[Subsection]

It was no less a personage than Assendorff, sometime horsetrainer in the imperial stables at St. Petersburg, who found Sabine more dead than alive on the second morning after her disappearance.

"Hey!" he thundered with his harsh bass voice, so that an echo passed across the silent waters. "Is that you, you wretch?"

He sat high up on the steep Maiden's Cliff, the special site he had chosen where he, in majestic surroundings and unbothered by stupid peasants, could reflect upon his life and remember the splendid days of his youth in the city of the czar. His nets and his fine new fish-trap had already been inspected, although the sun had scarcely had time to rub the sleep out of its eyes. He had just sat down at this favorite place of his, the smooth slab on the cliff's outermost brink---where he liked to imagine that the lovesick maiden of the story had stood before she threw herself into the depths---and was leisurely filling his pipe, when he caught sight of a neatly painted green-bottomed boat which drifted splashing against the stones of the beach. He peered curiously at the boat and saw a miserable little person lying curled up on its bottom. He realized immediately who it was. He lived as a lodger in the house of the old woman named Olsbom, and the sharp-nosed old witch of course   [p. 100]   knew about everything that took place in the parish. She had hardly got inside the door yesterday evening, barely giving herself enough time to babble the prayer which is prescribed for disasters and onslaughts of the foe, before everything she had heard in Matvej Olkkonen's store came rattling out of her mouth like so many peas. Imagine, the elegant young lady from Lintula had run away! Now they were making a careful search for her throughout the whole parish, and Lintula's master and mistress were beside themselves with fright. Broiling his fish in the embers on the open fireplace, Assendorff pretended he was not a bit concerned about the woman's chatter, but actually he listened greedily to every word, rejoicing in the news that things had gone wrong for the rich and haughty. He had been a coachman at Lintula for several years during the count's time, and they had never had a coachman like him there since, Assendorff thought. Instead of showing him due respect, they threw him out in a rather ungentle way, just because he had happened to get drunk when the countess wanted to ride into the city. He certainly had a crow to pick with Lintula, no mistake about it.

No answer came from the boat. He sat gazing at the miserable sight for a while. "The little wretch is lying there in her shift and nothing more," he thought, touched against his will by the child's pitiful situation. "Two nights on the lake and not a speck of food in the boat---I don't think I'd like to try something like that myself. Not even a rag to cover herself with. No, womenfolk can't stand that kind of thing." Like most irascible and unaccommodating persons, he had a certain weakness for children and young people. He wrinkled his bushy eyebrows and yelled with the full force of his lungs: "Are you cold? Are you hungry? Do you want some brandy?"

  [p. 101]  

There was nothing left for him to do but to stuff his pipe into his pocket unlit; he would have to climb down and see whether the little creature had given up the ghost.

When Sabine awoke from her sluggish and heavy doze, she saw a great red-bearded face close up to hers, and heard a mighty growling which filled her with a vast sense of security. She was not at all afraid. There was something about Assendorff which resembled a kindly old thunderbolt. She looked curiously at his tremendous red beard, his small squinting eyes, and his peculiar ragged tunic. She did not put up any opposition when, muttering and swearing to himself, he picked her up in his arms and resolutely transferred her to his own rickety boat. He gave the boat from Lintula an ill-tempered kick, spat three times, and said: "May the devil take you!" Then Sabine laughed. She thought it sounded funny.

Assendorff was pleased by the girl's laughter. She wasn't nervous by nature, that was good. He pushed his fish to one side and put the girl on the bottom of the boat.

"There's nobody at Lintula who knows about horses now," he declared as he lit his pipe. "It was different in my day. 'When Assendorff came into the stables in the morning, every little foal knew that Our Lord had arrived."

Sabine sat up in the boat straight as a stick. What was that he said? He was talking about the horses at Lintula. Lady Macbeth's beautiful head seemed to rise up over the edge of the boat. She looked at Sabine with her sad eyes.

"Then you must know Lady Macbeth," she blurted out in breathless eagerness. All her exhaustion had vanished in a flash. Her heart pounded in her breast.

"Ha, ha," Assendorff rumbled. "I just ask you: who knows Lady Macbeth if old Assendorff doesn't? Did I train her or didn't I? I held her in my arms when she was no   [p. 102]   bigger than a bundle. I bottle-fed her as if she were my own infant. I have counted the hairs on her head, that's God's own truth."

