A.
This
is an interesting question which I've not seen raised before. The
question arises from a twenty-first century perspective, and was not, I
would guess, an issue in the Victorian / Edwardian era in which Karen
Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton grew up. Guests to English country homes
did not pay rent or fees; their presence was considered payment enough.
The famous Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen spent much of his life
traveling from home to country home of wealthy Danish gentry--who knew
that he could not afford a country home of his own. (Karen Blixen's
relatives, the Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs's, hosted him regularly.)
Denys Finch Hatton brought wine and foodstuffs for his visits. We have
Karen Blixen's testimony to this in Letters
from
Africa.
Your question does raise a point, however. Karen Blixen once wrote a
story that hints that some form of payment might have been expected. In
"The Old Chevalier," a story in
which the lead character has an evanescent romance with a wandering
figure, Karen Blixen says:
We
two had played. A rare jest had been offered me and I had accepted it;
now it was up to me to keep the spirit of our game until the end. Her
own demand was well within the spirit of the night. For the palace
which he builds, for four hundred white and four hundred black slaves
all loaded with jewels, the djinn asks for an old copper lamp; and the
forest-witch who moves three towns and creates for the woodcutter's son
an army of horse-soldiers demands for herself the heart of a hare. The
girl asked me for her pay in the voice and manner of the djinn and the
forest-witch, and if I were to give her twenty francs she might still
be safe within the magic circle of her free and graceful and defiant
spirit.
| Coulsong