ELSIE LINDTNER
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE DANGEROUS AGE
_Letters and Fragments from a Woman’s Diary_
ELSIE LINDTNER
A Sequel to “The Dangerous Age”
BY
KARIN MICHAËLIS
STANGELAND
_AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION_
BY
BEATRICE MARSHALL
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXII
Copyright, 1912, by
JOHN LANE COMPANY
PREFACE
Readers and admirers of “The Dangerous Age”—and their name is legion—will
find themselves perfectly at home in the following story. To them, Elsie
Lindtner’s rambling aphorisms, her Bashkirtseffian revelations of soul,
the remarkably frank letters which she delights to write to her friends,
among whom she numbers her divorced husband; above all, her rather
preposterous obsession with regard to the dangers of middle age, will be
familiar as a twice-told tale.
Doubtless many will be charmed to meet Elsie Lindtner again, when she has
passed through the dreaded furnace of her “forties,” and is still keeping
the spark of inextinguishable youthfulness alive within her, by gambling
at Monte Carlo, travelling in Greece with Jeanne of the flaming hair,
fencing in London, riding in New York, and finally finding happiness and
salvation in the adoption of a small offscouring of the streets.
But for those who may have missed reading the little masterpiece of
modern femininity which only a short time ago set a whole continent by
the ears, some sort of key is, possibly, necessary to the enjoyment of
“Elsie Lindtner.”
In “The Dangerous Age” Elsie Lindtner writes an autobiographical letter
to Joergen Malthe, the rising young architect, who has been her ardent
admirer. She tells him now that her mother died when she was born, and
her father was bankrupt, and lived disgraced in retirement, while she was
left to the care of a servant girl.
From her she learnt that lack of money was the cause of their sordid
life, and from that moment she worshipped money.
“I sometimes buried a coin that had been given me,” she writes, “as a dog
buries a bone.”
When she went to school little Elsbeth Bugge was soon informed that she
was “the prettiest girl in the school”; that a pretty face was worth a
fortune.
“From that moment I entered upon the accursed cult of my person which
absorbed the rest of my childhood and all my first youth.... I avoided
the sun lest I should get freckles; I collected rain water for washing;
I slept with gloves, and though I adored sweets, I refrained from eating
them on account of my teeth. I spent hours brushing my hair.”
One day when she came home she found the only big mirror in the house had
been transferred from her father’s room and hung in her own.
“I made myself quite ill with excitement, and the maid had to put me to
bed. But later on, when the house was quiet, I got up and lit my lamp. I
spent hours gazing at myself in the glass. There I sat till the sun rose.”
Then follows an account of how this child, scarcely in her teens,
positively set her cap at a rich, elderly widower, because he had a fine
house.
“My brain reeled as I said to myself, ‘Some day I will live in that house
as wife of the Chief Magistrate.’”
The precociousness of Marie Bashkirtseff who fell in love with a
duke when she ought to have been playing with her dolls, pales into
insignificance beside this confession.
Elsie left school and went back to Denmark engaged to Herr von Brincken,
the Chief Magistrate, but he had heart disease and she did not marry him.
Instead she married Richard Lindtner, a wealthy Dane, and made her home
with him in the Old Market Place at Copenhagen, where for twenty-two
years she was, to outward appearances, a happy and contented wife.
“I allowed my senses to be inflamed while my mind remained cold and my
heart contracted with disgust. I consciously profaned the sacred words
of love by applying them to a man whom I chose for his money. Meanwhile,
I developed into the frivolous society woman everybody took me to be.
Every woman wears the mask which best suits her purpose. My mask was my
smile....”
It is only in this book, the second instalment of Elsie Lindtner’s
fragmentary diary and correspondence, that she gives us a reason for
leaving her husband after twenty-two years of married life, the wish that
he should have children. In “The Dangerous Age” she hints at other and
various reasons. To her friend and cousin, Lili Rothe, the perfect wife
and mother of “lanky daughters,” who could love another man passionately
without ceasing to love her husband, she writes, when announcing her
divorce, “There is no special reason ... none at least that is explicable
to the world. As far as I know Richard has no entanglements, and I have
no lover. There is no shadow of a scandal connected with our separation
beyond that which must inevitably arise when two middle-aged partners
throw down their cards in the middle of a rubber.... My real reason is so
simple and clear that few will be content to accept it.... You know that
Richard and I have got on as well as two people of opposite sex can do.
There has never been an angry word between us. But one day the impulse—or
whatever you like to call it—took possession of me that I must live
alone—quite alone, and all to myself. Call it an absurd idea ... call it
hysteria—which, perhaps, it is—I must get right away from everybody and
everything. Joergen Malthe has planned and built a little villa for me in
the belief that it was for some one else. The house is on an island, the
name of which I will keep to myself for the present.”
In her self-communings, however, she never disguises the fact that escape
from boredom was the main motive of her returning to the White Villa.
“Richard is still travelling, and entertains me scrupulously with
accounts of the sights he sees and his lonely nights.... As in the
past, he bores me with his interminable descriptions, and his whole
middle-class outlook....”
Richard’s neatness and tidy ways bored her; his correctness in the
convenances; even his way of eating, and “to watch him eat was a daily
torture.”
