Seven Gothic Tales (54 page)

Although she was addressing him so solemnly, her face still wore a reflection of her smile of a moment ago. Even as she went on talking and was deeply moved, it remained there.

Anders did not hear a word of what she was saying. With that great talent for oblivion, which the Councilor did not always appreciate in his protégé, Anders had long since forgotten all about the matter to which she was referring. He smiled back at her with exactly her own expression. As her face changed, his changed. They took light and shade from each other like two mirrors hung opposite each other in a room.

Fransine felt that the situation was not developing quite as it ought to, but she did not know what to do.

“The Councilor,” she said, “loves you as if you were his son, and if he had not helped you, you might have been starving. He is wise. He knows better than we do how to behave in the world. Look,” she said, fumbling at a small object which was tied to the golden watch-chain around her neck. It was a little piece of coral, formed like a horn, such as the plain people of Italy use as a talisman. “This my grandmother gave me. It is said to protect you against evil eyes. But she thought that it would guard you also against smallpox, and your own dangerous thoughts. For this reason she gave it to me. You take it now, and let it remind you to be careful, to follow the Councilor’s advice.”

Anders took the little amulet from her. As their hands met, they both grew very pale.

From his place on the sofa, the Councilor could see with the corner of his eye that great forces were in play. And he saw plainly that his bride gave to the young clerk, as some sort of symbol, what looked like a little pair of horns. With this, were it more or less than he had expected, he had to be content, and he and Fransine walked down the stair, arm in arm, to where Kresten was waiting for them with the carriage.

As it was not considered by the social world of Hirschholm quite proper that an engaged couple, even though the bridegroom were a man of a certain age, and the bride a widow, should be much together by themselves, it became, during the summer months, the custom for Anders, in the capacity of a chaperon, to accompany the Councilor on his visits to La Liberté. Upon fine evenings the three of them would have tea on the terrace, and Fransine made them pretty little Italian dishes which reminded the Councilor of other days and things. Looking then, in the mild, glowing evening light, across the tea table at the two young people who were both so precious to him—although their order of precedence within his heart might have surprised them—the Councilor felt happy and in harmony with the universe as he very rarely
had before. It was difficult, he thought, to imagine a more perfect idyll. “I, too,” he said to himself, “have been in Arcadia.”

At times the attitudes of his young shepherd and shepherdess surprised him and made him uneasy, and he was reminded of a tale which he had read in a book of travel. Therein a party of British explorers in a Negro village came upon a troop of prisoners who were being fattened, behind a palisade, for the table of their capturers. The indignant Britishers offered to buy their freedom, but the victims refused, for they thought that they were having a more pleasant time than they had ever had. Was it possible, the Councilor thought, that the young people had some plan of escape that they were skillfully concealing, or were they no more provident than the cannibals’ captives? Both possibilities seemed to him equally unlikely.

Still he was not in his parable very far from the truth; or the truth, had he known it, would not have appeared to him any more probable.

To Anders the situation was simplified by his decision to kill himself on Fransine’s wedding day, a decision which he had made when he heard of her engagement, and which seemed to him as inevitable as death itself. To the Danish peasant of his type the idea of flinging away your life comes very easily. Life never seems—or, indeed, is—to them any very great boon, and suicide in one way or another may be said to be the natural end of them.

Anders had not been spoiled by fate. If he had been spoiled at all, it had been done by other powers. He had felt the common lot of his kind, that is: to be, as if he had been made out of some stuff essentially different from the rest of the world, invisible to other people. When he had met Fransine, she had seen him. Without any effort, her clear eyes had taken him all in. This sort of human non-existence of which he had at times been tired had come to an end, and he had promised himself much from his newly gained reality. If she was marrying the Councilor, and
turning away her eyes, it was only reasonable that he himself should turn elsewhere.

