+THE ANGEL OF DEATH+
Hedvig’s and Percy’s marriage had for long been unconsummated. At first
in the Swiss mountain sanatorium Hedvig was not allowed to live in the
same house as her husband. Later on when he was better she still
remained his nurse.
“Think of your fever,” she said, and withdrew gently from his delicate
approaches. “It is your duty to get well, Percy dear.”
Percy was all too far away from the thousandfold stimulant of art from
which in his longing and his imagination he had otherwise derived
vitality. His natural submissiveness was still further fortified by the
strict discipline of the sanatorium. So he yielded and always acquiesced
in her cold sisterly behaviour to him. But only to approach her again at
the next opportunity with the same persistent, childlike,
half-embarrassed supplication for love. And if he had not done so Hedvig
would certainly have felt secretly hurt and worried. After having
wandered about the whole day in the pure cold air and in the light of
the white snow-capped peaks, among the brotherhood of suffering and
among the recaptured convalescents high up in the seclusion of the
alpine world it was pleasant in the evening to whisper a soft “no” to
the adoring husband. There was rehabilitation in it. It healed old
wounds. It was an innocent triumph. She lived through happy days. There
was nothing that tempted or scorched or tore at the heart. There was
just life enough for Hedvig Hill.
“No, Percy dear. For your own sake. Your temperature would rise....”
And she uttered her “no” in the same tone as others would whisper their
“yes.” “See how I sacrifice everything for you,” she seemed to say, “my
best years, my womanhood, my beauty, I sacrifice all for you, darling
Percy.” Even to herself she made a sacrifice of her half-heartedness and
her fear—though she probably suspected in her inmost heart this
unsatisfied longing of Percy’s was in the long run more dangerous to him
than ordinary life together as husband and wife. The truth was that
Hedvig Hill sipped at what she did not dare to drink at one draft. She
hugged to herself the glimpse of pain she saw in Percy’s glance after
her refusal. She cherished the mist of pulsing blood in his blue eyes,
so like those of a precocious boy. And she warmed her lonely bed with
it.
Then one day came when Percy was—not cured, because a complete cure
seemed almost out of question—but anyhow, so much better that he could
think of moving about in the world once again.
The doctors spoke of the south.
Hedvig felt a nervous dread of all that was to come. It was as if they
were being turned out of a safe refuge, she thought. She would have
preferred to remain amongst the brotherhood of the doomed, bewitched by
the mountain spirits up there into a half-life in the big white
monastery.
“But Percy, would it not be safer to spend one more winter in the
sanatorium?” she whispered.
Percy shook his head and smiled. He had been very mysterious these last
days; he had sent off and received a number of telegrams.
“Where are we going? Wouldn’t it be best to go home?” wondered Hedvig.
“You are going to have a magnificent present,” cried Percy, who glowed
with the pleasure of planning, acting and moving about after years of
supervision and inactivity.
So they went down into the valley when the first September days had
already sprayed the woods with gold. There the train stood ready. The
smoke, the noise, the jolting about soon tired Percy, who was so spoilt
with fresh air and quiet. Then Hedvig turned nurse again, and wrapped
him up in their reserved compartment. But that evening the train rushed
into a town by the sea under the mountains. It was Genoa and they at
once went aboard a steamer which seemed to have waited only for them in
order to depart.
“But where is this boat going to? Where are we going?” wondered Hedvig.
She positively knew nothing. Percy only smiled mysteriously.
One brilliantly fine morning they went ashore at white Cadiz.
“Here is my present,” said Percy. “It is the country that suits your
hair and your eyes.”
At the sanatorium Hedvig had forgotten to be Spanish. She felt terribly
nervous and cast out into the unknown.
“Now we will choose towns for you, just as one chooses frocks,”
continued Percy. “We shall begin with Seville, though I suspect that
Toledo would be the most suitable.”
So they arrived at Seville.
“I can’t offer you an auto-da-fé,” he whispered. “You will have to be
satisfied with a ‘corrida’.”
Above the entrance to the _plaza de toros_ there stood in big letters
“Press Bull-fight in commemoration of the immaculate conception of the
Virgin Mary.”
With eyes that still smarted and burnt from all the pitiless light on
the yellow sand of the arena Hedvig saw within a fraction of a second a
little grey bull, with the picador’s dart in his neck, bury his horns
into the stomach of the rearing horse. The horse beat the air helplessly
with his forefeet and lifted his slender neck and his head with a
gesture of wild, maddening pain, and then fell heavily on one side with
the picador beneath him, but only to rush up again and to gallop,
pursued by the bull, round the arena with bleeding sides and trailing
entrails.
