Hedvig sat in front of the stove, crumpling up newspapers and thrusting
them in through the open door, to keep the fire from going out entirely.
“This will never do,” said her mother, wringing her hands. Egholm was
tramping up and down in the next room, stopping every now and then to
open the door and ask if the supper wasn’t nearly ready. His face was
pale--he was always most dangerous when he was hungry.
“Huh! Let them wait,” said Hedvig.
“Run outside, dear, and see if you can’t find some bits of something--a
piece of board or some twigs or anything that’ll burn. I fancy I saw
some stuff under that bush in the corner.”
Hedvig was always happiest when she found a chance of using her legs.
She explored the yard across and across, quartering like a hound in all
directions, and finding not a little in the way of fuel. When she had
filled her apron, there was a knocking at one of the windows. At first
she tried to ignore it, and was hurrying in with her findings, but the
knocking was repeated, and more loudly. She turned angrily and looked
in.
A brown-eyed young workman in the carpenter’s shop stood beckoning to
her, both hands full of beautiful lumps of newly cut wood.
This was a language Hedvig understood; she picked up her heels and ran
to the workshop door.
“You the photographer’s?” he asked, with a bashful grin and a slight
lisp in his voice, as he laid the blocks like an offering in her apron.
“Yes,” said Hedvig. “We haven’t had time to get in any wood as yet.
Mother and I only came to-day. We’re going to have chicken soup for
dinner. There’s visitors.”
“But what are the bones for?” said the man, picking about among the
contents of the apron.
Hedvig flushed, but, ready witted as ever, answered, laughing:
“Oh. Perhaps you don’t do that here. In Odense we always use bones for
the fire when we can get them. They burn almost better than wood.”
“What’s your name?”
“Hedvig Egholm. And what’s yours? You’re the carpenter’s son, I
suppose?”
“No, I’m only working here, that’s all. My room’s just at that
end--like to come and see it?”
“No, thanks. I must make haste in.”
“Well, then, come this evening, or to-morrow. Will you?” he asked
eagerly, routing about in all the corners for more wood.
But Hedvig only laughed, and shook her heavy yellow plaits. She came
back to her mother with a load that reached to her chin. There was no
need to use the bones, after all--they burnt well enough, it is true,
but stank abominably in the burning.
Emanuel was given a row of the neat wooden blocks, set up on the table
before him.
“Look--there’s the puff-puff,” said Hedvig.
The child laughed all over his face, but a moment later he was nibbling
at the engine.
In the next room Egholm was still talking about the manifold
vicissitudes of his life.
He had started as a grocer’s assistant in Helsingør, then in Aalborg;
after that he had been a photographer, in the time of the war, when
the Austrians were there. He had made a fortune, but it had vanished
in an attempt to double it, in Göteborg, Sweden, where there was no
photographer at that time at all. Then on to Copenhagen with but a
few small coins remaining, and, despite this adverse beginning, the
possession of the biggest photographic studio in the town a few months
later.
This was Egholm’s _chef-d’œuvre_; he had told the story of it a
hundred times. And by frequent repetition, it had gained a certain
style, as he omitted more and more of the commonplace. He told of his
bold advertisements--a new departure altogether--his growing staff of
assistants, the eagerness of the public to come first, and the tearful
envy of his competitors. And when, in the flight of his telling,
he reached its highest point, where he really was the greatest
photographer in the place--he stopped. He felt he must remain there
on those heights, above the clouds; he wished his hearers always to
remember him as there and so. The miserable descent he passed over, and
began as a matter of course with his appointment on the railways, as
station assistant, at a wretched rate of pay.
Vang did not seem to miss the intervening chapters; he sat wallowing in
the delicious smell of cooking that came through from the kitchen.
Egholm told of his railway period, how he had rushed about the country,
now at some desolate little station on the Jutland moors, now in big
places like Odense or Frederikshavn. He sighed, and passed over the
conflicts with authority, and his dismissal. No, he would not think of
those things now; not a thought. He turned abruptly to the annals of
the Brethren of St. John. True, there was much that was disappointing
about his relations with that community, but, after all, there had
been something grand in its way about the final meeting. Had he not
stood there alone, and told them the truth, in such a wise that even
the fellow from Copenhagen had polished his glasses and shaken in his
shoes, finding nothing to say in return? Had he not gained the victory?
They had thrown him out--but was not that in itself sufficient evidence
that his words were true, and had pierced them accordingly?
“Yes, and then I heard a shout from someone down by the door; it was
Meilby. You know, the photographer I used to teach English. He was
rather like you, by the way, Vang--the same gentle sort of eyes....”
