THE ICE MAIDEN
1. LITTLE RUDY
LET’S VISIT SWITZERLAND. LET’S look around in that magnificent mountainous country where the forests grow upon steep rocky walls. Let’s climb upon the dazzling fields of snow, and go down again to the green meadows, where rivers and rivulets roar along as if they’re afraid that they won’t reach the sea soon enough and will disappear. The sun burns hot in the deep valley, and it also burns on the heavy masses of snow so that through the years they melt together to form bright blocks of ice that become rolling avalanches and towering glaciers.
Two such glaciers lie in the wide ravines under Schreckhorn and Wetterhorn,1 close to the little mountain town of Grindelwald. They’re extraordinary to see, and therefore many foreigners come here in the summer from all over the world. They come over the high, snow-covered mountains, or they come from down in the deep valleys, after a several hour climb. As they climb, the valley seems to sink deeper. They look down on it as if they were up in a hot-air balloon. At the top the clouds often hang like thick heavy curtains of smoke around the peaks, while down in the valley, where the many brown wooden houses are spread out, a ray of sun captures a patch of shiny green and makes it look transparent. The water roars, rumbles, and rushes down there. The water trickles and tinkles above. It looks like fluttering ribbons of silver falling down the cliffs.
On both sides of the road there are log chalets and each house has a little potato patch. This is a necessity because there are many mouths inside the doors. There are many children who have big appetites. They swarm out from all the houses and press around the tourists, both those on foot and in coaches. All the children are little merchants. The little ones offer and sell lovely little carved wooden houses, like the ones you see built there in the mountains. Rain or shine the swarms of children come out with their wares.
Twenty some years ago there was sometimes a little boy there, standing a little apart from the other children, who also wanted to sell his wares. He had such a serious face and stood with both hands tightly clasping his wooden box, as if he didn’t want to drop it. It was just this seriousness, and the fact that he was so little, that caused him to be noticed and called upon. Often he sold the most, but he himself didn’t know why. His grandfather, who carved the lovely, delicate houses, lived higher up the mountain. In the living room up there stood an old cabinet, full of all kinds of carvings. There were nut crackers, knives, forks, and boxes with carved leaves and jumping antelopes. There was everything there that could please the eyes of children, but the little boy—whose name was Rudy—looked with greatest pleasure and longing at the old rifle under the rafters. Grandfather had said that it would be his when he was big and strong enough to use it.
As little as he was, the boy was set to tend the goats, and if climbing with them was a sign of a good goatherd, then Rudy was a good goatherd. He climbed even higher than the goats. He liked gathering birds’ nests from high in the trees. He was daring and brave, but you only saw him smile when he was standing by a roaring waterfall, or when he heard an avalanche. He never played with the other children, and he was only together with them when his grandfather sent him down to sell carvings. Rudy didn’t care much for that, for he would rather clamber alone up in the mountains, or sit by grandfather and listen to him tell about the old days, or about the people close by in Meiringen where he was from. People hadn’t lived there from the beginning of the world, Grandfather said, they had migrated. They had come from way up north, and they had relatives there. They were called Swedes. This was real knowledge, and Rudy knew that, but he received even more knowledge from other good companions, and those were the animals in the house. There was a big dog, Ajola, that Rudy had inherited from his father, and there was a tomcat who meant a lot to Rudy because he had taught him how to climb.
“Come out on the roof with me,” the cat had said, quite clearly and intelligibly. When you’re a child and can’t talk yet, you can understand hens and ducks, cats and dogs very well indeed. They are just as easy to understand as father and mother when you are really small. Even grandfather’s cane can whinny and become a horse with a head, legs, and tail. Some children lose this understanding later than others, and people say that those children are slow in developing and are children for an exceedingly long time. People say so many funny things!
“Come out on the roof, little Rudy,” was one of the first things the cat said, and Rudy understood. “All that about falling is just imagination. You won’t fall if you aren’t afraid of falling. Come on, set one paw like this, and the other like this! Feel your way with your front paws. Use your eyes, and be flexible in your limbs. If there’s a gap, then jump and hold on. That’s what I do.”
And that’s what Rudy did too. He often sat on the ridge of the roof with the cat. He sat with it in the tree tops too, and then he sat high on the edge of the cliffs, where the cat never went.
“Higher! higher!” the trees and bushes said. “Do you see how we climb up? How high we reach and how we hold on, even on the outer narrow cliff tops?”
And Rudy often reached the mountain top before the sun did, and there he’d have his morning drink, the fresh fortifying mountain air. The drink that only God can make, though people can read the recipe. It says: the fresh scent of mountain herbs and the valley’s mint and thyme. The hanging clouds absorb everything that’s heavy and then the winds card them in the spruce forests. The fragrances’ spirits become air, light and fresh, always fresher. This was Rudy’s morning drink.
The sunbeams—her daughters bringing blessings—kissed his cheeks and Vertigo lurked nearby, but didn’t dare approach. The swallows from grandfather’s house, where there were never less than seven nests, flew up to him and the goats, singing: “We and you, and you and we.” They brought greetings from home, even from the two hens, the only birds in the place, but Rudy never had anything to do with them.
As young as he was, he had traveled pretty far for such a little fellow. He had been born in the upper part of the canton of Valais2 and carried here from over the mountains. Recently he had walked to the near-by Staubbach3 that waves in the air like a silver ribbon in front of the snow-covered blinding white mountain, The Jungfrau.4 And he had been on the big glacier at Grindelwald, but that was a sad story. His mother had died there, and there, said his grandfather, “little Rudy’s childhood joy had been blown away.” His mother had written that when the boy was less than a year old, he laughed more than he cried, “but after he came out of the ice crevice his disposition had entirely changed.” Grandfather didn’t talk much about it, but everyone on the mountain knew about it.
Rudy’s father had been a postman, and the big dog in the living room had always followed him on the trip over the Simplon pass, down to Lake Geneva.5 Rudy’s relatives on his father’s side still lived in the canton of Valais in the Rhone valley. Rudy’s uncle was an excellent goat-antelope hunter and a well-known guide. Rudy was only a year old when he lost his father, and his mother wanted to return then with her little child to her family in Berner-Oberland. Her father lived a few hours from Grindelwald. He was a wood carver and earned enough from that to support himself. So in the month of June she walked, carrying her little child, homewards over the Gemmi pass towards Grindelwald in the company of two antelope hunters. They had almost finished their journey and had already gone through the high pass and reached the snow fields above her home town. They could see the familiar wooden houses spread out in the valley below, but they still had to cross the difficult upper part of one of the big glaciers. The snow had freshly fallen and hid a cleft that was deeper than a person’s height, although it did not reach all the way to the bottom, where the water roared. All at once the young woman, carrying her child, slipped, sank, and disappeared without a cry or a sigh. But they heard the little child crying. It took over an hour for the two guides to get a rope and poles from the closest house to try to help. After tremendous difficulty, two apparent corpses were brought out from the ice cleft. They used all the means they could to resuscitate them and succeeded in saving the child, but not the mother. And so the old grandfather ended up with a grandson in the house instead of a daughter, the little one, who laughed more than he cried. But now he had been broken of that habit. The change had most likely happened while he was in the cleft, in that cold strange world of ice, where the souls of the condemned are locked until the day of judgment, as the dwellers in the Swiss mountains believe.
The glacier lies not unlike roaring water, frozen to ice and pressed into green blocks of glass, one huge piece of ice toppled on the other. In the depths below roars the furious stream of melted snow and ice. Deep caves and mighty clefts rise in there, making a wonderful ice palace, which the Ice Maiden, the queen of the glacier, has made her dwelling. Half child of the air and half mistress of the mighty rivers, she kills and crushes, and can rise with the spring of a goat-antelope to the highest peak of the mountains where the most daring mountain climbers have to chop footholds for themselves in the ice. She sails on the thinnest spruce twig down the rushing river and leaps from cliff to cliff surrounded by her long, snow-white hair, wearing her blue-green dress that glimmers like the water of the deep Swiss lakes.
“To crush, hold tight! Mine is the power!” she says. “They stole a lovely boy from me, a boy I had kissed, but not to death. He’s amongst people again. He guards the goats on the mountain and climbs higher, always higher, away from the others, but not from me! He is mine and I shall fetch him.”
And she asked Vertigo to tend to her errands. It was too muggy in the summertime for the Ice Maiden in the greenery where the mint thrives. And Vertigo rose and bowed. Here came one and then three more. Vertigo has many sisters, a whole flock of them, and the Ice Maiden chose the strongest of the many who ruled both indoors and out. They sit on stair banisters and on tower railings. They run like squirrels along the mountain edge, leap out treading air like swimmers treading water, and lure their victims out and down into the abyss. Vertigo and the Ice Maiden both grasp after people like the octopus grasps anything that moves around it. Vertigo was to seize Rudy.
“Seize him who can!” said Vertigo. “I’m not able to do it! The cat, that wretch, has taught him her tricks. The child has a power that pushes me away. I can’t reach the little fellow when he hangs on the branches over the chasm where I’d like to tickle the soles of his feet, or give him a ducking in the air. I can’t do it.”
“We could do it!” said the Ice Maiden. “You or me! Me!”
“No, no!” A response came to them like a mountain echo of church bells, but it was a song and words in a fused chorus from other spirits of nature: the gentle, good and loving daughters of the sunbeams. They pitch camp each evening in a wreath around the mountain tops. They spread out their rosy wings that blush redder and redder as the sun sinks. The high Alps glow and people call it the Alpenglow. When the sun has set, they pull into the mountain tops, in the white snow and sleep there until the sun rises. Then they come out again. They especially love flowers, butterflies, and human beings, and among the human beings, they were particularly fond of Rudy.
“You won’t catch him! You won’t catch him!” they cried.
“I have caught and kept bigger and stronger people than him!” said the Ice Maiden.
Then the sun’s daughters sang a song about the wanderer whom the whirlwind tore the cloak from and carried away in a mad rush. The wind took his covering, but not the man. “You children of nature’s force can seize but not hold him. He is stronger. He is more spiritual even than we are. He can rise higher even than the sun, our mother. He knows the magic words to bind wind and water so that they must serve and obey him. You release the heavy oppressive weight, and he lifts himself higher!”