Hedvig stared fixedly down. She was very pale.
“This is horrible,” she muttered. “I want to go.”
But she did not go.
More picadors, more bleeding horses. Then banderilleros who, dancing
nimbly, buried their flag-adorned darts in the bleeding neck of the bull
with subtle, playful cruelty. Meanwhile the sunlight lay like fire on
the yellow sand, the red blood stains, and the bright shawls of the
women on the rails of the boxes. Even the rising metallic sound of
thousands of voices seemed to be burnt through by the heat of the sun.
Then the _espada_ entered. With his knee breeches, slippers and pouched
hair he seemed to have stepped straight out of a Mozart opera.
Swinging his red cloth he dances an elegant Death dance before he draws
his weapon. Now everything gleams bright, the sun, eyes, the thin
fire-shaft of the sword. His posture, as with his weapon raised to the
level of his eyes he calmly awaits the onslaught of the bull, is
extremely graceful. Now the fire of the fine tongue of steel is suddenly
extinguished in the bull’s neck, the Colossus staggers and falls
heavily.
Hedvig sat mute and pale with devouring eyes. She was staring at the
gate from which the next bull would rush in....
When they drove home in the first yellow twilight Percy’s arm stole
round her waist.
“I believe all the same Toledo has amused itself in Seville,” he smiled.
“Wasn’t that a fine way of getting the sanatorium out of the system?”
Hedvig pushed away his arm almost unkindly:
“Don’t laugh at everything,” she muttered.
And suddenly she felt a secret bitterness that the man by her side was
not stronger, more robust, more dangerous, that he had allowed her to
say “no” so often.
Darkness requires more heat than light. The sun, the sight of blood, the
inborn cruelty of the south had all at once burnt through her shyness,
her fear and her brooding. Hunger for life buried its claws deep in this
strange virgin soul that had lain so anxious and so self-absorbed. She
was not the first barbarian from a twilight-land to whom the south has
given a bold desire to live.
That night Sister Hedvig became her husband’s lover.
They remained the whole autumn in Seville and saw many bull fights.
Hedvig was very beautiful at this time. Hers was a dark passionate
unfolding. Percy overwhelmed her with costly clothes and jewels. He
dressed her up as a Spaniard with combs and shawls and mantillas. He did
not touch his paint brush, but he let her pose to his love. And Hedvig
enjoyed his admiration, enjoyed her own beauty. For the first time in
her life she was at peace with her own body. It was no longer the cause
of restlessness and heavy care and danger. It took pride in this man’s
caresses. Beneath her silk and her jewels she felt the glow of her
nakedness. A solemn thrill would pass through her at the thought of her
own shoulders and breast. And she enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction,
which was both hot and cold. Oh, what a relief not to feel any longer
that anxious longing in her inmost soul.
Hedvig Hill was happily in love with herself. For Percy also these were
happy days. Their late union gave his mind a bright coolness. Perhaps he
sometimes suspected the gulf which nevertheless existed between them.
But that did not frighten a dilettante, it only now and then liberated a
certain light self-irony. He enjoyed his own extravagant gifts, he
enjoyed seeing her bloom in her own way under his hands. He felt
something of the cool intoxication of the artist before his work when it
has achieved independent life.
“You are my most beautiful picture,” he would whisper. “I sometimes
imagine I have done it myself.”
The time was far away when he had lain in the shadow of Death looking at
her with a beggar’s eyes. Percy Hill forgot things easily.
It was the evening of a clear and brilliant October day. The whitewashed
walls no longer dazzled. Down in the patio of the small hotel two
Spanish matrons in black were sitting talking with phlegmatic fire.
Their talk flowed as musically and as monotonously as the little
spraying fountain in the marble basin. Hedvig and Percy had just
returned from a long drive towards the _vega_. The coolness of the
approaching autumn suited him wonderfully well. He stood leaning against
the window frame with his hands behind his head:
“Today I feel quite aggressively alive,” he said. “Fancy if we should
have a child, Hedvig. A little girl. I would much rather have a girl
than a boy.”
There was a slight touch of annoyance in his voice.
Hedvig sat at her dressing table doing her hair. She felt a sudden
unpleasant shock. Strange as it may sound, she had up till that moment
not thought of the consequences of their life together, and not for a
moment had she thought of herself as a mother. She let slip the knot and
her black hair flowed again over her naked white shoulders. She sprang
up from the dressing table with a hard expression and frightened eyes:
“I don’t want a child!” she cried. “Never, never!”
Percy wondered at her vehemence. His smile grew hesitating:
“Dear child, forget my nonsense. It is bad taste to foretell nature in
that way. I only meant that I should certainly find your condition
beautiful.”