Augh! Egholm realised suddenly that he had said that once before
to-day. He had got to the end of his repertoire. A sense of shame came
over him, he cleared his throat, and cried in a forced voice:
“Hi, Anna! Vang says he’ll have his money back if the performance
doesn’t begin very soon.”
Vang grunted; that was the sort of thing he understood. But Fru Egholm
shivered in fear.
“Yes, yes, in a minute--five minutes more! Hedvig, for Heaven’s sake,
look and see if it’s nearly done?”
“Yes; it’s peeling now,” reported Hedvig, and her mother left the
horseradish to go and taste the soup. _Herregud!_ it was as weak as
ditchwater. She closed her eyes, and tasted once again, looking very
much like a blinking hen herself. “Ditchwater, simply!”
“Hedvig!” She routed out a pocket-handkerchief, and untied a
twenty-five _øre_ from one corner. “Run out and get a quarter of
butter, there’s a dear.”
“Well, and what then?” she said sullenly to herself. “It’s got to be
used, and I’m not sorry I did it. Egholm always likes his things a
little on the rich side, and now after he’s been so angry....”
It was hard to please him anyway when he was in that mood. Who would
have thought he could have turned so furious just for a little remark
like that?... What was it now she had happened to say?
Her brain was puzzling to remember it as she bustled about the final
preparations. She talked to herself in an undertone, weeping silently
the while.
“Anna, what do you think you’re doing out there?” cried Egholm.
Hedvig answered with a brief, sharp word, which her mother tried to
cover with a “Sh!”
“Yes, dear--yes,” she called.
At the last moment she had hit upon a new and ingenious plan for saving
her housewifely credit. The soup could be served up in the plates
outside, and brought to table thus; the nasty dish thing could be
used for the fowl itself. Fortunately, Vang might not know it was a
developing tank at all.
Hedvig carried Vang’s plate in, walking stiffly as a wooden doll,
and biting her lips till they showed white. But Vang, with a single
friendly tug at her pigtails, made her open her mouth at once.
She laughed, showing her fresh white teeth. That was Hedvig’s way.
Vang gulped down the hot soup with a gurgling noise like a malstrøm.
Egholm looked across nervously and enviously, and when Hedvig came
round behind his chair, he reached out backwards greedily, but was
sadly disappointed. No second helping--only the big geranium that
Hedvig had brought in to set in the middle of the table. This was her
mother’s last brilliant effort; no one could see now that the plates
were not alike. She had even fastened paper round the pot, as if it
were a birthday tribute.
They ate in silence, but when the dish was empty, and each
was wrenching at his skinny, fleshless wing, Vang let off his
long-restrained witticism:
“Egholm, what do you say? Can a chicken swim?”
“Swim? A chicken? Why, I suppose so--no, that is, I don’t think so.”
“Well, shall we try if we can teach it?”
“I--I don’t quite follow.... And, anyhow there’s only the ghost of it
left now, ha ha!”
“Well, there’s time yet, for it’s fluttering about just now in this
little round pond just here!” Vang rose heavily, as if from repletion,
snorting with delight at the success of his little joke, and drew a
circle with one finger over the front of his well-expanded waistcoat.
“All we want’s a drop of something for it to practise in!”
Hedvig was dispatched to buy _akvavit_ with the few coins Vang found
in his pockets; he gave her the most precise instructions as to which
particular brand it was to be.
Egholm never drank with his meals as a rule, but that evening he took
three glasses of the spirit, though it burned his throat like fire.
Vang made no attempt to force him, but simply said “_Skaal!_” and
tossed off his glass.
Egholm, however, had other reasons.
He had fancied he could _eat_ himself into oblivion, and was trying
now--with just as little effect--to drink his trouble away. But it only
grew the worse.
It was Anna’s eyes that would keep rising up before him.
Anna’s grey-green eyes, with their frightened look, in a setting of
swollen, blue, and bloodshot flesh, that hung in pouches down on either
side of her nose.
It was not that he felt remorse for what he had done; that did not cost
him a thought. But the effects of it--those _eyes_--haunted him now,
following him everywhere he turned, relentlessly, cruelly. He writhed,
and sighed, overflowing with self-pity for his troubles.
Eating did not help him, drinking was equally futile; there was but one
thing to do, then--to start talking again, before it grew worse. It was
nothing to what it might be yet. And Egholm launched out into a sea of
talk, diving into it, swimming out into it, hoping to leave the thing
that followed him outdistanced on the shore.
