Last Tales (25 page)

“I might tell you why,” he said, but sat on silent.

“You are a clever, wise, learned man, Eitel,” she said. “Your land is better worked and looked after than the land of your neighbors. People talk about you and your reforms and inventions. The King himself has said that he would there were more like you in his country. You give more thought to your peasants’ welfare than to your own. You have been away for years in foreign countries to study new farming systems and how to make their lot easier and happier to them. And yet you speak as if you were in debt to them even now.”

“I may be in debt to them even now,” he said.

“I remember,” she said thoughtfully, “that one day when we two were children and were walking together in the wood—just like now—you began telling me of the wrongs done, in old times, to the peasants in Denmark. I was older than you, but you spoke so gravely that I forgot my dolls for your tales. I almost believed, then, that the Lord God must have decided to create our whole world over again, and that you must be one of the angels whom He had chosen to assist Him in the task.”

“You were the angel, I think,” he said, and smiled a little, “who had the patience to listen to the fantasies of a lonely boy.”

They sat in silence for a while, thinking of the time of which they were talking.

“Today,” she said, “I know a little more about the world, and I do not think that it is going to be created over again—not in our time. I do not know, either, that one must think it unjust that there are both noblemen and peasants on the earth, any more than that there are both pretty and plain people upon it. May I not brush my own hair without grieving for the sake of the women who have got thin, dull hair?”

He looked at her long silky ringlets, and called to mind the many times that he had loosened them and wound them round his fingers.

“But to you,” she went on, “it is as if it were all your fault that there are poverty and distress in the world. It is as if you were tied with a rope to those old peasants of whom you talk.”

“Yes, I may be tied to them with a rope,” he said.

She sat silent for a long time, her hands round her knees. “If I had been a peasant’s wife,” she said lowly and happily, “you would not have taken me.”

He did not answer her. He was seized and transported, as often before, by the fact of her nature being so entirely without shame. She blushed easily, with joy or pride, but never with guilt. And that, he reflected, was why he found peace with her as with no other human being. He had heard and read, and he knew from his own experience, that a man’s love of a woman never for a long time outlives possession. But he had been the lover of this young lady, his neighbor’s wife, for two years. Her little daughter, up at her husband’s house to which the wood belonged, was his. And his desire and his tenderness were stronger today than two years ago, so strong that he had to hold himself back so as not to draw her to him or to kneel down before her and kiss her hands in sweet, wild gratitude. It would be the same, he felt, were they to live to old age. And it was not by her beauty or her gentleness that she did hold this happy and painful power over him. It was because she knew not shame nor remorse, nor rancor. After a while he also reflected that in her last words to him she had spoken the truth.

“You,” he said at length in a changed voice, low as her own, “you have never wronged the people whose lives were in your hand. Your family, your fathers, have lived in good understanding with the peasants on their land, as with the land itself.”

“My family and my fathers were like others, I think,” said she. “Papa had such a temper! When he had taken something
into his head, it would have to be done; he did not worry much whether it was reasonable or not.”

“But the name of your fathers,” said Eitel, “has not been loathed by the people who served you. Your harvesters have sung while they reaped their fields.”

She thought the matter over. “Have you got the barley in, with you?” she asked.

“Yes, it is in,” he answered, “except for a little in the lower field and a bit in ‘Milady’s Paddock.’ ”

“It would not make much difference to you, I do not think,” she said after a moment, “whether they sang or not while they reaped for you. That is what I have been wondering about many times, Eitel: what have you gained by your toils and your travels and your studies? It has made you a stranger among your equals. You do not take much pity on your friends, be they ever so unfortunate in cards or in love. And if you sell them a horse, you will know what price to ask, and stick to it. But when you are trading with a peasant you will feel, I think, that you must give him the whole horse for nothing. And for all that, there is no great affection for the peasants in your heart.

