Part 2

Perhaps you are in love? That idea has suddenly occurred to me, though it seems highly improbable. Now, however, that I have read through your last nonsensical letter again, I believe that I have really hit on the right solution.

You are in love, and out of feelings of mistaken gratitude, you do not like to tell me. Jeanne, Jeanne! Will you for my sake be an old maid? It is very sweet of you, but a little too much to expect. Besides, it is quite unnecessary. I am not going to lie, and pretend that it will not cost me something to give up my little fairy-tale princess with the beautiful hands. Not only my hair, but my shamefully overcultivated taste is missing you, with whom I was able to exchange ideas. An empty place on my balcony that will never be filled again till the aforesaid maiden sits in it with the sunlight shining on her and on the river, and on the town which is the town of all others.

But, Jeanne, our paths have diverged, and they can never again unite. You are not in the least fit to be in my company. You don’t want me, but life, and joyousness. May you find it, no matter whether, like me, you sell yourself, and are shut up in a golden cage, whether you live your own fairy-tale, and realise the mirage of your dreams, or whether you develop into an artist. Only with me you would have no peace.

I noticed how you beat your wings when we were together, how you pined and tortured yourself to adopt the pose that pleased me. How for my sake you acted a part.

Instead of writing sheets, I send you these lines, and entreat you to answer by telegram so that you may tell me in the fewest possible words what has happened to you.

I am, God knows, so curious that I should like to send you a wire a yard long. But I must rule my spirit so as to take this modern city of New York.

Your

ELSIE.

JEANNE, JEANNE, JEANNE!

Only that! Thank God, only that. How infinitely comforting a telegram with its few concise words can be.

Don’t let this matter worry you further. Of course, I’ll take the child to my heart; or still better, I will adopt the child.

After all, it’s much the same to me whether I have a camera, cacti, or a little child for a hobby. You needn’t be afraid that I shall plant it in a flower-pot like a cutting, or pin it into my lace collection. It shall, I promise you, be properly cared for, not by me, but through me. I will engage the best nurse money can procure. If you like, too, I will sail with the nurse over the whole width of the Atlantic to receive the little eel in person. The more I think it over, the more excellent the plan seems to me. You will have no bother, will not be interrupted in your career, and I shall add to the long list of my crazes one more item. To prevent there being any sort of misunderstanding about it, I am perfectly confident that providing for the little legacy will be a source of new enjoyment to me.

I only make one condition, and that is, if the affair becomes too complete I may be allowed to put “our child” out to nurse.

It is to be hoped that the father has not won a fraction of your heart. I can well imagine that he is some young artist whom you have met at the class. He gazed at your hair till he was sick, which is not at all to be wondered at, and you forgot momentarily that you had long ago abjured all folly.

Write me more details as to whether you approve; when “it” is expected, and so on. I needn’t advise you, of course, to leave Paris before the change in your exterior attracts notice. I am thinking a great deal of you, Jeanne, little Jeanne.

Your

ELSIE.

DEAR MAGNA WELLMANN,

And I am the woman who thought you had forgotten me, or that you still bore me a grudge for that letter which I wrote you four—no, it is already five—years ago.

Now I sit here and ponder whether the greatest transformation has been worked in you, or in me. You, at all events, are not the same, and I believe that I am not. But at our age, one is long past growing and developing.

You who of old were like a dry autumn leaf whirled before the wind, have proved yourself all at once to have a strength and courage which make me ashamed. Who has lulled your senses so to rest? The one “great” love? No, I will not ask questions, though a whole host of them pulsate within me. And you are not a bit afraid? You speak of it as if it were a mere frolic. You wonderful human creature, Magna. Other women suffer intolerably during the nine months of pregnancy, and grow irritable and ugly. But you are blooming as if it were the most perfectly natural condition to be in. What a contrast to your ordinary mood and your old escapades. You are not in the least afraid to bring a child into the world at your age; and in such circumstances every line of your letter breathes freshness and health, and there is no disguising it.

Do you know, your letter awoke in me the first longing for Denmark since I packed my boxes and went out into the wide world.

I have become an alien. Five years is not such a very long time, though long enough to render a person countryless. Richard in his pleasant way, keeps me _au courant_ with what he calls the “main movements” of our circle, so I know that you have been banned and ostracised. I cannot say that I think it is altogether undeserved. You know that I insist on good form outwardly as well as inwardly, and, really, Magna, I cannot picture myself behaving as you have done, any more than I can picture myself going out in society in a nightdress with my hair hanging down in a pigtail. But, of course, it is your affair.

For the most part I take no interest in what goes on at home. It reminds me too much of looking at a drop of water through a microscope. If, by any chance, I come across a Danish newspaper, I read nothing but the obituaries, and even they do not rouse a shadow of emotion in my soul.

Yet there are fates which, out of curiosity or fellow-feeling, appeal to me. And yours is one of them. When Richard wrote, “Frau Wellmann’s latest makes her ‘impossible’ in this part of the world,” I could not help smiling. You made yourself impossible years ago. It is true, Professor Wellmann’s name and social status have sheltered and held a restraining hand over you, that is to say, up till now.

But now it has come to an actual scandal. You parade your shame on the housetops of Copenhagen, instead of going away and hushing it up.

By the bye, how many small _affairs_ were there not year after year _hushed up_ in our set? The dear ladies even were not afraid to whisper about them to each other. And you, you even, delight in having a child of the peculiar kind that we call illegitimate. Magna, Magna! I am not going to suppose that behind it all is a spark of malicious joy in challenging the _crême de la crême_. That would be a poor joke. Neither can I believe that your motive has anything to do with _love_ for the father of your illegitimate child.

You write so beautifully about the feeling that life is growing within you. In this respect, I am a stranger, and absolutely blind. I have never felt the smallest sensation of longing to feel that life is growing within me. Perhaps I am even incapable of understanding your expression. Yet it touches me.

You were entering on a period of severe trial for yourself and for the children, and the time of trial will not end with your confinement. There will most certainly have to be an explanation, and preferably an explanation that will bring as little injury as possible to the children. Have you thought of this? Don’t put off the inevitable too long, or others may be before you. The children cannot—it would be terrible if they could—understand the whole, so the question is how to invent a fable which will best lull their reflection.

Many will judge you because you have done what is not customary and defied the usages of society; others will judge you out of envy, because they have not had the courage to do it themselves. Every one who has refrained through fear of disgrace and shame, will hurl a stone at you. Likewise the childless women. If I were still in the Old Market Place, I should flout you, too. Still, there are a whole lot of free-thinking human creatures who will judge you not on account of the child, but for the _children’s_ sake. You may shrug your shoulders at the others, but you can’t get away from the shadow which you are casting on the children.

Well, now that I have discoursed to you in this extremely reasonable manner, I may with a clear conscience extend my hands across the ocean and say, “Good luck, Magna.”

When the atmosphere becomes too hot to hold you, then take refuge with me. I live here, fourteen storeys high, on Riverside Drive. My name is on the door in characters as small as those on a postage stamp. It is the fashion here, and the letters are delivered to the porter. The house is magnificently arranged, and is as light as a studio. I steadily believe that I shall rest my bones in some peaceful burial ground here. And as it’s the custom to adorn and paint the dead till they look twenty or thirty years younger than when they were alive, you will comprehend how that appeals to the vanity of one who has warded off the burden of age. I should just like to know how any woman devoid of vanity could exist in this city of light and sunshine. I belong to two or three clubs where ladies of seventy and eighty congregate, with porcelain complexions, powdered coiffures, and Gainsborough hats. Don’t imagine for a moment that they are ludicrous. They possess a dignity and joy in existence which makes me think that they must pass their nights in a bath of youth.