He riveted his eyes on Sabine in order really to show her that she was not talking to a liar.

His effort was superfluous. Sabine trusted in Assendorff as she would in God the Father. She melted like wax at the mere thought that this red-bearded being had held Lady Macbeth in his arms when she was no bigger than a little bundle.

"Do you think that Lady Macbeth can cry?" Sabine asked and looked him straight in the eye. Her small hands were tightly clenched.

"No," said Assendorff. "That's something people imagine. What horses do is sigh. They sigh so heavily that your ears turn cold, in case you've done something wrong. Such a fine mare as Lady Macbeth, for example, has sensitive feelings, you know. That's what I've always said---you have to be a lady's man to get along with a mare. That's why I had such success in St. Petersburg."

Assendorff slapped his knees and let go a mighty laugh in his rusty bass voice. He told one story after another, for the most part stories of horses and women and that splendid fellow Assendorff who went around in riding boots and wore a fine livery.

But little Sabine had gone to sleep. Before she fell into slumber, she heard Lady Macbeth sighing. She sighed more heavily than any human can, and somehow Sabine got the idea that Lady Macbeth had a nightcap on her head with small silk ribbons tied beneath her chin, and she had to laugh to herself because it looked so funny and Lady Macbeth was exactly like the nice old troll woman in the big yellow storybook, the troll woman whom she had often impersonated,   [p. 103]   to Joachim's delight. Stretching out happily in the dirty boat, she fell asleep.

The sun climbed higher and higher in the sky, and the dream world of the morning, filled with presentiment, disappeared with its unspoken secrets beyond the holms. Clouds from the abode of unrest and change came sailing past, breezes swept over the quiet straits, and away in the edge of the reeds the bright-colored didapper plunged soundlessly into the depths.

Side by side with his own noisy voice, Assendorff's keen old ear caught the light and rhythmic sound of approaching oars. Swift and silent as a water bird, he made his boat glide into the narrow channel east of the Maiden's Cliff, and then went full steam ahead. The devil take him if he let the girl fall into the enemy's hands!

He took an irrevocable decision to help the girl in her flight. A little cockroach like her could always be hidden in some cranny or other. He looked fiercely in every direction, muttering half aloud to some invisible and garrulous opponent: "If she doesn't want to, then she doesn't want to! And that's all there is to it!" He felt in very high spirits indeed. No matter how you look at it, it was a joy for a fellow with the soul of a highwayman to have the chance of tricking authority somehow. He rowed so hard his horny fists grew hot. The water rushed and sang at the bow. Sabine lay lost in deep slumber while the strange beaches and the strange farms on their gentle knolls amidst the fields glided past, and an ill-tempered horse-lover steered the boat of her life toward freedom's unfamiliar coast.

Assendorff was careful not to tie up at the public beach where old Olsbom was accustomed to moor her boat. If the old battle-axe got wind of the matter, then the news would be spread all over the parish by evening. He had figured out   [p. 104]   a clever plan. He would tie up somewhere near the burial ground which lay on a lonely point of land at the edge of the village. It would not be a long walk from there to Uncle Ungert's cottage. And in the cottage, he had thought, the girl would find sanctuary. Uncle Ungert lived all by himself, except for his cat, and nobody ever came to see him. He would hardly notice that a little girl had come into his house, and if he noticed it, then he would believe that she had always been there. After all, the poor old man was always lost somewhere in his thoughts.

Everything went just the way Assendorff had planned it. The girl was so tired that he had to carry her. The creature didn't weigh any more than a crow. She hadn't had any food, surely. Nobody was in sight. He cut across the burial ground and noticed that a fresh grave had been dug. "The Lampinen's child, Sanni, is going to be buried tomorrow," he thought. "The priest will come to the village. There will be a party, and the old battle-axe will be gone all day long."

