Marie Grubbe Read online

  “Beauty!” he said. “Are you blind, all of you, or have none of you seen the Danish lady, not caught a glance of Madame Marie? Her hair is like the sun shining on a meadow when the grass is ripe; her eyes are more blue than a steel blade, and her lips are as red as the blood of a grape. She walks like a star crossing the heavens. She is as straight as a sceptre and as dignified as a throne. Every perfection, all beauty blooms in her, rose upon rose in flowering splendour. But there is something in her beauty that makes you feel as if you were hearing the sound of a trumpet on a high holy day sounding from cathedral towers, and you become quite still. For she’s like the holy mother of sorrows finely pictured on icons. There is such a lofty sorrow in her clear eyes, and her mouth wears that patient smile without hope.”

  He was quite moved and had tears in his eyes. He wanted to say something but could not do so, and he remained standing, struggling to speak. Then one of his neighbours gave him a friendly slap on his shoulder and made him sit down, whereupon they drank glass upon glass together, and all was well again. The old people were as loud and as merry as before, and there was nothing but joy, song and laughter.

  Marie Grubbe was in Nürnberg. Since she had left Sti Høg she had drifted about for the best part of a year, finally settling there.

  She had changed a lot since that evening when she had taken part in a masque in the park at Frederiksborg Castle. Not only was she in her thirtieth year, but the unhappy relationship with Sti had made a peculiarly strong impression on her. When parting from Ulrik Frederik, she had been influenced and swept along by a number of fortuitous circumstances. But she had been strengthened in her purpose, most of all, by the fact that she had retained those first dreams of youth, dreams of the man a woman should follow, who must be like a god on earth to her so that she can receive, humbly and with love, good and evil from his hands as he wills it. And now, in a moment of blindness, she had taken Sti for this man, he who was not even a man.

  Such were her thoughts. Every weakness, every unmanly hesitation in Sti, she felt was an indelible mark of shame on herself. She loathed herself for that brief love and gave it base names. Those lips, which had kissed him, might they wither, those eyes that had smiled at him, might they grow dim, the heart that had loved him, might it break. Every part of her soul that was special she had tainted by this love, every feeling she had profaned. She had lost all confidence in herself, all belief in her own worth, and as for the future, it held no hope for her.

  Her life was finished. She had run her course; a quiet corner where she could lay her weary head to rest, never to lift it again, that was the sum total of her desires.

  Such was her state of mind when she arrived in Nürnberg. Chance brought her together with the Golden Remigius and his sincere, but reserved, worship. The youthful freshness of his idolatrous worship, his triumphant faith in her, and the way he rejoiced in that faith, were like cool dew to a crushed flower: it might not rise again, but yet it does not wither. It is still unfolding its delicate, richly coloured, fragrant petals to the light, and it shines with a timid life force. Yes, that was what she had become.

  And to see herself reflected in the thoughts of another thus, so innocent and so pure, did offer some consolation, as did the knowledge that she had awakened in someone’s soul an easy confidence, beauty’s hope and noble longings that made him, in whom they had been awakened, rich. And then too, it was sweet and soothing to grieve in an outpouring of vague images and veiled words to a soul who, inexperienced and free from sorrow, suffered her every pain with quiet pleasure, grateful that he could share a suffering that he sensed but did not understand. Yes, it was so sweet to grieve when you perceived that your sorrows awakened reverence not pity, so that they became like a dark, majestic robe worn round the shoulders, or a tear-studded diadem on the brow.

  In this way Marie was beginning, little by little, to become reconciled to herself, but then it happened one day when Remigius was out riding that his horse shied, threw him out of the saddle and dragged him, caught in his stirrups, to his death.

  When Marie heard this, she sank into a deep, dull and tearless grief. She could sit for hours at a time, staring into the air with tired, empty eyes, silent as if mute, and she could not be made to do anything. She would not even allow anyone to talk to her; if anyone did so, she would turn them away with a weak wave of the hand, shaking her head quietly as if it pained her.

  This state of affairs lasted for a long time. Meanwhile, her money had been spent, and there was hardly enough for them to journey home. Lucie kept reminding Marie, but it took some time before she listened.

