The very next day the injunction was issued, restraining Ingigerd
Hahlström from dancing in public. The girl conducted herself wildly.
Lilienfeld said the time had come to place the matter before the Mayor of
New York. In order to protect Ingigerd from slander and from being sent
to an orphan asylum, Lilienfeld, who was married but had no children,
offered her a refuge in his own home on 124th Street near Lenox Avenue.
Whether she wanted to or not, Ingigerd had to accept.
The morning after Ingigerd's departure to Mr. Lilienfeld's home, when
Frederick sat in front of his modelling in a new smock of unbleached
linen of Miss Burns's buying, he experienced a sense of relief on
Ingigerd's account. A burden had been lifted from him. Her change of home
had removed a part of the responsibility from his shoulders and made a
break in the feeling he had had of their belonging to each other.
After the rehearsal, Ingigerd was much discussed in the studio. Ritter
had expressed to Miss Burns and his friends a desire to make a model of
the dancing girl for a bronze statuette. Miss Burns told Frederick of his
wish. But Frederick, who was still regarded somewhat in the light of
Ingigerd's guardian, assented unwillingly.
"You see, Miss Eva," he said, "I am really the last person in the world
to stand in the way when beautiful things are to be created. But I am
only a man, and if Ritter were to use Miss Hahlström as a model here,
where only one or two walls would separate us, that would mean an end to
my peace of soul." Miss Burns laughed. "You may well laugh," he said,
"but I am a convalescent, and relapses, you know, are worse than the
sickness they follow."
A week passed, in which Frederick carried on a remarkable, but not, as
yet, victorious warfare. He worked in the studio daily, and Miss Burns
became his confidante. From his own mouth she learned what she had
already observed, that he was languishing in the chains of an unhappy
passion. Without ever interfering in his spiritual struggles unless he
positively demanded it of her, she gave him advice as a good friend
and comrade.
"Every time I see Ingigerd, or go out with her, or spend any time at all
with her," he said, "I feel outraged and bored. I have firmly made up my
mind not to go back to her."--A resolution frequently broken a few hours
after it was made.
Miss Eva was so long-suffering that Frederick never felt compelled to
drop the theme of Ingigerd Hahlström. The girl's soul was turned inside
out and back again.
One day Ingigerd said to him:
"Take me, seduce me, do with me whatever you will, Frederick. Be strict,
be cruel with me. Lock me up. You are the only man I want to have
anything to do with me any more." Another time she said beseechingly:
"I want to be good, Frederick. Make me good."
But the very next day she again subjected her friend and protector to
unpardonably vile treatment. The fact was, she already had a following of
men, running errands for her, attending to her affairs, thinking for her,
and paying for her.
The thing that Frederick could not wean himself from was that sweet,
fair, frail, pathetic body. Yet he was determined to wean himself.
One day Ingigerd came to sit for Miss Burns for her portrait. Frederick
placed a revolving stand in front of her and also tried to model the
blonde Madonna in clay. Even Ritter had a mass of clay for modelling a
bust of her prepared on a revolving stand, and the master entered into
rivalry with his pupils. Miss Burns's purpose in arranging these sittings
was not easily fathomed. The result was, however, that the very severe
study of his idol's features had a remarkable effect upon Frederick.
The flatness of her forehead, her eyebrows, the setting of her eyes, the
turn of her temples, the shape of her ears and the twist they took where
they joined her head, her nose as narrow as the dull edge of a knife,
her nostrils, the oldish-looking nasolabial line, the depressions at the
corners of her mouth, her beautiful yet brutal chin, her unbeautiful
throat, with the washer-woman's pit in it--all these traits had a very
sobering effect upon Frederick, sapping from his imagination every bit
of its strength to beautify or palliate. Perhaps Miss Burns knew what
results from such strenuous, such persistently logical observation of an
object. In some ways it has the same effect as blood-letting. That is why
the artist must bleed to death unless new sources of illusion always open
up to him.
Moreover, in the long sittings, to which Ingigerd submitted from vanity,
she betrayed the narrowness, the attenuation, the barrenness of her mind.
In contrast with Miss Burns, Frederick perceived in Ingigerd with fearful
clearness that incompleteness which is eternally rudimentary. Once she
brought a letter from her mother in Paris and read it aloud. For about
a quarter of an hour, it actually seemed to torture her. It was serious,
severe, full of concern, and not unloving. Her mother referred
sorrowfully to Hahlström's death, and asked Ingigerd to come and live
with her in Paris. She told her of a woman in New York, the wife of a
German barber, with whom it would be eminently suitable for her to remain
until she returned to Europe. She even mentioned the steamer she should
take.
"I am not wealthy," she wrote. "You will have to help me with my work,
Ingigerd, but I will try to be a mother to you in every respect,"--here
came the apodosis--"if you make up your mind to change your mode of
life."
There was hard, stupid, even savage hatred in Ingigerd's commentaries on
this and other parts of her mother's letter.
"I am to go to her and repent," she mimicked, "because the Lord has so
miraculously saved me. Mamma should be the first to repent. I am not
going to be such a fool as to turn myself into a dressmaker. Always to
receive orders and listen to sermons from mamma! I am not bothered about
myself so long as I am not under somebody's thumb."
And so she went on, without the least hesitancy retailing the ugliest
intimacies in the life of her parents.