Hedvig had now calmed down again. She came up to him and stroked his
hair:
“You must never talk like that, Percy,” she muttered. “You ... we have
no right to children ... they are for those who are healthy...”
And her face had suddenly resumed the old expression of sisterly
resignation and self-sacrifice.
Percy grew a shade paler. It seemed as if the climate had suddenly grown
more chilly. It seemed as if the light reflected by the white walls had
been reflected by snow. The sanatorium had followed even to Seville.
“Forgive me, I forgot for a moment that I was an invalid,” he said.
From that day Hedvig suffered constant anxiety lest she should have a
child.
Woman’s egoism is more negative than that of a man—it is a real minus
quantity. For she reveals her sacrifice and her devotion in the very
lines of her body. Her whole body is a manifestation of generosity, a
splendid promise. From the day that her breasts fill out, invisible
childish lips grope round them. Within the sweet swelling lines of her
body and lips slumber the forces of regeneration. Her egoism is a
barrenness, a cowardly self-betrayal, for she betrays her own body and
she betrays the future...
Of course Hedvig was convinced she had the noblest motives. Of course it
was the curse of heredity that frightened her. She did not admit even to
herself that she would have been still more frightened had he been a
healthy man, that it was her own body she was beginning to fear again
and this time not with a vague and indefinite fear as before. No, now
she knew what was at stake. At any moment there might begin to grow
within her a strange being that would feed on her blood, would tear her
body, would perhaps bring death to her. She grew cold with fear at the
least disquieting sign. She had moments of hatred of her husband. And
she began to behave with a meanness and nervous caution that deprived
their life of all its charm.
Percy yielded. Probably it was criminal of him to hope for children.
He did not see through his wife, or at least only half saw through her.
There were perhaps dark moments when he suspected the cowardly poverty
of her character, but people of his type do not pursue disagreeable
thoughts to the end. All the same Percy relapsed into a restless state.
He felt as if he had been exiled from the kingdom of peace and health of
which he had only had a glimpse. He left Seville and began to lead a
roving life in Spain and the south of France. Galleries, ruins,
mountains, waterfalls. It was the same old hunt for beauty! Several
times he tried to stay in one place and take up his paint brush again.
But these were only good intentions, interrupted by crises of
discouragement. Towards Spring they reached Paris, for which he had all
the time been longing. Percy settled in Montparnasse amongst the
Scandinavian painters and talked art with feverish and excited interest.
Here he suddenly fell victim to the modern extremists, to futurism,
cubism, naïvism and ultra-expressionism, on which he had formerly only
bestowed an ironic curiosity. It seemed as if his very refinement and
submissiveness had rendered him defenceless against the latest
brutalities. He began to buy the crudest objects. The strangest things
were sent to their studio on the Boulevard Raspail. There was a
“Portrait of a Lady,” consisting of four straight, black-green lines on
a pink ground. There was a picture called “Motion” which consisted of
four triangular fields containing parts of a woman’s leg and a
locomotive.
Percy looked stealthily at Hedvig when with eager explanations and cold
enthusiasm he showed her these acquisitions. “I am not happy,” his look
said. “This kind of art is not for happy people. It is for those who
have something to avenge.”
They were, as a matter of fact, so many reproaches flung in the face of
life because he was weak, enervated, sorely tried and without a future.
Hedvig had suffered all the time from his new associates, among whom she
felt helpless and embarrassed. She was jealous of all the strange,
poisonous indecency that they called modern art. She stared silently at
the new monstrosities. Very well—he prefers all this to me, she thought.
It did not merely hurt her. She had also a strange, suppressed feeling,
never admitted, but nevertheless real, of becoming free, of slipping out
of his hands; a throbbing, secret, insolent feeling that anything was
possible. But with all this there immediately blended an anxious care,
an old frightened care as old as the Selambshof days, which stirred
within her every time he gave her expensive flowers, bought first-class
tickets or threw a big silver coin to a beggar.
“What have you given for those pictures?” she asked defiantly.
He mentioned a large sum, several thousand francs. And she went into her
own room with a pale face.
From this time Hedvig began to insist on their going home.
But Percy continued to buy modern art. Everything was not so provocative
as those first pictures. There were also pearls of bold but still
exquisitely tasteful expressionism. After running about all the day at
exhibitions and art dealers he sat down to drink his apéritif. He looked
out over the murmuring streams of humanity on the big boulevards, which
always make you feel that you are a poor little drop in the ocean and
may be washed away at any moment. But all the same there came into his
eyes a little look of anger. And he did not turn to Hedvig, who sat
there dressed in black looking stiff and disapproving, but to the young
painters round the table. It was strange how the air of Paris made him
free and independent:
“It’s a pity it’s so damned banal to make a donation,” he exclaimed.
