Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. Janet Lewis

years and is thoroughly the mistress of it; there she raised her family, there she watched war come and war be over, there she entertained generations of poets, artists, musicians, and even the occasional lepidopterist such as Vladimir Nabokov, who showed up at her door with his butterfly net one day in 1941. The Nabokovs and the Winterses hit it off; the exiles came often for meals. I had heard that Nabokov enjoyed himself so much in her kitchen that he sometimes helped her wash up; when I asked her about this she chuckled and said, “Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had.”

      I had hardly said hello when we were off through the streaming backyard to the small, detached study where she and Yvor Winters did their writing; an old Royal typewriter sits as a reminder of those days. On the walls, casually tacked up, were photographs of a number of noble Airedales and several slightly less noble poets, one or two of them so obscure that neither of us could quite puzzle out who they might be. A sketch of Pound was by one window; a lovely photograph of Janet as a young woman hung from a nail. Janet remarked that the goats came into her life at a time when she was too weak to write but liked to sketch; Yvor Winters went down the road and bought a couple of goats, so his wife could have something to sketch besides Airedales.

      Later, two gifted men friends turned up and cooked a delicious meal, which we ate at the small table in her kitchen. Once, on the audiotape, when a young interviewer was asking her how she got the details right in her historical fiction, Janet talked for a bit about looking at Breughel and reading lots of histories, but then she dropped from the highfalutin’ and merely said, “I’ve always liked kitchens”; it is as if she is saying that from her own bright kitchen, where Vladimir Nabokov once wielded a dish towel, she can imagine all kitchens, as her fiction—filled with kitchens—demonstrates.

      In the company of most people who are brushing a century, ignoring their age requires conscious effort; but when Janet Lewis is discussing a book or remembering a visit or a trip, or describing northern Michigan as it was in her girlhood, remembering that she’s elderly is what takes the conscious effort. Perhaps the fact that her sickness was so nearly mortal, that she lived for five years of her young womanhood with death as a near-neighbor, has left her unimpressed that it’s in the neighborhood still. Though she is reasonably cautious, and is attended by squadrons of friends, who do their attending for the rich reward of her company, there is also a slightly mischievous, slightly devil-may-care, I’ll-go-when-I’m-good-and-ready air about her. It’s as if that terribly early struggle has bought her a little exemption, and she knows it, and she means to enjoy her privileges to the full.

      The four of us finished the meal very companionably, had dessert, had more tea. Janet probed around in a bookcase and found an essay on her poetry that she thought I might like to read. I took it and wandered back to my motel on the Camino, thrilled. A great lady of American letters had—for the space of an evening—been my valentine.

      The Trial of Sören Qvist

      Swallow Press

      An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

      www.ohioswallow.com

      © 1947, 1974 by Janet Lewis Winters

      Introduction © 2013 by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press

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      First Swallow Press / Ohio University Press edition published 1983

      Printed in the United States of America

      Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ™

      23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.

      The trial of Sören Qvist / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth.

      pages ; cm

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-8040-1144-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4054-9 (electronic)

      1. Qvist, Sören Jensen, –1626—Fiction. 2. Denmark—History—Christian IV, 1588–1648—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3523.E866T7 2013

      813’π iv.52—dc23

      2013016753

      To Maclin Guérard

      Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition

      The story of the Parson of Vejlby is famous in Denmark. Steen Steesen Blicher (1782–1848), himself a Jutlander and a Parson, tells it in his Knitting Room Stories.

      I first came across it myself in a volume by Phillips called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. The only date I have been able to find for Phillips is the year 1814, when “Chief Baron Gilbert was superseded as an authority on the English laws of evidence by the books of Phillips.” He may have found his account in the story by Blicher, although I think, from certain differences of detail, that he had another source, possibly the same one Blicher had. At all events, I am sure that the story of Sören Jensen Qvist is, in its main facts and in many of its details, and even in some of the speeches of important characters, history rather than fiction. It would be impossible as well as foolish to attempt an archeologically correct version of the legend. However, I believe that there is nothing in my account of the Parson of Vejlby which might not have happened as I tell it. He is one of a great company of men and women who have preferred to lose their lives rather than accept a universe without plan or without meaning.

      There was said to be, before the presence of the Germans in Denmark, the cross in Aalsö churchyard which the Parson of Aalsö raised to the memory of his friend. I trust that it is still there.

      J.L.

      April 11, 1946

      One

      The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward. The air was clouded with dampness. It was late November, late in the afternoon, but no sunlight came from the west, and to the east the sky was walled with cloud where the cold fog thickened above the shores of Jutland. There was a smell of sea in the air even these few miles inland, but the foot traveler who had come upon sight of the inn had been so close to the sea for so many days now that he was unaware of the salty fragrance.

      The inn was familiar to him, and he thought he remembered what lay beyond the turn of the road as it circled the wooded hill and disappeared in shadow. Something in the aspect of the inn was also unfamiliar to him as he stood looking down at it from his side of the hollow where it lay shrouded in its own exhalations. The sign of the Golden Lion still hung above the door, although much of the fine bright yellow paint was gone from the wood. The last pale flakes were in tone now like the beech leaves which clung to the saplings at the edge of the denuded forest. When he had last seen it, the paint had been as fresh as buttercups. That was in the heyday of the king’s loves, when the inn had been named in honor of the king’s bastard children, all Golden Lions, the illegitimate children of the king being still more noble than the legitimate children of most people. Now that the king was old, and Denmark shrunken and impoverished by his reign, some of the Golden Lions had indeed shown themselves most noble. Others were quarreling among themselves. But here even in Jutland, which had suffered most from the King’s wars, the reign of Christian the Fourth was still considered glorious. Even the wayfarer looking down upon the Golden Lion, when he thought of the King, thought of him as splendid. Failing in health, blind in one eye ever since the great naval battle of the Kolberger Heide, and now turned sixty-nine, Christian was, in this year of 1646,