“And the money I made in Aalborg when the Austrians were there--you’ve
no idea. My studio was simply besieged by all those black-bearded
soldiers with their strings and stripes--and they’d no lack of cash,
I can tell you. But then while they were sitting about waiting, there
would come some slip of a lieutenant and turn the whole lot of them
out to make way for him. And one dirty thief I remember that wouldn’t
pay--between you and me, the photos were not much good, and that’s
the truth. Showed him with three or four heads, you understand. But
the General simply told him to pay up sharp, if he didn’t want his
brains blown out. And that settled it. The General, of course, was a
particular friend of mine. I’ll tell you while I think of it. It was
this way. He wanted his photo taken, of course, like all the rest of
them, but he must have it done up at the castle itself, in the great
hall, and that was as dark as a cellar. I managed to get him out on
the steps at last, though he cursed and swore all the time, and hacked
about on the stone paving with his spurs. All the others got out of the
way--sloped off like shadows--and there was I all alone with him, in a
ghastly fright, and making a fearful mess of things with the camera.
The interpreter had vanished, too. Then, just as I was ready, at the
critical moment, you understand, I rapped out in German, ‘Now! Look
pleasant, please!’ All photographers used to do that, you know, in
those days. I said it without thinking.
“You should have seen him. First he swore like the very devil; you
could almost see the blue flames dancing round him. But then he burst
out laughing.
“He wanted me to go back to Austria with him. Tried all he knew to get
me to go.”
Egholm sighed, and gazed vacantly before him, trying if the vision that
haunted him were gone.
... Eyes, eyes. Eyes full of terror, set in patches of bruised flesh,
and a drop of congealed blood just at the side of the nose....
He sprang violently to his feet, and started talking about Göteborg.
The canals, where the women did their washing, the park, Trädgården,
and Masthugget, where he had been out one Sunday. He talked Swedish,
and gave a long account of a funeral--Anna had lost one child in
Göteborg--the first.
Meanwhile, Vang was quietly getting to the bottom of the bottle, and
when at last Egholm, weary of his desperate fluttering on empty words,
flung himself down, Vang felt that it was _his_ turn to speak.
“Ahem!--seeing no other gentleman has risen Henrik Vang now begs to
propose: ‘The Ladies.’ My friend, my old and faithful friend, wake up
and listen to my words. You have honoured me. You have invited me to
share your board. The supper was good--rather tough, that fowl, but,
after all, that’s neither here nor there. In a word, you have done me
a great honour, and I propose then to honour you in return. My friend,
my old and faithful friend, you are a _man_. You can assert yourself,
and get your own way. But Henrik Vang, he can’t. And I ask you now: How
shall we gain the mastery over woman? There! That, my friend, is the
problem--the problem of the future.”
“But is it true that she knocks you about?” asked Egholm, grasping
eagerly at anything to turn the current of his own thoughts.
“Sh! Wait. Let me. I’ll tell you the whole story, from the time when
she was parlourmaid at the house. I was only a boy, really--it was
just after Mother had died. No--I won’t begin there, though. Nothing
happened, really, till four or five years after, when I came home after
I’d been out in the world a bit. Therese had got to be housekeeper,
then. And Father, he said I was to leave her alone. Well, that of
course put me on to her at once. There were enough of them about I
could have got if I’d cared--what do you think? Ah, you don’t know
the sort of man Henrik Vang was to look at in those days! But she was
nearest to hand, of course. Ever so near.... Oh! And handsome, that she
was. In two layers, as you might say, one outside the other. Father,
he was after us whenever he got a chance. He offered me his gold watch
to leave her alone, but I wasn’t such a fool. I’d have that anyway
when he was gone, and I told him so. But then one day comes Therese and
shows me where he’d been pinching her--arms black and blue. Well, I
wasn’t going to stand that, you know, so we got a special licence, and
went off and got married in Fredericia. Father, he didn’t know about
it, of course, and when he sees us coming up the steps arm in arm, he
says: ‘Henrik, do you know I’ve kept that girl ever since your mother
died?’ ‘That’s as may be,’ says I. ‘Anyhow, she’s mine now.’ And then
I up and showed him our wedding ring--cost me ten _kroner_, it did.
Then says he: ‘Out you get--out of my house. A thousand _kroner_ a
year, that’s all you’ll get. The hotel here I’ll keep, as long as I’ve
strength to lift a glass!’”
The tears flowed down over Vang’s puffy purple cheeks. Egholm sniffed
once or twice in sympathy, and forgot his own troubles for a moment.