But when he stepped into Uncle Ungert's cottage, a stranger was sitting by the window, and Uncle Ungert was not to be seen. The cat rubbed against the stranger's legs in a very friendly fashion, its tail straight up in the air and its evil yellow eyes half closed. Assendorff paid special attention to these facts because the cat disliked people and spent most of its time out in the fields; he himself had a certain respect for the damned animal. He said good morning and laid the girl on the old man's bed. There was nothing else he could do. Of course, he knew who it was who had forced his way in here. It could not be anyone other than the fellow whom Lampinen was said to have brought home with him. What kind of a rascal was he? And what devil had shown him the way to the cottage? It wasn't so far away from Lampinen's, of course, but just the same! What was he prying around   [p. 105]   here for? The more Assendorff thought of the matter, the more suspicious he decided the man was. Gradually he worked himself up into a rage. He drew his mighty frame up to full length, so that his hair touched the ceiling. He stared straight forward and kept swearing softly to himself the whole time. "It's a peculiar kind of people who won't leave others in peace," he muttered into his beard.

Troubled, Myyriäinen stood up.

"I'm sorry if I've disturbed you," he said. "What happened was that I met Uncle Ungert at the churchyard. And we had a few things to talk about. He's very much interested in art. He has some handsome old prints he wanted to show me. Look here, what do you think of them? They're Leonardos, every one."

He laughed in a faintly embarrassed way and handed Assendorff a portrait of the head of Christ, so that he could examine it:

"When you see things like this, you realize just how little you know about art yourself. And how little you know about how a person looks. But you're pleased just the same. Pleased because it exists."

Assendorff could not deny that the man was very agreeable. He was not a little flattered by the fact that such a direct appeal had been made to his understanding of art. Yes, apparently it showed on him that he was something of a cosmopolitan. He spat vigorously in the direction of the hearth, put the picture back on the table, and declared:

"It's not so bad. Although I've seen more beautiful icons, of course. With more colors and things like that."

"Yes," Myyriäinen said. "There are many beautiful old icons, too."

As he spoke, he noticed that the girl had crept up to the table where the soiled old pictures were lying. She stood there in breathless stillness, lost in contemplation of the   [p. 106]   wonderful head of Christ. The vital, beautiful loneliness of the face fascinated her. She could never have dreamt that a thing of such beauty existed in all the world.

"Is that the Savior?" she asked naively.

"Yes," Myyriäinen said, and bent down over her. "Actually, one ought to see the colors. It's a sketch in red crayon. Do you like the picture?"

Sabine did not answer. She quickly directed her dark eyes toward the stranger. A friendly blue glance met hers. With a child's perspicacity she saw everything that was contained in it, the shyness and the melancholy and the strange blue loneliness, and her heart suddenly began to throb. Her legs could hardly hold her up. In order to conceal her confusion, she began to poke through the pictures, pretending that she was studying them. But all her senses were concentrated upon capturing the subtlest vibrations from this strange, strong being who seemed to be related to her, and who filled her with a longing she had never known before.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She was happy. Listening to his deep and pleasant voice, she wished that he would never stop talking to her.

"You understand what is beautiful, I think," said Myyriäinen. "You're lucky to have such eyes."

When he said it, it really seemed to Sabine that she did have eyes which could tell how beautiful everything was. She felt a burning wish to be able to show him something beautiful she herself had discovered. She stared with an apparent intensity at old Leonardo's pictures, but all the while she was frantically searching her memory for something which could give him an idea of what beautiful things she could see. In her haste she could not remember anything save the Little Mermaid, which she had once painted with her favorite colors, in silvery bright gray and dark golden brown, in order to convince herself of how beautiful the   [p. 107]   mermaid really was, although she had been made so ugly in the illustrations to Andersen's fairy tales. But oh, she didn't have her little painting with her! Everything she possessed was back there in the gloomy house to which she would never return, and she realized that she must begin anew with her two empty hands in order to convince him that she had the kind of eyes he thought.

"Do you think that the Little Mermaid is pretty?" she asked hesitatingly.

"I have never seen the Little Mermaid," said Myyriäinen. "But perhaps we'll get to see her some evening down in the river, if we stay on the lookout."

Sabine shook her head energetically.

"She lives in the sea," she said. "People never see her. But I'll paint her for you, and then you'll see how beautiful she is."

"Is that right?" said Myyriäinen. "Then I'll make something beautiful for you, too."

He felt a shy and terribly cold little hand slip into his, and two dark eyes looked up to him with an expression of such boundless gratitude that he almost grew frightened. He thought that he must impress this fact upon his memory---that he had promised to make something beautiful for her; for if he happened to forget it, then he would have committed an unconscious crime against a passionate trust.

