Winter's Tales (19 page)

But when Jens was six years old Mamzell Ane died, leaving to him her few earthly possessions: a thin-worn silver thimble, a fine pair of scissors and a little black chair with roses painted on it. Jens set a great value to these things, and every day gravely contemplated them. Just then Madame Mahler began to see the end of her hundred rixdollars. She had been piqued by her old friend’s absorption
in the child, and so decided to get her own back. From now on she would make the boy useful to her in the business of the laundry. His life therefore was no longer his own, and the thimble, the scissors and the chair stood in Madame Mahler’s room, the sole tangible remnants, or proof, of the splendour which he and Mamzell Ane had known and shared.

At the same time as these events took place in Adelgade, there lived in a stately house in Bredgade a young married couple, whose names were Jakob and Emilie Vandamm. The two were cousins, she being the only child of one of the big shipowners of Copenhagen, and he the son of that magnate’s sister—so that if it had not been for her sex, the young lady would with time have become head of the firm. The old shipowner, who was a widower, with his widowed sister, occupied the two loftier lower stories of the house. The family held closely together, and the young people had been engaged from childhood.

Jakob was a very big young man, with a quick head and an easy temper. He had many friends, but none of them could dispute the fact that he was growing fat at the early age of thirty. Emilie was not a regular beauty, but she had an extremely graceful and elegant figure, and the slimmest waist in Copenhagen; she was supple and soft in her walk and all her movements, with a low voice, and a reserved, gentle manner. As to her moral being she was the true daughter of a long row of competent and honest tradesmen: upright, wise, truthful and a bit of a pharisee. She gave much time to charity work, and therein minutely distinguished between the deserving and the undeserving poor. She entertained largely and prettily, but kept strictly to her own milieu. Her old uncle, who had travelled round the world, and was an admirer of the fair sex, teased her over the Sunday dinner-table. There was, he said, an
exquisite piquancy in the contrast between the suppleness of her body and the rigidity of her mind.

There had been a time when, unknown to the world, the two had been in concord. When Emilie was eighteen, and Jakob was away in China on a ship, she fell in love with a young naval officer, whose name was Charlie Dreyer, and who, three years earlier, when he was only twenty-one, had distinguished himself, and been decorated, in the war of 1849. Emilie was not then officially engaged to her cousin. She did not believe, either, that she would exactly break Jakob’s heart if she left him and married another man. All the same, she had strange, sudden misgivings; the strength of her own feelings alarmed her. When in solitude she pondered on the matter, she held it beneath her to be so entirely dependent on another human being. But she again forgot her fears when she met Charlie, and she wondered and wondered that life did indeed hold so much sweetness. Her best friend, Charlotte Tutein, as the two girls were undressing after a ball, said to her: “Charlie Dreyer makes love to all the pretty girls of Copenhagen, but he does not intend to marry any of them. I think he is a Don Juan.” Emilie smiled into the looking-glass. Her heart melted at the thought that Charlie, misjudged by all the world, was known to her alone for what he was: loyal, constant and true.

Charlie’s ship was leaving for the West Indies. On the night before his departure he came out to her father’s villa near Copenhagen to say good-bye, and found Emilie alone. The two young people walked in the garden; it was moonlit. Emilie broke off a white rose, moist with dew, and gave it to him. As they were parting on the road just outside the gate, he seized both her hands, drew them to his breast, and in one great flaming whisper begged her, since nobody would see him walk back with her, to let him stay with her that night, until in the morning he must go so far away.

It is probably almost impossible to the children of later generations to understand or realize the horror and abomination which the idea and the very word of seduction would awake in the minds of young girls of that past age. She could not have been more deadly frightened and revolted had she found that he meant to cut her throat.

He must repeat himself before she understood him, and as she did so the ground sank beneath her. She felt as if the one man amongst all, whom she trusted and loved, was intending to bring upon her the supreme sin, disaster and shame, was asking her to betray her mother’s memory and all the maidens in the world. Her own feelings for him made her an accomplice in the crime, and she realized that she was lost. Charlie felt her wavering on her feet, and put his arms around her. In a stifled, agonized cry she tore herself out of them, fled, and with all her might pushed the heavy iron gate to; she bolted it on him as if it had been the cage of an angry lion. On which side of the gate was the lion? Her strength gave way; she hung on to the bars, while on the other side the desperate, miserable lover pressed himself against them, fumbled between them for her hands, her clothes, and implored her to open. But she recoiled and flew to the house, to her room, only to find there despair within her own heart, and a bitter vacuity in all the world round it.

Six months later Jakob came home from China, and their engagement was celebrated amongst the rejoicings of the families. A month after she learned that Charlie had died from fever at St. Thomas. Before she was twenty she was married and mistress of her own fine house.

Many young girls of Copenhagen married in the same way—
par dépit—
and then, to save their self-respect, denied their first love and made the excellency of their husbands their one point of honour,
so that they became incapable of distinguishing between truth and untruth, lost their moral weight and flickered in life without any foothold in reality. Emilie was saved from their fate by the intervention, so to say, of the old Vandamms, her forefathers, and by the instinct and principle of sound merchantship which they had passed on into the blood of their daughter. The staunch and resolute old traders had not winked when they made out their balance-sheet; in hard times they had sternly looked bankruptcy and ruin in the face; they were the loyal, unswerving servants of facts. So did Emilie now take stock of her profit and loss. She had loved Charlie; he had been unworthy of her love; and she was never again to love in that same way. She had stood upon the brink of an abyss, and but for the grace of God she was at this moment a fallen woman, an outcast from her father’s house. The husband she had married was kind-hearted, and a good man of business; he was also fat, childish, unlike her. She had got, out of life, a house to her taste and a secure, harmonious position in her own family and in the world of Copenhagen; for these she was grateful, and for them she would take no risk. She did at this moment of her life with all the strength of her young soul embrace a creed of fanatical truthfulness and solidity. The ancient Vandamms might have applauded her, or they might have thought her code excessive; they had taken a risk themselves, when it was needed, and they were aware that in trade it is a dangerous thing to shy danger.

Jakob, on his side, was in love with his wife, and prized her beyond rubies. To him, as to the other young men out of the strictly moral Copenhagen bourgeoisie, his first experience of love had been extremely gross. He had preserved the freshness of his heart, and his claim to neatness and orderliness in life by holding on to an ideal of purer womanhood, in the first place represented by the young cousin whom he was to marry, the innocent fair-haired girl
of his own mother’s blood, and brought up as she had been. He carried her image with him to Hamburg and Amsterdam, and that trait in him which his wife called childishness made him deck it out like a doll or an icon; out in China it became highly ethereal and romantic, and he used to repeat to himself little sayings of hers, to recall her low, soft voice. Now he was happy to be back in Denmark, married and in his own home, and to find his young wife as perfect as his portrait of her. At times he felt a vague longing for a bit of weakness within her, or for an occasional appeal to his own strength, which, as things were, only made him out a clumsy figure beside her delicate form. He gave her all that she wanted, and out of his pride in her superiority left to her all decisions on their house and on their daily and social life. Only within their charity work it happened that the husband and wife did not see eye to eye, and that Emilie would give him a little lecture on his credulity. “What an absurd person you are, Jakob,” she said. “You will believe everything that these people tell you—not because you cannot help it, but because you do really wish to believe them.” “Do you not wish to believe them?” he asked her. “I cannot see,” she replied, “how one can well wish to believe or not to believe. I wish to find out the truth. Once a thing is not true,” she added, “it matters little to me whatever else it may be.”

A short time after his wedding Jakob one day had a letter from a rejected supplicant, a former maid in his father-in-law’s house, who informed him that while he was away in China his wife had a liaison with Charlie Dreyer. He knew it to be a lie, tore up the letter, and did not give it another thought.