“Sundays were no better in the Old Market Place. There I had Richard from
morning till night. To be bored alone is bad; to be bored in the society
of one other person is much worse. To think that Richard never noticed
it! His incessant talk reminded me of a mill-wheel, and I felt as though
all the flour were blowing into my eyes.”
In another place she says: “I am now sure that even if the difference
in our own age did not exist, I could never marry Malthe.... I could do
foolish, even mean things for the sake of the one man I loved with all my
heart.... But set up a home with Joergen Malthe—never!”
The terrible part of home-life is that every piece of furniture in the
house forms a link in the chain which binds two married people long after
love has died out—if indeed it ever existed. Two human beings—who differ
as much as two human beings always must do—are forced to adopt the same
tastes, the same outlook. The home is built upon this incessant conflict.
“How often Richard and I gave way to each other with a consideration
masking an annoyance that rankled more than a violent quarrel.... What
a profound contempt I felt for his tastes and, without saying so, how
he disapproved of mine. No, his home was not mine, although we lived in
it like an ideal couple. My person for his money—that was the bargain
crudely but truthfully expressed.”
* * * * *
Even in her White Villa, on its island with a forest of her very own,
Elsie Lindtner, to her intense disappointment, was bored. She lived there
with two servants, Torp, the cook (a delightful figure), who believed
in spooks, and whose teeth chattered when she told ghost stories; and
Jeanne, the mysterious young housemaid with “amber eyes” and hair that
glowed like red fungi against the snow, who wore silk stockings, and won
Elsie’s heart by admiring and dressing Elsie’s own wonderful hair. Jeanne
became the salient interest in Elsie’s hermit life on the island, and
was promoted to the intimacy of companion and confidante. It was Jeanne
who arranged the flowers artistically with her “long, pointed fingers,”
and picked up her skirts disdainfully when she passed the flirtatious
gardener, to whose fascinations Torp, the cook, became a hapless prey.
Torp “made herself thin in collecting fat chickens for him,” and he
played cards with her in the basement kitchen.
Jeanne rowed hard in the little white boat across the lake to catch the
last post with Elsie’s fatal invitation to Malthe. “I will never part
with Jeanne,” Elsie said as she watched her. Then she wandered at random
in the woods and fields, and scarcely seemed to feel the ground under her
feet. The flowers smelt so sweet, and she was so deeply moved.
“How can I sleep? I feel I must stay awake until my letter is in his
hands.... Now it is speeding to him through the quiet night. The letter
yearns towards him as I do myself.... I am young again, yes, young,
young! How blue the night is.”
But she could not, alas, young as she felt, get into the white
embroidered muslin which used to become her so well, and Malthe’s first
glance told her all.
“He cast down his eyes so that he might not hurt me again.” One reads of
tears of blood. “... During the few hours he spent in my house I think we
smiled ‘smiles of blood.’”
Malthe left the White Villa the same night, and said at parting, “I feel
like the worst of criminals.”
After this shattering blow Elsie in her despair craved for even the
boring society of the husband she had deserted. She was, to use her own
expression, “greedy of Richard’s caresses,” and invited him, too, to
visit her on her island. But Richard declined altogether. He had just
become engaged to a girl, “a mere chit of nineteen.”
“He has made a fool of me! I am done for. Nothing is left to me but to
efface myself as soon as possible.”
Elsie Lindtner’s method of effacing herself for the second time was to
quit her desert island, and take a Cook’s tour round the world with
Jeanne.
Thus it happens that we renew acquaintance with her breaking the bank
at Monte Carlo in the first pages of this book to which she has given
her own name, though it might just as appropriately have been entitled
“More Dangerous Age Reflections.” For here, again, the “transition” is
the absorbing topic of Elsie Lindtner’s thoughts and correspondence; one
might almost say it is “the bee in her bonnet.” Even when she has emerged
triumphantly, as she boasts afterwards, from its perils, and has found
a new source of interest and happiness in the street arab whom she has
adopted, she seems unable to keep the subject out of her conversation and
letters. She goes so far as to warn strangers of the “stealthy footsteps
of the approaching years,” and disputes with her dear friend, the
extraordinary widow, Magna Wellmann, which of them came through those
years, “when we are all more or less mad,” with the greatest _éclat_.
In “Elsie Lindtner” we miss the _mise en scène_ of the White Villa on
the island, with its forest and lake, for when Elsie re-visits it with
Kelly, it hardly seems the same place, with no Torp and no gardener....
We miss, too, the first, fine, careless rapture of feminine revolt which
characterises “The Dangerous Age,” and the Jeanne of these pages is not
so vivid as the Jeanne of the former book. In compensation we have more
of Magna, and we have Lili Rothe’s love-letters—which were addressed but
never sent to the man she loved. Also, as in the previous volume, we
have Elsie Lindtner’s letters, with their strange, pathetic eloquence,
marvellously revealing a woman’s complicated soul. Their literary merit
and their value as a picture of life cannot fail to impress all readers.
BEATRICE MARSHALL.
ELSIE LINDTNER
_Elsie Lindtner_
MONTE CARLO.
DEAR RICHARD,
Thank you for the money, and forgive my audacious telegram. I am
directing this letter to your office, as it has nothing to do with
domestic affairs.