"Your hand is like ice," he said. "You aren't cold, are you?"

Sabine did not feel that she was cold. She felt warm and happy. Her cheeks were hot and her heart throbbed within her breast. But still, it seemed to her that her legs were giving way under her and the floor disappeared and the room began to dance around her.

Myyriäinen took her in his arms and put her down on   [p. 108]   Uncle Ungert's hard wooden bed, where an old horse-blanket served as a mattress. He noticed that her clothes were damp, and when he touched her he realized that she had a fever.

Blowing and puffing, Uncle Ungert came in with a bucket of water. He had some coffee beans which he had been preserving for years in a tin can. Now, by heavens, he would make coffee, for now there would be a party in his cottage. He had met someone who possessed wisdom about life and understanding about art. For a moment it seemed to confuse him that a girl was lying on his bed. He put the bucket aside and went forward to look. Sabine had revived, and returned his glance curiously.

"Why yes, it's you," the old man said, and nodded.

Of course, one didn't know what he meant by what he said. Perhaps he thought that it was someone whom he had known a generation ago. At any rate, he seemed to accept it as a natural matter that a little being lay in his bed. He did not take the time to think it over, for now he was going to prepare the coffee, and that was a complicated procedure. You had to hunt up something to roast the beans on, and you had to make a fire, and one thing after another. No one else was allowed to mix into these sublime and mystic proceedings. The water had to be clean, the beans had to be clean, the fire had to be clean. When he offered his guest a beverage, no one save himself was allowed to touch anything needed for its preparation. In every one of its parts, it should come from him, and be mingled with his life-spirit.

Meanwhile, a complicated and low-voiced conversation was taking place between Myyriäinen and Assendorff on the question of what was to be done with the girl. Myyriäinen agreed with Assendorff that, for the time being, they ought to bide their time and let the girl do whatever she wanted to. "A child is a human being too," Assendorff   [p. 109]   said emphatically. The only thing which bothered Myyriäinen was that the girl, judging by appearances, was coming down with a cold. "That won't bother her," said Assendorff, waving the matter away with his hand. "She's tough." It was decided to borrow a nightshirt from Uncle Ungert and to get the girl to bed properly; Assendorff took upon himself the job of hunting up a little brandy for her, so that her breathing could be put in order. And everything should be kept as secret as death. The two men were as excited and eager as schoolboys who are planning some prank or other. The thought that they could be here, taking care of the fine-limbed little girl and getting food for her and having the responsibility for her well-being, appealed to them deeply; their protective instinct was awakened, and at the same time their need for a tender romanticism found satisfaction.

Hardly an hour had passed before Uncle Ungert's coffee was done and Assendorff's fish were broiled and Sabine, all dressed up in a tremendous nightshirt which was carefully patched and so threadbare that it resembled a spider-web, got a hearty gulp of brandy which burned like fire as it ran down her throat, giving her a sensation of buoyant lightness and strength. If poor Ottilia, who had always seen her squeamish daughter picking at her food, had been there to witness what quantities of fish, broiled in the embers, Sabine stuffed into herself, and how she lapped up the hot coffee with it, she wouldn't have believed her eyes. Assendorff gave Myyriäinen a meaningful nod. "Starved," he said in such a whisper that the room rumbled and the cat spat in its fright.

When everything was devoured down to the last crumb, and that devil of a cat had got his share, Assendorff took a ceremonious farewell of the girl. He had one thing and another to take care of in the village, he said. He saluted   [p. 110]   Myyriäinen and made him swear a holy oath of silence one last time.

Uncle Ungert, who was shortsighted, leaned over some yellowed papers which he had taken out of his hiding place. His old fingers trembled. The secret dreams of a shining and adventurous youth arose from these sketches which he had carried with him through two continents, and which he had always thought he would burn before he himself disappeared from the earth. Nothing of his spiritual person should be allowed to stay behind, adding to the litter of the world's trash heaps; he intended to take everything with him into the great transformation. But he had never had the strength to destroy these papers, where the frail and half-obliterated orthography bound his most intimate thoughts and experiences to the material world. He had thought: someday someone will come along who understands me and who feels the way I do. Then I shall read him everything I have written. And afterwards I shall burn it up. In a remarkable way, such a man had come to him now. He had not exchanged many words with the contemplative stranger, whom he chanced to meet in the churchyard where they were digging somebody's grave, before he realized that the moment had come when he would free himself from the last links he had with life.

