Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen (parable of the sower read online txt) ๐
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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pride in winning the divorced wife of the Viceroy; but this did not
prevent him from treating her and speaking to her in a manner that
might have seemed incompatible with such a feeling. Not that he was
grossly rude or violentโby no means. He simply belonged to the class
of people who are so secure in their own sense of normal and
irreproachable mediocrity that they cannot refrain from asserting
their superiority over the less fortunate and naively setting
themselves up as models. As for Marie, she was, of course, far from
unassailable; her divorce from Ulrik Frederik and her squandering of
her motherโs fortune were but too patent irregularities.
This was the man who became the third person in their life at Tjele.
Not one trait in him gave grounds for hope that he would add to it any
bit of brightness or comfort. Nor did he. Endless quarrelling and
bickering, mutual sullenness and fault-finding were all that the
passing days brought in their train.
Marie was blunted by it. Whatever had been delicate and flowerlike in
her nature, all the fair and fragrant growth which heretofore had
entwined her life as with luxurious though fantastic and even bizarre
arabesques, withered and died the death. Coarseness in thought as in
speech, a low and slavish doubt of everything great and noble, and a
shameless self-scorn were the effect of these sixteen years at Tjele.
And yet another thing: she developed a thick-blooded sensuousness, a
hankering for the good things of life, a lusty appetite for food and
drink, for soft chairs and soft beds, a voluptuous pleasure in spicy,
narcotic scents, and a craving for luxury which was neither ruled by
good taste nor refined by love of the beautiful. True, she had scant
means of gratifying these desires, but that did not lessen their
force. She had grown fuller of form and paler, and there was a slow
languor in all her movements. Her eyes were generally quite empty of
expression, but sometimes they would grow strangely bright, and she
had fallen into the habit of setting her lips in a meaningless smile.
There came a time when they wrote sixteen hundred and eighty-nine. It
was night, and the horse-stable at Tjele was on fire. The flickering
flames burst through the heavy clouds of brown smoke; they lit up the
grassy courtyard, shone on the low outhouses and the white walls of
the manor house, and even touched with light the black crowns of the
trees in the garden where they rose high above the roof. Servants and
neighbors ran from the well to the fire with pails and buckets full of
water glittering red in the light of the flames. Palle Dyre was here,
there, and everywhere, tearing wildly about, his hair flying, a red
wooden rake in his hand. Erik Grubbe lay praying over an old chaff bin
which had been carried out. He watched the progress of the fire from
beam to beam, his agony growing more intense every moment, and he
groaned audibly whenever the flames leaped out triumphantly and swung
their spirals high above the house in a shower of sparks.
Marie too was there, but her eyes sought something besides the fire.
They were fixed on the new coachman, who was taking the frightened
horses out from the smoke-filled stable. The doorway had been widened
to more than double its usual size by lifting off the frame and
tearing down a bit of the frail wall on either side, and through this
opening he was leading the animals, one by either hand. They were
crazed with the smoke, and when the stinging, flickering light of the
flames met their eyes, they reared wildly and threw themselves to one
side until it seemed the man must be torn to pieces or be trampled
down between the powerful brutes. Yet he neither fell nor lost his
hold; he forced their noses down on the ground and ran with them, half
driving, half dragging them across the courtyard to the gate of the
garden where he let them go. There were many horses at Tjele, and
Marie had plenty of time to admire that beautiful, gigantic form in
changing postures as he struggled with the spirited animals, one
moment hanging from a straight arm, almost lifted from the ground by a
rearing station, the next instant thrown violently down and gripping
the earth with his feet, then again urging them on by leaps and bounds
always with the same peculiarly quiet, firm, elastic movements seen
only in very strong men. His short cotton breeches and blue-gray shirt
looked yellow where the light fell on them but black in the shadows
and outlined sharply the vigorous frame, making a fine, simple
background for the ruddy face with its soft, fair down on lip and chin
and the great shock of blonde hair. This giant of two-and-twenty was
known as Soren Overseer. His real name was Soren Sorensen Moller, but
the title had come down to him from his father, who had been overseer
on a manor in Hvornum.
The horses were all brought out at last. The stable burned to the
ground, and when the fire still smouldering on the site had been put
out, the servants went to get a little morning nap after a wakeful
night.