You really must help me. We, Jeanne and I, are stranded here like a pair
of adventuresses, and don’t know what to do. I have wired to my lawyer,
who has simply replied with an unconditional “No.” The creature seems to
think he has the right to manage my fortune as well as myself. Naturally,
I find it far from pleasant to be obliged to apply to you, but you are
the only person I can think of to whom I can turn without risking a
refusal.
I have been gambling, winning and losing, finally losing. I am
overdrawn, and the last draft which Riise had the grace to send me is
gone.
Your money kept me going for two hours, but now that is gone, too. I
have pawned the few valuables I possessed, but I am determined to win
everything back. So please don’t give me good advice; instead, go and
talk to Riise. Explain to him that it is urgent, and I _must_ have the
money. I am quite indifferent as to what becomes of the capital. I don’t
mind paying dearly for this spree—or whatever you like to call it—and
being poor afterwards in consequence. If the matter goes awry, you’ll
hear nothing more of Elsie Lindtner. I shall neither take poison nor
shoot myself. There is a more comfortable way out of it. A Brazilian,
whom I don’t like, has lent me a big sum of money. If I borrow any more
of him, it’ll have to come to a bargain. Make Riise sell the stock, even
at a heavy loss, I must have money. Meanwhile send me all you can spare
at the moment by cheque. I hope you continue to be as happy as ever.
With many thanks in advance,
Yours,
ELSIE.
MONTE CARLO.
DEAR RICHARD,
A friend in need is a friend indeed. Accept my thanks for your prompt and
ready help. All the same, I could not wait till it came, and borrowed
again from the Brazilian. His obnoxious money has brought me luck. If it
had been the other way about—well, never mind. It was a mad, desperate
plunge on my part. Now that it is over I cannot understand how I could
nerve myself for it. But I have won. The night before last I raked in two
hundred and fifty thousand francs besides all that I had lost. After that
I laid down to sleep. Your money has just arrived. I shall send it back
at once with what you sent me before, and the amount I have wrung out of
Riise. Jeanne has started packing.
To-morrow we leave here. We are going for Jeanne’s sake. She has taken my
gambling too much to heart.
Now, if you possibly can, forget this little episode. I wasn’t completely
myself. It’s all over, and too late to repent. We intend to spend the
rest of the winter in Tangiers and Cairo, and probably in Helvan. Jeanne
wants to go to India, and I have no objection so long as the journey is
not too difficult. At all events, we shall spend a few weeks in Paris,
just to fit ourselves out stylishly.
It is positively disgraceful of me that I have forgotten to congratulate
you on the birth of your son and heir. How I should like to see your
paternal countenance—you might send me a photograph of yourself with the
Crown Prince, and now, farewell, till circumstances throw us together
again.
ELSIE.
* * * * *
How long can things go on like this? We wander hither and thither, and
have no abiding place, as if we were fugitives condemned to be eternally
on the move. And we feign enjoyment of this perpetual unsettlement.
Jeanne has long ago seen through the pitiable farce, but she continues
to play her part loyally out of gratitude for the small kindness I have
shown her. We get on quite well together. Jeanne reads in my face when it
is best to speak, and when to be silent.
She is happiest on shore with terra firma beneath her feet, while I
like best the gliding days and nights on board ship; the sky above, the
sea beneath me, my brain vacant, and all my senses lulled to sleep. It
reminds me of the early days on my solitary island, when every trifling
incident was an affair of huge importance. The flight of a seagull, the
top of a mast above the horizon—a ship sailing by in the night. We spend
the day on our deck chairs, half dozing over a book, or conversing in
a company voice; but at night we throw ulsters over our nightgowns and
pace the deck, our natures expanding like flowers which only shed their
perfume after dark.
I have become very fond of Jeanne. Her poor, withered heart, too early
developed, too soon faded, awakes a certain gentle compassion within
me. All my opinions are accepted by her eagerly as golden rules for the
ordering of life. If only I could forget! existence might be bearable.
But I cannot forget. The glance which showed me the corpse of his love
follows me continually everywhere. The humiliation in that glance! I
don’t love him, and I don’t hate him. I am getting too lukewarm to hate.
But contempt rankles—Jeanne is careful to say nothing that can hurt me,
and yet sometimes she hurts me by being too tactfully silent! I don’t
want to be pitied, so we while away hours over our toilette.
How long can it go on?
ATHENS.
Here it is as nice as anywhere else. I struggle bravely to let myself be
enchanted with Greece’s past, but in reality I care as little about it as
I care for the potshares on the Keramaikos.
We are attending Professor Dörpfeld’s lectures on “The Acropolis,” and I
am more interested in the way the man says things than in concentrating
my mind on what he says. He has made himself so thoroughly familiar with
the plastic beauty of the world, that finally the invisible words that
fall from his lips seem to have become plastic, too. I take no interest
in why the pillars are thickest in the middle. It is the olive groves,
and the lights and shadows flitting over Athens, that charm and engross
me.
Jeanne takes it all in like a gaping-mouthed schoolgirl; she studies
the history of art in the hotel. I have given her leave to go on an
excavating expedition, but without me. I strongly object to riding
through snow up to my waist, sleeping in tents on the bare ground, and
living on mutton and canned goods. My laziness is growing.
LUXOR.
