Free Last Tales by Isak Dinesen Page B

should have played this scene on the stage. Might it not have been sublime and thrilling, dear Angelo? Now it must content itself to become reality someday.
    “And you yourself now,” he said after a minute. “Are you going to Paradise? And shall we meet and talk together there, as we do here now?”
    Angelo for a long time found no answer. He took up one of his small clay figures and set it on the balustrade, a little to the left.
    “A man is more than one man,” he said slowly. “And the life of a man is more than one life. The young man who was Leonidas Allori’s chosen disciple, who felt that at his hand he would become the greatest artist of his age, and who loved his master’s wife—he will not go to heaven. He was too light of weight to mount so high.”
    He set up another figure on the balustrade, at some distance from the first and to the right of it.
    “And this famous sculptor, Angelo Santasilia,” he went on, “whom princes and cardinals beseech to work for them, this good husband and father—he will not go to heaven either. And do you know why? Because he is not at all eager to go there.”
    He placed his last figure in between the two others, farther back on the balustrade.
    “Do you see, Pino?” he said softly. “These three tiny toy figures are placed to mark three corners of a rectangle, in which the width is to the length as the length to the sum of the two. These, you know, are the proportions of the golden section.”
    He let his skilled hands fall to rest in his lap.
    “But,” he finished very slowly, “the young man whom you met at the inn of Mariana-the-Rat—the good home of thieves and smugglers down by the harbor—the young man with whom you talked there at night, Pino—he will go to heaven.”

TALES OF
TWO OLD GENTLEMEN
    T wo old gentlemen, both of them widowers, played piquet in a small salon next to a ballroom. When they had finished their game, they had their chairs turned round, so that through the open doors they could watch the dancers. They sat on contentedly, sipping their wine, their delicate noses turned up a little and taking in, with the melancholic superiority of age, the fragrance of youth before them. They first talked of ancient scandals in high society—for they had known each other as boys and young men—and of the sad fate of common friends, then of political and dynastic matters, and at last of the complexity of the universe in general. When they got there, there was a pause.
    “My grandfather,” the one old gentleman said at the end of it, “who was a very happy man and particularly happy inhis married life, had built up a philosophy of his own, which in the course of my life from time to time has been brought back to me.”
    “I remember your grandfather quite well, my good Matteo,” said the other, “a highly corpulent, but still graceful figure, with a smooth, rosy face. He did not speak much.”
    “He did not speak much, my good Taddeo,” Matteo agreed, “for he did, in accordance with his philosophy, admit the futility of argumentation. It is from my brilliant grandmother, his wife, that I have inherited my taste for a discussion. Yet one evening, while I was still quite a young boy, he benignly condescended to develop his theory to me. It happened, I remember, at a ball like this, and I myself was all the time longing to get away from the lecture. But my grandfather, his mind once opened upon the matter, did not dismiss his youthful listener till he had set forth to him his entire train of ideas. He said:
    “ ‘We suffer much. We go through many dark hours of doubt, dread and despair, because we cannot reconcile our idea of divinity with the state of things in the universe round us. I myself as a young man brooded a good deal over the problem. Later on I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the