Winter's Tales (24 page)

It was a curious trait in our friendship that I should so often dream of Alkmene, even when in the day I had not given her a thought. In my dreams she frequently disappeared, and was lost. One might imagine that these dreams, in the end, would have inspired me with a real fear of losing her. But it was not so; on the contrary, and to my own peril, they convinced me that, even when
she appeared to be gone and away, she would be sure to come back when the day dawned.

Both as a child and a girl Mene was wonderfully light of movement. If she only lifted an arm to smooth her hair, it was a thing to make one gape, so favourable and faultless was it. And when she skipped in the woods she made me think of a roe, or of a fish that leaps in a brook. Later I have seen some famous dancers in the great theatres, but for sweetness and harmony of motion none of them to my mind could touch the girl in the parsonage. I saw this from the beginning, but I do not think that the others ever noticed it; to Gertrud it was just part of the general excellence of the child. My father, however, remarked upon it. Now in the parsonage all dancing was prohibited. Moreover, to Gertrud, the art of the dance was somehow connected with the theatre and with the child’s early years, of which she was very jealous, so that she would not hear or think of them. Alkmene, then, was never allowed to dance. But the parson taught her many other things. For a while he even set himself to teach her Greek, at which, he told me, she was quite extraordinarily quick. She could recite verses from the Greek comedies and tragedies.

During the next years Alkmene twice tried to run away from the parsonage. The first time, on a day in March, when the snow was just off the ground, she walked straight south across the fields, and had gone more than twelve miles before the parson’s cowman, who was sent out in search that way, caught up with her and brought her home. Gertrud had believed the child drowned; her distress had been pitiful. She now clasped the girl to her bosom, stared at her, and kept on asking her why she had done them this great grief. The next day, when she thought that she was alone with the child, I heard her again question her: “Why did you run away? Why did you leave us?” And still she got no answer.

Two years later, when she was eleven, the girl again ran off, and this time gave her parents a still worse fright. For there had been a band of gypsies in the village; they had left the night before with their caravan, and had gone across the moors west of my father’s land, and it was clear that Mene had gone after them. These people had a bad name in the country; it was believed that they had killed a pedlar a year ago. This time it was I who rode out and brought home the girl. I had by then finished my lessons with the parson. I had also travelled, but I still frequently came down to the parsonage.

It was a hot day in midsummer; there was a quivering air and great mirages over the moors. Twice I believed that I saw the girl in the vast landscape, when it was but a stack of peat. At last I caught sight of her small figure far away. She walked on quickly; after a while she began to run. It made me laugh, on my horse, as I was so sure that she could not escape me. Still there was something sad in the picture as well. As I came up to her I did not stop her, but for a while rode on side by side with her. She kept on hastening forth. She was bareheaded, very white, her face was wet with sweat. She could not keep pace with the horse. As a black-cock ran out of the heather in front of her and took to the wing with much noise, she stumbled and stood dead still. I felt sorry for her. I thought she was going to cry. “Give me your horse, Vilhelm,” said she, “then I shall still catch up with them.” “No,” I said, “you are to come back. But I shall let you ride, and I will walk.” Not a word said she. So I lifted her into the saddle.

It was a still day. I began to sing, and in a little while Alkmene joined in in her clear voice. We sang many songs, and in the end an old folk-song of a mother lamenting her dead child. I said: “You frighten your people, you fool, when you run away.” She said: “Why will they not let me go?” I sang another verse and then
said: “People are different. Look at my father now; nothing that I do will be right to him, and I am ever in his way. But your folks love you, and think you just a glorious girl, if you will only agree to stay with them.” Alkmene was now silent for a long time; then she asked: “What about the children, Vilhelm, who do not want to be loved?”

We got back late. The summer moon rose, although the sky was still quite light. As we came to my father’s land we crossed a barley field. The corn grew but sparsely in the sandy soil, but all over the field there was such a multitude of yellow marigolds that it seemed to reflect the moon in it, like a lake.

