendly thought of me, who am old, here up at Odda. Good-bye.

“Your friend, Peiter Viken.”

Jensine had been reading the letter with her elbows on the mantelpiece, to steady herself. As she looked up, she met the grave eyes of her own image in the looking-glass above it. They were severe; they might be saying: “You are really a thief, or if not that, a receiver of stolen goods, and no better than a thief.” She stood for a long time, nailed to the spot. At last she thought: “It is all over. Now I know that I shall never conquer these people, who know neither care nor fear. It is as in the Bible; I shall bruise their heel, but they shall bruise my head. And Alexander, as far as he is concerned, ought to have married the English lady.”

To her own deep surprise she found that she did not mind. Alexander himself had become a very small figure in the background of life; what he did or thought mattered not in the least. That she herself had been made a fool of did not matter. “In a hundred years,” she thought, “it will all be one.”

What mattered then? She tried to think of the war, but found that the war did not matter either. She felt a strange giddiness, as if the room was sinking away round her, but not unpleasantly. “Was there,” she thought, “nothing remarkable left under the
visiting moon?” At the word of the visiting moon the eyes of the image in the looking-glass opened wide; the two young women stared at one another intensely. Something, she decided, was of great importance, which had come into the world now, and in a hundred years would still remain. The pearls. In a hundred years, she saw, a young man would hand them over to his wife and tell the young woman her own story about them, just as Alexander had given them to her, and had told her of his grandmother.

The thought of these two young people, in a hundred years’ time, moved her to such tenderness that her eyes filled with tears, and made her happy, as if they had been old friends of hers, whom she had found again. “Not cry quarter?” she thought. “Why not? Yes, I shall cry as high as I can. I cannot, now, remember the reason why I would not cry.”

The very small figure of Alexander, by the window in the other room said to her: “Here is the eldest of your aunts coming down the street with a big bouquet.”

Slowly, slowly Jensine took her eyes off the looking-glass, and came back to the world of the present. She went to the window. “Yes,” she said, “they are from Bella Vista,” which was the name of her father’s villa. From their window the husband and wife looked down into the street.

THE INVINCIBLE
            SLAVE-OWNERS

“C
E PAUVRE JEAN,” said an old Russian General with a dyed beard on a summer evening of 1875 in the drawing-room of a hotel at Baden-Baden. “This poor Jean. He is really an excellent fellow, quite decidedly a most excellent person. You know Jean, of course, the waiter at my table, the oldest waiter of the hotel? Well, I shall tell you what a good fellow he is. I am in the habit of taking, every morning, a nectarine with my coffee—a nectarine, mind you, no peach or apricot for me—but it must be really good, ripe, yet not over-ripe. This morning, now, Jean came up and spoke to me. He was white, I assure you; the man was as white as a corpse. I thought that he had been taken ill. ‘Your Excellency,’ he says, ‘it is terrible,’ and then he can say no more. ‘What is terrible, my friend?’ I ask. ‘Is there a European war?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘but it is terrible; something awful has happened. Your Excellency, there are no nectarines to be had today.’ And at that two big tears do roll down his cheeks. Yes, he is a good fellow.”

The person to whom the General spoke was a young Dane, named Axel Leth, a good-looking and well-dressed young man, who did not talk much himself, and for that reason was often chosen as a listener by the people of the watering place who had something to say.

As the General had finished his story an old English lady came up and joined the group. For her benefit the Russian repeated the tale of Jean and the nectarine. The Englishwoman listened with the expression of scorn and contempt with which she received all communications at this time of the day.

“A qui le dîtes-vous?”
she asked. “Jean? I knew him before you ever did. Nine years ago he cut his thumb on a carving-knife while serving me a chicken, and I myself bandaged it for him. He would not let me do it. He was genuinely indignant and shocked that
I should take trouble about him. I honestly believe that the fool would have preferred to lose his thumb. He would go through fire and water for me ever since, of course, would die for me, in fact.”

She did not wait for any answer from the General, but turned to young Leth and gave him a little smile to emphasize her indifference to the Russian. “I promised you last night,” she said, “to tell you more of the review at Munich.” Axel, who had been brought up by his grandmother and had been taught to pay elderly ladies attention, put on an expectant face.

“To me,” said the old lady, “it was particularly affecting. Because I understand King Ludwig. The swan-hermit! A French poet has addressed him:
‘Seul roi de ce siècle, salut!’
That accurately expresses my own feelings. To me his solitude at Neuschwanstein is exquisite and majestic, sublime. He cannot live at Munich. He cannot breath the air polluted by the crowd, nor bear the rank smell of it. He cannot enjoy art in the presence of the profane, so at the Residenz Theatre performances are often commanded for him alone. He is a true aristocrat. To the High Order of the Defenders of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, of which he is grand master, no candidate is eligible who cannot prove his sixty-four quarterings. But at Neuschwanstein, high above the common world, the King is happy. In that mountain air and silence he wanders, dreams and meditates. There he feels near God.”

“He is not very popular, I am told,” said the General airily.

“Who told you?” returned the Englishwoman with hauteur. “No one, surely, who has been to Munich. The emotion of the crowd waiting to see their King was touching to me. Few of them had seen him before; he shows himself so rarely. When he appeared, on a white horse, a storm of enthusiasm broke. It was as if the hearts were running forth to him, like a wave. Tears were
streaming down these rough, tanned faces of artisans and labourers; children were lifted in hard dirty hands so that he should see them; coarse voices were breaking to the general cry of ‘Long live the King.’ An unforgettable day.”

