Marie Grubbe Read online

  “Yes, that’s what happens… both of us, we both succumbed, just as everyone else, and made our bargain with life for less than we once ever imagined… you in your way and I in mine.”

  “Aye, but your honour is well enough?” asked Marie, speaking again as if she were a simpleton.

  “Well enough,” he laughed. “Well enough is half rotten; and I’m just that, well enough, and you, Marie?”

  “Yes, thank you, we have our good health, and when we toil with all our might, why then we have bread and aquavit too.”

  They had reached land, and Sti got out and said goodbye.

  “Dear God,” said Marie, looking at him with pity as he left. “They’ve cut off both his wings and his crown.”

  *

  And time passed quietly and without change for the inhabitants of Burdock House, with daily chores and daily profit. Little by little, and by hard work, their circumstances improved. They employed men to look after the ferry service, did a little trade and enlarged their old house. They saw the old century out and lived ten years into the new; Marie reached sixty and then sixty-five but kept herself well and active, work-fit and workhappy, as if she were on the right side of fifty. But then, on her sixty-eighth birthday in the spring of 1711, it happened that Søren, in very suspicious circumstances but apparently by accident, shot and killed a ship’s captain from Dragør, and as a consequence he was arrested.

  It was a heavy blow for Marie and the long uncertainty about what the punishment would be – there would not be any judgement till the following year around midsummer – together with her anxiety that this might reawaken the old case of the attempted murder of Ane Trinderup, aged her greatly.

  One day, at the beginning of this period of waiting, Marie went to meet the boat that was putting in. There were two travellers on board, and one of them, a journeyman, commanded all her attention by refusing to show his travel documents, which he claimed to have shown the ferry people when they took him on board, although they denied this. But when she threatened him with having to pay the full fare unless his travel documents proved that he was a journeyman, and so entitled to half fare, he decided to comply. Only when she had finished with this did Marie notice the other passenger, a small, frail figure of a man who was standing there, pale and cold from recent seasickness, closely wrapped in a green and black, coarsely-woven cape, leaning against the railing of an upturned boat. He asked in a grumpy voice whether he could stay at Burdock House, and Marie replied that he could look at the lodging.

  She showed him a small room that, besides a bed and a chair, contained a barrel of aquavit, a tray and a funnel, as well as a few large ceramic jars of molasses and vinegar. There was also a table with ash-grey legs and a top fitted with square ceramic tiles, on which were drawings in a dark, almost black, violet showing scenes from the Old and New Testament. The stranger remarked immediately that three of those tiles showed Jonah being spewed onto land from the jaws of a whale, and as he placed his hand on one, a shiver went through him, and he said that he would certainly catch a cold should he be foolish enough to sit and read, before resting his elbows on that table.

  To Marie’s questions he replied that he had left the capital because of the plague, and would be staying here till it was over. He informed her that he only ate three times a day and could not bear salt, meat or freshly baked bread. He was a Master of Arts and at that moment an alumnus of Borch’s Collegium and his name was Holberg, Ludvig Holberg.29

  Master Holberg was a very quiet man with an extraordinarily youthful appearance. He seemed only eighteen or nineteen years old at first glance, but if one noticed his mouth, his hands and the inflection of his voice, then it became obvious that he was quite a bit older. He kept himself very much to himself, spoke little and with apparent reluctance. Yet he was not at all someone who avoided company, provided he would be left in peace and not drawn into any conversations, and it gave him obvious pleasure when the ferry came and went with travellers, or when the fishermen landed their catch, to watch all that bustle from a distance and to listen to their exchanges. On the whole, he liked to watch people at work, whether it was ploughing or staking or launching their boats, and if someone were to exert himself in a way that was beyond ordinary human strength, then he would smile with great satisfaction and lift his shoulders in quiet pleasure.

  When he had been staying in Burdock House for about a month, he became closer to Marie Grubbe, or allowed her to get closer to him, and they would often sit on balmy summer evenings talking to each other for an hour or two at a time in the main room of the inn, with an open door offering a view across the bright sea to the bluish, darkening twilight of Møen.

  One evening Marie told him her story and finished with a sigh because Søren had been taken from her.

  “I must confess,” said Holberg, “that I am utterly unable to comprehend how you should have preferred a vulgar stable boy or beggar to so perfect a cavalier as his excellence the governor, who is praised by all as a master of etiquette and fine manners – indeed as an example of all that belongs to the art of being gallant et charmant.”

