Winter's Tales (29 page)

“Some time after,” Sune continued, “Polycrates visited Orontes, the Governor of Magnesia. His daughter, warned by a dream, begged him not to go, but he did not listen to her.” “And what
then?” asked the King. Sune said: “At Magnesia King Polycrates was put to death.”

“But I,” said the King, after a moment, “have not complied to sacrifice to the fates, to checker my luck.” “No,” said Sune, smiling, “your ring is a free gift from the fates; they pay obedience to you on their own accord. Yours will be a different tale to write down in books.” “Then tell me,” said the King, “by the comradeship of your childhood, what significance do you give to it?” “My Lord,” said Sune, now grave, “I know this: that events attain significance from the state of mind of the men to whom they happen, and no outward event is the same to two men. You are my King and my Sovereign, but you are not my penitent. And I do not know your mind.”

The King sat for a little while in silence. “When Granze found the ring, and cried out to me,” he said, “I had my thoughts with King Canute of Denmark. You never forget a tale, Sune. You will remember how the sea did not obey King Canute, when he ordained her.” “Yes, I know the tale, my lord,” said Sune. “King Canute himself called forth the incident, to put his flatterers and eye servants to shame, and he was never a greater King than at that hour.” “Nay,” said the King. “But if the sea had obeyed him? If it had obeyed him, Sune?”

There was a long silence.

He held up his hand. “The stone in the ring,” he said, “is blue, like the sea.” He stretched out his hand to Sune to see.

Sune lifted up the King’s fingers respectfully, but stood for such a long time dead still, gazing at them, that the King asked him: “What are you looking at?” Sune released the King’s hand, and let his own hand fall. “As God lives, my lord,” he said in a low, clear voice, “this is such a strange thing that I hardly dare speak to you of it. When last I saw a ring like this, it sat on the hand of
my kinswoman, the wife of your Lord High Constable Stig Andersen.” “Upon her hand?” the King said. “Yes,” said Sune, “in very truth, upon her right hand.” “What is her name?” the King asked him. “Ingeborg,” answered Sune.

“How can that be?” the King asked. “No, my lord, I know not,” said Sune. “I was staying with her husband at Møllerup, in the country of Mols, just lately, a week ago, as I came from France. We sailed together in a boat out to a small island, Hielm, not far from the coast, which belongs to her husband. It was a clear, sunny day, the sea was blue, and the Lady Ingeborg let her hand trail in the water. Her fingers were slim and smooth; the ring was too large for them, and I told her to be careful, lest she should lose it in the sea, for, I said, she would not get another like it.” The King looked at the ring and smiled. “So Granze’s fish,” he said, “has come across the sea from our country of Mols.”

After a while he said: “I have heard much of the beauty of your kinswoman, but I have never seen her for myself. Is she indeed so fair?” “Yes, she is indeed very fair,” said Sune.

Before the eyes of the King’s mind rose the picture of the boat in blue water and a gay breeze, with the young black priest in it, and the fair lady, in silk and gold, her white fingers playing in the ripples, and underneath them the big fish swimming in the dark-blue shadow of the keel. “Why did you tell your kinswoman that she would not get another ring like this one?” he asked Sune. Sune laughed. “My lord,” he said, “I have known my kinswoman since she was a child. I have taught her to play chess, and the lute, and we have jested together many times. I said to her, in jest, that she must take good care of her ring, for she would not get another blue stone which was so like her own eyes.” The King said: “It is gracious and courteous in the Lady Ingeborg to send me her ring by the fish. I shall wear it until I can give it back to her.”

“It is a curious thing,” he added after a moment, “when fair women wear jewels, these mate themselves with some part of their face or body. Pearls seem to be only another expression of the fairness of their neck and breasts, rubies and garnets of their lips, finger-tips and nipples. And this blue stone, you tell me, is like the lady’s eyes.”

Granze had gone back to his fire, but from there he had watched the talk, and kept his eyes on the one face or the other. He cried out to the King: “Now the fish has swum, and has been caught, now it is fried and ready to serve. It remains but for you to eat it; your meal is here for you.”

King Erik of Denmark, surnamed dipping, was murdered in the barn of Finnerup, in the year of 1286, by a party of rebellious vassals. According to the tradition and the old ballads, the murderers were headed by the King’s Lord High Constable, Stig Andersen Hvide, who killed King Erik in revenge, because he had seduced his wife, Ingeborg.

