Winter's Tales (20 page)

As to Madame Mahler, when time came to approach her, the matter was easily arranged. She had it not in her to oppose the wishes of her social superiors; she was also, vaguely, rating her own future connection with a house that must surely turn out an abundance of washing. Only the readiness with which Jakob refunded her her past outlays on the child left in her heart a lifelong regret that she had not asked for more.

At the last moment Emilie made a further stipulation. She would go alone to fetch the child. It was important that the relation between the boy and herself should be properly established from the beginning, and she did not trust to Jakob’s sense of propriety on this occasion. In this way it came about that, when all was ready for the child’s reception in the house of Bredgade, Emilie drove by herself to Adelgade to take possession of him, easy in her conscience towards the firm and her husband, but, beforehand, a little tired of the whole affair.

In the street by Madame Mahler’s house a number of unkempt children were obviously waiting for the arrival of the carriage. They stared at her, but turned off their eyes, when she looked at them. Her heart sank as she lifted her ample silk skirt and passed through their crowd and across the backyard. Would her boy have the same look? Like Jakob, she had many times before visited the houses of the poor. It was a sad sight, but it could not be otherwise. “The poor you have with you always.” But today, since a child from this place was to enter her own house, for the first time she felt personally related to the need and misery of the world. She was seized with a new deep disgust and horror, and at the next moment with a new, deeper pity. In these two minds she entered Madame Mahler’s room.

Madame Mahler had washed little Jens and watercombed his hair. She had also, a couple of days before, hurriedly enlightened him as to the situation and his own promotion in life. But being an unimaginative woman and moreover of the opinion that the child was but half-witted, she had not taken much trouble about it. The child had received the information in silence; he only asked her how his father and mother had found him. “Oh, by the smell,” said Madame Mahler.

Jens had communicated the news to the other children of the
house. His Papa and Mamma, he told them, were coming on the morrow, in great state, to fetch him home. It gave him matter for reflection that the event should raise a great stir in that same world of the backyard that had received his visions of it with indifference. To him the two were the same thing.

He had got up on Mamzell Ane’s small chair to look out of the window and witness the arrival of his mother. He was still standing on it when Emilie came in, and Madame Mahler in vain made a gesture to chase him down. The first thing that Emilie noticed about the child was that he did not turn his gaze from hers, but looked her straight in the eyes. At the sight of her a great, ecstatic light passed over his face. For a moment the two looked at each other.

The child seemed to wait for her to address him, but as she stood silent, irresolute, he spoke. “Mamma,” he said, “I am glad that you have found me. I have waited for you so long, so long.”

Emilie gave Madame Mahler a glance. Had this scene been staged to move her heart? But the flat lack of understanding in the old woman’s face excluded the possibility, and she again turned to the child.

Madame Mahler was a big, broad woman. Emilie herself, in a crinoline and a sweeping mantilla, took up a good deal of room. The child was much the smallest figure in the room, yet at this moment he dominated it, as if he had taken command of it. He stood up straight, with that same radiance in his countenance. “Now I am coming home again, with you,” he said.

Emilie vaguely and amazedly realized that to the child the importance of the moment did not lie with his own good luck, but with that tremendous happiness and fulfillment which he was bestowing on her. A strange idea, that she could not have explained to herself, at that, ran through her mind. She thought:
“This child is as lonely in life as I.” Gravely she moved nearer to him and said a few kind words. The little boy put out his hand and gently touched the long silky ringlets that fell forward over her neck. “I knew you at once,” he said proudly. “You are my Mamma, who spoils me. I would know you amongst all the ladies, by your long pretty hair.” He ran his fingers softly down her shoulder and arm, and fumbled over her gloved hand. “You have got three rings on today,” he said. “Yes,” said Emilie in her low voice. A short, triumphant smile broke upon his face. “And now you kiss me, Mamma,” he said, and grew very pale. Emilie did not know that his excitement rose from the fact that he had never been kissed. Obediently, surprised at herself, she bent down and kissed him.

