Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen

Author:Isak Dinesen [Dinesen, Isak]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-79182-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-19T14:00:00+00:00

ALKMENE

MY FATHER’S ESTATE lay in a lonely part of Jutland, and I was his only child. When my mother died he did not care to send me away to school, but when I was seven years old he took on a tutor for me.

My tutor’s name was Jens Jespersen; he was a theological student and, I believe, the most honest man I have known in my life. He was himself the son of a poor village parson; he had had to work hard to get on to the University of Copenhagen, and there the professors had been expecting great things from him. But his health had suffered during his years of study, and for that reason he had, already five years ago, left town and taken on the job as a teacher in the country.

Under his direction I took to books more willingly than I had ever thought I would, and was quite happy both at school and in the company of our keepers and grooms. And so I managed to gather a little knowledge of mathematics and of the classics, as well as of horses and game.

Two years later my father went off to a watering place, took me with him, and left me at a school in Holstein; but after an equal span of time he again fetched me back. During my absence our old, drunken parson of the estate had died, and my father had presented the living to my former tutor. He was now settled in the parsonage and had married the girl to whom he had been engaged for five years. From then on I continued my lessons by riding down to the parsonage every day. I also sometimes stayed there over a night or two.

The parsonage was a ramshackle old place, and the people within it were poor, for the living was but small, and my old teacher still had heavy debts from his student days to pay off. All the same, it was a joyous place, because the parson was so happily married. His wife’s name was Gertrud. She was twelve years younger than her husband, but twelve years older than I, so that she sometimes seemed to be the contemporary of the clergyman, and sometimes of the schoolboy. She was a big young woman, who was not considered pretty by the parish, for she had a broad face, and in summer she was as freckled as a turkey’s egg. But she had clear, bright eyes—so that when in Homer I read about the lively-glancing maiden Chryseis, I thought of her—and rich reddish hair. I remember the first time that I realized how well I liked her. One summer evening a party of young people from the neighbourhood were gathered at the parsonage and were playing hide-and-seek all over the house. I had hidden in a small lumber room in the attic. While I was there the parson’s wife came rushing in, and without seeing me squeezed up behind the door. She stood there, all out of breath from her run up the stairs, and placed a finger upon her lips.

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