“Those old men,” she continued slowly, “those old lords of the land whom you cannot forget—maybe they took more pleasure in having their servants about them than you do. They felt that those people belonged to them; they made merry with them and were pleased and proud when they were comelier or shrewder than the servants of their neighbors. But you, Eitel, you do not want your own valet to touch you; you dress and undress without him; you ride about without a groom; you go out with your gun and your dog all alone. Why, when that old tenant of yours, to whom you forgave his lease, wanted to kiss your hand, you would not let him do so, and I had to give him mine to kiss, so as not to let him go away empty! It is not out of love for your peasants that you rack your brain and allow yourself no rest. It is out of love for something else. And what that is I know not.”

“Nay, you are mistaken,” said he. “I love this land of mine, every acre of it. In foreign countries, in the big towns there, I have been sick with longing for this very soil and air of mine.”

“I know,” said she, “that you love your land as if it were your wife. But you are not the less lonely for that. And I wonder, Eitel,” she added with a vague mockery or pity in her voice, “I wonder whether in all your life you have really loved any human being except just me.”

At her words he looked back searchingly into the past. She herself, he reflected, wherever she had been had found something to love.

“Nay,” he said once more after a while, “I have indeed loved very deeply a human being—a long, long time ago. But at the same time you are right. It is not out of love for my servants or my peasants that I do, as you say, rack my brain and allow myself no rest. It is out of love for something else. And the name of that thing is justice.”

“Justice,” she repeated wonderingly and became silent. “Eitel,” she said at last, “we two need not worry ourselves about justice. Fate is just, God is just. Surely He will judge and retribute, without our assistance. And we human beings may leave off judging one another.”

“And yet,” he said, “we human beings take upon ourselves to judge one another. Yet we take upon ourselves to sentence one another to death.

“Did you ever know,” he asked after a pause, “that my father had a man put to death?”

“Your father?” she asked. “A peasant?”

“Yes,” he answered, “he was a peasant.”

“I believe that they told me so,” she said, “when I was a little girl.”

“They told you so, Ulrikke,” he said. “They told an old story, a nursery tale, to a little girl. But to me it was a different tale, for my own father was in it.”

“It seems to me that I remember your father,” said she,
“and that he set me on his knee and played with me. And yet that can hardly be. But Mama has talked about him many times, and has told me that he was a handsome, gallant, gay gentleman. A very fine horseman and afraid of nothing—like you.”

“My father died before I was born,” he said. “That, to me, has seemed to mean that he did, from the very beginning, wish to give all that was his into my hands.”

“You need not grieve at that,” she said and smiled.

“I need not grieve at that,” he repeated slowly. “You are thinking of his land and of his fortune. That inheritance of mine has been growing with me myself, during my minority. But he left me more. His own guilt and that of his fathers, that dark shadow which they cast wherever they walked—that, too, is an inheritance which may also have been growing until today.”

“Until today?” she asked.

He caught the vague echo of resentment in her voice—their happy day together darkened by ancient incomprehensible shadows. His heart ached a little at it.

“Listen,” he said, “I have never spoken to you of my father. Today if you would hear me, I should like to speak of him.

“I have never seen his face or heard his voice, yet in my small world when I was a child he was ever with me. His portrait on the wall showed the face of a handsome, gallant, gay gentleman, and the people round me have talked to me of him as your mother did to you, for who speaks ill to a child of his dead father? How did it then happen that this dead father came to his child, a dark figure looming over the little boy, wrapped in a black cloak of guilt, gloom and shame, formidable? Yet I was never afraid of him. It does, I believe, happen like that with children: the grown-up people will tell them of a troll or hobgoblin, and the child will become familiar with the troll and will, in its own way, make it belong to him. In the peaceful house, filled with
gentle women, my father and I belonged to one another, and if he was formidable I was formidable as well.

“As I grew older,” he continued, “and on my own or by the hand of my tutor began to think and reason more abstractly, my ideas of a moral order of the world, of right and wrong and of justice, all grouped themselves round his figure as if they did indeed come to me through him. It was then that I realized the nature of our partnership. He had a claim on me; there was something that I must do for him; he required me to pay his debt.

