Marie Grubbe - Jens Peter Jacobsen (best english novels for beginners .txt) 📗

They had to go down into the

trenches, climb the barricades, peep into the necks of the mines, and

pluck at the gabions. This was the spot where such a one had been

posted, and here so-and-so had fallen, and over there another had

rushed forward and been surrounded. Everything was remarkable, from

the wheel tracks of the cannon carriages and the cinders of the watch

fires to the bullet-pierced board fences and the sun-bleached skull of

a horse. And so the narrating and explaining, the supposing and

debating, went on, up the ramparts and down the barricades.

 

Gert Pyper was strutting about with his whole family. He stamped the

ground at least a hundred times and generally thought he noticed a

strangely hollow sound while his rotund spouse pulled him anxiously by

the sleeve and begged him not to be too foolhardy, but Master Gert

only stamped the harder. The grown-up son showed his little betrothed

where he had been standing on the night when he got a bullet hole

through his duffel great-coat, and where the turner’s boy had had his

head shot off. The smaller children cried because they were not

allowed to keep the rifle ball they had found, for Erik Lauritzen, who

was also there, said it might be poisoned. He was poking the

half-rotten straw where the barracks had stood, for he remembered a

story of a soldier who had been hanged outside of Magdeburg and under

whose pillow seven of his comrades had found so much money that they

had deserted before the official looting of the city began.

 

The green fields and grayish white roads were dotted black with people

coming and going. They walked about examining the well-known spots

like a newly discovered world or an island suddenly shot up from the

bottom of the sea, and there were many who, when they saw the country

stretching out before them field behind field and meadow behind

meadow, were seized with wanderlust and began to walk on and on as

though intoxicated with the sense of space, of boundless space.

 

Toward supper time, however, the crowds turned homeward and, as moved

by one impulse, sought the North Quarter, where the graveyard of St.

Peter’s Church lay surrounded by spacious gardens, for it was an

old-time custom to take the air under the green trees after vespers on

summer Sundays. While the enemy was encamped before the ramparts, the

custom naturally fell into disuse, and the churchyard had been as

empty on Sundays as on week days; but this day old habits were

revived, and people streamed in through both entrances from Norregade:

nobles and citizens, high and low, all had remembered the full-crowned

linden trees of St. Peter’s churchyard.

 

On the grassy mounds and the broad tombstones sat merry groups of

townspeople, man and wife, children and neighbors, eating their

supper, while in the outskirts of the party stood the ‘prentice boy

munching the delicious Sunday sandwich as he waited for the basket.

Tiny children tripped with hands full of broken food for the beggar

youngsters that hung on the wall. Lads thirsting for knowledge spelled

their way through the lengthy epitaphs while father listened full of

admiration, and mother and the girls scanned the dresses of the

passers-by, for by this time the gentlefolk were walking up and down

in the broad paths. They usually came a little later than the others

and either supped at home or in one of the eating-houses in the

gardens round about.

 

Stately matrons and dainty maids, old councillors and young

officers, stout noblemen and foreign ministers passed in review. There

went bustling, gray-haired Hans Nansen, shortening his steps to the

pace of the wealthy Villem Fiuren and listening to his piping voice.

There came Corfits Trolle and the stiff Otto Krag. Mistress Ide Daa,

famed for her lovely eyes, stood talking to old Axel Urup, who showed

his huge teeth in an everlasting smile, while the shrunken form of his

lady, Mistress Sidsel Grubbe, tripped slowly by the side of Sister

Rigitze and the impatient Marie. There were Gersdorf and Schack and

Thuresen of the tow-colored mane and Peder Retz with Spanish dress

and Spanish manners.

 

Ulrik Frederik was among the rest, walking with Niels Rosenkrands, the

bold young lieutenant-colonel whose French breeding showed in his

lively gestures. When they met Mistress Rigitze and her companions,

Ulrik Frederik would have passed them with a cold, formal greeting,

for ever since his separation from Sofie Urne he had nursed a spite

against Mistress Rigitze, whom he suspected, as one of the Queen’s

warmest adherents, of having had a finger in the matter. But

Rosenkrands stopped, and Axel Urup urged them so cordially to sup with

the party in Johan Adolph’s garden that they could not well refuse.

 

A few minutes later they were all sitting in the little brick summer

house eating the simple country dishes that the gardener set before

them.

 

“Is it true, I wonder,” asked Mistress Ide Daa, “that the Swedish

officers have so bewitched the maidens of Sjaelland with their pretty

manners that they have followed them in swarms out of land and

kingdom?”

 

“Marry, it’s true enough at least of that minx Mistress Dyre,” replied

Mistress Sidsel Grubbe.

 

“Of what Dyres is she?” asked Mistress Rigitze.

 

“The Dyres of Skaaneland, you know, sister, those who have such light

hair. They’re all intermarried with the Powitzes. The one who fled the

country, she’s a daughter of Henning Dyre of West Neergaard, he who

married Sidonie, the eldest of the Ove Powitzes, and she went bag and

baggage—took sheets, bolsters, plate, and ready money from her

father.”

 

“Ay,” smiled Axel Urup, “strong love draws a heavy load.”

