He came back to his partner in the dance, and in front of the latter’s figure, which had remained immovable on the spot, he made ready for their pas de deux.
“What good luck,” he cried, “that I have tonight got you here to talk to, Orosmane. All other people might think that I am drunk and am talking wildly. But you are a king, and I once more bless you for your kingly understanding. Your sympathy convinces me that this mythos of mine will indeed some day be found on earth. In two hundred years’ time the people of Copenhagen will know nothing at all about me; yet when they meet me they will recognize me. Terrifying and joyous is my covenant with the King of Heaven—dignum et justum est, that the hand of an earthly king shall seal it.”
Orosmane received him gracefully and harmoniously as a dancer, and fell in with his rhythm.
“Ainsi soit-il!” he said. “My hand shall seal your covenant.”
For a moment, as in confirmation of what had been spoken, both speakers were at rest and expectant.
“But what of me?” Orosmane exclaimed in a new movement. “What of me? Will I myself, some day, obtain that reflection on earth of my heavenly glorification, which you tell me is called mythos? Do you think so?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Yorick.
“O la la,” cried Orosmane. “You think so, because all your life you have associated with decent people and have never met tutors, teachers of religion or advisers of kings, and so have no knowledge of genuine canaillerie. For all that you have said tonight, Poet, is but what I myself have long known, and what all my life I have wanted. What other thing have I ever longed for but that which you have named, and which you call—what did you call it?”
“Mythos,” said Yorick.
“—but mythos! I have wished to harden myself—and surely a mythos is hard, and surely an oak tree is hard—and I have wanted to be all in one piece, like them. But I shall tell you something, you! At Court, and in council meetings, people fear! Everybody fears, although none of them will ever let out what it is they fear. They may tell you that they fear God—but they fear not God!—or that they fear the King—but they fear not the King! Nay, they run about, they tattle, they bow and scrape and rig themselves out in uniforms and robes, they chop up a king’s mind and life into kindling wood, all for fear of one thing, which is named …”
“Mythos,” said Yorick.
“Mythos,” said Orosmane. “Womenfolk they will get for me in plenty, both of the blood royal and out of the Danish stud-book—in order to have me henpecked. They wish a king’s mythos to be danced on by silk slippers, but not one of them will bring a cothurnus for it to march in. They would consent to honor me with a pompous enough monument—and the sooner the better too—they will be all at one in setting up an equestrian statue for me. But they are all at one, take my word for it, in grudging me the—say it again!”
“The mythos,” said Yorick.
“The mythos,” said Orosmane. “Tu l’as dit! My seat amidst my hochselig ancestors I cannot fail to get. But the clear and deep reflection of my Hochseligkeit here, here in Copenhagen, they are smashing up before it has come into existence—into a thousand pieces, so that even now, while still alive, I hear the splinters of glass clatter round my ears!”
Yorick looked at his guest for a long time. At last he spoke.
“No,” he said with great authority. “You are wrong, Sire. You will have your mythos.
“For your mythos will be this, that you have got none. Your people of Denmark, of Copenhagen, in two hundred years will know but little about you—and maybe nothing at all. Yet within the long row of kings of Denmark, of Christians and Fredericks, the one whom they will first of all recognize will be you.”
Orosmane was now silent for a while, with all his powers of observation turned inwards, onto something in himself.
“Fill my glass,” he said.
The gin, which might be said to have been the music to the scene, lifted up his being into high earnestness and energy. Now was the time for his own solo. Strangely free and erect and light as a bird, he rose, spiritually, on tiptoe. No movement of his was over-hasty or disconnected, in his most daring airiness there was abundance and equilibrium. He glided across the pause as across a stage, straight towards Yorick.
“You praised your luck, Yorick, my poet and my friend,” he said, “in having me to speak to tonight. Now hear! Your luck is greater than you know of. I will share my wisdom with you. I will tell you who I am, and who you are!
“For there are,” he went on, “upon this earth a few people—and to my belief we are only seven in all—who see into the true and essential nature of the world. The others incessantly distort it to us because they want nobody to understand its proportions and harmony. And those others will be working tirelessly to separate us and to keep us apart—since they are aware that if we are united, we should overcome our foes. All my life I have looked out for the six others of my own kind, but my jailers have not allowed me to find them. Ha, they do not know that tonight, I have all by myself found my way up here, to you! And alas—soon, very soon, they will be on my track to tear us asunder. At this very moment they are out after me, scurrying through backyards, up alleys and steep stairs. Well may you now think, and cry out:
… o nuit, nuit effroyable,
peux-tu prêter ton voile à de pareils forfaits!
“But in that hour of which you spoke, and which you toasted, we can still be together and speak the truth to each other. Let me then, as I speak truly to you, have your true answers.”
“Aye,” said Yorick. “Speak, Sire, your Poet and Fool listens.”
“Listen, my Poet and my Fool,” said Orosmane. “The world, I tell you, is far nobler and more beautiful than our enemies will ever allow us to see.”
“It is so,” said Yorick.
“Human beings,” Orosmane continued, “are all created greater, finer and more lovable than they look.”
“They are so,” said Yorick.
“And are not our pleasures,” Orosmane cried, “much greater fun than they allow us to perceive?”
“Why, yes,” said Yorick.
“Are not our actors of the stage,” Orosmane cried again, “far less wretched than they appear to us?”
“Certainly they are,” said Yorick.
“And is it not,” said Orosmane, “a great deal more pleasant to go to bed with a woman than we can know by now?”
“Of that I can assure you, mon Soudane,” said Yorick.
“We three then do know!” said Orosmane. “We do know, you and I and Lise—even if, the night over, we must keep our knowledge to ourselves. We know, tonight, how sweet and of what excellent quality is our gin. Aye, we know,” he exclaimed, slipping over into a graceful repetition of an earlier passage of the conversation:
“How sweet it is to taste the flavor
Of what the house may call its own,
And of one’s due inhale the savor
Mid those who stand before the throne.
Oh, there to see
The Persons Three
Is risen human’s greatest favor.”
He gracefully stretched out a hand, slim, pointed fingers collected—to each side, toward the two others. The hand was not meant to be touched, nor did either of them stir to touch it. Yet this gesture of high kingly favor made the three people in the room one.
“And,” he said very slowly, “Il y a dans ce monde un bonheur parfait.”
Yorick rose and fell into step with his partner.
“Yes, Sire,” he agreed, speaking as slowly and weightily as he. “There are, upon this earth and in this our existence, three kinds of perfect happiness. And there are human beings so highly favored as to come to taste all three.”
“Even three!” Orosmane cried out joyfully. “There you see how, when we three are together, good things double and treble themselves. Now set words to my thoughts, you who tell me that you love the word. Nothing further shall I demand of you. Name the three.”
“The first bonheur parfait,” said Yorick, “is this: to feel in oneself an excess of strength.”
“As we do now!” said Orosmane and laughed. “As now, blissfully united, we are able to soar into the air, like to three kites made fast with slim strings only to wet Copenhagen beneath us. You are a real poet, you! Your words turn my thoughts into pictures. At this moment I see before me a glass filled to the brim with wine from Bouzy or Epernay, foaming down its stem, and in its abundance frothing even in the dust! When, at the time of my accession to the throne, I informed the wig-blocks that I would now rage for a year, then did I foam and froth like that. An access of strength—ha, those are sweet-sounding words, like a song. And verily, during that one year the entire Court-ceremonial was turned into a drinking song, which rang in the halls of our palace and resounded in our streets of Copenhagen! But you tell me,” he went on after a short pause, “that there is a second happiness as perfect as the first. Name it! ”
“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.
Isak Dinesen, Last Tales
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends