The house was slowly turning in for the night. Heavy trucks rattled
on the street. Boys whistled piercingly. The outer door was closed
thunderously. The walls shook with the tread of a hundred feet. In the
yard some one was driving nails into a box. Somewhere a discordant
voice was singing. Tumult arose from the public houses at the corners.
A bestial laugh sounded from above.
Christian opened the window. It was warm. Groups of workingmen
came from Malmöer Street and scattered. At one corner there was a
green-grocer’s shop. In front of it stood an old woman with a lidless
basket, in which there were dirty vegetables and a dead chicken with a
bloody neck. Christian could see these things, because the light of the
street lamp fell on them.
“She’ll take the child for four thousand,” said Karen.
Surreptitiously Christian glanced at the cradle. The infant both
repelled and attracted him. “You had better keep it,” he said.
Hollow tones could be heard from the adjoining flat. Hofmann had come
home. He was talking, and a clear boyish treble answered him.
The clock ticked. Gradually the confused noises of the house blended
into a hum.
Karen sat down at the table and strung glass beads. Her hair had
recently become even yellower and more touselled; but her features
had a firmer modelling. Her face, no longer swollen and puffed from
drinking, was slimmer and showed purer tints.
She looked at Christian, and, for a moment, she had an almost mad
feeling; she yearned to know some yearning. It was like the glowing of
a last spark in an extinguished charcoal stove.
The spark crimsoned and died.
“You were going to tell me about Hilde Karstens and your foster-father,
Karen,” Christian said persuasively. “You made a promise.”
“For God’s sake, leave me alone! It’s so long ago I can’t remember
about it!” She almost whined the words. She held her head between her
hands and rested her elbows on her knees. Her sitting posture always
had a boastful lasciviousness. Thus women sit in low public houses.
Minutes passed. Christian sat down at the table facing her. “I want
to give the brat away,” she said defiantly. “I can’t stand looking at
it. Come across with the four thousand--do! I can’t, I just can’t bear
looking at it!”
“But strangers will let the child sicken and perhaps die,” said
Christian.
A grin, half coarse and half sombre, flitted across her face. Then
she grew pale. Again she saw that mirrored image of herself: it came
from afar, from the very end of the shaft. She shivered, and Christian
thought she was cold. He went for a shawl and covered her shoulders.
His gestures, as he did so, had something exquisitely chivalrous about
them. Karen asked for a cigarette. She smoked as one accustomed to it,
and the way she held the cigarette and let the smoke roll out of her
mouth or curl out from between pointed lips was also subtly lascivious.
Again some minutes passed. She was evidently struggling against the
confession. Her nervous fingers crushed one of the glass beads.
Then suddenly she spoke: “There’s many that isn’t born at all. Maybe
we’d love them. Maybe only the bad ones are born because we’re too low
to deserve the good ones. When I was a little girl I saw a boy carry
seven kittens in a sack to the pool to drown ’em. I was right there
when he spilled them into the water. They struggled like anything and
came up again and tried to get to land. But as soon as one of the
little heads came up, the boy whacked at it with a stick. Six of ’em
drowned, and only the ugliest of ’em managed to get into a bush and get
away. The others that was drowned--they was pretty and dainty.”
“You’re bleeding,” said Christian. The broken bead had cut her hand.
Christian wiped the blood with his handkerchief. She let him do it
quietly, while her gaze was fixed on old visions that approached and
receded. The tension was such that Christian dared scarcely breathe.
Upon his lips hovered that strange, equivocal smile that always
deceived men concerning his sympathies.
He said softly: “You have something definite in mind now, Karen.”
“Yes, I have,” she said, and she turned terribly pale. “You wanted to
know how it was with Hilde Karstens and with the cabinet-maker. He was
the man with whom my mother was living at that time. Hilde was fifteen
and I was thirteen. She and I was good friends, together all the time,
even on the dunes one night when the spring-tide came. The men were
wild after her. Lord, she was pretty and sweet. But she laughed at
’em. She said: ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to marry a man--a real
man that can do things; till then, just don’t bother me.’ I didn’t
go to the dance at the ‘Jug of Hösing’; I had to stay home and help
mother pickle fish. That’s when it all happened. I could never find
out how Hilde Karstens got to the mounds on the heath alone. Maybe she
went willingly with the pilot’s mate. It was a pilot’s mate; that’s
all we ever knew about him. He was at the ‘Jug’ for the first time
that night, and, of course, he wasn’t never seen again. It was by
the mounds that he must have attacked her and done her the mischief,
’cause otherwise she wouldn’t have walked out into the sea. I knew
Hilde Karstens; she was desperate. That evening the waves washed her
body ashore. I was there. I threw myself down and grasped her wet,
dead hair. They separated me from her, but I threw myself down again.