 

“Faith,” agreed Oluf Daa, who always struck out with his left hand when

he talked, “love—as a man may say—love is strong.”

 

“Lo-ove,” drawled Rosenkrands, daintily stroking his moustache with

the back of his little finger, “is like Hercules in female dress;

gentle and charming in appearance and seeming all weakness and

mild-ness, yet it has stre-ength and craftiness to complete all the

twelve labors of Hercules.”

 

“Indeed,” broke in Mistress Ide Daa, “that is plainly to be seen from

the love of Mistress Dyre, which at least completed one of the labors

of Hercules, inasmuch as it cleaned out chests and presses, even as he

cleaned the stable of Uriah—or whatever his name was—you know.”

 

“I would rather say”—Ulrik Frederik turned to Marie Grubbe—“that

love is like falling asleep in a desert and waking in a balmy pleasure

garden, for such is the virtue of love that it changes the soul of man

and that which was barren now seems a very wonder of delight. But what

are your thoughts about love, fair Mistress Marie?”

 

“Mine?” she asked. “I think love is like a diamond, for as a diamond

is beautiful to look upon, so is love fair, but as the diamond is

poison to anyone who swallows it, in the same manner love is a kind of

poison and produces a baneful raging distemper in those who are

infected by it—at least if one is to judge by the strange antics one

may observe in amorous persons and by their curious conversation.”

 

“Ay,” whispered Ulrik Frederik gallantly, “the candle may well talk

reason to the poor moth that is crazed by its light!”

 

“Forsooth, I think you are right, Marie,” began Axel Urup, pausing to

smile and nod to her. “Yes, yes, we may well believe that love is but

a poison, else how can we explain that coldblooded persons may be

fired with the most burning passion merely by giving them

miracle-philtres and love-potions?”

 

“Fie!” cried Mistress Sidsel; “don’t speak of such terrible godless

business—and on a Sunday, too!”

 

“My dear Sidse,” he replied, “there’s no sin in that—none at all.

Would you call it a sin, Colonel Gyldenlove? No? Surely not. Does not

even Holy Writ tell of witches and evil sorceries? Indeed and indeed

it does. What I was about to say is that all our humors have their

seat in the blood. If a man is fired with anger, can’t he feel the

blood rushing up through his body and flooding his eyes and ears? And

if he’s frightened o’ the sudden, does not the blood seem to sink

down into his feet and grow cold all in a trice? Is it for nothing,

do you think, that grief is pale and joy red as a rose? And as for

love, it comes only after the blood has ripened in the summers and

winters of seventeen or eighteen years; then it begins to ferment like

good grape wine; it seethes and bubbles. In later years it clears and

settles as do other fermenting juices; it grows less hot and fierce.

But as good wine begins to effervesce again when the grape-vine is in

bloom, so the disposition of man, even of the old, is more than

ordinarily inclined to love at certain seasons of the year when the

blood, as it were, remembers the springtime of life.”

 

“Ay, the blood,” added Oluf Daa, “as a man may say, the blood—‘t is a

subtle matter to understand—as a man may say.”

 

“Indeed,” nodded Mistress Rigitze, “everything acts on the blood, both

sun and moon and approaching storm; that’s as sure as if ‘t were

printed.”

 

“And likewise the thoughts of other people,” said Mistress Ide. “I

saw it in my eldest sister. We lay in one bed together, and every

night as soon as her eyes were closed, she would begin to sigh and

stretch her arms and legs and try to get out of bed as someone were

calling her. And ‘twas but her betrothed, who was in Holland, and was

so full of longing for her that he would do nothing day and night but

think of her until she never knew an hour’s peace, and her

health—don’t you remember, dear Mistress Sidsel, how weak her

eyesight was all the time Jorgen Bille was from home?”

 

“Do I remember? Ah, the dear soul! But she bloomed again like a

rosebud. Bless me, her first lying-in—” and she continued the subject

in a whisper.

 

Rosenkrands turned to Axel Urup. “Then you believe,” he said, “that an

elixir d’am-our is a fermenting juice poured into the blood? That

tallies well with a tale the late Mr. Ulrik Christian told me one day

we were on the ramparts together. ‘T was in Antwerp it happened—in

the Hotellerie des Trois Brochets, where he had lodgings. That morning

at mass he had seen a fair, fair maid-en, and she had looked quite

kind-ly at him. All day long she was not in his thoughts, but at night

when he entered his chamber, there was a rose at the head of the bed.

He picked it up and smelled it, and in the same moment the

counterfeit of the maiden stood before him as painted on the wall,

and he was seized with such sudden and furious longing for her that

he could have cried aloud. He rushed out of the house and into the

street, and there he ran up and down, wailing like one bewitched.

Something seemed to draw and draw him and burn like fire, and he never

stopped till day dawned.”

 

So they talked until the sun went down, and they parted to go home

through the darkening streets. Ulrik Frederik joined but little in

the general conversation, for he was afraid that if he said anything

about love, it might be taken for reminiscences of his relation with

Sofie Urne. Nor was he in the mood for talking, and when he and

Rosenkrands were alone, he made such brief, absentminded replies that

his companion soon wearied of him and left