Such was the lovely song of the bell-like choir.
And every morning the rays of the sun shone through the only small window in Grandfather’s house and fell on the quiet child. The sunshine’s daughters kissed him. They wanted to thaw out, warm up, and destroy the ice kisses that the glacier’s royal maiden had given him when he lay in the deep ice cleft in his dead mother’s lap and was saved as if by a miracle.
2. JOURNEY TO A NEW HOME
When Rudy was eight years old, his uncle in the Rhone valley, on the other side of the mountains, wanted to take the boy to live with him. He could be more easily educated there and would have more opportunities. Grandfather realized this too, and let him go.
Rudy was leaving. There were others besides Grandfather to whom he had to say good bye. First there was Ajola, the old dog.
“Your father was a postman, and I was a post dog,” said Ajola. “We traveled both up and down, and I know the dogs and people on the other side of the mountains. It’s never been my habit to talk much, but now that we won’t be able to talk to each other much longer, I will say a little more than usual. I will tell you a story that I’ve always thought a lot about. I don’t understand it, and you won’t be able to either, but that doesn’t matter because I have gotten this much out of it: things are not distributed quite the way they should be, either for dogs or for people in this world. Not everyone is created to sit on laps or drink milk. It’s not something I’ve been used to, but I have seen a puppy ride on the postal coach sitting in a passenger seat. The woman who was his mistress, or perhaps he was the master, had brought a milk bottle with her that he drank from. He was given cake, but he couldn’t be bothered to eat it. He just sniffed at it, and so she ate it herself. I was running in the mud beside the coach, as hungry as a dog. I chewed on my own thoughts. It wasn’t right, but then again there is much that isn’t. I hope you’ll end up on a lap and in the coach, but it’s not something you can do by yourself. I haven’t been able to, either by yipping or yawning.”
That was Ajola’s speech, and Rudy put his arms around the dog’s neck and kissed it right on its wet snout. Then he picked up the cat, but it squirmed.
“You have become too strong for me, and I don’t want to use my claws! Climb over the mountains. I have taught you to climb, you know! Never think that you will fall, and you’ll manage!” And then the cat ran away because it didn’t want Rudy to see the sorrow in its eyes.
The hens were running around on the floor. The one had lost its tail. A tourist who wanted to be a hunter had shot the tail off because he thought the hen was a bird of prey.
“Rudy’s going over the mountains,” said one hen.
“He’s always in a hurry,” said the other, “and I don’t like saying good-bye!” And both of them pattered off.
He also said good by to the goats, and they cried, “Nayhhh, nayhhh.” They wanted to go along, and it was so sad.
There were two good guides in the district who were just then going over the mountains. They were going down the other side through the Gemmi pass. Rudy went with them, on foot. It was a rigorous hike for such a little fellow, but he had great strength and tireless courage.
The swallows flew with them for a distance. “We and you, and you and we!” they sang. The route went over the rapid Lutschine that gushes forth in many small streams from Grindelwald glacier’s black cleft. Loose tree limbs and boulders act as bridges here. Now they were high in the scrub alder and started up the mountain, close to where the glacier separates from the side of the mountain, and then they went out on the glacier, over blocks of ice and around them. Sometimes Rudy had to crawl, sometimes walk. His eyes shone with pure pleasure, and he stepped firmly with his iron clad mountain boots as if he wanted to mark where he had walked. The black earth deposits on the glacier spawned by the mountain water flow gave it the appearance of being calcified, but the blue-green, glassy ice still shone through. They had to walk around small pools that were damned up by the ice pack, and once they came close to a big boulder that was rocking on the edge of an ice fissure. The rock lost its equilibrium and fell rolling. The echo came resounding from the glacier’s deep hollow caverns.
Upward, ever upward they walked. The glacier itself stretched up in height like a river of wildly towering ice masses, squeezed between sheer cliffs. For a moment Rudy thought about what they had told him—that he had lain deep down in one of these cold-breathing crevices with his mother, but soon such thoughts were gone. It was to him like one of the many similar stories he had heard. Now and then when the men thought it was a little too hard for the boy to climb, they reached out and gave him a hand, but he wasn’t tired, and he stood as surefooted as a goat-antelope on the ice. Then they came out on the bare rock again, sometimes walking between barren rocks, sometimes between dwarf spruces, then out on grass-covered slopes. Always changing, always new. Around them rose the snow-covered mountains, those that he, like every child here, knew: The Jungfrau, Munken, and Eiger.
Rudy had never been so high before, never before been on the outstretched ocean of snow, lying there with immovable waves of snow that the wind blew a few flakes from, like it blows foam from the ocean. The glaciers hold each other by the hand, if you can say that about glaciers, and each is a glass palace for the Ice Maiden whose power and will is to capture and bury. The sun was shining warmly, and the snow was blinding and looked like it had been sown with sparkling whitish-blue diamonds. Innumerable insects, especially butterflies and bees, lay dead in masses on the snow. They had flown too high, or the wind had carried them until they died in the cold. Around Wetterhorn a threatening sky hung like a finely carded wad of black wool. It sank down bulging with its hidden Fohn, a violent force when it broke loose. The impressions of the entire journey became forever fixed in Rudy’s memory: staying overnight on the mountain, the path from there, and the deep mountain ravines where the water had sawed through the boulders for so long it made him dizzy to think of it.
An abandoned stone hut on the other side of the sea of snow gave them shelter for the night. They found charcoal and tree branches there, and a fire was soon lit. They prepared for the night as best they could. The men sat around the fire, smoked tobacco and drank the hot, spiced drink they had made themselves. Rudy received his share, and then the men talked about the mysterious creatures of the Alps and the strange giant snakes in the deep lakes, about the folk of the night, the legions of ghosts who carried the sleeper through the air to the wonderful swimming city of Venice. They talked about the wild herdsman who drove his black sheep across the pastures. Even if they hadn’t seen them, they had nevertheless heard the sound of their bells, and heard the uncanny bleating of the herd. Rudy listened curiously, but without fear because he was never afraid. As he listened he thought he could sense the ghostly, hollow bellow. It became more and more audible. The men heard it too and stopped talking. They told Rudy not to go to sleep.
It was the Föhn blowing. The violent stormy wind that flings itself from the mountains down into the valley and cracks trees in its fury as if they were reeds. It moves log houses from one side of the river bank to the other as easily as one moves a chess piece.
After an hour had passed they told Rudy that now the storm was over and he could sleep. He slept as if on command, so tired was he from the trek.
They broke camp early in the morning. That day the sun shone for Rudy on new mountains, new glaciers and fields of snow. They had arrived in the canton of Valais and were on the other side of the mountain ridge you could see from Grindelwald, but still far from Rudy’s new home. Other mountain ravines, other grassy pastures, forests and mountainous paths unfolded before them. They saw other houses and other people, but what people they were! Indeed, they were deformed, grim, fat with yellow-white faces. Their throats were heavy, ugly clumps of flesh hanging out like bags. They were cretins.6 They dragged themselves sickly forward and looked with dumb eyes at the strangers. The women looked the worst. Were these the people of his new home?
3. RUDY’S UNCLE
At his uncle’s house, when Rudy got there, the people, thank God, looked like the people Rudy was used to. There was only one cretin there, a poor foolish lad. One of those poor creatures who in their poverty and loneliness live by turns in families in canton Valais. They stay a few months in each house, and poor Saperli happened to be there when Rudy came.
Rudy’s uncle was still a strong hunter, and in addition he was a barrel-maker. His wife was a lively little person with an almost birdlike face, eyes like an eagle, and a long and quite downy neck.
Everything was new to Rudy—the clothing, the customs, even the language, but his childish ear would soon learn to understand that. It was clear that they were better off here than at Grandfather’s home. The rooms they lived in were bigger. The walls were covered with antelope antlers and highly polished guns. Over the door hung a picture of the Virgin Mary with fresh rhododendrons and a lamp burning in front of it.
Rudy’s uncle, as mentioned, was one of the district’s best goat-antelope hunters and was also the best and most experienced guide. Rudy would now become the darling of the house, although there was already one there. This was an old, blind, and deaf hunting dog who was no longer of any use, but who had been so. They remembered the animal’s ability in earlier years, and he was now a member of the family who would live out his life in comfort. Rudy pet the dog, but it wouldn’t have much to do with strangers, and of course Rudy was still a stranger. But not for long. He soon took root in the house and in their hearts.
“It’s not so bad here in Valais canton,” said Rudy’s uncle. “We have goat-antelopes, and they won’t soon die out like the mountain goats did. It’s much better than in the old days no matter how much people talk about their glory. It’s better now. There’s a hole in the bag now, and fresh air has blown into our enclosed valley. Something better always comes forward when the old antiquated things fall away,” he said. When Rudy’s uncle became very talkative, he talked about his childhood years and about the years when his father was in his prime, when Valais was, as he put it, a closed bag with way too many sick people, the pitiful cretins. “But then the French soldiers came, and they were real doctors. They soon killed the illness, and the people too. The Frenchmen could fight all right, strike a blow in more ways than one, and the women could strike too!” and Rudy’s uncle nodded to his French-born wife and laughed. “The French were able to strike the rocks so they’d give way. They built the Simplon7 road out of the cliffs, built that road so that I could now tell a three-year-old child to go down to Italy. Just stay on the road, and the child will find Italy if he stays on the road.” And then Rudy’s uncle sang a French ballad and gave a cheer for Napoleon Bonaparte.
That was the first time Rudy had heard about France and about Lyon, the big city on the Rhone where his uncle had once been.
It wouldn’t take many years for Rudy to become a good antelope hunter because he had an aptitude for it, said his uncle, and he taught him to hold a gun, take aim, and shoot. In the hunting season he took Rudy along up in the mountains and let him drink the warm antelope blood, which was supposed to keep dizziness from the hunter. He taught him to know what time avalanches would happen on the various mountain sides, whether at dinner time or in the evening, depending on how the sun beams worked the slopes. He taught him to observe the antelope and learn from them how to leap so that you could land on your feet and stand firmly, and if there wasn’t footing in the mountain clefts, how you had to support yourself with your elbows, clinging fast with the muscles of your thighs and legs. You could even keep yourself in place with your neck if it was necessary. The goat-antelopes were smart and even posted a lookout, but the hunter had to be smarter, and get downwind from them. He could fool them by hanging his cloak and hat on his walking stick, and the antelope would mistake the cloak for the man. His uncle played this trick one day when he was hunting with Rudy.