There is a glamour of festivity hanging over this place. Not in the slums; but there of course, you needn’t go. New York’s poor have a totally different aspect and manner of behaviour from the poor of European cities, where they rub against travellers with their sores and crutches. In all these years I have only seen two human beings who didn’t belong to Fifth Avenue. An Italian and his wife lay and sunned themselves on the curb and ate dirty vegetables out of a rusty tin. No one sent them off, but the whole traffic of the street gave them a wide berth, as if they had been a pair of plague-stricken patients.

I ride on horseback every day till I am dead tired, in a salmon-coloured habit and a slouch hat over my eyebrows. My master—a pitiful wreck of a once brilliant Scottish nobleman—at first objected to my riding _en cavalier_. But as I remained obstinate, he left me to my fate till one fine day he was seized with admiration for my mastery of the horse, and now we are good friends. We ride alternately in Central Park, which is indescribably lovely when all the beds are aglow with rhododendrons in bloom, and in New Jersey, which is still unspoilt Nature. Sundays, as a rule, we form quite a cavalcade, and then we amuse ourselves like children. These people who are outwardly stiff and reserved, and inwardly do not overburden their souls with super-culture, have a wholly remarkable and infectious capacity for sucking honey out of the most trifling banalities of existence. We chat about the sun, moon and stars, about our horses, our ravenous appetites, and the recently discovered Rembrandt, and never about our neighbours. We never backbite.

At the end of such a day, when I am resting after my bath, I seem to myself like a being with life all before me.

In truth, I have found congenial calm. I play bridge through the long winter mornings at the Astor Hotel Club, or go to lectures on psychology, followed by luxurious luncheons during which Madame Homer and Signor Caruso sing to us, not in the intervals, but while we eat!

The waiters go round pouring out coffee the whole time, while we sit in a rosy twilight. Every one pays every one else little choice and sincerely-meant compliments. Call it an empty life, if you like, and I won’t deny that it is.

You ask what I have been doing since I took flight from my now desolate and dilapidated villa. If I only knew myself I would tell you. It all seems so long ago I travelled about with Jeanne, my young housemate and friend, and we really did nothing but kill time.

Rumours of my Monte Carlo period have no doubt penetrated to Denmark. I admit it was an ugly experience. Never in all my life had I imagined that I could become the prey of this passion, but I caught the fever so badly that I conducted myself as shamelessly as the most hardened professional gamblers. I certainly believe that during those days I was scarcely responsible. If the tide of fortune had not turned I should have gambled away every farthing I possess. But things went so well that I am living to-day on my winnings, without touching my dividends.

Jeanne is still in Paris, where she has been for the last two years. She intends to qualify for some industrial art, for she has an indisputable and highly original talent. Lately I have had a very significant letter from her, but I may not divulge its contents. If things turn out, as at present seems likely, my life may undergo a complete re-arrangement.

I must tell you about my latest craze. I have had quite a dozen little crazes in this one year alone. It is a splendid distraction. Well, my latest is collecting dwarf cacti and Japanese dwarf trees, which you hardly ever see in Denmark. They are only a few inches high, and incredibly old. You buy them in fat boxes, miniature imitations of Japanese gardens with rivers, bridges, and porcelain cupolas and tea-houses. They are entrancing. Fortunately, a gardener tends them; otherwise they would die of neglect. The care of plants is no more in my line than the care of children, or any other live things. If I had the gift I should have a choice little aquarium with goldfishes and electric light and illuminations.

Imagine Richard a paterfamilias and domestic tyrant! Yes, indeed, Magna, everything is changed.

Now, I really have told you all about myself. I don’t believe there is a single craving of my soul that I have not disclosed to you. It’s not my fault that the result of these disclosures appears so miserably poor. How old is Jarl now? Sixteen or more? It is a good thing that Agnete is soon to be married. Write again soon, Magna. I promise to answer.

