I

Towards evening of a clear and calm afternoon in May there was a haze over the black sites of the city; the naked walls looked reddish yellow and the factory chimneys a livery brown in the sunlight. Large and small houses, high and low roofs, stood outlined against the greyish-purple air, heavy with dust and smoke and vapours. A little tree by a red wall showed tiny greenish-yellow leaves, transparent in the sunlight.

The mould on the board walls of the workshops was bright green and the soot flakes on the factory walls jet black in some places and in others covered, as it were, with a thin, glistening silvery film.

Jenny had been walking about all the morning in the outskirts of the town, where the sky rose dark blue and hot over the olive-golden fir-tops and the amber-coloured buds of the leaf trees, but here in the city over the high houses and the net of telephone wires it was growing pale behind a thin veil of opal-white haze. This was really the prettier sight of the two, though Gert could not see it. To him the city was always ugly, grey, and dirty; it was the city they had cursed, all those young men of the eighties who had been obliged to settle down there to work. He was probably standing at his window this moment, looking out in the sun, and to him the play of light in line and colour was not worth noticing; it was merely a sunray outside his prison window.

She stopped a few steps from his door, looking up and down the street, as usual. There was nobody she knew, only business people on their way home. It was past six o’clock.

She ran up the stairs—those dreadful iron steps that echoed their movements when they stole down from his rooms late in the winter nights. The naked walls seemed ever to retain the cold, raw air.

She hurried along the corridor and gave the usual three knocks at his door. Gram opened it. He put his arm round her, and locked the door with his other hand as they kissed. Over his shoulder she could see the flowers on the little table, with wine and foreign fruits in a crystal bowl. There was a slight mist of cigarette smoke in the room, and she knew that he had been sitting there since four o’clock waiting for her.

“I could not come before,” she whispered. “I was so sorry to let you wait.” When he released her she went to the table, bending over the flowers. “I will take two and make myself nice, may I? I am getting so spoilt since I have come to you, Gert.” She stretched out her hands to him.

“When must you go?” he asked, kissing her arms tenderly.

Jenny bent her head:

“I promised to be back for supper. Mother always waits up for me, and she is so tired now; she needs me to help her in the evening with one thing or another,” she said quickly. “It is not so easy to get away from home, you see,” she whispered in excuse.

He listened to her many words with bowed head. When she came towards him he took her in his arms so that her face was hidden against his shoulder.

She could not lie, poor little thing, not so well, anyhow, that he would believe it for a single merciful second. In the winter—the very short time of their love—and in the early spring she could always be away from home.

“It is tiresome, Gert, but now I am living at home it is much more difficult to manage; you know I have to be there because mother needs the money as well as the help. You agreed with me, did you not, that I had better move home?”

Gert nodded assent. They were sitting on the sofa close together, Jenny’s head resting on his shoulder, so that she could not see his face.

“I was in the country this morning, walking where we used to go together. Let us go there again soon—the day after tomorrow if it is fine—will you? You are sorry because I have to go home so early today, are you not?”

“My dear, have I not said that thousands of times already?” She could hear from his voice that he was saying this with his melancholy smile again. “I am grateful for every second of your life that you give me.”

“Don’t speak like that, Gert,” she said, pained.

“Why should I not say it when it is true? Dearest little girl, do you think I will ever forget that all you have given me is as a princely grace, and I can never understand how you came to give it to me at all?”

“When I realized last winter that you were fond of me—how much you really loved me—I said to myself it must stop. But then I understood that I could not be without you, and so I gave myself to you. Was that a grace? When I could not let you go?”

“I call it an inconceivable grace that you ever came to love me.”

She nestled in his arms without speaking.

“My own darling ... so young and sweet you are....”

“I am not young, Gert. When you met me I was already beginning to get old without ever having been young. You seemed young to me, much younger at heart than I, because you still believed in what I called childish dreams and used to laugh at them. You have made me believe in love and tenderness and all such things.”

Gert Gram smiled, and whispered: “Perhaps my heart was not older than yours—for it seemed to me that I had never yet had any youth, and deep down in my soul I still entertained the hope that some day youth would touch me, if only for once, with his wand. But my hair has turned white meanwhile.”

Jenny raised her head and laid her hand caressingly on his head.

“Are you tired, little one? Shall I take off your shoes? Will you not lie down and rest?”

“No, let me stay as I am; it is nicer so.”

She drew her feet up under her and nestled closer in his lap. He laid one arm about her, and with the other hand he poured out some wine, holding the glass to her lips. She drank readily. He dropped cherries into her mouth and took the stones from her lips, putting them on the plate.

“More wine?”

“Thanks. I think I will stay with you. I can send a message home to say I have met Heggen—I believe he is in town—but I must go home before the trams stop.”

“I’ll go and see about it now.” He let her down gently on the sofa. “Lie still there and rest, little one.”

When he was gone she took off her shoes, drank some more wine, and lay down on the sofa with her head deep in the cushions, pulling a rug over herself.

After all, she loved him, and was glad to be with him. Sitting as she had been a moment ago, resting in his arms, she was happy. He was the only one in the world who had taken her on his knee, warming her and hiding her and calling her his little girl. He was the only being who had stood by her really—so why should she not be close to him?

When he held her close to him and hid her so that she saw nothing, but only felt that he had his arms round her and warmed her, she was contented. She could not do without him, so why not give him the little she had to give, when he gave her what she needed most of all?

He could kiss her, do with her what he liked, provided he did not speak, for then they drew so far apart. He spoke of love, but her love was not what he believed it to be, and she could not explain it in words. It was no grace or princely gift—she clung to him with a poor, begging love; she did not want him to thank her for it, only to be fond of her and say nothing.

When he came back she was lying with her eyes wide open, but she closed them under his discreet caresses, smiling a little; then she put her arms round his neck and pressed close to him. The faint scent of violet that he used was mild and agreeable. She nodded slightly when he lifted her up with questioning eyes. He wanted to say something, but she put her hand across his mouth and then kissed him so that he could not speak.

He saw her to the car. She remained an instant standing on the platform, looking after him as he walked down the street in the blue light of a May night. Then she went in and sat down.

Gram had left his wife that Christmas, and lived alone in the office building, where he had taken another room. Jenny understood that he was going to get a separation later on when Rebecca Gram had seen that he was not coming back to her. It was his way of doing it; he had not the strength to break with her at once.

Jenny dared not think of what his plans for the future might be. Did he think they would marry?

She could not deny to herself that she had never for a second thought of binding herself to him for good, and that was why she felt the bitter, hopeless humiliation and shame at the thought of him when she was not with him and could hide in his love. She had deceived him—all the time she had deceived him.

“That you have learnt to love me, Jenny, that is what I call an inconceivable grace”—was it her fault that he looked upon it in that way?

He could not have made her his mistress unless she had wanted it herself or made him feel that she wanted it. She understood that he was longing for her; it worried her every time they were together to know herself desired and to see his efforts to conceal it—he was too proud to let her see it, too proud to beg where he had once offered to give—and too proud to risk refusal. Knowing that she did not want to reject his love and to lose the only being who loved her, what else could she do, if she wished to be honest, but offer him what she had to give when she accepted from him something she could not do without?

But she had been faced with the necessity of saying words stronger and more passionate than her feelings, and he had believed them. And it happened again and again. When she came to him depressed, worried, tired of thinking what the end of it all would be, and saw that he understood, she used again the tender words, feigning more feeling than she had, and he was deceived at once.

He knew no other love than the love which was happiness in itself. Unhappiness in love came from outside, from some relentless fate, or from stern justice as a vengeance for old wrongs. She knew what his fear was—he dreaded that her love would die one day when she saw that he was too old to be her lover, but he never had a suspicion that her love was born a weakling and had in it the germ that would lead to death. It was no good trying to explain this to Gert; he would not understand. She could not tell him that she had sought shelter in his arms because he was the only one who had offered to shelter her when she was weary to death. When he offered her love and warmth she had not the strength to reject, although she knew she ought not to accept it—she was not worthy of it.

No, he was not old. It was the passion of a youth of twenty, a childish faith, a reverent worship, and the kindness and tenderness of a grown man—all the love that filled a man’s life—that flared up on the border of old age. And it should have been given to a woman who could love him in return, who could live with him for those few years the life he had dreamt of, longed and hoped for, would last—live with him so that she would be bound to him by a thousand happy memories when old age came, having been in true love the wife of his youth and manhood, and ageing with him.

But she—what could she give him if she remained? She had never been able to give him anything, only taken what he gave. If she tried to stay, she would not be able to make him believe that all her longing for life was quenched for ever in the love of their youth. He would himself tell her to go. She had loved and given; she did not love any more, and would be free. That is how he would look upon it; he would never understand that she mourned because there was nothing—nothing she had been able to give.

She could not bear to hear him speak about her gifts to him. It is true that she had brought him her pure soul when she gave herself to him. He could never forget it, and he measured, as it were, the depth and strength of her love by this fact, for she had given him the purity of her youth—of twenty years.

She had kept it as a white bridal dress, unused, unstained, and in her longing and anxiety lest she should never come to wear it, in despair over her cold solitude and her inability to love, she had clung to it, crumpled it, and soiled it with her thoughts. Was not any one who had lived the life of love purer than she, who had been brooding and spying and longing until all her faculties were paralysed by that longing?

She had given herself—and yet what a slight impression it had made on her. She was not altogether cold; sometimes she was carried away by his passion, but she feigned passion while she was cool, and when she was away from him she scarcely remembered it at all. Yet, to please him, she wrote of a longing which did not exist—yes, she had been feigning, feigning all the time before his honest passion.

There was a time when she had not been a hypocrite, or if she had lied to Gert she had also lied to herself. She had felt a storm in herself; it was perhaps pity for him and his fate and rebellion against her own—why should they both be harried by a longing for something impossible?—and in the growing anxiety for where it all would lead, she had rejoiced that she loved him, for she was forced to fall into the arms of this man, however mad she knew it to be.

She would sit in the tram when she left him of an evening, looking at all the sleepy, placid faces of the people, and rejoicing that she came from her lover—that he and she were whirled by the tempest of their fate. They had been driven into it and did not know where they were going, and she was proud of her fate because unhappiness and darkness threatened.

And now she was sitting here only wishing for it to end, planning a journey abroad to escape from it all. She had accepted an invitation to stay at Tegneby with Cesca to prepare the break. It was better for Gert that he was alone—if she could manage to end the life between them now, she could have done him some good.

Two young women were sitting opposite her. They were probably not older than she, but stupefied by a few years of marriage. Three or four years ago they had no doubt been a couple of neat office girls, who dressed attractively and sported with their admirers in Nordmarken. She knew the face of one of them, now she thought of it; she had seen her at Hakloa one Easter. Jenny had noticed her then because she was such a good ski-runner and looked so brisk and smart in her sport-suit. In a way she was not badly dressed now either; her walking habit was fashionable enough, but did not fit. The figure had no firmness; she was well covered, and at the same time the shoulders and hips were angular. The face under a big hat with ostrich feathers was old, with bad teeth, and furrows round the mouth. She was talking, and her friend listened interestedly, sitting there heavily and painfully enceinte, with knees apart and her hands in a colossal muff. The face was originally pretty, but fat and red, and with a treble chin.

“I have to lock up the cheese in the sideboard; if it goes into the kitchen only the rind is left the next day—a big piece of GruyÈre costing nearly three kroner.”

“I quite believe it.”

“And then there’s another thing. She is very fond of eggs. The other day I went into her bedroom—she is such a pig and her room is very smelly; the bed had not been made for I don’t know how long. ‘Really, Solveig,’ I said, lifting the blankets, and what do you think I found? Three eggs and a paper of sugar in the bed. She said she had bought it herself—and perhaps she had.”

“I don’t think so,” said the other.

“The sugar was in a paper bag, so she may have bought it, but the eggs she had certainly taken, and I gave her a scolding. Last Saturday we were to have rice pudding. When I went into the kitchen I found the rice boiling on the gas and quite burnt, while she was sitting in her room doing needlework. I called her while I was stirring the rice, and what do you think I found in the spoon? An egg, if you please. She boils eggs for herself with the rice! I had to laugh, but did you ever hear anything so dirty? I gave her a piece of my mind. Don’t you think she deserved it?”

“Certainly. Servants are a bother. What do you think mine did the other day?...”

They had also been longing for love when they were young girls—their ideal of love was a smart, straight lad with a secure position, who could take them away from the monotonous work in office or shop and settle them in a little home, where the three rooms would hold all their belongings, and they could spread out all the pieces of needlework with embroidered roses and bluebells which they had made while dreaming their girlish day-dreams about love. They smiled at those dreams now with a superior air, and to those who still dreamed they had the satisfaction of stating that the reality was quite different. They were pleased to be among the initiated who knew what it really meant—and they were perhaps content.

But there was happiness all the same in not being content, in refusing to put up with things and be thankful when life offered things of little worth; far better to say: I believe in my dreams; I will call nothing happiness but that which I claim, and I believe it exists. If it is not to be mine, it is my own fault; it is because I have been one of the foolish virgins who did not watch and wait for the bridegroom, but the wise will see him and will enter in with rejoicing.

When Jenny came home she saw there was a light in her mother’s room, so she went in to tell her about the party at AhlstrÖm’s studio, and how Heggen was. Ingeborg and Bodil slept farther down in the room, with their black plaits across the pillows. Jenny felt no compunction at standing there telling falsehoods to her mother. She had always done it from the time she was a schoolgirl and used to tell merry tales about the children’s parties, where she had in reality been sitting alone, watching the others dance—an unhappy and lonely little girl who could not dance or talk of anything that the boys cared for.

When Ingeborg and Bodil came home from a dance their mother sat up in bed listening and smiling and asking questions, young and rosy in the lamplight, and they could always tell the truth, because it was full of merriment and laughter. There may have been a thing or two so nice that they wanted to keep it to themselves, but it did not matter, for their smiles were true.

Jenny kissed her mother good-night. Passing through the sitting-room, she happened to pull down a photograph; she picked it up, knowing in the dark that it was a brother of her own father, with his wife and little girls. He had lived in America, and she had never seen him; he was dead, and his picture stood in its place without anybody ever thinking of it. She herself dusted it every day, yet never looked at it.

She went into her own room and began to take down her hair.