Gertrud, before I went, had made her husband promise to beat the child this time, but it was all forgotten when they got her back. Yet the mother, still very white with fear, could not becalm herself. She said: “You love these wicked people better than us, you would rather be with them than with your father and me. Do you not know that they would have killed you and eaten you?” Alkmene looked at her, her light eyes wide open. “Would they have eaten me?” she asked. Gertrud believed that she was mocking her. “Oh, you hard child!” she cried.

By the time when Mene was to be confirmed, two problems rose to the people of the parsonage. First, the parson found that he had never seen the child’s certificate of baptism, and could not be sure that she had ever really been baptized. He wrote to the professor, but had to wait for the reply, for the old man had left Copenhagen, and had got a high office in a German court. When at last the letter came, the professor would do no more than give his word of honour that the girl was baptized. The parson, now, did not know whether to confirm the girl without more ado, or to baptize her himself, privately, first, to make sure. His wife told me that the dilemma caused him many sleepless nights. He said to me: “Some theologians hold
baptism to be but a symbol. God help us all, symbols are mighty things. I myself may have handled great symbols too lightly.” It was from this time that he gave up teaching the girl Greek. In the end, however, he took his wife’s advice, and confirmed Mene together with the other children of the parish.

But at the confirmation class Mene met with other girls, and listened to their talk. And here, now, the parson and his wife found reason to believe that she heard rumours of how she was not their own child. Alkmene herself did not speak of it; somebody had overheard the girls’ conversation. The parson weighed the matter in his mind, and one day, in my presence—really, I believe, because he feared to open the subject when he was alone with his wife—he told her that he meant to deal openly with the girl, and to tell her the truth. Gertrud at once turned upon him. I had not seen her so hard with him since the time before Mene came. It was as if she had forgotten that she was not really the girl’s mother, and now held him to be wilfully bereaving her of her own child. “Nay,” said the parson, “but I am to lay my hand on the child’s head in the name of the Lord. What if, at that moment, in her heart she knows me to be deceiving her?” Gertrud stood up. “And do you want to take her from me altogether?” she cried. “Have you not seen, then, that she already hates and fears me? If now she is to be taught that I am not her mother, I shall have no means to hold her; she will wholly despise me and turn her back on me!” The parson sat dumb before her accusation. Still, as she spoke, I believe that we both realized that she was right. During these two last years Alkmene had altered and hardened towards her mother; at times she showed her a strange distrust, revolt and hostility. At last the parson said: “Dear wife, it might have been better if we had never taken on this task, but had sat here in our parsonage peacefully, an aging, childless couple.” Gertrud stared at him, quite bewildered. “But we
have laid our hand on the plough,” he went on. “We must now carry through the work, according to our light.” Gertrud began to cry. “Do as you think best,” she said, and left the room.

But as I was going away she lay in wait for me. She took my hand, looked me in the face and said: “Vilhelm, you are my child’s friend. Will you do something for me? Watch her, good Vilhelm. When her father will have spoken to her, note how it affects the poor child, and tell me what she says to you about it. For God help us, she will say nothing to me.” It seemed to me a sad and affecting thing that Gertrud should thus turn to me for help, for she had till now held that no one but herself knew or understood her daughter. So I promised to do as she asked me.

Still a fortnight or so later on she said to me: “God is merciful, Vilhelm, or Jens is a wise man. Behold, since he has spoken to the child she is changed. She has come back to me, and keeps to me as sweetly as when she was a small girl. I myself feel young with it. I happened to look into the mirror today. You may laugh, but it was the face of a young woman that I saw there. I do not know why, but I feel, now, that this good and kindly conformity between us is going to last as long as we live.” She quite forgot to question me on the matter, as she had said she would. “But is it not strange,” she added after a while, “that she has not asked a single question about her real father and mother? She does not know that we could not have answered her.”

To me Alkmene never spoke of her enlightenment. But I think that the parson, in the course of their talk, may have mentioned the professor’s name, for one day she asked me if I knew him. I told her that I had seen him. “I should like,” she said, “to see him, too, some time.”

