Winter's Tales (31 page)

Without a sound Rosa withdrew to the wall, and Peter lay down beside her. The boy never washed more than strictly needed, and smelled of earth and sweat, but his breath was fresh and sweet in the dark, close to her face.

With the horizontal position calm came to him, and he spoke less wildly. “And all this,” he said very slowly, “has come about only because I have not run away.”

“Run away?” said Rosa, speaking for the first time. “Yes,” said he. “Yes. Listen. I shall run away to sea, to be a sailor. God means me to be a sailor; that is what He has made me for. I shall become a great sailor, as good as any He has ever made. To think of it, Rosa! That God made those great seas, and the storms in them, the moon shining on them—and that I have left them alone and have never gone to see them! I have sat in that room downstairs and stared at things six inches off my nose. God must have disliked looking my way.

“Nay, imagine now, Rosa,” he said after a while, “imagine only, just in order to understand what I say, that a flute-maker did make a flute, and that nobody did ever play on it. Would not that be a shame and a great pity? Then, all at once, someone takes hold of it and plays upon it, and the flute-maker hears, and says: ‘That is my flute.’ ” He once more drew in his breath deeply, and there was a long silence in the bed.

“But,” said Rosa in a small, clear voice, “I have often wished that you would go to sea.”

At this unexpected and amazing expression of sympathy, Peter became perfectly still. He had a friend in the world, then, an ally.
For a long time he had failed to value his friend rightly; he had even held her to be light-headed and frivolous. And the while she had been faithful, she had thought of him, and had guessed his needs and his hopes. In this calm and fresh hour of the spring night, the sweetness of true human intercourse was, for the first time, mysteriously, revealed to him. In the end he timidly asked the girl: “How did you come to think of that?” “I do not know,” said Rosa, and really at this moment she had forgotten why she had wanted Peter to go to sea.

“Will you help me to run away, then?” he asked, lowly and giddily. “Yes,” said she, and after a while: “How am I to help you? ”

“Listen,” he said, and eagerly moved a little closer to her. “It is at Elsinore that I will get my ship. I know of a ship, the
Esperance
, the captain Svend Bagge, that lies at Elsinore now. She would take me. But I can not get to Elsinore! your father would not let me go. Only you might tell him that you want to go to see your Godmother there, and that you do not care to travel alone, and then he might let me come with you.

“And when we are there, Rosa, when we are at Elsinore I shall go aboard the
Esperance
before anybody can know of it. I shall be on the North Sea before they get scent of it, and nearing Dover, England, Rosa. Some day I shall round the Horn.” He had to stop; he had too much to tell her, now that at last he had got himself under sail. “But I can stay here all night,” he thought. “I can easily stay here till morning.”

Rosa did not answer at once; it was as well that he should be kept in suspense a little and learn to appreciate her help. “You have thought it all out very precisely,” she said at last, with a bit of irony. He thought her words over. “No,” he said. “No, I did not exactly think it out. It all came to me on its own, suddenly. And do you know when? When I saw you standing in the window.” He
was shy of telling her that she had looked like the figure-head of the
Esperance
itself, but there was so much joyful triumph in his whisper that Rosa understood without words.

After a minute she said: “Many ships go down, Peter. Most sailors are drowned in the end.” He had to fetch his mind back from the picture of her in the window before he could speak. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But all people are to die some time, you know. And I think that to be drowned will be the grandest death of all.” “Why do you think that?” asked Rosa, who was herself scared of water. “Oh, I do not know,” said he, and after a moment: “It will be, perhaps, because of that great lot of water. For when you come to think of it, there is really nothing dividing the one ocean from the other. They are all one. When you drown in the sea, it is all the seas of the world that take you. It seems to me that that is grand.” “Yes, it may be,” said Rosa.

Peter, in talking of the oceans, had made a great gesture and had struck Rosa’s head. He felt her soft, crispy hair towards his palm, and beneath it her little hard, round skull. Once more he became very still. Against his own will his fingers fumbled over her head and played with and stroked her hair. He drew his hand back, and after a minute he said: “Now I must go.” “Yes,” said she. He got out of the bed and stood beside it in the dark. “Good night,” he said. “Good night” said the girl, “Sleep well,” said Peter, who had never in his life wished anybody to sleep well. “Sleep well, Peter,” said Rosa.

