Gert and Jenny were walking side by side down the windy path under ragged
pines. He stopped to pick some little wild strawberries, ran after her,
and put them in her mouth. She thanked him with a smile, and he took her
hand as they walked towards the sea that showed glittering blue between
the trees.
He looked bright and young in a light summer suit, the panama hiding his
hair completely. Jenny sat down near the edge of the wood, Gert lying on
the grass beside her in the shade of big drooping birches.
It was scorching hot and still; the grassy slope by the water was dried
yellow. Over the point hung a blue metallic bar of haze with white and
smoke-yellow clouds in front. The fjord was light blue, streaked with the
currents, the sailing boats lay still and white, and the smoke from the
steamers hung long in the air in grey strips. There was a slight swirl of
water round the pebbles, and the twigs of the birches moved gently above
their heads, dropping one or two leaves dried by the heat.
One of them fell on her fair curly hair—she had taken off her hat—and
Gert removed it. Looking at it, he said:
“Queer how the rain keeps off this summer. You women are much better off
than we are, wearing such thin dresses. It would look as if you were in
half-mourning but for those pink beads. It is very becoming, though.”
The dress was a dead white, with small black blossoms, gathered all over
and held at the waist by a black silk belt. The straw hat in her lap was
black, trimmed with black velvet roses, and the pale pink crystal beads
shone against the delicate skin of her neck.
He bent forward to kiss her foot above the rounding of the shoe, and,
following with his fingers the delicate bend of her instep in the thin
stocking, grasped her ankle. She loosened his hand gently and he seized
hers, holding it, smiling, in a firm grip. She smiled back at him and
turned away her head.
“You are so quiet, Jenny. Is it the heat?”
“Yes,” she said, and then was silent again.
At a short distance from them, where the garden of a villa reached down
to the sea, some children were playing on a landing-stage; a gramophone
was singing sleepily inside the house. Now and again the breeze brought
the sound of music from the band at the bathing establishment.
“Gert”—Jenny took hold of his hand suddenly—“when I have been a short
time with mamma and come back to town again, I shall go.”
“Where?” He raised himself on his elbow. “Where do you think of going?”
“To Berlin.” She felt her voice tremble as she spoke.
Gert looked into her face; neither of them spoke. At last he said:
“When did you make up your mind to go?”
“You know it has been my intention all along to go abroad again.”
“I know. But I mean how long have you been determined—when did you decide
to go so soon?”
“At Tegneby.”
“I wish you had told me before,” said Gram, and his voice, low and calm
as it was, cut her to the heart.
She was silent for a moment.
“I did not want to write it, Gert. I would rather tell you. When I wrote
you yesterday to come and see me I meant to tell you, but I could not.”
His face turned livid.
“I see. My God, how you must have suffered, child!” he exclaimed.
“Yes, mostly for your sake, Gert. I will not ask you to forgive me.”
“I forgive you? Great heavens! Can _you_ forgive me? I knew this day
would come.”
“I suppose we both did.”
He threw himself suddenly face downwards on the ground. She bent and laid
her hand on his neck.
“Oh, my dear Jenny—my little one—what have I done to you?”
“Dearest....”
“Little white bird, have I touched you with my ugly unclean hands—spotted
your white wings?”
“Gert”—she took both his hands, speaking impetuously—“listen to me. You
have done nothing but what was good and kind; it is I who have done
wrong. I was tired and you gave me rest; I was cold and you warmed me. I
needed rest and I needed warmth; I needed to feel that somebody loved me.
I did not wish to deceive you, Gert, but you did not understand—I could
not make you see that I loved you in a different way—with a very poor
love. Can you not understand?”
“No, Jenny, I don’t believe that a young innocent girl gives herself to a
man if she does not believe her love will last.”
“That is just what I ask you to forgive—I knew you did not understand,
and yet I accepted all you gave me. It became more and more unendurable,
and I realized that I could not go on. I am fond of you, Gert, but I
cannot go on only taking when I can give you nothing that is real.”