She had always lied to her mother—could she ever have been truthful to her without making her suffer, and to what purpose? Mother would never have understood. She had had happiness and sorrow since she was quite young; she had been happy with Jenny’s father and had bemoaned his death, but she had her child to live for, and learnt to be content. Then she met Nils Berner, who filled her life with fresh happiness and fresh sorrow—and again the children consoled her, inasmuch as they filled the emptiness of her life. The joy of motherhood is bought with too much suffering; it is too actual, when held living in one’s arms, for one ever to doubt its existence. To love one’s child is so natural that there is no cause for reflection. A mother never doubts that she loves her child, or that she wants it to be happy—that she does her best for it, or that it returns her love. The grace of nature is so great to mothers that children instinctively shrink from confiding their sorrows and disappointments to her; illness and money troubles are almost the only sorrows she ever gets to know. Never the irreparable, the shame, the failures in life, and were she told of them ever so emphatically by her own children, she would never believe they were irreparable.

Her mother was not to know anything about her sorrow—nature itself had raised a wall between them. Rebecca Gram would never know a tenth part of the sufferings her children had endured for her sake. And a friend of her mother’s was still mourning her handsome boy, who had been killed by an accident, and dreaming of the future that would have been his; she was the only person who did not know that he had shot himself as the only way of escape from insanity.

Love of one’s children did not exclude any other love; one or two mothers among her acquaintances had lovers, and believed that the children did not know. Some were divorced, and found happiness in new ties; only if the new love brought disappointment did they ever complain or regret. Her own mother had idolized her—yet there was room for Berner in her heart too, and she had been happy with him. Gert had been fond of his children—and a father’s affection is more understanding, more a matter of reflection and less instinctive than a mother’s—yet he had scarcely thought of Helge all last winter.

II

Jenny had been to fetch their mail bag at the station; and gave Francesca the papers and the letters, and opened the one addressed to herself. Standing on the gravel of the station platform in the blazing sun, she looked through Gert’s long effusion, reading the expressions of love at the beginning and the end and skipping the rest, which was only a mass of observations on love in general. She put it back in the envelope and placed it in her hand-bag. Ugh! those letters from Gert—she could not be bothered to read them. Every word proved to her that they did not understand one another; she felt it when they talked together, but in writing it was more painfully distinct still. Yet there was a mental relationship between them—how was it that they did not harmonize? Was he stronger or weaker than she? He had lost repeatedly, had resigned, stooped, and submitted in every way, and yet he went on hoping, living, and believing. Was it weakness or vitality? She could not make out.

Was it the difference in their ages after all? He was not old, but his youthfulness belonged to another period, when youth was more unsophisticated and had a healthier creed. Perhaps she was naÏve too—with her aims and opinions—but it was in a quite different way. Words change their meanings after twenty years—was that the reason?

The gravel glittered red and purple, and the paint on the station building was blistered by the scorching sun. As she looked up everything went dark before her eyes for a moment; it was a peculiar sensation, but probably the effect of the heat, which she seemed to feel more than usual this summer.

The haze hung trembling over fields and meadows, reaching right out to where the forest lay, a dark green line under the deep blue summer sky. The foliage of the birches had already changed its colour to a darker green.

Cesca was reading a letter from her husband. Her linen dress was strikingly white against the dark gravel of the platform.

Gunnar Heggen’s luggage had been put on the pony cart, and he stood stroking the horse’s head and talking to it while he waited for the ladies. Cesca put her letter in her pocket, shaking her head as if trying to drive away a thought.

“Sorry to keep you so long, boy—now let us start.” Jenny and Cesca took the front seat; she was taking the reins herself. “I am so pleased, Gunnar, that you could come. Won’t it be nice to be together again for a few days, we three? Lennart sends his love to both of you.”

“Thanks—is he all right?”

“Oh yes—first-rate, thanks. Brilliant idea of father, wasn’t it, to go away with Borghild and leave the house to me and Jenny? Old Gina looks after us, and is ready to stand on her head for us. I call it perfectly lovely.”

“It is delightful to see you again, you two.”

He laughed and chatted with them, but Jenny imagined she noticed a touch of sadness behind his merry talk. She knew that she looked worn and tired herself, and Cesca in her cheap, ready-made costume looked like a tomboy beginning to get old without having been properly grown up. Cesca seemed to have shrunk very much in the one year they had been separated, but she chatted on as before, telling them what they were going to have for dinner, that they would have coffee in the garden, and that she had bought liqueurs and whisky and soda to celebrate the occasion of their visit.

That night, when Jenny came into her bedroom, she sat down on the window-seat to cool her face in the fresh breeze made by the fluttering curtain. She was not sober; it was an extraordinary thing, but it was a fact. She could not understand how it had happened; all she had had was one glass and a half of toddy and a couple of small liqueurs after supper. True, she had not eaten much, but she had no appetite lately. She had had strong coffee, so perhaps it was that and the cigarettes which affected her, although she smoked much less now than she used to.

Her heart beat irregularly, and hot waves were rushing over her till she felt moist all over. The landscape she was looking at from the window, the greyish fields, the soft coloured flower-beds in the garden, and the dark trees against the pale summer sky turned and twisted before her eyes, and the room seemed turning round. A taste of whisky and liqueur rose to her throat. How horrid!

She spilt the water when she poured some in the basin, and she felt unsteady on her feet. Jenny mia, this is scandalous. You will soon be done for, my girl, if you cannot stand that much. In the olden days you could have taken twice as much.

She bathed her face and her hands for a while, keeping her wrists under water; then she pulled off her clothes and squeezed the full sponge over her body. She was wondering if Cesca and Gunnar had noticed it; she had not realized it herself till she got to her room; a good thing the Colonel and Borghild had not been there.

She felt better after her wash, got into her nightdress, and went to sit by the window again. Her thoughts were wandering about confusedly, calling up fragments of conversation between Cesca and Gunnar, but all of a sudden she felt wide awake, realizing with vivid surprise that she had been drunk. Never before had she had such an experience; she used scarcely to feel it at all, even if she took quite a lot of wine.

Anyhow, it had passed off now, and, feeling limp and cold and sleepy, she went to lie down in the big bed. Fancy if she were to wake up tomorrow with a “head”—that would be a new experience.

She had scarcely settled down in the bed and closed her eyes when the disagreeable heat again stole over her, plunging her whole body in a bath of perspiration. The bed seemed to rock under her like a ship in a storm, and she felt sea-sick. Lying perfectly still, she tried to overcome the nausea, telling herself: I will not, I will not, but it was no good. Her mouth filled with water, and she had scarcely time to get up before she was overcome with sickness.

Heavens! Was she really as drunk as that? It became most embarrassing, but it ought to be over now. She tidied up, drank some water, and went to bed again, hoping to sleep it away, but after a brief moment of rest, with her eyes shut, the rocking began again and with it the heat and the nausea. It was astonishing, for her head was now quite clear—yet she had to get up once more.

Stepping back into bed, a thought suddenly struck her. Nonsense! She lay down again, pressing her neck deep into the pillows. It was impossible. She did not want to think of it, but, unable to dismiss the thought from her mind, she began a review of recent events. She had not felt quite well lately, had been tired and worn out, worried and nervous generally; that was probably why the little she had taken last night had been too much for her. She could quite understand now that people become abstemious after a few nights of the kind she had just experienced. The other matter she would not consider; if things had gone wrong she would know it in due time—it was no good worrying unnecessarily. She was going to sleep; she was so tired—but she could not keep her thoughts away from that awful subject—ugh!

At the beginning of their relations the possibility of consequences had quite naturally presented itself to her mind, and once or twice she had been in the throes of anxiety, but she had been able to master it and had forced herself to look reasonably at the matter. What if it were true? The dread of having a child is really a senseless superstition; it happens every day. Why should it be worse for her than for any poor working girl, who was able to provide for herself and her child? The anxiety was a remnant from the times when an unmarried woman in similar circumstances had to go to the father or her relations and confess that she had had a good time, and that they had to pay the expenses—with the sad prospect of never afterwards having her provided for by somebody else—a quite sufficient reason for their anger.

Nobody had any right to be angry with her. Her mother would, of course, be sorry, but when a grown-up person tried to live according to his conscience the parents had nothing to say. She had tried to help her mother as much as possible, she had never worried her with her own troubles, her reputation had never been spoilt by any tales of levity, flirtation, or revelling, but where her own opinions about right and wrong differed from that of other people, she meant to follow them, even if it would be painful to her mother to hear disagreeable things said about her.

If her relations with Gert were a sin, it did not mean that she had given too much, but too little, and whatever the consequences would be, she had to bear them without complaint.

She could provide for a child just as well as many a girl who had not a tenth part of her knowledge. There was still some money left of her inheritance—enough for her to go abroad. If the profession she had chosen was a poor one, she knew that several of her fellow-artists were able to keep wife and children with it, and she had been used to helping others from the time she was almost a child. She would, of course, prefer not to have to do it; so far everything had been all right—she would not think of it.

Gert would be in despair.

If it was true, how dreadful that it should happen now. If it had happened when she loved him, or thought she did, and she could have gone away in good faith, but now, when everything that had been between them had crumbled to pieces, torn asunder by her own thinking and pondering....

During these weeks at Tegneby she had made up her mind not to go on any longer. She was longing to go away to new conditions, new work. Yes, the longing for work had come back; she had had enough of this sickly desire of clinging to somebody, to be cuddled and petted and called little girl.

At the thought of breaking with him her heart winced with pain. She shrank from causing him sorrow, but she had kept it up as long as possible. Gert had been happy while it lasted, and he was free from the degrading slavery with his wife.

She was perfectly resigned to the thought that her life henceforth would be work and solitude only. She knew she could not obliterate the past months from her life; she would always remember them and the bitter lessons they had taught her. The love that others found enough was not enough for her—it was better for her to dispense with it altogether than to be contented.

Yes, she would remember, but as years went by the memory of the short happiness mixed with so much pain and bitter repentance would perhaps be less poignant, and she would be able partly to wipe out the memory of the man to whom she had done a deadly wrong—and whose child perhaps she bore.

No; it was impossible. Why lie here brooding over it?

But if it were true....

When Jenny at last sank into a heavy and dreamless sleep it was almost daylight, but when she awoke again with a shock, it was not much lighter. The sky was a little more yellow above the garden trees, and the birds were chirping sleepily. She was instantly wide awake, and the same thoughts returned; she would hardly get any more sleep that night, and she resigned herself to thinking them over and over again.

III

Heggen had left; the Colonel and Borghild had returned and gone again to pay a visit to a married sister of Francesca’s. Jenny and Cesca were alone, and they went about by themselves, deep in their own thoughts.

Jenny was convinced now of her condition, but she had not been able to realize what it all meant; if she tried to think of the future, her imagination stood still. She was, on the whole, in a better frame of mind now than in the first desperate weeks when she was waiting anxiously for her suspicions to be disproved.

She told herself that there would be a way out of it for her as for so many other women. Fortunately she had spoken of going abroad since last autumn. She had not made up her mind about telling Gert or not, but she thought she would not do it.

When she was not thinking of herself she thought of Cesca. There was something the matter—something that was not as it ought to be. She was sure Cesca was fond of Ahlin. Did he not care for her any longer?

Cesca had had a bad time of it this first year of her married life; there had been serious money troubles. Cesca looked so small and dejected. Hour after hour of an evening she would sit on Jenny’s bed telling her about all her household worries. Everything was so expensive in Stockholm, and cheap food was bad, especially when one had not learnt to cook. Housework was all so difficult when one was brought up in such an idiotic way as she had been, and the worst of it was that it had to be done over and over again. She had scarcely finished cleaning the house before it was in an awful state again, and the moment she had finished a meal there was the washing up—and so it went on indefinitely, cooking things, soiling plates, and washing up again. Lennart tried to help her, but he was just as clumsy and unpractical as she was. Then, too, she worried about him. The commission for the monument had been given to some one else after all; he was never appreciated, and yet he was so gifted, but far too proud, both individually and as an artist. It could not be helped—and she would not have had him different. In the spring he had had a long illness, being confined to bed for two months with scarlet fever, pneumonia, and subsequent complications—it had been a very trying time for Cesca.

But there was something else—Jenny felt it distinctly—that Cesca did not tell her, and she knew she could not be to Cesca now what she had been in the old days. She had no longer the tranquil heart and open mind, ready to receive the sorrows of others and able to give comfort; and it hurt her to feel that she could no longer help.

Cesca had gone to Moss one day to do some shopping. Jenny preferred to stay at home, and was spending the day in the garden reading, so as not to think. Then, when she found that she could not pay attention to her book, she started knitting, but soon lost count of her stitches, pulled them out, and went on again, trying to be more attentive. Cesca did not come back to dinner as she had promised, and Jenny dined alone, killing the afternoon by smoking cigarettes which she did not enjoy, and knitting, though her work constantly dropped on to her lap.

At last, about ten o’clock Cesca came driving up the avenue; Jenny had gone to meet her, and the moment she sat down beside her in the cart she saw that something had happened, but neither of them said a word.

Later, when Francesca had had something to eat and they were having a cup of tea, she said quietly without looking at Jenny:

“Can you guess whom I met in town today?”

“No.”

“Hans Hermann. He is on a visit at the island and living with a rich woman who seems to have taken him up.”

“Is his wife with him?” asked Jenny.

“No; they are divorced. I saw in the papers that they had lost their little boy in the spring. I am sorry for her”—and Cesca began to talk of other things.

When Jenny was in bed Cesca came quietly into her room, sitting down at the foot end of the bed and pulling her nightdress well over her feet. She sat with her arms folded round her knees, her little dark head making a black shadow on the curtain.

“Jenny, I am going home tomorrow. I will send a wire to Lennart early in the morning and leave in the afternoon. You must stay here as long as you like, and don’t think me very inconsiderate, but I dare not stay. I must go at once.” She was breathing heavily. “I cannot understand it, Jenny. I have seen him. He kissed me, and I did not strike him. I listened to all he had to say, and I did not strike him in the face as I ought to have done. I don’t care for him—I know that now—and yet he has power over me. I am afraid. I dare not stay, because I don’t know what he might make me do. When I think of him now I hate him, but when he speaks to me I seem to get petrified; and I could not believe that anybody could be so cynical, so brutal, so shameless.

