Winter's Tales (21 page)
Jens had come to the Vandamms in October, when trees were yellow and red in the parks. Then the tinge of frost in the air drove people indoors, and they began to think of Christmas. Jens seemed to know everything about the Christmas-tree, the goose with roast apples, and the solemnly joyful church-going on Christmas morning. But it would happen that he mixed up these festivals with others of the season, and described how they were soon all to mask and mum, as children do at Shrovestide. It was as if, from the centre of his happy, playful world, its sundry components
showed up less clearly than when seen from afar.
And as the days drew in and the snow fell in the streets of Copenhagen, a change came upon the child. He was not low in spirits, but singularly collected and compact, as if he were shifting the centre of gravitation of his being, and folding his wings. He would stand for long whiles by the window, so sunk in thought that he did not always hear it when they called him, filled with a knowledge which his surroundings could not share.
For within these first months of winter it became evident that he was not at all a person to be permanently set at ease by what the world calls fortune. The essence of his nature was longing. The warm rooms with silk curtains, the sweets, his toys and new clothes, the kindness and concern of his Papa and Mamma were all of the greatest moment because they went to prove the veracity of his visions; they were infinitely valuable as embodiments of his dreams. But within themselves they hardly meant anything to him, and they had no power to hold him. He was neither a worldling nor a struggler. He was a Poet.
Emilie tried to make him tell her what he had in his mind, but got nowhere with him. Then one day he confided in her on his own account.
“Do you know, Mamma,” he said, “in my house the stairs were so dark and full of holes that you had to grope your way up it, and the best thing was really to walk on one’s hands and knees? There was a window broken by the wind, and below it, on the landing, there lay a drift of snow as high as me.” “But that is not your house, Jens,” said Emilie. “This is your house.” The child looked round the room. “Yes,” he said, “this is my fine house. But I have another house that is quite dark and dirty. You know it, you have been there too. When the washing was hung up, one had to twine in and out across that big loft, else the huge, wet, cold
sheets would catch one, just as if they were alive.” “You are never going back to that house,” said she. The child gave her a great, grave glance, and after a moment said: “No.”
But he was going back. She could, by her horror and disgust of the house, keep him from talking of it, as the children there by their indifference had silenced him on his happy home. But when she found him mute and pensive by the window, or at his toys, she knew that his mind had returned to it. And now and again, when they had played together, and their intimacy seemed particularly secure, he opened on the theme. “In the same street as my house,” he said, one evening as they were sitting together on the sofa before the fireplace, “there was an old lodging-house, where the people who had plenty of money could sleep in beds, and the others must stand up and sleep, with a rope under their arms. One night it caught fire, and burned all down. Then those who were in bed did hardly get their trousers on, but ho! those who stood up and slept were the lucky boys; they got out quick. There was a man who made a song about it, you know.”
There are some young trees which, when they are planted, have thin, twisted roots and will never take hold in the soil. They may shoot out a profusion of leaves and flowers, but they must soon die. Such was the way with Jens. He had sent out his small branches upwards and to the sides, had fared excellently of the chameleon’s dish and eaten air, promise-crammed, and the while he had forgotten to put out roots. Now the time came when by law of nature the bright, abundant bloom must needs wither, fade and waste away. It is possible, had his imagination been turned on to fresh pastures, that he might for a while have drawn nourishment through it, and have detained his exit. Once or twice, to amuse him, Jakob had talked to him of China. The queer outlandish world captivated the mind of the child. He
dwelled with the highest excitement on pictures of pig-tailed Chinamen, dragons and fishermen with pelicans, and upon the fantastic names of Hongkong and Yangtze-kiang. But the grown-up people did not realize the significance of his novel imaginative venture, and so, for lack of sustenance, the frail, fresh branch soon drooped.
A short time after the children’s party, early in the new year, the child grew pale and hung his head. The old doctor came and gave him medicine to no effect. It was a quiet, unbroken decline: the plant was going out.
As Jens was put to bed and was, so to say, legitimately releasing his hold upon the world of actuality, his fancy fetched headway and ran along with him, like the sails of a small boat, from which the ballast is thrown overboard. There were, now, people round him all the time who would listen to what he said, gravely, without interrupting or contradicting him. This happy state of things enraptured him. The dreamer’s sick-bed became a throne.