“Is this what you wanted to tell me yesterday?” asked Gert after a pause.
She nodded.
“And instead....”
Jenny turned scarlet.
“I had not the courage. You were so happy to come, and I saw that you had
been longing and waiting.”
He raised his head quickly: “You should not have done it. No, you should
not have given me—alms.”
Her face was turned away; she remembered the painful hours of yesterday
in her hot, stuffy studio, hurriedly dusting and tidying to receive him,
her heart aching with sorrow; but she did not care to tell him:
“I did not quite know myself—when you came. I thought for an instant—I
wanted to make sure.”
“Alms.” He moved his head as if in pain. “It was alms all the time,
then—what you gave me.”
“But, Gert, don’t you understand that it is just what I have accepted
from you—alms—always?”
“No,” he said abruptly, lying face downwards again. After a little he
lifted his head:
“Jenny, is there any one else?”
“No,” she replied, vexed at the thought.
“Don’t think I would reproach you if there had been another—a young
man—your equal; I could understand that easier.”
“You don’t seem able to realize—I don’t think there need be another.”
“Perhaps not. It seemed to me more likely, and, remembering what you
wrote about Heggen being at Tegneby and going to Berlin....”
Jenny blushed deeply:
“How can you think that I would have—yesterday?”
Gert was silent. Then he said wearily:
“I cannot quite make you out.”
She was suddenly seized by a wish to hurt him.
“In a way it would not be wrong to say that there was another—a third
person.”
He looked at her searchingly, then clutched her arm all of a sudden:
“Jenny—good God!—what do you mean?”
But she regretted her words already, and said hurriedly:
“Yes, my work—my art.”
* * * * *
Gert Gram had risen to his knees before her:
“Jenny—is there anything—particular—tell me the truth—don’t lie to me—is
there anything the matter with you?”
She tried for a second to look him straight in the eyes, then bent her
head. Gert Gram fell forward with his face in her lap.
“O God!—O God!...”
“Gert, dear, compose yourself. You irritated me with your talk about
another. I ought not to have told you. I did not mean to let you know
until afterwards.”
“I would never have forgiven you for not telling me,” said Gram. “You
must have known this some time. Do you know how...?”
“Three months,” she answered shortly.
“Jenny”—he seized her hands in awe—“you cannot break with me now—not in
this way. We cannot part now.”
“Oh yes.” She stroked his face caressingly. “If this had not happened
I daresay we could still have been together some time, but now I must
arrange my life accordingly, and make the best of it.”
He was silent a moment.
“Listen to me, little one. You know I was divorced last month. In two
years’ time I shall be free, and then I will come to you to give you—and
it—my name. I ask nothing from you, you understand—nothing—but I claim
the right to give you the redress I owe you. God knows I shall suffer
because it cannot be done before. Nothing else will I claim; you shall
not be tied in the least to me—an old man.”
“Gert, I am glad that you are separated from her, but I will tell you
once and for all that I am not going to marry you when I cannot be your
wife in truth. It is not because of the difference in age. If I did not
feel that I have never wholly been yours, as I should have been, I would
stay with you—your wife as long as you were young, your friend when old
age came—even your nurse—willingly and happily. But I know I cannot be
what a wife ought to be, and I cannot promise a thing I could not keep
just because of what other people might say—church or civil contract, it
makes no difference.”
“It is madness, Jenny, to talk like that.”
“You cannot make me change on that point,” she replied quietly.
“What are you going to do, child? I cannot let you go now. What will
happen to you?—you _must_ let me help you.”
“Hush. You see I take it calmly. I suppose once you are in for it, it is
not so bad as you imagine. Fortunately I have still some money left.”
“But, Jenny, think of the people who will be unkind to you—look down on
you.”
“Nobody can do that. There is only one thing I am ashamed of, and it is
that I allowed you to waste your love on me.”