The mountain path was narrow. It really wasn’t a path at all, just a thin ledge, right by the dizzying abyss. The snow was lying half melted there; the stone crumbled when you walked on it. That’s why Rudy’s uncle laid down on his stomach, long as he was, and crept forward. Every stone that broke off fell, careened, and broke, skipped and rolled again, bounced from cliff to cliff before coming to rest in the black depths. Rudy stood on the outermost firm cliff crag a hundred steps behind his uncle. He saw an enormous vulture approaching in the air, swaying over his uncle. With one flap of its wings, the bird could throw the creeping worm into the abyss to turn it into carrion. His uncle had eyes only for the antelope that was visible with its kid on the other side of the cleft. Rudy kept his eye on the bird, understood what it wanted to do, and so he had his hand on the gun ready to shoot. Then the antelope leaped up, and Rudy’s uncle fired. The animal was killed by the shot, but the kid ran as if it had practiced fleeing its whole life. The huge bird flew quickly away, frightened by the shot. Rudy’s uncle didn’t realize the danger until Rudy told him about it.
As they were on their way home in the best of spirits, Rudy’s uncle whistling a tune from his childhood, they suddenly heard an odd sound from not far away. They looked to both sides, and then upward, and there on the heights, on the sloping mountain ledge, the snow cover was lifting. It was waving as when the wind sweeps under a spread-out sheet of linen. The tops of the waves snapped as if they were plates of marble cracking and breaking up and then released in a foaming, plunging stream, booming like the muffled roar of thunder. It was a rushing avalanche, not right on top of Rudy and his uncle, but close—too close.
“Hold on tight, Rudy!” his uncle cried. “Tightly, with all your might!”
And Rudy threw his arms around a nearby tree trunk, while his uncle clambered over him up into the tree’s branches and held on tightly. Although the avalanche was rolling past many yards from them, all around them the air turbulence and gusts of wind cracked and broke trees and bushes as if they were but dry reeds and scattered them widely. Rudy lay pressed to the ground. The tree trunk he was holding was now a stump, and the crown of the tree was lying a long way off. Rudy’s uncle lay there, amongst the broken branches. His head was crushed, and his hand was still warm, but his face was unrecognizable. Rudy stood there pale and trembling. This was the first fright of his life, the first time he had known horror.
He brought the tidings of death home in the late evening, a home that was now a house of grief. His uncle’s wife reacted without words, without tears. Only when the corpse was brought home, did grief erupt. The poor cretin crawled into his bed. No one saw him the whole day, but towards evening he came to Rudy.
“Write a letter for me! Saperli can’t write. Saperli will take the letter to the post office.”
“A letter from you?” asked Rudy, “and to whom?”
“To the Lord Christ!”
“Who do you mean by that?”
And the half-wit, as they called the cretin, looked at Rudy with pleading eyes, folded his hands, and said so solemnly and piously: “Jesus Christ! Saperli wants to send him a letter and ask that Saperli may lie dead and not the master.”
Rudy squeezed his hand. “That letter wouldn’t reach him. That letter wouldn’t bring him back to us.”
It was hard for Rudy to explain how impossible this was.
“Now you’re our sole support,” said his foster mother, and that’s what Rudy became.
4. BABETTE
Who’s the best shot in Valais canton? Well, the goat-antelopes knew that. “Watch out for Rudy!” they would say. “Who’s the best looking shot?” “Well, that’s Rudy,” said the girls, but they didn’t say, “Watch out for Rudy!” Even their serious mothers didn’t say that because he nodded just as cordially to them as to the young girls. He was so bright and happy. His cheeks were brown, his teeth fresh and white, and his eyes shone coal-black. He was a handsome fellow and only twenty years old. The icy water didn’t bother him when he swam, and he could turn in the water like a fish. He could climb like no other and cling tight to the cliff walls like a snail. He had good muscles and sinews, and this was evident too in his jumps and leaps which he had first learned from the cat and later from the goat-antelopes. You couldn’t entrust your life to a better guide, and Rudy could have amassed a fortune from that. He wasn’t interested at all in barrel-making, which his uncle had also taught him. All his delight and longing was for shooting antelope, and that also brought in money. Rudy was a good match, as they said, as long as he didn’t set his sights too high. At dances he was a dancer that the girls dreamed about, and one and another of them thought about him when they were awake too.
“He kissed me while we were dancing,” Annette, the school teacher’s daughter, told her dearest friend. But she shouldn’t have said that, even to her best friend. It’s not easy to keep quiet about such things. It’s like sand that runs out of a bag with a hole in it. Soon everyone knew that Rudy, no matter how proper and good he was, kissed girls while dancing. And yet he had not kissed the one that he most wanted to.
“Watch him!” said an old hunter. “He kissed Annette. He’s started with A and will most likely kiss through the whole alphabet.”
A kiss while dancing was yet all that could be gossiped about Rudy, but he had kissed Annette, and she was not at all the flower of his heart.
Down by Bex, between the big walnut trees and right next to a little rushing mountain stream, there lived a rich miller. His house was a big one with three stories. It had small towers, covered with wooden shingles and fitted with pieces of tin that shone in the sun and moonlight. The tallest tower had a weather vane in the shape of an apple with a shiny arrow through it. It was supposed to represent Wilhelm Tell’s arrow. The mill looked prosperous and neat, and could be both drawn and described, but the miller’s daughter could neither be drawn nor described. At least that’s what Rudy would say, and yet he had her picture in his heart. Her two shining eyes were burning there like a fire. It had flared up at once, like fire does, and the strangest thing about it was that the miller’s daughter, the lovely Babette, had no idea about this. She and Rudy had never spoken so much as two words to each other.
The miller was rich, and that wealth meant that Babette occupied a high position, difficult to reach. But nothing sits so high that you can’t reach it, Rudy said to himself. You have to climb, and you won’t fall down if you believe you won’t. He had learned that lesson at home.
And so it happened that Rudy had an errand in Bex. It was a long trip because at that time the railroad hadn’t been built there yet. From the Rhone glacier, at the foothill of the Simplon mountain, and between many mountains of various heights, stretches the wide Valais valley with its great river, the Rhone. It often waxes and washes over fields and roads, destroying everything. Between the towns of Sion and St. Maurice there is a curve in the valley. It bends like an elbow, and below St. Maurice becomes so narrow that there is only room for the river bed and a narrow road. There is an old tower on the mountainside that stands like a sentry for the canton of Valais, which ends here. It overlooks the brick bridge that leads to the toll house on the other side. The canton of Vaud begins here, and not far away is Bex, the closest town. On this side, with every step you take, everything swells with abundance and fertility. It’s like a garden of chestnut and walnut trees, and here and there cypress and pomegranate flowers peek out. It’s as southerly warm as if you had come to Italy.
Rudy reached Bex, carried out his errand, and looked around. But he did not see a fellow from the mill, much less Babette. It wasn’t supposed to be like this!
It was evening. The air was filled with the fragrance from the wild thyme and the flowering linden. A bright, airy blue veil seemed to lie on the forest-covered mountains. There was a pervasive silence, not of sleep nor of death, but it was as if all of nature were holding its breath, as if it felt silenced because it was going to be photographed against the backdrop of the blue sky. Here and there among the trees, and across the green fields, stood poles that carried the telegraph wires through the quiet valley. An object was leaning up against one of these, so still that you would think it must be a dead tree limb. But it was Rudy who stood as still as his surroundings, not sleeping and certainly not dead. But just as great world events or situations with great meaning for certain individuals often fly through the telegraph wires without a tremble or tone of indication in the wire, just in this way powerful, overwhelming thoughts—his happiness in life and from now on his idee fixe-flew through Rudy’s mind. His eyes were fastened on a point between the foliage, a light in the miller’s house, where Babette lived. So still was Rudy standing that you might think he was taking aim to shoot an antelope, but at this moment he was like the antelope himself, who can stand as if chiseled from stone for minutes, and then suddenly, when a rock rolls, leap up and run away. And that’s exactly what Rudy did as a thought, like a rolling rock, came to him.
“Never give up!” he said. “Go to the mill. Say ‘good evening’ to the miller, ‘good evening’ to Babette. You can’t fall if you think you can’t. Babette has to see me some time, after all, if I’m to be her husband.”
And Rudy laughed, and in good spirits he went to the mill. He knew what he wanted. He wanted Babette.
The river with its whitish yellow water was rushing along. Weeping willows and lindens overhung the swiftly flowing water. Rudy walked on the path, and as it says in the old children’s ditty:“... and on to the mill,
Where no one was home
But a cat on the sill. ”
But the housecat was standing on the steps. He arched his back and said, “Miaow!” but Rudy didn’t pay attention to this. He knocked on the door. But no one heard, and no one opened the door. “Miaow!” said the cat. If Rudy had been little, he would have understood animal language and would have heard the cat say, “No one’s home here.” But he had to go over to the mill to hear this. There he got the news that the master was on a trip, far away in the city of Interlaken. “Inter Lacus, between the lakes,” as the school master, Annette’s father, had explained in his teaching. The miller had taken that long trip, and Babette was with him. There was a big marksmanship competition, which would start the following day and last for a week. People from all the German-speaking cantons would be there.
Poor Rudy, you could say. It wasn’t the best time for him to come to Bex. He could just as well turn back, and that’s what he did. He took the road via St. Maurice and Sion, to his own valley and his own mountains, but he wasn’t dispirited. His spirits, which had risen before the sun rose the next morning, had never been down.
“Babette is in Interlaken, many days’ journey from here,” he said to himself. “It’s a long way if you take the road, but it’s not so far if you go over the mountains, and that’s the road for a hunter to take. I’ve gone that way before. That’s my native soil, where I lived with grandfather when I was little. And they’re having a shooting competition in Interlaken! I will take first place there and will also be first with Babette, when first I meet her in person!”
