It is with great difficulty that I venture to give you advice at this
moment. Besides, we are so completely opposed in habit, thought, and
temperament. We have really nothing in common but our unfortunate middle
age and our sex; therefore, how can it help you to know what I should do
if I were in your place?
May I speak quite frankly without any fear of hurting your feelings? In
that case I will try to advise you; but I can only do so by making your
present situation quite clear to you. Only when you have faced matters
can you hope to decide upon some course of action which you will not
afterwards regret. Your letter is the queerest mixture of self-deception
and a desire to be quite frank. You try to throw dust in my eyes, while
at the same time you are betraying all that you are most anxious to
conceal. Judging from your letter, the maternal feeling is deeply
ingrained in your nature. You are prepared to fight for your children
and sacrifice yourself for them if necessary. You would put yourself
aside in order to secure for them a healthy and comfortable existence.
The real truth is that your conscience is pricking you with a remorse
that has been instigated by others. Maternal sentiment is not your
strong point; far from it. In your husband's lifetime you did not try to
make two and two amount to five; and you often showed very plainly that
your children were rather an encumbrance than otherwise. When at last
your affection for them grew, it was not because they were your own
flesh and blood, but because you were thrown into daily contact with
these little creatures whom you had to care for.
Now you have lost your head because the outlook is rather bad. Your
family, or rather your late husband's people, have attempted to coerce
you in a way that I consider entirely unjustifiable. And you have
allowed yourself to be bullied, and therefore, all unconsciously, have
given them some hold over your life and actions.
You must not forget that your husband's family, without being asked,
have been allowing you a yearly income which permitted you to live in
the same style as before Professor Wellmann's death. They placed no
restrictions upon you, and made no conditions. Now, the family--annoyed
by what reaches their ears--want to insist that you should conform to
their wishes; otherwise they will withdraw the money, or take from you
the custody of the children. This is a very arbitrary proceeding.
Reflect well what they are asking of you before you let yourself be
bound hand and foot.
Are you really capable, Magna, of being an absolutely irreproachable
widow?
Perhaps there ought to be a law by which penniless widows with children
to bring up should be incarcerated in some kind of nunnery, or burnt
alive at the obsequies of their husbands. But failing such a law, I do
not think a grown-up woman is obliged to promise that she will
henceforth take a vow of chastity. One must not give a promise only to
break it, and, my dear Magna, I do not think you are the woman to keep a
vow of that kind.
For this reason you ought never to have made yourself dependent upon
strangers by accepting their money for the education of your children.
At the same time I quite see how hard it would be to find yourself
empty-handed with a pack of children all in need of something. If you
had not courage to try to live on the small pension allowed by the
State, you would have done better to find some means of earning a
livelihood with the help of your own people.
You never thought of this; while I was too much taken up with my own
affairs just then to have any superfluous energy for other people's
welfare or misfortune.
But now we come to the heart of the question. For some years past you
have confided in me--more fully than I really cared about. While your
husband was alive I often found it rather painful to be always looking
at him through the keyhole, so to speak. But this confidence justifies
me in speaking quite frankly.
My dear Magna, listen to me. A woman of your temperament ought never to
bind herself by marriage to any man, and is certainly not fit to have
children. You were intended--do not take the words as an insult--to lead
the life of a _fille de joie_. The term sounds ugly--but I know no other
that is equally applicable. Your vehement temperament, your insatiable
desire for new excitements--in a word, your whole nature tends that way.
You cannot deny that your marriage was a grave mistake.
There was just the chance--a remote one--that you might have met the
kind of husband to suit you: an eminently masculine type, the kind who
would have kept the whip-hand over you, and regarded a wife as
half-mistress, half-slave. Even then I think your conjugal happiness
would have ceased the first day he lost the attraction of novelty.
Professor Wellmann, your quiet, correct husband, was as great a torment
to you as you were to him. Without intending it, you made his life a
misery. The dreadful scenes which were brought about by your violent and
sensual temperament so changed his disposition that he became brutal;
while to you they became a kind of second nature, a necessity, like food
or sleep.
Magna, you will think me brutal, too, because I now tell you in black
and white what formerly I lacked the courage to say. Believe me, it was
often on the tip of my tongue to exclaim: "Better have a lover than
torment this poor man whose temperament is so different to your own."