ELSIE LINDTNER.

DEAR JEANNE,

It may be the consequence of your condition, but really, I am getting quite concerned about your letters. I thought everything was settled for good when I promised to relieve you of responsibility by taking the child. And now you begin posing new riddles.

What secret is it that you cannot betray? Why do you talk about hiding yourself in the remotest desert? From whom should you hide? For what reason? Why do you speak of desecration, and say you wish you could die before the child is born? You hate to do it a wrong? What wrong?

Is this man married? If so, his wife needn’t know that you are going to give birth to a child. You don’t want to marry him; or do you?

If I may advise you, Jeanne, I should suggest your leaving the future to take care of itself, till you are established in peace and quietness in some pretty neighbourhood. What do you say to Provence? At the moment you are nothing but a bundle of nerves, and I have half a mind to come across and do what I can to help you. But I am too lazy. To do anything to help people when it involves trouble, is not my _métier_; for you, even, I cannot take trouble, though I love you.

But if there is anything on your mind, please let me know what it is, for, as I said before, I am unable to make sense out of the nonsense you have written. Write as often and at as great length as you like, and the day will come, I hope, when I shall at last grasp your meaning. Is it a human being that is lacking, one with whom you can really talk? I am experiencing every day a crowd of little stupid things, that keep me going in a most agreeable fashion. But I am chiefly taken up with cherishing and cultivating my own precious appearance. Altogether, I was much more alive when we two sat together in our White Villa on the island, and saw the leaves falling from the trees.

Your

ELSIE.

* * * * *

Jeanne ... Malthe ... Jeanne ... Malthe.

Jeanne and he ... he and Jeanne....

I must try to understand it. Those two....

And, it was the child of these two, their child, I wanted to adopt....

* * * * *

Two days have passed, but I am no nearer understanding. I go round and round in an empty circle, and say to myself, “Jeanne and Malthe—Malthe and Jeanne.” And I expect to be overcome by a heart-rending agony. But so far as I can judge, neither my heart nor my mind are affected. My nerves, too, are perfectly composed. I am, in fact, only petrified with astonishment.

* * * * *

Why don’t I suffer? What has become of the love I once felt. Where is it?—or—I understand those two so exactly. It’s myself that I don’t understand. I can give them my blessing with the easiest and most serene conscience in the world. I can even rejoice that these two, just these two, have found each other so futile; then am I so inexplicably, egregiously futile?

* * * * *

I have begun to take delight in travelling by the Subway. People there don’t pose. They are in too great a hurry to put on masks. Extraordinary how impressive breeding is when it is united with good clothes. The train can be so full that there is often a double row extending from one end of the car to the other, hanging on to the round leather rings with coarse, toil-worn, or delicate kid-gloved hands. Some one always makes room for me, but I also take my time to form the desired expression on my face. To-day a poor woman sat next to me with two or three little wreaths on her lap. She wore a dusty mourning veil thrown over her hair.

She cried the whole way; the veil was so shabby that I calculated the child must have died a long time ago. Her grief was still fresh. Mine has never existed. I had thought my life at least contained what is called a great sorrow. But I have only draped an empty space with the trappings of sorrow....

I must write to Jeanne.

* * * * *

DEAR LITTLE TRAVELLING COMPANION,

This letter might be written in twenty different ways, but only one is the right way, and now I begin writing to you in the same style as I write in my own poor, dull diary. You know it is only lazy people who can bear to record the barrenness of their daily life in a diary.

Accept my warmest and most sincere congratulations, dear Jeanne, and don’t shed any more tears on my account. You have not transgressed anything, you dear child, with your refined humanity. Neither has he. Yet you fancy that your letters—your “confession,” has caused me pain. Oh, no! Alas! it has done nothing of the kind. I say, alas! because I should so like to believe myself, that I had once in my life loved with my whole heart. Now I see it must have been all imagination. It can’t be explained otherwise—a delusion, a myth—anything you like. Perhaps a charming dream.

