Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen (parable of the sower read online txt) 📕
He was a large-boned, long-limbed man with a stoop in his broad shoulders. His hair was rough as a crow's nest, grayish and tangled, but his face was of a deep yet clear pink, seemingly out of keeping with his coarse, rugged features and bushy eyebrows.
Erik Grubbe invited him to a seat and asked about his haymaking. The conversation dwelt on the chief labors of the farm at that season and died away in a sigh over the poor harvest of last year. Meanwhile the pastor was casting sidelong glances at the mug and finally said: "Your honor is always temperate--keeping to the natural drinks. No doubt they are the healthiest. New milk is a blessed gift of heaven, good both for a weak stomach and a sore chest."
"Indeed the gifts of God are all good, whether they come from the udder or the tap. But you must taste a keg of genuine mum that we brought home from Viborg the other day. She's both good and German, though I can't see that the customs have put their mark on her."
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roundness, and she actually followed her impulse, biting like a fierce
little animal mark upon mark till she felt the pain and would stop and
begin to fondle the poor maltreated arm.
At other times when she was sitting quietly, she would be suddenly
moved to go in and undress, only that she might wrap herself in a
thick quilt of red silk and feel the smooth, cool surface against her
skin, or put an ice-cold steel blade down her naked back. She had many
such whims.
Finally, after an absence of fourteen months, Ulrik Frederik returned.
It was a July night, and Marie lay sleepless, listening to the slow
soughing of the wind, restless with anxious thoughts. For the last
week she had been expecting Ulrik Frederik every hour of the day and
night, longing for his arrival and fearing it. Would everything be as
in olden times—fourteen months ago? Sometimes she thought no, then
again yes. The truth was, she could not quite forgive him for that
trip to Spain. She felt that she had aged in this long time, had grown
timid and listless, while he would come fresh from the glamor and
stir, full of youth and high spirits, finding her pale and faded,
heavy of step and of mind, nothing like her old self. At first he
would be strange and cold to her; she would feel all the more cast
down, and he would turn from her, but she would never forsake him. No,
no, she would watch over him like a mother, and when the world went
against him, he would come back to her, and she would comfort him and
be kind to him, bear want for his sake, suffer and weep, do everything
for him. At other times she thought that as soon as she saw him all
must be as before; yes, they romped through the rooms like madcap
pages; the walls echoed their laughter and revelry, the corners
whispered of their kisses—
With this fancy in her mind she fell into a light sleep. Her dreams
were of noisy frolic, and when she awoke, the noise was still there.
Quick steps sounded on the stairs, the street door was thrown open,
doors slammed, coaches rumbled, and horses’ hoofs scraped the
cobblestones.
There he is! she thought, sprang up, caught the large quilt, and
wrapping it round her, ran through the rooms. In the large parlor she
stopped. A tallow dip was burning in a wooden candlestick on the
floor, and a few of the tapers had been lit in the sconces, but the
servant in his flurry had run away in the midst of his preparations.
Someone was speaking outside. It was Ulrik Frederik’s voice, and she
trembled with emotion.
The door was opened, and he rushed in still wearing his hat and cloak.
He would have caught her in his arms but got only her hand, as she
darted back. He looked so strange in his unfamiliar garb. He was
tanned and stouter than of old, and under his cloak he wore a queer
dress, the like of which she had never seen. It was the new fashion
of long waistcoat and fur-bordered coat, which quite changed his
figure and made him still more unlike his old self.
“Marie!” he cried, “dear girl!” and he drew her to him, wrenching her
wrist till she moaned with pain. He heard nothing. He was flustered
with drink, for the night was not warm and they had baited well in the
last tavern. Marie’s struggles were of no avail; he kissed and fondled
her wildly, immoderately. At last she tore herself away and ran into
the next room, her cheeks flushed, her bosom heaving, but thinking
that perhaps this was rather a queer welcome, she came back to him.
Ulrik Frederik was standing in the same spot, quite bewildered between
his efforts to make his fuddled brain comprehend what was happening
and his struggles to unhook the clasps of his cloak. His thoughts and
his hands were equally helpless. When Marie went to him and unfastened
his cloak, it occurred to him that perhaps it was all a joke, and he
burst into a loud laugh, slapped his thigh, writhed and staggered,
threatened Marie archly, and laughed with maudlin good nature. He was
plainly trying to express something funny that had caught his fancy,
started but could not find the words, and at last sank down on a
chair, groaning and gasping, while a broad, fatuous smile spread over
his face.
Gradually the smile gave place to a sottish gravity. He rose and
stalked up and down in silent, displeased majesty, planted himself by
the grate in front of Marie, one arm akimbo, the other resting on the
mantel, and—still in his cups—looked down at her condescendingly. He
made a long, potvaliant speech about his own greatness and the honor
that had been shown him abroad, about the good fortune that had
befallen Marie when she, a common nobleman’s daughter, had become the
bride of a man who might have brought home a princess of the blood.
Without the slightest provocation he went on to impress upon Marie
that he meant to be master of his own house, and she must obey his
lightest nod; he would brook no gainsaying, no, not a word, not one.
