Part 7

“All right, get along with you, then?” he said, pushing her in, and Hedvig, with Emanuel in her arms, behind her. “There you are! But mind! No fooling about with any of my things!”

The door opened with a queer sucking noise--it had been caulked with strips of cardboard and cloth.

Hedvig and her mother stood aghast, while Egholm thrust past them and began moving his bottles with the easy familiarity of habit.

All the windows were darkened but one, that glared red as a furnace door. They could see nothing save their own hands, which looked strange and uncanny in the red light.

“Egholm, you surely don’t mean to say we’re to do the cooking here? When you can’t see your hand before your face!”

Egholm stepped across and shut the door behind them; then, turning to his wife, he brought his face close down to hers, and whispered in a voice that seethed like a leak in an overheated boiler:

“Look here! You’re not going to come along and ruin the business for me now, so don’t you think it. If I can see to do my developing, you can see to cook. You understand?”

And he went on with a further flow of words, furious, though subdued.

Fru Egholm writhed.

“But, Egholm ... there’s no _room_! I can’t even see the stove.... Oh....”

She still clung to a faint hope that he might be brought to see things with her eyes, and realise how unreasonable it was to ask her.

“Very well. I’ll give you a lamp. My dark-room lamp should be about here somewhere.”

His fingers moved among rattling bottles on the stove.

“Here it is--no. Now, where the devil....”

A bottle upset; he grasped at it hurriedly and knocked over another; the liquid gurgled out into a pool on the floor.

“A basin--quick, give me a basin! My silver nitrate ... quick, a basin!”

They reached about for one in haste and confusion.

“Open the door so we can see!” cried Hedvig. But at the same moment her father came towards them. His face looked as if smeared with blood in the light from the red-covered pane; his teeth showed between parted lips.

“You--you’re the serpent in the garden!” he hissed.

“Oh, don’t!” she cried, her voice rising to a scream.

Emanuel was beginning to cry. Hedvig tried to wriggle through with him to the door, but stepped on the basin her father had just set on the floor.

This was too much for Egholm. He felt he must either discharge the current within, or be fused by it, like an overcharged wire.

He staggered one step back, then forward again. His arms rose up as if with an inner force of their own; then with his full strength he struck his clenched fist in his wife’s face.

Once again, and once again he struck, the flesh of her checks squelching under the blows. Then he stumbled out, and closed the door carefully behind him.

Vang was seated on the bed exactly as before. What could he say to him? It was the first time any stranger had witnessed a scene of this sort. What was the use of starting upon heart-rending explanations, which Vang would never understand? And how much of the trouble had been audible through the close-padded door?

Vang gets to his feet; he must go now--yes, he must. There is something cowed about him; he speaks in a low voice, and does not look up. And Egholm, suddenly aware of Anna’s sobbing and Hedvig’s uncontrolled blubbering plainly heard through the door, realises that Vang must have been able to follow the drama through all its painful details.

And now he is going off, convinced that Egholm is a cruel, cruel brute.

It must not be! Egholm feels now, more strongly than ever before, that he _can_ be so good, so good!

“No, no; you mustn’t go!” he cries, as Vang steps cautiously over the bath full of flower-pots. He grips him by the arm, anxious to prove his all-embracing affection on the spot. “You mustn’t go now I’m in all this mess. Didn’t you say we’d been as one together? Wait a bit; there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Egholm sat down on a ragged mattress, and covered his face with his hands.

If only he had something--some precious gift--to offer Vang. But he had nothing--not a copper _øre_ in his pocket; not a thing. Not so much as a bite of bread for himself, still less for Vang. And what about the others?...

_The fowl!_ The thought of it seemed to flow like something rich and soft and fat right out to his fingers. He straightened himself up and looked round--yes, there it was, in the perambulator.

“I was going to ask you to supper, Vang. My wife’s brought a fowl along, a fine fat bird, almost as big as a drake. But I suppose you’ve something better for supper yourself?”

He gauged Vang’s hunger by the rumbling of his own empty paunch, and made every effort to persuade him.