I will not say you did not care for your husband. You learnt to see his
good qualities; but there was no true union between you. You hated his
work. Not like a woman who is jealous of the time spent away from her;
but because you believed such arduous brain work made him less ardent as
a lover. Although you did not really care for him, you would have
sacrificed all his fame and reputation for an hour of unreasoning
passion.
At his death you lost the breadwinner and the position you had gained
in the world as the wife of a celebrity. Your grief was sincere; you
felt your loneliness and loss. Then for the first time you clung to your
children, and erroneously believed you were moved by maternal feeling.
You honestly intended henceforward to live for them alone.
All went well for three months, and then the struggle began. Do you
know, Magna, I admired the way you fought. You would not give way an
inch. You wore the deepest weeds. Sheltered behind your crape, you
surrounded yourself by your children, and fought for your life.
This inward conflict added to your attractions. It gave you an air of
nobility you had hitherto lacked.
Then the world began to whisper evil about you while you were still
quite irreproachable.
No, after all there _was_ something to reproach you with, although it
was not known to outsiders. While you were fighting your instincts and
trying to live as a spotless widow, your character was undergoing a
change: against your will, but not unconsciously, you were become a
perfect fury. In this way your children acquired that timidity which
they have never quite outgrown. Strangers began to notice this after a
while, and to criticise your behaviour.
Time went on. You wrote that you were obliged to do a "cure" in a
nursing home for nervous complaints. When I heard this, I could not
repress a smile, in spite of your misfortunes. Nerve specialists may be
very clever, but can they be expected, even at the highest fees, to
replace defunct husbands. You were kept in bed and dosed with bromides
and sulphonal. After a few weeks you were pronounced quite well, and
left the home a little stouter and rather languid after keeping your bed
so long.
When you got home you turned the house upside-down in a frantic fit of
"cleaning." You walked for miles; you took to cooking; and at night,
having wearied your body out with incessant work, you tried to lull your
brain by reading novels.
What was the use of it all? The day you confessed to me that you had
walked about the streets all night lest you should kill yourself and
your children, I realised that your powers of resistance were at an end.
A week later you had embarked upon your first _liaison_. A month later
the whole town was aware of it.
That was about a year after the Professor's death. Six or seven years
have passed since then, and you have gone on from adventure to
adventure, all characterised by the same lamentable lack of discretion.
The reason for this lies in your own tendency to self-deception. You
want to make yourself and others believe that you are always looking for
ideal love and constant ties. In reality your motives are quite
different. You hug the traditional conviction that it would be
disgraceful to own that your pretended love is only an affair of the
senses. And yet, if you had not been so anxious to dupe yourself and
others, you might have gone through life frankly and freely.
The night is far advanced, moreover it is Christmas Eve.
I will not accuse you without producing proofs. Enclosed you will find
a whole series of letters, dated irregularly, for you only used to write
to me when I was away from home in the summer. In these letters, which I
have carefully collected, and for which I have no ground for reproaching
you, you will see yourself reflected as in a row of mirrors. Do not be
ashamed; your self-deception is not your fault; society is to blame. I
am not sending the letters back to discourage or hurt you; only that you
may see how, with each adventure, you have started with the same
sentimental illusions and ended with the same pitiable disenchantment.
A penniless widow turned forty--we are about the same age--with five
children has not much prospect of marrying again, however attractive she
may be. I have told you so repeatedly; but your feminine vanity refuses
to believe it. In each fresh adventure you have seen a possible
marriage--not because you feel specially drawn towards matrimony, but
because you are unwilling to leave the course free to younger women.
You have shown yourself in public with your admirers.
Neglecting the most ordinary precautions, you have allowed them to come
to your house; in a word, you have unblushingly advertised connections
which ought to have been concealed.
And the men you selected?
I do not wish to criticise your choice; but I quite understand why your
friends objected and were ashamed on your account.
At first people made the best of the situation, tacitly hoping that the
affairs might lead to marriage and that your monetary cares would thus
find a satisfactory solution. But after so many useless attempts this
benevolent attitude was abandoned, and scandal grew.
Meanwhile you, Magna, blind to all opinion, continued to follow the same
round: flirtation, sentiment, intimacy, adoration, submission, jealousy,
suspicion, suffering, hatred, and contempt.
The more inferior the man of your choice, the more determined you were
to invest him with extraordinary qualities. But as soon as the next one
appeared on the scene, you began to judge his predecessor at his true
value.
If all this had resulted in your getting the wherewithal to bring up
your children in comfort, I should say straight out: "My dear Magna, pay
no attention to what other people say, go your own road."