  “If he had been as full of such arts as are found in the book Nouveau Traité de la Civilité, it would have added not a grain of weight once I had conceived for him such dégoût and aversion that I could hardly bear to look at him; and you understand how utterly impossible it can be to overcome such a dégoût, even if one were to possess the virtues and principles of an angel, yet to natural aversion goes the victory. But to my present husband, I am drawn with such a strong and immediate attachment that I can only put it down to an irresistible attraction.”

  “Now that’s a fine argument! We might as well pack all the morality of the world in a chest and send it to Hell and live as our hearts desire. There is no obscenity in existence that anyone can think of, that cannot be dressed up as an irresistible attraction; nor is there any virtue, among all the virtues that can be named, that cannot easily be dismissed, as one person might have a dégoût for moderation, another for truthfulness, yet another for modesty, and such a natural dégoût or aversion is quite irresistible one might argue, and so whoever is burdened by it, is entirely blameless. But you are much too enlightened, my good woman, to be unaware that these are only sinful fantasies and the talk of a simpleton.”

  Marie did not reply.

  “Don’t you believe in God, my good woman,” continued Master Holberg, “and in the eternal life?”

  “Praise and thank the Lord, yes I do, I do believe in God.”

  “But eternal retribution or eternal reward, my dear, what about that?”

  “I believe that everyone lives their own life and dies their own death, that’s what I believe.”

  “That is no religion at all. Do you believe in the resurrection of the flesh?”

  “And how shall I be raised? As the young innocent child I was when I first came out in the world, knowing nothing and nobody, or as I was when I was admired and envied, the king’s favourite, a rich jewel in the court’s crown or as the poor, old and hopeless Marie the ferrywoman? And shall I have to answer for the sins they committed, the child, the woman in her prime, or is one of them going to answer for me? Can you tell me that, Master Holberg?”

  “But you only have one soul, my dear.”

  “Do I now?” asked Marie, becoming lost in her own thoughts. “Let me speak to you candidly,” she continued, “and tell me honestly what you think: do you believe that someone who all his life has sinned gravely against his God and Maker, but who in his last hour, lying on his death bed, confesses his sin and repents with a sincere heart, submitting to God’s mercy without doubt or hesitation, do you believe that he is more pleasing to God than someone who has also been hard towards Him, full of sin and contempt, but who then, for many a year of her life, has strived to do her duty and born every burden without a murmur, but has never repented her previous life to God or man? Do you think that she who has lived as she believed it was right to live, without any hope
of reward hereafter, and never praying for that, do you believe that God will thrust her from him and cast her away because she never entreated Him, not with a single word of prayer?”

  “That is a question no man can answer,” replied the Master of Arts, and went out of the room.

  He left shortly after.

  The following year in August, judgment was pronounced in the case of Søren the Ferryman, and he was sentenced to three years hard labour in irons at Bremerholm. It was a long time to suffer, and even longer to wait, but that too passed.

  Søren returned home, but imprisonment and the hard treatment had broken his health, and Marie had not taken care of him for a year before he was taken to the cemetery.

  Marie had to struggle with life for another long year, before she suddenly became ill and died. Throughout the duration of her illness, Marie's mind was never properly lucid, and the priest could therefore neither pray with her nor give her the last rites.

  On a sunlit summer’s day they buried her at Søren’s side, and over the bright Sound and the fields, golden with grain, a poor group of mourners sang, tired with the heat and without thought or feeling:

  “Your wrath, Lord of mercy, turn away,

  Stay that bloody whip, stay,

  Let not anger’s passion run

  From dark sins turn that bright sun.

  Should your anger justly fall,

  On sinners, one and all,

  They would sadly fall and crumble,

  Aye, Lord, both rich and humble.”30

  * * *

  29 Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), philosopher, essayist and playwright of the enlightenment, was born in Norway but spent most of his life in Copenhagen. He visited Marie Grubbe in 1711 and wrote an account of the meeting, in which he says that she told him that she was happier with Søren than with her previous husbands. The detail of their conversation here is otherwise fictitious.

  30 Anonymous, published in the book of hymns by Thomas Kingo (1643–1703) in 1699.

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  First published by Dedalus in 2015

  Translation copyright © Mikka Haugaard 2015

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