“A fine bird, a delicious bird; the size of a drake as nearly as can be.”

Egholm was not quite sure whether a duck or a drake would be the larger, but took the word as it came into his head, to help him in his need.

Vang could not resist. He smacked his lips, and said:

“I could go down to Father’s place, of course. They can’t refuse me anything there, after all, though they do keep me waiting and make things as uncomfortable as they can. If only I could be sure your wife wouldn’t mind....”

“Not a bit, not a bit,” said Egholm cheerfully, relieved that all was well again. He had been cruel, by an unfortunate chance, but now he had wiped that out. Briskly he took up the parcel with the delicious bird, and even played ball with it as he went towards the dark-room door. The business in there before sickened him unspeakably.

There was a moment of deadly silence as he opened the door, but hardly had he taken a step forward when he ran against a shadow that would not let him pass. Next moment he felt Hedvig’s skinny hands like claws, one at his chest, the other gripping his throat, as she hissed out:

“You dare to touch Mother again--you dare! Quick, Mother, take Emanuel and run!”

Egholm was more astonished than angry at first. What was all this?

But--ugh! it hurt! He tried in vain to wrest her hands away; then he struck at her head. But she ducked down between his arms and butted him over against the stove.

“Run--run quick! I’ve got him!”

“Let go, you little devil!--oh, help! she’s strangling me!”

“Hedvig, what are you doing?--Hedvig, dearest child! Let go, do; it’s your father!” Fru Egholm tried to pull her off.

Then Hedvig realised that the day was lost. She loosened her hold, and let Mother and Father wrest an arm to either side, till she stood as if crucified up against the wall, her head drooping, and yellow wisps of hair falling over her flushed face. And she fell to crying, with a horrible penetrating wail.

Egholm had still by no means recovered from his astonishment. He coughed, and began rubbing his neck, speculating the while on some appropriate punishment for the presumptuous girl.

“Well, you’re a nice little beast, you are,” he said. But he could hardly find more to say. There were not actually words in the language for criminals of that sex.

“You overgrown hobbledehoy, falling upon your own father, your own flesh and blood. I never heard of such a thing. If you had your deserts, you’d be bundled off to gaol this minute, you disgraceful young scoundrel.”

Suddenly he began tearing down the planks and cardboard from the window, without a word of explanation, but with emphatic jerks and crashes that fell in time to his words and gave them added weight.

“You wait--I shan’t--forget, you--squat-nosed--little--guttersnipe.”

But for every tug at the flimsy covering, the light poured in more violently, like a wonderful grace of God. Both Hedvig and her mother, despite their indignation, could not help craning their necks to look, as the corner of a garden, with budding trees, came moving, as it were, towards them. Even Emanuel opened his eyes wide, and lifted his little hands towards the light.

Once he had begun, there seemed no end to Egholm’s willingness to oblige. He cut the string by which the door was fastened, and tore away the padding from all sides.

“There! _Now_, are you satisfied?” he asked, with great politeness.

But there was something wanting yet to render his wife’s satisfaction complete. Those bottles.... All along the shelves and dresser were rows of bottles, in every shape, thickness, and colour. Many of them were ticketed with complicated chemical names, and some bore the awe-inspiring death’s-head poison label. Egholm had strung a tangle of lines from wall to wall, on which his photos hung to dry, exactly as when Hedvig played dolls’ washing-day.

And the kitchen table was a veritable map of stains.

“They cost something, those did,” said Egholm. “That’s my silver nitrate.” And he seemed as proud as if he had paved the way for his wife’s arrival with pieces of eight.

He helped to set the numerous bowls and glass plates aside, and murmured regretfully:

“Well, well, anyhow, you’ve had your way.”

“Yes, but....”

“I hope you can see now, at any rate. And now, for Heaven’s sake, make haste and get that fowl done. I’ve asked Vang to supper.”

“But, Egholm! You don’t mean to say....” Fru Egholm almost screamed.

“Beginning again, are you?” he said threateningly. But at sight of her face, bruised and already colouring from his recent blows, he turned away.

“We must do something for him. He’s been a help to me from the first day I came. And he’s got a miserable home.”