Rudy packed his Sunday clothes in his light backpack, took his rifle and hunting bag, and went up the mountain, the short way, which was still quite long. But the competition was just starting that day and would last a good week. He’d been told that the miller and Babette would be at their relatives in Interlaken the whole time. Rudy headed for the Gemmi pass.8 He wanted to come down by Grindelwald.
Happy and healthy he set out, upwards in the fresh, light, invigorating mountain air. The valley sank deeper, the horizon became wider. First one and then another snow-topped mountain came into view, and then the whole shining chain of the Alps. Rudy knew every mountain. He headed towards Schreckhorn, which lifted its snow-powdered rocky finger high into the blue sky.
Finally he was across the high mountains. The grazing meadows sloped downward towards the valley of his childhood. The air was light, as was his mind. The mountains and valleys were filled with flowers and greenery. His heart was full of the thoughts of youth: I’ll never get old, I’ll never die. Live! Prevail! Enjoy! He was as free and light as a bird. And the swallows flew by and sang as they had in his childhood: “We and you, and you and we!” All was soaring and joyous.
Down below lay the velvet green meadow, studded with the brown wooden houses. The Lütschine river rushed and roared. He saw the glacier with its glass-green edges in the dirty snow and the deep clefts. He saw both the upper and lower glacier, and heard the bells ring in the church as if they were welcoming him home. His heart beat more strongly and filled with memories, so that Babette was forgotten there for a moment.
He walked again on that road where he had stood as a little fellow by the ditch with the other children selling carved wooden houses. Up there behind the fir trees grandfather’s house was still standing, but strangers lived there. Children who wanted to sell things came running down the road. One of them gave him a rhododendron. Rudy took this as a good sign and thought about Babette. Soon he was down and over the bridge, where the two Lütschine rivers run together. The deciduous trees increased, and the walnut trees gave shade. Then he saw waving flags, the white cross on a red background, as both Switzerland and Denmark have. In front of him lay Interlaken.
It was really a splendid city, like no other, thought Rudy. A Swiss town in its Sunday best. It wasn’t like other market cities—a crowd of big stone buildings, heavy, forbidding, and distinguished. No, here it looked like the wooden houses from the mountains had run down into the green valley by the clear, rapidly flowing river and had lined themselves up in rows, a little uneven, to make streets. The most magnificent of all the streets had appeared since Rudy had last been there as a boy. It was as if all the beautiful wooden houses grandfather had carved, and which the cabinet at home was full of, had positioned themselves here and grown up, like the old, the very oldest chestnut trees. Every house was a hotel, as they are called, with carved woodwork around the windows and balconies. They had projecting roofs, so neat and elegant, and there was a flower garden in front of each, all the way out to the paved road. The houses stood along the road, but just on one side. Otherwise they would have hidden the view of the fresh green meadow, where the cows grazed with bells that clang like they did in the high Alpine meadows. The meadow was surrounded by high mountains that seemed to step aside right in the middle so that you could clearly see the dazzling, snow-covered Jungfrau, the most beautifully shaped of all the Swiss mountains.
What a crowd of elegant gentleman and ladies from foreign countries! What a swarm of residents from the various cantons! The marksmen who were competing wore numbers on their hats. There was music and singing, barrel organs and wind instruments, shouting and noise. Houses and bridges were decorated with verses and emblems. Flags and banners were waving, and the guns fired shot after shot. This was the best music to Rudy’s ears, and with all this he completely forgot Babette, for whose sake he had come in the first place.
The marksmen wanted target practice, and Rudy was soon among them. He was the best and the luckiest. He always hit the bulls-eye.
“Who is that stranger, the very young hunter?” people asked. “He speaks French like they do in Valais canton. He can also make himself well understood in our German,” said some. “It’s said that he used to live in the district by Grindelwald as a child,” one of them knew.
There was life in the young fellow! His eyes shone. His eye was sure, and his arm was steady. That’s why he hit the mark. Success produces courage, and of course, Rudy had always had that. Soon he had a whole circle of friends around him. He was both acclaimed and applauded. Babette was nearly out of his thoughts. Then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, and a gruff voice asked him in French, “Are you from canton Valais?”
Rudy turned around and saw a fat man with a happy red face. It was the rich miller from Bex. Hidden behind his wide body was dainty delicate Babette, who soon peered around him with her radiant dark eyes. The rich miller was flattered that it was a hunter from his canton who was the best shot and was being praised. Rudy certainly was good fortune’s child! What he had wandered in search of, but had almost forgotten, had now sought him out.
When you meet someone from your home when you are far away, then you speak to each other like you know each other. Rudy was the best at the shooting competition, just as at home in Bex the miller was the best because of his money and his good mill. So the two men shook hands, which was something they had never done before. And Babette also took Rudy’s hand so innocently. He pressed her hand in return and looked intensely at her so that she blushed.
The miller talked about the long way they had traveled to get there, and of the many big cities they had seen. It was a real journey. They had sailed on a steamship, taken the train, and also the mail coach.
“I went the shorter way,” said Rudy. “I came over the mountains. No way is so high you can’t take it.”
“But you can also break your neck!” said the miller. “And you look like you’ll break your neck one day, as daring as you are!”
“You won’t fall if you don’t think you will,” said Rudy.
The miller’s relatives in Interlaken, where the miller and Babette were visiting, asked Rudy to stop by to see them. After all, he was from the same canton as their relatives. That was a good invitation for Rudy. Luck was with him, as it always is for those who believe in themselves and remember that “God gives us the nuts, but he doesn’t crack them open for us.”
And Rudy sat like part of the family with the miller’s relations, and a toast was proposed to the best shot. Babette toasted with him, and Rudy thanked them for the toast.
Towards evening they all went for a walk under the old walnut trees along the pretty street by the neat hotels. There were so many people, such crowds, that Rudy had to offer Babette his arm. He was so happy that he had met people from Vaud, he said. Vaud and Valais cantons were good neighbors. He expressed his joy so sincerely that Babette thought she should clasp his hand. They walked along almost like old friends, and she was so funny, the lovely little person! Rudy thought it so becoming the way she pointed out the comical and exaggerated in the foreign women’s dress and manner of walking. And it wasn’t to make fun of them because they could be very honest people, sweet and lovable, Babette knew that. She had a godmother who was a very distinguished English lady. Eighteen years ago, when Babette had been baptized, the godmother had been in Bex. She had given Babette the expensive brooch that she wore on her vest. Babette had gotten two letters from her godmother, and this year they were supposed to meet her here in Interlaken, along with her daughters. They were two old maids, almost thirty, said Babette. She herself was only eighteen.
The sweet little mouth didn’t stop for a moment, and everything Babette said seemed to Rudy of the utmost importance. He, in turn, told her what he had to tell. He told her how often he had been in Bex, how well he knew the mill, and how often he had seen Babette, but that she very likely hadn’t noticed him. The last time he had been there he had many thoughts he couldn’t mention, but she and her father had gone, were far away, but not farther than that he could clamber over the wall that made the road long.
Yes, he said that, and he said so much more. He told her how much he thought of her, and that he had come there for her sake, not for the shooting competition.
Babette became silent. What he had confided to her was almost too much to bear.
While they walked, the sun sank behind the high mountain wall. Jungfrau stood in all its magnificence and glory, surrounded by a wreath of the nearer forest-clad mountains. All the people stopped quietly and looked at it, and Rudy and Babette looked at all the grandeur too.
“There is no place more beautiful than here,” said Babette.
“No place!” said Rudy and looked at Babette.
“I have to leave tomorrow,” said Rudy a little later.
“Visit us in Bex,” whispered Babette. “That would please my father.”
5. ON THE WAY HOME
Oh, how much Rudy had to carry, when he headed home the next day over the high mountains! He had three silver cups, two very good guns, and a silver coffeepot. That would be useful when he settled down. But those weren’t the weightiest. He carried something much more important, more powerful, or perhaps it carried him home across the high mountains. But the weather was raw and grey, rainy and heavy. The clouds descended on the mountain heights like black mourning crepe and shrouded the snow-clad tops. From the forests rang the last blows of the axe, and down the mountainside rolled tree trunks that looked like flimsy sticks from that height, even though they were huge trees. The Lutschine river sounded its monotonous music. The wind sang, and the clouds sailed. Suddenly a young girl was walking right beside Rudy. He hadn’t noticed her until she was right beside him. She was also going over the mountain. Her eyes had such power that you had to look into them. They were so strangely clear, like glass, deep and bottomless.
“Do you have a sweetheart?” asked Rudy. All his thoughts were filled with having a sweetheart.
“I don’t have one!” she said and laughed, but it sounded like she wasn’t telling the truth. “Let’s not go the long way around,” she said. “We have to go more to the left. It’s shorter.”
“Yes, if you want to fall into an ice crevice!” said Rudy. “How can you be the guide if you don’t know the way better than that!”
“Oh, I know the way,” she said. “And I have my wits about me. I guess yours are down in the valley. Up here you must think of the Ice Maiden. People say she’s dangerous to human beings.”
“I’m not afraid of her,” said Rudy. “She had to let me slip when I was a child. I will surely give her the slip now that I’m older!”
It started to get dark. The rain fell and then snow. It brightened and blinded.
“Give me your hand, and I’ll help you climb,” said the girl and she touched him with ice-cold fingers.
“You help me?” said Rudy. “I don’t yet need the help of women to climb!” And he picked up speed and moved away from her. The snowstorm wrapped around him like a curtain. The wind whistled, and behind him he heard the girl laughing and singing. It sounded so strange—must be a troll girl in service of the Ice Maiden. Rudy had heard about this when he had spent the night here as a boy on the journey over the mountains.
The snowfall decreased, for the clouds were under him. He looked back. There was no one in sight, but he heard laughter and yodeling, and it didn’t sound like it came from a human being.
When Rudy finally reached the highest part of the mountain pass, where the path went down towards the Rhone valley, he saw two clear stars in a strip of clear blue sky in the direction of Chamouny. They twinkled brightly, and he thought about Babette and about himself and his happiness, and he warmed at the thought.
6. A VISIT TO THE MILL
“You’re bringing grand items home with you!” said Rudy’s old foster mother, and her strange eagle eyes flashed. Her thin neck moved in odd gyrations even faster than usual. “Good fortune is with you, Rudy. I must kiss you, my sweet boy.”
