Last Tales (44 page)
“The second perfect happiness,” said Yorick, “is this: to know for certain that you are fulfilling the will of God.”
There was a short pause.
“Mais oui!”
said Orosmane proudly. “You are there speaking rightly and seemly to a king
par la grâce de Dieu
. The burden of the crown, you must know, is a heavy one, but our insight and knowledge—by the grace of God—will swing the balance. Your second supreme happiness, Poet, is my inheritance and my element, and cannot fail me. But see you here: since tonight we have met and have been united, I will share that happiness with you. From now on you will, both of you, in your separate callings, the poet and the whore, be fulfilling the will of God. You will, in hours of despondency, remember these my words and be comforted, and never again will you weep—as Lise wept, the while I was tarrying outside your door.
“But now, my soothsayer, good Athenian—now to the third perfect happiness of which you spoke.”
As Yorick did not answer at once he repeated: “The third, what is it?”
Yorick answered: “The cessation of pain.”
Orosmane’s face became clear with an almost luminous pallor. In a last, flying, completely weightless leap—as in the language of the ballet is called
grand jeté
—he finished off his solo.
“Ha!” he cried. “There you hit the nail on the head! There you speak from my own heart! Would that you knew how many times I have experienced your third perfect happiness! And indeed, that was why, first of all, even as a child, I demanded
to be made almighty—in order that I should no longer feel the cane—old Ditlevs’ cane!”
Yorick took a step back, as if in his flying leap Orosmane had knocked him over. Slowly his own face whitened and lit up like that of his
vis-à-vis
. His intoxication fell from him, or it increased to the point of steadying him.
The stillness that now filled the room was not the absence of speech; it was a vital affirmation superseding words.
Finally the host took a step forward, as he had before taken a step back, and bent a knee before the armchair. He raised his guest’s noble hand from the arm of the chair, brought it to his lips, and for a long time kept his mouth pressed upon it. Orosmane, immovable as he, lowered his gaze to the lowered head before him.
The kneeling man stood up, went and sat down on the bed, and pulled on his stocking and his shoe.
“Are you not staying on?” asked Orosmane.
“Nay, I am going,” said Yorick. “My business here was finished already before you came. But do you stay a while with Lise. In the lap of the people,” he added after a short pause, “King and Poet can mingle their innermost being—just as in times of old the Nordic vikings in confirmation of sworn brotherhood—a pact of life and death—let their blood mingle, to soak into the earth’s mute, bounteous womb.”
“Good night, Sire,” he said. “Good night, Lise.”
He took from a peg on the wall an old cloak, which had once been black, but now after many years of service showed shades of green and gray. He buttoned it, listened for the rain outside, and turned up his collar. His hat had fallen to the floor, he found it, pressed it down upon his head, and went out of the door and shut it after him.
As he descended the steep stairway, he heard muffled voices from below. On the next landing he encountered a small company mounting in single file. At the head was a young man wearing a livery under his cloak, with a lantern in his hand. An old gentleman, who had some difficulty with the
uneven stairs, and two more persons followed. All faces in the gleam from the lantern were pale and anxious.
As the group met him on his way down, they halted, and thereby halted him too, since in the narrow space he could not get round them.
They looked at him doubtfully for a few seconds, and seemed to wish to put a question to him, but to be somehow puzzled as to how to shape it. Yorick forestalled them by whistling softly, and by pointing upwards over his shoulder with his thumb.
“Yes, that is where Lise lives,” he said. “An honest wench. I have just paid her off and left her.”
The little ascending procession pressed themselves against the wall so that he could pass. But as he went by him, the old gentleman said in a low and hoarse voice:
“And there
ist kein anderer daoben?”
“Kein anderer,”
answered Yorick and whistled again, this time a snatch of a ditty.
He continued his somewhat uncertain way to the ground, and before he had quite reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard the company above him turn round and follow him downwards.
About the Author
ISAK DINESEN is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, she anpad her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation. She was divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. There she began to write in English under the
nom de plume
Isak Dinesen. Her first book, and literary success, was
Seven Gothic Tales
. It was followed by
Out of Africa, The Angelic Avengers
(written under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel),
Winter’s Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass
and
Ehrengard
. She died in 1962.
Table of Contents
The Cardinal’s First Tale
The Cloak
Night Walk
Of Hidden Thoughts and Of Heaven
Tales of Two old Gentlemen
The Cardinal’s Third Tale
The Blank Page
The Caryatids, an Unfinished Tale
Echoes
Country Tale
Copenhagen Season
Converse at Night in Copenhagen