However high he might raise her, she would always be his slave, his
little slave, his sweet little slave, and at that he became as gentle
as a sportive lynx, wept and wheedled. With all the importunity of a
drunken man he forced upon her gross caresses and vulgar endearments,
unavoidable, inescapable.
The next morning Marie awoke long before Ulrik Frederik. She looked
almost with hatred on the sleeping figure at her side. Her wrist was
swollen and ached from his violent greeting of the night before. He
lay with muscular arms thrown back under his powerful, hairy neck. His
broad chest rose and fell, breathing, it seemed to her, a careless
defiance, and there was a vacant smile of satiety on his dull, moist
lips.
She paled with anger and reddened with shame as she looked at him.
Almost a stranger to her after their long parting, he had forced
himself upon her, demanding her love as his right, cocksure that all
the devotion and passion of her soul were his, just as he would be
sure of finding his furniture standing where he left it when he went
out. Confident of being missed, he had supposed that all her longings
had taken wing from her trembling lips to him in the distance and that
the goal of all her desire was his own broad breast.
When Ulrik Frederik came out, he found her half sitting, half
reclining on a couch in the blue room. She was pale, her features
relaxed, her eyes downcast, and the injured hand lay listlessly in her
lap wrapped in a lace handkerchief. He would have taken it, but she
languidly held out her left hand to him and leaned her head back with
a pained smile.
Ulrik Frederik kissed the hand she gave him and made a joking excuse
for his condition the night before, saying that he had never been
decently drunk all the time he had been in Spain, for the Spaniards
knew nothing about drinking. Besides, if the truth were told, he liked
the homemade alicant and malaga wine from Johan Lehn’s dram-shop and
Bryhans’ cellar better than the genuine sweet devilry they served down
there.
Marie made no reply.
The breakfast table was set, and Ulrik Frederik asked if they should
not fall to, but she begged him to pardon her letting him eat alone.
She wanted nothing, and her hand hurt; he had quite bruised it. When
his guilt was thus brought home to him, he was bound to look at the
injured hand and kiss it, but Marie quickly hid it in a fold of her
dress with a glance—he said—like a tigress defending her helpless
cub. He begged long, but it was of no use, and at last he sat down to
the table laughing and ate with an appetite that roused a lively
displeasure in Marie. Yet he could not sit still. Every few minutes he
would jump up and run to the window to look out, for the familiar
street scenes seemed to him new and curious. With all this running his
breakfast was soon scattered about the room, his beer in one window,
the bread knife in another, his napkin slung over the vase of the
gilded Gueridon, and a bun on the little table in the corner.
At last he had done eating and settled down at the window. As he
looked out, he kept talking to Marie, who from her couch made brief
answers or none at all. This went on for a little while until she came
over to the window where he sat, sighed, and gazed out drearily.
Ulrik Frederik smiled and assiduously turned his signet ring round on
his finger. “Shall I breathe on the sick hand?” he asked in a
plaintive, pitying tone.
Marie tore the handkerchief from her hand and continued to look out
without a word.
“‘Twill take cold, the poor darling,” he said glancing up.
Marie stood resting the injured hand carelessly on the windowsill.
Presently she began drumming with her fingers as on a keyboard, back
and forth, from the sunshine into the shadow of the casement, then
from the shadow to the sunlight again.
Ulrik Frederik looked on with a smile of pleasure at the beautiful
pale hand as it toyed on the casement, gamboled like a frisky kitten,
crouched as for a spring, set its back, darted toward the bread knife,
turned the handle round and round, crawled back, lay flat on the
windowsill, then stole softly toward the knife again, wound itself
round the hilt, lifted the blade to let it play in the sunlight, flew
up with the knife—
In a flash the knife descended on his breast, but he warded it off,
and it simply cut through his long lace cufF into his sleeve as he
hurled it to the floor and sprang up with a cry of horror, upsetting
his chair, all in a second as with a single motion.
Marie was pale as death. She pressed her hands against her breast, and
her eyes were fixed in terror on the spot where Ulrik Frederik had
been sitting. A harsh, lifeless laughter forced itself between her
lips, and she sank down on the floor noiselessly and slowly, as if
supported by invisible hands. While she stood playing with the knife,
she had suddenly noticed that the lace of Ulrik Frederik’s shirt had
slipped aside revealing his chest, and a senseless impulse had come
over her to plunge the bright blade into that white breast, not from
any desire to kill or wound but only because the knife was cold and
the breast warm, or perhaps because her hand was weak and aching while
the breast was strong and sound, but first and last because she could
not help it, because her will had no power over her brain and her
brain no power over her will.
Ulrik Frederik stood pale, supporting his palms on the table which
shook under his trembling till the dishes slid and rattled. As a rule
he was not given to fear nor wanting in courage, but this thing had
come like a bolt out of the blue, so utterly senseless and
incomprehensible that he could only look on the unconscious form
stretched on the floor by the window with the same terror that he
would have felt for a ghost. Burrhi’s words about the
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