Well, the dream is over; that is the only thing I am certain about. All that remains of it is the memory of a good friend who, by a truly magical freak of fate, has found the one woman, in my opinion, suited to him.

Jeanne, I am not disguising the facts. This is the first and the last time, too, for that matter—that the subject of Malthe and myself is mentioned between us.

The whole time you and I were knocking about the world like homeless vagrants, you never referred to it, or let drop a hint, that you knew the whole humiliating connection. Though _I knew that you knew_, and that raised you in my esteem as a human creature to an extraordinary degree. I think so highly of Malthe that you alone seem to me good enough for him. So you see what you write about committing a “robbery” has no point. And more than that, I can tell you I am one of those women ill adapted to _live with_, much less _to love_, another human being. I am quite clear now about this. You, on the contrary, in compensation for your joyless youth, are endowed with the capacity for self-sacrifice and yielding. For you it will be a positive delight to abandon your _ego_, and let it be absorbed by his. For me such a thing is inconceivable.

There is no necessity to recur any more to the past—at least as far as I am concerned. On your behalf we unfortunately have to do it. Much more than the news itself, does your question, shall you speak or be silent, perplex my brain and excite my emotions.

If my position was now what it once was, and my views of life what they once were, I should answer decidedly: Keep your lips closed, and the secret that concerns only you, locked in your heart! But now there are other factors to consider. I am changed. Time and life—I scarcely know what—have changed me—and you are not like the majority of women, and Malthe is not a man like other men.

You may perhaps cause him a never-ending torment by speaking. Be clear on this, or you may cause yourself no less pain by keeping silent, and letting what is past and over for ever be forgotten. I know you, Jeanne; every day and every hour you will despise yourself more and more because his belief in you is so boundless.

You can’t be silent. You will be compelled to lie. What to ninety-nine people out of a hundred would be simple and natural enough will undermine not only your self-respect, but your joy in life. On the other hand, you have never loved. The thing you call your past, has really had no significance for you. Why should it be unearthed now, and dragged into the glare of day? Why should something that meant nothing but words to you, be made crucial? Are you two, you and he, to spend the most beautiful years of your love in exhuming corpses and taking them about with you wherever you go?

Joergen Malthe is not as other men are. He will never reproach you, but he will grieve, and you will grieve with him.

You see, I am unable to advise you. Perhaps I have no right to take the responsibility upon me. I have often talked by the hour to your future husband. But as far as I can remember, we never touched on the topic of woman in the abstract. Thus it comes about that I am ignorant of what Malthe’s views are.

And yet—Malthe is the father of your child. The father of your unborn child.

Speak, Jeanne, speak openly and without fear. It will be setting up no defence for having yielded to his inclinations, but he will find in it a means of explaining and defending what happened before his time; for Joergen Malthe is not like other men.

If he has thought it right and natural that the woman he loves should become his in the way you have become his, he will think it right and natural that you should have exercised the sovereignty over your person before you knew him. All you have got to tell him afterwards is that you love him and that you have never loved any one but him.

I seem to myself at this moment so very ancient. Such an eternity lies between then and now, but that is as it should be.

Little travelling companion with the red hair, let me see you helping him now in the prime of his manhood to build up his reputation, so that his name will become immortal. You understand how to see—how to enjoy. Pack your infant when it is born in a little trunk with perforated lid, and take it about with you, or leave it behind. Don’t let it be a hindrance or a barrier between you two in your joint lives.

There is a great deal more that I should like to write, but now I must go and dress. You know “Tristan and Isolde” always was my favourite opera.

I was going to urge you not to show this letter to Malthe, but, after all, I leave you a free hand in the matter.

For many reasons I believe that if he saw it the consequences would not be disastrous.

With many embraces. I wish you a happiness that will last through life.

Your

ELSIE LINDTNER.