“But a poor wretch like me has no other way out. I have no children. I
won’t live very much longer. I am an end and not a beginning like you
boys. My money has no personal future. But if I add a wing to my little
art gallery and fill it with first-class explosive matter and then
present the whole splendour to the nation or rather to the city, yes, to
Stockholm, then I shall at any rate have sown the seeds of a little
healthy restlessness in their minds. And a little help to you fellows.
And I shall have erected a little monument to myself in the usual
dishonest but generally approved way. The Hill Collection! What do you
think of that idea?”
They grew excited round the table:
“We must thank you, of course! But why don’t you do something yourself?
You can, Percy! You are no bourgeois! Why don’t you stick it out?”
Hedvig had been sitting all the time silent and forbidding. At Percy’s
unexpected mention of an endowment she suddenly felt a cold shiver of
anger. She rose quickly:
“You all seem to forget that Percy is ill,” she said. “He must not be
rushed. He is much too excited here in Paris. Shan’t we go back home
now, Percy?”
The young painters felt a little nervous of Mrs. Hill, of her
aristocratic air, her dark nun-like beauty. Silence fell around the
table. Percy rose with his little, absent-minded, apologetic smile:
“Yes, there you see, gentlemen,” he said.
And then they left.
At last Hedvig succeeded in making her husband leave Paris, where it was
already beginning to be hot and dusty. There is always an element of
danger in the journey home for consumptives who have been living in the
south. In Stockholm there had been an unfortunate relapse in the late
spring, with storm and icy rain. Percy had to go to bed at once and
Hedvig was again his nurse. He did not want the doctor. He had a real
horror of doctors and Hedvig did not insist on calling one in. She took
great care that he should not be exposed to tiring visits of old artist
friends and she nursed him with quite, inexhaustible energy. There was
no more talk of the great donation and Hedvig began to feel a certain
deep calm.
But one fine day Percy got up in spite of all her protest and in spite
of his not having quite a normal temperature. And the following morning
an architect arrived. The two men walked round the house, drew, measured
and made a lot of calculations.
“I want the drawings as quickly as possible,” Percy said at lunch. “I am
in a great hurry.”
His eyes glowed and he had little red patches in his cheeks.
The architect promised to do his best.
Immediately afterwards the pictures began to arrive from Paris. Not only
those that Hedvig had already seen, but a whole lot of new ones. Percy
evidently had somebody down there buying for his account.
Hedvig said nothing. She kept to herself, locked herself in, brooded and
scarcely answered when spoken to.
Still more new pictures arrived, and Percy was busy with them the whole
day, studying them, and moving them from one crowded room to another.
Then the plans were ready and the workmen arrived, a whole swarm of
them. They dug and blasted, laid foundations and built the walls. Percy
sat in an easy chair out in the sunshine and looked on. He was so eager
that he scarcely allowed himself time to eat. “This is my protest
against oblivion,” he thought. “I am building a house for my ashes. I am
building my own little pyramid....”
He really imagined his ashes standing in a beautiful Japanese urn in a
corner of the Hill gallery.
Towards autumn the roof was already on the new wing. Percy began to hang
the pictures at once. He could not even wait till the walls had dried.
He himself was not strong enough to move anything, but he sat in his
chair and gave orders to Ohlesson, the coachman, who had now become a
chauffeur. You could see even from Ohlesson’s back how he disapproved of
these awful novelties. Percy did not worry. Whenever he looked in at the
rooms containing examples of the older art, everything there seemed to
him strangely quiet and as it were covered over with a fine dust. His
taste was already brutalised by these strident colours and paradoxical
forms. He really needed strong food now, poor Percy. Fatigue sometimes
descended like a grey mist over his feverish zeal. He used these new
excesses as weapons against the deepening shadows.
Hedvig walked about devoured by a silent consuming bitterness. Her
feelings were a strange compound of jealousy of his overpowering
interest in art and brooding anxiety at his wicked extravagance. This
donation seemed to her like a challenge, like a theft from one who had
sacrificed herself for him. Percy had allowed himself to be seduced, she
thought. He has no power of resistance. But she dared not speak openly
to him. She had a vague feeling that there was something within her that
she must not betray. That is why she never went beyond her increasingly
bitter reproaches that he overtired himself, and neglected himself. She
wore an expression as if the crêpe were already floating round her. Yes,
Percy thought sometimes that she assumed her widowhood in advance. There
was something sharp and nervous in his answer:
“Why do you insist on wearing black?” he said. “I should understand you
much better in sealing wax red or sulphur green.”