I am uneasy about Jeanne. She is strung up to a state of enthusiasm
which alienates me. Is it travelling that has developed her, or are her
hitherto dormant abilities awakening? We are simply travelling to kill
time, but she takes everything with the same tremendous seriousness as
that day in Berlin when she first heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She
regards me as if it were long ago an accepted fact that we each exist for
ourselves, alone in our separate worlds. She skips half the meals to roam
about among the temples. To-night we sat on top of the great pylon and
watched the sun go down. For me it was just like a beautiful decorative
effect at the theatre. I couldn’t help thinking of “Aïda.” She wouldn’t
come in when I did, and when I suggested that the night air was chilly
she answered quite snappishly, “I wish to see the moon illumine the
classic sea.” Of course, I left her alone, but I couldn’t sleep, and at
about midnight I heard her come back. My door was open, and I called her
in. She sat down on the end of my bed and was crying. What can be the
matter with her?
I am not going to torment her with questions. She shall be free to
come and go as she chooses—so long as she spares me the paeans of an
enthusiasm which I cannot share. It is all very well here but I prefer
myself in the Paris boulevards, Unter den Linden, and Bond Street. I feel
so poverty-stricken when I see others full of emotional _élan_.
Yes, that is it. That is why I am nervous about Jeanne’s enthusiasm for
art. She reminds me of old days when Malthe, in my yellow room looking
over the market-place, told me of his travels, and I deluded myself into
imagining I understood what he was talking about....
And so this phase has come to an end, too! I had quite thought that
Jeanne had sold herself to me for life. But it was not to be, after all.
I might have prevented it. Perhaps she was waiting for a word from me.
Still, it is best that we should part. Let her put her abilities to the
test, by all means. She will soon have had enough of work, and I am in
a position of being able to wait. Now I shall go to America, and if I
find that bores me, too, God only knows if I shan’t give in and accept
the Brazilian. His method of courtship, at least, is as systematic as a
persecution. And at bottom I am flattered, that still—_still_; but for
how much longer? I am deemed desirable. I ask myself in moments of doubt
whether I should be even that, without the aid of Poiret and Worth.
DEAR JEANNE,—Little travelling companion.
So our paths separate—temporarily, or for ever—neither of us can say
which. But I feel that it is best to part, and I am not at all sad
or hurt. Two years is a good long time for two people to have lived
together, and we have both derived some profit from those years. For me
the profit lies also in their coming to an end, for you that you have
found life worth living. As I said before, I strongly advise you to go
through the whole training, which will prove whether you have creative
talent, or your art is merely suited to commercial purposes. I shouldn’t
be surprised, indeed, if you became a designer of buildings—architect
is, I suppose, too ambitious a word to apply to a woman—and as Greek
and Egyptian temples are likely to be your speciality, you are hardly
destined to be popular.
Now we have discussed all the practical points. I think you know that I
wish you absolutely to enjoy your time in Paris. Enjoy it to the full,
but don’t commit any irrevocable follies!
You will get these lines from London, where I am amusing myself by a
short obesity cure. Imagine us fencing, like small children in black
satin knickerbockers and white sweaters! Several ladies from Court
take part in the “class.” Afterwards we have a brisk but delightful
hip-massage, and that alone makes it worth the trouble. Directly I am
satisfied with the slimness of my exterior, I start for New York. You
were never very happy over there, but for me that city has a peculiar
fascination. I don’t know myself what it consists in.
I beg you, from my heart, Jeanne, that you will always consider me as
a friend to whom you can comfortably tell everything, and come to for
sympathy and advice, whether in sorrow or happiness. You will, Jeanne,
won’t you? and don’t neglect your appearance. Work may absorb you for a
time, but that kind of thing is a transitory craze in a woman of your
disposition. Your heritage is your appearance, remember.
Good-bye for the present, and “good luck,” little travelling companion.
ELSIE LINDTNER.
DEAREST JEANNE,
Your last letter—to put it mildly—is very exaggerated. Frankly, it is
positively hysterical. Why should you harp to me on your “guilt,” or your
everlasting gratitude, on your privilege of making some sacrifice for me.
I don’t understand a word of the whole rigmarole, not a single word. I
don’t see the point of it in the least. Here I am perfectly content in
my own solitary way, which is not a bit misanthropic, and my own desire
is that you should feel content, too. Don’t you like Paris? You really
needn’t be afraid to say so—or is it the work that you are sick of? If
so, it is only what I have long expected.
According to my opinion, you belong to those human luxuries whose
presence in the world are quite superfluous, but who have a certain
genius through their mere existence alone of making life more tolerable
for others. Your place is either this, or in the midst of a _grande
passion_ (heaven forbid) in which you would screw yourself into a bread
pellet, to be held in some one else’s mouth. I can see you like _The
Princess on the Pea_, scorning everything, or I can see you on your knees
scouring steps for the man you love.
But I should like to see the man you were able to love.
Perhaps you are in love? That idea has suddenly occurred to me, though it
seems highly improbable. Now, however, that I have read through your last
nonsensical letter again, I believe that I have really hit on the right
solution.
You are in love, and out of feelings of mistaken gratitude, you do not
like to tell me. Jeanne, Jeanne! Will you for my sake be an old maid?