Emilie sat at the bed all the time, distressed by a feeling of impotence which sometimes in the night made her wring her hands. All her life she had endeavoured to separate good from bad, right from wrong, happiness from unhappiness. Here she was, she reflected with dismay, in the hands of a being, much smaller and weaker than herself, to whom these were all one, who welcomed light and darkness, pleasure and pain, in the same spirit of gallant, debonair approval and fellowship. The fact, she told herself, did away with all need of her comfort and consolation here at her child’s sick-bed; it often seemed to abolish her very existence.
Now within the brotherhood of poets Jens was a humorist, a comic fabulist. It was, in each individual phenomenon of life, the whimsical, the burlesque moment that attracted and inspired him.
To the pale, grave young woman his fancies seemed sacrilegious within a death-room, yet after all it was his own death-room.
“Oh, there were so many rats, Mamma,” he said, “so many rats. They were all over the house. One came to take a bit of lard on the shelf—pat! a rat jumped at one. They ran across my face at night. Put your face close to me, and I will show you how it felt.” “There are no rats here, my darling,” said Emilie. “No, none,” said he. “When I am sick no more I shall go back and fetch you one. The rats like the people better than the people like them. For they think us good, lovely to eat. There was an old comedian, who lived in the garret. He had played comedy when he was young, and had travelled to foreign countries. Now he gave the little girls money to kiss him, but they would not kiss him, because they said that they did not like his nose. It was a curious nose, too—all fallen in. And when they would not he cried and wrung his hands. But he got ill, and died, and nobody knew about it. But when at last they went in, do you know, Mamma—the rats had eaten off his nose!—nothing else, his nose only! But people will not eat rats even when they are very hungry. There was a fat boy in the cellar, who caught rats in many curious ways, and cooked them. But old Madame Mahler said that she despised him for it, and the children called him Rat-Mad.”
Then again he would talk of her own house. “My Grandpapa,” he said, “has got corns, the worst corns in Copenhagen. When they get very bad he sighs and moans. He says: ‘There will be storms in the China Sea. It is a damned business; my ships are going to the bottom.’ So, you know, I think that the seamen will be saying: ‘There is a storm in this sea; it is a damned business; our ship is going to the bottom.’ Now it is time that old Grandpapa, in Bredgade, goes and has his corns cut.”
Only within the last days of his life did he speak of Mamzell
Ane. She had been, as it were, his Muse, the only person who had knowledge of the one and the other of his worlds. As he recalled her his tone of speech changed; he held forth in a grand, solemn manner, as upon an elemental power, of necessity known to everyone. If Emilie had given his fantasies her attention many things might have been made clear to her. But she said: “No, I do not know her, Jens.” “Oh, Mamma, she knows you well!” He said: “She sewed your wedding-gown, all of white satin. It was slow work—so many fittings! And my Papa,” the child went on and laughed, “he came in to you, and do you know what he said? He said: ‘My white rose.’ ” He suddenly bethought himself of the scissors which Mamzell Ane had left him, and wanted them, and this was the only occasion upon which Emilie ever saw him impatient or fretful.
She left her house for the first time within three weeks, and went herself to Madame Mahler’s house to inquire about the scissors. On the way the powerful, enigmatical figure of Mamzell Ane took on to her the aspect of a Parca, of Atropos herself, scissors in hand, ready to cut off the thread of life. But Madame Mahler in the meantime had bartered away the scissors to a tailor of her acquaintance, and she flatly denied the existence both of them and of Mamzell Ane.
Upon the last morning of the boy’s life Emilie lifted her small pug, that had been his faithful playmate, onto the bed. Then the little dark face and the crumpled body seemed to recall to him the countenance of his friend. “There she is!” he cried.
Emilie’s mother-in-law and the old shipowner himself had been daily visitors to the sick-room. The whole Vandamm family stood weeping round the bed when, in the end, like a small brook which falls into the ocean, Jens gave himself up to, and was absorbed in, the boundless, final unity of dream.
He died by the end of March, a few days before the date that Emilie had fixed to decide on his fitness for admission into the house of Vandamm. Her father suddenly determined that he must be interred in the family vault—irregularly, since he was never legally adopted into the family. So he was laid down behind a heavy wrought-iron fence, within the finest grave that any Plejelt had ever obtained.