“It seems as if he does not understand there is such a thing as honour or shame; they do not exist for him, and he does not believe that anybody else cares for them either. His point of view is that our talking of right and wrong is only speculation, and when I hear him speak I seem to get hypnotized. I have been with him all the afternoon, listening to his talk. He said that as I was married now I need not be so careful about my virtue any longer, or something to that effect, and he alluded to his being free again, so as to give me some hope, I suppose. He kissed me in the park and I wanted to scream, but could not make a sound. Oh, I was so afraid. He said he would come here the day after tomorrow—they were going to have a party tomorrow—and all the time he smiled at me with that same smile I was always so afraid of in the old days.

“Don’t you think I ought to go home when I feel like this?”

“Yes; I think so.”

“I am a goose, I know. I cannot rely upon myself, as you see, but you can be certain of one thing: if I had been false to Lennart, I would go straight to him and tell him, and kill myself the same instant before his eyes.”

“Do you love your husband?” asked Jenny.

Francesca was silent a moment.

“I don’t know. If I loved him really as one ought to love, I suppose I should not be afraid of Hans Hermann. Do you think I should have let Hans behave like he did and kiss me?

“But I know, anyhow, that if I did wrong to Lennart I could not go on living. You understand, don’t you? While I was Francesca Jahrman I was not very careful about my good name, but now I am Francesca Ahlin, and if I let fall the very faintest shadow of a suspicion on that name—his name—I should deserve to be shot down like a mad dog. Lennart would not do it, but I would do it myself.”

She dropped her arms suddenly and crept into the bed, nestling close to Jenny.

“You believe in me, don’t you? Do you think I could live if I had done anything dishonourable?”

“No, Cesca.” Jenny put her arms round her and kissed her. “I don’t think you could.”

“I don’t know what Lennart thinks; he does not understand me. When I get home I will tell him everything just as it is, and leave it to him.”

“Cesca,” said Jenny, but checked herself. She would not ask, after all, if she was happy. But Cesca began to tell by herself:

“I have had many difficulties since I married, I must tell you, and I have not been very happy, but then I was so foolish and ignorant in many ways.

“I married Lennart because Hans began to write to me when he was divorced, saying that he was determined to have me, and I was afraid of him and did not want to have anything to do with him. I told Lennart everything; he was so kind and sympathetic and understood me, and I thought he was the most wonderful man in the world—and so he is, I know.

“But I did something awful. Lennart cannot understand it, and I know that he has not forgiven me. Perhaps I am wrong in telling you, but I must ask somebody if it is really so that a man can never forgive it, and you must answer me frankly—tell me if you think that it is impossible ever to get over it.

“We went to Rocca di Papa in the afternoon when we were married. You know how dreadfully afraid I have always been of marriage, and when Lennart took me into our room in the evening, I began to cry. Lennart was such a dear to me.

“This was on a Saturday. We did not have a particularly pleasant time—I mean Lennart did not, for I would have been delighted to be married like that, and every morning when I awoke I was so grateful to him, but I was scarcely allowed to kiss my husband.

“On the Wednesday we had gone to the top of Monte Cavo, and it was marvellously beautiful up there. It was in the end of May and the day was glorious. The chestnut wood was light green, the leaves had just come out, the broom was blossoming madly in the crevices, and along the road grew heaps of white flowers and lilies. There was a haze in the air, for it had rained earlier in the day, and the Nemi and Albano lakes were lying silvery white below, with all the little white villages round. The whole Campagna and Rome were wrapped in a thin veil of mist, and farther out the Mediterranean shone like a golden line on the horizon.

“Oh, it was such a day! And life seemed wonderfully beautiful to me—but Lennart was sad. To me he was the most perfect man in the world, and I was immensely fond of him. All of a sudden it seemed so silly of me to make a fuss, and I put my arms round his neck and said: ‘I want to be yours, for I love you.’”

Cesca was silent a second, taking a deep breath.

“Oh, Jenny—how happy he was, poor boy!” She swallowed her tears. “He was so pleased. ‘Now?’ said he—‘here?’ and took me in his arms, but I resisted. I don’t know really why I did it. It would have been beautiful in the deep forest and the sunshine.

“He rushed out and stayed away all night. I lay awake. I was anxious, wondering what he had done, where he had gone. Next day we went back to Rome and stayed at an hotel. Lennart had taken two rooms. I went to him in his room—but there was no beauty in it. We have never been quite happy since. I know that I have offended him frightfully, but tell me, Jenny, if you think it a thing a man never can forget or forgive?”

“He ought to have realized afterwards that you did not understand what it was you were doing—how it would hurt him.”

“No.” Cesca was shivering. “But I do now. I see that it was something pure and beautiful that I soiled, but I did not understand it then. Jenny, do you think a man’s love could ever get over that?”

“It ought to. You have proved since that you want to be a good and faithful wife to him. Last winter you worked so hard and suffered without complaining, and in the spring when he was ill you nursed him week after week, watching night after night by his bedside.”

“That is nothing to speak of,” said Cesca eagerly. “He was so good and patient, and he helped me in the house as much as he could. When he was ill some of our friends came sometimes to help me to sit up with him in the night. That week when he was near death we had a nurse, but I sat up just the same because I wanted to—although I was not really needed.”

Jenny kissed Cesca’s forehead.

“There is one thing I have not told you, Jenny. You warned me, you remember, to be more careful with men, and said I had no instincts. Gunnar used to scold me, and Miss Linde said once, don’t you remember, that if you make a man excited that way he goes to somebody else.”

Jenny felt quite cold with fright for what was coming next.

“Well, I asked him something about that on this first morning.”

Jenny could not say a word. “I understand that he cannot forget it and perhaps not forgive, but I wish he would find an excuse for me, remember how very stupidly I looked at it all.” She hesitated, searching for words. “Our life has been so horrid ever since. He does not really wish to kiss me—if he ever does, it is almost against his will, and he is angry afterwards with himself and with me. I have tried to explain, but it is no good. To be quite honest, I don’t know what to make of it all, but I do not mind anything any longer if I could only make him happy. Anything that makes Lennert happy is good and beautiful to me. He thinks that I sacrifice myself, but it is no sacrifice—quite the contrary. Oh, I have cried for nights and days in my room because I saw that he was longing for my love, and I have tried to kiss him, but he pushes me away.

“I am very fond of him, Jenny. Tell me, can’t one love a man in that way too?—can I not say that I love Lennart?”

“Yes, Cesca.”

“You cannot think how desperate I have been. But I cannot help being as I am. When we are out of an evening with other artists I see that he is in a bad humour; he does not say anything, but I see he thinks I flirt with them. It is true, perhaps, for I get into good spirits when I can have a meal out and need not cook and wash up once for a change, and not be afraid of spoiling the food when Lennart has to eat it all the same because we cannot afford to throw it away. Sometimes I was glad, too, of not having to be alone with Lennart, though I am fond of him and he is of me—I know he is. If I ask him about it he says, ‘You know it quite well,’ and smiles in a queer way, but he does not trust me because I cannot love with my senses and yet like to flirt. Once he said I had not a notion of what love really meant and that it was his fault for not being able to awaken it in me, but there would probably be another man some day who could. O God, how I cried!

“You know we are ever so poor. Well, in the spring Gunnar managed to get my still-life picture sold—the one I had at the exhibition three years ago. We got three hundred kroner for it and we lived on it for several months, but Lennart did not like spending the money I had earned. I cannot see what difference it makes when we are fond of each other, but he talked about having brought me into misery and so on. We have got debts too, of course, so I wanted to write to father asking him for a few hundreds, but he would not let me. I thought it so ridiculous. Borghild and Helga have lived at home or abroad all these years and had everything given to them, whereas I have saved and pinched with the little I had from mother since I came of age, because I did not want to take anything from papa after what he said to me when I broke my engagement with Kaasen and there was all the talk about Hans and me. Father has since admitted that I was right. It was mean of Kaasen and of them at home to try and force me to marry him because he had beguiled me into an engagement when I was only seventeen, and did not know that marriage meant anything else but what you read in silly girl stories. When I began to understand, I knew I would rather kill myself than marry him. If they had succeeded in forcing me to it, I would have led them a life, taking all the lovers I could get just out of spite and to pay them out. Papa sees it now, and he says I can have money whenever I want it.

“Lennart was very weak after his illness, and the doctor said he must go into the country—and I myself was tired and overworked, so I said I ought to go away for a change and a rest as I was going to have a baby. I got his permission to write to papa for money. We got it and went to WÄrmland, having a lovely time. Lennart was getting well and strong, and I took up my painting again. When he understood I was not expecting a child really, he asked if I had not made a mistake, and I told him I had tricked him, not wanting to lie to him. But he is angry with me for it, and I can see that he does not quite believe me. If he understood my nature, don’t you think he would believe in me?”

“Yes, Cesca dear.”

“You see, I had told him the same thing once before—about the baby, I mean—in the autumn, when he was so sad and we were not happy. I wanted him to be pleased and to be kind to me, and he was. It was a lovely time. I had really lied, but I began to believe it myself at last, for I thought God would make it true, so that I need not disappoint him. But God did not do it.

“I am so unhappy because I can’t have one. Do you think it is true—some people say it is so,” she whispered emotionally—“that a woman cannot have a child if she cannot feel—passionate?”

“No,” said Jenny sharply. “I am sure it is only nonsense.”

“I am sure everything would come all right then, for Lennart wishes it so very much. And I—oh, I think I should be so good—an angel for joy at having a dear little child of my own. Can you imagine anything more wonderful?”

“No,” whispered Jenny, confused, “when you love each other. It would help you to get over many difficulties.”

“Yes, it would. If it were not so awkward I would go and see a doctor. Don’t you think I ought to? I think I will some day, but I am so stupid about it—I feel so shy. I suppose it really is my duty as I am married. I might go to a lady doctor—one who is married and has children of her own.

“Think of it! A tiny little creature all your own; Lennart would be so happy!”

Jenny set her teeth in the dark.

“Don’t you think I ought to go home tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“I will tell Lennart everything. I don’t know if he will understand me—I don’t myself, but I am going to tell him the truth always. Should I not, Jenny?”

“When you think it is right you should do so. One must always do what one thinks right, and never do anything one is not absolutely sure about.”

“Good-night, Jenny dear.” She embraced her friend with sudden earnestness. “Thank you! It is so lovely to have you to talk to; you are so good, and you know how to take me. You and Gunnar always get me on to the right way. I don’t know what I should do if it weren’t for you.”

Then, standing by the bed, she said: “Won’t you come through Stockholm when you go abroad this autumn? Please, do! You could stay with us. I am getting a thousand kroner from father because he is going to give Borghild the same for her trip to Paris.”

“Thanks, I should like to, but I don’t know yet what I am going to do.”

“Do come if you can! Are you sleepy? Do you want me to go now?”

“I am a little tired,” and, pulling Cesca’s head down, she kissed her. “God bless you, darling.”

“Thank you.” Cesca went across the floor on her bare feet; at the door she turned, saying in a sad, childish voice: “I do wish Lennart and I could be happy!”

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:

A few days later came a whole bundle of letters. Jenny waded through some of the writing, printed in an awful gothic scrawl, and then wrote to a Mrs. Schlessinger in the vicinity of WarnemÜnde, renting a room from the fifteenth of November. She gave Mrs. Rasmussen notice, and told Gunnar by letter of her decision.

On the eve of her departure she wrote to Gram:

So she moved from one widow to another, and into another small cottage—this time a red one with whitewashed windowsills and standing in a little garden with flagged paths and shells around the flower-beds, where the dahlias and chrysanthemums stood black and rotting. Twenty to thirty similar houses stood along a small street leading from the railway station to the fishing harbour, where the waves foamed against the long stone piers. On the beach, a little away from the village, stood a small hotel with the shutters up. Endless roads, with bare, straggling poplars bending in the wind, led out over interminable plains and swamps past small brick farms with a strip of garden front and a couple of haystacks at the back.

Jenny walked along the road as far as she could manage, returning home to sit in her little room, which this time was overloaded with precious knick-knacks, coloured plaster casts of castles, and merry scenes at country inns in brass frames. She had not the strength to change her wet shoes even, but Mrs. Schlessinger took off the boots and stockings, talking all the time, exhorting her to keep up her courage, telling her about all the other young ladies she had had in the house—how So-and-so had married and was well off and happy now.

When she had been there a month Mrs. Schlessinger came into her room one day, excited and beaming—a gentleman had come to see the young lady. Jenny was paralysed with fright, but managed at last to ask what he looked like. “Quite young,” said Mrs. Schlessinger, with a lurking smile—“and very nice looking.” It dawned upon her that it might be Gunnar, and she got up, but, suddenly changing her mind, wrapped herself up in a rug and sat down in the deepest of her armchairs.

Mrs. Schlessinger departed, pleased to announce a visitor. Showing Gunnar into the room, she remained an instant smiling by the door before closing it.

He squeezed her hand, almost hurting her, and greeted her with a beaming smile:

“I thought I had better come up here to see what kind of a place you had settled on. It is rather a dull part of the world you have chosen, but it is healthy anyway.” He shook the water from his hat as he spoke.

“You must have some tea and something to eat,” said Jenny, making a movement as if meaning to rise, but remained sitting, saying with a blush: “Do you mind ringing the bell?”

Heggen ate with excellent appetite, talking all the while. He was delighted with Berlin; he had lived in a workmen’s quarter—the Moabit—and spoke with equal enthusiasm about the social democrats and the military, for “there is something grand and manly about it, and the one stimulates the other.” He had been over some great factories and had studied night life, having met a Norwegian engineer who was on his honeymoon and a Norwegian couple with two lovely daughters, who were dying to see a little vice at close quarters. They had been to National, Riche, and to Amorsaale, and the ladies had enjoyed it all immensely.

“But I offended them, I’m afraid—asked Miss Paulsen to come home with me late one evening.”

“Gunnar, how could you!”

“Well, I was not quite sober, you understand; it was only a joke, you know. If by any chance she had consented, I should have been in an awful fix. Might have had to marry a little girl who amuses herself sniffing at such things—no, thank you. It was great fun to see her so virtuously offended. There was no danger really—little girls of that sort don’t give away their treasure without making sure of a fair return.”

He blushed suddenly. It struck him that Jenny might think it tactless of him to speak like that before her—now. But she only laughed:

“What mad things you do!”