It is very sweet of you, but a little too much to expect. Besides, it
is quite unnecessary. I am not going to lie, and pretend that it will
not cost me something to give up my little fairy-tale princess with the
beautiful hands. Not only my hair, but my shamefully overcultivated taste
is missing you, with whom I was able to exchange ideas. An empty place on
my balcony that will never be filled again till the aforesaid maiden sits
in it with the sunlight shining on her and on the river, and on the town
which is the town of all others.
But, Jeanne, our paths have diverged, and they can never again unite.
You are not in the least fit to be in my company. You don’t want me, but
life, and joyousness. May you find it, no matter whether, like me, you
sell yourself, and are shut up in a golden cage, whether you live your
own fairy-tale, and realise the mirage of your dreams, or whether you
develop into an artist. Only with me you would have no peace.
I noticed how you beat your wings when we were together, how you pined
and tortured yourself to adopt the pose that pleased me. How for my sake
you acted a part.
Instead of writing sheets, I send you these lines, and entreat you to
answer by telegram so that you may tell me in the fewest possible words
what has happened to you.
I am, God knows, so curious that I should like to send you a wire a yard
long. But I must rule my spirit so as to take this modern city of New
York.
Your
ELSIE.
JEANNE, JEANNE, JEANNE!
Only that! Thank God, only that. How infinitely comforting a telegram
with its few concise words can be.
Don’t let this matter worry you further. Of course, I’ll take the child
to my heart; or still better, I will adopt the child.
After all, it’s much the same to me whether I have a camera, cacti, or a
little child for a hobby. You needn’t be afraid that I shall plant it in
a flower-pot like a cutting, or pin it into my lace collection. It shall,
I promise you, be properly cared for, not by me, but through me. I will
engage the best nurse money can procure. If you like, too, I will sail
with the nurse over the whole width of the Atlantic to receive the little
eel in person. The more I think it over, the more excellent the plan
seems to me. You will have no bother, will not be interrupted in your
career, and I shall add to the long list of my crazes one more item. To
prevent there being any sort of misunderstanding about it, I am perfectly
confident that providing for the little legacy will be a source of new
enjoyment to me.
I only make one condition, and that is, if the affair becomes too
complete I may be allowed to put “our child” out to nurse.
It is to be hoped that the father has not won a fraction of your heart.
I can well imagine that he is some young artist whom you have met at the
class. He gazed at your hair till he was sick, which is not at all to be
wondered at, and you forgot momentarily that you had long ago abjured all
folly.
Write me more details as to whether you approve; when “it” is expected,
and so on. I needn’t advise you, of course, to leave Paris before the
change in your exterior attracts notice. I am thinking a great deal of
you, Jeanne, little Jeanne.
Your
ELSIE.
DEAR MAGNA WELLMANN,
And I am the woman who thought you had forgotten me, or that you still
bore me a grudge for that letter which I wrote you four—no, it is already
five—years ago.
Now I sit here and ponder whether the greatest transformation has been
worked in you, or in me. You, at all events, are not the same, and I
believe that I am not. But at our age, one is long past growing and
developing.
You who of old were like a dry autumn leaf whirled before the wind,
have proved yourself all at once to have a strength and courage which
make me ashamed. Who has lulled your senses so to rest? The one “great”
love? No, I will not ask questions, though a whole host of them pulsate
within me. And you are not a bit afraid? You speak of it as if it were
a mere frolic. You wonderful human creature, Magna. Other women suffer
intolerably during the nine months of pregnancy, and grow irritable and
ugly. But you are blooming as if it were the most perfectly natural
condition to be in. What a contrast to your ordinary mood and your old
escapades. You are not in the least afraid to bring a child into the
world at your age; and in such circumstances every line of your letter
breathes freshness and health, and there is no disguising it.
Do you know, your letter awoke in me the first longing for Denmark since
I packed my boxes and went out into the wide world.
I have become an alien. Five years is not such a very long time, though
long enough to render a person countryless. Richard in his pleasant way,
keeps me _au courant_ with what he calls the “main movements” of our
circle, so I know that you have been banned and ostracised. I cannot
say that I think it is altogether undeserved. You know that I insist on
good form outwardly as well as inwardly, and, really, Magna, I cannot
picture myself behaving as you have done, any more than I can picture
myself going out in society in a nightdress with my hair hanging down in
a pigtail. But, of course, it is your affair.
For the most part I take no interest in what goes on at home. It reminds
me too much of looking at a drop of water through a microscope. If, by
any chance, I come across a Danish newspaper, I read nothing but the
obituaries, and even they do not rouse a shadow of emotion in my soul.
Yet there are fates which, out of curiosity or fellow-feeling, appeal to
me. And yours is one of them. When Richard wrote, “Frau Wellmann’s latest
makes her ‘impossible’ in this part of the world,” I could not help
smiling. You made yourself impossible years ago. It is true, Professor
Wellmann’s name and social status have sheltered and held a restraining
hand over you, that is to say, up till now.
But now it has come to an actual scandal. You parade your shame on the
housetops of Copenhagen, instead of going away and hushing it up.
By the bye, how many small _affairs_ were there not year after year
_hushed up_ in our set? The dear ladies even were not afraid to whisper
about them to each other. And you, you even, delight in having a child of
the peculiar kind that we call illegitimate. Magna, Magna! I am not going
to suppose that behind it all is a spark of malicious joy in challenging
the _crême de la crême_. That would be a poor joke. Neither can I believe
that your motive has anything to do with _love_ for the father of your
illegitimate child.
