Last Tales (38 page)

In this light air and among this light-hearted crowd, Ib
crossed the Knippelsbro on his way home from a visit to Petra. He was held up by the bridge being raised to let through a tugboat with a heavy barge behind it. He looked at the name of the boat:
Olivia Svendsen
. There was a haze above the surface of the water as high up as pillars of the bridge, through it
Olivia’s
red funnel-marking shone like a wax seal on a faded letter, and gave the impression that she was a lusty woman. As he turned round to take a farewell look at the old borough of Christianshavn, the golden spire of Our Saviour’s Church suddenly glinted in the sun like a fish leaping in opaque water.

While he waited Ib’s thoughts were still with Petra. He had known, what the girl could not guess: that this meeting of theirs was the last. In itself it was short, for she had had to go to church with her mother in the morning; they had sat together in that small apartment of his which was their usual meeting place, he on the bed and she on the chair, talking about things. It seemed to him that in the course of this talk he had seen Petra’s face for the first time, for till now he had been, like Professor Sivertsen himself, mainly fascinated by the beauty of her body. Her coarse young face, with its thick lips and eyebrows, today had revealed a new side of her being to him; she looked, he thought, like a brent goose of the fields of Ballegaard. It was as if he had been talking not to a beautiful woman but to a young man, his friend, to whom he might confide his plans, his unhappy love and even his feeling of uneasiness about a mistress from whom he received more than he gave back. They had not, though, talked about any concerns of his, but had been discussing problems of Petra’s life, her mother’s tyranny and a project of hers to learn millinery, and, except for his regret at not being able to beg Adelaide or Drude to recommend his sweetheart to the milliner who made their own hats, the meeting had been pleasant. He had left Petra with a relief akin to that of the Copenhagen girls who had set away their galoshes. “If only,” he reflected, “one
might have a guarantee that each rendezvous was the last, one might keep up a love affair almost forever.”

On his return to the barracks he was handed a letter and informed that it had been brought an hour ago by a footman in the Galen livery. It ran:

Dear Ib,

I want you to come to Aunt Nathalie’s house at four o’clock this afternoon. Aunt Nathalie will not be in, nor Oline either, so I am enclosing the front-door key, and you will let yourself in. You must be sure to come. Good-bye, my dear Ib. Your sister,

Drude.

Now this short note might strike a sober-minded reader as in more than one way somewhat out of the ordinary. For why would Drude, whom one must suppose to be inside Aunt Nathalie’s house and in a position to open the door to him, enclose the key to it in her letter? The reason for the arrangement, which was Adelaide’s reluctance to sit waiting in an empty house, the letter did not give. Why, next, did not Drude, in inviting Ib to Aunt Nathalie’s house, state that she herself meant to come there? The explanation of the evasion was that Drude was an honest girl, and, even in an intrigue like the present, averse to telling a direct lie. And was there not, lastly, an incongruity in style between the laconic note itself and its tender, pathetic farewell greeting? These peculiarities, however, with the three young people involved in the matter passed unnoticed, since they were none of them sober-minded and to all of them, at the moment, all things were out of the ordinary.

It had not often happened in the life of the brother and sister that Drude had asked Ib for advice or help; it did not occur to him to disobey.

So he brought the key with him and let himself into the
house in Rosenvænget even a while before four. It might be a good thing to sit in Aunt Nathalie’s room waiting for Drude. The blinds were down, for the old lady was afraid of her covers fading in the sun, but the familiar smell of ancient books, hyacinths and the dog basket, the inhabitant of which was out with old Oline, received him as mildly and vivaciously as if it had been Aunt Nathalie herself kissing him on both cheeks. He pulled up the blinds, lighted a cigar and sat down. As he looked around the rooms it was brought home to him that they were furnished not so much with tangible objects as with the emotional experiences of an old maid’s long life: girlhood friendships, travels to Germany and Rome, two wars, possibly a virginal heartache of long ago. The things began to speak to him. “Why,” they asked, “have you and all your brothers and sisters run away from rooms furnished by the heart to halls filled with objects purchased in foreign cities, designed and manufactured after the taste of great foreign people, according to the taste of the Empress of France?” He thought for a long time of his home at Ballegaard, in which things had likewise grown up on their own.

Ib was perhaps a bit clairvoyant this afternoon. As he tried to explain matters to Aunt Nathalie’s armchairs, potted plants and sofa cushions, he viewed distant things and events with great lucidity. First, that glittering and dazzling Second Empire of France of which he had seen a glimpse when two years ago he had been on a visit to France with Leopold. The great, terrible downfall of it was to come; it was not far away; he was, he surmised, to witness it with his own eyes. Like avalanches in a mountain landslide, one thundering down on the heels of the other, the coming falls of other radiant worlds began to echo around him. The golden world of Russia, that had held his brother captive, would fall too, and it would look like the end of time. Other, later glories would follow it. The while the quiet world of simple, innocent human hearts might still remain. “Why, then,” he repeated the question put to him, “have we been running away
from safe things, which wished us well, to golden halls in which we were risking our peace of heart?” He sat on for a time, smoking his cigar. “You see,” he answered, “it could not be helped; we had to go. Those golden halls did not attract my brothers and sisters or me myself, on account of their luxury and comfort, their food and wine and soft beds. For you know that we are none of us soft-skinned, and poverty to us holds nothing at all frightening. We have been drawn to the world of splendor—irresistibly like moths to the flame—not because it Was rich, but because its riches were boundless. The quality of boundlessness in any sphere would have drawn us in the same manner.”

As still Drude did not come he walked from the sitting room into the small study beside it, which during the season served as Drude’s private salon. By the window stood a lady’s escritoire with a number of old friends, framed and under glass, upon its shelves. He himself was there, a grave boy of twelve with his first gun. Drude and Adelaide were there, lanky lasses of twelve and thirteen, twined together, with their hair down their backs. As again he set away the picture, his eyes fell on a sheet of paper in Leopold’s handwriting. It was half covered by a book, as if Drude had been leaving to chance whether he should catch sight of it or not. He let his gaze run over that well-known, ever-welcome hand until it was caught by five lines of a verse:

“Qui les saura, mes secrètes amours?
Je me ris des soupçons, je me ris des discours
Quoique l’on parle et que l’on cause.
Nul ne les saura, mes secrètes amours,
Que celle qui les cause.”

He recognized it; it was an old French poem that he himself had struck upon in an ancient book of poetry; it was supposed to have been written by the King of France to a maid-of-honor, Mademoiselle de la Vallière. He had scratched it, with the diamond of the ring that Leopold was presenting to
Mademoiselle Fifi, upon a pane of Leopold’s dressing room, and his cousin, who was no great reader of poetry, had been attracted by it and had questioned him about it. Why, now, had he taken it up, and what use was he making of it? Ib’s proprietorship in the verse seemed to give him a right to read the letter through.

It was a love letter, preparing an elopement. He read the burning words of longing, the vows and the ecstatic terms of adoration. “As I dare not send my own carriage, the droshky will be waiting for you by Østerport. The coachman is well known to me and loyal. Be not afraid, my wild rose, he will drive you safely to the place where he who loves you most in the world is waiting for you.” He turned the letter over and gazed at the first line and then at the signature. The letter was to Drude from Leopold.

He grew a little giddy in the reading; he had to read the whole note over again. This time he was well aware that he was committing a breach of the law of honesty, but the depth of dishonesty revealed justified his action. He read it all through for a third time. Then he became very pale.

Ib was in uniform, his sword by his side. It could not be but that he must feel and reason like an officer. Even before he had arranged his ideas about the extent and the consequences of the treachery, his hand went to his sword hilt, and his whole being cried out for revenge, for blood. It was a good thing that one had a sword, sharp-edged, within reach of hand. It was a good thing that one could kill, and kill soon, at once. His own blood mounted to his head, behind his eyes; Aunt Nathalie’s bookshelves, embroidered cushions and hyacinths all turned a deep scarlet.

A number of old tales of seduction, at which he and Leopold had laughed between them, came back to him. The two cousins had been hunting together in this field as in others, and had seen fair women as the noblest game of all. But the hunting of a friend’s sister, the purest and proudest maiden in the country, was no longer a gay, gallant venture, but
black and base treason. The hunting of her in words borrowed from that friend himself was a breach of sworn brotherhood.

He once more took up the letter—which by now was scarlet, like the room itself—and looked at the date. It had been written on the previous day. Thus the hour of the flight, which in the letter was “tomorrow afternoon at six,” was in reality today, within two hours. Within an hour the droshky would be waiting by Østerport; if he went there he would find it. He would force the coachman to drive it to its destination, wherever that would be; in less than three hours Leopold would find himself face to face with the revenger. He should be forced to draw then, and Ib was a fine swordsman. It was a good thing to know that within two hours the world would have been cleansed of a traitor. Only the waiting time was long; how was he to make it pass? He went to the window, in need of the sight of open air.

By and by, in self-preservation his mind turned from the hideous and contemptible in search of something pure and good. He thought of Drude.

He and she had always been such friends. It could not be that she had written her note to him, to the barracks, just in order to get him out of her way. Or if it was so, what power must not her lover, and her passion for him, have over her! He knew that power well himself; he grieved for his sister’s sake, and his thoughts again fled from his theme. Then after a long time he found himself wondering deeply at the fact that this sister, up till now so close to him, a second self, was today in a position so different from his own.

“Women,” he reflected, “have been strangely favored in life. A young girl, solely by abandoning her honor, will be sure to find herself, even within the next hour, in the arms of the beloved.”

As in his mind he pronounced the word “arms,” and again the words “arms of the beloved,” his course of thought switched. Adelaide’s cool, slender arms, springing from the
white rounded shoulders and flowing into the graceful delta of ten rosy fingertips. Smooth arms, with a silky swirl at the elbow, yet strong enough to sweep along and bear down the strongest of swimmers. “In the arms of the beloved.”

His mind felt its way as in the dark, step by step, itself wondering at the places to which it was taken. Yes, he might be in time to save his sister and kill the offender. He might be in time to prevent that embrace from which his thoughts had shrunk. To which, even while he was standing here immovable by the window, the thoughts of the lovers were turned, he himself best knew with what yearning and transport and trembling. She would never find herself in the arms of the beloved.

And what, then, would he have done for his fair sister? She would be left for the remaining years of her life—Drude—with the one remembrance: that there was nothing to remember.

Ib was no moralist; very rarely in his life had he given thought to the problems of guilt or innocence. His indignation and abhorrence at the reading of Leopold’s letter a quarter of an hour ago had been a new experience, surprising to himself. It now came upon him that he had come near to committing what is called a sin. That he had been, and that he was still, in danger of committing a sin against a higher law than that broken by Leopold. He found that he could not name this supreme law, but he knew that it was there, and must be obeyed.

When he had got so far, his hand let go of the sword hilt.

The bell of the street door rang. Still in his own thoughts he went out into the small dim hall to open the door to Kirstine, Adelaide’s maid, in a black shawl and a small black bonnet. She would, he reflected, have come with a message from Adelaide to Drude, and he would have to find, and to give her, an explanation of Drude’s absence. Ib was courteous to all women. He held open the door to her, so that she might
deliver her message in the sitting room, then closed it behind her. And it was Adelaide.

The late afternoon sun for a moment came out in the dim sky. In its rays he saw her mouth and shoulders close to him.

Kirstine’s small black bonnet with its black strings, a chambermaid’s bonnet, looked queer upon Adelaide’s head. If Adelaide herself had not felt the significance of the situation so deeply, upon her entrance into the room she would have undone the strings and laid the bonnet on the table. Ib understood the negative gesture; the cataclysmic character of Adelaide’s appearance in Aunt Nathalie’s house was finally affirmed by the fact that she was looking at him, and speaking to him, beneath Kirstine’s hat.