“We’ve neither knives nor forks--we haven’t even plates.” Fru Egholm dared not say too much just now, but hurried to unpack a box, that the contents might speak for her. There were a few cups without handles, five or six plates, some of them soup-plates, but no two alike. One had a pattern of flowers, another birds; a third was ornamented with a landscape. Two of the knives lacked handles, and nearly all the forks were one prong short.

“There! I don’t know what you think?”

Egholm was on the point of breaking out again, but suddenly he laughed.

“Oh, an elegant dinner service. Splendid! splendid!” And he danced about the floor.

“We haven’t a single dish, or a tureen. And his father keeps a real hotel--we can’t serve it up in the saucepan.”

“Oh yes, you can. Vang and I, we’re not the sort to stand on ceremony. Wait a minute, though--a dish ... I can let you have a dish.”

He picked up a big white rinsing-dish from among his own equipment, fished up some plates that were lying in the bottom, and tipped the liquid into a bottle.

“There you are--real porcelain. Now the set’s complete. But mind you wash it out well, or you’ll send us all to kingdom come. And, for Heaven’s sake, make haste. I’ve got to keep talking to him all the time, and you’ve no idea what a business that is.”

Whereupon Egholm danced out of the doorway, leaving his wife, confused and helpless, with the dripping poison dish in her hands.

XI

Hedvig sat in front of the stove, crumpling up newspapers and thrusting them in through the open door, to keep the fire from going out entirely.

“This will never do,” said her mother, wringing her hands. Egholm was tramping up and down in the next room, stopping every now and then to open the door and ask if the supper wasn’t nearly ready. His face was pale--he was always most dangerous when he was hungry.

“Huh! Let them wait,” said Hedvig.

“Run outside, dear, and see if you can’t find some bits of something--a piece of board or some twigs or anything that’ll burn. I fancy I saw some stuff under that bush in the corner.”

Hedvig was always happiest when she found a chance of using her legs. She explored the yard across and across, quartering like a hound in all directions, and finding not a little in the way of fuel. When she had filled her apron, there was a knocking at one of the windows. At first she tried to ignore it, and was hurrying in with her findings, but the knocking was repeated, and more loudly. She turned angrily and looked in.

A brown-eyed young workman in the carpenter’s shop stood beckoning to her, both hands full of beautiful lumps of newly cut wood.

This was a language Hedvig understood; she picked up her heels and ran to the workshop door.

“You the photographer’s?” he asked, with a bashful grin and a slight lisp in his voice, as he laid the blocks like an offering in her apron.

“Yes,” said Hedvig. “We haven’t had time to get in any wood as yet. Mother and I only came to-day. We’re going to have chicken soup for dinner. There’s visitors.”

“But what are the bones for?” said the man, picking about among the contents of the apron.

Hedvig flushed, but, ready witted as ever, answered, laughing:

“Oh. Perhaps you don’t do that here. In Odense we always use bones for the fire when we can get them. They burn almost better than wood.”

“What’s your name?”

“Hedvig Egholm. And what’s yours? You’re the carpenter’s son, I suppose?”

“No, I’m only working here, that’s all. My room’s just at that end--like to come and see it?”

“No, thanks. I must make haste in.”

“Well, then, come this evening, or to-morrow. Will you?” he asked eagerly, routing about in all the corners for more wood.

But Hedvig only laughed, and shook her heavy yellow plaits. She came back to her mother with a load that reached to her chin. There was no need to use the bones, after all--they burnt well enough, it is true, but stank abominably in the burning.

Emanuel was given a row of the neat wooden blocks, set up on the table before him.

“Look--there’s the puff-puff,” said Hedvig.

The child laughed all over his face, but a moment later he was nibbling at the engine.

In the next room Egholm was still talking about the manifold vicissitudes of his life.

He had started as a grocer’s assistant in Helsingør, then in Aalborg; after that he had been a photographer, in the time of the war, when the Austrians were there. He had made a fortune, but it had vanished in an attempt to double it, in Göteborg, Sweden, where there was no photographer at that time at all. Then on to Copenhagen with but a few small coins remaining, and, despite this adverse beginning, the possession of the biggest photographic studio in the town a few months later.

