Winter's Tales (26 page)

“For God alone knows all,” she said. “And who can say of himself: of this deed I could never have been guilty?”

In the early morning Alkmene and I drove out to the North Common, a long way. By the scaffold a great crowd was already gathered, mostly rough and common people, but there were many women amongst them, and some had even brought their children. As we worked our way through the throng, they stared at the graceful, deadly pale girl on my arm. But then again they turned their eyes to where, in their midst, the dreadful structure was raised above the ground, with the executioner and his assistant already waiting.

When the cart, with the doomed man and the prison chaplain in it, came along, slowly, over the heads of the people, Alkmene trembled so heavily that I put my arm round her, and, although I was myself terrified and sad, it gave me a sweet content. The murderer sat with his face towards us. For a moment I thought that his eyes were seeking the face of the girl. The chaplain mounted the scaffold with him, and there took his hand and spoke to him, before he made him kneel in front of the block, and himself stood back to let the executioner take his place. A moment later the axe fell.

I thought that Alkmene would sink to the ground, but she kept upon her feet. The crowd now thronged round the scaffold, many of them dipping bits of cloth in the blood, which is held by the common people to cure the falling sickness, but we went away.

I had not slept that night, and the awful sight had made my hair
rise on my head. I supported the girl, but I did not find a word to say to her. On our way back, while the day became clearer, I remembered the plans which, on our journey, I had made to show Alkmene the town, and I laughed at myself for being such a pitiful figure, a dunce. Still I said to her that before we went away—for I had promised to take her back that same evening—we ought to see the King’s palace. So when we had left our cab at the hackney stable, we went there on foot. I could not help seeing how well she walked in the street, how graceful and grandly she carried herself in her little village dress and bonnet. And when we stood before the palace, and she gravely gazed up at it, I reflected that she had been born to live in a place like that.

While we stood there, an old man came along with a big bouquet in his hand, gazed at the girl as he passed, and, when he had walked on a bit, turned and came back to pass her and gaze at her again. I recognized him, although he was very old and crooked, and was also now dyed and painted, for it was the professor. I saw him following us at some distance, through the streets, and as we entered the hotel he kept standing before it, looking at the windows. I thought: “He is now going to deliver his bouquet, to whomever it is meant for, and then he will come back. But then, according to my promise to her, we shall have gone.”

It happened that at the hotel I met a man I knew, who told me of a ship leaving for Vejle that same evening. I thought that it would be the easier to travel by sea, and I also was loath to pass, backwards, the very road by which we had come to Copenhagen. So when we left the hotel we took the way to the harbour.

It was a fine spring evening with a gentle southern wind as we sailed up the Sound. We sat on the deck and watched the coast; we saw a few lights spring up both on the Danish and the Swedish coast, and we kept sitting there most of the clear night. Alkmene
had taken off her bonnet and tied a shawl round her head. When we had sailed past Elsinore and the castle of Kronborg, the moon came up.

I said to her: “I thought that you and I might have kept together all our lives, Alkmene.” “Did you think that?” said she. “It is late to speak of these things now.” “There was never really anything to make me doubt,” said I, “that it might be so.” “Nay,” said she, “I have learned now that there are so many ways of looking at things. You, you speak about my life now. But before, when it was time, you did not try to save it.” “But I want to ask you a question,” I said. “Have you not known that I loved you all the time?” “Love?” she said. “They all loved Alkmene. You did not help her. Did you not know, now, all the time, that they were all against her, all?” I thought her words over for a while. “To me it was a joke,” I said, “a thing of fun. Nay, I think that I did even feel sorry for them. It never occurred to me but that you were the stronger.” “Yes, but it was not so,” said she. “They were the strongest. It could not be otherwise when they were so good, when they were always right. Alkmene was alone. And when they died, and made her watch it, she could stand up against them no longer. She could see no way out, but she must die, too.” She sat very still, and she looked small upon the ship’s deck. “And can you not,” she asked me “not even now say: ‘Poor Alkmene’?” I tried to, but it would not come to me. “Will you remember,” I at last asked her, “that I am your friend?” “Yes,” said she, “I shall always remember that you took me to Copenhagen, Vilhelm. That was good of you.”