And Rudy submitted to the kiss, but you could see by his face that he considered it one of those inconveniences that you have to put up with. “How handsome you are, Rudy!” said the old woman.
“Don’t make me think that,” said Rudy and laughed, but it pleased him.
“I’ll say it again,” said the old woman. “Luck is with you.”
“There I agree with you,” he said and thought about Babette.
He had never before longed for the deep valley like this. “They must be home by now!” he said to himself. “It’s already two days past the time when they were to come. I must go to Bex.”
And Rudy went to Bex, and the miller’s family was home. He was well received, and the family in Interlaken had sent their regards. Babette didn’t say much. She had become so silent, but her eyes spoke, and that was enough for Rudy. The miller, who normally liked to talk, and who was used to people laughing at his whims and word play—after all, he was the rich miller—acted like he’d rather listen to Rudy tell hunting stories. And Rudy told about the difficulties and dangers that the goat-antelope hunters endured on the high mountain cliffs, and how they had to crawl on precarious ledges of snow that the wind and weather plastered to the mountain rim—how he crawled on the dangerous bridges that snowstorms had formed over deep chasms. Rudy looked so brave, and his eyes shone while he told about the hunter’s life, the antelope’s shrewdness and daring leaps, the strong Föhn,9 and the cascading avalanches. He noticed very well that with each new description he was winning over the miller, and that what the miller especially liked hearing about was the description of the vulture and the bold golden eagle.
Not far from there, in the canton of Valais, there was an eagle’s nest built very ingeniously in under an overhanging mountain cliff. There was an eaglet there, but it couldn’t be taken. Just a few days ago an Englishman had offered Rudy a whole fistful of gold to bring him the eaglet alive, “but there’s a limit to everything,” he said. “That eagle’s nest is unreachable. It would be madness to undertake it.”
The wine flowed, and talk flowed, but Rudy thought the evening was much too short, and yet it was past midnight when he ended his first visit to the mill.
The lights still shone for a short while through the window and through the green branches. Out from the open venting in the roof came the housecat, and along the gutter came the kitchen cat.
“Is there anything new at the mill?” asked the housecat. “We have a secret engagement in the house! Father doesn’t know about it yet. Rudy and Babette stepped on each other’s paws all evening under the table. They stepped on me twice, but I didn’t miaow because it would have caused attention.”
“Well, I would have miaowed!” said the kitchen cat.
“What’s fitting in the kitchen isn’t fitting in the parlor,” said the housecat. “I just wish I knew what the miller will say when he finds out about the engagement.”
What would the miller say? Rudy wanted to know that too, but he couldn’t wait a long time to find out, and so a few days later, when the coach rolled over the Rhone bridge between Valais and Vaud, Rudy was sitting within, optimistic as usual. He was thinking good thoughts about being accepted that very evening.
And when evening came, and the coach drove the same way back, Rudy was sitting in it again, going back the same way, but at the mill the housecat ran around with news.
“Have you heard about it, kitchen cat? Now the miller knows everything. A fine ending, I’ll say! Rudy got here towards evening, and he and Babette had a lot to whisper about. They were standing in the hallway right outside the miller’s room. I lay by their feet, but they had no word or thought for me. ‘I’m going straight in to your father,’ said Rudy. ‘It’s an honorable matter.’ ‘Shall I go with you?’ asked Babette. ‘It will give you courage.’ ‘I have enough courage,’ said Rudy, ‘but if you come along, he must look kindly upon us, whether he wants to or not.’ ”
“So they went in. Rudy stepped hard on my tail! He’s so clumsy. I miaowed, but neither he nor Babette had ears for me. They opened the door, and both went in. I went first, but jumped up on the back of a chair. I had no way of knowing what direction Rudy would kick next. But the miller is the one who kicked out! And it was a good kick. Out of the door, and up into the mountains to the antelope! Now Rudy can aim at them and not at our little Babette!”
“But what was said?” asked the kitchen cat.
“Said! Everything was said that people say when they’re courting: ‘I love her, and she loves me. And if there’s enough milk in the pail for one, there’s enough for two!’ ‘But she’s too far above you,’ said the miller, ‘She’s sitting on grain, golden grain, as you know. You can’t reach her.’ ‘Nothing is so high that it can’t be reached if you really want it,’ Rudy said, because he’s quick on the draw. ‘But you said last time that you can’t reach the eaglet! And Babette sits higher than that!’ ‘I’ll take both of them,’ said Rudy. ‘I’ll give her to you when you bring me the eaglet alive,’ said the miller, and he laughed until he cried. ‘Thanks for the visit, Rudy. If you come back tomorrow, there’ll be no one home. Good bye, Rudy.’ And Babette said good bye too, as pitifully as a little kitten who can’t see its mother. ‘A man’s as good as his word,’ Rudy said. ‘Don’t cry, Babette, I’ll bring the eaglet.’ ‘I hope you’ll break your neck,’ said the miller, ‘then we’ll get out of seeing you here.’ I call that kicking! Now Rudy’s gone. Babette is crying, and the miller is singing in German. He learned that on his trip. I’m not going to cry over it. It doesn’t help.”
“But there are always appearances,” said the kitchen cat.
7. THE EAGLE’S NEST
On the mountain path the yodeling rang out merrily and loudly. It suggested good spirits and confident courage. It was Rudy on his way to see his friend, Vesinand.
“You have to help me! We’ll get Ragli to come along. I must get the eaglet up on the cliff edge.”
“Why don’t you get the dark of the moon first? That would be just as easy,” said Vesinand. “You’re in a good mood.”
“I’m thinking about getting married. But seriously now, I’ll tell you what I’ve gotten myself into.”
And soon Vesinand and Ragli knew what Rudy wanted.
“You’re a foolhardy fellow!” they said. “It’s impossible! You’ll break your neck!”
“You won’t fall if you don’t think you will,” said Rudy.
At midnight they started off with poles, ladders, and ropes. The path went through scrub and bushes, and over rocky slopes, always upwards, upwards in the dark night. The river was rushing down below. Water was trickling above them, and heavy rain clouds chased by in the air. The closer the hunters got to the steep mountain edge, the darker it became. The walls of the cliffs almost met, and only high up above through the narrow cleft did the sky lighten. Close by, under them, there was a deep abyss with the sound of roaring water. All three sat quietly waiting for dawn when the eagle would fly out. It had to be shot before the eaglet could attempt to be taken. Rudy squatted, as still as if he were a piece of the rock he sat on. He had his rifle in front of him, ready to shoot. His eyes never left the upper cleft where the eagle’s nest was hidden under the overhanging cliff. The three hunters waited for a long time.
Then high above they heard a terribly loud rushing sound and a huge, hovering object darkened the sky. Two gun barrels aimed as the black eagle flew out of the nest. A shot rang out. For a moment the widespread wings moved, and then the bird slowly fell. It was as if its size and wing span would fill the entire cleft and pull the hunters down with it in its fall. But the eagle sank into the depths. They heard the creaking of tree branches and bushes that cracked from the bird’s fall.
Then they got busy. Three of the longest ladders were tied together. They had to reach all the way up, but when they were placed on the outermost safe footing at the edge of the abyss, they didn’t reach far enough. The side of the cliff was as smooth as a wall a considerable way further up, where the nest was hidden in the shelter of the uppermost overhanging cliff crag. After some deliberation they agreed that the best thing to do was to lower two ladders tied together into the cleft from above, and then connect these to the three that were already set up from below. With great difficulty two ladders were dragged furthest up and ropes attached. The ladders were lowered over the projecting cliff and hung swaying freely over the abyss. Rudy was already sitting on the lowest rung. It was an ice-cold morning. Clouds of fog drifted upward from the black crevice. Rudy sat there like a fly sitting on a tottering straw lost by a nest-building bird on the edge of a factory chimney. But the fly can fly when the straw breaks loose, and Rudy could only break his neck. The wind rushed around him, and down in the abyss roared the rushing water from the thawing glacier, the palace of the Ice Maiden.
He set the ladder in a swinging motion, like when a spider tries to grab hold from its long, swaying thread. And when Rudy touched the tip of the lower ladders the fourth time, he got hold of them. He tied them together with a sure and steady hand, but still they wobbled as if they had worn hinges.
The five long ladders that reached up towards the nest looked like a swaying reed as they leaned vertically towards the mountain wall. Now came the most dangerous part. He had to climb like a cat climbs, but Rudy could do that. The cat had taught him. He didn’t sense Vertigo, who was treading air behind him, reaching her polyp-like arms towards him. He was standing on the ladder’s top rung and realized that even here he couldn’t reach high enough to see into the nest. He could only reach it with his hand. He tested how solid the thick, lower, intertwined branches that made up the lower part of the nest were, and when he was sure that he had a thick, unbreakable branch, he swung from the ladder up to the branch and got his head and chest above the nest. But he was met with the sickening stench of rotting meat. Rotted lambs, antelope, and birds lay there torn to pieces. Vertigo, who wasn’t able to touch him, blew the poisonous reek into his face so that he would get dizzy, and down in the black, gaping depths on the rushing water sat the Ice Maiden herself with her long, white-green hair gazing with eyes deadly as gun barrels.
“Now I’ll catch you!”
In a corner of the eagle’s nest he saw the eaglet sitting, big and powerful. It couldn’t fly yet. Rudy fastened his eyes on it, held on with all his might with one hand, and with his other hand threw a sling around the young eagle. It was captured alive, its leg in the tight cord. Rudy slung the sling with the bird over his shoulder, so the eagle dangled a good distance below him, and clung to a helpfully lowered rope until his toes again reached the top rung of the ladder.
“Hold on tight! Don’t think you’ll fall and you won’t.” It was the old mantra, and he followed it. He held on tight, crawled, was sure he wouldn’t fall, and he didn’t fall.
There was yodeling then, loud and happy. Rudy stood on the firm rocky ground with his eaglet.
8. THE HOUSECAT HAS NEWS
“Here’s what you called for,” said Rudy, who walked into the miller’s house in Bex and set a big basket on the floor. He took the cloth off and two yellow, black-rimmed eyes glowed out, so flashing and wild that they looked like they could burn into and through anything. The strong, short beak was gaping to bite, and its neck was red and downy.