He knew now that he did not have much time left. But he looked forward to a series of days during which the stranger would sit here with him, while he---slowly and without the least sense of urgency, leaf by leaf---would impart to him what he himself had preserved as the most authentic expressions of his personality. Even if it would be only a matter of days, for him it would be eternity.

He thought he would begin with Leonardo da Vinci.

He had noted down some of the master's deepest words, and because they had meant so much to him in the searching   [p. 111]   days of his youth, he wanted to read them aloud as the only real and true introduction to what he himself had observed about the meaning of life. The old Florentine, because of his all-embracing desire for investigation and his faithful, conscientious attention to details, as well as by the fact that most of what he planned to do remained undone while the noblest of his deeds vanished like a vision---the old Florentine was for Uncle Ungert the essence of man's astounding genius.

He suddenly looked up from his papers, as if he remembered something.

"You, girl," and it was apparently Sabine to whom he spoke, "did you know that Leonardo trembled, yes, one must actually say trembled, when he was going to paint the head of Christ on his picture of the Last Supper? And yet he offered the duke his machines of war. That's the way he was. And he wanted to make a flying machine."

Sabine was quiet as a mouse. She did not want to let the smallest careless word disturb this wonderful thing which was happening to her. But, all the while, she was sending secret little messages to her friend who remained in the room, although she could not see him from where she lay in the bed.

Uncle Ungert read aloud in his weak, trembling voice:

"Where the flame cannot live, there no creature which breathes can live."

"The origin of all our knowledge lies in feeling. 'Where the most feeling is, there is the greatest suffering."

"The deeper knowledge is, the more intense is love."

"If you, oh man, when you contemplate the wondrous creations of nature in my sketches, regard the destruction of my work as a crime, consider then how much greater the crime must be when one robs a human being of his life. Consider too that the body's edifice, which seems such   [p. 112]   perfection to you, is naught in comparison to the soul which resides within this dwelling. For it, of whatsoever sort it may be, is something which at all events comes from God. Consider how unwillingly it departs the body, and that its lament and its sadness cannot be without cause. Thus do not prevent it from inhabiting the body which it has constructed, as long as it will, and do not destroy this life in your deceit and evil. Life is so fair that he who does not truly value it is unworthy of it."

Uncle Ungert was overcome by emotion and could not continue his reading. So many memories pressed in upon him, strangely filled with life. He looked out with his old eyes, in which the dusk was falling, across the floor of his cottage, and there a multitude of phantoms came toward him, with hands outstretched and words that had never been spoken on their lips. "Yes, yes," he mumbled to himself, "there is so much which never gets a chance to live." He remained sitting on his chair, altogether still. Was he sleeping with his eyes open, as they say old horses do, or was he preparing to cross the boundary into death unnoticed?

Myyriäinen went across the floor quietly, in order not to disturb the old man.

He sat down on the edge of the bed beside Sabine. Soon they were involved in a low-voiced conversation. They did not tell one another everything that passed through their minds. Myyriäinen, for example, thought that Uncle Ungert was going to die now, but did not mention it to Sabine. And Sabine thought passionately of the soul's sadness and lament when it must leave the body, but did not mention it to her friend. Instead she said that she was thinking of the Little Mermaid, who had such a boundless longing to become a human being for a single day and to acquire an immortal soul. Now she clearly understood, she said, why the Little Mermaid felt the way she did. If she---Sabine---had not been   [p. 113]   born a human being, then she would long for nothing so much as to become one.

"But do you know," she said in a mysterious whisper, "what can turn a mermaid into a human being?"

Myyriäinen said that he did not know.

Sabine sat up with shining eyes. She threw her arms around his neck and whispered into his ear: "If a son of man loves her."

"Oh," said Myyriäinen. "Now I know what your mermaid looks like. She resembles you."

They both thought this was very funny.

"Do you think I'm pretty?" she asked.

Myyriäinen was careful not to tell her what his opinion was, but in his mind he was surprised at seeing such beauty suddenly come into bloom upon her face.