He was always very reserved about his own plans, and in this case felt that his decision concerned nobody but himself. Therefore he did not let it out in any manner. The Councilor, had he known of it, would not only have prevented it, but would also have disliked it. Few people would choose to sit down at their tea tables with a ghost of today a week. Fransine it might have made unhappy. Anders had no chivalry in his disposition, but he had a talent for friendliness, and he would not have liked to grieve any of them. To avoid it he had even planned to borrow a sailing boat from a friend of his amongst the fishermen of Rungsted and to capsize by accident. He was a skilled sailor and could manage that. From time to time he had a strange feeling toward Anders Kube, as toward some central figure in one of his own poems. Sometimes he felt a little guilty, and then again as a benefactor, for he was helping him to escape a lot of unpleasant things. Upon the whole he had, behind his palisade, as quiet eyes as those of the Negro prisoners in the tale.

Apart from this central idea of his, he had in his head a great poem, a swan song, which he was to finish before himself. Having written before of the forests and fields, and relying upon the sea for a last embrace, he had let all his thoughts wander toward her. Naiads and tritons danced in the waves within this last great epos of his; the whales passed over their heads like clouds; dolphins, swans, and fishes played in the powerful and pearly foam of long breakers, and the winds played at flutes and bassoons, and joined in great orchestras. That freedom in which people live, who can die, had got into it; and although it was not, as a drama, very long, there was no end to its many aspects. He read it to Fransine, in the afternoons at La Liberté, as it proceeded.

As to Fransine, it was natural for her to live like this, from hand to mouth. She had no real idea of time; indeed did not have
it in her to distinguish between time and eternity. That was one of the traits of character which made the ladies of Hirschholm think her a little feebleminded. She had never before in her life been as happy as this, and could not feel sure whether the uncertainty about its duration and about the future might not be a peculiarity of happiness. For the rest her thoughts followed the moods of Anders. She read his last great poem, and as it was all about the sea, she had the frocks of her trousseau made in hues of sky and sea blue—rather heavenly the two men thought her.

As during these months the Councilor came to know his bride better, he was often surprised by her extreme disregard of truth. He was himself a rearranger of existence, and in many ways in sympathy with her; also in this he found her methods to fall in well with his own plans. But still more than once this talent of hers impressed him. It was, he reflected, an especially feminine trick, a
code de femme
of practical economy, proved by innumerable generations. Women, wanting to be happy, are up against a
force majeure
. Hence they may be justified in taking a short cut to happiness by declaring things to be, in fact, that which they want them to be. They have by practice made this household remedy indispensable in the housekeeping of life. In this way, because he was to be her husband, he was pronounced by his young bride
ipso facto
good, clever, and generous. He did not take it as a personal compliment; she had probably made use of the same formula in connection with the old apothecary Lerche. So were his presents to her always beautiful, so were the sermons of old Pastor Abel of Hirschholm highly moving, so was the weather nice when he took her out for a drive. An exception to the rule was formed by her frocks and bonnets, about which she took much genuine trouble; but then she had such a talent for wearing clothes that in this she could successfully strive toward an ideal. Whether she had come to take refuge in this woman’s religion from personal need, or had been inaugurated into it by wise female Nestors, he did not know. Few women, he thought,
come to know romance, married bliss, or success in life except by such an arrangement. The principle had some likeness to Count Schimmelmann’s new clothes, but, invented by simple women, it was devoid of any masculine ambition to prove; it was plain dogma, indisputable.

Thus did the witches of old make up wax children, carry them for nine months under their clothes, and then have them christened, at midnight, with the name of someone of their acquaintance, and after that for all practical purposes the wax child served in place of its namesake. In the hands of an amiable witch this pretty white magic might work much good. But if ever a young witch conceives and carries for nine months a child of her own flesh and blood? Ah! it is then that there will be the devil and all to pay.