“The eaglet!” cried the miller. Babette shrieked and jumped aside, but couldn’t take her eyes off Rudy or the eaglet.
“You don’t scare easily!” said the miller.
“And you always keep your word,” said Rudy. “We each have our distinguishing feature!”
“Why didn’t you break your neck?” asked the miller.
“Because I held on,” answered Rudy, “and I’m still doing it. I’m holding on to Babette!”
“Make sure you have her first,” said the miller and laughed, and Babette knew that was a good sign.
“Let’s get the eaglet out of the basket. Look how terribly he’s glaring! How did you get a hold of him?”
And Rudy told the story while the miller’s eyes grew bigger and bigger.
“With your courage and luck you could support three wives,” said the miller.
“Thank you! Thank you!” cried Rudy.
“Well, you don’t have Babette yet,” said the miller, and slapped the young hunter on the shoulder in jest.
“Did you hear the latest from the mill?” The housecat asked the kitchen cat. “Rudy has brought us the eaglet and is taking Babette in exchange. They kissed each other right in front of Father. They’re as good as engaged. The old fellow didn’t kick. He pulled in his claws, took a nap, and let the two sit there and fawn over each other. They have so much to say that they won’t finish by Christmas.”
And they didn’t finish by Christmas. The wind whirled the brown leaves. The snow drifted in the valley as it did on the high peaks. The Ice Maiden sat in her proud palace that grew bigger when winter came. The cliff walls were glazed with ice, and there were yard-wide icicles as heavy as elephants in places where the mountain streams waved their veils in the summer. Garlands of fantastic ice crystals shone on the snow-dusted spruce trees. The Ice Maiden rode on the roaring wind over the deepest valleys, and the snow blanket reached all the way down to Bex. She could ride there and see Rudy indoors, more than he was used to being. He was sitting with Babette. The wedding would be in the summer. Their ears were often ringing, so much was the wedding discussed among their friends. There was sunshine, and the loveliest glowing rhododendron. There was the merry, laughing Babette, as lovely as the spring that came. Spring—that had all the birds singing about summer, and about the wedding day.
“How those two sit and hang on each other!” said the housecat. “I’m tired of that miaowing of theirs!”
9. THE ICE MAIDEN
Spring had unfolded its lush green garlands of walnut and chestnut trees that were especially luxuriant from the bridge by St. Maurice to Lake Geneva along the Rhone, which rushed with tremendous speed from its source under the green glacier, the ice palace where the Ice Maiden lives. She lets herself be carried on the piercing wind up onto the highest fields of snow and in the bright sunshine stretches out on the drifting pillows of snow. There she sat and looked with her far-sighted glance down in the deep valleys, where people busily moved about, like ants on a sunny rock.
“Powers of reason, as the children of the sun call you,” said the Ice Maiden. “You’re nothing but vermin. A single rolling snowball, and you and your houses and towns are crushed and obliterated!” And she lifted her proud head higher and looked around widely and deeply with her death-flashing eyes. But there was a rumbling sound from the valley, the blasting of rocks. This was the work of men—roads and tunnels for the railroad were being built.
“They’re playing mole!” she said. “They’re digging passages. That’s why there’s a sound like gunfire. If I were to move my palaces, there would be roaring louder than the boom of thunder !”
Smoke lifted up from the valley, moving forward like a fluttering veil, a waving plume from the locomotive that was pulling the train on the newly laid tracks. It was a winding snake whose joints were car after car. It shot forward swiftly as an arrow.
“They’re playing God down there, those powers of reason!” said the Ice Maiden. “But the powers of nature are the rulers,” and she laughed and sang so it resounded in the valley.
“Another avalanche,” said the people down there.
But the children of the sun sang even louder about human ideas. Thought that rules. It has subjugated the sea, moved mountains, and filled valleys. The human mind is the master of the natural powers. Just at that moment a party of travelers came across the snowfield where the Ice Maiden was sitting. They had tied each other together with a rope to make a bigger body on the slippery ice, along the deep crevices.
“Vermin!” she said. “How can you be the masters of natural forces?” and she turned away from them and looked mockingly down in the deep valley, where the train went roaring by.
“There they sit, those thinkers! They’re sitting in nature’s power. I can see each of them. One is sitting alone as proudly as a king. Others are sitting in a bunch. Half of them are sleeping. And when the steam dragon stops, they climb out and go their way. Thoughts going out into the world!” And she laughed.
“There went another avalanche,” they said down in the valley.
“It won’t reach us,” said two people in the steam dragon. “Two minds but with a single thought,” as the saying goes. It was Rudy and Babette, and the miller was also along.
“As baggage,” he said, “I’m along because I’m necessary.”
“There those two sit,” said the Ice Maiden. “I have crushed many a goat-antelope, and I have beat and broken millions of rhododendrons. Not even the roots remained. I wipe them out! Thoughts! People of reason!” And she laughed.
“Another avalanche!” they cried down in the valley.
10. GODMOTHER
In Montreux, one of the closest towns, that along with Clarens, Vernex and Crin form a garland around the northeastern part of Lake Geneva, Babette’s godmother, the distinguished English lady, was staying with her daughters and a young relative. They had recently arrived, but the miller had already paid them a visit, announced Babette’s engagement, told about Rudy and the eaglet, and the visit to Interlaken; in short, the whole story. This had pleased them to the highest degree and made them interested in Rudy and Babette, and the miller too. All three of them must come for a visit, and so they did! Babette was going to see her godmother, the godmother to see Babette.
By the little town of Villeneuve, at the end of Lake Geneva, lay the steamship that would reach Vernex, close to Montreux, after a half-hour trip. It’s a coast sung about by poets. Here under the walnut trees by the deep, blue-green lake, Byron sat and wrote his melodic verse about the prisoner in the sinister mountain castle of Chillon. At Clarens, where the town is mirrored in the water with its weeping willows, Rousseau walked dreaming of Heloise. The Rhone river flows along under the high snow-covered mountains of Savoy. Not far from its mouth in the lake lies a small island. It’s so small that from the coast it looks like a little boat out there. It’s a skerry, and a hundred years ago a woman had it surrounded by rocks and filled with soil. She had three acacia trees planted there. Now they shade the entire island. Babette was transported with delight when she saw it. She thought it was the loveliest sight on the whole boat trip—they should land there—they must land there! She thought it would be so marvelous to be there. But the steamship went by and docked where it was supposed to, at Vernex.
The little party walked from there up through the white, sunlit walls that surround the vineyards around the little mountain village of Montreux. The farmers’ houses are shaded by fig trees, and laurel and cypress trees grow in the gardens. Half way up was the bed and breakfast where Babette’s godmother was staying.
They were very warmly received. Godmother was a big, friendly woman with a round, smiling face. As a child she must have had one of Raphael’s cherub faces, but now she had an old angel’s face, surrounded by abundant silver-white curls. Her daughters were neat and elegant, tall and thin. Their young cousin, who was with them, was dressed in white from tip to toe. He had golden hair and such big gilded sideburns that they could have been divided among three gentlemen. He immediately paid the utmost attention to little Babette.
Richly bound books, sheets of music, and drawings lay spread across the big table. The balcony door stood open to the lovely view of the wide lake that was so calm and still that the mountains of Savoy with towns, forests and snowcaps were reflected in it upside down.
Rudy, who usually was so cheerful, lively, and confident, felt like a fish out of water, as they say. He acted as if he was walking on peas spread on a slippery floor. How slowly time passed! It was like a treadmill. And now they were going for a walk! That went just as slowly. Rudy had to take two steps forwards and one back to be in step with the others. They went down to Chillon, the sinister old castle on the rocky island, to see the torture stakes and cells of death, and rusty chains in the rocky wall. They saw stone bunks for the condemned, and the trap-doors through which poor unfortunates were pushed to fall impaled onto iron spikes in the surf. And this is supposed to be a pleasure to see! It was a place of execution, lifted into the world of poetry by Byron’s song. Rudy sensed the horror. He leaned against the big stone window ledge and looked down into the deep, blue-green water, and over to the lonely little island with the three acacia trees. He wished he were there, free of the whole prattling company, but Babette felt very happy. She had enjoyed herself tremendously, she said later. She thought the cousin was just perfect.
“Yes, a perfect fool,” said Rudy, and that was the first time Rudy said something that she didn’t like. The Englishman had given her a little book as a souvenir of Chillon. It was Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon in a French translation so that Babette could read it.10
“The book might be all right,” said Rudy, “but that dandy who gave it to you didn’t make a hit with me.”
“He looked like a flour sack without flour in it,” said the miller and laughed at his joke. Rudy laughed too and said that he had hit the nail on the head.
11. THE COUSIN
When Rudy visited the mill a few days later, he found the young Englishman there. Babette was just serving him poached trout, which she herself had garnished with parsley to dress it up. That was totally unnecessary. What did the Englishman want? What was he doing here, served and waited on by Babette? Rudy was jealous, and that amused Babette. It pleased her to see all sides of him, the strong and the weak. Love was still a game, and she played with Rudy’s heart; and yet it must be said that he was her happiness, in all her thoughts, the best and most wonderful in the world. But the gloomier he looked, the more her eyes laughed. She would gladly have kissed the blond Englishman with the golden sideburns if it would have caused Rudy to run furiously away. That would have simply proved how much he loved her. It wasn’t right, wasn’t smart of little Babette, but she was only nineteen years old. She didn’t think about it, and thought even less of how her behavior could be interpreted by the young Englishman as more frivolous and irresponsible than what was appropriate for the miller’s modest, newly engaged daughter.
The road from Bex runs under the snow-covered mountain tops called Diablerets in French, and the mill was not far from a rapid mountain stream that ran whitish grey like whipped soapy water. But this wasn’t the stream that drove the mill. There was a smaller stream that rushed down from the cliffs on the other side of the river and through a stone culvert under the road where its power and speed lifted it into a wooden dam and then through a wide trough, over the larger river. This drove the mill wheel. The trough was so full of water that it flowed over, and so the rim presented a wet and slippery route for anyone who might think to use it as a short cut to the mill. This idea presented itself to the young Englishman. Dressed in white, like a mill worker, he climbed up there one evening, guided by the light in Babette’s window. He hadn’t learned how to climb and almost went head first in the stream, but he escaped with wet arms and splattered pants. Dripping wet and muddy, he came under Babette’s window, where he climbed up into the old linden tree and imitated the hoot of an owl. He couldn’t do any other bird calls. Babette heard it and peeked out through the thin curtains, but when she saw the man in white and realized who it was, her little heart beat with fright, but also with anger. She quickly put out the light, made sure that all the windows were hooked, and let him sit there howling and yowling.