Vang licked a last drop from the neck of the bottle, and went on:
“Well, you see, Therese had never expected that--nor had I. But don’t
let’s talk about me. What _was_ I to expect? Drunken fool, that’s all.
Perhaps it was that made her turn religious. I don’t know. I never can
think things out. It tires me. Well, she said to me: ‘Look here, you
get me a place at the Postmaster’s or the Stationmaster’s, or one of
those you’re always drinking with.’ Well, they simply laughed at me.
But the religious lot, they didn’t mind. Only the worst of it was, from
the time she set her thoughts on heaven, it’s been simply hell for me!
Now, how d’you explain that?”
Egholm saw him off, going out to the gate with him, and at the same
moment Hedvig opened the kitchen door. Yes, the dish was empty. A good
thing they had helped themselves before it went in.
They lit the lamp, and began making things ready for the night. There
was a jumble of things in every corner. Empty bottles by the dozen,
and in one place she found a parcel, carefully wrapped in newspaper,
containing the skins and skeleton remains of smoked herrings. Father,
no doubt, thought that was the easiest way of clearing up after him.
“We’ll sleep in the little room, of course,” said Hedvig firmly to her
mother.
“Ye--es,” said her mother quietly. But as Hedvig began dragging the
bedding across, she put on her sternest face, and said:
“Never you mind where your mother’s to sleep or not to sleep. You know
your Bible, don’t you, enough to remember about man and wife being one?”
“Ho!”
“But I’ll be there under the window. Yes, that’s best.”
“I know what I’d have done if I’d been you,” said Hedvig firmly. “I
wouldn’t have washed that dish.”
“The one with the poison! Heavens, child--why, they might have been
ever so ill!”
“_They might have died!_” Hedvig’s eyes were almost white to look at as
she spoke.
At the same moment Egholm came in again, and now nothing was heard but
the rattle of the iron bedsteads and flapping of sheets and bedclothes
patted down. They shared for better or worse. Hedvig was given one iron
bedstead in the little room to herself, but had to be content with a
woollen blanket and her father’s old railway cloak for covering. Fru
Egholm had to spread her mattress on the floor till they could get the
settee screwed together; then she had a real down coverlet over.
Egholm began undressing without a word. His wife turned down the
lamp--there were no curtains to the windows. They heard him drop his
waistcoat over by the coal-scuttle, and his trousers by the door; then
he threw himself on his bed, breathing heavily.
Fru Egholm stole into the little room, where Emanuel’s cradle was set
against Hedvig’s bed, lest the master of the house should be disturbed.
Sleeping soundly, the little angel.
“Hedvig dear, you’ve kept your stockings on, haven’t you?”
“Oh, I’m warm enough--just feel here.” She found her mother’s hand and
drew it down over some thick woollen stuff, that felt strange to the
fingers.
“What--what is it?”
“Look and see!”
Fru Egholm closed the door and struck a match. There lay Hedvig,
covered over with a curious black rug with a silver fringe round the
edges and a cross in the centre.
For a moment she was dazed, then, calling up some distant memory, she
exclaimed in horror:
“Heavens, child! Why, it’s the pall they use for the hearse! Wherever
did you get it?”
“It was hanging on the stairs outside,” said Hedvig, with a grin.
“But you mustn’t. However could you, Hedvig! That you could ever
dare.... Come! We must put it back at once.”
Hedvig made as if to obey, and drew the thing down, but the moment
her legs were free, she turned a back-somersault and commenced a
wild topsy-turvy dance in the air, waving her feet about like a
catherine-wheel. Then suddenly she disappeared again under the pall,
showing not so much as the tip of her nose.
The match went out. Fru Egholm shook her head anxiously, with a faint
smile, and stole out of the room. Hedvig--what a child!
All was quiet in the parlour now. Egholm was apparently asleep. Pray
God he might wake in a better mood!
Anyhow, they had got that fellow Vang out of the house at last--and if
she could manage it, he should not be in a hurry to come again. He’d a
bad influence. The way he spoke about his wife--Egholm would never have
talked like that himself! A nice sort of fellow, indeed--and his father
owned a hotel!
Her breast heaved as she undressed and laid her things neatly on
a chair, as her father had taught her when a child. She listened
breathlessly--was Egholm asleep?
Should she?... He didn’t deserve it--but why think of that now?
Softly she dragged the mattress from under the window, a little way
over the floor, stopped, listened, and dragged it a little farther.
Then she started at a sound, and felt ashamed, as if she had been a
thief trying to steal her own bed.
Little by little she edged her way along, and finally crept under the
clothes with a sigh of resignation.
When he awoke, he should find her humble couch on the floor beside his
bed.