Gertrud complained to me that Mene was heedless about her clothes, and would take no more care of her Sunday gown, which
she herself had made for her, than of her little faded week-day frocks. But one day the girl happened to hear our old housekeeper speak of my mother’s fine gowns that were all locked up in a big chest in the attic, because my father would not see them, nor let anybody else wear them. She then gave me no peace until, on a day when my father was out, I broke open the chest for her and took out the clothes. She spread them out one by one and sat for a long time gazing at them; in the end she asked me to give her one. This was a dress of thick green silk with a yellow pattern to it. When I see it now it looks to me somewhat like a lime-tree in bloom. I laughed at her and asked her whether she meant to put it on to go to church. “No,” she said, but she would wear it some time.

A little later, on a June evening, Gertrud had been baking fresh bread, and Alkmene begged leave of her to go with me—for I was then home for the summer holidays—and bring some to old Madame Ravn, the widow of our late parson, who lived on the other side of the village. But when we came out on the road, she told me that she did not mean to go to Madame Ravn at all; she would put on her silk gown, and we would go for a walk in the wood and the fields. She kept the gown in a cottage near by, with a woman who had before been working at the parsonage, but had been sent away because she drank. She went in there and soon came out again in the green and yellow frock. She had not put up her hair or washed her hands, yet I do not think that I have ever seen anyone more royal or at ease than she was then.

We walked in the woods, and she did not speak much. Her frock was a little too long for her, and she let it trail on the ground. I told her of my new horse that I had then just bought, and of a quarrel I had had with my father. If we had met people there they must have wondered and laughed at encountering a girl so magnificently dressed upon a forest path. All the same it somehow seemed
natural that she should walk here like that. The wood was fresh. Where the low sun fell into it the foliage was all green and yellow like her gown, and as she walked the silk made a small chirping noise, like a late bird in a tree. We came upon a fox on the path, but we met no human beings.

When the sun was just above the horizon we came out in the fields. Here there was an exceeding high hill. We walked to the top of it, and from there had a great view to all sides over the golden plains and moors, and the glory of them. Alkmene stood quite still and gazed at it all. Her face was as clear and radiant as the air. After a while she drew a deep sigh of joy, and I reflected what ludicrous creatures girls are, who will be made happy by standing on the top of a hill in a silk gown. Later we sat down and ate the bread that Gertrud had meant for the old widow. It was still warm from the oven. Ever since, when I taste fresh bread, I am reminded of that evening and the hill.

As we came home to the parsonage, after Alkmene had again changed her clothes in the cottage, we found Gertrud by a tallow-candle with her glasses on, before a high pile of the girl’s white stockings that were to be darned. She had done a good many already, but I thought that if she were to finish them all she must sit up late into the night. She smiled at us and wanted us to tell her of Madame Ravn. Alkmene stood behind her and looked at her and at the stockings, and it seemed to me that she was growing very white. “Let me help you to darn the stockings, Mother,” she said. “No, my puss,” said Gertrud, and snuffed the candle. “You have been a long way and ought to go to bed.”

In the autumn of that same year a thing happened to me that came to have some influence on my life. A girl in the village, whose name was Sidsel and who was, by the way, daughter to the woman
in whose cottage Alkmene had fetched her silk frock, had a baby that died and fathered me with the child. I did not believe her to be right, for she was no model of virtue. Still people would talk about it. My father said to me: “The child is dead, and Sidsel is to marry the keeper. But you shall not play the fool in your own village, while you wait for the wench in the parsonage to be big enough for you. Go up now to your uncle at Rugaard, in Djursland, for six months. His daughter is two years older than you, and will some day be a rich girl. In any case, you can there learn something about farming; it is time that you get that into your head.” This last part of the lecture was unfair to me, for till now my father had but laughed, and called me a peasant, whenever I took any interest in the farm-work on the estate, which was then in a bad way.