“Such foolish talk! You don’t know how heartless people can be; they will
treat you unkindly, insult and hurt you.”
“I don’t mind that very much, Gert.” She smiled vaguely. “Fortunately I
am an artist; people expect a little scandal now and then from us.”
He shook his head. In a sudden desperate regret at having told him and
given him so much pain she took him in her arms:
“My dear friend, you must not be so distressed—you see that I am not. On
the contrary, I am sometimes quite happy about it. When I think that I am
going to have a child—a sweet little child, my very own—I can scarcely
believe it. I think it will be so great a happiness that I can hardly
grasp it now. A little living being, to belong to me only, to love, to
live and work for. I sometimes think that then only will my life and my
work be of some purpose. Don’t you think I could make a name for myself
good enough for the child too? It is only because I don’t know yet how to
arrange it all that I am a little depressed sometimes, and also because
you are so sad.
“Perhaps I am poor and dull and an egoist, but I am a woman, and as such
I cannot but be happy at the prospect of being a mother.”
He kissed her hands:
“My poor, brave girl! It makes it almost worse for me to see you take it
that way.”
Jenny smiled faintly:
“Would it not be worse still if I took it in another way?”
V
Ten days later Jenny left for Copenhagen. Her mother and Bodil Berner saw
her off at the station in the early morning.
“You are a lucky one, Jenny!” said Bodil, smiling all over her little
soft brown face. And she yawned till the tears came into her eyes.
“Yes, some must be the lucky ones, I suppose. But I don’t think you have
anything to complain of either,” said Jenny, smiling too; but she was
several times on the point of bursting into tears when she kissed her
mother farewell. Standing at the compartment window looking at her, it
seemed as if she had not really seen her mother for ever so long. She
took in with her eyes the slightly stooping, slender figure, the fair
hair that scarcely seemed grey at all, and the strangely unaffected
girlish expression of her face, despite its wrinkles. Only the years, not
life, had made the furrows, in spite of all she had gone through.
How would she take it if she knew? No, she would never have the courage
to tell her and see her under the blow—she who knew nothing about it all
and would not have understood. If it had been impossible to go away Jenny
thought she would rather have taken her life. It was not love—it was
cowardice. She would have to tell her sometime, of course, but it would
be easier to do that later, from abroad.
As the train began to glide out from the station she saw Gert walking
slowly down the platform behind her mother and sister, who were waving
their handkerchiefs. He took off his hat, looking very pale.
It was the first of September. Jenny sat by the window looking out. It
was a beautiful day, the air clear and cool, the sky dark blue, and the
clouds pure white. The morning dew lay heavy on the rich green meadows
where late daisies were in bloom. The birches at the edge of the forest
were already turning yellow from the summer heat, and the bilberry shrub
was copper coloured. The clusters of the rowan were deep red; where
the trees stood on richer soil the leaves were still dark green. The
colouring was splendid.
On the slopes stood old silver-grey farmhouses or new shining white or
yellow ones with red-painted outhouses and crooked old apple trees with
yellow or glassy green fruit showing among the foliage.
Time after time tears veiled her eyes; when she came back—if she ever
did....
The fjord became visible near Moss, a town built along the canal, with
factory walls and the small wooden houses in gay colours surrounded by
gardens. Often when passing it in the train she had thought of going
there some day to paint.
The train passed the junction where a branch line turns off to Tegneby.
Jenny looked out of the window at the familiar places; there was the
drive leading to the house, which lay behind the little fir grove, and
there was the church. Dear little Cesca liked to go to church; she
felt herself safe and protected there, borne away by a sentiment of
supernatural strength. Cesca believed in something—she did not quite know
what, but had created some kind of a God for herself.
Jenny was pleased to think that Cesca and her husband seemed to be
getting on better. She had written that he had not quite understood her,
but had, nevertheless, been so kind and dear and convinced that she would
never do anything wrong—on purpose. Strange little Cesca! Everything must
come right with her in the end. She was honest and good. But she herself
was neither, not to any considerable degree. If only she need not see her
mother’s tears; she could bear to hurt her—it only meant that she was
afraid of scenes.
