Winter's Tales

  Winter’s Tales

  Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, she and 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.

  ALSO BY Isak Dinesen

  Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard

  (including “Babette’s Feast”)

  Last Tales

  Out of Africa

  Seven Gothic Tales

  Shadows on the Grass

  First Vintage International Edition, July 1993

  Copyright © 1942 by Random House, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1970 by Johan Philip Thomas Ingerslev

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada

  Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by

  Random House, Inc., New York, in 1942.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dinesen, Isak, 1885–1962.

  [Vinter-eventyr. English]

  Winter’s tales/Isak Dinesen. — 1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79182-5

  1. Dinesen, Isak, 1885–1962 Translations into English.

  I. Title

  PT8175.B545V513 1993

  839.8′1372—dc20 92-50615

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  THE YOUNG MAN WITH THE CARNATION

  SORROW-ACRE

  THE HEROINE

  THE SAILOR-BOY’S TALE

  THE PEARLS

  THE INVINCIBLE SLAVE-OWNERS

  THE DREAMING CHILD

  ALKMENE

  THE FISH

  PETER AND ROSA

  A CONSOLATORY TALE

  Also Available by Vintage International

  THE YOUNG MAN

  WITH THE CARNATION

  THREE-QUARTERS of a century ago there lay in Antwerp, near the harbour, a small hotel named the Queen’s Hotel. It was a neat, respectable place, where sea captains stayed with their wives.

  To this house there came, on a March evening, a young man, sunk in gloom. As he walked up from the harbour, to which he had come on a ship from England, he was, he felt, the loneliest being in the world. And there was no one to whom he could speak of his misery, for to the eyes of the world he must seem safe and fortunate, a young man to be envied by everyone.

  He was an author who had had a great success with his first book. The public had loved it; the critics had been at one in praising it; and he had made money on it, after having been poor all his life. The book, from his own experience, treated the hard lot of poor children, and it had brought him into contact with social reformers. He had been enthusiastically received within a circle of highly cultivated, noble men and women. He had even married into their community, the daughter of a famous scientist, a beautiful young woman, who idolized him.

  He was now going to Italy with his wife, there to finish his next book, and was, at the moment, carrying the manuscript in his portmanteau. His wife had preceded him by a few days, for she wanted to visit her old school in Brussels on the way. “It will do me good,” she had said, smiling, “to think and talk of other things than you.” She was now waiting for him at the Queen’s Hotel, and would wish to think and talk of nothing else.

  All these things looked pleasant. But things were not what they looked. They hardly ever were, he reflected, but in his case they were even exactly the opposite. The world had been turned upside down upon him; it was no wonder that he should feel sick, even to death, within it. He had been trapped, and had found out too late.

  For he felt in his heart that he would never again write a great book. He had no more to tell, and the manuscript in his bag was nothing but a pile of paper that weighed down his arm. In his mind he quoted the Bible, because he had been to a Sunday School when he was a boy, and thought: “I am good for nothing but to be cast out and be trodden under foot by men.”

  How was he to face the people who loved him, and had faith in him: his public, his friends and his wife? He had never doubted but that they must love him better than themselves, and must consider his interests before their own, on account of his genius, and because he was a great artist. But when his genius had gone, there were only two possible future courses left. Either the world would despise and desert him, or else it might go on loving him, irrespective of his worthiness as an artist. From this last alternative, although in his thoughts he rarely shied at anything, he turned in a kind of horror vaccui; it seemed in itself to reduce the world to a void and a caricature, a Bedlam. He might bear anything better than that.

  The idea of his fame augmented and intensified his despair. If in the past he had been unhappy, and had at times contemplated throwing himself in the river, it had at least been his own affair. Now he had had the glaring searchlight of renown set on him; a hundred eyes were watching him; and his failure, or suicide, would be the failure and the suicide of a world-famous author.

  And even these considerations were but minor factors in his misfortune. If worse came to worst, he could do without his fellow-creatures. He had no great opinion of them, and might see them go, public, friends and wife, with infinitely less regret than they would ever have suspected, as long as he himself could remain face to face, and on friendly terms, with God.

  The love of God and the certainty that in return God loved him beyond other human beings had upheld him in times of poverty and adversity. He had a talent for gratitude as well; his recent good luck had confirmed and sealed the understanding between God and him. But now he felt that God had turned away from him. And if he were not a great artist, who was he that God should love him? Without his visionary powers, without his retinue of fancies, jests and tragedies, how could he even approach the Lord and implore Him to redress him? The truth was that he was then no better than other people. He might deceive the world, but he had never in his life deceived himself. He had become estranged from God, and how was he now to live?

  His mind wandered, and on its own brought home fresh material for suffering. He remembered his father-in-law’s verdict on modern literature. “Superficiality,” the old man had thundered, “is the mark of it. The age lacks weight; its greatness is hollow. Now your own noble work, my dear boy …” Generally the views of his father-in-law were to him of no consequence whatever, but at the present moment he was so low in spirits that they made him writhe a little. Superficiality, he thought, was the word which the public and the critics would use about him, when they came to know the truth—lightness, hollowness. They called his work noble because he had moved their hearts when he described the sufferings of the poor. But he might as well have written of the sufferings of kings. And he had described them, because he happened to know them. Now, that he had made his fortune, he found that he had got no more to say of the poor, and that he would prefer to hear no more of them. The word “superficiality” made an accompaniment to his steps in the long street.<
br />
  While he had meditated upon these matters he had walked on. The night was cold, a thin, sharp wind ran straight against him. He looked up, and reflected that it was going to rain.

  The young man’s name was Charlie Despard. He was a small, slight person a tiny figure in the lonely street. He was not yet thirty, and looked extraordinarily young for his age; he might have been a boy of seventeen. He had brown hair and skin, but blue eyes, a narrow face and a nose with a faint bend to one side. He was extremely light of movement, and kept himself very straight, even in his present state of depression, and with the heavy portmanteau in his hand. He was well dressed, in a havelock, all his clothes had a new look on him, and were indeed new.

  He turned his mind towards the hotel, wondering whether it would be any better to be in a house than out in the street. He decided that he would have a glass of brandy when he came there. Lately he had turned to brandy for consolation; sometimes he found it there and at other times not. He also thought of his wife, who was waiting for him. She might be asleep by now. If only she would not have locked the door, so that he should have to wake her up and talk, her nearness might be a comfort to him. He thought of her beauty and her kindness to him. She was a tall young woman with yellow hair and blue eyes, and a skin as white as marble. Her face would have been classic if the upper part of it had not been a little short and narrow in proportion to the jaw and chin. The same peculiarity was repeated in her body; the upper part of it was a little too short and slight for the hips and legs. Her name was Laura. She had a clear, grave, gentle gaze, and her blue eyes easily filled with tears of emotion, her admiration for him in itself would make them run full when she looked at him. What was the good of it all to him? She was not really his wife; she had married a phantom of her own imagination, and he was left out in the cold.

  He came to the hotel, and found that he did not even want the brandy. He only stood in the hall, which to him looked like a grave, and asked the porter if his wife had arrived. The old man told him that Madame had arrived safely, and had informed him that Monsieur would come later. He offered to take the traveller’s portmanteau upstairs for him, but Charlie reflected that he had better bear his own burdens. So he got the number of the room from him, and walked up the stairs and along the corridor alone. To his surprise he found the double door of the room unlocked, and went straight in. This seemed to him the first slight favour that fate had shown him for a long time.

  The room, when he entered it, was almost dark; only a faint gas-jet burned by the dressing-table. There was a scent of violets in the air. His wife would have brought them and would have meant to give them to him with a line from a poem. But she lay deep down in the pillows. He was so easily swayed by little things at the present time that his heart warmed at his good luck. While he took off his shoes he looked round and thought: “This room, with its sky-blue wallpaper and crimson curtains, has been kind to me; I will not forget it.”

  But when he got into bed he could not sleep. He heard a clock in the neighborhood strike the quarter-stroke once, and twice, and three times. He felt that he had forgotten the art of sleeping and would have to lie awake for ever. “That is,” he thought, “because I am really dead. There is no longer any difference to me between life and death.”

  Suddenly, without warning, for he had heard no steps approaching, he heard somebody gently turning the handle of the door. He had locked the door when he came in. When the person in the corridor discovered that, he waited a little, then tried it once more. He seemed to give it up, and after a moment softly drummed a little tune upon the door, and repeated it. Again there was a silence; then the stranger lowly whistled a bit of a tune. Charlie became deadly afraid that in the end all this would wake up his wife. He got out of bed, put on his green dressing-gown and went and opened the door with as little noise as possible.

  The corridor was more clearly lighted than the room, and there was a lamp on the wall above the door. Outside, beneath it, stood a young man. He was tall and fair, and so elegantly dressed that Charlie was surprised to meet him in the Queen’s Hotel. He had on evening clothes, with a cloak flung over them, and he wore in a buttonhole a pink carnation that looked fresh and romantic against the black and white. But what struck Charlie the moment he looked at him was the expression in the young man’s face. It was so radiant with happiness, it shone with such gentle, humble, wild, laughing rapture that Charlie had never seen the like of it. An angelic messenger straight from Heaven could not have displayed a more exuberant, glorious ecstasy. It made the poet stare at him for a minute. Then he spoke, in French—since he took it that the distinguished young man of Antwerp must be French, and he himself spoke French well, for he had in his time been apprenticed to a French hairdresser. “What is it you want?” he asked. “My wife is asleep and I very much want to sleep myself.”

  The young man with the carnation had appeared as deeply surprised at the sight of Charlie as Charlie at the sight of him. Still, his strange beatitude was so deeply rooted within him that it took him some time to change his expression into that of a gentleman who meets another gentleman. The light of it remained on his face, mingled with bewilderment, even when he spoke and said: “I beg your pardon. I infinitely regret to have disturbed you. I have made a mistake.” Then Charlie closed the door and turned. With the corner of his eye he saw that his wife was sitting up in her bed. He said, shortly, for she might still be only half awake: “It was a gentleman. I believe he was drunk.” At his words she lay down again, and he went back to bed himself.

  The moment he was in his bed he was seized by a tremendous agitation; he felt that something irreparable had happened to him. For a while he did not know what it was, nor whether it was good or bad. It was as if a gigantic, blazing light had gone up on him, passed, and left him blinded. Then the impression slowly formed and consolidated, and made itself known in a pain so overwhelming that it contracted him as in a spasm.

  For here, he knew, was the glory, the meaning and the key of life. The young man with the carnation had it. That infinite happiness which beamed on the face of the young man with the carnation was to be found somewhere in the world. The young man was aware of the way to it, but he, he had lost it. Once upon a time, it seemed to him, he too had known it, and had let go his hold, and here he was, forever doomed. O God, God in Heaven, at what moment had his own road taken off from the road of the young man with the carnation?

  He saw clearly now that the gloom of his last weeks had been but the foreboding of this total perdition. In his agony, for he was really in the grip of death, he caught at any means of salvation, fumbled in the dark and struck at some of the most enthusiastic reviews of his book. His mind at the next moment shrank from them as if they had burnt him. Here, indeed, lay his ruin and damnation: with the reviewers, the publishers, the reading public, and with his wife. They were the people who wanted books, and to obtain their end would turn a human being into printed matter. He had let himself be seduced by the least seductive people in the world; they had made him sell his soul at a price which was in itself a penalty. “I will put enmity,” he thought, “between the author and the readers, and between thy seed and their seed; thou shalt bruise their heel, but they shall bruise thine head.” It was no wonder that God had ceased to love him, for he had, from his own free will, exchanged the things of the Lord—the moon, the sea, friendship, fights—for the words that describe them. He might now sit in a room and write down these words, to be praised by the critics, while outside, in the corridor, ran the road of the young man with the carnation into that light which made his face shine.

  He did not know how long he had lain like this; he thought that he had wept, but his eyes were dry. In the end he suddenly fell asleep and slept for a minute. When he woke up he was perfectly calm and resolved. He would go away. He would save himself, and he would go in search of that happiness which existed somewhere. If he were to go to the end of the world for it, it did not signify; indeed it might be the best plan to go strai
ght to the end of the world. He would now go down to the harbour and find a ship to take him away. At the idea of a ship he became calm.

  He lay in bed for an hour more; then he got up and dressed. The while he wondered what the young man with the carnation had thought of him. He will have thought, he said to himself: “Ah, le pauvre petit bonhomme à la robe de chambre verte.” Very silently he packed his portmanteau; his manuscript he first planned to leave behind, then took it with him in order to throw it into the sea, and witness its destruction. As he was about to leave the room he bethought himself of his wife. It was not fair to leave a sleeping woman, forever, without some word of farewell. Theseus, he remembered, had done that. But it was hard to find the word of farewell. In the end, standing by the dressing-table he wrote on a sheet from his manuscript, “I have gone away. Forgive me if you can.” Then he went down. In the loge the porter was nodding over a paper. Charlie thought: “I shall never see him again. I shall never again open this door.”

  When he came out the wind had lowered, it rained, and the rain was whispering and murmuring on all sides of him. He took off his hat; in a moment his hair was dripping wet, and the rain ran down his face. In this fresh, unexpected touch there was a purport. He went down the street by which he had come, since it was the only street he knew in Antwerp. As he walked, it seemed as if the world was no longer entirely indifferent to him, nor was he any longer absolutely lonely in it. The dispersed, dissipated phenomena of the universe were consolidating, very likely into the devil himself, and the devil had him by the hand or the hair.

  Before he expected it, he was down by the harbour and stood upon the wharf, his portmanteau in his hand, gazing down into the water. It was deep and dark, the lights from the lamps on the quay played within it like young snakes. His first strong sensation about it was that it was salt. The rainwater came down on him from above; the salt water met him below. That was as it should be. He stood here for a long time, looking at the ships. He would go away on one of them.