As Heggen went on talking, the unnatural, painful shyness gradually left her. Once or twice, when she did not notice it, his eyes anxiously scanned her face—heavens! how thin and hollow-eyed she was, and furrowed about the mouth. The sinews of her neck were prominent, and there were a couple of ugly lines across the throat.

The rain had stopped, and she consented to go for a walk with him. They walked in the sea-mist along the deserted road with the scraggy poplars.

“Take my arm,” said Gunnar casually, and Jenny took it, feeling heavy and tired.

“It must be awfully dull for you here, Jenny—don’t you think it would be much better if you went to Berlin?”

Jenny shook her head.

“You would have the museums there to go to and other things besides—and somebody to be with at times. You don’t care to go to National anyway. Won’t you come, just for a bit of a change? You must be deadly dull here.”

“Oh no, Gunnar—I could not go now, you understand.”

“You look quite nice in that ulster,” said Gunnar cautiously, after a short pause.

Jenny bent her head.

“Oh, I am a fool,” said he suddenly. “Forgive me. You must tell me, Jenny, if I bother you.”

“Oh no, you don’t bother me. I am glad you came.”

“I realize that it must be awful for you, Jenny.” His voice had changed completely. “I quite realize it, but I am sure you are making it still worse by going about here all alone. I do think you ought to go somewhere else—somewhere a little less hopeless than this.” He was looking at the dark plain and the rows of poplars losing themselves in the distance.

“Mrs. Schlessinger is so very kind,” said Jenny evasively.

“Oh yes, good soul; I am sure she is.” He smiled. “I think she suspects me of being the culprit.”

“Probably,” said Jenny, smiling too.

They walked on in silence. After a while Gunnar asked:

“How are you going to arrange matters? Have you made any plans as to the future?”

“I don’t know yet. I suppose you mean about the child? I may leave it with Mrs. Schlessinger for a time; she would look after it all right, I dare say. Or I may get some one to adopt it; you know, such children are adopted sometimes. I might call myself Mrs. Winge and never mind what people think.”

“You are quite decided, then, to break completely with—er—the man concerned? You wrote me to that effect.”

“I am,” she said firmly. “It is not the man I was engaged to,” she added, after a pause.

“Thank God!” he burst out, so relieved that Jenny could not help smiling a little.

“Well, you know, Jenny, he was not worth reproducing—not by you anyway. I saw in the papers recently that he has got his doctor’s degree. Well, it might have been worse—I was afraid....”

“It is his father,” she said abruptly.

Heggen came to a dead stop. She fell to crying desperately, and he put his arm round her and laid his hand to her cheek while she went on sobbing with her head on his shoulder.

Standing so, she began to tell him all about it. Once she looked up at his face; it was pale and haggard; and she started crying again. When she stopped, he lifted her head, looking at her:

“My God, Jenny—what you must have suffered! I cannot realize it.”

They walked back to the village in silence.

“Come with me to Berlin,” he said suddenly. “I cannot bear to think of you here alone and brooding over this.”

“I have almost given up thinking,” she said, tired.

“Oh, it’s too awful!” he burst out, with such violence that she came to a sudden stop. “Always the best of you that get let in for this kind of thing, and we have no idea of what you have to go through. It is dreadful!”

Heggen stayed three days. Jenny could not explain why, but she felt much better after his visit. The unbearable feeling of humiliation was gone; she was able to face her confinement with more composure and confidence.

Mrs. Schlessinger went about smiling slyly in spite of Jenny’s declaration that the gentleman was her cousin.

He had offered to send her some of his books, and at Christmas a whole case arrived, besides flowers and chocolates. Every week he wrote her a long letter about all manner of trifles, enclosing cuttings from Norwegian papers. In January he came up for her birthday and stayed two days, leaving behind some of the latest Norwegian books. Shortly after his last visit she fell ill. She was poorly, worried, and sleepless during the remaining weeks. She had never busied her thoughts with the actual confinement or been anxious about it before, but, feeling always wretched now, she was seized by a sudden dread of what she had to go through, and when the time came she was quite worn out with insomnia and anxiety.

It was a nasty case. Jenny was more dead than alive when the doctor, who had been sent for from WarnemÜnde, at last held her son in his hands.

VI

Jenny’s son lived six weeks—exactly forty-four days and a half, she said bitterly to herself, thinking again and again of the short time she had felt really happy.

She did not cry for the first days after his death, but she could not leave the dead child, and sat moaning deep down in her throat and taking it in her arms to caress it:

“Darling little boy—mother’s pretty little boy, you must not go—I cannot let you go. Can’t you see I want you so?”

The child was tiny and feeble at birth, but Jenny and Mrs. Schlessinger had both thought he was thriving and making good progress. Then one morning he fell ill, and by midday it was all over.

After the funeral she started to cry, and could not stop; for weeks afterwards she sobbed unceasingly night and day. She fell ill herself too; inflammation of the breasts developed, and Mrs. Schlessinger had to send for the doctor, who performed an operation. The despair of her soul, together with the pains of her body, gave her many a dreadful, delirious night.

Mrs. Schlessinger slept in the adjoining room, and on hearing her cries of agony, rushed in and sat down by the bed, comforting her, stroking her thin, clammy hands with her own fat, warm ones, and coaxing and lecturing her a little. It was God’s will, and was probably much better for the boy and for her too—still so young as she was. Mrs. Schlessinger had lost two children herself—little Bertha when she was two years old, and Wilhelm at fourteen, such a dear boy too—yet they were born in wedlock and should have been the support and comfort of her old age. But this little one would only have been a chain round the feet of the FrÄulein who was so young and pretty. He had been very dear and sweet, the little angel, and it was very hard....

Mrs. Schlessinger had lost her husband too, and many of the young ladies who had stayed in her house had seen their little ones die; some of them had been pleased, others had put their babies out to nurse at once so as to get rid of them. It was not nice, of course, but what could one do? Some had cried and wailed as Jenny did, but they got over it in time, and married and settled down happily afterwards. But a despair like FrÄulein’s she had never yet witnessed.

Mrs. Schlessinger suspected in her heart that her patient’s despair was caused to a great extent by the departure of the cousin first to Dresden and then to Italy just about the time the boy died. But that is exactly what they always did—the men.

The memory of those maddening, agonizing nights was ever afterwards associated with the picture of Mrs. Schlessinger sitting on the stool by her bed while the light rays from the lamp were refracted in the tears dropping from her small, kind eyes on to her round red cheeks. And her mouth, which did not stop talking for a second, her little grey plait of hair, the white night-jacket trimmed with pointed lace, and her petticoat of grey and pink stripped flannel scalloped at the bottom. And the small room with plaster medallions in brass frames.

She had written to Heggen about her great joy, and he had replied saying he would have loved to come and have a look at the boy, but the journey was long and expensive and he was on the point of starting for Italy. He sent his best wishes to her and the little prince, hoping to welcome them both in Italy soon. At the time of the child’s death Heggen was in Dresden and sent her a long and sympathetic letter.

As soon as she was well enough to write she sent a few lines to Gert, giving him her address, but asking him not to come and see them until the spring, when baby would be big and pretty. Only his mother could see now that he was lovely. She wrote him a longer letter when she was up and about again.

On the day the child was buried she wrote telling Gram in a few words of her loss, informing him of her intention to go south the same evening, and asking him not to expect to hear from her until she was more like herself again. “Do not worry about me,” she wrote. “I am fairly composed now, but hopelessly miserable, of course.”

Her letter crossed one from Gert, who wrote:

VII

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.

VIII

Heggen was sitting at the outer side of the marble table, taking no part in the conversation; now and then he cast a glance at Jenny, who sat pressed into the corner, with a whisky and soda before her. She was chatting very merrily with a young Swedish lady across the table, without taking the slightest notice of her neighbours, Dr. Broager and the little Danish artist Loulou Schulin, who both tried to draw her attention. Heggen saw that she had had too much to drink again. A company of Scandinavians and a couple of Germans had met in a wine shop, and were finishing the night in the inmost corner of a somewhat dingy cafÉ. They were all of them more or less affected by what they had drunk, and very much opposed to the request of the landlord that they should leave, as it was past time for locking up and he would be fined two hundred lire.

Gunnar Heggen was the only one who would have liked the symposium to come to an end; he was the only sober one, and in a bad temper.

Dr. Broager was constantly applying his black moustache to Jenny’s hand; when she pulled it away he tried to kiss her bare arm. He had succeeded in placing his arm behind her and they were squeezed so tight in the corner that it was useless to try and get away from him. Her resistance was, to tell the truth, somewhat lame, and she laughed without offence at his boldness.

“Ugh!” said Loulou, shrugging her shoulders. “How can you stand it? Don’t you think he is disgusting, Jenny?”

“Yes, I do, but don’t you see that he is exactly like a blue-bottle?—it is useless trying to drive him away. Ugh! stop it, doctor!”

“Ugh!” said Loulou again. “How can you stand that man?”

“Never mind. I can wash myself with soap when I get home.”

Loulou Schulin leaned against Jenny, stroking her arms. “Now I will take care of these poor, beautiful hands. Look!” She lifted one of them to be admired by the company round the table. “Isn’t it lovely?” and, loosening the green motor veil from her hat, she wrapped it round Jenny’s arms and hands. “In a mosquito net, you see,” she said, thrusting out a small tongue swiftly at Broager.

Jenny sat an instant with her arms and hands enveloped in the green veil before undoing it and putting on her coat and gloves.

Broager leaned back with eyes half closed, and Miss Schulin raised her glass: “Your health, Mr. Heggen.”

He pretended not to hear, but when she repeated her words he seized his glass: “Pardon—I did not see”—and, after taking a sip, looked away again.

One or two people in the company smiled. Heggen and Miss Winge lived next door to each other on the top floor of a house somewhere between Babuino and Corso; intimate relations between them seemed therefore to be a matter of course. As to Miss Schulin, she had been married to a Norwegian author, but after a year or so of married bliss had left him and the child, gone out into the world under her maiden name as “Miss,” and calling herself an artist.

The landlord came up once more to the company, urgently soliciting their departure; the two waiters put out the gas at the farther end of the room and stood waiting by the table, so there was nothing else to be done but pay and leave the place.

Heggen was one of the last as they came out into the square. By the light of the moon he saw Miss Schulin taking Jenny’s arm, both running towards a cab, which some of the others were storming. He ran in the same direction and heard Jenny calling out: “You know, the one in Via Paneperna,” just as she jumped into the already filled cab and fell into somebody’s lap.

But some ladies wanted to get out and others to get in—people kept on jumping out from one door and in at another, while the driver sat motionless on his seat waiting, and the horse slept with its head drooping against the stone bridge.

Jenny was in the street again now, but Miss Schulin reached out her hand—there was plenty of room.

“I’m sorry for the horse,” said Heggen curtly, and Jenny started to walk at his side behind the cab, the last among those who had not got room in the vehicle, which rolled on ahead.

“You don’t mean to say you want to be with these people any longer—to walk as far as Paneperna for that?” said Heggen.

“We might meet an empty cab on the way.”

“How can you be bothered with them?—they are all drunk,” he added.

Jenny laughed in a languid way.

“So am I, I suppose.”

Heggen did not answer. They had reached the Piazza di Spagna when she stopped:

“You are not coming with us, then, Gunnar?”

“Yes, if you absolutely insist on going on—otherwise not.”

“You need not come for my sake. I can get home all right, you know.”

“If you go, I go—I am not going to let you walk about alone with those people in that state.”

She laughed—the same limp, indifferent laugh.

“You will be too tired to sit to me tomorrow.”

“Oh, I shall be able to sit all right.”

“You won’t; and anyhow, I shan’t be able to work properly if I have to walk about all night.”

Jenny shrugged her shoulders, but started to walk in the direction of Babuina—the opposite way to the rest of the party.

Two policemen passed them; otherwise there was not a living soul to be seen. The fountain was playing in front of the Strada di Spagna, lying white with moonlight and bordered by black and silver glittering evergreen shrubs.

Suddenly Jenny spoke in a hard and scornful voice:

“I know you mean it kindly, Gunnar. It is good of you to try and take care of me, but it is not worth while.”

He walked on in silence.

“No, not if you have no will of your own,” he said after a while.

“Will”—imitating him.

“Yes; I said will.”

Her breath came quick and sharp, as if she wanted to answer, but she checked herself. She was suddenly filled with disgust—she knew that she was half drunk, but she would not accentuate it by beginning to shout, moan, and explain—perhaps cry, before Gunnar. She set her teeth.

They reached their own entrance. Heggen opened the door and struck a match to light her up the endless flight of dark stone steps. Their two small rooms were on the half-landing at the end of the stairs; a small passage outside their doors ended in a marble staircase leading to the flat roof of the house.

At her door she shook hands with him, saying in a low voice:

“Good-night, Gunnar—thanks for tonight.”

“Thank you. Sleep well.”

“Same to you.”

Gunnar opened the window in his room. The moon shone on an ochre-yellow wall opposite, with closed shutters and black iron balconies. Behind it rose Pincio, with sharply outlined dark masses of foliage against the blue moonlit sky. Below him were old moss-covered roofs, and where the dark shadow of the house ended some washing was hung out to dry on a terrace farther down. He was leaning on the windowsill, disgusted and sad. He was not very particular in general, but to see Jenny in such a state. Ugh! And it was more or less his own fault; she had been so melancholy the first months of her return—like a wounded bird—and to cheer her up a little he had persuaded her to join the party, thinking of course that he and she would amuse themselves by watching the others only, never for a moment suspecting that it would have such an effect on her. He heard her come out from her room and go on to the roof. He hesitated a moment, then followed her.

She was sitting in the only chair, behind the little corrugated-iron summer-house. The pigeons cooed sleepily in the dovecot above.

“Why have you not gone to bed? You will be cold up here.” He fetched her shawl from the summer-house and handed it to her, sitting down between the flower-pots on the top of the wall. They sat quietly staring at the city and the church domes that seemed floating in the moonlit mist. The outlines of distant hills were completely obliterated.

Jenny was smoking. Gunnar lit a cigarette.

“I can hardly stand anything now, it seems—in the way of drink, I mean. It affects me at once,” she said apologetically.

He understood that she was quite herself again.

“I think you might leave it off altogether for a time, and not smoke—at least not so much. You know you have complained of your heart.”