Jens’ farewell to Madame Mahler at first was somewhat ceremonious in two people who had known each other for a long time. For she already saw him as a new person, the rich man’s child, and took his hand tardily, her face stiff. But Emilie bade the boy, before he went away, to thank Madame Mahler because she had looked after him till now, and he did so with much freedom and grace. At that the old woman’s tanned and furrowed cheeks once more blushed deeply, like a young girl’s, as by the sight of the money at their first meeting. She had so rarely been thanked in her life. In the street he stood still. “Look at my big, fat horses!” he cried. Emilie sat in the carriage, bewildered. What was she bringing home with her from Madame Mahler’s house?

In her own house, as she took the child up the stairs and from one room into another, her bewilderment grew. Rarely had she felt so uncertain of herself. It was, everywhere, in the child, the same rapture of recognition. At times he would also mention and look for things which she faintly remembered from her own
childhood, or other things of which she had never heard. Her small pug, that she had brought with her from her old home, yapped at the boy. She lifted it up, afraid that it would bite him. “No, Mamma,” he cried, “she will not bite me, she knows me well.” A few hours ago—yes, she thought, up to the moment when in Madame Mahler’s room she had kissed the child—she would have scolded him: “Fie, you are telling a fib.” Now she said nothing, and the next moment the child looked round the room and asked her: “Is the parrot dead?” “No,” she answered, wondering, “she is not dead; she is in the other room.”

She realized that she was afraid both to be alone with the boy, and to let any third person join them. She sent the nurse out of the room. By the time Jakob was to arrive at the house she listened for his steps on the stairs with a kind of alarm. “Who are you waiting for?” Jens asked her. She was at a loss as how to designate Jakob to the child. “For my husband,” she replied, embarrassed. Jakob on his entrance found the mother and the child gazing in the same picture-book. The little boy stared at him. “So it is you who are my Papa!” he exclaimed, “I thought so, too, all the time. But I could not be quite sure of it, could I? It was not by the smell that you found me, then. I think it was the horse that remembered me.” Jakob looked at his wife; she looked into the book. He did not expect sense from a child, and was soon playing with the boy and tumbling him about. In the midst of a game Jens set his hands against Jakob’s chest. “You have not got your star on,” he said. After a moment Emilie went out of the room. She thought: “I have taken this upon me to meet my husband’s wish, but it seems that I must bear the burden of it alone.”

Jens took possession of the mansion in Bredgade, and brought it to submission, neither by might nor by power, but in the quality
of that fascinating and irresistible personage, perhaps the most fascinating and irresistible in the whole world: the dreamer whose dreams come true. The old house fell a little in love with him. Such is ever the lot of dreamers, when dealing with people at all susceptible to the magic of dreams. The most renowned amongst them, Rachel’s son, as all the world knows, suffered hardships and was even cast in prison on that account. Except for his size, Jens had no resemblance to the classic portraits of Cupid; all the same it was evident that, unknowingly, the shipowner and his wife had taken into them an amorino. He carried wings into the house, and was in league with the sweet and merciless powers of nature, and his relation to each individual member of the household became a kind of aerial love affair. It was upon the strength of this same magnetism that Jakob had picked out the boy as heir to the firm at their first meeting, and that Emilie was afraid to be alone with him. The old magnate and the servants of the house no more escaped their destiny—as was once the case with Potiphar, captain to the guard of Egypt. Before they knew where they were, they had committed all they had into his hands.

One effect of this particular spell was this: that people were made to see themselves with the eyes of the dreamer, and were impelled to live up to an ideal, and that for this their higher existence they became dependent upon him. During the time that Jens lived in the house, it was much changed, and dissimilar to the other houses of the town. It became a Mount Olympus, the abode of divinities.

