FROM "A BLUE STORY" BY ISAK DINESEN

This comes from "The Young Man With The Carnation", which is

the first story in WINTER'S TALES(1942). It describes how a

Lady Helena is separated from her father on board a sinking ship, and how she

spends nine days lost and afloat on a raft with a young sailor,

who is sent away after their rescue. It describes how this

unsteadies her mind, which thereafter fixed on the ideal blue,

which she has seen but can not find. And she sails around

the world in search of it; she believes it will appear on blue china.

Her aunts ask her to come back home and marry but she replies,

"Nay, I have got to sail. For you must know, dear Aunts, that it

is all nonsense when learned people say the seas have a bottom on them.

On the contrary, the water, which is the noblest of all elements,

does,of course, go all through the earth, so that our planet

really floats on the ether like a soap bubble. And there, on the other

hemisphere, a ship sails, with which I have got to keep pace.

We two are like the reflection of each other, in the deep sea,

and the ship of which I speak is always exactly beneath my ship, upon

the opposite side of the globe. You have never seen a big fish swimming

underneath a boat, following it like a dark blue shade in the water.

But in that way this ship goes, like the shadow of my ship, and

I draw it to and fro wherever I go, as the moon draws the

tides, all through the bulk of the earth.....In the end my ship

will go down to the center of the globe, and at the very same hour

the other ship will sink as well--for people call it sinking,

although I can assure you that there is no up and down in the sea

--and there, in the midst of the world, we two shall meet.'

"Many years passed...and Lady Helena became old and deaf,

but still she sailed. Then it happened,

after the plunder of the summer palace of the Emporer of China,

that a merchant brought her a very old blue jar. The moment

she set eyes on it she gave a terrible shriek. "There it is" she cried.

"I have found it at last. This is the true blue. O how light it makes

one. Oh, it is as fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full

as I say not what. With trembling hands she held the jar

to her bosom, and sat for six hours in contemplation of it.

Then she said to her doctor and lady companion,'Now

I can die. And when I am dead you will cut out my heart and

lay it in the blue jar. For then everything will be as it was

then. All shall be blue around me, and

in the midst of the blue world my heart will be

innocent and free. ...A little later she asked them

'Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you have patience,

all that ever has been, will come back to you?" Shortly afterwards

the old lady died.