She did not answer.

“I know that you agree with me about those people, and I cannot think how you could condescend to associate with them—in the way you did.”

“One is sometimes in need of—well, of a narcotic,” she said quietly. “And as to condescending....” He looked into her white face; her fair fluffy hair shone in the moonlight. “Sometimes I think it does not matter, though now—at this moment—I feel ashamed, but then I am extraordinarily sober just now, you see,” she said, smiling. “I am not always, although I have not taken anything, and in those moments I feel ready for any kind of revels.”

“It is dangerous, Jenny,” he said, and again after a pause: “I think it was disgusting tonight—I cannot call it anything else. I have seen something of life; I know what it leads to. I would not like to see you come down and end as something like Loulou.”

“You can be quite easy in your mind about me, Gunnar. I am not going to end that way. I don’t really like it, and I know where to stop.”

He sat looking at her.

“I know what you mean,” he said at last. “Other women have thought as you, but when one has been gliding downward for a time one ceases to care about where to stop, as you call it.” Stepping down from the wall, he went towards her and took her hand:

“Jenny, you will stop now, will you not?”

She rose, smiling:

“For the present, anyway. I think I am cured for a long time of that sort of thing.” She shook his hand firmly: “Good-night; I’ll sit for you in the morning,” she said, going down the stairs.

“All right, thanks.”

He remained on the roof for some time smoking, shivering a little, and thinking, before going down to his room.

Next day she sat to him after lunch until it grew dark; in the rests, they exchanged some insignificant words while he went on painting the background or washed his brushes.

“There,” he said, putting down the palette and tidying up his paint-box. “That will do for today.”

She came to look at the picture.

“The black is good, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think it is very effective.”

He looked at his watch:

“It is almost time to go out and get something to eat—shall we dine together?”

“All right. Will you wait for me while I put on my things?”

A moment later when he knocked at her door she was ready, standing before the glass to fasten her hat.

How good looking she was, he thought, when she turned round. Slim and fair in her tight-fitting steel-grey dress, she looked very ladylike—discreet, cold, and stylish. What he had thought of her yesterday seemed quite impossible today.

“Did you not promise to go to Miss Schulin this afternoon to see her paintings?”

“Yes, but I am not going.” She blushed. “Honestly I don’t care to encourage an acquaintance with her, and I suppose there is not much in her paintings either.”

“I should not think so. I cannot understand your putting up with her advances last night. Personally, I would rather do anything—eat a plateful of live worms.”

Jenny smiled, and said seriously:

“Poor thing, I daresay she is not happy at all.”

“Pooh! not happy. I met her in Paris in 1905. I don’t think she is perverse by nature—only stupid and full of vanity. It was all put on. If it were the fashion now to be virtuous she would sit up darning children’s stockings, and would have been the best of housewives. Possibly painting roses with dewdrops on as a recreation. But once she got away from her moorings she wanted to see life—free as an artist, she thought she ought to get herself a lover for the sake of her self-respect. But unfortunately she got hold of a duffer who was old-fashioned enough to want her to marry him in the old non-modern way when things had gone wrong, and expected her to look after the child and the house.”

“It may be Paulsen’s fault that she ran away—you never know.”

“Of course it was his fault. He was of the old school, wanting happiness in his home, and he gave her probably too little love and still less cudgelling.”

Jenny smiled sadly:

“I know, Gunnar, that you believe life’s difficulties are easily solved.”

Heggen sat down astride on a chair with his arms on the back.

“There is so much of life that we don’t know anything about, that what we know is easy enough to manage. Have to make your aims and dreams accordingly, and tackle the unexpected as best you can.”

Jenny sat down in the sofa, resting her head in her hands:

“I can no longer feel that there is anything in life I am so sure about that I could make it a foundation for my judgment or the aim of my exertions,” she said placidly.

“I don’t think you mean it.”

She only smiled.

“Not always,” said Gunnar.

“I suppose there is nobody who means the same thing always.”

“Yes, always when one is sober. You were right last night in saying that sometimes one isn’t sober even if one hasn’t been drinking.”

“At present—when I am sober once in a while, I——” She broke off and remained silent.

“You know what I think about life, and I know you have always thought the same. What happens to you is, on the whole, the result of your own will. As a rule, you are the maker of your own fate. Now and then there are circumstances which you cannot master, but it is a colossal exaggeration to say it happens often.”

“God knows I did not will my fate, Gunnar. Yet I have willed for many years and lived accordingly, too.”

Both were quiet a moment.

“One day,” she said slowly, “I changed my course an instant. I found it so severe and hard to live the life I considered the most worthy—so lonely, you see. I left the road for a bit, wanting to be young and to play, and thus came into a current that carried me away, ending in something I never for a second had thought could possibly happen to me.”

After a moment’s silence Heggen said:

“Rossetti says—and you know he is a much better poet than painter:

Jenny said nothing—and Gunnar repeated: “That the same goal is still on the same track.”

“Do you think it is easy to find the track to the goal again?” asked Jenny.

“No, but ought one not to try?” he said, almost in a childish way.

“But what goal did I have at all?” she said, with sudden vehemence. “I wanted to live in such a way that I need never be ashamed of myself either as a woman or as an artist. Never to do a thing I did not think right myself. I wanted to be upright, firm, and good, and never to have any one else’s sorrow on my conscience. And what was the origin of the wrong—the cause of it all? It was that I yearned for love without there being any particular man whose love I wanted. Was there anything strange in it, or that I wanted to believe that Helge, when he came, was the one I had been longing for—wanting it so much that at last I really believed it? That was the beginning of what led to the rest. Gunnar, I did believe that I could make them happy—and yet I did only harm.”

She had risen and was pacing up and down the floor.

“Do you believe that the well you speak of will ever be pure and clear again to one who knows she has muddied it herself? Do you think it is easier for me to resign now? I longed for the same that all girls long for, and I long for it now, but I know that I have now a past which makes it impossible for me to accept the only happiness I care for. Pure, unspoilt, and sound it should be—but none of these conditions can I ever fulfil—not now. My experiences of these two last years are what I must be satisfied to call my life—and for the rest of it I shall just have to go on longing for the impossible.”

“Jenny,” said Gunnar, “I am sure I am right in saying again that it depends on yourself if these memories are going to spoil your life, or if you will consider them a lesson, however hard it may be, and still believe that the aim you once set for yourself is the only right one for you.”

“But can you not see it is impossible? It has sunk too deep; it has eaten into me like a corrosive acid, and I feel that what was once my inmost self is crumbling to pieces. Yet I don’t want it—I don’t want it. Sometimes I am inclined to—I don’t know really what—to stop all the thoughts at once. Either to die—or to live a mad, awful life—drown in a misery still greater than the present one. To go down in the mud so deep and so thoroughly that nothing but the end will come of it. Or”—she spoke low, with a wild, stifled voice—“to throw myself under a train—to know in the last second that now—just now—my whole body, nerves, heart, and brain will be made into one single shivering blood-stained heap.”

“Jenny,” he cried, white in the face, “I cannot bear to hear you speak like this!”

“I am hysterical,” she said soothingly, but she went to the corner where her canvases stood and almost flung them against the wall, with the painting turned out:

“Is it worth living to go about making things like those? Smearing oil paint on canvas? You can see for yourself that it is nothing now but a mess of paint. Yet you saw how I worked the first months—like a slave. Good God! I cannot even paint any more.”

Heggen looked at the pictures. He felt he had a firm ground to stand upon again.

“I should really like to have your frank opinion on—that piggish stuff,” she said provokingly.

“I must admit that they are not particularly good.” He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets looking at them. “But that happens to every one of us—I mean that there are certain times when you cannot produce anything, and you ought to know that it is only for a time. I don’t think one can lose one’s talent even if one has been ever so unhappy. You have left off painting for such a long time, besides; you will have to work it up again—to master the means of action, so to say. Take life study, for instance—I am sure it is three years since you drew a live model. One cannot neglect those things without being punished for it. I know from my own experience.”

He went to a shelf and searched among Jenny’s sketch-books:

“You ought to remember how much you improved in Paris—let me show you.”

“No, no, not that one,” said Jenny, reaching her hand for it.

Heggen stood with the book in his hand, looking amazed at her. She turned her face away:

“I don’t mind if you look at it—I tried to draw the boy one day.”

Heggen turned the leaves slowly. Jenny was sitting in the sofa again. He looked at the pencil sketches of the sleeping infant for a moment, then put the book carefully away.

“It was a great pity that you lost your little boy,” he said gently.

“Yes. If he had lived, all the rest would not have mattered. You speak about will, but when one’s will cannot keep one’s child alive, what is the good of it? I don’t care to try to make anything of my life now, because it seemed to me the only thing I was good for and cared about was to be a mother to my little boy. Oh, I could have loved him! I suppose I am an egoist at heart, for whenever I tried to love the others, my own self rose like a wall between us. But the boy was mine alone. I could have worked if he had been spared to me. I could have worked hard.

“I had made so many plans. On the way down here they all came back to my mind. I had decided to live in Bavaria with him in the summer, because I was afraid the sea air would be too strong for him. He was going to lie in his pram under the apple trees while I painted. There is not a place in the world I could go to where I have not been in my dreams with the boy. There is nothing good or beautiful in all the world that I did not think, while I had him, he should learn and see. I have not a thing that was not his too. I used to wrap him up in the red rug I have. The black dress you are painting me in was made in WarnemÜnde when I was out of bed again, and I had it cut so that it would be easy to nurse him.

“I cannot work because I am so full of him—the longing for him paralyses me. In the night I cuddle the pillow in my arms and sob for my baby-boy. I call him and talk to him when I am alone. I should have painted him, to have a picture of him at every age. He would have been a year old now, would have had teeth and been able to take hold of things, to stand up, and perhaps to walk a little. Every month, every day I think of him—how he would have grown and what he would be like. When I see a woman with a bambino on her arm, or the children in the street, I always think of him and how he would look at their age.”

She stopped talking for a moment.

“I did not think you felt it like that, Jenny,” said Heggen gently. “It was sad for you, of course—I quite understood that—but I thought, on the whole, it was better he was taken. If I had known you were so distressed about it, I should have come to see you.”

She did not answer, but went on in the same strain: “And he died—such a tiny, tiny little thing. It is only selfishness on my part to grudge him death before he had begun to feel and to understand. He could only look at the light and cry when he was hungry or wanted to be changed; he did not know me even—not really, anyhow. Some vague glimpses of reason had possibly begun to awaken in his little head, but, think of it, he never knew that I was his mother.

“Never a name had he, poor darling, only mother’s baby-boy, and I have nothing to remember him by, except just material things.”

She lifted her hands as if holding the child to her heart, then let them fall empty and lifeless on the table.

“I remember so distinctly my impression when I first touched him, felt his skin against mine. It was so soft, a little damp—the air had scarcely touched it yet, you see. People think a newborn child is not nice to feel, and perhaps it is so when it is not your own flesh and blood. And his eyes—they were no special colour, only dark, but I think they would have been grey-blue. A baby’s eyes are so strange—almost mysterious. And his tiny head was so pretty, when he was feeding and pressing his little nose against me. I could see the pulse beating and the thin, downy hair; he had quite a lot of it—and dark—when he was born.

“Oh, that little body of his! I can never think of anything else—I can feel it lying in my hands. He was so round and fat, and every bit of him was so pretty—my own sweet little boy!

“But he died! I was looking forward so much to all that was going to happen that it seems to me now I did not pay enough attention to things when I had him, or kissed him or looked at him enough, though I did nothing else in those weeks.

“When he was gone there was nothing left but the yearning for him. You cannot understand what I felt. My whole body ached with it. I fell ill, and the fever and the pain seemed to be my longing materialized. I missed him from my arms, between my hands, and at my cheek. Once or twice in the last week of his life he clutched my finger when I put it in his hand. Once he had somehow got hold of a little of my hair—oh, the sweet, sweet little hands....”

She lay prostrate over the table, sobbing violently, her whole form shivering.

Gunnar had got up and stood hesitating, emotion rising in his throat. Then he went to her and, bending down over her head, he touched her hair lightly with a shy, gentle kiss.

She continued crying, in the same position, for a little while. At last she got up and went to the washstand to bathe her face.

“Oh, how I miss him,” she repeated, and he could not find anything to say but “Jenny, if I had known that you felt it so much.”

She came back to where he was and, putting her hands on his shoulders, said:

“Gunnar, you must not pay any attention to what I said a while ago. Sometimes I am not quite myself, but you will understand that, for the sake of the boy, if for no other reason, I am not going to throw myself entirely into a life of dissipation. At heart I really want to make the best I can of my life—you know that. I mean to try and work again, even if the result is poor in the beginning. I have always the comfort of knowing that one need not live longer than one cares to.”

She put on her hat again, finding a veil for her tear-stained face:

“Let us go and have something to eat—you must be starving by this time—it is very late.”

Gunnar Heggen blushed all over his face. Now she mentioned it, he felt awfully hungry, and was ashamed of himself for admitting it at such a moment as this. He dried the tears from his wet, hot cheeks and took his hat from the table.

X

By tacit agreement they passed the restaurant where they usually had their meals and where there were always a number of their countrymen, and, continuing their way in the twilight towards the Tiber, they crossed the bridge into the old Borgo quarters. In a corner by the Piazza San Pietro there was a small trattoria where they had dined after going to the Vatican, and they went there.

They ate in silence. When she had finished Jenny lit a cigarette, and sat sipping her claret and rubbing her fingers with the fragrant tangerine peel. Heggen smoked, staring in front of him. They were almost alone in the place.

“Would you like to read a letter I got from Cesca the other day?” asked Jenny suddenly.

“Yes. I saw there was a letter for you from her—from Stockholm, is it not?”

“Yes; they are back there and going to stay the winter.” Jenny took the letter out of her bag and handed it to him.

Gunnar handed the letter back to Jenny, who put it in her pocket.

“I am so pleased,” she said gently. “I am glad there are some people who are happy. That feeling is something still left of my old self—even if there is nothing else.”

Instead of going back to the city, they crossed the Piazza, walking in the direction of the church.

The shadows fell coal black on to the square in the moonlight. White light and night-black darkness played about ghostlike in one of the arcades. The other lay in complete obscurity but for the row of statues on top. The front of the church was in shadow, but here and there the dome glittered like water. The two fountains sent their white jets sparkling and foaming towards the moon-blue sky. The water rose whirling in the air, splashing down again to the porphyry shelves to drop and trickle back into the basin.