The General said nothing, and Axel, glancing at him, saw his face change. He was gazing with surprise and exultation towards the door. From its expression the young man guessed that an unknown, pretty woman had come in. The eyes of the English lady took the same direction, her old face, too, immediately altered. Axel turned round. Two women, whom till now he had never seen at the resort, evidently a young lady of the best society with her
dame de compagnie
or governess, had entered the room.

The first, who at once captured the attention of the assembly, was a very young beauty of such freshness, that it was as if she was sweeping with her, into the closely furnished, velvet-hung room, a sea breeze or a summer shower, and Axel remembered a reviewer’s remark about a young German actress: ‘She enters the stage with a wild landscape at her heels.’ The astonishment and admiration which her loveliness aroused were, at the next moment, accompanied by a little smile of wonder or mockery, because her slender, forceful, abundant figure was dressed up, two or three years behind her age, in the short skirt of a schoolgirl, and she wore her hair down her back. The clothes gave her a curious likeness to a doll, and inspired in onlookers the sentiment of humourous tenderness with which one looks at a big, beautiful doll.

The girl was in herself rather tall than short, a high-stemmed rose. Indeed it looked as if she had, at the moment when her Maker was holding her up for contemplation, slid through His mighty hand, and in this movement had all her young forms gently pushed upwards. The slight calves of her delicate legs—in
white stockings and neat little shoes—were set high up, so was the immature fullness of the hips, while the knees and thighs, which, in her quick walk, showed through the flounces of her frock, were narrow and straight. Her young bosom strutted just below the armpits, high above a slim waist. Her milk-white throat was long and round, strangely dignified and monumental in one so young. Her hair itself seemed averse to the law of gravitation. Behind the ribbon that held it back from the forehead it streamed out almost horizontally. This rich hair was of a rare colour, a pale, coraline red, with no yellow in it, such as is found in sea-shells. The girl’s fair, smooth, rosy face had not a lie in it, no grain of powder or paint, and not a single wrinkle. The eyes, outlined by the thin black streak of the eyelashes, were set in it without a line, like two pieces of dark-blue glass. Her cheekbones were a little high, the nose, too, had an upward tilt. But by far the most striking feature in the face was the mouth, a thick, sullen, flaming mouth, like a red rose. Looking at it one might well imagine the whole straight, proud figure to exist only in order to carry this fresh, presumptuous mouth about the world.

She was dressed with precise neatness in a white muslin frock with a pink sash. She had a black velvet ribbon round her throat, but no ornament whatever. She walked quickly, in a defiant, disdainful gait, magnificently vital, as if at the same time, and with all her might, giving and holding back herself to the world. Axel, the dreamer, in his mind quoted a poem that he had read only a short time ago:

D’un air placide et triomphant
,
Tu passes ton chemin, majestueuse enfant
.

The lady who followed at the girl’s heels was a distinguished person in black silk, with a thin gold watch chain down her
narrow bust, and blue glasses. She was severe in all her lines, the model governess or duenna. Still she had something of her own, a cat-like suppleness of movement, and a quiet, grave determination. The two together made a picturesque group, and to accentuate the unity of it, the elder woman’s austerely plaited hair had in it a faded reflection of the red within the girl’s floating locks. It was as if the artist had found a little of the colour left upon his pallet and had been loath to waste such a glorious mixture.

“Nom d’un chien,”
said the General to Axel.

After supper he again came up to him, with two roses in his old cheeks, rejuvenated by the quickened circulation of his imagination.

“I can let you have,” he said, “a few facts about our beauty.” At that he gave her name, which, he explained, belonged to a very old family, and added a row of details about its history and connections. The girl’s name was Marie, but her governess called her Mizzi. Mizzi’s father, he believed, had been a famous gambler. He had, he was told, lately married a second time. “One does not need to be told that,” the General went on, “the child is obviously the victim of a jealous stepmother—at that time of life when the venom in women inevitably strikes in and poisons their system—who would give her ratbane if she dared to, but has sent her off here instead, with that female Jesuit as a jailer. What do you think, my friend, does she birch her? It is both a deadly sin and a joke to dress up that young woman as a child; she would wear a tiara before any other woman in the room. What a walk! And what innocence! All the same she is furious with us all, and will get her own back. I wish I were your age.”

There had been music in the drawing room; a lady had sung, and an elderly German gentleman had played a fugue by Bach. But as the clock on the mantelpiece struck ten, the governess gave
the girl a glance and a few low, respectful words, Mizzi rose at once, like a soldier on parade. On her way to the door she dropped her little handkerchief. Two young men, one in black and one in uniform, threw themselves upon it. But Mizzi did not as much as look at them. It was the lady companion who demurely took it from them and thanked them with a ceremonious little bow, before she held the door open to the girl, let her pass before her, and was gone.

Late in the evening Axel went out on the terrace, smoked a cigar and looked at the lights of the town, and then up at the stars. He often did so.

The cadence of the lively conversation in the drawing-room was still in his ears, and he reflected that human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker’s mind. He only knew the people of the resort from their conversations together; consequently he did not know them at all; neither did they know him. He was told by the other guests of the hotel that the General had been suspected of poisoning his wife. Of that he would not talk. But when he was alone, in his bed and his dreams: was the old General sincere, an honest murderer? He tried to imagine one after another of his acquaintances—the General, the old Englishwoman—asleep, such as they probably were at this hour. The idea was melancholy to him, and he took his thoughts off them again.