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

sense of

pride in winning the divorced wife of the Viceroy; but this did not

prevent him from treating her and speaking to her in a manner that

might have seemed incompatible with such a feeling. Not that he was

grossly rude or violent—by no means. He simply belonged to the class

of people who are so secure in their own sense of normal and

irreproachable mediocrity that they cannot refrain from asserting

their superiority over the less fortunate and naively setting

themselves up as models. As for Marie, she was, of course, far from

unassailable; her divorce from Ulrik Frederik and her squandering of

her mother’s fortune were but too patent irregularities.

 

This was the man who became the third person in their life at Tjele.

Not one trait in him gave grounds for hope that he would add to it any

bit of brightness or comfort. Nor did he. Endless quarrelling and

bickering, mutual sullenness and fault-finding were all that the

passing days brought in their train.

 

Marie was blunted by it. Whatever had been delicate and flowerlike in

her nature, all the fair and fragrant growth which heretofore had

entwined her life as with luxurious though fantastic and even bizarre

arabesques, withered and died the death. Coarseness in thought as in

speech, a low and slavish doubt of everything great and noble, and a

shameless self-scorn were the effect of these sixteen years at Tjele.

And yet another thing: she developed a thick-blooded sensuousness, a

hankering for the good things of life, a lusty appetite for food and

drink, for soft chairs and soft beds, a voluptuous pleasure in spicy,

narcotic scents, and a craving for luxury which was neither ruled by

good taste nor refined by love of the beautiful. True, she had scant

means of gratifying these desires, but that did not lessen their

force. She had grown fuller of form and paler, and there was a slow

languor in all her movements. Her eyes were generally quite empty of

expression, but sometimes they would grow strangely bright, and she

had fallen into the habit of setting her lips in a meaningless smile.

 

There came a time when they wrote sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. It

was night, and the horse-stable at Tjele was on fire. The flickering

flames burst through the heavy clouds of brown smoke; they lit up the

grassy courtyard, shone on the low outhouses and the white walls of

the manor house, and even touched with light the black crowns of the

trees in the garden where they rose high above the roof. Servants and

neighbors ran from the well to the fire with pails and buckets full of

water glittering red in the light of the flames. Palle Dyre was here,

there, and everywhere, tearing wildly about, his hair flying, a red

wooden rake in his hand. Erik Grubbe lay praying over an old chaff bin

which had been carried out. He watched the progress of the fire from

beam to beam, his agony growing more intense every moment, and he

groaned audibly whenever the flames leaped out triumphantly and swung

their spirals high above the house in a shower of sparks.

 

Marie too was there, but her eyes sought something besides the fire.

They were fixed on the new coachman, who was taking the frightened

horses out from the smoke-filled stable. The doorway had been widened

to more than double its usual size by lifting off the frame and

tearing down a bit of the frail wall on either side, and through this

opening he was leading the animals, one by either hand. They were

crazed with the smoke, and when the stinging, flickering light of the

flames met their eyes, they reared wildly and threw themselves to one

side until it seemed the man must be torn to pieces or be trampled

down between the powerful brutes. Yet he neither fell nor lost his

hold; he forced their noses down on the ground and ran with them, half

driving, half dragging them across the courtyard to the gate of the

garden where he let them go. There were many horses at Tjele, and

Marie had plenty of time to admire that beautiful, gigantic form in

changing postures as he struggled with the spirited animals, one

moment hanging from a straight arm, almost lifted from the ground by a

rearing station, the next instant thrown violently down and gripping

the earth with his feet, then again urging them on by leaps and bounds

always with the same peculiarly quiet, firm, elastic movements seen

only in very strong men. His short cotton breeches and blue-gray shirt

looked yellow where the light fell on them but black in the shadows

and outlined sharply the vigorous frame, making a fine, simple

background for the ruddy face with its soft, fair down on lip and chin

and the great shock of blonde hair. This giant of two-and-twenty was

known as Soren Overseer. His real name was Soren Sorensen Moller, but

the title had come down to him from his father, who had been overseer

on a manor in Hvornum.

 

The horses were all brought out at last. The stable burned to the

ground, and when the fire still smouldering on the site had been put

out, the servants went to get a little morning nap after a wakeful

night.

 

Marie Grubbe too went to bed, but she could not sleep. She lay

thinking, sometimes blushing at her own fancies, then tossing about as

if she feared them. It was late when she rose. She smiled

contemptuously at herself as she dressed. Here veryday attire was

usually careless, even slovenly, though on special occasions she would

adorn herself in a manner more showy than tasteful, but this morning

she put on an old though clean gown of blue homespun, tied a little

scarlet silk kerchief round her neck, and took out a neat, simple

little cap; then she suddenly changed her mind again and chose instead

one with a turned-up rim of yellow and brown flowered stuff and a

flounce of imitation silver brocade in the back which went but poorly

with the rest. Palle Dyre supposed she wanted to go to town and gossip

about the fire, and he thought to himself there were no horses to

drive her there. She stayed home, however, but somehow she could not

work. She would take up one thing after another only to drop it as

quickly. At last she went out into the garden, saying that she meant

to set to rights what the horses had trampled in the night, but she

did not accomplish much; for she sat most of the time in an arbor with

her hands in her lap, gazing thoughtfully into the distance.

 

The unrest that had come over her did not leave her but grew worse day

by day. She was suddenly seized with a desire for lonely walks in the

direction of Fastrup Grove or in the more distant parts of the outer

garden. Her father and husband both scolded her, but when she turned a

deaf ear and did not even answer them, they finally made up their

minds that it was best to let her go her own way for a short time, all

the more as it was not the busy season.

 

About a week after the fire she was taking her usual walk out Fastrup

way, and was skirting the edge of a long copse of stunted oaks and

dogrose that reached almost to her shoulder when suddenly she caught

sight of Soren Overseer stretched at full length in the edge of the

copse, his eyes closed as if he were asleep. A scythe was lying at his

side, and the grass had been cut for some distance around.

 

Marie stood for a long time gazing at his large, regular features, his

broad, vigorously breathing chest, and his dark, full-veined hands,

which were clasped above his head. But Soren was drowsing rather than

sleeping, and suddenly he opened his eyes, wide awake, and looked up

at her. He was startled at being found by one of the family sleeping

when he should have been cutting hay, but the expression in Marie’s

eyes amazed him so much that he did not come to his senses until she

blushed, said something about the heat, and turned to go. He jumped

up, seized his scythe and whetstone, and began to rub the steel until

it sang through the warm, tremulous air. Then he went at the grass,

slashing as if his life were at stake.

 

After a while he saw Marie crossing the stile into the grove, and at

that he paused. He stood a moment staring after her, his arms resting

on his scythe, then suddenly flung it away with all his strength, sat

down with legs sprawling, mouth open, palms flat out on the grass, and

thus he sat in silent amazement at himself and his own strange

thoughts.

 

He looked like a man who had just dropped down from a tree.

 

His head seemed to be teeming with dreams. What if anyone had cast a

spell over him? He had never known anything like the way things

swarmed and swarmed inside of his head as if he could think of seven

things at once, and he couldn’t get the hang of them—they came and

went as if he’d nothing to say about it. It surely was queer the way

she’d looked at him, and she hadn’t said anything about his sleeping

this way in the middle of the day. She had looked at him so kindly,

straight out of her clear eyes, and—just like Jens Pedersen’s Trine

she had looked at him. Her ladyship! Her ladyship! There was a story

about a lady at Norbalk manor who had run away with her gamekeeper.

Had he got such a look when he was asleep? Her ladyship! Maybe he

might get to be good friends with her ladyship, just as the gamekeeper

did. He couldn’t understand it—was he sick? There was a burning spot

on each of his cheeks, and his heart beat, and he felt so queer it was

hard to breathe. He began to tug at a stunted oak, but he could not

get a grip on it where he was sitting;-he jumped up, tore it loose,

and threw it away, caught his scythe, and cut till the grass flew in

the swath.

 

In the days that followed, Marie often came near Soren, who happened

to have work around the house, and he always stared at her with an

unhappy, puzzled, questioning expression as if imploring her to give

him the answer to the riddle she had thrown in his way, but Marie only

glanced furtively in his direction and turned her head away.

 

Soren was ashamed of himself and lived in constant fear that his

fellow-servants would notice there was something the matter with him.

He had never in all his life before been beset by any feeling or

longing that was in the least fantastic, and it made him timid and

uneasy. Maybe he was getting addled or losing his wits. There was no

knowing how such things came over people, and he vowed to himself that

he would think no more about it, but the next moment his thoughts were

again taking the road he would have barred them from. The very fact

that he could not get away from these notions was what troubled him

most, for he remembered that he had heard tales of Cyprianus, whom you

could burn and drown, yet he always came back. In his heart of hearts

he really hoped that the fancies would not leave him, for life would

seem very dreary and empty without them, but this he did not admit to

himself. In fact his cheeks flushed with shame whenever