But, unfortunately, it is just the reverse; your children suffer. They
are growing up. Wanda and Ingrid are almost young women. In a year or
two they will be at a marriageable age. How much longer do you suppose
you can keep them in ignorance? Perhaps they know things already. I have
sometimes surprised a look in Wanda's eyes which suggested that she saw
more than was desirable.
In my opinion it is better for children not to find out these things
until they are quite old enough to understand them completely. But the
evil is done, and cannot be undone. And yet, Magna, the peace of mind of
these innocent victims is entirely in your hands. You can secure it
without making the sacrifice that your husband's family demands of you.
You have no right to let your children grow up in this unwholesome
atmosphere; and the atmosphere with which their dear mother surrounds
them cannot be described as healthy.
If your character was as strong as your temperament, you would not
hesitate to take all the consequences on your own shoulders. But it is
not so. You would shrink from the hard work involved in emigrating and
making yourself a new home abroad; at the same time you would be lowered
in your own eyes if you gave your children into the care of others.
Then, since for the next few years you will never resign yourself to
single life, and are not likely to find a husband, you must so arrange
your love affairs that they escape the attention of the world. Why
should you mix them up with your home life and your children? What you
need are prudence and calculation; but you have neither.
You will never fix your life on a firm basis until you have relegated
men to the true place they occupy in your existence. If you could only
make yourself see clearly the fallacy of thinking that every man you
meet is going to love you for eternity. A woman like yourself can
attract lovers by the dozen; but yours is not the temperament to inspire
a serious relationship which might become a lasting friendship. If you
constantly see yourself left in the lurch and abandoned by your admirers
before you have tired of them yourself, it is because you always delude
yourself on this point.
I know another woman situated very much as you are. She too has a large
family, and a weakness for the opposite sex. Everybody knows that she
has her passing love affairs, but no one quarrels with her on that
score.
She is really entitled to some respect, for she lives in her own house
the life of an irreproachable matron. She shows the tenderest regard for
the needs of her children, and never a man crosses her threshold but the
doctor.
You see, dear Magna, that I have devoted half my Christmas night to you,
which I certainly should not have done if I did not feel a special
sympathy for you. If I wind up my letter with a proposal that may wound
your feelings at first sight, you must try to understand that it is
kindly meant.
Living here alone, a few months' experience has shown me that my income
exceeds my requirements, and I can offer to supply you with a sum which
you can pay me back in a year or two, without interest. This would
enable you to learn some kind of business which would secure you a
living and free you from family interference. Consider it well.
I live so entirely to myself on this island that I have plenty of time
to ponder over my own lot and that of other people. Write to me when you
feel the wish or need to do so. I will reply to the best of my ability.
If I am very taciturn about my own affairs, it springs from an
idiosyncrasy that I cannot overcome. To make sure of my meaning I have
read my letter through once more, and find that it does not express all
I wanted to say. Never mind, it is true in the main. Only try to
understand that I do not wish to sit in judgment upon you, only to
throw some light on the situation. With all kind thoughts.
Yours,
ELSIE LINDTNER.
* * * * *
It snows, and snows without ceasing. The trees are already wrapped in
snow, like precious objects packed in wadding. The paths will soon be
heaped up to their level. The snowflakes are as large as daisies. When I
go out they flutter round me like a swarm of butterflies. Those that
fall into the water disappear like shooting stars, leaving no trace
behind.
The glass roof of my bedroom is as heavy as a coffin-lid. I sleep with
my window open, and when there comes a blast of wind my eyes are filled
with snow. This morning, when I woke, my pillow-case was as wet as
though I had been crying all night.
Torp already sees us in imagination snowed up and receiving our food
supplies down the chimney. She is preparing for the occasion. Her hair
smells as though she had been singeing chickens, and she has
illuminated the basement with small lamps and red shades edged with
pearl fringes.
Jeanne is equally enchanted. When she goes outside without a hat her
hair looks like a burning torch against the snow. She does not speak,
but hums to herself, and walks more lightly and softly than ever, as
though she feared to waken some sleeper.
... I remember how Malthe and I were once talking about Greece, and he
gave me an account of a snowstorm in Delphi. I cannot recall a word of
his description; I was not listening, but just thinking how the snow
would melt when it fell upon his head.
He has fulfilled my request not to write. I have not had a line since
his only letter came. And yet....
* * * * *