Her old method of holding him was no longer effective. Hedvig again
began to feel his lack of respect for illness as a personal insult. By
and by they almost quarrelled about Ohlesson, the chauffeur. Hedvig
began to drive into town every day in the car. Then Percy would have no
one to help him, she thought. Then he would be forced to rest. This made
her a little easier. One day she did something she had been tempted to
do for a long time. She ordered Ohlesson to drive to Selambshof.
The avenue was full of yellow leaves. Several of the old trees had blown
down and there were ugly gaps as in a broken set of teeth.
Peter sat in the office puffing at an unlit cigar and looking at his
papers. He had aged. He was bent, his face was flabby and yellow. Hedvig
stood before him as Laura had done once upon a time. She could not help
having been spoilt by so many beautiful and expensive things. For a
moment she shivered at the ugliness of her brother. But in her inmost
heart she tolerated him, had even a feeling of security in the presence
of something intimate and familiar.
“Good-morning, Peter!”
“Good-morning, Hedvig. So the elegant Mrs. Hill visits this remote spot.
Why this honour?”
Hedvig did not answer but looked out through the window with an
expression of resignation.
Peter wore a look of injured innocence which suited him perfectly:
“Is it perhaps for the last dividends? Because Levy has long ago cashed
them.”
Hedvig had, on Laura’s recommendation, appointed the lawyer Levy to look
after her personal estate, including her shares in Selambshof. And Peter
did not at all like the insolent supervision of the Jew.
Hedvig shook her head.
“I am anxious about Percy,” she mumbled. It sounded as if this
confession had been forced out of her by a thumbscrew.
“Really, how—how is your lord and master, anyhow?”
On Peter’s face there appeared a well-meaning grin of sympathy. He
summoned up all that was left of his former sentimentality, but it did
not reach beyond his expression. His eyes penetrated swiftly into her
very soul with a cold, familiar, insolently searching glance. “Aha, my
dear,” they seemed to say, “this business did not turn out so well as
you thought.” Hedvig, of course, stood in silent, dignified protest
against his every low thought. But all the same she enjoyed his
glance—something that groped blindly and stealthily in her vitals.
“Percy is very bad,” she exclaimed in a kind of exaltation, “much worse
than he thinks himself. And he has quite lost his balance. He does
nothing but buy picture after picture, mad things that unscrupulous
people palm off on him. He is positively throwing away all he has! It is
such a dreadful shame!”
Peter was playing with his pencil. He had never heard Hedvig say so much
at once before.
“You mean that Percy ought to be under restraint,” he interrupted
calmly. “I am afraid that would be rather difficult.”
“I shall have remorse all my life if I do nothing to help and protect
him.”
Peter wanted to damp what he thought was unbusiness-like vehemence.
“Pictures, you said ... but pictures can be good, almost as good as
shares. They give no dividend but they can rise a damned lot in value.”
“No, not the pictures that Percy buys. He is being robbed by real
swindlers. And then he wants to give it all away to the State. But they
will never accept such rubbish. People will only laugh at us.”
Peter was startled. A donation! This was damned serious. He rose
panting, walked up to Hedvig and poked his thumb into her arm:
“You ... you ought to occupy Percy’s time a little more,” he leered. “So
that he won’t have any left for this nonsense. Why the devil are you so
black and white and beautiful as sin?... And have expensive pretty
frocks and all that sort of thing.... The chief thing is that Percy does
not commit any folly while he is still ... well, I mean that one can
always protest against a will....”
There was a certain satisfaction in Peter’s grunts. He enjoyed saying
this kind of thing to an elegant lady in diamond rings and black silk.
There was a sort of luxurious revenge at last in being able to speak
straight out to Hedvig, the hypocritical Hedvig.
His sister did not push him away. She smelled his breath, and the smell
of stale tobacco and of cheese on his old clothes. All the time she had
the same feeling in the pit of her stomach as one has when one sinks
rapidly in a lift. Now she had reached the bottom. She did not push him
away. She stood there with closed eyes without a trace of colour in her
face. She felt his shamelessness groping with coarse, hairy hands about
her reserve, her shyness, and her stealthy and lying fear.
“How dare you!” she whispered in a low, hoarse voice, “how dare you say
anything so vile?”
But his words stuck all the same. They crawled about, teemed and
multiplied within her. They stimulated her to action and emboldened her
gloomy heart.