I brought her back two days later, and nobody in the parsonage guessed but that she had been with her friends in Vejle all the time.

A short time afterwards, my father wrote to me to join him in Pyrmont, as he was ill and dared not undertake the journey home
alone. It seemed to me that I had nothing to do at Nørholm; so I went. At Pyrmont my father and I each had a letter from Gertrud, who communicated to us her decision to leave the parsonage before the end of her year of grace. For her daughter had bought land in the west country, with a small farmhouse to it, to keep sheep there. Gertrud was no great letter writer. To my father she wrote humbly and gratefully. But in my letter I read, between the lines, an appeal for enlightenment: why had things gone the way they had? There was also, there, a dumb anguish, as if she were, in her heart, frightened at leaving her home, and at going out in the world, alone with her daughter. I did not see that I could set her at rest. I wrote back, thanked her for many years’ kindness to me, and said good-bye.

I have not much more to tell in this story about Alkmene.

Sixteen years after our journey to Copenhagen, it happened that a matter of business took me out westwards, to the district where Alkmene’s farm lay. My road ran close to it. I thought that I might call in, and turned off by the narrow, rough road to the house.

I drove through a wide, lonely landscape, with moors, bogs and long hills. It was a day in late August; the clouds hung low; it had rained, but towards evening a wind rose, and the sunset was fine. On my way I met a bullock-cart, loaded high with sacks, and reflected that it would be Alkmene’s wool. The farm, when I came there, had a big barn and some stables, with a number of tall stacks round it. The house itself was a long, low, thatched building. All was neatly kept, but very poor. An old man and some children stared at me, as if it was a rare thing to see a visitor here. As I drove up before the door, a peasant woman, in bare feet, with a small shawl round her head, came out through the stable door, and it was Gertrud herself.

Gertrud had aged. She no longer had her slim waist or rounded
bosom, but was square like a stack of firewood. Her bony face was tanned, as if all her small freckles had run into one, and she had lost a tooth or two. But she was still light-footed and clear-eyed, an upright, genial old farm wife.

In the lonely house any visitor might have been welcome, but Gertrud was as pleased to see me as if I had been her son. She was alone on the farm, she told me. Alkmene had driven to Ringkøbing with wool, and to put money into the savings bank—indeed, I ought to have met her on the road. She took me into the best room, which was obviously never used, and went to make coffee, the which she did solemnly fetch from a secret small box behind the chest. While I was alone I looked round. Everything here was clean, but very poor. I thought of the past, and of the girl I had then known, and a kind of dread came upon me.

Over our coffee Gertrud and I talked of old days. She had a keen memory for people and places, but the events had become blurred to her. She confused their succession, as if she had not talked or thought of them for a long time. She asked me if I had married. I told her that I had been engaged to my cousin at Rugaard, but that after my father’s death we had agreed to break off the engagement.

Afterwards we got on to the farm and the sheep. She asked my advice on a sick lamb, recalling how I had doctored the cow in the parsonage. She and her daughter were doing well, she said, after the first few years in which they had made mistakes and had been cheated. They had increased their stock, and every month Alkmene went to Ringkøbing and put money into the savings bank. But they were still working hard, from sunrise to night, and allowing no waste at all. They had but poor help from the old man who was their only farm hand. Gertrud became animated as she talked about
the sheep; she had two roses in her cheeks, and she made use of a bold, straight language, which I had not heard from her before. I reflected that the sheep and the landscape here would have taken back Gertrud to her childhood and early youth, and that I was, in reality, speaking to the young country lass, whom my old tutor had fallen in love with. In this way, too, her daughter with her had taken the place of her mother, so much that she might even, when her back was turned, play a small trick on her with the secret box and the coffee.