  Finally they left. On the way Marie became ill so that the journey took much longer, and Lucie had to sell one precious gown and one piece of jewellery after another to enable them to travel on.

  When they reached Aarhus, Marie owned little more than the clothes on her back. Here they parted; Lucie returned to Madame Rigitze, while Marie went to Tjele. It was the spring of 1673.

  XVI

  After Marie had returned to Tjele, she stayed there, in her father’s house, until 1679 when she let herself be married to Palle Dyre, a member of his majesty’s Privy Council, and she lived with him until 1689 in a completely eventless marriage. This period at Tjele began in her thirtieth year and lasted a full sixteen years.

  They proved to be sixteen monotonous years of a life of everyday anxieties, trivial obligations, with no trust or intimacy to give it some warmth, and not a spark of everyday cheer to offer any consolation. Constant quarrels about nothing, loud squabbles over trivial oversights, peevish criticism and coarse mockery were all she heard. And every sunlit day of life was measured out in coin, down to the last groat, every sigh uttered was a sigh over a loss; every wish spoken was a wish for a gain, every hope, a hope for more. And threadbare miserliness was everywhere, and constant hurry, the enemy of common cheer, was in every bit of the fabric of this life, and avarice’s wakeful, ever watchful eyes stared from the face of every hour. Such was the life Marie Grubbe led.

  In the beginning, it often happened that amidst all this fury and haste she would become oblivious to everything around her, tantalised by waking dreams of beauty, changing like clouds, rich like light.

  And there was one in particular. That was the dream about the sleeping castle concealed by roses. What a quiet garden, the garden of that castle was, with its stillness in the air and among the trees. Everywhere silence dreamt in a night without darkness. Fragrance in flower bells and dew on pliant blades of grass lay slumbering there. Violets slept with their mouths half open beneath bent spires of fern, and on moss-green branches thousands of buds just about to open had been lulled to sleep, even though it was spring. She reached the courtyard of the keep: thorny rose branches threw a silent wave of green over walls and roofs, and foamed in a host of petal-pale rose blooms and rose sprays. From the yawning maw of a lion came a leaping ray of water, like a crystal tree made of spiders’ webs. The sleeping waters of porphyry basins reflected the breathless muzzles and closed eyes of shiny horses, while a slumbering page boy rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

  She feasted her eyes on such tranquil loveliness in this silent yard, where fallen rose petals lay in tall drifts against walls and doors, concealing with their blushing snow the wide steps of broad marble stairs.

  Oh, to find rest! To let the days descend in delicious rest, hour by hour, while all hopes, all memories and thoughts too, drip from the soul in soft shapeless waves… that was the finest dream she could imagine.

  That was how she felt at first. However, fantasy tires of ever flying unsuccessfully towards the same goal, like a trapped bee that buzzes against the window, all potential drained.

  Just as a graceful, fine building unappreciated by barbarians can be corrupted – daring spires are squashed into the fat hats of cupolas, fine lattice decorations are broken off one by one, the rich beauty of frescoes is covered by layer upon layer of deadening chalk – in the same way Marie Grubbe was unappreciated and
corrupted during those sixteen years.

  Her father, Erik Grubbe, had become old and decrepit, and it seemed that old age, which had made his face sharper and more forbidding, had also intensified and made prominent all the worst parts of his character. He was surly and intractable, stubborn as a child, full of a vicious temper, suspicious to a fault, sly, dishonest and mean. In old age, God was always on his lips, particularly when animals were sick or the harvest difficult, and he had a host of slavish, obsequious epithets for the Lord of his own invention.

  It was impossible for Marie to love or respect him, and now she also resented him, because, by unfulfilled promises and threats of disinheriting her, and of making her leave Tjele and depriving her of any support, he had succeeded in making her marry Palle Dyre. What had most influenced her choice had been the hope of becoming independent of her father’s authority, a hope that was not however fulfilled, because Palle Dyre and Erik Grubbe had reached an agreement on jointly running Tjele and Nørbækgaard, the estate which was her dowry but only on certain conditions; and since Tjele was the larger of the estates and Erik Grubbe was not up to its care, it happened that the newlyweds spent more of their time under her father’s roof than in their own home.