They had no children. This to Emilie was a grave affliction; she felt that she was lacking in her duties. When they had been married for five years Jakob, vexed by his mother’s constant concern,
and with the future of the firm on his mind, suggested to his wife that they should adopt a child, to carry forward the house. Emilie at once, and with much energy and indignation, repudiated the idea; it had to her all the appearance of a comedy, and she would not see her father’s firm encumbered with a sham heir. Jakob held forth to her upon the Antonines with but little effect.

But when six months later he again took up the subject, to her own surprise she found that it was no longer repellent. Unknowingly she must have given it a place in her thought, and let it take root there, for by now it seemed familiar to her. She listened to her husband, looked at him, and felt kindly towards him. “If this is what he has been longing for,” she thought, “I must not oppose it.” But in her own heart she knew clearly and coldly, and with awe of her own coldness the true reason for her indulgence: the deep apprehension, that when a child had been adopted there would be no more obligation to her of producing an heir to the firm, a grandson to her father, a child to her husband.

It was indeed their little divergences in regard to the deserving or undeserving poor which brought upon the young couple of Bredgade the events recounted in this tale. In summer-time they lived in Emilie’s father’s villa on the Strandvej, and Jakob would drive in to town, and out, in a small gig. One day he decided to profit by his wife’s absence to visit an unquestionably unworthy mendicant, an old sea-captain from one of his ships. He took his way through the ancient town, where it was difficult to drive a carriage, and where it was such an exceptional sight that people came up from the cellars to stare at it. In the narrow lane of Adelgade a drunken man waved his arms in front of the horse; it shied, and knocked down a small boy with a heavy wheelbarrow piled high with washing. The wheelbarrow and the washing
ended sadly in the gutter. A crowd immediately collected round the spot, but expressed neither indignation nor sympathy. Jakob made his groom lift the little boy onto the scat. The child was smeared with blood and dirt, but he was not badly hurt, nor in the least scared. He seemed to take this accident as an adventure in general, or as if it had happened to somebody else. “Why did you not get out of my way, you little idiot?” Jakob asked him. “I wanted to look at the horse,” said the child, and added: “Now, I can see it well from here.”

Jakob got the boy’s whereabouts from an onlooker, paid him to take the wheelbarrow back, and himself drove the child home. The sordidness of Madame Mahler’s house, and her own, one-eyed, blunt unfeelingness impressed him unpleasantly; still he had before now been inside the houses of the poor. But he was, here, struck by a strange incongruity between the backyard and the child who lived in it. It was as if, unknowingly, Madame Mahler was housing, and knocking about, a small, gentle, wild animal, or a sprite. On his way to the villa he reflected that the child had reminded him of his wife; he had a reserved, as it were selfless, way with him, behind which one guessed great, integrate strength and endurance.

He did not speak of the incident that evening, but he went back to Madame Mahler’s house to inquire about the boy, and, after a while, he recounted the adventure to his wife and, somewhat shyly and half in jest, proposed to her that they should take the pretty, forlorn child as their own.

Half in jest she entered on his idea. It would be better, she thought, than taking on a child whose parents she knew. After this day she herself at times dwelt upon the matter when she could find nothing else to talk to him about. They consulted the family lawyer, and sent their old doctor to look the child over.
Jakob was surprised and grateful at his wife’s compliance with his wish. She listened with gentle interest when he developed his plans, and would even sometimes vent her own ideas on education.

Lately Jakob had found his domestic atmosphere almost too perfect, and had had an adventure in town. Now he tired of it and finished it. He bought Emilie presents, and left her to make her own conditions as to the adoption of the child. He might, she said, bring the boy to the house on the first of October, when they had moved into town from the country, but she herself would reserve her final decision in the matter until April, when he should have been with them for six months. If by then she did not find the child fit for their plan she would hand him over to some honest, kindly family in the employ of the firm. Till April they themselves would likewise be only Uncle and Aunt Vandamm to the boy.

They did not talk to their family of the project, and this circumstance accentuated the new feeling of comradeship between them. How very different, Emilie said to herself, would the case have proved had she been expecting a child in the orthodox way of women. There was indeed something neat and proper about settling the affairs of nature according to your own mind. “And,” she whispered in her mind, as her glance ran down her looking-glass “in keeping your figure.”