Peter came down the ladder in such a state of rapture and bliss that he might as well have gone the other way, heavenwards, to those well-known stars which were now hidden behind the mist. The causes of his agitation were, on the one hand, his flight and his future at sea, and on the other: Rosa. Under ordinary circumstances the two ecstasies would have seemed to be incompatible. But tonight
all elements and forces of his being were swept together into an unsurpassed harmony. The sea had become a female deity, and Rosa herself as powerful, foamy, salt and universal as the sea. For a moment he thought of reclimbing the ladder. His soul, indeed, went up, and once more embraced Rosa in the transport of glorious fellowship. His body would have followed it if he had not, bewilderedly, realized that he did not know what to do with it, once he got it there. So he sat down on the lowest rung of the ladder, his head in his hands, in mystic concord with all the world.

After a time his thoughts began to adjust themselves. There was, after all, a distinction in his attitude towards the universe round him and that towards the girl above him.

In regard to the world, mankind in general and his own fate, he was from now on the challenger and the conqueror. They would have to give themselves up to him; if they struck he would strike back, and he would take from them what he wanted. On their side, everything was clear as daylight, bright as metal or the surface of the sea, shining with danger, adventure, victory.

But towards Rosa all his being went forth in a tremendous motion of munificence and magnanimity, in the desire to give. He had no earthly riches with which to reward her, and even if he had possessed all the treasures of the world he would have forgotten them now. It was something more absolute which he meant to yield up to her; it was himself, the essence of his nature, and at the same time it was eternity. The offering, he felt, would be the highest triumph and the utmost sacrifice of which he was capable. He could not go away until it had been consummated.

Would Rosa understand him then, would she receive him, and accept his gift? As slowly his mind swung from marine adventures and exploits to the girl, he saw that on her side everything lay in a solemn and sacred darkness, such as would be found, he thought,
in the deep waters of the oceans, off sounding. It seemed that he did not know her, as she knew him. His thoughts, even, could not get quite close to her, but were held back, every time, as by an unknown law of gravitation. His wild, overwhelming longing to beatify her, and this new, strange unapproachableness of her figure in his imagination kept him awake, in his own bed, till morning. He remembered Jacob, who had wrestled all night with the angel of God. Only here he somehow appropriated to himself the part of the angel, and reversed the cry of the Patriarch’s heart. His soul called out to Rosa: “Thou shalt not let me go except I bless thee.”

In her room upstairs, Rosa, a little while after Peter had left her, turned to her side, her cheek upon her folded hands and her long plait on her bosom, such as she used to do in the evening, when she meant to fall asleep. But she felt, wonderingly, that tonight she would not sleep at all. She had read about people passing a sleepless night, but as a rule they were cither miscreants or rejected lovers, and it was, she reflected, a curious thing that one might be sleepless with content and ease as well. She kept on thinking of the hour that Peter had passed in her bed. A faint scent of his hair lingered on the pillow. She would not for all the world have moved any closer to the place where he had lain, but remained squeezed up against the wall, as she had been while he was there.

All, she repeated in her thoughts, had come to him on its own, suddenly, when he saw her standing in the window. She vaguely remembered that she had, not long ago, distrusted her old playmate, and had meant to refuse him access to her own secret world. “You are a silly girl, Rosa,” she whispered, as when she had been scolding her dolls. The idea of his strength, which had alarmed her, was now pleasing to her mind. She recalled an incident of which she had not thought for many years. A short time after Peter had first come to the house he and she had had a great fight.
She had pulled his hair with all her might while, with his tough boy’s arms round her, he had tried to fling her to the floor. She laughed at the memory, with her eyes closed. Peter, when he climbed down the ladder, had failed quite to shut the window behind him. The night-air was cold in the room. Half an hour after Peter had gone Rosa fell into a sweet, quiet sleep.

But towards morning she had a terrible dream, and woke up with her face bathed in tears. She sat up in bed, her hair sticking to her wet cheeks. She could not recollect the dream in full; she only knew that within it she had been let down and deserted by someone, and left in a cold world, from which all colour and life were gone. She tried to chase off the dream by turning to the world of realities, and to her daily life. But as she did so she remembered Peter, and the fact that he was running away to sea. At that she grew very pale.

