Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (8 page)

But Philippa’s heart was melting in her bosom. It seemed that an unforgettable evening was to be finished off with an unforgettable proof of human loyalty and self-sacrifice.

“Dear Babette,” she said softly, “you ought not to have given away all you had for our sake.”

Babette gave her mistress a deep glance, a strange glance. Was there not pity, even scorn, at the bottom of it?

“For your sake?” she replied. “No. For my own.”

She rose from the chopping block and stood up before the two sisters.

“I am a great artist!” she said.

She waited a moment and then repeated: “I am a great artist, Mesdames.”

Again for a long time there was deep silence in the kitchen.

Then Martine said: “So you will be poor now all your life, Babette?”

“Poor?” said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. “No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.”

While the elder sister found nothing more to say, in Philippa’s heart deep, forgotten chords vibrated. For she had heard, before now, long ago, of the Café Anglais. She had heard, before now, long ago, the names on Babette’s tragic list. She rose and took a step toward her servant.

“But all those people whom you have mentioned,” she said, “those princes and great people of Paris whom you named, Babette? You yourself fought against them. You were a Communard! The General you named had your husband and son shot! How can you grieve over them?”

Babette’s dark eyes met Philippa’s.

“Yes,” she said, “I was a Communard. Thanks be to God, I was a Communard! And those people whom I named, Mesdames, were evil and cruel. They let the people of Paris starve; they oppressed and wronged the poor. Thanks be to God, I stood upon a barricade; I loaded the gun for my menfolk! But all the same, Mesdames, I shall not go back to Paris, now that those people of whom I have spoken are no longer there.”

She stood immovable, lost in thought.

“You see, Mesdames,” she said, at last, “those people belonged to me, they were mine. They had been brought up and trained, with greater expense than you, my little ladies, could ever imagine or believe, to understand what a great artist I am. I could
make them happy. When I did my very best I could make them perfectly happy.”

She paused for a moment.

“It was like that with Monsieur Papin too,” she said.

“With Monsieur Papin?” Philippa asked.

“Yes, with your Monsieur Papin, my poor lady,” said Babette. “He told me so himself: ‘It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,’ he said, ‘to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing, his second best.’ He said: ‘Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!’ ”

Philippa went up to Babette and put her arms round her. She felt the cook’s body like a marble monument against her own, but she herself shook and trembled from head to foot.

For a while she could not speak. Then she whispered:

“Yet this is not the end! I feel, Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!” she added, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Ah, how you will enchant the angels!”

T
HERE WAS an old actor and theatre director whose name was Herr Soerensen. In his young days he had played in Copenhagen theatres; he had even got so—far as to appear as Aristophanes in Adam Oehlenschlaeger’s tragedy
Socrates
at the very Royal Theatre. But he was a man of a mighty, independent character, which demanded the creation and control of his own world around him. As a child he had been taken to stay with his mother’s relations in Norway, and he had kept a deep, undying passion for the land of fells, which in his mind loomed heaven-aspiring and windswept, as back-drop and wings for
Hakon Jarl
and for Macbeth’s and Ossian’s Scotland. He read the Norwegian poet Wergeland and heard tell of the Norwegian folk’s longing for great art, and his soul grew restless within him. Visions and voices filled him, a crown was indicated for him, and he received his orders to sally forth for the North. Late in life he abruptly pulled up his roots from the soft mould of Copenhagen to plant them afresh in stony ground, and at the time—about a hundred years ago—when steamers first began to ply regularly along the Norwegian coast he traveled with his own small company from town to town up and down the fjords.

His old Copenhagen friends discussed among themselves the sad come-down it must be for a Royal Copenhagen actor to appear on provincial stages with a half-trained cast and before a half-barbarous public. But Herr Soerensen himself delighted in his freedom; his being blossomed in the swell of wind and wave, in dressing-rooms made from rough boards, in draughts and among tallow-dips. On gala nights he was the highly appreciated ambassador to the great powers, glittering with stars and royal favor, at other times, groaning
away in his narrow berth and in the merciless hand of seasickness, he was their hard-tried prophet, Jonah in the belly of the whale. But always and everywhere he was the chosen one, the wanderer in his vocation.

Herr Soerensen in his nature had a kind of duplicity which might well confuse and disturb his surroundings and might even be called demoniacal, but with which he himself managed to exist on harmonious terms. He was on the one hand a wide-awake, shrewd and untiring businessman, with eyes at the back of his head, a fine nose for profit, and a completely matter-of-fact and detached outlook on his public and humanity in general. And he was at one and the same time his art’s obedient servant, a humble old priest in the temple, with the words
“Domine, non sum dignus”
graven in his heart.

He did not, in his contracts, let himself be done for as much as a farthing. While laying on his mask in front of a dim, chipped mirror he might suddenly get a bright idea which put him in a position to steal a march on other folk. He played in many coarse farces (which in his time were called
Possen
), giving his audience their hearts’ desire of capering, roaring and fantastic grimacing, and thanking them for their deafening applause with his hand on his heart and the sweetest of smiles on his lips—and all the time he had the evening’s accounts, down to the smallest item, in his head.

But when, later at night, after having enjoyed his modest supper, with a little glass of schnapps thrown in, he ascended to his bedroom, candle in hand, up a staircase as steep and narrow as a hen-coop ladder, in spirit he moved as high as an old angel on Jacob’s ladder. Up there he sat down again to table with Euripides, Lopez de Vega and Molière, with the poets of his own country’s golden age, and with the one who most of all looked like a human being, with William Shakespeare himself. The immortal minds were his brethren
and understood him as he them. In their circle he could let himself go, free and jubilant, or he could shed tears of deepest
weltschmerz
.

