Free Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard by Isak Dinesen Page A

Ariel come swooping onto the stage on a wire from the wings. To hell with it! Such things to me are an abomination. It is the words of the poet which are to make Ariel fly. Ought we, who are our William’s servants, to rely more on a bit of steel than on his heavenly stanzas! That, on this stage, shall come to happen only over Valdemar Soerensen’s dead body!
    “You are a bit slow in your movements,” he went on. “That is as it should be. Rapid Ariel must not be, nor bustling. And when he answers Prospero:
    I drink the air before me and return
or e’er your pulse twice beat
,
    the public will believe him. Certainly they will believe him. But, it shall not be because they think: ‘Ay, maybe he can do it, the way he can hustle.’ No, they must not be in doubt even for a fraction of a second, for they must at the very momentbe blissfully a-tremble in their hearts and there cry out: ‘Oh, what witchcraft!’
    “Nay, I will tell you something, wench,” Herr Soerensen took up the tale a moment after, mightily carried away by his own fantasy. “If one imagines—for one may imagine anything—that it happened that a girl had come into the world with a pair of wings to her back, and she came to me and begged for a part in a play, I should answer her: ‘In the works of the poets there is a part for every single child of man, ergo, one for you too. Indeed, one will find more than one heroine in the kind of comedies we have to put up nowadays who might profit by losing a bit of her
avoir du pois!
The Lord be with you, you may play one of those. But Ariel, you cannot play because already you have got wings to your back, and because, in stark reality and without any poetry at all, you are capable of flying!’ ”
III. THE CHILD OF LOVE
    The girl who was to play Ariel had for some time known in her heart that she would be an actress.
    Her mother sewed hats for ladies in a small fjord town, and the daughter sat beside her and dizzily felt that the swell in her own heart was like that in the water. Sometimes she thought that she would die from it. But she knew no more about the soundings of the heart than about those of the sea. She picked up her thimble and scissors with a pale face.
    Her father had been a Scotch ship’s captain, by name Alexander Ross, whose ship twenty years ago had suffered damage on her way to Riga and had had to lie up through the summer in the town harbor. During these summer months the big handsome man, who had sailed round the world andtaken part in an Antarctic expedition, had created much stir and unrest among the townsfolk. And he had, in haste and with a will, such as he did everything, fallen in love with and married one of their loveliest girls, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a customs officer. The young maiden had defended herself in sweet emotion and confusion, but had still become Madam Ross before she knew where she was. “It’s the sea that brought me, little heart of mine,” he had whispered to her, in his queer, broken, adorable Norwegian. “Stop wave-beat, stop heart-beat.”
    Toward the end of the summer the captain’s ship was cleared, he embraced and kissed his young bride, laid a pile of gold coins on her work table and promised her to come again before Christmas to take her with him to Scotland. She stood on the quay in the fine East Indian shawl he had given her, and saw him sail away. He had been one with her: now he became one with his ship. Since that day no one had seen or heard anything of him.
    The young wife next spring, after the long terrible waiting of the winter months, realized that his ship had gone down, and that she was a widow. But the townsfolk began to talk: never had Captain Ross intended to come back. A little later it was said that he already had a wife at home in Scotland; his own crew had hinted at it.
    There were those in the town who blamed a maiden who had been in such a hurry to throw herself into the arms of a foreign sea captain. Others felt