Marie Grubbe too went to bed, but she could not sleep. She lay
thinking, sometimes blushing at her own fancies, then tossing about as
if she feared them. It was late when she rose. She smiled
contemptuously at herself as she dressed. Here veryday attire was
usually careless, even slovenly, though on special occasions she would
adorn herself in a manner more showy than tasteful, but this morning
she put on an old though clean gown of blue homespun, tied a little
scarlet silk kerchief round her neck, and took out a neat, simple
little cap; then she suddenly changed her mind again and chose instead
one with a turned-up rim of yellow and brown flowered stuff and a
flounce of imitation silver brocade in the back which went but poorly
with the rest. Palle Dyre supposed she wanted to go to town and gossip
about the fire, and he thought to himself there were no horses to
drive her there. She stayed home, however, but somehow she could not
work. She would take up one thing after another only to drop it as
quickly. At last she went out into the garden, saying that she meant
to set to rights what the horses had trampled in the night, but she
did not accomplish much; for she sat most of the time in an arbor with
her hands in her lap, gazing thoughtfully into the distance.
The unrest that had come over her did not leave her but grew worse day
by day. She was suddenly seized with a desire for lonely walks in the
direction of Fastrup Grove or in the more distant parts of the outer
garden. Her father and husband both scolded her, but when she turned a
deaf ear and did not even answer them, they finally made up their
minds that it was best to let her go her own way for a short time, all
the more as it was not the busy season.
About a week after the fire she was taking her usual walk out Fastrup
way, and was skirting the edge of a long copse of stunted oaks and
dogrose that reached almost to her shoulder when suddenly she caught
sight of Soren Overseer stretched at full length in the edge of the
copse, his eyes closed as if he were asleep. A scythe was lying at his
side, and the grass had been cut for some distance around.
Marie stood for a long time gazing at his large, regular features, his
broad, vigorously breathing chest, and his dark, full-veined hands,
which were clasped above his head. But Soren was drowsing rather than
sleeping, and suddenly he opened his eyes, wide awake, and looked up
at her. He was startled at being found by one of the family sleeping
when he should have been cutting hay, but the expression in Marieโs
eyes amazed him so much that he did not come to his senses until she
blushed, said something about the heat, and turned to go. He jumped
up, seized his scythe and whetstone, and began to rub the steel until
it sang through the warm, tremulous air. Then he went at the grass,
slashing as if his life were at stake.
After a while he saw Marie crossing the stile into the grove, and at
that he paused. He stood a moment staring after her, his arms resting
on his scythe, then suddenly flung it away with all his strength, sat
down with legs sprawling, mouth open, palms flat out on the grass, and
thus he sat in silent amazement at himself and his own strange
thoughts.
He looked like a man who had just dropped down from a tree.
His head seemed to be teeming with dreams. What if anyone had cast a
spell over him? He had never known anything like the way things
swarmed and swarmed inside of his head as if he could think of seven
things at once, and he couldnโt get the hang of themโthey came and
went as if heโd nothing to say about it. It surely was queer the way
sheโd looked at him, and she hadnโt said anything about his sleeping
this way in the middle of the day. She had looked at him so kindly,
straight out of her clear eyes, andโjust like Jens Pedersenโs Trine
she had looked at him. Her ladyship! Her ladyship! There was a story
about a lady at Norbalk manor who had run away with her gamekeeper.
Had he got such a look when he was asleep? Her ladyship! Maybe he
might get to be good friends with her ladyship, just as the gamekeeper
did. He couldnโt understand itโwas he sick? There was a burning spot
on each of his cheeks, and his heart beat, and he felt so queer it was
hard to breathe. He began to tug at a stunted oak, but he could not
get a grip on it where he was sitting;-he jumped up, tore it loose,
and threw it away, caught his scythe, and cut till the grass flew in
the swath.
In the days that followed, Marie often came near Soren, who happened
to have work around the house, and he always stared at her with an
unhappy, puzzled, questioning expression as if imploring her to give
him the answer to the riddle she had thrown in his way, but Marie only
glanced furtively in his direction and turned her head away.
Soren was ashamed of himself and lived in constant fear that his
fellow-servants would notice there was something the matter with him.
He had never in all his life before been beset by any feeling or
longing that was in the least fantastic, and it made him timid and
uneasy. Maybe he was getting addled or losing his wits. There was no
knowing how such things came over people, and he vowed to himself that
he would think no more about it, but the next moment his thoughts were
again taking the road he would have barred them from. The very fact
that he could not get away from these notions was what troubled him
most, for he remembered that he had heard tales of Cyprianus, whom you
could burn and drown, yet he always came back. In his heart of hearts
he really hoped that the fancies would not leave him, for life would
seem very dreary and empty without them, but this he did not admit to
himself. In fact his cheeks flushed with shame whenever
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