It would be terrible if Rudy were at the mill now, but Rudy was not at the mill. No, it was much worse. He was right there below. She heard loud angry words. There was going to be a fight, maybe even a killing.
Babette opened the window in fright, called Rudy’s name, and asked him to leave. She said she couldn’t stand to have him stay.
“You can’t stand that I stay!” he yelled, “So you’ve arranged this! You’re expecting good friends, better than me! Shame on you, Babette!”
“You’re detestable!” said Babette. “I hate you!” and she started crying. “Go! Go!”
“I didn’t deserve this,” he said and he went. His cheeks were on fire, and so was his heart.
Babette threw herself crying on the bed.
“As much as I love you, Rudy! How can you think so badly of me!”
She was angry, very angry and that was a good thing for her. Otherwise she would have been broken-hearted. But she could fall asleep and sleep the refreshing sleep of youth.
12. EVIL POWERS
Rudy left Bex and took the road home, up the mountains in the fresh cooling air, where the snow lay, where the Ice Maiden ruled. The leafy trees stood deep below, as if they were the tops of potato plants. The spruce and bushes grew smaller. The rhododendrons grew in the snow in patches like linen laid out to bleach. He saw a blue gentian, and crushed it with the butt of his gun.
Higher up he saw two antelope, and a glint came to his eyes, and his thoughts went in a different direction. But he wasn’t close enough for a good shot. He climbed higher, where only a strip of grass grew between the boulders. The antelope were walking calmly on the snowfields. Eagerly he quickened his pace. Clouds of fog fell over him, and suddenly he was standing by the sheer cliff wall. Rain began to pour.
He felt a burning thirst, and his head was hot, but the rest of his body felt cold. He took out his flask, but it was empty. He hadn’t thought about it as he stormed up the mountain. He had never been sick, but now he knew what it felt like. He was tired. He just wanted to lie down and sleep, but everything was soaked with water. He tried to pull himself together, but objects shimmered so strangely before his eyes. But then he saw what he had never seen here before—a low, newly built house, right up against the cliff. There was a young girl standing in the doorway, and he thought it was the schoolmaster’s daughter Annette, whom he had once kissed while dancing. It wasn’t Annette, but he’d seen her before—maybe close to Grindelwald, the evening he returned from the shooting match in Interlaken.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
“I’m home,” she said. “I’m tending my herd.”
“Your herd? Where is it grazing? There’s only snow and rocks here.”
“You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” she said and laughed. “Down behind here a ways there’s good grazing. That’s where my goats are. I take good care of them and never lose one. What’s mine stays mine.”
“You’re pretty bold!” said Rudy.
“So are you!” she answered.
“If you have some milk, give me some because I’m so unbearably thirsty.”
“I have something better than milk,” she said. “And you shall have it! Some travelers came by here yesterday with their guide. They forgot half a bottle of wine, better than you’ve ever tasted. They won’t come back for it, and I won’t drink it. You can drink it!”
And she brought out the wine, poured it into a wooden bowl, and gave it to Rudy.
“It’s good,” he said. “I’ve never tasted a wine so warming and full of fire!” His eyes shone, and a life and fervor arose in him as if all his sorrows and burdens evaporated. Natural human feelings arose in him, fresh and lively
“But you’re the schoolmaster’s Annette!” he exclaimed. “Give me a kiss!”
“Well, give me that pretty ring you wear on your finger!”
“My engagement ring?”
“That’s the one!” said the girl, poured wine in the bowl, and put it to his lips. He drank. The joy of living streamed through his blood. He felt like the whole world was his. Why worry? Everything is created to enjoy and make us happy! The current of life is a current of joy-be carried along by it—let yourself be carried by it! That is bliss. He looked at the young girl. It was Annette and yet not Annette, even less was she the phantom troll, as he had called her, whom he met by Grindelwald. The girl here on the mountain was as fresh as newly fallen snow, as lush as the rhododendron, and as light as a kid. But yet she was formed from Adam’s rib, a human being like Rudy. And he threw his arms around her, looked into her strange clear eyes—only for a second-and how to explain in words what he saw? Was it the spirit of life or death that filled him? Was he lifted up, or sunk down into the deep, killing ice chasm, deeper, always deeper? He saw the walls of ice like blue-green glass. Bottomless crevices gaped all around him, and water dripped tinkling like a clock and as clear as pearls, lighting with blue-white flames. The Ice Maiden gave him a kiss that sent a chill through his spine into his forehead. He gave a cry of pain, tore himself loose, tumbled and fell. His eyes closed in darkness, but he opened them again. Evil powers had played their tricks.
The mountain girl was gone. The sheltering hut was gone. Water was streaming down the naked cliff wall. Snow was all around. Rudy was shaking with cold, wet to the skin, and his ring was gone. The engagement ring Babette had given him. His gun lay in the snow by his side. He picked it up and tried to shoot, but it didn’t go off. Wet clouds lay like masses of snow in the crevices. vertigo was sitting there watching for powerless prey, and under her in the deep cleft there was a sound as if a boulder fell, crushing and sweeping away anything breaking its fall.
But at the mill Babette sat crying. Rudy had not been there for six days. Rudy, who was in the wrong, and who should ask her for forgiveness since she loved him with all her heart.
13. IN THE MILLER’S HOUSE
“Talk about frightful nonsense with those people!” said the housecat to the kitchen cat. “Babette and Rudy have broken up again. She’s crying, and he probably doesn’t think about her anymore.”
“I don’t like that!” said the kitchen cat.
“Me neither,” said the housecat, “but I’m not going to cry about it. Babette can just as well be sweethearts with the red sideburns. But he hasn’t been here either since he tried to climb up on the roof.”
Evil forces play their tricks, both outside and within us. Rudy had realized this and thought about it. What had happened around him and in him high up there on the mountain? Had he seen visions, or was it a feverish dream? He had never had a fever or been sick before. He had gained an insight into himself when he judged Babette. He thought about the wild chase in his heart, the hot Föhn that had blown there so lately. Could he confess everything to Babette? Every thought that in the moment of temptation could have become an action? He had lost her ring, and in that loss she had regained him. Would she confess to him? He felt like his heart would break to pieces when he thought about her. There were so many memories. He saw her large as life in front of him, laughing, a high-spirited child. Many a loving word that she had spoken in the fullness of her heart flew like a flash of sun into his breast, and soon there was nothing but sunshine there for Babette.
She must be able to confess to him, and she would!
He came to the mill. They confessed everything. It started with a kiss and ended with Rudy being the sinner. His big fault was that he had doubted Babette’s faithfulness. That was really abominable of him. Such distrust and such impetuosity could have led them both to disaster. Most assuredly! And therefore Babette delivered a little sermon to him. She enjoyed it, and it was most becoming, although in one respect Rudy was right: godmother’s relative was a fool. She would burn the book he had given her, and not keep anything that would remind her of him.
“Now it’s over and done with,” said the housecat. “Rudy is back. They understand each other, and they say that’s the greatest happiness.”
“Last night,” said the kitchen cat, “I heard the rats say that the greatest happiness is to eat tallow candles and to have plenty of tainted bacon. Whom should we believe, the rats or the sweethearts?”
“Neither of them,” said the housecat. “That’s always the best bet.”
The greatest happiness for Rudy and Babette still lay ahead. They still had the most beautiful day, as it’s called, in front of them—their wedding day.
But the wedding wasn’t going to be in the church in Bex, nor in the miller’s house. Godmother wanted the wedding to be celebrated at the bed and breakfast, and have the ceremony take place in the lovely little church in Montreux. The miller backed this request. He alone knew what godmother had in mind for the newlyweds. They would get a wedding gift from her that was certainly worth such a small concession. The day was set. They were going to travel to Villeneuve the evening before and take the boat over to Montreux in the morning in time for godmother’s daughters to dress the bride.
“I suppose they’ll have another wedding celebration here the day after,” said the housecat. “Otherwise, I don’t give a miaow for the whole thing!”
“There’s going to be a party,” said the kitchen cat. “Ducks have been butchered, doves beheaded, and there’s a whole deer hanging on the wall. It makes my mouth water to see it all. Tomorrow the trip begins!”
Yes, tomorrow! That evening Rudy and Babette sat at the mill for the last time as an engaged couple. Outside was the Alpenglow, the evening bells rang, and the daughters of the sunbeams sang, “What happens is always for the best.”
14. VISIONS IN THE NIGHT
The sun had set, and the clouds settled into the Rhone valley between the high mountains. The wind blew from the south, an African wind, down over the high Alps, the Föhn. It tore the clouds into fragments, and when it was gone there was a moment of complete stillness. The fragmented clouds hung in fantastic forms between the forest-clad mountains above the swiftly flowing Rhone River. They looked like prehistoric sea animals, like hovering eagles of the sky, and like leaping frogs from the marsh. They descended to the raging river and sailed on it, and yet they sailed in the air. The current was carrying an uprooted fir tree, and in front of it the water formed whirling eddies. It was Vertigo and her sisters, who were spinning around on the turbulent torrent. The moon shone on the snow of the mountain tops, on the dark forests, on the strange white clouds—night visions, spirits of nature’s powers. Mountain folk saw them through their windows. They sailed down there in flocks in front of the Ice Maiden. She came from her palace in the glacier, sitting on her flimsy ship, the uprooted fir. Water from the glacier carried her down the stream to the open lake.
“The wedding guests are coming,” was sighed and sung in air and water.
Visions outside and visions inside. Babette had a strange dream.