Herr Soerensen at times had been characterized by business connections as a shameless speculator. But in his relations to the immortals he was as chaste as a virgin.

Only a few close friends knew of his theory: that much which is unworthy in human life might be avoided if people would only accustom themselves to talking in verse. “It need not exactly rhyme,” he said. “Nay, it really ought not to rhyme. Rhyming verse in the long run is an underhand attack on the true being of poetry. But we should express our feelings, and communicate with one another, in blank verse. For iambics gently sway our nature’s rawness—to noble worth, and zealously divide—chatter and tripe and scandal’s overspill—from gold and silver in the human speech.” In the great moments of his existence Herr Soerensen himself thought in iambics.

Only the Registrar-General of Births and Deaths in Copenhagen—who had shown himself highly reluctant to the idea—knew of a codicil to his will, in accordance with which his old cranium would one day be polished and through the ages to come would figure on the stage as Yorick’s skull.

Now one year it happened that Herr Soerensen in doing his accounts found his last season to have been more profitable than any previous one. The old manager felt that the great powers above had looked to him kindly and that in return he ought to do something for them. He determined to put into operation a life-old dream. He would produce
The Tempest
and himself play the part of Prospero.

No sooner had he taken this decision than he got up from his bed, dressed and went for a long walk in the night. He gazed at the stars above him and reflected that he had been
led along strange ways. “Those wings for which all my life I have been longing and looking,” he said to himself, “have now been granted me—in order that I may fold them together! My thanks to those in whose hands I have been, and am.”

He lay wakeful through many a night, shifting his males and females here and there in the play’s cast, as if they had been pieces in a choice game of chess. At length, except for one single figure, he had the whole distribution of parts on his fingers and was pleased with it. But an Ariel he had not yet found, and he tore his hair in despair over his inability. Already in his mind he had tried his best artists in the part and in exasperation had flung them out of it again, when one day his eye fell on a young girl who had recently become a member of the troupe, and in a couple of small parts had won modest applause.

“My Lord and Judge,” Herr Soerensen at the same instant cried out in his heart, “where have I had my eyes? Here have I been on my knees, imploring heaven to send me a serviceable air-spirit! I have been on the point of losing all hope and giving up! And all the time the most exquisite Ariel the world has ever known has been walking up and down under my nose without my recognizing him!” So moved was he that he overlooked his pupil’s sex.

“My girl,” he said to the young actress. “You are to play Ariel in
The Tempest
.”

“Am I!” she cried.

“Yes,” said Herr Soerensen.

The girl to whom he was talking was big, with a pair of
clear, undaunted eyes, but with a peculiar reserved dignity in her manner. Herr Soerensen who, so far as the morals of his young actresses went, had preserved the high traditions of the Royal Copenhagen theatre, occasionally had noticed her just because she seemed difficult to approach. She was a pretty girl and to a chivalrous nature like that of Herr Soerensen there was something moving or pathetic in her face. Still no theatre man but one with the eyes of genius would ever have imagined her in the part of Ariel.

“She is somewhat skinny,” Herr Soerensen thought, “because she has had to live on short commons, poor child. But it becomes her because the structure of her skeleton is exceptionally noble. If it be correct—as my Copenhagen director, of blessed memory, did hold forth to me—that woman is to man what poetry is to prose, then are the womenfolk we come across from day to day poems read aloud.—They’re read aloud with taste, and please the ear—or else they’re badly read, and grate and jar.—But this my gray-eyed lassie is a song.”

“Now then, little one,” he said, as he lit one of the fat cigars which were the only luxury he allowed himself. “Now we two will set to work, and set to work in earnest. We are here to serve Will Shakespeare, the Swan of Avon. And we are not going to think of ourselves at all, for we are nothing at all in ourselves. You are prepared to forget everything for his sake?”

The girl thought the matter over, blushed and said: “If only I am not too big.”

Herr Soerensen looked her over observantly from head to foot and even walked round her once in order to become certain.

“To hell with stones and pounds,” he burst out. “I could,
au contraire
, wish that there was more of you. For you are
light in yourself, in the way of a gas balloon: the more one fills into it the higher it will go. Besides, surely our William is man enough to do away with such a hackneyed regulation as the law of gravity.

“And look at me now. I am a little man as I walk about on my dreary daily round. But do you think that once in the cloak of Prospero I shall look the same? Nay, the danger will then be that the stage will become too cramped for my stature; the rest of my cast will find it a bit of a tight fit. And when I order myself a new suit of clothes—which the Lord knows I need—the tailor who has had a seat in the pit will put up his price because he realizes that he will need to use extra material for my volume!

“I am aware,” he continued after a long pause and in deep earnest, “that even among theatre managers there may be found those who have the heart—and the means—to let Ariel come swooping onto the stage on a wire from the wings. To hell with it! Such things to me are an abomination. It is the words of the poet which are to make Ariel fly. Ought we, who are our William’s servants, to rely more on a bit of steel than on his heavenly stanzas! That, on this stage, shall come to happen only over Valdemar Soerensen’s dead body!

“You are a bit slow in your movements,” he went on. “That is as it should be. Rapid Ariel must not be, nor bustling. And when he answers Prospero: