Babette's Feast and Other Stories Read online

  Ferdinand’s mother came into the room again and made Malli sit down on a chair. She began to tell about Ferdinand and about what a good son he had always been to her. She went over his short life, relating small traits and incidents from his childhood and boyhood, and as she did so the tears ran down her cheeks. But when she began to tell of how Ferdinand had ever laid aside almost all his pay to give to his mother when he came home, she ceased to cry. She only sighed deeply and heavily over how hard life would now be for his small brothers and sisters, and for herself.

  “Ferdinand,” she said sorrowfully, “would have been so grieved to see it.”

  Malli listened, and deep in her heart recognized this subdued woman’s wailing. It was her own mother’s anxiety about bread for herself and her child. She looked about her, and now also recognized the needy, narrow room. This was the room of her own home; here she had grown up. The old familiar, bare world came back to her, so strangely gentle, and so inescapable.

  It was as if a hand—and was it Ferdinand’s own cold hand, on which hers had just now rested?—seized her by the throat, and she grew giddy and sank, or everything round her sank. The elder woman looked at her, and with the quiet tact of the poor changed the subject. She began to tell of Ferdinand’s pride at being the young lady’s friend. She had from Ferdinand’s own lips heard more of the shipwreck than anyone else, and had followed Malli’s steps from the deck to the engine room, and from the engine room to the helm. By her son’s sickbed she had had to read aloud to him so many times the report of the Christianssand Daily News that she now knew it all by heart. A little smile broke out on her careworn face as she explained how, to please him, she herself had had to repeat the young lady’s cry through the din and roaring of the tempest: “Ferdinand!”

  At that Malli rose from her chair, pale as death. She looked at the simple bench and table, at the one poor flower pot in the window and at the woman’s threadbare clothes. Lastly she turned toward the silent face in the coffin. But now she dared not go near it. She merely for an instant wrung her hands in its direction in a movement that was like a shriek. Then she gave Ferdinand’s mother her hand and went away.

  When she came home, she sought out Fru Hosewinckel and said to her:

  “Ay, Ferdinand is dead. And it is such a poor home. How, now, is his mother to get along?”

  Fru Hosewinckel felt sorry for the pale girl.

  “Dear Malli,” she said, “we will not forget Ferdinand’s loyalty. We will stand by this poor mother.”

  Malli stared at her as if she had not understood what was said and was waiting to hear something she could better comprehend.

  “My dear child,” said Fru Hosewinckel. “That is the happiness of possessing wealth, that one may help where need is great.”

  When next morning Malli came downstairs, she was so changed that her housemates were frightened. She was once more the girl with the stiff white face and the dark rings under her eyes, paralyzed in all her joints, who had been brought in from the wreck. And she was now also dumb, as at that time Herr Soerensen himself. She would not go out, but also dreaded to stay in; she got up from one chair to sit down on another. Fru Hosewinckel proposed sending for the family doctor, but Malli begged her not to with such anguish that she again gave up the idea. The household then in perplexity left her in peace; only the lady of the house attentively followed the distressed expressions in the young face.

  XIII. The Altar Cloth

  As long as Arndt was in the house it had been difficult for Fru Hosewinckel, in the strong light with which her son’s love surrounded Malli, really to catch sight of the girl. In her sober way she had almost looked forward to his absence, during which she would have time and peace to look at her. The sudden ominous change in Malli’s face and manner frightened her, and she did not know what to think about it. For some days her son was still so close to her that she saw Malli with his eyes. The girl then was to her a precious possession, and she tried to the best of her ability to help and console her.

  Now she also reproached herself, more seriously than on the evening of the ball, with having thoughtlessly allowed Malli to be the object of so many people’s curiosity and homage. This very young girl had looked death in the face, had immediately after been taken up into new, rich surroundings, and there to all probability had had her life’s course decided. Let good fortune be ever so sweet, the elderly woman reflected, it takes strength to bear even that. Now there must be an end to parties and gatherings, and Malli must remain unobserved and undisturbed under the protection of the house.

  As Fru Hosewinckel spoke of her resolve to Malli herself, it was as if for the first time since Ferdinand’s death the girl did really grasp what was said to her.

  “Yes, unobserved,” whispered Malli. “Be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible to every eyeball else! What lovely words.”

  But soon afterwards she was once more white and restless in the grip of her grief.

  Arndt’s mother knew Malli so little that she could not guess what she was grieving about. She noticed that least of all the girl could bear to hear her son’s name mentioned; it was as if each time the sound of it struck her at the heart. A terrible thought for a while gained hold of Fru Hosewinckel’s mind. Was it possible that this girl was not quite sane? Nobody had really known her father, and who could tell what ghosts of old forgotten times had been admitted to the house together with the valiant maiden? Yet till now no one had noticed any derangement in Malli, and she again dismissed her fear. There was something else weighing on the girl’s mind, and what was it?

  She called to mind that it was the news of Ferdinand’s death which had brought Malli to despair. What could there have been between the girl and the young sailor? While pondering on this she called to mind that she herself, while her engagement to Jochum Hosewinckel was still a secret, had had another suitor applying for her hand and had been unhappy about it. Malli in the turbulence of the storm might have given Ferdinand a promise, and might now be grieving because she had not got herself released from it in time. Slowly Fru Hosewinckel groped her way further into the idea, at times amazed at the unwonted audacity of her own fantasy. Did the girl, she wondered, now imagine that the dead young ordinary seaman might rise from his grave and call her to account? Young girls have strange notions and may almost die of them. But a secret distress to be relieved must be brought into the light of day. She must persuade or force Malli to speak.

  For a few days she cautiously questioned the girl on her childhood and her time with Herr Soerensen’s troupe. Malli artlessly answered all her questions; in this past there were no secrets. Fru Hosewinckel went on to mention Ferdinand’s name, and it seemed evident that Ferdinand had never caused Malli any sorrow but his death. The elder woman almost lost patience with the young one who suffered and would not let herself be helped. Then she bethought herself that in this world there are powers stronger than the human will, and decided to turn to them with regard to Malli’s salvation.

  As already mentioned, she was unaccustomed to troubling heaven with direct petitions; this was perhaps the first time she approached it with a personal plea. But she did it for the sake of her only son, and because she had now gone so far into the matter that to her there was no retreat. Neither could she hand over her task to anyone else. Her husband was as pious as herself, and for more than forty years the two had said their evening prayers together. But just as Fru Hosewinckel—although she inwardly hoped that she might be wrong—could not quite believe that any man could attain to eternal life, she could not quite imagine that a person of the male sex could put a matter before God in the form of prayer.

  So next Sunday she went to church and collected herself to submit her demand. She did not ask for strength or patience; what was required of these she must, she knew, herself supply. But she prayed for an inspiration to find clarity in the affair and help for the sorrowing girl, for she realized that she herself was not rich in inspiration. She walked home from church
with hope in her heart.

  Fru Hosewinckel, in her gratitude for the rescue of Sofie Hosewinckel, had wished to present her church with a new altar cloth, a fine piece of drawn-thread work fitted together in squares which could be embroidered separately and when ready joined together. She herself worked on one such piece and had asked Malli, who had been taught needlework by her mother, to do another, and this occupation, a return to days of old, was the only one in which the girl seemed to be at ease; she worked on steadily, almost without looking up. On Sunday evening the lady of the house and its young guest were sitting together by the drawing-room table sewing; in the large, dim room the linen shone a delicate white in the gleam of the paraffin lamp. Shortly after the master of the hous came into the room and sat down with them.

  XIV. Old Folk and Old Tales

  Old Jochum Hosewinckel during the last years had been living under the growing shadow of a fate hard to bear because to him it seemed to include some kind of guilt or shame; he had never spoken about it to anyone. Yet this was no personal or individual visitation, but a share in conditions common to all the human race: when men live long enough they come to know it. He had begun to feel the burden of old age. The people of his family were long-lived; he had watched his father and his grandfather grow old in a manner both expected and respected, becoming hard of hearing and in the end stone-deaf, stiff in the back as in mode of thought, walking about as honorable and honored memorials to a long row of years and experiences. With him himself, it seemed, old age was making itself known in a different way, and in his own mind he blamed his mother’s mother, who had come from the far north of Norway, for the fact. He did not grow stiff or petrified, but the whole world, and he himself with it, day by day seemed to be losing in weight and dissolving. Matters and ideas changed color as the coat of paint on a boat that has been out in wind and weather will change color. The hues on the boat’s planks may become almost prettier than before, there will be a new play in them, but all the same it is not as it should be, and one has one’s boat painted afresh. It became difficult for him to keep his accounts and to determine whether things happening round him were of an advantageous or undesirable, of a gay or sad, nature, ay, whether in the books of his conscience they ought to be entered as credits or debits. At times it seemed to him that he could no longer rightly distinguish between past and present; his mind willingly let go its grasp of near things to run back to vanished times; childhood games and boy’s pranks grew more alive to him than cargoes and rates of exchange. He was afraid lest his surroundings should discover the decay in him and became highly watchful in all communication with his skippers and clerks. He was least worried in front of his wife, who once for all had taken him for what he was, and now as a rule did not look much at him; but he sometimes shunned his son’s company. In himself he might at times feel happy and even buoyant in an existence without accounts, but this fact to an old man of an old family, whose struggle throughout life had been to keep assets and liabilities apart, was disquieting, and he called himself to account. It went so far with him that the suspense in the days round Sofie Hosewinckel’s shipwreck for a while had brought him a feeling of relief, because here one could clearly distinguish between good and bad luck.

  Then Malli came into the house, a young being whose idea of the universe could not be expected to include strict border lines, and who nonetheless, against the views of competent people, had headed straight for a goal and had saved his own good ship—a child who deserved to be spoiled and jested with. A joyous understanding and confidence sprang up between the old host and the young guest, as if within the whole household those two belonged to one another. She accompanied him on his early morning walks to the harbor and the warehouses, she took the trouble to recall songs of old days and sang them to him; one time when he brought her a bird in a cage she kissed him on both cheeks.

  As now she grew ill or deeply melancholy and kept back from all other people, the understanding between the two was strengthened and found a particular expression. Malli was loath to hear about matters or events of the present day, but was pleased to listen to accounts of old times, even to plain nursery tales. And her old ally and protector, with his gentle bony face and his white whiskers, was pleased to recount to her childhood experiences and tales which more than sixty years ago had been told to him by the house’s servants, by old skippers and fishermen and by his mother’s mother. So it became a kind of tradition in the Hosewinckel house that when in the evening the ladies sat sewing by the table, its master would come in from his office, settle down in his grandfather’s chair and bring out a story to them. At such hours he did not mind being heard by his wife to indulge in queer fancies. He might imagine himself and Malli to be running, hand in hand, into a twilight, a darkness of their own. But it was not barren; it was the mighty night of northern lights, and in it things lived: heavy, shaggy bears padded and puffed, wolves whirled in long trails through the blizzard over the plains, ancient Finns, who knew witchcraft, chuckled while selling fair winds to the seamen. Old Jochum Hosewinckel sat in his chair smiling, as if in a refuge from life, to which a bad conscience was not admitted.

  On this Sunday evening he entered the room with a story for Malli ready at hand, and shortly after began to tell it.

  “Tonight, Malli,” he said, “I am going to tell you about a grave danger that once threatened the house in which you are sitting; God preserve it from another such. And also about my grandmother’s grandfather, Jens Aabel. I myself had the story told me when I was a small boy.”

  XV. Jens Aabel’s Story and His Good Advice

  “This old Jens Guttormsen Aabel,” he began his tale, the light from the lamp, which did not reach his face, falling upon his big old folded hands, “had come here from Saeterdalen, where the folk at that time were still half heathen, but he himself was a good Christian. He was a well-to-do man, held in respect by the whole town, and already getting on in years, when in the month of February, 1717, the great fire broke out in Christianssand.

  “It was a grave disaster, in six hours more than thirty houses were laid in ashes. It was reported that the mighty glow from the fire on the sky could be seen from Lillesand and from ships lying off Mandal. That night it blew a gale from the northwest, so that the fire, which first sprang up in Lillegade, ran straight toward my great-great-grandfather’s house and warehouses in Vestergade, and it looked as if they were doomed.

  “Already Jens Guttormsen’s servants and shop-assistants had begun to bring out money chests and ledgers. Many people had gathered at the other end of the street, and some of them wept for the good man who was to see all that he had collected in life brought to nothing. So close was the fire, old people of the town have been telling, that in the midst of winter it was as hot in the street as in a bakehouse.

  “Then, my girl,” the old shipowner went on, “Jens Aabel came out of his gate with his scales in his right hand and his yardstick in his left. He took his stand in the street and spoke in a loud voice, so that all heard it. He said: ‘Here stand I, Jens Guttormsen Aabel, merchant of this town, with my scales and my measure. If in my day I have made wrong use of any of them, then, wind and fire, proceed against my house! But if I have used these righteous things righteously, then you two wild servants of God will spare my house, so that in years to come it may serve men and women of Christianssand as before.’

  “And at that moment,” Jochum Hosewinckel recounted, “just when he had spoken, all people in the street saw the wind waver and for a moment cease altogether, so that smoke and sparks swept down over them. But immediately after it changed and shifted from northwest to due north, and the fire swerved off Vestergade and down toward the marketplace. Jens Aabel’s house in this way was out of danger, and the things which had just been brought out could be brought in again.”

  The big clock in the room slowly struck eight, and the old narrator and the listening girl remained silent, absorbed in the story, as if they had stood together in Vestergade on that winte
r’s night.

  “You will have seen, Malli,” Jochum Hosewinckel, who could not all at once bring himself to return to everyday life, took up the tale again, “you will have seen the big Bible lying on the table in my office. That is Jens Aabel’s Bible, which has come into the family through my father’s mother. And it has this quality to it, that if anyone in the house, uncertain as to what he ought to do, goes to it to ask advice from it, and lets it fall open where it chooses, he will get from it the right answer to what he is asking.”

  Fru Hosewinckel looked across the table at Malli, and at that moment it seemed to her that her prayer was being answered. She sat still on her sofa, but she followed the conversation closely.

  “I can tell you,” said her husband, “how I myself did once ask Jens Aabel’s Bible for advice. But you must then take a candle and fetch it in here, so that I can find the right text. It is heavy, you will have to carry it on both arms and to leave the candle standing till you have laid the book back again.”

  Malli went away with the candle and came back with the book, carrying it on both arms, and laid it on the table in front of the old gentleman who was waiting for it.

  He took up his glasses, hesitated a moment, sat back in his chair and related:

  “One time many years ago my cousin Jonas came to me to make me go halves with him in the purchase of a ship. For the sake of my good aunt, his mother, I was loath to say no, but when I considered the man himself I was even more unwilling to say yes, for he was an unsafe man in all his dealings and had duped me before. As now he sat on the sofa, impatient to get my answer, and I walked up and down the floor sadly uncertain about it, my eyes fell on our Bible.