Within the following days the house in Bredgade, and its inhabitants with it, shrank and decreased. The people were a little confused, as after a fall, and seized by a sad sense of diffidence. For the first weeks after Jens’ burial life looked to them strangely insipid, a sorry affair, void of purport. The Vandamms were not used to being unhappy, and were not prepared for the sense of loss with which now the death of the child left them. To Jakob it seemed as if he had let down a friend, who had, after all, laughingly trusted to his strength. Now nobody had any use for it, and he saw himself as a freak, the stuffed puppet of a colossus. But with all this, after a while there was also in the survivors, as ever at the passing away of an idealist, a vague feeling of relief.
Emilie alone of the house of Vandamms preserved, as it were, her size, and her sense of proportion. It may even be said that when the house tumbled from its site in the clouds, she upheld and steadied it. She had deemed it affected in her to go into mourning for a child who was not hers, and while she gave up the balls and parties of the Copenhagen season, she went about her domestic tasks quietly as before. Her father and her mother-in-law, sad and at a loss in their daily life, turned to her for balance, and because she was the youngest amongst them, and seemed to them in some ways like the child that was gone, they transferred to her the tenderness and concern which had formerly been the boy’s, and of which they now wished that they had given him
even more. She was pale from her long watches at the sick-bed; so they consulted between them, and with her husband, on means of cheering and distracting her.
But after some time Jakob was struck with, and scared by, her silence. It seemed at first as if, except for her household orders, she found it unnecessary to speak, and later on as if she had forgotten or lost the faculty of speech. His timid attempts to inspirit her so much appeared to surprise and puzzle her that he lacked the spirit to go on with them.
A couple of months after Jens’ death Jakob took his wife for a drive by the road which runs from Copenhagen to Elsinore, along the Sound. It was a lovely, warm and fresh day in May. As they came to Charlottenlund he proposed to her that they should walk through the wood, and send the carriage round to meet them. So they got down by the forest-gate, and for a moment their eyes followed the carriage as it rolled away on the road.
They came into the wood, into a green world. The beech trees had been out for three weeks, the first mysterious translucence of early May was over. But the foliage was still so young that the green of the forest world was the brighter in the shade. Later on, after midsummer, the wood would be almost black in the shade, and brilliantly green in the sun. Now, where the rays of the sun fell through the tree-crowns, the ground was colourless, dim, as if powdered with sun-dust. But where the wood lay in shadow it glowed and luminesced like green glass and jewels. The anemones were faded and gone; the young fine grass was already tall. And within the heart of the forest the woodruff was in bloom; its layer of diminutive, starry, white flowers seemed to float, round the knotty roots of the old grey beeches, like the surface of a milky lake, a foot above the ground. It had rained in the night; upon the narrow road the deep tracks of the wood-cutters’ cart were moist.
Here and there, by the roadside, a grey, misty globe of a withered dandelion caught the sun; the flower of the field had come on a visit to the wood.
They walked on slowly. As they came a little way into the wood they suddenly heard the cuckoo, quite close. They stood still and listened, then walked on. Emilie let go her husband’s arm to pick up from the road the shell of a small, pale-blue, bird’s egg, broken in two; she tried to set it together, and kept it on the palm of her hand. Jakob began to talk to her of a journey to Germany that he had planned for them, and of the places that they were to see. She listened docilely, and was silent.
They had come to the end of the wood. From the gate they had a great view over the open landscape. After the green sombreness of the forest the outside world seemed unbelievably light, as if bleached by the luminous dimness of midday. But after a while the colours of fields, meadows and dispersed groups of trees defined themselves to the eye, one by one. There was a faint blue in the sky, and faint white cumulus clouds rose along the horizon. The young green rye on the fields was about to ear; where the finger of the breeze touched it it ran in long, gentle billows along the ground. The small thatched peasants’ houses lay like lime-white, square isles within the undulating land; round them the lilac-hedges bore up their light foliage and, on the top, clusters of pale flowers. They heard the rolling of a carriage on the road in the distance, and above their heads the incessant singing of innumerable larks.