The Councilor, seeing his protégé so absorbed in his new work, asked him to read it to him. Anders saw no reason whatever why his old friend should not know of it, and recited bits of it to him from time to time. The old man was very much impressed, filled with an admiration which at times came near to idolatry. It seemed to him, too, that he had come out into a new sort of space and time, into the ether itself, until he was swimming and flying in the blue, and in a new kind of harmony and happiness. He thought it the beginning of great things. He discussed it much with the poet, and even advised him upon it, so that not a few of the Councilor’s own ideas and reflections were, in one way or another, echoed within the epos, and he was, during these summer months, in a way making love, and writing poetry, to his bride by proxy—a piquant situation, which would last till his wedding day. For days and weeks the three of them, even while taking tea upon the terrace, would be living in the waters of great, heavenly seas.

Two days before the wedding the Councilor received from a friend in Germany a copy of the new novel,
Wally: Die Zweiferiti
,
by young Gutzkow, about which the waves of indignation and discussion were at the time going high there.

As it will be remembered, Wally and Cæsar love each other, but they cannot marry, for Wally has promised to become the bride of the ambassador of Sardinia. Cæsar then demands of her that she shall, to symbolize the spiritual marriage between her and him, upon the very wedding morning, show herself to him naked, in her full beauty. There exists an old German poem in which Sigune in this way reveals herself to Tchionatulander.

The Councilor was so much interested in the novel that he brought it with him on his afternoon visit to La Liberté, and went on with his reading, seated under a tree on the terrace, while the young people went to look at a tame fox cub which Fransine kept in the kennel. He considered that he would not, in the coming week, have much time for reading, and that he had better finish his book today.

He read:

The Councilor closed his book, and leaning back in his chair, as if he were looking toward heaven, he even closed his eyes. The air under the crown of the lime tree was filled with green and golden light, with the sweet scent of the linden blossoms, and the humming of innumerable bees.

This, he thought, is very pretty. Very pretty, let old Professor
Menzel thunder against it as he likes. A dream of a golden age, of an eternal innocence and sweetness came back to him. Let the critics say that such things do not happen; that does not really matter, for a new variety of flower has been forced in the frame of imagination. He could hear Fransine and Anders talking a little way off, but he could not hear what the talk was about.

From the kennel the two young people had walked down to the vegetable garden, south of the house, to pick some lettuce, peas, and young carrots for the supper table. Part of the low garden was already shaded by a row of old crooked birches which formed the boundary fence of the garden. Through an opening they could look out on the fields, where, in the mellow, golden, evening air two maids, walking out to milk the cows and carrying their tall milk pans on their heads, threw tremendously long blue shadows across the clover field.

Fransine asked Anders’s advice about the fox cub. “In the autumn,” she said, “if I let him out, will he be able to find his own food?”

“I should let him out,” said Anders, “only he may be too familiar with your hen-coops, and come back in the night.” He had a vision of the sharp-toothed, lonely fox, the ghost of the woolen playmate of their summer evenings, in a frosty, silvery, winter night, trotting on to La Liberté. “Then you must come and catch him again,” said Fransine.

“But then I shall not be here,” said Anders, without thinking.

“Oh,” said she, “what high offices, in what state, are taking you away from us, Mr. Anders?” Anders was silent. What high offices, in what state?

“I have got to go away,” he said at last. Fransine did not dispute the fact. Probably she knew enough of the hard necessity, mistress of men and gods. But after a moment she looked at him, as intently as if she had thrown her whole being at him in the glance. “But if you are not here,” she said, “it will be—” she reflected for a second—“it will be too cold here!” she said. Anders
understood her very well. An immense wave of pity lifted him up and hurled him at her feet. It would indeed be too cold for her. And his soul was rent between the despair of her feeling cold, and the despair of his being, by that time, too cold to comfort her. “What am I to do then?” she asked him. She was standing up before him. Except that she was clothed, and her two hands were therefore reposing lightly on the flounces of her dress, she was holding the exact pose of that Venus of Medici of which the Councilor was at the same moment reading. Looking at her, Anders remembered that he had before seen her as a child who would not lose, in him, her favorite doll. Now he saw her differently, as the doll which could not lose its child, the child who was to play with it, dress and undress it, and go into ecstasies over it—an ownerless doll, a stray doll, except in his hands.