Inset tale from "The Young Man with the Carnation," in Winter's Tales:
“There was once,” he began, “an immensely rich old Englishman who had
been a courtier and a councillor to the Queen and who now, in his old
age, cared for nothing but collecting ancient blue china. To that end
he travelled to Persia, Japan and China, and he was everywhere
accompanied by his daughter, the Lady Helena. It happened, as they
sailed in the Chinese Sea, that the ship caught fire on a still night,
and everybody went into the lifeboats and left her. In the dark and the
confusion the old peer was separated from his daughter. Lady Helena
got up on deck late, and found the ship quite deserted. In the last
moment a young English sailor carried her down into a lifeboat that had
been forgotten. To the two fugitives it seemed as if fire was following
them from all sides, for the phosphorescence played in the dark sea,
and, as they looked up, a falling star ran across the sky, as if it was
going to drop into the boat. They sailed for nine days, till they were
picked up by a Dutch merchantman, and came home to England.
“The old lord had believed his daughter to be dead. He now wept with
joy, and at once took her off to a fashionable watering-place so that
she might recover from the hardships she had gone though. And as he
thought it must be unpleasant to her that a young sailor, who made his
bread in the merchant service, should tell the world that he had sailed
for nine days alone with a peer’s daughter, he paid the boy a fine sum,
and made him promise to go shipping in the other hemisphere and never
come back. ‘For what,’ said the old nobleman, ‘would be the good of
that?’
“When Lady Helena recovered, and they gave her the news of the Court
and of her family, and in the end also told her how the young sailor had
been sent away never to come back, they found that her mind had
suffered from her trials, and that she cared for nothing in all the
world. She would not go back to her father’s castle in its park, nor go
to Court, nor travel to any gay town of the continent. The only thing
which she now wanted to do was to go, like her father before her, to
collect rare blue china. So she began to sail, from one country to the
other, and her father went with her.
“In her search she told the people, with whom she dealt, that she was
looking for a particular blue colour, and would pay any price for it.
But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would
always after a time put them aside and say: ‘Alas, alas, it is not the
right blue.’ Her father, when they had sailed for many years, suggested
to her that perhaps the colour which she sought did not exist. ’O God,
Papa,’ said she, ‘how can you speak so wickedly? Surely there must be
some of it left from the time when all the world was blue.’
“Her two old aunts in England implored her to come back, still to
make a great match. But she answered them: ‘Nay, I have got to sail.
For you must know, dear aunts, that it is all nonsense when learned
people tell you that the seas have got a bottom to them. On the
contrary, the water which is the noblest of the elements, does, of
course, go all through the earth, so that our planet really floats in
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 one another, in the deep sea, and the ship of which I
speak is always exactly beneath my own 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.
If I stopped sailing, what would those poor sailors who make their
bread in the merchant service do? But I shall tell you a secret,’ she
said. ’In the end my ship will go down, to the centre 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, the old lord died and Lady Helena became old and
deaf, but she still sailed. Then it happened, after the plunder of the
summer palace of the Emperor 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. Oh, 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
sunk in contemplation of it. Then she said to her doctor and her
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 round me, and in the midst of the blue world
my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently, like a wake
that sings, like the drops that fall from an oar blade.’ A little later
she asked them: ‘Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you
have patience, all that has ever been, will come back to you?’ Shortly
afterwards the old lady died.”
descensus Averno facilis est