It took three men to get me back home. Mother locked me up and told
me to sift lentils, but I jumped out of the window and ran to Hilde’s
house. They said she’d been buried. I ran to the church yard and looked
for her grave. The grave-digger showed it to me far off in a corner.
They looked for me all night and found me by the grave and dragged me
home. Half the village turned out to see. Because I’d run away from the
lentils my mother beat me with a spade handle so that my skin peeled
from my flesh. And while I lay there and couldn’t stir, she went to
the schoolmaster, and they wrote a letter to the squire asking if he
wouldn’t take me to work on the estate. The house was empty, and the
cabinet-maker came into the kitchen where I was lying. He was drunk as
a lord. He saw me stretched out there by the hearth, and stared and
stared. Then he picked me up and carried me into the bedroom.”
She stopped and looked about as though she were in a strange place and
as though Christian were a menacing stranger.
“He tore off my clothes, my skirts and my bodice and my shirt and
everything, and his hands shook. In his eyes there was a sparkling
like burning alcohol. And when I lay naked before him he stroked me
with his trembling hands over and over again. I felt as if I’d have to
scratch the brain out of his skull; but I couldn’t do nothing. I just
felt paralyzed, and my head as heavy as iron. If I get to be as old as
a tree, I’ll never forget that man’s face over me that time. A person
can’t forget things like that--never in this world. And as soon as ever
I could stir again, he reeled in a corner and fell down flat, and it
was all dark in the room.” She gave a deep sigh. “That was the way of
it. That’s how it started.”
Christian did not turn his eyes from her for the shadow of a moment.
“After that,” she went on, “people began to say, ‘Lass, your eyes are
too bold.’ Well, they was. I couldn’t tell everybody why. The vicar
drivelled about some secret shame and turning my soul to God. He made
me laugh. When I went into service on the estate, they grudged me the
food I ate. I had to wait on the children, fetch water, polish boots,
clean rooms, run errands for the Madame. There was an overseer that was
after me--a fellow with rheumy eyes and a hare-lip. Once at night when
I got to my little room, there he was and grabbed me. I took a stone
jug and broke it across his head. He roared like a steer, and everybody
came hurrying in--the servants and the master and the mistress. They
all screamed and howled, and the overseer tells them a whacking lie
about me, and the master says: ‘Out with you, you baggage!’ Well, why
not, I thought. And that very night I tied up my few rags, and off I
was. But next night I slunk back, ’cause I’d found no shelter anywhere.
I crept all around the house, not because I was tired or hungry, but
to pay them out for what they’d done to me. I wanted to set the house
on fire and burn it down and have my revenge. But I didn’t dare, and
I wandered about the countryside for three days, and always at night
came back to the house. I just couldn’t sleep and I’d keep seeing
the fire that I ought to have lit, and the house and stables flaring
up and the cattle burning and the hay flying and the beams smoking
and the singed dogs tugging at their chains. And I could almost hear
them whine--the dogs and the children who’d tormented me so, and the
mistress who’d stood under the Christmas tree in a silk dress and given
presents to everybody except to me. Oh, yes, I did get three apples
and a handful o’ nuts, and then she told me to hurry and wash the
stockings for Anne-Marie. But at last my strength gave out, wandering
about that way and looking for a chance. The rural policeman picked
me up and wanted to question me. But I fainted, and he couldn’t find
out nothing. If only I’d set fire to that house, everything would have
been different, and I wouldn’t have had to go with the captain when my
mother got me in her claws again. I let him talk me into going for a
blue velvet dress and a pair of cheap patent leather shoes. And I never
heard till later about the bargain that mother’d struck with him.”
With her whole weight she shoved the chair she sat on farther from the
table, and bent over and rested her forehead on the table’s edge. “O
gee,” she said, absorbed by the horror of her fate, “O gee, if I’d set
fire to that house, I wouldn’t have had to let everybody wipe their
boots on me. If only I’d done it! It would have been a good thing!”
Silently Christian looked down upon her. He covered his eyes with his
hand, and the pallor of his face and hand was one.