You write so beautifully about the feeling that life is growing within
you. In this respect, I am a stranger, and absolutely blind. I have
never felt the smallest sensation of longing to feel that life is growing
within me. Perhaps I am even incapable of understanding your expression.
Yet it touches me.
You were entering on a period of severe trial for yourself and for the
children, and the time of trial will not end with your confinement.
There will most certainly have to be an explanation, and preferably an
explanation that will bring as little injury as possible to the children.
Have you thought of this? Don’t put off the inevitable too long, or
others may be before you. The children cannot—it would be terrible if
they could—understand the whole, so the question is how to invent a fable
which will best lull their reflection.
Many will judge you because you have done what is not customary and
defied the usages of society; others will judge you out of envy, because
they have not had the courage to do it themselves. Every one who has
refrained through fear of disgrace and shame, will hurl a stone at you.
Likewise the childless women. If I were still in the Old Market Place,
I should flout you, too. Still, there are a whole lot of free-thinking
human creatures who will judge you not on account of the child, but for
the _children’s_ sake. You may shrug your shoulders at the others, but
you can’t get away from the shadow which you are casting on the children.
Well, now that I have discoursed to you in this extremely reasonable
manner, I may with a clear conscience extend my hands across the ocean
and say, “Good luck, Magna.”
When the atmosphere becomes too hot to hold you, then take refuge with
me. I live here, fourteen storeys high, on Riverside Drive. My name is on
the door in characters as small as those on a postage stamp. It is the
fashion here, and the letters are delivered to the porter. The house is
magnificently arranged, and is as light as a studio. I steadily believe
that I shall rest my bones in some peaceful burial ground here. And as
it’s the custom to adorn and paint the dead till they look twenty or
thirty years younger than when they were alive, you will comprehend how
that appeals to the vanity of one who has warded off the burden of age.
I should just like to know how any woman devoid of vanity could exist in
this city of light and sunshine. I belong to two or three clubs where
ladies of seventy and eighty congregate, with porcelain complexions,
powdered coiffures, and Gainsborough hats. Don’t imagine for a moment
that they are ludicrous. They possess a dignity and joy in existence
which makes me think that they must pass their nights in a bath of youth.
There is a glamour of festivity hanging over this place. Not in the
slums; but there of course, you needn’t go. New York’s poor have a
totally different aspect and manner of behaviour from the poor of
European cities, where they rub against travellers with their sores and
crutches. In all these years I have only seen two human beings who didn’t
belong to Fifth Avenue. An Italian and his wife lay and sunned themselves
on the curb and ate dirty vegetables out of a rusty tin. No one sent them
off, but the whole traffic of the street gave them a wide berth, as if
they had been a pair of plague-stricken patients.
I ride on horseback every day till I am dead tired, in a salmon-coloured
habit and a slouch hat over my eyebrows. My master—a pitiful wreck of
a once brilliant Scottish nobleman—at first objected to my riding _en
cavalier_. But as I remained obstinate, he left me to my fate till one
fine day he was seized with admiration for my mastery of the horse, and
now we are good friends. We ride alternately in Central Park, which is
indescribably lovely when all the beds are aglow with rhododendrons
in bloom, and in New Jersey, which is still unspoilt Nature. Sundays,
as a rule, we form quite a cavalcade, and then we amuse ourselves
like children. These people who are outwardly stiff and reserved, and
inwardly do not overburden their souls with super-culture, have a wholly
remarkable and infectious capacity for sucking honey out of the most
trifling banalities of existence. We chat about the sun, moon and stars,
about our horses, our ravenous appetites, and the recently discovered
Rembrandt, and never about our neighbours. We never backbite.
At the end of such a day, when I am resting after my bath, I seem to
myself like a being with life all before me.
In truth, I have found congenial calm. I play bridge through the long
winter mornings at the Astor Hotel Club, or go to lectures on psychology,
followed by luxurious luncheons during which Madame Homer and Signor
Caruso sing to us, not in the intervals, but while we eat!
The waiters go round pouring out coffee the whole time, while we sit
in a rosy twilight. Every one pays every one else little choice and
sincerely-meant compliments. Call it an empty life, if you like, and I
won’t deny that it is.
You ask what I have been doing since I took flight from my now desolate
and dilapidated villa. If I only knew myself I would tell you. It all
seems so long ago I travelled about with Jeanne, my young housemate and
friend, and we really did nothing but kill time.
Rumours of my Monte Carlo period have no doubt penetrated to Denmark. I
admit it was an ugly experience. Never in all my life had I imagined that
I could become the prey of this passion, but I caught the fever so badly
that I conducted myself as shamelessly as the most hardened professional
gamblers. I certainly believe that during those days I was scarcely
responsible. If the tide of fortune had not turned I should have gambled
away every farthing I possess. But things went so well that I am living
to-day on my winnings, without touching my dividends.
Jeanne is still in Paris, where she has been for the last two years. She
intends to qualify for some industrial art, for she has an indisputable
and highly original talent. Lately I have had a very significant letter
from her, but I may not divulge its contents. If things turn out, as at
present seems likely, my life may undergo a complete re-arrangement.