Yes, he was running away, that was his thanks to her for letting him come into her bed, and for liking him, since last night, better than other people. She went through their night talk, sentence by sentence. She had meant to be sweet to him—before she went to sleep had she not, in her fancy, stroked his thick, glossy hair, which once she had pulled, smoothed it and twisted it round her fingers? But he was going away all the same, to far places, where she could not follow him. He did not mind what became of her, but left her here, forlorn, as in her dream.

In two or three days he would be gone. He would see the house no more, nor the garden, nor the church. He would not even hear the Danish language spoken, but some strange tongue, incomprehensible to her. And he would not think of her; she would have gone from his mind. Gone, gone, she thought, and bit her hair that was wet with salt tears.

She was now, according to her promise, going to speak to her
father, and to get leave for herself and Peter to go to Elsinore. After a while an idea rose to the surface of her mind. How easily could she not make all his great plans void? If she did tell her father of his project, there would be no ships in Peter’s life, no rounding of the Horn, no drowning in the water of all the oceans. She sat in her bed, crouching on the thought, like a hen on her eggs. Till now, it seemed to her, she had managed to keep things at a distance; today they were drawing in upon her, touching her, as she hated things to do, pressing her breast. In the end she got up and put on her old frock.

Rosa very rarely begged her father for anything. He would give her what she asked, for the reason, she had been told, that she was so like her mother, after whom she was named. But she did not like to assume, in this way, the part of a dead woman; she wanted to be herself, the young Rosa. So she might sometimes apply to him on behalf of Eline or of her child, but for herself she would not do it. Still, today she needed the support of both Father and Mother. Some time ago, to amuse herself, she had put up her hair after the fashion of her mother’s hair in her small portrait. Now, in front of the little dim mirror she again carefully did it up in the same way. Then she went down to her father’s room.

She came out from it again with a blank face, like a doll’s, and for some time stood quite still outside the room. She had her handkerchief in her hand, with a small pile of money tied up in it, the purchase price of the cow, which the parson had given her, and told her to hand over to Eline. He had been so deeply moved during their talk together, that he had even covered his face at the idea of his nephew’s ingratitude, and again lifted it, marked by tears. As she was about to go, he took her hand and looked at her.

To the parson it was a constant burden and grief that he could not quite believe in the dogma of the resurrection of the body, on
which, all the same, he must preach from his pulpit, for he distrusted and feared the body. The young girl, he thought, would not be tormented by any such doubts. And indeed the flesh that he touched was fresh and clean; one might imagine that it would be admitted to paradise. He had sighed deeply, counted up the money and laid it in her cool, calm hand. To Rosa all ideas of purchase and sale were, for some reason, displeasing. She took it reluctantly, and so unconcernedly that the old man had reminded her to tie it up in her handkerchief. Now, outside the door, she put the bundle into the pocket of her skirt.

She wanted to strengthen herself in the conviction that she was behaving normally and reasonably, and decided that she would go down to the kitchen, to have her breakfast. On the steps down she heard lively voices in there, and in the kitchen she found the whole household gathered round a fish-wife from the coast, who brought fish for sale in a creel upon her back.

These fisherwomen were a brisk, hardy race; they would walk twenty miles, heavy-laden, in all kinds of weather, and come home to cook and darn for a husband and a dozen children. They were quick-witted, great newsmongers and at home in every house, and they preferred their roving outdoor profession to that of the peasant woman, tied up in the stable or by the churn, and to that of the parson’s wife. Emma, the fish-wife, had placed her creel on the floor and herself upon the chopping-block. She was drinking coffee from a saucer and giving out the news of the neighbourhood, laughing at her own tales. The lump of candy in her mouth, her scarcity of teeth and the broad dialect of her talk—mixed up with Swedish, for she was a Swede by birth as were many of the fishermen’s wives along the Sound—made it difficult to follow her tales. But the children of the parsonage could speak the dialect themselves, when they wanted to. She broke off her story to nod to the parson’s pretty
daughter, and Rosa took her own cup of coffee to the chopping-block, to hear the news.