  Palle Dyre – the son of Colonel Clavs, Dyre to Sandvig and Krogsdal, and later to Vinge, and his wife, Edele daughter of Palle Rodtssteen – was a corpulent, short-necked, small man whose movements had a certain liveliness and whose face showed determination, although it was a little disfigured by a strawberry birthmark which covered almost all of his right cheek. Marie despised him.

  He was as mean and careful as Erik Grubbe. Although he was an able man, and clever, quick and courageous, he simply lacked all sense of honour. He cheated and swindled whenever he could get away with it, and he was never ashamed when he was caught out. He would let himself be cursed like a dog without answering back for a penny’s profit, and if a friend or a relative entrusted a sale or a purchase to him, or some other business, he would not think twice to use that trust to his own advantage.

  Although his marriage had been, on the whole, a business arrangement, he still felt proud to be married to the divorced wife of the governor of Norway, a fact which did not stop him from speaking to and treating her in a way that could not be reconciled with such a feeling. Not that he was in any way unusually coarse or violent, not at all, but he did belong to that class of people who, proud and complacent in the consciousness of their own irreproachability – being in every way correct and conventional – cannot refrain from letting others, less fortunate in this respect, feel their superiority, and with an unattractive naïveté like to hold themselves up as examples for imitation. And Marie was certainly not among the fortunate, with both her divorce from Ulrik Frederik and her waste of her maternal fortune being only too obvious irregularities.

  Such then was that man who took his place as the third person at Tjele, and not one of his qualities held out any promise that he might make life lighter or gentler, nor did he. Endless arguments, mutual bickering and discord, that was what one day brought after another.

  All this dulled Marie, and all that had been refined and fragrant and full of beauty, lending life rich if uncontrolled and mad arabesques, all that withered away into nothing. Coarseness in both speech and thought, a base and slavish suspicion of anything noble or great, a brazen contempt for herself, that is what those sixteen years had taught her.

  And one other thing: a heavy, thick-blooded sensuality had come over her, a desire for the good things of life, a strong pleasure in drink and food, in soft seats and beds, a lascivious delight in soporific, spicy scents and a love of ostentation, neither checked by taste or refined by beauty. They were desires which she could only poorly satisfy, but that did not make her crave them any less.

  She had become pale and plump. There was a lingering inertia in all her movements. Her eyes were now strangely empty and expressionless, though occasionally they had an unnatural shine, and she had got into the habit of shaping her lips into the same, empty smile.

  In 1689, the stables of Tjele started burning one night. Flickering flames were licking their way through the thick, fire-browned smoke, lighting up the whole grassy yard, the low-slung outhouses and the white walls of the main building, even as far as the black tree tops of the garden, which rose high above the roof. Farmhands and people rushing to help were running back and forth between the well and the flames, fire-dyed water in their glittering buckets and pails. Palle Dyre was running this way and that, his hair flying and a red rake in his hand, while Erik Grubbe lay praying on an old salvaged grain chest, as he followed with growing fear the progress of the fire from roof to roof, moaning loudly every time a flame triumphantly swung its whirl of flying sparks high above the house.

  Marie was there too, but her eyes were on something other than the fire. She was watching the new coachman leading the terrified, fire-shy horses out of the smoke-filled stables. The door frame had been ripped out and the opening made wider, more than twice the width. The weak clay walls had been torn down on either side, and through this opening he was leading the horses, one by each hand. The mighty beasts, completely bewildered by the smoke, reared and threw themselves violently to the side when the dazzling, flickering light of the flames met their eyes, and it looked as if the coach driver between them would be torn in pieces or trampled underfoot, but neither did he fall or yield. Instead, yanking their muzzles, he dashed across the yard, running, jumping and dragging them as far as the gate by the garden, where he let them go.

  There were many horses at Tjele, and Marie Grubbe had a rich opportunity to admire this giant, handsome figure as he fought with those mighty beasts moving all the time: now almost dangling by an outstretched arm and raised into the air by a rearing stallion, now throwing himself down violently, feet firmly on the ground, now egging them on by leaps and bounds, all with those soft, tough, feathery movements that are peculiar to all exceptionally strong men.

  His short linen breeches and greyish flax shirt, to which the fire gave a yellowy shine and strong, shadowy folds, accentuated his magnificent limbs and complimented simply and beautifully his strong, tanned face, and the fine blond down around his mouth and lips as well as his shock of thick blond hair.

  Søren the Overseer was what this twenty-two-year-old giant was called. His real name was Søren Sørensen Møller, but he had got his nickname from his father, who had been an overseer at a manor in Hvornum.

  So the horses were rescued, the stables burnt down, the smouldering fire had been put out, and people left to take a brief morning slumber after a sleepless night.

  Marie Grubbe also sought her bed, but she did not sleep. She lay blushing at her thoughts, and throwing herself about anxiously as if afraid of them. Finally she rose.

  While getting dressed, she smiled at herself in contempt and pity. Usually she would be careless, dirty and almost slovenly in her dress so as to dress herself up all the more on special occasions, and in a way that caught the eye more than showed taste; but today was different. She put on an old, but clean, dark blue, homespun dress, tied a small scarlet handkerchief round her neck, and took out a small simple hat. Then she changed her mind and chose another one that, with its turned-up rim of yellow and brown flowers and its nape of fake silver brocade, did not go at all with the rest.

  Palle Dyre thought that she wanted to go to town and talk about the fire, but he told himself that there would be no horse to get her there. However, she stayed at home, but she was so restless that she could not settle on anything. She began one task after another. Finally, she went out into the garden, saying that she wanted to attend to what the horses had destroyed during the night, but she did not achieve much, because she spent most of her time sitting in the arbour with her hands in her lap, staring thoughtfully into the distance.

  The restlessness that had come over her did not disappear but became stronger day by day, and she had a sudden desire for lonely walks in the direction of Frastruplund or i
n the furthermost part of the garden. Both her husband and her father scolded her for this, but she did not appear to listen and would not even reply, and so they thought that it might be better to leave her to herself for a little while, as long as there was not much urgent work.

  One afternoon, a week or so after the fire, she was on her usual walk out Frastrup way and following a line of bushes of scrub oak and wild rose that grew waist-high when she suddenly saw Søren the Overseer just lying there, full length, among the low bushes, his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. A sickle lay not far away and the grass had been cut where she was standing.

  She remained standing there for a long time, staring at his big, regular features, his broad, heaving chest and his dark, big-veined hands, which lay clasped above his head. But Søren was resting rather than sleeping, and he suddenly opened his eyes and looked up at her, wide awake. He gave a start of fright that her ladyship had found him there asleep, instead of occupied with something; but he was so confused by the way she was looking at him that only when she blushed and said something about the heat and turned about to go, did he come to his senses and jump up, grab his sickle and his sharpening rod and begin to rub the steel blade so that it rang through the warm, quivering air. And then he began to cut as if his life depended on it.

  Only when he saw that Marie had crossed the stile and entered the grove did he stop. He stood for a while looking in her direction, his arms resting on the scythe. Then, all of a sudden, he threw the scythe far away and sat down, his legs sprawled out and his mouth wide open. He could not believe his own thoughts. He really looked like a man who had just fallen out of a tree.

  His head seemed so full of things, as if he were dreaming. Perhaps someone had cast some spell on him? He had never felt like this before. His head was teeming, as if he could think of a dozen things at once, as if his mind were not his own. It was strange how she had looked at him, and she had not said anything about how he was lying there asleep in the middle of the day. She had looked straight at him with her clear eyes, looked kindly, but then… just as Jens Pedersen’s Trine, that was how her ladyship had looked at him. There was a tale about a lady at Nørrebæk Manor, who had run off with her gamekeeper; perhaps he, too, had been given such a look when asleep? Her ladyship! Perhaps he could become good friends with her ladyship, just as that gamekeeper had done? He could not make any sense of it, perhaps he was ill? He could feel a burning spot on both cheeks, his heart was beating so anxiously and he could hardly catch his breath… He began to pull at the scrub oak, but he could not get it out while sitting down; so he got up and tore it out, grabbed his scythe and began to cut the grass so that it flew in all directions.