I must tell you about my latest craze. I have had quite a dozen little
crazes in this one year alone. It is a splendid distraction. Well,
my latest is collecting dwarf cacti and Japanese dwarf trees, which
you hardly ever see in Denmark. They are only a few inches high, and
incredibly old. You buy them in fat boxes, miniature imitations of
Japanese gardens with rivers, bridges, and porcelain cupolas and
tea-houses. They are entrancing. Fortunately, a gardener tends them;
otherwise they would die of neglect. The care of plants is no more in my
line than the care of children, or any other live things. If I had the
gift I should have a choice little aquarium with goldfishes and electric
light and illuminations.
Imagine Richard a paterfamilias and domestic tyrant! Yes, indeed, Magna,
everything is changed.
Now, I really have told you all about myself. I don’t believe there is a
single craving of my soul that I have not disclosed to you. It’s not my
fault that the result of these disclosures appears so miserably poor. How
old is Jarl now? Sixteen or more? It is a good thing that Agnete is soon
to be married. Write again soon, Magna. I promise to answer.
ELSIE LINDTNER.
DEAR JEANNE,
It may be the consequence of your condition, but really, I am getting
quite concerned about your letters. I thought everything was settled
for good when I promised to relieve you of responsibility by taking the
child. And now you begin posing new riddles.
What secret is it that you cannot betray? Why do you talk about hiding
yourself in the remotest desert? From whom should you hide? For what
reason? Why do you speak of desecration, and say you wish you could die
before the child is born? You hate to do it a wrong? What wrong?
Is this man married? If so, his wife needn’t know that you are going to
give birth to a child. You don’t want to marry him; or do you?
If I may advise you, Jeanne, I should suggest your leaving the future to
take care of itself, till you are established in peace and quietness in
some pretty neighbourhood. What do you say to Provence? At the moment you
are nothing but a bundle of nerves, and I have half a mind to come across
and do what I can to help you. But I am too lazy. To do anything to help
people when it involves trouble, is not my _métier_; for you, even, I
cannot take trouble, though I love you.
But if there is anything on your mind, please let me know what it is,
for, as I said before, I am unable to make sense out of the nonsense
you have written. Write as often and at as great length as you like,
and the day will come, I hope, when I shall at last grasp your meaning.
Is it a human being that is lacking, one with whom you can really talk?
I am experiencing every day a crowd of little stupid things, that keep
me going in a most agreeable fashion. But I am chiefly taken up with
cherishing and cultivating my own precious appearance. Altogether, I
was much more alive when we two sat together in our White Villa on the
island, and saw the leaves falling from the trees.
Your
ELSIE.
* * * * *
Jeanne ... Malthe ... Jeanne ... Malthe.
Jeanne and he ... he and Jeanne....
I must try to understand it. Those two....
And, it was the child of these two, their child, I wanted to adopt....
* * * * *
Two days have passed, but I am no nearer understanding. I go round and
round in an empty circle, and say to myself, “Jeanne and Malthe—Malthe
and Jeanne.” And I expect to be overcome by a heart-rending agony. But
so far as I can judge, neither my heart nor my mind are affected. My
nerves, too, are perfectly composed. I am, in fact, only petrified with
astonishment.
* * * * *
Why don’t I suffer? What has become of the love I once felt. Where is
it?—or—I understand those two so exactly. It’s myself that I don’t
understand. I can give them my blessing with the easiest and most
serene conscience in the world. I can even rejoice that these two, just
these two, have found each other so futile; then am I so inexplicably,
egregiously futile?
* * * * *
I have begun to take delight in travelling by the Subway. People there
don’t pose. They are in too great a hurry to put on masks. Extraordinary
how impressive breeding is when it is united with good clothes. The
train can be so full that there is often a double row extending from one
end of the car to the other, hanging on to the round leather rings with
coarse, toil-worn, or delicate kid-gloved hands. Some one always makes
room for me, but I also take my time to form the desired expression on my
face. To-day a poor woman sat next to me with two or three little wreaths
on her lap. She wore a dusty mourning veil thrown over her hair.
She cried the whole way; the veil was so shabby that I calculated the
child must have died a long time ago. Her grief was still fresh. Mine has
never existed. I had thought my life at least contained what is called a
great sorrow. But I have only draped an empty space with the trappings of
sorrow....
I must write to Jeanne.
* * * * *
DEAR LITTLE TRAVELLING COMPANION,
This letter might be written in twenty different ways, but only one is
the right way, and now I begin writing to you in the same style as I
write in my own poor, dull diary. You know it is only lazy people who can
bear to record the barrenness of their daily life in a diary.
Accept my warmest and most sincere congratulations, dear Jeanne, and
don’t shed any more tears on my account. You have not transgressed
anything, you dear child, with your refined humanity. Neither has he.
Yet you fancy that your letters—your “confession,” has caused me pain.
Oh, no! Alas! it has done nothing of the kind. I say, alas! because I
should so like to believe myself, that I had once in my life loved with
my whole heart. Now I see it must have been all imagination. It can’t
be explained otherwise—a delusion, a myth—anything you like. Perhaps a
charming dream.
Well, the dream is over; that is the only thing I am certain about. All
that remains of it is the memory of a good friend who, by a truly magical
freak of fate, has found the one woman, in my opinion, suited to him.
