Seven Gothic Tales (56 page)

Anders was a long time in answering her, then he spoke very slowly: “Yes,” he said, “you may well ask, Fransine. It is important. The spirit we need not talk about; it is not dangerous. But what is the matter? It has many strange things about it. It is the phlogiston of our bodies, being of negative weight, you might say. That is easy to understand, of course, but it gives you such great pain when it is demonstrated upon you. First we are treated by fire—burned, or roasted slowly, that comes to the same thing—and even then we cannot fly.”

Now the cause of the lover’s immobility became clear to the old listener. This young man was dead drunk. He could just manage to keep himself, sealed, in balance, but could make no further movement. He was pale as a corpse; the sweat kept pouring down his face; and he kept his eyes on the face of the girl as if it would
have caused him infinite pain to move them away from it. The Councilor, who had been repeating to himself his little aphorism, “the half to be more than the whole,” here had the theory proved straight in his face.

Fransine smiled at the young man. Like many women, she did not recognize the symptoms of drunkenness in a man. “Oh, Anders,” she said, “you do not know it, so I will tell you: I can fly. Or nearly. Old ballet-master Basso said to me: ‘The other girls I have to whip up, but I shall have to tie two stones to your legs soon, or you will fly away from me.’ These old men are mad, and they want strange things of you. I do not mind now. I will show you soon that I can fly, like the flying fishes with which the sea children made ducks and drakes.”

“You see, my girl,” said Anders, “you are like a cook who kills a whole, good, live duck just for making a giblet soup. You may use me for a giblet soup if you like, but you must come and cut out the bits you want yourself. The birds do not themselves know the places of their liver and heart. That is woman’s work, Fransine.”

Fransine thought this over for a little while. She was sure that every one of his words was wise, and kind to her. “My mother,” she said, “came from the ghetto of Rome. You did not know that. Nobody knows that. There I saw her kill the birds in the right way, so that no blood was left in them. That ghetto, Anders, that is the place, you can be sure, where people suffer, where you have to be careful, or else you are robbed and hurt. Hanged, even. I have seen people hanged. My grandfather was hanged there. The world has been hard to me, Anders, and to you as well. But then it is even sweeter still to be happy.” She paused a moment. “To be happy,” she said. “Do you not think so?”

“But it is too late,” Anders said. “Things happen, even when you are not there. That is the trouble. That is what you do not know. The cocks are crowing, though we cannot hear them here.” Quoting an old ditty of the charcoal burners, he said, slowly and gently:

“No, they are not crowing,” she said. “It is not daylight, Anders. It is not even midnight.” She stood still before him.

“There are two,” said Anders, “who will take me whole, as I sit here. Abelone will take me whole. She wants to keep a public house at Elsinore, and me to marry her and be landlord to the seamen. The sea, also, will take me whole. When one of the two has been at you, you will have had your bones well picked.”

The Councilor, even though absorbed in their talk, here got a small shock. Had his housekeeper been entertaining such prospects, and not said a word to him? Had she, perhaps, even, perceived in Fransine a rival of her own dignities, and in this shown more insight than he himself had?

Fransine stood staring at Anders, bewildered. “Anders,” she said, “do not speak like that. Listen. At the fairs, when I danced to them, they cried: ‘Again! Again!’ They said: ‘It is like seeing the stars dancing, the hearts burning.’ Do you not believe that I can make you happy?”

“Oh, my lass,” said he, “let us be good. Let us behave like good people. Let me pay you what the seamen pay the girls at Elsinore. I have not much to give you, and that is a great pity. The other night I spent a lot of my savings on beer for the people at the inn, and that was bad of me. But fifty specie-dollars I have still laid aside. Do take them now, for God’s sake. I do not ask you this for my own sake, I swear to you, for I am going to die sooner or later in any case, but for yours, you poor, pretty girl. It is always a good thing for a girl to have fifty specie-dollars. Go buy yourself a shift, and do not run about naked in the cold nights.”

There was much strength in Fransine. Upon this she made a movement towards him. Her tightly drawn cloak and long hair followed it. Within her self-luminous face her two big dark eyes were fixed upon his face. She looked like a young witch under
the moon. “Anders, Anders!” she said, “do you not love me?”

“Oh, God’ ” he said. “That was coming, I knew. I can answer that, from practice, quite well. I love you, my pretty vixen. Your hair, now, is like a little red flame in the dark, a cloven tongue of fire, a little marsh fire to show people the wrong way, the way to hell.”

The young woman was trembling from her head to her feet. “Did you not,” she said, wringing her hands, “want me to come, here, to you, tonight?”

He sat silent for a moment. “Well,” he said, “if you are asking me my honest opinion, Madame Fransine, No. I should like to be by myself.”

Fransine turned and ran away. Her long cloak of Naples, trailing in her wake, hindered her. Still she held it closely wrapped about her. Thus fled Arethusa, when, long ago, she was changed into a river, and loudly lamenting, hurled herself through the myrtle groves.

Anders sat for a long time like a dead man. Then, with the slow and uncertain movement of drunken people, he took up his gun and got onto his feet. He turned around, and in so doing was brought face to face with the Councilor.

He did not seem at all surprised to see him. Perhaps he had thought of him, or had felt his presence, somehow, in the atmosphere of his rendezvous. He only grinned, when he set eyes on him, as if he had been shown the solution of a crafty riddle. The Councilor felt the moment more awkward. For a few seconds the two stared at each other. Then, with a smile such as a boy might show in playing a bad prank on somebody, Anders half lifted his gun, and without taking aim fired it off straight into the body of the old man. The retort boomed and echoed far away in the summer night.

The roar and the sudden, overwhelming pain struck the old man as one thing, as the end or the beginning of the world. He fell, and in falling saw his murderer, with an agility surprising in
a dead-drunk man, swing himself over the low wall of the little temple and disappear.

The Councilor found himself, after a long stay in a strange world, lying on his back in the clover, in a pool of something warm and sticky: his own blood, which was blending with the moisture of the field.

He had the feeling that he had been terribly angry. He was not sure whether the din and the darkness were not the effects of his wrath, an anathema flung at the head of his ungrateful protégé. Slowly returning to consciousness, he was still suffering from the pain and exhaustion which a great anger leaves in the breast, but he no longer hated or condemned. He was past all that.

He had lost a lot of blood. He thought that he must have had the full barrel fired into his right side. He could not move his right leg, either. It was strange that you could change things so completely just by lying down where you had been standing up. He had never known that the scent of the flowering clover could be so strong, but that was because he had not before been lying down, buried, bathed in it, as now.

He was going to die. The young man, whom he loved, had meant him to die. The world had thrown him out. His will, he remembered, was in order. He was leaving his money to his bride. His old servants were provided for, and his cellar was going to Count Schimmelmann, who took such pleasure in wine. In making this will he had been wondering whether the thought of a well-made will might be any comfort to a dying man. Now he knew it to be so.

After a little while he tried to realize whereto he had been thrown, out of the world. As he recognized the place, it occurred to him that he might still save himself. He might control his world once more.

He must be about a mile from La Liberté. If he could manage to turn, and shift his weight onto his sound arm, he might be able to
move. Could he get as far as the long avenue which led to the house, he might crawl along the stone fence, and rest against it.

He was in great pain as soon as he started to move, and he wondered whether it would be worth while. “Now, my dear friend,” he said to himself, feeling that it was time for a kind word, “try. You will be all right.” He could draw himself along in this way, like an old snake which has been run over on the road, but still wriggles on.

His arm gave way; he fell straight upon his face, and his mouth, open in the struggle for breath, was filled with dust.

As he raised himself again he saw that he had been mistaken about the place; he was not in Denmark, but at Weimar.

The sweetness of this discovery nearly overwhelmed him. Weimar, then, was so easy to get to. A road led there from the hayfield of La Liberté. This place—he saw it clearly now—was the terrace; the view over the town was as fine as ever; it was the sacred garden itself, and the solemn lime trees were guarding the sanctuary; he felt their full, balsamic scent. The moon was shining serenely on it all, and from a shining window the great poet might at this moment be watching her, forming divine lines to her divinity.

He remembered now: he himself was writing a tragedy. He had, upon a time, considered this undertaking the greatest of his life, and he did not know how it was that he had for some time not thought about it. He had even had a plan for maneuvering it into the hands of the Geheimerat, to get his opinion on it. Perhaps this night would be the right moment. It had been called
The Wandering Jew
. It might not be worth very much. There were reminiscences of the Geheimerat’s own
Faust
in it; still, there was also some imagination. The imaginary cross, which his Ahasuerus had been carrying through the world on his long weary road, that was not without effective power.

He thought: Would the great poet let his own people—Wilhelm Meister, Werther, Dorothea—associate with the creations of his, the Councilor’s, mind? Undoubtedly there would be a social order
in the world of fiction as there was everywhere, even in the world of Hirschholm. Indeed, it might be the criterion of a work of art that you should be able to imagine its characters keeping company with the people, or frequenting the places, of the works of the great masters. Would not Elmire and Tartuffe land at Cyprus, and be received there, on his master’s behalf, by young Cassio, having passed on the way a ship with brown sails, a-sail for Scheria?

He fell again, and rolled over on his back. This was a more difficult position from which to raise himself, and while he was lying thus, gasping for breath, a dog barked some way off.

“The little dogs and all—Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart—see, they bark at me.”

Yes, they might have reason to do so. He saw his own clothes in the light of the summer moon, stiff with blood and dust. No beggar could look worse.

King Lear, also, had at a time been in a bad position. Murderers had been after him, too. He had been alone upon a heath and had struggled and fallen. The night that he had been out in had been much worse than this. But all the same the old King had somehow been so safe, so unshakenly secure. Still lying flat upon the ground, panting, the Councilor tried to remember what it had been that had made King Lear so exceptionally safe, so that even the storm on the heath, and even all the wickedness in the world, could not harm him in the least. He had been in the hands of two ungrateful daughters; they had treated him with dreadful cruelty; there was nothing safe in the situation there. It was something else. The old King had been in the hands, whatever happened to him, of the great British poet, of William Shakespeare. That was it.

The Councilor had reached the stone fence of the garden. With a very great effort he sat himself up against it. It gave him rest. And suddenly, with the face of the moon looking into his own blood-stained and smirched face, the old Councilor understood everything in the world.

He was not only at Weimar. No, it was more than that. He had got inside the magic circle of poetry. He was in the world of the mind of the great Geheimerat. All this still landscape around him, also this great pain which washed over him from time to time, they were the accomplishments of the poet of Weimar. He himself had got into these works of harmony, deep thought, and order undestroyable. He was free, if he liked, to be Mephistopheles, or the silly student who comes to ask advice about life. In fact he might be anything without ever running any risk, for whatever he did the author would see to it that things would somehow come out all right, that high and divine law and order would be maintained. How was it that he had ever in his life been afraid? Had he believed that Goethe might fail?

The words gave him an extraordinary comfort. What a fool, what a fool he had been! What could anything matter? He was in the hands of Goethe.

The old man looked, as if for the first time in his life, up toward the sky. His lips moved. He said:

Ich bin Eurer Excellenz ehrerbietigster Diener
.

At this moment of his apotheosis he became aware of somebody crying a little way off. The sound came nearer, then suddenly turned off and withdrew. Was this, he thought, Margaret weeping in her desertion?

No, he thought, it must be the young lady of La Liberté, his bride of the same day, poor Fransine. From the sound he judged her to be walking up and down near him. She had gone to the farthest end of the terrace, so as not to be heard from the house. If he could get a few yards farther, he would be within earshot, and he would be saved.