Gunnar and Jenny walked slowly in the shade of the arcade towards the church.

“Jenny,” he said all of a sudden, in a perfectly cool and everyday voice, “will you marry me?”

“No,” she answered after a pause, in a similar tone.

“I mean it.”

“Yes, but surely you understand that I don’t want to.”

“I don’t see why not. If I understood you rightly, you don’t value your life very highly at present, and you entertain thoughts of suicide occasionally. As you feel so inconsolable in any case, why should you not marry me? I think you might try.”

Jenny shook her head: “Thank you, Gunnar—but I think it would be taxing your friendship too heavily.” She spoke in earnest. “In the first place, you ought to understand that I cannot accept it, and in the second that, if you could make me accept you as a last resource, it would not be worth your troubling to reach out one of your little fingers to save me.”

“It is not friendship.” He hesitated a little. “The truth is that I have got fond of you. It is not to save you—although I would do anything to help you, of course—but because I realize now that if anything happened to you I don’t know what I should do. I dare not think of it. There is nothing in the world I would not gladly do for you, because you are very dear to me.”

“Oh, Gunnar, don’t!” She stopped and looked at him almost in fear.

“I know quite well that you are not in love with me, but that need not prevent your marrying me. You say you are tired of everything, and have nothing to live for, so why not try it?” His voice grew more earnest, and he exclaimed: “For I know that one day you too will be fond of me! You could not help it, seeing how fond I am of you.”

“You know that I have always been fond of you,” she said seriously, “but it is not a feeling you would be satisfied with in the long run. A strong and entire devotion is more than I can give.”

“Not at all. We can all give that. Was I not convinced that I should never experience anything but—little love affairs? In fact, I did not believe anything else existed.” His voice sank. “You are the first woman I love.”

She stood still and silent.

“I have never uttered that word to any woman before—I had a kind of reverence for it, but then I have never loved a woman before. I was always in love with something particular about them—the corners of Cesca’s mouth, for instance, when she smiled; her unconscious coquetry. There was always one thing or other that took my fancy and inspired me to invent adventures about them—adventures I wanted to experience. I fell in love with one woman because the first time I saw her she wore a beautiful red silk dress, almost black in the folds, like the darkest of roses. I thought of her always in that dress. And with you that time in Viterbo—you were so sweet, so gentle and reserved, and there was a glint in your eyes when the rest of us laughed as if you would have liked to be merry with us, but dared not. That time I was in love with the idea of seeing you gay and smiling.

“But I have never loved another human being till now.”

He turned his face from her, staring at the jet of water rising in the moonlight, and the new sensation in him rose too, inspiring him with new words, which burst in ecstasy from his lips:

“I love you so much, Jenny, that everything else is of no account. I am not sorry you don’t love me in return, for I know you will some day; I feel that my love is strong enough to make you return it. I have time to wait; my happiness will be in loving you.

“When you spoke about being trampled upon and throwing yourself under the train, something happened to me. I could not explain what it was. I knew only that I could not listen to you saying such things. I knew I would never allow it to happen—not for my life. And when you spoke of the child, I felt infinitely sad to think that you had suffered so intensely and that I could not do anything for you. And I was sad too because I wanted you to love me. Everything you said was echoed in my soul—the boundless love and the bitter longing—and I understood that my love for you was just that. While we were in the trattoria and walking out here it has grown more and more clear to me how much you are to me, how I love you—and it seems to me that it has always been so. All I know and remember of you is part of it. I understand now why I have been so depressed since you came here. It was because I saw how you suffered. You were so quiet and sad the first weeks, and then came those fits of dissipation—and I remember that day on the road to WarnemÜnde, when you were crying against my shoulder—everything that concerns you is part of my love for you.

“I know how it all happened with the other men you have known—the boy’s father too. You have talked and talked with them about all you have been thinking, and there was no response to your words even when you tried to make them realize what you felt, because they could not understand your mind. But I know it—all you have been telling me today and what you said to me that day in WarnemÜnde you could not have told to anybody else. Only to me, because I understand—is it not so?”

She bent her head in surprised assent. It was true.

“I know that I alone understand you thoroughly. I know exactly what you are, and I love you as you are. If your mind were full of stains and bleeding wounds, I would love and kiss them until you were clean and well again. My love has no other purpose but to see you become what you always wanted to be and must be to feel happy. If you did ever so foolish a thing, I would only think you were ill or that some strange influence had poisoned your mind. If you deceived me or if I found you lying drunk in the road, you would be my own darling Jenny just the same.

“Will you not be mine—give yourself to me? Will you not come into my arms and let me hold you and make you happy and whole? I don’t know now quite how to set about it, but my love will teach me, and every morning you will wake up less sad—every day will seem a little brighter and warmer than the day before, and your sorrow less great. Let us go to Viterbo or anywhere you like. Give yourself to me, and I will nurse you as if you were a sick child. When you are well again you will have learnt to love me and to know that we two cannot live without each other.

“You are ill; you cannot look after yourself. Close your eyes and give me your hands; I will love you and make you well—I know I can do it.”

Jenny was leaning against a pillar. She turned her white face to him, smiling sadly:

“How can you imagine I would do such a great wrong, and sin against God?”

“You mean because you don’t love me? But I tell you it does not matter, because I know my love is such that you will end by returning it, when you have lived wrapped in it for a time.”

He seized her in his arms, covering her face with kisses. She made no resistance, but whispered:

“Don’t, Gunnar, please.”

He released her reluctantly:

“Why may I not?”

“Because it is you. I don’t know if I should have minded if it had been anybody else for whom I did not care at all.”

Gunnar held her hand and they walked up and down in the moonlight.

“I understand. When you had the little boy you thought your life had some aim and purpose again after all these aimless years, because you loved him and you needed him. When he died you became indifferent to everything and considered yourself superfluous in the world.”

Jenny nodded:

“There are a few people I care for enough to be sorry if I knew them in distress and glad if all was well with them. But I myself cannot add either to their sorrow or their joy—it has always been so, and one of the reasons why I was unhappy and filled with longing was just that my life was spent without making anybody happy. My sole wish and yearning was to make another being happy. I have always believed in that as the greatest blessing in life. You spoke of the joy of work—to me it never seemed enough, and it is very selfish, besides, because the greatest joy and satisfaction of it is yours alone; you cannot share it with anybody else. Unless you can share your happiness with others, you lose the greatest possible joy. When you are quite young and feel strongly you are selfish perhaps sometimes—I have felt it myself when I have reached a step nearer my goal, but as a rule it is only the abnormal beings who amass riches for any other purpose than spending. A woman’s life is useless to my mind if she is not the joy of somebody else—and I have never been that—I have only caused sorrow. The little happiness I have been able to give was only what any one else could have given just as well; they have loved me only for what they imagined me to be, not for my real self.

“After my baby’s death I began to realize how fortunate it was that there was nobody in the world whom I could cause a really inconsolable grief—nobody to whom I was indispensable.

“And now you tell me all this. You have always been the one person I least of all wanted to drag into my confused life; I have always been more fond of you, in a way, than of any one else I know. I enjoyed our friendship so much, because I thought that love and all it brings in its train could never come between us. You were too good for it, I thought. Oh, how I wish it had never changed!”

“To me it seems now that it has never been different,” he said gently. “I love you and you need me. I know I can make you happy again, and when I have done that you will have made me happy.”

Jenny shook her head:

“If I had the least bit of faith in myself left, it would be different. I might have listened to you if I had not felt so keenly that I have done with life. You say you love me, but I know that what you think you love in me is destroyed—dead. It is the same old story: you are in love with some quality you dream that I possess—that I have before or might have acquired. But one day you would see me as I really am, and I should only have made you unhappy too.”

“I should never look upon it as unhappiness whatever my fate might be. You may not be aware of it yourself, but I know that in the state you are now it only needs a touch for you to fall—into something that would be madness. But I love you, and I can see all the way that has led you to it, and if you feel I would follow you to try and carry you back in my arms, because I love you in spite of all.”

As they stood by their doors in the dark passage he took her hands: “Jenny, rather than be alone, would you not like me to remain with you tonight?”

She looked at him with a curious smile.

“Oh, Jenny!” He shook his head. “I may come to you, all the same. Would you be angry—or sorry?”

“I think I should be sorry—for your sake. No, do not come, Gunnar. I will not take your love when I know I could just as well give mine to anybody else.”

He laughed a little, half angrily, half sadly.

“Then I ought to do it. If once you were mine you would never belong to anybody else—I know you too well for that—but as you ask me not to, I will wait:” he added, with the same curious little laugh.

XI

All day long the weather had been bad, with cold, pale clouds high up in the sky; towards evening some thin brass-yellow stripes appeared on the western horizon. Jenny had been up to Monte Celio to sketch in the afternoon, but it did not come to much—she had been sitting listlessly on the big stairs outside of San Gregorio, looking down into the grove where the big trees were beginning to bud and daisies shone all over the grass. She came back through the avenue below the south side of the Palatine. The ruins showed dull grey against the palms of the convent on the mountain-top; the evergreen shrubs hung on the slope, powdered with chalky dust.

Some shivering postcard-sellers loitered about outside the Constantin arch on the Piazza, where the ruins of the Colosseum, the Palatine, and the Forum lay. Very few tourists were about; a couple of skinny old ladies bargained in vile Italian with a mosaic pedlar.

A small boy of barely three hung on to Jenny’s cloak, offering her a small wisp of pansies. He was exquisitely black eyed and long haired, and dressed in national costume, with pointed hat, velvet jacket, and sandals over white woollen socks. He could not speak distinctly yet, but he could manage to ask for a soldo.

Jenny gave him the coin, and instantly the mother came up to his side, thanking her and taking the money herself. She, too, had tried to give her dress a national touch by lacing a red velvet bodice on top of her dirty checked blouse, and pinning on top of her hair a serviette folded into a square. She carried an infant in her arms. It was three weeks old, she said, in answer to Jenny’s question. Yes, the poor dear was ill.

The infant was no bigger than Jenny’s own boy had been at birth. Its skin was red and sore and peeling, it was panting as if its throat were choked by mucus, and the eyes looked wearily from under inflamed, half-closed lids.

Oh yes, she took it every day to the hospital for treatment, said the mother, but they said there that it was going to die. Best thing for it, too—the woman was looking so tired and sad, besides being ugly and toothless.

Jenny felt the tears mounting to her eyes. Poor little creature, it certainly was much better for it to die. She passed her hand caressingly over the little ugly face. She had given the woman some money, and was on the point of going when a man suddenly passed her. He took off his hat and stopped for a moment, but walked on as Jenny did not acknowledge his salute. It was Helge Gram.

She was too much taken aback to think of answering. She bent down to the little boy with the pansies, taking his hands and pulling him closer to her, and talked to him, trying to master the unreasonable shivering of her whole body.

She turned her head once in the direction he had gone and saw him standing on the stairs that led to the street from the Piazza round the Colosseum, and looking in her direction.

She remained in the same position, talking to the child and the woman. When she looked up again he was gone, but she waited long after she had seen his grey coat and hat disappear round a corner.

Then she went home, almost running through side streets and passages, afraid of meeting him every time she turned a corner.

She got as far as the other side of Pincio, and went to have some food in a trattoria where she had never been before. Then after a rest and some wine, she began to feel better.

If she met Helge and he spoke to her it would be very painful; she would much prefer to escape it, but if it happened, it was nothing to be so senselessly afraid of. Everything between them was finished; what had occurred after their separation was no concern of his, and he had no right to take her to task for anything. Whatever he knew about it, and whatever he had to say, she had said it all to herself, for nobody knew better than she what she had done. She had to answer only to herself; nothing else could compare with that ordeal.

Need she fear anybody? Nobody could do her a great wrong than she had done to herself.

It had been a bad day—one of those days when she did not feel sober. However, she felt better now.

Scarcely was she out in the street before the same stupid, desperate fright came over her again, and, without realizing it, she rushed on as if lashed by it, with clenched hands and muttering to herself.

Once she pulled off her gloves, because she was burning hot, and she recollected suddenly having noticed a wet spot on one of them after she had caressed the child. She flung them away in disgust.

When she reached home she stood a moment hesitating in the passage, then knocked at Gunnar’s door, but he was not in. She went to look on the roof; there was no one there.

She entered her room, lit the lamp, and sat staring at the flame, her arms folded. After a while she rose and began walking restlessly up and down the floor—only to sit down again as before. She listened breathlessly to every sound on the stairs. Oh, if only Gunnar would come! And not the other one. But how could he? He did not know where she lived—he might have met somebody who knew and asked. Oh, Gunnar, Gunnar, come!

She would go straight to him, throw herself in his arms.

The moment she had seen Helge Gram’s light brown eyes again, her whole past, that had begun under their glance, confronted her. It all came back—the disgust, the doubt of her own ability to feel, to will and to choose, and the suspicion that in reality she wanted what she said she did not. While she was pretending to herself that she wanted to be strong, pure, and whole in her feelings, and while she said she wanted to be honest, courageous, disciplined—to work and to sacrifice herself for others—she allowed herself to be tossed between moods and desires she did not care to fight, although she knew she should have done so. She had pretended to love so as to sneak into a place in life which she could never have attained if she had been honest.

She had wanted to change her nature to fall in with the others who lived, although she knew she would always be a stranger among them because she was of a different kind. She had not been able to stand alone, a prisoner, so to say, of her own nature. And her relations to those who were strange to her innermost being—the son and the father—had been unnatural and repulsive. In consequence of it her own inner self was ruined; every fixed point in herself, to which she had held on, gave way—crumbled to nothing. She felt as if she were dissolving from within.

If Helge came, if she met him, she knew that the despair and disgust of her own life would overwhelm her. She did not know what would happen, but one thing was certain—she could not face a repetition of the old scenes.

And Gunnar. All these weeks, while he had been begging of her to be his, she had not made up her mind if she loved him or not. He wanted her such as she was, and he vowed that he could help her—build up again all that had been destroyed in her.