Hedvig staggered out of Peter’s hovel. She stood beneath the naked,
shivering maples on the soil of her bitter youth and of her long
humiliation. A dull consuming autumn restlessness ran through her blood.
The darkness of the main building attracted her suddenly as by some
secret hardening of her heart. The door stood ajar above the bank of
withering leaves on the steps. She entered. Everything was dim, dusty,
cold, stuffy. She wandered about the empty echoing corridors, turned the
creaking locks, stole through swarms of moths between the covered
mirrors and chairs and the windows which were specked with innumerable
dead flies. In her own room she sank with a groan on to the edge of the
old narrow bed of her girlhood. Memories of her poor, lonely, miserable
childhood rushed over her with renewed strength. She felt a wild self
pity, a kind of fury clawing her breast. But she liked to feel that
claw. That was why she was here. She drained the cup of pain to the last
drop with voluptuous bitterness. It gave her a right to revenge.
When, as if under the pressure of a dangerous burden, Hedvig slowly
staggered out again it was only to pursue the past still further. She
strolled through the neglected, overgrown garden where the benches and
the paths were covered with dead stalks and the trees were already
robbed of their fruit. Here in the old pear tree beside the well there
was a big hole in which she used to hide her secrets—as a dog hides a
bone. There had lain for a long time a broken seal out of the smoking
room and a little ring with a green heart that she had taken from Laura.
In her thoughts she still obstinately defended this theft: “Had not
Laura broken her fine comb? And not given her anything in place of it!”
How quiet and self-possessed she had been as she sat there and Laura
searched for the ring, cried and stamped....
Hedvig cast a shy and searching glance around her. Then she quickly
pulled off her glove and pushed her hand down into the hole. Her arm had
grown plumper and it was a little difficult to reach the bottom. With
the tips of her fingers she felt something hard and managed to pull it
up. It was a little bottle with a death’s head and cross bones on it.
There was still something thick and brown at the bottom. It was a
souvenir of her confirmation. She had taken the bottle from the family
medicine chest after that affair with Brundin. In the darkness she often
ran down to feel it. It was death she fingered ... death ...
Hedvig stared at the sluggish brown drops. “It was that struggle that
made a nurse of me,” she thought with sudden clear vision. “I had to
finger—death. I was a fool.” And seized by a wild mortification she
flung the bottle on the ground so that it was shattered into a thousand
pieces.
Now Hedvig stepped through a broken-down hanging gate into a road, from
the rustling, leafy carpet of which there was reflected a strange,
sulphur yellow light which seemed like the very shimmer of putrefaction.
Not a human soul was visible. It seemed as if Peter had devoured the
whole population. Next she stood on the cliff by The Rookery where she
used to spy on Laura’s and Herman’s kisses. Oh, she could still feel her
burning mortification and her envy of her sister. Overhead the autumn
breeze soughed heavily in the dark pine tops. Out on the lake sudden
black gusts perturbed the surface as if in irresolute fury. But the
waves beat against the shiny green stones on the shore with short, sharp
onslaughts, already troubled by the thought of the moment when
everything would be frozen up. Hedvig suddenly lifted her hands as if to
ward off a blow. The thought that Percy would soon die, that she would
soon be alone again, rushed over her with a vehemence as never before.
Alas! to know a thing is one thing; to feel it in your heart and bones
is another thing. She felt a shivering fear of the old loneliness of
Selambshof. The autumn day, the decay all round her, the icy cold shadow
of death, suddenly awakened all the hunger in her blood. The memories
from Seville rose up before her flame-clear on this chilly northern
autumn day. Once more they swept away her cautious fears and her anxious
reserve. She had a savage pleasure in standing there in the cold wind
and letting loose all the black hot gusts....
And deep, deep down in her soul there was during all this seething
turmoil the consciousness that Peter had given his approval, that she
had the sanction of the Selamb family spirit for whatever might happen.
Without that she might never, never have undertaken this stimulating and
fateful excursion into the past....
They had late dinner at the Hills’. Hedvig came down in her black
Spanish dress, with her hair parted in the middle and a high comb under
the mantilla. She was as stiff as an image of a saint. But she had a
burning pallor, and there was fire in her alluring black eyes.
The saint drank several glasses of wine.
Percy sat mute. He did not take his eyes off her and trembled as if
before some overpowering phenomenon of nature. We are to begin again, he
thought. It was not dead. From the first moment he saw her there was no
thought of resistance in his mind.
When they were sitting over coffee in the yellow twilight of the
intimate little anteroom she suddenly threw her arms round his neck and
kissed him. He no longer wondered how it had happened, or why it had
happened just then. He only revelled in his intoxication of joy, at once
awful and glorious. He had a strange feeling of starting on a journey
from which he would never return.
During a long, silent, dark autumn night she drank his fever like a
fiery wine. She was the intoxicated nun officiating at the dark mass of
love. Never had Percy found her lips so greedy, so glorious and
unashamed.
In the morning Hedvig played with Percy, as the cat plays with the
mouse. She stood there wonderfully naked in the pale sunlight from the
window. Never before had she been able to show herself to him thus.
There was in the very lines of her body something wild and virginal, a
shyness which made the sight of her nakedness a sort of breathless
sacrilege. Percy had the sensation of beholding a martyred girl who,
with her clothes torn from her body, awaits the fierce and hungry beasts
on the yellow sands of the arena.
“Today I need some air,” she said, “but I don’t mind walking if you want
the chauffeur!”
“May I not come with you?” whispered Percy from his pillows. He looked
so small in the big carved bed resembling a catafalque. “Could we not
take a long run into the country to look at the autumn.”
That day Percy no longer spoke of his pictures, nor during the following
days either. Hedvig did not see him even glance at the new gallery. He
seemed to have grown afraid of his plans for farewell, his pyramid, the
urn for his ashes and all the rest of it.
All Percy’s feelings had been transfused into a new, passionate love.
Day and night he wanted to be with Hedvig. Protected by her white limbs
he huddled together in the growing shadows and intoxicated himself in
the warmth of her presence. But it was a fatal intoxication. Love made
everything, even death, greater, more real, more terrible—. It seemed as
if strong hands had torn to pieces the bright artistically woven veil
that dilettantism had suspended between him and reality. He felt for
perhaps the first time in his life a deep fear. But then he only drank
the deeper from Hedvig’s unbroken life as if by doing so he might save
his own. And when he noticed that the intoxication consumed his strength
instead of increasing it then he drank deeper still in order to benumb
himself.
But now it was Hedvig’s turn to steal into Percy’s picture galleries.
Yes, the rôles were strangely reversed. She positively felt attracted to
her former chamber of horror. She would stay there for a long time
staring around her. It was not that any artistic instincts had awakened
in her. It was not that she had begun to understand any of these new
paradoxes. No, but she imbibed courage from their impudent recklessness.
She deafened her conscience with their excesses. “Everything is
permitted,” that was what Percy’s pictures whispered into the ear of a
Selamb.
Life and death soar strangely near each other in love. You give and take
with the same recklessness. Sacrifice and selfishness disport themselves
side by side. And just at the moment when the human egoism is nearest to
its dissolution it is sometimes most blindly cruel.
During these weeks Hedvig loved Percy and killed him. There came a
moment when she began to be afraid to look into his face. But all the
same she could not find the strength to spare him. During the day she
invented many a cunning trick to escape seeing the truth. There was
something round his mouth and eyes which now and then filled her with a
cold terror, almost with hatred. It was the disease in him she hated.
She would feel fits of cruel invincible hunger for the moment when death
would at last strike its blow and no longer creep stealthily around
them. And all the same she loved him, loved for the first time in her
life with a kind of dim, wild abandon. So strange is the human heart. In
the midst of these fits she longed for the night, the darkness, the
great, teeming, blind darkness when she could once more draw him to her,
kiss him, drink up his fever.
Sometimes Hedvig was seized by a kind of dark frenzy. Their love had
resembled a silent bitter struggle with death. Percy sank back with
perspiring temples. Convulsively, like, a drowning man, he would seize
her black hair and stare into her eyes, which he saw in spite of the
darkness and which seemed to him surrounded by pale little dancing
flames:
“My beautiful angel of death,” he whispered. “My beautiful angel of
death.” And in his voice was a strange mixture of love, hopelessness
and, to the very last, playful irony.
One such night there came a fresh hæmorrhage of the lungs. It was the
third, and Percy knew at once that it was the last. For several days he
lay there white and thin and faded away without any serious pain. The
winter had come early. The light from the snow on the pines lit up the
room just as in the sanatorium in Switzerland. The doctors had that
all-wise and important expression which always means that they are
completely powerless. Percy had recovered his little, wan, ironical,
submissive smile. He did not complain and did not seem to regret
anything. He smiled also to his wife without wondering at her
metamorphosis.
Hedvig had turned nurse again. Silent, indefatigable, with the
expression of painfully heroic resignation of her profession she moved
silently about his bed. Not a word did they speak of what had passed
between them. They were like people who have become sober and who
scarcely suspect what they have done during their intoxication.
Until one day Percy wanted to be carried out into the new gallery.