And Gert? Her heart shrank at the thought of him. A feeling of physical
sickness rose in her, a despair and loathing so profound that she felt
herself played out—on the point of becoming indifferent to everything.
Those awful last days in Christiania with him. She had given in at last.
He was coming to Copenhagen, and she had to promise to stay somewhere in
the country so that he could come and see her. Would she ever be able to
get quite free of him?
In the end she would perhaps have to leave the child with him and run
away from it all—for it was a lie, all she had told him about being happy
about it and the rest. Sometimes at Tegneby she had really felt so,
because she only remembered it was her child—not his at all. But if it
were to be a link between him and her humiliation she would have nothing
to do with it. She would hate it—she hated it already at the memory of
the last days before her departure. The morbid desire to cry and sob to
her heart’s content was gone; she felt dry and hard as if she could never
cry again.
A week later Gert Gram arrived. She was so worn out and apathetic that
she could pretend to be almost in good spirits, and if he had proposed
that she should move into the hotel where he was staying, she would have
done so. She made him take her to the theatre, to supper at restaurants,
and one day, when the weather was fine, for an excursion to Fredensborg,
because she saw that it pleased him if she seemed well and happy. She
gave up thinking—it was no sacrifice, for as a matter of fact her brain
was tired out.
Jenny had taken rooms with a teacher’s widow in a country village. Gram
accompanied her there and went back the same evening to Copenhagen. At
last she was alone.
She had engaged the rooms without seeing them beforehand. When she
had been studying in Copenhagen some years ago she had gone with her
fellow-students into the country one day, lunching at an inn and bathing
among the rocks, and she remembered it was pretty out there, so when a
certain Mrs. Rasmussen, in answer to her advertisement, had offered to
house the young lady who was expecting a child, she decided to go there.
The widow lived in a tiny yellow, sadly ugly brick cottage outside the
village by the main road, which ran dusty and endless between open tilled
fields, but Jenny was pleased on the whole. She liked her bedroom with
the blue wall-paper, the etchings on the wall, and the white crochet-work
d’oyleys all over the place, on the bed, on the back of the American
rocking-chair, and on the chest, where Mrs. Rasmussen had placed a bunch
of roses the day she arrived.
From her two little windows she could see the main road winding past the
house and the small front garden, where roses, geraniums, and fuchsias
grew, heedless of the dust. On the other side of the road was a bare hill
at the back of the field. Stone fences, along which the vividly coloured
autumn flowers grew between bramble bushes, divided the slope into
squares of stubble, greeny-brown meadow, and blue-green turnip field;
spriggy wind-blown willow bushes grew along the boundaries. When the
evening sun had left Jenny’s window the sky was flaming red and golden
above the ridge and the meagre twigs of the willows.
At the back of her room was a neat doll’s-house kitchen with red brick
floor, opening into the back yard, where the widow’s chickens were
cackling and the pigeons cooing. A small passage ran through the house;
on the farther side Mrs. Rasmussen had her parlour, with flower-pots in
the window and crochet work everywhere, daguerreotypes and photographs
on the walls, and a book-case with religious books in black paper
covers, bound volumes of periodicals, and a few novels. At the back was
a small room where she slept, and where the air was always heavy with an
indefinable odour, though everything in the room was spotlessly clean.
She could not hear in there if her boarder on the other side of the
passage spent a night now and again in tears.
Mrs. Rasmussen was not so bad, on the whole. Tall and lanky, she pattered
about in some kind of felt slippers, always with a worried look on
her long yellow face, which was rather like that of a horse and had
straggling grey hair combed back from it, forming quaint little wings
over the ears. She scarcely ever spoke, save for an anxious question as
to whether the lady was pleased with the room or the food, and when Jenny
went to sit in the parlour with her needlework they were both perfectly
quiet. Jenny was specially grateful to the woman for not mentioning her
condition; only once when she went out with her painting paraphernalia
did Mrs. Rasmussen ask her anxiously if she did not think it unwise. She
had worked hard at first, standing behind a stone fence with her field
easel, which threatened to be upset every instant by the wind.