I had heard much of Alkmene’s parsimony. During these sixteen years the rich woman on the lonely farm had become a kind of myth to the country, and people were a little afraid of her; they held her to be mad. Everything round me here went to confirm the rumours. I saw, then, how old we had all grown; the world seemed to me an infinitely sad place, and I fell to wonder both bitterly and amusedly whether Gertrud might not, in the innocence and activity of her nature, find good meaning, and something to do, in hell as well.

I asked Gertrud what they were going to do with all the money that they were collecting from month to month. Gertrud swept off my question indulgently as if I had been a child. “It would have been a good thing to my poor father, had he had that money in the savings bank, would it not?” she asked. When after a while I came back to it, she took upon herself to preach a little to me: “The world, surely, is a dangerous place, Vilhelm,” she said, “and what better thing will we find in it than that hard, honest work which the Lord has set us here to do? We should not question.”

Still my remark had touched a theme to which she had perhaps herself, without speaking, given consideration. She became thoughtful and after a time she confided to me that Mene was too
sparing on her own behalf. She was kind to her mother; I must not but think so, but she was so hard on herself.

Gertrud looked up at me, the net of fine wrinkles in her face contracted. Her eyes for a moment shone the brighter with two small tears. She took my hand and pressed it. “Vilhelm,” she said. “Do you know? She has got no shift on!”

THE FISH

I
N THE WINDOW within the fathom-thick wall a small star stood, shining, in the pale sky of the summer night. The restfulness of this star made the King’s mind restless; he could not sleep.

The nightingales, which all evening had filled the woods with their exuberant, rapturous singing, were silent for a few hours round midnight. There was no sound anywhere. But from the groves round the castle came, through the open window, the scent of fresh, wet foliage; it bore all the woodland-world into the King’s alcove. His mind wandered, unhindered and aimless, within that silvery land: he saw the deer and the fallow-deer lying peacefully amongst the big trees, and in his thoughts, without bow or arrow, and without any wish to kill, he walked up quite close to them. Here, maybe, the white hind was now grazing, which was no real hind, but a maiden in hind’s slough, with hoofs of gold. Farther on, in the depths of the forest, the dragon was asleep in a valley, his terrible, scaly neck under his wing, his mighty tail stirring faintly in the wet grass.

The King’s mind was strangely moved and upset; a sadness was upon it, and yet he felt as strong as never before. It was as if his own strength lay heavily upon him, and weighed him down.

The King thought of many things, and called to mind how, ten years ago, when he was seventeen, in the town of Ribe he had met with the Wandering Jew. He had been told by Father Anders, his confessor, that the old outlaw of twelve hundred years had come to Ribe, and had sent for him. But when the ancient, crooked, earth-coloured Ahasuerus, in the black caftan, fell upon his face before him, that terrible wrath that had filled his heart against the man who had mocked the Lord again withdrew from it; he stood and looked at him, struck with wonder. “Are you the Cobbler of Jerusalem?” he asked him. “Yes, yes,
I am that,” the Jew answered and sighed deeply. “I was once a cobbler in Jerusalem, that great city. I made shoes and sandals for the rich burghers, and for the Romans as well. Once I made a pair of slippers for the wife of Pontius Pilate, the Governor, that were set all over the toe with chrysoprases and roses.”

Now the King felt again, as if no time had passed and as clearly as that day in Ribe, the infinite loneliness of the old Wanderer. But tonight things had been turned about and had become real to him in a new sense: he was himself Ahasuerus. How many people, since then, had died around him! Gallant knights had fallen in battle, gay friends of his youth had disappeared, fair ladies—they were all gone, like tunes played on a lute. He remembered the old king’s fool, with the little bells on his cap, and how merrily he had jumped up and down on the table while he mimicked the great lords of the court. Now it was many years since he had died, and many years, even, since the King had thought of him. Often he had met the gaze of the hunted, jaded stag, as he set his knife in its heart and turned it round; tears had run from the animal’s limpid eyes. But the King could not tell, he did not know, if he himself were ever to die.

A light breeze ran through the grass and the crowns of the trees outside. The tapestries by the window rustled gently; in the dark he could not distinguish the figures of men and beasts on them, but he knew that they would be moving as if their procession was advancing along the wall.