At first Hedvig objected vehemently. He was not to be moved. He could
not bear the least movement. Only after persistent prayers did she give
in to his whim, but with an injured, worried expression. And she did not
leave him alone. Erect and rigid she stood on guard by his pillow in the
hall.
Here the dying Percy lay amongst all his new art. A look of bitterness
and weariness fell across his face. He shivered a little. The walls
looked around him indescribably cold and unsubstantial. They seemed to
radiate cold and meaninglessness. The stiffness and perverse spasms of
the latest fashion in art gave him a terrible feeling of a blighted life
frozen in death.
“They can never have had a fire here,” he mumbled, and crept right down
under the bedclothes.
Hedvig was already prepared to have him carried back to the bedroom. But
then Percy caught a glimpse through his half-closed eyelids of a little
spring landscape, a hill with apple trees in bloom against white walls.
In the midst of all the frostiness he received a lovely impression of a
pure motive, of a simplicity that was full of meaning and of quiet
appealing beauty. And he remembered again his promises in Paris. They
again seemed to him important and binding. He took the picture with him
and had it placed at the foot of the bed when he was carried back into
his “crypt,” as he called his bedroom alcove. Tomorrow, he thought.
Tomorrow I will send for a lawyer and will arrange the matter.
But the lawyer was not sent for. Percy had other things to dream about.
In the twilight Hedvig came and sat down on the edge of his bed. She had
been into town for a while, for the first time for weeks. She looked as
solemn as a priestess. And after a moment’s silence she told him that
she expected a child.
Percy did not say much. He whispered thanks. Then he kissed her hand and
put it on his chest. And then he lay there trying to imagine that new
life that he would never raise up in his arms. But it was difficult to
feel that it was true. He could scarcely imagine Hedvig as a mother. He
had remorse because he did not feel this more deeply. He kissed her hand
again.
Percy lived one week longer. He had several troublesome attacks of
suffocation after which he was seized by a death-like weakness. But as
soon as he had a clear moment Hedvig spoke to him of the child. It grew,
it developed, it lived in her consciousness. It was a boy and he was
called Percy. He was a little delicate, but handsome, with dark hair
like his mother’s, blue eyes like his father’s. Hedvig was no longer so
quiet. She spoke quickly, nervously, in short breathless sentences. It
seemed as if she had tried to put her own fear to sleep. She made a
convulsive and touching effort to keep death away with the last
resources of her womanhood.
And still the whole thing was a lie.
One winter morning when the snow lay thick on the ground Percy Hill died
in his wife’s arms. Something seemed to make him restless during his
last moments. It was not the child. No, he muttered something over and
over again about the lawyer ... the donation.... It sounded almost as if
he had wanted to force a promise from Hedvig.
Truly pitiful was this hopeless appeal to her.
Percy Hill died a dilettante. He had succeeded in completing nothing in
all his life. Not even a new will had he been able to draw up. There was
only the one that he had written the day they were married and in which
he left Hedvig everything.
And there was no child born to him after his death. Hedvig had cheated
him. It was a lie of love. Yes, no doubt she believed that she lied to
console him, to sweeten his last moments and to make death easier. She
was perhaps quite unconscious of the terrible Selamb logic in the fact
that it was just on the very day that Percy began to be interested in
his donation again that her fiction about an heir escaped her.
Exhausted by vigils and anxiety Hedvig collapsed after Percy’s death.
For several days she lay unconscious. Not one of those who arranged for
the funeral knew any of Percy’s old artist friends. So the strange thing
happened that he was driven out to Lidingö cemetery together with Peter,
Stellan and an old gouty sea-captain from Gothenburg, whom he had never
seen in his life.
Hedvig mourned him sincerely. As soon as she could stand up she hurried
out to his grave. For months not a day passed without her paying it a
visit. A rigid figure in black, she stood there under the snowcovered
trees staring at his grave. Did she ask his pardon for her lie, for not
laying his ashes in an urn in the Hill gallery? Did she fall back upon
memories of their love, sensuous memories? Did she only try to fill an
aching void with the foolish illusion of physical proximity? I don’t
know, but it is a fact that the tears often came to her eyes. Hedvig
cried, the tearless Hedvig....
Then she returned home to conferences with Levy, who was making the
inventory. Percy had an old-established, solid fortune. He had only been
obliged to sell an insignificant part of it in order to realize his
dreams of a gallery. There was a cold, numb pleasure in hearing the
clever Jew descant on funds, interest, dividend warrants and
investments. It seemed as if the very soul of gold had spoken to her
with glib tongue and beautiful though ironically curled lips. After a
time she began to understand with a feeling of secret, refreshing joy
how rich she really was.
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