Below the stone fence the stubby rye field sloped towards a swamp where
the bog bean round the bluish water pools was whitening, and velvety
black peat stacks stood piled on the grass. Beyond the swamp were the
chalk-white peasants’ huts set in rich dark green groves and surrounded
by meadows, stubbed rye fields, and turnip land as far as the water’s
edge. The beach was cut into tiny bays and points, the sand and the short
dried grass making it look a whitish yellow. To the north a heather-brown
hill with a windmill on top sloped down towards the bay. Light and shadow
flitted alternately over the landscape as the clouds travelled across the
wide, ever restless sky.
When Jenny got tired she lay down by the fence, looking up at the sky and
out over the bay; she could not stand for long at a time, but it made her
only more eager. Two small pictures painted from the fence were finished,
and she was pleased with them; a third one she painted in the village,
where the low whitewashed houses with thatched roofs almost covering the
windows, and climbing roses and dahlias in the gardens, stood along a
velvety green ditch, and a red brick church stretched its gabled tower
above the foliage of the vicarage garden. But it made her nervous when
people came to look at her, and flaxen-haired youngsters clustered round
her when she was painting. When the picture was finished she moved with
her easel again to the stone fence.
In October the rain came, pouring down for a week or two. Now and again
the skies cleared a little, letting out a sickly yellow ray of light
between the clouds over the hill with the pitiable willows, and the
puddles in the road lay shining a little while before the rain troubled
their surface again.
Jenny borrowed Mrs. Rasmussen’s books and learnt to knit the kind of
lace that bordered her curtains, but neither reading nor knitting came
to much. She sat in the rocking-chair by the window all day long, not
even caring to dress properly, only wearing her old faded kimono. As her
condition became more and more apparent she suffered agonies.
Gert Gram had written to say he was coming to see her, and two days later
he arrived, driving up in the early morning in pouring rain. He stayed
a week, putting up at the railway hotel two miles from the village, but
spending all his time with her. When he left he promised to come again
soon—possibly in six weeks.
Jenny lay awake all night with her lamp burning. She knew she could
not bear it again; it had been too awful. Everything was unbearable
from the moment he arrived—his first worried, compassionate glance
when he saw her—dressed in a new navy blue straight frock made by the
village dressmaker. “How lovely you are,” he said, and declared she was
like a madonna. Madonna, indeed! His arm placed cautiously round her
waist, his long, guarded kiss on her forehead, made her feel as if she
could die of shame. And how he had worried her with his concern about
her health and his advice about taking enough exercise. One day when
the rain stopped he dragged her for a long walk, insisting that she
should hang on his arm for support. One evening he had looked at her
needlework—stealthily—expecting probably that she would be hemming baby
linen. He meant it all so kindly, and there was no hope of a change for
the better when he would come again—more likely the reverse; she simply
could not endure it.
One day she had a letter from him in which, among other things, he said
she ought to see a doctor, and the same night she wrote to Gunnar Heggen
telling him that she was expecting a child in February, and would he let
her have the address of a quiet place where she could stay until it was
over. Heggen answered by return:
“DEAR JENNY,—I have advertised in a couple of papers and
will send you the answers when they come, so you can see for
yourself. If you would like me to go and look at some of the
places before you decide, I will do so with pleasure—you know
that. I am at your disposal in every way. Let me know when you
leave, what way you are coming, and if you want me to meet
you, or if I can help you in any other way. I am sorry about
it, of course, but I know you are comparatively well equipped
to face trouble. Please write and say if there is anything
else I can do for you; you know I am only too pleased to be
of any service. I hear you have a good picture at the State
exhibition—congratulations.
“Kind regards from your sincere friend,