Jenny remained with Mrs. Schlessinger; it was cheap, and she did not know
what to do with herself. Spring was in the air. She walked on the pier
in the evenings. Heavy clouds, bordered by the sun, with red and burning
gold, chased across the immense open dome of the sky, and were reflected
in the restless sea. The dark and desolate plain turned light green and
the poplars reddish brown with young shoots. Along the railway line
violets and small white and yellow flowers were coming up in hundreds,
and at last the whole plain was luxuriously green, and a world of colour
sprang forth along the ditches; sulphur-tinted irises and big white
lilies were reflected in the pools of the marsh. Then one day the air was
permeated by a sweet scent of hay, mixing with the smell of tar from the
shore.
The hotel opened, and the small houses by the pier were filled with
summer visitors; children swarmed on the white beach, rolling in the
sand and paddling in the water. Mothers and nurses in national costumes
of the Spreewald sat on the grass with their sewing, looking after them.
The bathing-huts had been transported into the sea, and young girls were
shouting and laughing in the water. Sailing yachts anchored by the pier,
tourists came from the town, in the evenings there was dancing in the
hotel, and couples walked about in the small plantation where Jenny used
to lie in the grass early in the spring listening to the wash of the
waves and the rustling of the wind in the scraggy tree-tops.
One or two of the ladies looked at her with interest and compassion when
she walked on the beach in her black and white dress. The summer visitors
staying in the village had got to know that a young Norwegian girl had
had a child and was disconsolately mourning its death, and some of them
found it more touching than scandalous.
She much preferred walking out into the country, where the summer
boarders never went. Once in a while she went as far as the cemetery,
where her boy was buried. She sat staring at the grave, which she had
not wished to have tended in any way, sometimes laying on it some
wild flowers which she had picked on the way, but her mind refused to
associate the little mound of grey earth with her beloved little boy.
In her room in the evenings she sat staring at the lamp—with needlework
which she never touched. And her thoughts were always the same: she
remembered the days when she had the boy—first the faint, peaceful joy
while she was in bed, getting well, then when she was sitting up and
Mrs. Schlessinger showed her how to bath and dress and handle him, and
when they went to Warnemünde together to buy fine material, lace, and
ribbon, and how on their return home she cut and sewed, designed and
embroidered. Her boy was to have nice things, instead of the common,
ready-made outfit she had ordered from Berlin. She had also bought a
ridiculous garden syringe of green-painted tin, with pictures of a lion
and a tiger, standing by a blue sea amid palms and looking with awe at
the German dreadnoughts steaming away towards the African possessions of
the Empire. She had found it so amusing that she bought it for baby-boy
to play with when he should be big enough—after a very long time. He must
first learn to find mother’s breast, which at present he only blindly
sought for, and to discover his own little fingers, which he could not
separate when he had clutched them together. By and by he would be able
to recognize his mother, to look at the lamp and at mother’s watch when
she was dangling it before his eyes. There were so many things baby-boy
would have to learn.
All his things were in a drawer she never opened. She knew what every
little piece looked like; she could feel them in the palms of her hands,
the soft linen and the fluffy woollen things and the unfinished jacket of
green flannel on which she had embroidered yellow buttercups—the jacket
he was to wear when she took him out.
She had begun a picture of the beach with red and blue children on the
white sands. Some of the compassionate ladies came to look at it, trying
to make acquaintance with her: “How nice!” But she was not pleased with
the sketch, and cared neither to finish it nor to make a new one.
* * * * *
Then one day the hotel closed up again, the sea was stormy, and summer
had gone.
Gunnar wrote from Italy, advising her to go there. Cesca wanted her to
go to Sweden, and her mother, who knew nothing, wrote she could not
understand why she stayed so long in Germany. Jenny was thinking of going
away, but she could not make up her mind, although a faint longing began
to stir in her.
She became restless at going about like that without being able to do
anything. She had to take a decision—even if it came only to throwing
herself into the sea one night from the pier.