“As then I read the story of Orestes, I reflected how much easier was his task than mine, since he had a virtuous father to avenge. As I was taught my catechism, the words that stuck in my mind were these, ‘I am in my father and my father is in me.’

“In the end, five years ago, when I was eighteen and his land and fortune were given into my hands, when I was known to the world no longer as Master Eitel but by the name of my fathers, it became clear to me what I had to do. So I made up my mind to go to foreign countries, there to study how to make the lot of the people on my land happier.

“This is what I have thought of, Ulrikke,” he continued. “The Christian religion will tell us of our duty toward our brothers and our neighbors, the people living round us today. It bids us take up the cause of the abandoned, destitute and downtrodden among them. It was first preached by artisans and fishermen.

“But there is another kind of religion which speaks not of brothers or neighbors but of fathers and sons. It proclaims our duty toward the past, and it bids us take up the cause of the dead. To that religion the nobleman is priest. And for this reason are we noblemen and bear old names, for this reason is the land given into our hands: that the past, and the dead, may put their trust in us. My brother or my neighbor, after all, if I strike him may return the blow, and the oppressed around us, if too hard tried, may rebel. But if we are not
there, who will look after the past? And who will then be abandoned and destitute and in very truth downtrodden as the dead? For this reason do I bear my father’s old name, which has been known in the country for many centuries, that my dead father in his grave, who can trust in no one else, may trust in me.

“To cut away from the past,” he said very slowly, as if to himself, “to annihilate it, is the vilest of all breaches of the laws of the cosmos. It is ingratitude, and running away from your debt. It is suicide: you are annihilating yourself in it. I have heard it said, or have read somewhere,” he added and smiled a little, “that a thing is not true until it is twenty-five years old—almost my own age. I shall not, at the moment when I have become, truthfully, what I am, in cutting off my roots, turn myself into a shadow, into nothingness.

“You tell me,” he went on, “that it is not out of love for my people that I am working, and you are right. For in this I am doing the work of my father. I will him to be able to speak some day to the man he wronged, ‘Now your death has been paid for, Linnert.’ I have been told—a very long time ago, and I do not remember by whom—that for eleven years, the last eleven years of my father’s life, the peasants on his land did not speak his name, but in speaking of him used other names, of their own invention. I will them to name him again, some day, as they say, ‘The son of this man dealt fairly with us and was just to us.’

“There can be,” he said after a while, “there can be no lawful love between me and them while they do still fear and distrust my father in me. And I cannot allow them to touch me while I still know them to be shrinking from his blood within my veins. When I have paid off my father’s debt, it will be time for me to stretch out my hands and let them kiss them.”

“I do not think, though,” said Ulrikke, “that any of the families round here are afraid of your father’s name or of his
blood. If you had not gone away to foreign countries, while we were both so young, I think that Papa and Mama would have been well pleased to have you and me marry. I was told that they did indeed talk about it, even before you were born.”

He sat silent, once more checked in his course of thought by her mysterious light-heartedness. Her words brought him back to Germany and to the time, five years ago, when letters from home had informed him that she was married. Until that hour he had felt sure that he and she belonged to one another, and had been too simple to know or to reckon with the forces which had stepped in and had carried her off. Later on, after his return to Denmark, he had understood. Her mother, a beauty and
bel-esprit
of European fame, at this time had had her eyes opened to the fact that her daughter was nineteen years and sweet and graceful, and in haste—in jealousy, or in a fit of wild motherly tenderness, and in order to save that daughter from her own tempest-tossed career—had married off the maiden to an old man. Now, for a few moments, he called to mind those dark nights in which, from his wet, burning pillow, he had stormed against the gods, and had seen the playmate of his childhood as the central figure in a classic group: the white-robed virgin upon the sacrificial altar of a non-human power.