PETER AND
               ROSA

O
NE YEAR, a century ago, spring was late in Denmark. During the last days of March, the Sound was ice-bound, and blind, from the Danish to the Swedish coast. The snow in the fields and on the roads thawed a little in the day, only to freeze again at night; the earth and the air were equally without hope or mercy.

Then one night, after a week of raw and clammy fog, it began to rain. The hard, inexorable sky over the dead landscape broke, dissolved into streaming life and became one with the ground. On all sides the incessant whisper of falling water re-echoed; it increased and grew into a song. The world stirred beneath it; things drew breath in the dark. Once more it was announced to the hills and valleys, to the woods and the chained brooks: “You are to live.”

In the parson’s house at Søllerød, his sister’s son, fifteen-year-old Peter Købke, sat by a tallow candle over his Fathers of the Church, when through the rustle of the rain his ear caught a new sound, and he left the book, got up and opened the window. How the noise of the rain rose then! But he listened to other, magic voices within the night. They came from above, out of the ether itself, and Peter lifted his face to them. The night was dark, yet this was no longer winter gloom; it was pregnant with clarity, and as he questioned it, it answered him. And over his head, called the music of wandering life in the skies. Wings sang up there; clear flutes played; shrill pipe-signals were exchanged high up beyond his head. It was the trekking birds on their way north.

He stood for a long time thinking of them; he let them pass before the eyes of his mind one by one. Here travelled long wedges of wild geese, flights of fen-duck and teal, with the shell-duck, for which one lies in wait in the late, warm evenings of August. All the pleasures of summer drew their course across the sky; a migration
of hope and joy journeyed tonight, a mighty promise, set out to many voices.

Peter was a great huntsman, and his old gun was his dearest possession; his soul ascended to the sky to meet the soul of the wild birds. He knew well what was in their hearts. Now they cried: “Northward! Northward!” They pierced the Danish rain with their stretched necks, and felt it in their small clear eyes. They hastened away to the Northern summer of play and change, where the sun and the rain share the infinite vault of heaven between them; they went off to the innumerable, nameless, clear lakes and to the white summer nights of the North. They hurried forth to fight and to make love. Higher up, in the lofts of the world, perhaps big swarms of quail, thrush and snipe were on the move. Such a tremendous stream of longing, on its way to its goal, passed above his head, that Peter, down on the ground, felt his limbs ache. He flew a long way with the geese.

Peter wanted to go to sea, but the parson held him to his books. Tonight, in the open window, he slowly and solemnly thought his past and his future over, and vowed to run away and become a sailor. At this moment he forgave his books, and no longer planned to burn them all up. Let them collect dust, he thought, or fall into the hands of dusty people fit for books. He himself would live under sails, on a swinging deck, and would watch a new horizon rise with each morning’s sun. As he had taken this resolution he was filled with such deep gratitude that he folded his hands upon the window-sill. He had been piously brought up; his thanks were dedicated to God, but they strolled a little on their way, as if beaten off their course by the rain. He thanked the spring, the birds and the rain itself.

Within the parson’s house death was zealously kept in view and lectured upon, and Peter, in his survey of the future, also took the
sailor’s end into consideration. His mind dwelled for some time on his last couch, at the bottom of the sea. Soberly, his brows knitted, he contemplated, as it were, his own bones upon the sand. The deep-water currents would pass through his eyes, like a row of clear, green dreams; big fish, whales even, would float above him like clouds, and a shoal of small fishes might suddenly rush along, an endless streak, like the birds tonight. It would be peaceful, he reflected, and better than a funeral at Søllerød, with his uncle in the pulpit.

The birds travelled forth over the Sound, through the stripes of grey rain. The lights of Elsinore glimmered deep below, like a fragment of the Milky Way. A salt wind met them as they came out beyond the open water of the Kattegat. Long stretches of sea and earth, of woods, wasteland and moors, swept south under them in the course of the night.

At dawn they sank through the silvery air and descended upon a long file of flat and bare holms. The rocks shone roseate as the sun came up; little glints of light came trickling upon the wavelets. The rays of the morning refracted within the duck’s own fine necks and wings. They cackled and quacked, picked and preened their feathers, and set to sleep, with their heads under their wings.

A few days later, in the afternoon, the parson’s daughter Rosa stood by her loom, at which she had just set up a piece of red and blue cotton. She did not work at it, but looked out through the window. Her mind was balancing upon a thin ridge, from which at any moment it might tumble either into ecstasy at the new feeling of spring in the air, and at her own fresh beauty—or, on the other side, into bitter wrath against all the world.

Rosa was the youngest of three sisters; the two others had both married and gone away, one to Møen and one to Holstein. She was a spoilt child in the house, and could say and do what she liked,
but she was not exactly happy. She was lonely, and in her heart she believed that some time something horrible would happen to her.

Rosa was tall for her age, with a round face, a clear skin and a mouth like Cupid’s bow. Her hair curled and crisped so obstinately that it was difficult for her to plait it, and her long eyelashes gave her the air of glancing at people from an ambush. She had on an old, faded blue winter frock, too short in the sleeves, and a pair of coarse, patched shoes. But the ease and gracefulness of her young body lent to the rough clothes a classical and pathetic majesty.

Rosa’s mother had died at her birth, and the parson’s mind was fixed upon the grave. The daily life of the parsonage, even, was run with a view to the world hereafter; the idea of mortality filled the rooms. To grow up in the house was to the young people a problem and a struggle, as if fatal influences were dragging them the other way, into the earth, and admonishing them to give up the vain and dangerous task of living. In her own way Rosa meditated upon death as much as Peter. But she disliked the thought of it; she was not even allured by the picture of paradise with her Mother in it, and she trusted that she would live a hundred years still.

All the same during this last winter she had often been so weary of, so angry with her surroundings that in order to escape and punish them she had wished to die. But as the weather changed she too had changed her mind. It was better, she thought, that the others should all die. Free from them, and alone, she would walk over the green earth, pick violets and watch the plovers flitting low over the fields; she would make pebbles leap on the water, and bathe undisturbed in the rivers and the sea. The vision of this happy world has been so vivid with her that she was surprised when she heard her father scolding Peter in the next room, and realized that they were both still with her.

This spring Rosa had a particular grudge against fate. She felt it strongly, yet she did not like to admit it to herself.

Peter, her orphan cousin, had been adopted into the house nine years ago, when both he and Rosa were six years old. She could still, if she wanted to, recall the time when he had not been there, and remember the dolls, which, with the arrival of the boy, had faded out of her existence. The two children got on well, for Peter was a good-natured creature and easy to dominate, and they had then had many great adventures together.

But two years ago Rosa grew up taller than the boy. And at the same time she came into possession of a world of her own, inaccessible to the others, as the world of music is inaccessible to the tone-deaf. Nobody could tell where her world lay; neither did the substance of it lend itself to words. The others would never understand her, were she to tell them that it was both infinite and secluded, playful and very grave, safe and dangerous. She could not explain, either, how she herself was one with it, so that through the loveliness and power of her dream-world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth. Sometimes, she felt, she was expressing the nature of the dream-world in her movements and her voice, but she was then speaking a language of which they had no knowledge. Within this mystic garden of hers she was altogether out of the reach of a clumsy boy with dirty hands and scratched knees; she almost forgot her old playfellow.

Then last winter Peter had suddenly, as it were, caught her up. He became the taller of the two by half a head, and this time Rosa reflected with bitterness he would remain so. He became so much stronger than she that it alarmed and offended the girl. On his own he began to play the flute. Peter was of a philosophical turn of mind, and, seven or eight years ago, when the two were walking together,
he had often held forth to Rosa on the elements and order of the universe, and on the curious fact that the moon, when quite young and tender, was let out to play at the hour when the other children were put to bed, but that when she grew old and decrepit she should be chased out early in the morning, when other old people like to stay in bed. But he had never talked much in the presence of his elders, and when Rosa ceased to take an interest in his enterprises or reflections, he had withdrawn into himself. Now lately he would, uninvitedly, and before the whole household, give venture to his own fancies about the world, and many of them rang strangely in Rosa’s mind, like echoes of hers. At such moments she fixed her gaze hard on him, seized by a deep fear. She could no longer, she felt, be sure of her dream-world. Peter might find the “Sesame” which opened it, and encroach upon it, and she might meet him there any day.