One evening she took out Heggen’s books from their case. Among them was
one with poetry—_Fiori della Poesia Italiana_—in an edition for tourists,
bound in leather. She turned the leaves to see if she had forgotten all
her Italian.
The book fell open by itself at Lorenzo di Medici’s carnival song, where
a folded piece of paper lay in Gunnar’s handwriting:
“DEAR MOTHER,—I may tell you now that I have arrived safely in Italy and
am quite comfortable, and that”—the rest of the sheet was covered with
words to learn. Beside the verbs he had written down the conjugations,
and the margin all along the melodramatic poetry was tightly covered with
notes: _Quant’è bella giovenezza, che se fugge tuttavia_.
Even the commonest words were written down. Gunnar had probably tried to
read the book directly he came to Italy, before he knew the language at
all. On the first page was written “G. Heggen, Firenze, 1903”—that was
before she knew him.
She began to read here and there. It was Leopardi’s “Ode to Italy,” which
Gunnar was so enthusiastic about. She read it. The margin was full of
notes and ink-spots.
It was as if he had sent her a message more intimate than any of his
letters. Young, sound, firm, and active, he was calling her, asking her
to come back to life—and work. Oh, if she could gather courage and begin
work again! She wanted to try—to make her choice whether for life or
death; she wanted to go out there where once she had felt herself free
and strong—alone save for her work. She longed for her friends, the
trusty comrades who never came too near to hurt one another, but lived
side by side, each minding their own business and all sharing what they
possessed in common: the belief in their ability and the joy of their
work. She wanted to see again the country of mountains, with proud,
severe lines and sunburnished colours.
A few days later she left for Berlin, where she stayed some time visiting
the galleries, but, feeling tired and forlorn, she went on the Munich.
In the Alte Pinakothek she stopped before Rembrandt’s “Holy Family.” She
did not look at it from a painter’s point of view; she only looked at
the young peasant woman who, with her garment still drawn aside from her
full bosom, sat looking at her child sleeping on her lap, and holding his
foot caressingly in her hand. It was an ugly little peasant boy, but in
splendid condition; he was sound asleep and such a darling all the same.
Joseph was looking at him across the mother’s shoulder, but it was not
an old Joseph, and Mary was no immaterial, heavenly bride; they were a
strong, middle-aged working man and his young wife, and the child was the
joy and pride of the two.
In the evening she wrote to Gert Gram a long, sad and tender letter
bidding him farewell for ever.
On the following day she took a through ticket to Florence; after a
sleepless night in the train she found herself sitting at the window at
daybreak. Wild torrents spurted down the forest-clad mountain-sides. It
grew lighter and lighter, and the towns became more and more Italian in
character: rust-brown or golden-yellow tiles, loggias to the houses,
green shutters against reddish stone walls, church fronts in baroque,
stone bridges across the rivers, vineyards outside the towns, and grey
castle ruins on the hilltops. At the stations all the signs were written
in German and Italian.
She stood in the customs office looking at the first- and second-class
passengers startled out of their sleep, and she felt quite happy without
being able to account for it. She was back again in Italy. The customs
officer smiled at her because she was so fair, and she smiled back;
evidently he took her for the maid of one or other of the lady passengers.
The misty grey mountains ridges on either side had a bluish shade in the
crevices, the ground looked rusty red, and the sun flamed white and hot.
But in Florence it was bitterly cold in the early days of November. Tired
and frozen, she stayed in the city a fortnight—her heart cold to all the
beauty around her, and melancholy and discouraged because it did not warm
her as before.
One morning she went to Rome. The ground was white with frost all the way
down through Toscana; in the middle of the day the frosty mist lifted
and the sun shone—and she saw again a spot she had never forgotten: the
lake of Trasimene lying pale blue, surrounded by the mountains. A point
of land projected into the water, with towers and pinnacles of a small
stone-grey town, with a cypress avenue leading from the station.
She arrived at Rome in pouring rain. Gunnar was on the platform to meet
her, and he squeezed her hands as he wished her welcome. He went on
talking and laughing all the time as they drove from the station to the
quarters he had engaged for her, the rain splashing against the cab from
the grey sky and from the street paving.