This was Egholm’s _chef-d’œuvre_; he had told the story of it a hundred times. And by frequent repetition, it had gained a certain style, as he omitted more and more of the commonplace. He told of his bold advertisements--a new departure altogether--his growing staff of assistants, the eagerness of the public to come first, and the tearful envy of his competitors. And when, in the flight of his telling, he reached its highest point, where he really was the greatest photographer in the place--he stopped. He felt he must remain there on those heights, above the clouds; he wished his hearers always to remember him as there and so. The miserable descent he passed over, and began as a matter of course with his appointment on the railways, as station assistant, at a wretched rate of pay.

Vang did not seem to miss the intervening chapters; he sat wallowing in the delicious smell of cooking that came through from the kitchen.

Egholm told of his railway period, how he had rushed about the country, now at some desolate little station on the Jutland moors, now in big places like Odense or Frederikshavn. He sighed, and passed over the conflicts with authority, and his dismissal. No, he would not think of those things now; not a thought. He turned abruptly to the annals of the Brethren of St. John. True, there was much that was disappointing about his relations with that community, but, after all, there had been something grand in its way about the final meeting. Had he not stood there alone, and told them the truth, in such a wise that even the fellow from Copenhagen had polished his glasses and shaken in his shoes, finding nothing to say in return? Had he not gained the victory? They had thrown him out--but was not that in itself sufficient evidence that his words were true, and had pierced them accordingly?

“Yes, and then I heard a shout from someone down by the door; it was Meilby. You know, the photographer I used to teach English. He was rather like you, by the way, Vang--the same gentle sort of eyes....”

Augh! Egholm realised suddenly that he had said that once before to-day. He had got to the end of his repertoire. A sense of shame came over him, he cleared his throat, and cried in a forced voice:

“Hi, Anna! Vang says he’ll have his money back if the performance doesn’t begin very soon.”

Vang grunted; that was the sort of thing he understood. But Fru Egholm shivered in fear.

“Yes, yes, in a minute--five minutes more! Hedvig, for Heaven’s sake, look and see if it’s nearly done?”

“Yes; it’s peeling now,” reported Hedvig, and her mother left the horseradish to go and taste the soup. _Herregud!_ it was as weak as ditchwater. She closed her eyes, and tasted once again, looking very much like a blinking hen herself. “Ditchwater, simply!”

“Hedvig!” She routed out a pocket-handkerchief, and untied a twenty-five _øre_ from one corner. “Run out and get a quarter of butter, there’s a dear.”

“Well, and what then?” she said sullenly to herself. “It’s got to be used, and I’m not sorry I did it. Egholm always likes his things a little on the rich side, and now after he’s been so angry....”

It was hard to please him anyway when he was in that mood. Who would have thought he could have turned so furious just for a little remark like that?... What was it now she had happened to say?

Her brain was puzzling to remember it as she bustled about the final preparations. She talked to herself in an undertone, weeping silently the while.

“Anna, what do you think you’re doing out there?” cried Egholm.

Hedvig answered with a brief, sharp word, which her mother tried to cover with a “Sh!”

“Yes, dear--yes,” she called.

At the last moment she had hit upon a new and ingenious plan for saving her housewifely credit. The soup could be served up in the plates outside, and brought to table thus; the nasty dish thing could be used for the fowl itself. Fortunately, Vang might not know it was a developing tank at all.

Hedvig carried Vang’s plate in, walking stiffly as a wooden doll, and biting her lips till they showed white. But Vang, with a single friendly tug at her pigtails, made her open her mouth at once.

She laughed, showing her fresh white teeth. That was Hedvig’s way.

Vang gulped down the hot soup with a gurgling noise like a malstrøm. Egholm looked across nervously and enviously, and when Hedvig came round behind his chair, he reached out backwards greedily, but was sadly disappointed. No second helping--only the big geranium that Hedvig had brought in to set in the middle of the table. This was her mother’s last brilliant effort; no one could see now that the plates were not alike. She had even fastened paper round the pot, as if it were a birthday tribute.

They ate in silence, but when the dish was empty, and each was wrenching at his skinny, fleshless wing, Vang let off his long-restrained witticism:

“Egholm, what do you say? Can a chicken swim?”

“Swim? A chicken? Why, I suppose so--no, that is, I don’t think so.”

“Well, shall we try if we can teach it?”

“I--I don’t quite follow.... And, anyhow there’s only the ghost of it left now, ha ha!”

“Well, there’s time yet, for it’s fluttering about just now in this little round pond just here!” Vang rose heavily, as if from repletion, snorting with delight at the success of his little joke, and drew a circle with one finger over the front of his well-expanded waistcoat. “All we want’s a drop of something for it to practise in!”

Hedvig was dispatched to buy _akvavit_ with the few coins Vang found in his pockets; he gave her the most precise instructions as to which particular brand it was to be.

Egholm never drank with his meals as a rule, but that evening he took three glasses of the spirit, though it burned his throat like fire. Vang made no attempt to force him, but simply said “_Skaal!_” and tossed off his glass.

Egholm, however, had other reasons.

He had fancied he could _eat_ himself into oblivion, and was trying now--with just as little effect--to drink his trouble away. But it only grew the worse.

It was Anna’s eyes that would keep rising up before him.

Anna’s grey-green eyes, with their frightened look, in a setting of swollen, blue, and bloodshot flesh, that hung in pouches down on either side of her nose.

It was not that he felt remorse for what he had done; that did not cost him a thought. But the effects of it--those _eyes_--haunted him now, following him everywhere he turned, relentlessly, cruelly. He writhed, and sighed, overflowing with self-pity for his troubles.

Eating did not help him, drinking was equally futile; there was but one thing to do, then--to start talking again, before it grew worse. It was nothing to what it might be yet. And Egholm launched out into a sea of talk, diving into it, swimming out into it, hoping to leave the thing that followed him outdistanced on the shore.

“And the money I made in Aalborg when the Austrians were there--you’ve no idea. My studio was simply besieged by all those black-bearded soldiers with their strings and stripes--and they’d no lack of cash, I can tell you. But then while they were sitting about waiting, there would come some slip of a lieutenant and turn the whole lot of them out to make way for him. And one dirty thief I remember that wouldn’t pay--between you and me, the photos were not much good, and that’s the truth. Showed him with three or four heads, you understand. But the General simply told him to pay up sharp, if he didn’t want his brains blown out. And that settled it. The General, of course, was a particular friend of mine. I’ll tell you while I think of it. It was this way. He wanted his photo taken, of course, like all the rest of them, but he must have it done up at the castle itself, in the great hall, and that was as dark as a cellar. I managed to get him out on the steps at last, though he cursed and swore all the time, and hacked about on the stone paving with his spurs. All the others got out of the way--sloped off like shadows--and there was I all alone with him, in a ghastly fright, and making a fearful mess of things with the camera. The interpreter had vanished, too. Then, just as I was ready, at the critical moment, you understand, I rapped out in German, ‘Now! Look pleasant, please!’ All photographers used to do that, you know, in those days. I said it without thinking.

“You should have seen him. First he swore like the very devil; you could almost see the blue flames dancing round him. But then he burst out laughing.

“He wanted me to go back to Austria with him. Tried all he knew to get me to go.”

Egholm sighed, and gazed vacantly before him, trying if the vision that haunted him were gone.

... Eyes, eyes. Eyes full of terror, set in patches of bruised flesh, and a drop of congealed blood just at the side of the nose....

He sprang violently to his feet, and started talking about Göteborg. The canals, where the women did their washing, the park, Trädgården, and Masthugget, where he had been out one Sunday. He talked Swedish, and gave a long account of a funeral--Anna had lost one child in Göteborg--the first.

Meanwhile, Vang was quietly getting to the bottom of the bottle, and when at last Egholm, weary of his desperate fluttering on empty words, flung himself down, Vang felt that it was _his_ turn to speak.