Jeanne, I am not disguising the facts. This is the first and the last
time, too, for that matter—that the subject of Malthe and myself is
mentioned between us.
The whole time you and I were knocking about the world like homeless
vagrants, you never referred to it, or let drop a hint, that you knew the
whole humiliating connection. Though _I knew that you knew_, and that
raised you in my esteem as a human creature to an extraordinary degree. I
think so highly of Malthe that you alone seem to me good enough for him.
So you see what you write about committing a “robbery” has no point. And
more than that, I can tell you I am one of those women ill adapted to
_live with_, much less _to love_, another human being. I am quite clear
now about this. You, on the contrary, in compensation for your joyless
youth, are endowed with the capacity for self-sacrifice and yielding. For
you it will be a positive delight to abandon your _ego_, and let it be
absorbed by his. For me such a thing is inconceivable.
There is no necessity to recur any more to the past—at least as far as I
am concerned. On your behalf we unfortunately have to do it. Much more
than the news itself, does your question, shall you speak or be silent,
perplex my brain and excite my emotions.
If my position was now what it once was, and my views of life what they
once were, I should answer decidedly: Keep your lips closed, and the
secret that concerns only you, locked in your heart! But now there are
other factors to consider. I am changed. Time and life—I scarcely know
what—have changed me—and you are not like the majority of women, and
Malthe is not a man like other men.
You may perhaps cause him a never-ending torment by speaking. Be clear
on this, or you may cause yourself no less pain by keeping silent, and
letting what is past and over for ever be forgotten. I know you, Jeanne;
every day and every hour you will despise yourself more and more because
his belief in you is so boundless.
You can’t be silent. You will be compelled to lie. What to ninety-nine
people out of a hundred would be simple and natural enough will undermine
not only your self-respect, but your joy in life. On the other hand,
you have never loved. The thing you call your past, has really had no
significance for you. Why should it be unearthed now, and dragged into
the glare of day? Why should something that meant nothing but words
to you, be made crucial? Are you two, you and he, to spend the most
beautiful years of your love in exhuming corpses and taking them about
with you wherever you go?
Joergen Malthe is not as other men are. He will never reproach you, but
he will grieve, and you will grieve with him.
You see, I am unable to advise you. Perhaps I have no right to take the
responsibility upon me. I have often talked by the hour to your future
husband. But as far as I can remember, we never touched on the topic of
woman in the abstract. Thus it comes about that I am ignorant of what
Malthe’s views are.
And yet—Malthe is the father of your child. The father of your unborn
child.
Speak, Jeanne, speak openly and without fear. It will be setting up no
defence for having yielded to his inclinations, but he will find in it
a means of explaining and defending what happened before his time; for
Joergen Malthe is not like other men.
If he has thought it right and natural that the woman he loves should
become his in the way you have become his, he will think it right and
natural that you should have exercised the sovereignty over your person
before you knew him. All you have got to tell him afterwards is that you
love him and that you have never loved any one but him.
I seem to myself at this moment so very ancient. Such an eternity lies
between then and now, but that is as it should be.
Little travelling companion with the red hair, let me see you helping him
now in the prime of his manhood to build up his reputation, so that his
name will become immortal. You understand how to see—how to enjoy. Pack
your infant when it is born in a little trunk with perforated lid, and
take it about with you, or leave it behind. Don’t let it be a hindrance
or a barrier between you two in your joint lives.
There is a great deal more that I should like to write, but now I must go
and dress. You know “Tristan and Isolde” always was my favourite opera.
I was going to urge you not to show this letter to Malthe, but, after
all, I leave you a free hand in the matter.
For many reasons I believe that if he saw it the consequences would not
be disastrous.
With many embraces. I wish you a happiness that will last through life.
Your
ELSIE LINDTNER.
* * * * *
You need not trouble to find me more lace patterns. I have presented my
whole collection to the Metropolitan Museum. My new craze, dwarf cacti,
amuses me far more—they can’t be enclosed in letters and newspapers
unfortunately.
When did they first meet? It is no concern of mine, but I can’t help
thinking much about it. Did they know each other before? Yes, of course.
He looked after her when she passed through the room. From me he looked
across at her—and compared. And after—yes, what after? Did he think
continually of Jeanne as before he thought of me? Or is it merely because
chance has thrown them together in Paris? Or is it possible that they did
not recognise each other at first, and only discovered later where they
had met for the first time? Have I played any part in their conversation?
Have they clasped hands over my memory, as over a grave?
* * * * *
I don’t grudge them their happiness. Jeanne is the right woman for him,
and only a Joergen Malthe could satisfy and supplement Jeanne’s whole
nature.
How has it come about that everything in me has gone to rest? I feel like
a heap of faded leaves lying down somewhere in a deep hollow, where not a
breath of wind reaches it, and it lulls itself to sleep.
I don’t live now as I used to live, and I have no goal to strive for; but
I have no cares, much less do I feel in despair about anything. Truly, I
am very comfortable in mind and body. I should not mind living for ever
this sort of life. Yet at the same time I should feel no alarm if some
one came and said, “You must die to-night.”
* * * * *
When I consider it in broad daylight, I have a heap of enjoyments, small
and insignificant, but perfectly unclouded enjoyments.
* * * * *