The child took the same lordly, laughing pride in the old shipowner, who ruled the waters of the universe, as in Jakob’s staunch, protective kindness and Emilie’s silk-clad gracefulness. The old housekeeper, who had often before grumbled at her lot in
life, for the while was transformed into an all-powerful, benevolent guardian of human welfare, a Ceres in cap and apron. And for the same length of time the coachman, a monumental figure, elevated sky-high above the crowd, and combining within his own person the vigour of the two bay horses, majestically trotted down Bredgade on eight shod and clattering hoofs. It was only after Jens’ bed hour, when, immovable and silent, his cheek buried in the pillow, he was exploring new areas of dreams that the house resumed the aspect of a rational, solid Copenhagen mansion.

Jens was himself ignorant of his power. As his new family did not scold him or find fault with him, it never occurred to him that they were at all looking at him. He gave no preference to any particular member of the household; they were all within his scheme of things and must there fit into their place. The relation of the one to the other was the object of his keen, subtle observation. One phenomenon in his daily life never ceased to entertain and please him: that Jakob, so big, broad and fat, should be attentive and submissive to his slight wife. In the world that he had known till now bulk was of supreme moment. As later on Emilie looked back upon this time, it seemed to her that the child would often provoke an opportunity for this fact to manifest itself, and would then, so to say, clap his hands in triumph and delight, as if the happy state of things had been brought about by his personal skill. But in other cases his sense of proportion failed him. Emilie in her boudoir had a glass aquarium with goldfish, in front of which Jens would pass many hours, as silent as the fish themselves, and from his comments upon them she gathered that to him they were huge—a fine catch could one get hold of them, and even dangerous to the pug, should she happen to fall into the bowl. He asked Emilie to leave the curtains by this window undrawn
at night, in order that, when people were asleep, the fish might look at the moon.

In Jakob’s relation to the child there was a moment of unhappy love, or at least of the irony of fate, and it was not the first time either that he had gone through this same melancholy experience. For ever since he himself was a small boy he had yearned to protect those weaker than he, and to support and right all frail and delicate beings in his surroundings. The very qualities of fragility and helplessness inspired in him an affection and admiration which came near to idolatry. But there was in his nature an inconsistency, such as will often be found in children of old, wealthy families, who have got all they wanted too easily, till in the end they cry out for the impossible. He loved pluck, too; gallantry delighted him wherever he met it, and for the clinging and despondent type of human beings, and in particular of women, he felt a slight distaste and repugnance. He might dream of shielding and guiding his wife, but at the same time the little cool, forbearing smile with which she would receive any such attempt on his side to him was one of the most bewitching traits in her whole person. In this way he found himself somewhat in the sad and paradoxical position of the young lover who passionately adores virginity. Now he learned that it was equally out of the question to patronize Jens. The child did not reject or smile at his patronage, as Emilie did; he even seemed grateful for it, but he accepted it in the part of a game or a sport. So that, when they were out walking together, and Jakob, thinking that the child must be tired, lifted him on to his shoulders, Jens would take it that the big man wanted to play at being a horse or an elephant just as much as he himself wanted to play that he was a trooper or a mahout.

Emilie sadly reflected that she was the only person in the house
who did not love the child. She felt unsafe with him, even when she was unconditionally accepted as the beautiful, perfect mother, and as she recalled how, only a short time ago, she had planned to bring up the boy in her own spirit, and had written down little memoranda upon education, she saw herself as a figure of fun. To make up for her lack of feeling she took Jens with her on her walks and drives, to the parks and the zoo, brushed his thick hair, and had him dressed up as neatly as a doll. They were always together. She was sometimes amused by his strange, graceful, dignified delight in all that she showed him, and at the next moment, as in Madame Mahler’s room, she realized that however generous she would be to him, he would always be the giver. Her sisters-in-law, and her young married friends, fine ladies of Copenhagen with broods of their own, wondered at her absorption in the foundling—and then it happened, when they were off their guard, that they did themselves receive a dainty arrow in their satin bosoms, and between them began to discuss Emilie’s pretty boy, with a tender raillery as that with which they would have discussed Cupid. They asked her to bring him to play with their own children. Emilie declined, and told herself that she must first be certain about his manners. At the New Year, she thought, she would give a children’s party herself.