Sometimes she wished that he would take her by force, so that she need not choose. It did not matter what he said; she knew that if she became his, the little pride she had left told her that the responsibility was her own. She had to become what she had once been—what he believed she had been and could be again. Whether she cared or not, she had to clean herself from all that soiled her now, bury in a new life everything that had happened since she gave Helge Gram the kiss by which she betrayed her faith and her whole life up to that spring day on the Campagna.

Did she want to be his? Did she love him because he was all that she had wished to be, because his whole being awoke in her all that which she had once chosen to worship and to nurse—every faculty she had thought worth developing?

The love she had looked for on byways, driven by her morbid longing and feverish restlessness—would she find it here by surrendering to him, by shutting her eyes and giving herself to the one man she really trusted—the one who all her instincts told her was her conscience and her just judge?

She had not been able to do it—not in all these weeks. It seemed to her that she ought to try and get out by her own will from the mire into which she had descended; she wanted to feel that it was her will from the old days which had taken the lead of her shattered mind, so that she could get back ever so little of the respect and confidence in herself from before.

If she was to go on living, Gunnar was life itself to her. A few words written by him on a piece of paper, a book that brought her a message from some emotion in his soul had awakened the last smouldering longing back to life when after the death of the child she had dragged herself about like a maimed animal.

If he came now—he would win her. If he would but carry her the first bit of the way, she would try to walk the rest of it herself. And as she sat there waiting for him she decided in her shrinking soul: If he comes, I shall live. If the other one comes, I must die.

And when she heard steps on the stairs, and they were not those of Gunnar, and there was a knock at the door, she bent her head and went shivering to open it for Helge Gram, instinctively feeling that she opened the door to the fate she had challenged.

She stood looking at him while he walked into the room, putting his hat on a chair. She had not acknowledged his greeting this time either.

“I knew you were in town,” said he. “I came the day before yesterday from Paris. I looked up your address at the club, and meant to come and see you some day—but then I saw you in the street this afternoon. I recognized your grey fur a long way off.” He spoke swiftly—out of breath, as it were. “Will you not say good evening to me? Are you vexed because I have come to see you?”

“Good evening, Helge,” she said, taking the hand he offered her. “Will you not sit down, please?”

She sat down on the sofa. She could hear that her voice sounded calm and as usual. But in her brain she had the same delirious sensation of dread as in the afternoon.

“I wanted to come and see you,” said Helge, sitting down on a chair close to her.

“It was good of you,” replied Jenny. Both were silent.

“You live in Bergen now,” she said. “I saw that you had got your degree. I congratulate you.”

“Thank you.”

There was another pause.

“You have been abroad a long time. I meant to write to you sometimes, but it never came off. Heggen lives in this house, I see.”

“Yes; I wrote him to get a studio for me, but they are so dear and so difficult to find. This room has a good light, though.”

“I see that you have some pictures drying.”

He rose, went across the room, but returned immediately to his seat. Jenny bent her head, feeling that he did not take his eyes from her. They tried to keep up conversation. He asked about Francesca Ahlin and other acquaintances they had in common, but there were long intervals when he sat staring at her.

“Do you know that my parents are divorced?” he asked suddenly.

She nodded.

“They stayed together for our sake as long as they could, whining and creaking against each other like two millstones until they had ground everything to powder between them. There was nothing more to grind, I suppose, so the mill stopped.

“I remember when I was a boy. They did not fight, but there was something in their voices that made you think they would like to. Mother abused him and used plain talk, always ending with tears. Father kept cool and quiet, but his voice was full of hatred and so hard and cutting. I lay in my bed listening to this performance that was forced on me. I used to think what a relief it would be to put a knitting needle right through my head, in at one ear and out at the other. The voices created a physical pain in my ears and spread to the whole of my head. Well, that was the beginning—they have done their duty as parents, and now it is all over.

“Hatred is an ugly thing; it makes everything ugly that comes in contact with it. I went to see my sister last summer. We have never been sympathetic, but I thought it disgusting to see her with that husband of hers. Sometimes I saw him kiss her—taking his pipe out of his thick wet mouth, he kissed his wife. I saw Sophy get quite white when he touched her. He is a pope in his pulpit and a libertine at home.

“As to you and me—it was quite natural. I understood it afterwards—that the fine, delicate threads between us should break, that they could not stand the atmosphere at home. When I had gone from you that time I regretted it, and meant to write to you, but do you know why I did not? I had a letter from my father, telling me he had been to see you and that he thought I ought to resume my relations with you. I have a superstitious objection to any advice from that quarter, so I did not write.

“All the time since we parted I have been longing for you, Jenny, dreaming of you, and recalling again and again to my memory the time I spent here with you. Do you know which place in Rome I revisited first of all—yesterday? I went to Montagnola and I found our names on the cactus leaf.”

Jenny was sitting with clenched hands, very pale.

“You look exactly the same as then, and you have lived three years about which I don’t know anything,” said Helge gently. “I can scarcely realize that I am here with you again—it seems as if all that has happened since we parted here in Rome were not true. Yet you belong perhaps to somebody else now?”

Jenny did not answer.

“Are you engaged?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

“Jenny”—Helge bent his head so that she could not see his face—“all these years I have been hoping—dreaming of winning you back. I have imagined that we should meet again some day and come to an understanding. You said I was the first man you had been fond of. Is my dream impossible?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Heggen?”

She did not answer at once.

“I have always been jealous of Heggen,” said Helge gently. “I thought he was the one, especially when I saw that you both lived here. So you are in love with each other?”

Jenny still did not answer.

“Do you love him?”

“Yes, but I will not marry him.”

“Oh, I see,” said Helge, in a hard voice.

“No.” She bent her head, tired, smiling sadly: “I have done with love; I don’t want to have anything more to do with it. I am tired, and I wish you would go, Helge.”

But he did not move.

“I cannot realize now when I see you again that it is all over. I never would believe it. I have been thinking so much of it, I suppose it was my own fault. I was so timid, I never knew what was the right thing to do. Everything might have been quite different. I have often remembered the last evening I was with you in Rome, and it seemed always that such an occasion would present itself again, for I left you then because I thought it was right. Surely, that could not have been the cause of my losing you? I had never been near a woman then,” he said, looking down. “I was warned by what I had seen at home. Dreams and fancies became a hell at times, but that fear was always paramount.

“I am twenty-nine and there has been no beautiful or happy experience in my life but that short spring spent with you. Can you not understand that I have never been able to separate you from my thoughts, that I love you as before? The only happiness I have known is that you gave me. I cannot let you go out of my life—not now.”

She got up, trembling, and he rose too. Instinctively she drew back a few steps from him:

“Helge, there has been another.”

He stood still, looking at her.

“You say there has been another—and it could have been I. I don’t care; I want you all the same. I want you now because you promised me once to be mine.”

Terrified, she tried to go past him, but he seized her violently in his arms. It took a few seconds for her brain to realize that he was kissing her mouth. She thought she made a resistance, but was in fact almost passive in his arms. She wanted to tell him not to, and she wanted to say who the other had been, but she could not. She would have told him about the child, but when she remembered the boy she shrank from mentioning him; she felt she must not drag her child into the disaster she knew was coming. As this thought crossed her mind she imagined she felt the dead little one caressing her, and it gave her a sensation of joy, so that her body relaxed for a second in his arms.

“You are mine—mine only—yes, yes, Jenny!”

She tore herself away from him and, running to the door, she called aloud for Gunnar. Helge was at her side again in an instant, taking her back in his arms.

They wrestled with each other by the door without a word. It seemed to Jenny that her life depended on her opening it and escaping into Gunnar’s room, but feeling Helge close to her, stronger than she, as he held her, it seemed to her that there was no escape—and at last she gave way.

In the grey morning light, he came over to her to kiss her:

“My glorious Jenny. How wonderfully beautiful you are. You are mine now, and everything will come right, will it not? Oh, I love you so.

“Are you tired? You must sleep when I have gone, and I will come to see you again at noon. Sleep soundly, my darling Jenny. Are you so tired?”

“Yes, very tired, Helge.”

She was lying with her eyes half closed, looking at the pale morning light coming through the ribs of the blind.

He kissed her when he stood fully dressed, holding his hat; then he kneeled by her bed and put an arm under her shoulder:

“Thank you for tonight. Do you remember that I said those same words to you the first morning in Rome, when we were at Aventine?”

Jenny nodded on her pillow.

“One more kiss—and good-night—my lovely Jenny.”

At the door he stopped:

“What about the front door? Is there a key, or is it one of those ordinary ones with a latch?”

“Yes, an ordinary one. You can open it all right from the inside.”

She remained in bed with her eyes closed. She saw her own body as it lay under the cover, white, bare, beautiful—a thing that she had flung away as she had the gloves. It was not hers any more.

She gave a start on hearing Heggen mount the stairs slowly and open his door. He walked up and down in his room, then came out again and went up the stairs to the roof. She heard him pacing to and fro above her head. She was sure he knew, but it did not make much impression on her tired brain. She felt no pain now. It seemed to her that he would probably think what had happened as natural and unavoidable as she did. She could not decide what was the next thing to do—it must just come as the other had done, as a necessary consequence of her opening the door last night to Helge.

She put out one foot from under the cover and lay looking at it. It was pretty. She bent it, accentuating the instep. Yes, it was pretty, white with blue veins and pink heel and toes.

She was tired—it was nice to feel so utterly tired. It felt like having recovered from some keen suffering. She was tired now, and what she had to do she did mechanically.

She got up and dressed. When she had put on stockings, bodice, and a skirt she slipped her feet into a pair of bronze slippers, washed, and did her hair in front of the glass without noticing the reflection of her face in it. Then she went to the small table where she kept her painting things, looking for the box containing her implements. In the night she had been thinking of the small triangular scraper,—she had sometimes played with it, putting it against her artery.

She took it out, looked at it, testing it with her finger, but she put it back again and took out a folding knife that she had once bought in Paris. It had a corkscrew, tin-opener, and many blades; one was short, pointed, and broad. She opened it.

She went back to her bed and sat down on it. Putting her pillow on the table at the side of the bed, she steadied her left hand on it and cut through the artery.

The blood spurted out, hitting a small water-colour on the wall above her bed. Noticing it, she moved her hand. She lay down on the bed and mechanically pushed off her shoes with her feet, and put her hand under the cover to prevent the blood from making a mess.

She did not think; she was not afraid; she felt only that she was surrendering to the inevitable. The pain of the cut was not great—only sharp and distinct, and concentrated on one spot.

After a while a strange, unknown sensation took hold of her, an agony that grew and grew—not a fear of anything in particular, but the feeling of an ache round her heart and sickness, as it were. She opened her eyes, but black specks flickered before her sight and she could not breathe. The room seemed to crumble down on her. She tumbled out of bed, tore the door open, rushed up the stairs to the roof, and collapsed on the last step.

Helge had met Gunnar Heggen as he came out of the front door. They had looked at each other, both touching their hats, and passed on without a word.

That meeting had sobered Helge. After the intoxication of the night his mood instantly changed to the other extreme, and what he had experienced seemed to him incredible, inconceivable, and monstrous.

He had dreamt of this meeting with her all these years. She, the queen of his dreams, had scarcely spoken to him, at first sitting quiet and cold and then suddenly throwing herself into his arms, wild, mad, without saying a word. It struck him now that she had said nothing—nothing at all to his words of love in the night. A strange, appalling woman, his Jenny. He realized suddenly that she had never been his.

Helge walked about in the quiet streets, up and down the Corso. He tried to think of her as she had been when they were engaged, to separate the dreams from the reality, but he could not form a clear picture of her, and he realized that he had never penetrated to the bottom of her soul. There had always been something about her he could not see, though he felt it was there.

He did not really know anything about her. Heggen might be with her now—why not? There had been another—she said so herself—who? How many more? What else that he did not know—but had always felt?...

And now—after this he could not leave her; he knew it—less than ever now. Yet he did not know her. Who was she, who had held him in a spell for three years—who had this power over him?

He turned on his way, hurrying back to her door, driven by fear and by rage. The front door stood open. He rushed up the stairs—she would have to answer him—tell him everything—he would not let her go. The door was open; he looked in and saw the empty bed with the blood-stained sheets and the blood on the floor. Turning round, he saw that she was lying huddled at the top of the stairs, and that the marble steps were red with her blood.

With a scream he ran up the stairs and lifted her up. He felt her body limp against his arm and her hands hung down cold—and he understood that the body he had held in his arms a few hours ago, hot and trembling with life, was now a dead thing, and would soon be carrion.

He sank to his knees with her on his arm, calling out wildly.

Heggen tore open the door to the terrace. His face was white and drawn. He saw Jenny. Seizing Helge, he flung him aside and bent down on his knees beside her.

“She was lying there when I came back—lying there....”

“Run for a doctor—quick!” Gunnar had pulled away her clothes, feeling her heart; he steadied her head and lifted her hands. Then he saw the wound, and, pulling out the blue silk ribbon from her bodice, he tied it hard round her wrist.

“Yes, but where shall I find....”

Gunnar gave a sudden cry of rage—then said in a quiet voice:

“I will go. Carry her in,” but he took her in his own arms and went towards the door. At sight of the blood-stained bed his face twitched. Turning away, he pushed open the door to his room and placed her on his own untouched bed. Then he rushed down the stairs.

Helge had moved at his side the whole time, his mouth half open as if paralysed in the act of crying out. But he stopped at Gunnar’s door. When he was left alone with her he stole into the room, touching her hand with his finger-tips, and he fell down beside the bed, crying wildly, hysterically, with his head against it....

XI

Gunnar walked along the narrow road, overgrown with grass, between the high, whitewashed garden walls. On the one side lay the barracks, probably with a terrace, as high up over his head some soldiers were laughing and talking. A tuft of yellow flowers, growing in a cleft of the wall, hung swaying. On the other side of the road the huge old poplars by the Cestius pyramid and the cypress grove in the new part of the cemetery stretched their tops towards the blue and silver clouded sky.

Outside the grated gate a girl sat crocheting. She opened to him, curtseying to thank him for the coin he gave her.

The spring air was mild and damp; in the closed green shade of the churchyard it became wet and warm as in a hothouse, and the narcissus along the border of the path gave out a hot, sickly scent.