She had been married to Rudy for many years. He was out antelope hunting, but she was at home, and there with her was the young Englishman with the gilded sideburns. His eyes were so warm, and his words had a magical power. He reached out his hand to her, and she had to follow him. They walked away from her home. Always downwards! And it felt to Babette that there lay a burden on her heart that became heavier and heavier. It was a sin against Rudy, a sin against God. Suddenly she was alone. Her clothes had been torn to pieces by thorns. Her hair was grey. She looked upward in pain, and on the mountain edge she saw Rudy. She stretched her arms out towards him, but dared neither to shout nor pray, and it wouldn’t have helped because she soon saw that it wasn’t Rudy at all, but just his hunting jacket and hat, hanging on a walking stick the way hunters do, to trick the antelope. And in unbounded pain she whimpered, “Oh, if I could have died on my wedding day! My happiest day! Lord, my God, it would have been a mercy, the good fortune of my life. That would have been the best that could have happened for Rudy and me. No one knows his future!” And in godless grief she threw herself into the deep ravine. A string snapped, a song of sorrow sounded.
Babette woke up. The dream was over and forgotten, but she knew she had dreamed something terrible and dreamed about the young Englishman, whom she hadn’t seen or thought about for several months. Was he in Montreux? Would she see him at the wedding? A little shadow passed over her fine mouth, and she frowned. But soon she was smiling, and her eyes were sparkling again. The sun was shining so beautifully outside, and tomorrow was she and Rudy’s wedding day.
He was already in the living room when she came down, and soon they were off for Villeneuve. They were both so happy, and so was the miller. He laughed and beamed with the greatest good humor. He was a good father and an honest soul.
“Now we’re the masters of the house,” said the housecat.
15. THE END
It was not yet evening when the three happy people reached Villeneuve and had dinner. The miller sat in an easy chair with his pipe and took a little nap. The young couple walked arm in arm out of the town, on the road under the cliffs covered with bushes, along the deep blue-green lake. The sinister Chillon with its grey walls and thick towers was reflected in the clear water. Even closer was the little island with the three acacia trees. It looked like a bouquet on the water.
“It must be lovely over there,” said Babette. She once again had such a strong wish to visit the little island, and that wish could be fulfilled at once. There was a boat by the bank. The rope that held it was easy to loosen. They didn’t see anyone to ask for permission, so they just took the boat. Rudy knew how to row.
The oars caught the yielding water like the fins of a fish. Water is so soft and yet so strong. It has a back to bear weight, and a mouth with which to swallow. Gently smiling, softness itself and yet a terror, with shattering strength. There was a foamy wake following the boat that reached the little island within a few minutes, and the two went ashore. There was only enough room for the two of them to dance.
Rudy swung Babette around two or three times, and then they sat down on the little bench under the overhanging acacia trees. They gazed into each other’s eyes, held each other’s hands, and everything around them shone in the splendor of the setting sun. The fir forests on the mountains had a violet cast that made them look like blooming heather, and the rocky stones above the tree line glowed as if the mountain were transparent. The clouds in the sky were lit up like red fire, and the whole lake was like a fresh, blooming rose petal. As the shadows rose higher and higher up the snow-capped Savoy mountains, these turned to dark blue, but the highest peaks shone like red lava. It was as if they repeated a moment from their creation, when these massive mountains rose up glowing from the earth’s womb, still burning. It was an Alpenglow unlike any Rudy or Babette had ever seen. The snow-covered Dent du Midi shone like the disc of the full moon as it rises above the horizon.
“What beauty! What happiness!” they both said. “The world has nothing more to give me,” said Rudy. “An evening like this is really a whole life. How often have I sensed my joy, as I sense it now and thought that if everything were to end, what a happy life I have had! How blessed this world is! And that day was over, but a new one began and I thought that one was even more beautiful! How good and great God is, Babette!”
“I am so happy,” she said.
“The world has nothing more to give me,” exclaimed Rudy.
And the evening bells rang from the mountains of Savoy, from the Swiss mountains. In golden glory the dark black Jura mountains rose up in the west.
“May God give you the most wonderful and best!” Babette exclaimed.
“He will!” said Rudy. “Tomorrow I’ll have it. Tomorrow you’ll be all mine. My own lovely little wife.”
“The boat!” screamed Babette at the same time.
The boat that was to ferry them back had torn loose and was drifting away from the island.
“I’ll get it,” said Rudy. He cast off his jacket, tore off his boots, and ran into the lake, swimming swiftly towards the boat.
Cold and deep was the clear blue-green ice water from the mountain glaciers. Rudy looked down into it, only a single glance, and it was as if he saw a gold ring roll, gleam, and sparkle. He thought about his lost engagement ring, and the ring became bigger, and widened out into a glittering circle. Inside of it the clear glacier was shining. Infinitely deep crevices were gaping all around, and water dripped tinkling like a carillon, and shining with white-blue flames. He saw in an instant what we must describe in many long words. Young hunters and young girls, men and women—those who at one time had sunk in the glacier’s crevasses—stood here alive with open eyes and smiling mouths. And deep under them sounded church bells from buried towns. The congregation kneeled under the church vault. The mountain stream played the organ, whose pipes were pieces of ice. The Ice Maiden sat on the clear, transparent floor. She rose up towards Rudy, kissed his feet, and an icy chill shot through his limbs—an electric shock—ice and fire! You can’t tell the difference from a quick touch.
“Mine! Mine!” resounded around him and inside him. “I kissed you when you were little! Kissed you on the lips! Now I kiss your toes and heel. You are solely mine!”
And he was gone in the clear, blue water.
Everything was still. The church bells stopped ringing. The last tones disappeared with the radiance on the red clouds.
“You’re mine!” resounded in the depths. “You’re mine!” resounded in the heights, from the eternal.
It’s lovely to fly from love to love, from the earth into heaven.
A string snapped. A song of sorrow sounded. The kiss of death conquered the perishable. The prologue ended so that the drama of life could begin. Disharmony dissolved in harmony.
Would you call this a sad story?
Poor Babette! For her it was a time of terror. The boat drifted further and further away. No one on land knew that the couple had gone to the little island. Evening came. The clouds descended, and it got dark. Alone and despairing she stood there moaning. There was a devilish storm brewing. Lighting flashed over the Jura mountains, over Switzerland, and over the Savoy. Flash after flash on all sides—thunder boom after boom, rolling into each other and lasting for several minutes. It was as bright as sunlight in the lightning flashes. You could see each individual grapevine as if at midday, and then the brooding black darkness returned. The lightning came in ribbons, rings, and zigzags, struck all around the lake, and flashed from all sides, while the thunder claps grew in echoing rumbles. On land people pulled boats up on the shore. Everything living sought shelter. And the rain came streaming down.
“Where in the world are Rudy and Babette in this terrible weather?” asked the miller.
Babette sat with folded hands, her head in her lap. Mute with grief and from her screams and sobs.
“In the deep water!” she said to herself, “Deep down, as if under the glacier, is where he is!”
She thought about what Rudy had told her about his mother’s death, and his rescue, when he was pulled as a corpse from the cleft of the glacier. “The Ice Maiden has taken him again.”
And there was a flash of lightning as blinding as the sun on white snow. Babette jumped up. The lake rose in that instant like a shining glacier. The Ice Maiden stood there—majestic, pale blue, shining—and at her feet lay Rudy’s corpse. “Mine!” she said, and then there was pitch darkness again, and pouring water.
“It’s horrible,” whimpered Babette. “Why did he have to die just as our day of joy had come? God! Help me understand! Enlighten my heart! I don’t understand your ways. I’m groping for your omnipotence and wisdom.”
And God enlightened her heart. A flash of thought, a ray of mercy—her dream from last night, large as life—flew through her in a flash, and she remembered the words she had spoken: the wish for the best for Rudy and herself.
“Woe is me! Was the seed of sin in my heart? Was my dream my future, whose string had to be snapped for the sake of my salvation? Miserable me!”
She sat whimpering in the pitch dark night. In its deep stillness she thought Rudy’s words still rang out—the last thing he said here: “The world has no more joy to give me.” Words uttered in an abundance of happiness, repeated in a torrent of grief.
A few years have passed since then. The lake is smiling. The shores are smiling, and the grapevines are heavy with grapes. The steamship with its waving flags hurries by, and the pleasure boats with their two out-stretched sails fly like white butterflies across the mirror of the water. The railroad above Chillon is open and runs deep into the Rhone valley. Tourists get off at every station. They consult their little red bound travel guides to learn what attractions there are to see. They visit Chillon, see the little island with the three acacia trees out in the lake, and read about the engaged couple who rowed over there early one evening in 1856. They read about the bridegroom’s death and how “only the next morning did those on shore hear the bride’s screams of despair.”
But the travel guide doesn’t say anything about Babette’s quiet life with her father. Not at the mill—strangers live there now—but in the pretty house by the railroad station from where she can still see on many evenings the snow-capped mountains above the chestnut trees where Rudy once played. In the evenings she sees the Alpenglow. The sunshine’s children camp up there and repeat the song about the wanderer whom the whirlwind tore the cloak from and carried away. It took his covering but not the man.
There’s a rosy radiance on the mountain snow, and a rosy radiance in every heart that believes that “God lets the best happen for us!” But it’s not always as apparent to us as it was for Babette in her dream.
NOTES
1 Schreckhorn (13,379’) and Wetterhorn (12,142’) are mountains in the Bernese (Swiss) Alps.
2 Canton in southern Switzerland that is predominantly French speaking.
3 Waterfall in south-central Switzerland, near Interlaken.
4 Swiss mountain (13,642’) not far from Grindelwald.
5 I have omitted “As we know” from this sentence. Andersen had given information about Rudy’s father in an earlier version of the story. This “as we know” reference is evidently a remnant from an earlier version overlooked by Andersen in the final story.
6 Cretinism, mental and physical retardation caused by a lack of thyroid hormones, was more common in Switzerland than in other European countries because of an iodine deficiency in the water of the Swiss Alps. A survey carried out in 1810 in what is now the Swiss canton of Valais revealed 4,000 cretins among 70,000 inhabitants.
7 Mountain pass in the Alps in southern Switzerland.
8 Pass in the Bernese Alps connecting Bern and Valais cantons.
9 Warm dry wind that blows down the northern slopes of the Alps.
10 English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), wrote The Prisoner of Chillon after visiting the castle with fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1816. The castle, on Lake Geneva, was for the most part built by the counts of Savoy in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although the site had been occupied for hundreds of years. During the sixteenth century the castle was used as a prison.
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