The old cypresses stood round the graves that lay, green and dark with creepers and violets, set in terraces from the ivy-clad wall of the town. Above the flowers rose the monuments of the dead, little marble temples, white figures of angels, and big, heavy slabs of stone. Moss grew on them and on the trunks of the cypresses. Here and there a white or red flower still clung to the camelia trees, but most of them lay brown and faded on the black earth, exhaling raw, damp fumes. He remembered something he had read: the Japanese did not like camelias because they fell off whole and fresh like heads chopped off.

Jenny Winge lay buried at the farthest end of the cemetery near the chapel on a grassy slope, covered with daisies. There were only a few graves. On the border of the slope cypresses had been planted, but they were still very small, like toy trees with their pointed green tops on straight brown trunks, reminding one of the pillars in a cloister arcade. Her grave was a little way from the others; it was only a pale grey mound of earth, the grass round it having been trodden down when it was being dug. The sun shone on it and the dark cypresses formed a wall behind it.

Covering his face with his hands, Gunnar bent on his knees until his head rested on the faded wreaths.

The weariness of spring weighted his limbs, the blood flowed aching with sorrow and regret at every beat of his heavy heart.

Jenny—Jenny—Jenny—he heard her pretty name in every trill of the birds—and she was dead.

Lying far down in the dark. He had cut off a curl from her fair hair and carried it in his pocket-book. He took it out and held it in the sunshine—those poor little filmy threads were the only part of her luxurious, glossy hair the sun could reach and warm.

She was dead and gone. There were some pictures of hers ... there had been a short notice about her in the papers. And the mother and sisters mourned her at home, but the real Jenny they had never known, and they knew nothing about her life or her death. The others—those who had known—stared in despair after her, not understanding what they knew.

She who lay there was his Jenny; she belonged to him alone.

Helge Gram had come to him; he had asked and told, wailed and begged:

“I don’t understand anything. If you do, Heggen, I beg you to tell me. You know—will you not tell me what you know?”

He had not answered.

“There was another; she told me so. Who was it? Was it you?”

“No.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“Yes, but I am not going to tell you. It is no good your asking, Gram.”

“But I shall go mad if you don’t explain.”

“You have no right to know Jenny’s secrets.”

“But why did she do it? Was it because of me—of him—or of you?”

“No; she did it because of herself.”

He had asked Gram to leave him and had not seen him since; he had left Rome. It was in the Borghese garden, two days after the funeral, that Gram had come across him sitting in the sunshine. He was so tired; he had had to see to everything—give satisfactory explanations at the inquest, arrange for the interment, and write to Mrs. Berner that her daughter had died suddenly from heart failure. And all the time he had a kind of satisfaction in the thought that nobody knew of his own sorrow, that the real cause of her death was known only by him and for ever hidden with him. The sorrow had sunk so deep into him that it would for ever be the inmost essence of his soul, and he would never speak of it to any living being.

It would govern his whole life—and be governed by it; the colour and form of it would change, but it would never be effaced. Every hour of the day it was different, but it was always there, and always would be. On the morning when he had run for the doctor, leaving the other man alone with her, he had wanted to tell Helge Gram all he knew, and in such a way that his heart would turn to ashes like his own had done; but in the days that followed all he knew became a secret between him and the dead woman—the secret of their love. All that had happened had happened because of her being what she was, and as such he had loved her. Helge Gram was a casual, indifferent stranger to him and to her, and he had no more wish to avenge himself on him than he had pity for his sorrow and dread at the mystery.

And he understood that what had happened was natural because she was made as she was. Her mind swayed and bent for a gust of wind, because it had grown so upright and slender; he had thought she could grow as a tree grows, and had not understood that she was only a flower, a rich, fragile stem, springing up to be kissed by the sun and to let all the heavy, longing buds break into bloom. She had only been a little girl after all, and to his eternal sorrow he had not understood it until too late.

For she could not right herself again when once she had been bent; she was like a lily, that does not grow from the root again if the first stalk has been broken. There was nothing supple or luxuriant about her mind—but he loved her such as she was. And she was his only, for he alone knew how fair and delicate she had been—so strong in her desire to grow straight, and yet so frail and brittle, and with delicate honour, from which a spot never could be washed away because it made so deep a mark. She was dead. He had been alone with his love many nights and days, and he would be alone with it all the days and nights of his life.

He had stifled his cries of despair many a night in his pillows. She was dead, and she had never been his. He was the one she should have loved and belonged to, for she was the only one he had ever loved. He had never touched or seen her beautiful, slim, white body that enclosed her soul like a velvet sheath about a thin, feeble blade. Others had possessed it, and had not understood what a strange and rare treasure had happened to fall into their hands. It lay buried in the grave, a prey to ugly change until it was consumed and reduced to a handful of dust in the earth.

Gunnar was shaking with sobs.

Others had loved her, soiled, and destroyed her, not knowing what they did—and she had never been his.

As long as he lived there would be moments when he would feel the same agony about it as now.

Yet he was the only one who owned her at the last; in his hand only would her golden hair sparkle, and she herself was living in him now; her soul and her image were reflected in him clear and firm as in still water. She was dead; she had no more sorrow—it stayed with him instead, to go on living, not to die until he died himself, and because it was living it would grow and change. What it would be like in ten years, he did not know, but it might grow to something great and beautiful.

As long as he lived there would be moments when he would feel the same strange, deep joy that it was so, as he felt now.

He remembered dimly what he had been thinking in the early morning hour when he was walking on the terrace overhead while she was ending her life. He had been enraged with her. How could she do it? He had begged and implored to be allowed to help her, to carry her away from the abyss she was nearing, but she had pushed him away and thrown herself down before his eyes—exactly in the way a woman would—an obstinate, irresponsible, foolish way.

When he saw her lying lifeless he had been in despair and rage again, because he would not have let her go. Whatever she had done he would have exonerated her, helped her, offered her his love and trust.

As long as he lived there would be moments when he would reproach her for choosing to die—Jenny, you should not have done it. Yet there would be moments when he would understand that she did so, because it was in keeping with her character, and he would love her for it as long as he lived. And never would he wish that he had not loved her.

But he would cry desperately, as he had already done, because he had not loved her long before; he would cry for the lost years when she had lived beside him as his friend and comrade and he had not understood that she was the woman who should have been his wife. And never would the day dawn when he would wish he had not understood, even if only to see that it was too late.

Gunnar rose from his knees. He took a small box from his pocket and opened it. One of Jenny’s pink crystal beads was in it. He had found it in the drawer of her dressing-table when he packed up her belongings; the string had broken and he kept one of the beads. He took some earth from the grave and put it in the box. The bead rolled about in it and was covered with grey dust, but the clear rose colour showed through and the fine rents in the crystal glittered in the sun.

He had sent all her possessions to her mother, except the letters, which he had burnt. The child’s clothes were in a sealed cardboard box. He sent it to Francesca, remembering that Jenny had said one day she would give them to her.

He had looked through all her sketch-books and drawings before packing them and carefully cut out the leaves with the picture of the boy, hiding them in his pocket-book. They were his—all that was hers alone was his.

On the plain grew some purple anemones; he rose mechanically to pick them. Oh, spring-time!

He remembered a spring day two years ago when he had been in Norway. He had been given a cart and a red mare at the posting station; the owner was an old schoolfellow of his. It was a sunny day in March; the meadows were yellow with withered grass, and the dung-heaps over the ploughed fields shone like pale brown velvet. They drove past the familiar farms with yellow, grey, and red houses and apple yards and lilac bushes. The forest all round was olive green, with a purple tint on the birch twigs, and the air was full that day with the chirping of invisible birds.

Two little fair-haired children were walking in the road, carrying a can. “Where are you going, little ones?”

They stopped, looking suspiciously at him.

“Taking food to father?”

They assented hesitatingly—a little astonished that a strange gentleman should know it.

“Climb up here and I’ll give you a ride.” He helped them into the cart. “Where is father working?”

“At Brusted.”

“That’s over beyond the school, is it not?”

Thus went the conversation. A stupid, ignorant man asking and asking, as grown-up people always talk to children, and the little ones, who have such a lot of wisdom, consult each other quietly with their eyes, giving sparingly of it—as much as they think convenient.

Hand in hand they walked along beside a rushing brook when he put them down, and he turned his horse in the direction he wanted to go.

There was a prayer meeting that evening at his home. His sister Ingeborg was sitting by the old corner cupboard, following with a pale, ecstatic face and shining steel-blue eyes a shoemaker, who spoke of spiritual grace; then suddenly she rose herself to bear witness.

His pretty, smart sister who once had been so fond of dancing and merriment. She loved to read and to learn; when he had got work in town he sent her books and pamphlets and the Social Democrat twice a week. At thirty she was “saved,” and now she “spoke in tongues.”

She had bestowed all her love on her nephew Anders and a little girl they had with them—an illegitimate child from Christiania. With sparkling eyes she told them about Jesus, the children’s Friend.

The next day it was snowing; he had promised to take the children to a cinema in the small neighbouring town, and they had to walk a couple of miles in the melting snow, leaving black footprints behind. He tried to talk to the children, asking questions and receiving guarded answers.

But on the way back the children were the inquisitive ones, and, flattered, he gave frank and detailed answers, anxious to give them proper information about the films they had seen—of cowboys in Arizona and cocoanut harvest in the Philippines. And he tried his best to tell them properly and answer without ever being at a loss.

Oh, spring-time!

It was on a spring day he had gone to Viterbo with Jenny and Francesca. Dressed in black, she had been sitting by the window looking out with eyes so big and grey—he remembered it well.

The stormy clouds sent showers over the brown plains of the Campagna, where there were no ruins for the tourists to go and see, only a crumbled wall here and there and a farm with two pines and some pointed straw-stacks near the house. The pigs herded together in the valley, where some trees grew beside a stream. The train sped between hills and oak woods where white and blue anemones and yellow primroses grew among the faded leaves. She said she wanted to get out to pick them, gather them in the falling rain among the dripping leaves under the wet branches. “This is like spring at home,” she said.

It had been snowing; some of the snow was still lying grey in the ditches, and the flowers were wet and heavy, with petals stuck together.

Little rivulets rushed down the crevices, vanishing under the railway line. A shower beat against the window and drove the smoke to earth.

Then it cleared over valleys and grove, and the water streamed down the sides of the hills.

He had had some of his things in one of the girls’ boxes. When he remembered it in the evening they had already begun to undress and were laughing and chatting when he knocked at their door. Jenny opened it a little, giving him what he asked for. She had on a light dressing-jacket with short sleeves, leaving the slender white arm bare. It tempted him to many kisses, but he dared only give it one single, light one. He had been in love with her then, intoxicated with the spring, the wine, the merry rain, and the sudden sunshine, with his own youth and the joy of life. He wanted to make her dance—that tall, fair girl, who smiled so guardedly as if she were trying a new art, something she had never yet done—she who had stared with grey, serious eyes at all the flowers they passed and that she wanted to pick.

Oh, how different all might have been! The dry, bitter sob shook his frame again.

The day they went to Montefiascone it rained too, so hard that the water was flung back from the stone bridge on to the girls’ lifted skirts and ankles. How they had laughed, all three of them, when they walked up the narrow street, the rain-water streaming towards them in small torrents. When they reached Rocca, the castle cliff in the centre of the old town, it cleared. They leaned over the rampart, looking at the lake, which lay black beneath the olive groves and the vineyards. The skies hung low about the hills round the lake, but across the dark water there came a silver line, which broadened, the mist rolled back into the crevices, and the mountain came into better view. The sun pierced the clouds, which sank down to rest round the small promontories with grey stone castles. Towards the north a distant peak became visible—Cesca said it was Monte Amiata.

The last rain-clouds rolled across the blue spring sky, melting before the sun; the bad weather fled westward, darkening the Etrurian heights, which sloped desolately towards the far yellow-white strip of the Mediterranean. The sight reminded him of the mountain scenery in his own country, in spite of the olive grove and the vineyards.

He and she had stooped behind the hedge, and he had held out his coat so that she could light her cigarette. The wind was keen up there, and she shivered a little in her wet clothes. Her cheeks were red and the sun glittered in her damp, golden hair as she stroked it away from her eyes with one hand.

He would go there tomorrow to meet the spring, the cold, naked spring, full of expectation, with all the buds wet and shivering in the wind—blossoming all the same.

She and the spring were one to him, she who stood shivering and smiled in the changing weather and wanted to gather all the flowers into her lap. Little Jenny, you were not to gather the flowers, and your dreams never came true—and now I am dreaming them for you.

And when I have lived long enough to be so full of longing as you were, perhaps I will do as you, and say to fate: Give me a few of the flowers; I will be satisfied with much less than I wanted in the beginning of life. But I will not die as you did, because you could not be content. I will remember you, and kiss your head and your golden hair and think: She could not live without being the best, and claiming the best as her right; and maybe I shall say: Heaven be praised that she chose death rather than living content.

Tonight I will go to Piazza San Pietro and listen to the wild music of the fountain that never stops, and dream my dream. For you, Jenny, are my dream, and I have never had any other.

Dream—oh, dream!

If your child had lived he would not have been what you dreamt when you held him in your arms. He might have done something good and great, or something bad and disgraceful, but he would never have accomplished what you dreamt he should do. No woman has given life to the child she dreamt of when she bore it—no artist has created the work he saw before him in the moment of his inspiration. And we live summer after summer, but not one is like the one we have been longing for when we stooped to gather the wet flowers in the spring showers. And no love is what lovers dreamed when they kissed for the first time.

If you and I had lived together we might have been happy or not, we might have done good or ill to one another, but I shall never know what our love would have been if you had been mine. The only thing I know is that it would never have been what I dreamt that night when I stood with you in the moonlight while the fountain was playing.

And yet I would not have missed that dream, and I would not miss the dream I am dreaming now.

Jenny, I would give my life if you could meet me on the cliff and be as you were then, and kiss me and love me for one day, one hour. Always I am thinking of what it might have been if you had lived and been mine, and it seems to me that a boundless joy has been wasted. Oh, you are dead, and your death has made me so poor. I have only my dream of you, but if I compare my poverty with others’ riches it is ever so much more glorious. Not to save my life would I cease to love you and dream of you and mourn you.

Gunnar Heggen did not know that in the great storm of his heart he had lifted his arms towards heaven and was whispering to himself. The anemones he had picked were still in his hand, but he did not know it.

The soldiers on the wall laughed at him, but he did not see. He pressed the flowers to his heart, and whispered gently to himself as he walked slowly from the grave toward the cypress grove.

THE END