Part 7

This is the last drop that overflows your cup of anguish. You take your sick husband home. You torture him till he says, “Death would be better than this.”

And now you ask me what you ought to do.

It would be much simpler to tell you what you ought not to have done.

But it is too late for that now. All the same, I will, to the best of my poor abilities, give you advice and the benefit of my experience, gathered from contemplation of many wretched and foolish cases in which people tread happiness under foot, and then instantly lament what they have lost.

First and foremost, Agnete, you must look into yourself, and get rid of the lie which like an octopus has caught you in its embrace and smothers the best within you.

The lie about your husband’s deficiency. Your expressions of longing for a harmony of souls is a lie, just as your pretension to love with the soul and not with the senses is a lie.

You are one of the many women who, for reasons which I fail to understand, find no salvation in your relations to a man. What for him was the highest enjoyment, for you was only a torturing excitement. A physical shortcoming in yourself would in him appear a crime in your eyes. Instead of honestly and frankly explaining to him the state of things and the cause of your unhappy condition, you try to seek satisfaction by making scenes.

Don’t you see, dear child, a clever woman never makes scenes. It isn’t politic. A scene that lasts an hour does fourteen days’ detriment to her appearance.

Your question, “What ought I to do now?” really means, “How can I punish him further?”

Rather you should ask, “What can I do to heal his wounded soul?” And this is my answer, Agnete, “You can do it by confessing your own mistakes, and forgetting his.”

You must not ape humility, and let something cry within you, “See what a sacrifice I am making!”

No, you must acknowledge your wrongdoing and not let it out of sight. Take it in both hands, hold it tightly like a costly goblet, and keep your eyes fixed on it. You should remember that it is no credit to you that you have not betrayed him because there has been no necessity; for you know nothing of the mad impulse that can arise between two human creatures, suddenly, like a storm in the thickest part of the wood.

Above all things, recognise that at the time your husband summoned his mistress to his side when he thought he was going to die, he acted from the greatest and most primitive of instincts—the instinct of love.

Tell him that you have been wrong. Show him your love. Give him your best. Not for an hour or a day, but every hour and every day. That is the only way to his heart, and to your own peace of mind. And then the time will come when mutual forgiveness has performed its miracle.

Try to understand what I mean.

Hearty good wishes from your mother’s old friend. If you like you may show your husband this letter.

ELSIE LINDTNER.

* * * * *

It is certainly a very fine trait in Magna’s character, that she who used to be—well, never mind, I won’t say what—has never breathed the name of her child’s father to any living soul.

The man must have been good and strong, and I am fortunate indeed that my Kelly has found a protector in the little fellow. Oluf doesn’t like Kelly drinking schnaps. So Kelly doesn’t drink schnaps. Oluf wants Kelly’s moustache to grow, so Kelly lets it grow.

“So long as I have Oluf, who takes care of me, you need not be afraid of me.” Those words are close to my heart.

And yet I have still some anxiety. The world is so big, and here things are reduced to such a groove. I notice the effect on Oluf when Kelly tells him about America. Who knows if the day will not come when the pair come to bid me and Magna farewell to go off on adventures?

Oluf was making plans the other day for travelling to Canada, and camping in the great forests far away from civilisation. The boy had fixed it all up. They were to live in the trees, and live by hunting and fishing. Perched up on the highest branches they would spread out their nets, and catch fish out of the great river that rolls through the forest. They would only enter a town twice a year to sell the skins of the beasts they had caught.

Oluf is not too small for such dreams, but Kelly—

I am so unwilling to budge from here till Kelly has taken root in the soil so that he can’t tear himself away. He promises to stay here always, but what is a promise?

* * * * *

DEAR MAGNA,

I must really tell you without delay. Richard has been to see me. When Lucie brought in his card I was dumbfounded. But the moment he entered the room, thank God I got over my feeling of embarrassment. We stood and looked at each other, and were at a loss how to begin the conversation, till it occurred to Richard to say something about Kelly. He knew, of course, the whole story.

It did one good to see the dear fellow, to speak to him again. He said he could only stay a few minutes, and he stayed two hours. In reality, it was his little wife who sent him to see me. She thought it so extraordinary that she should not know me, who had played such an important part for so many years in Richard’s life.

We spoke a great deal of our respective children, and were both equally proud.

Now Richard has promised to visit me next Sunday with his family. You and our boys come, too. In the course of the week I shall return Richard’s call.

Do you know, Magna, I intend to make it quite a festive occasion, and there shall be no feeling in the matter that I am a divorced wife. You will have to lend me a few things as most of my china is over in the villa, and I shall order the food to be sent in from Palace Street. One can be certain of getting it good there, or would you advise going to an hotel? I have got so out of the habit of entertaining that I feel nervous at the thought of it.

Anyhow, you must come, Magna, and take care that Kelly is properly attired. Also see to his hands.

When Richard was gone, I sat a long time and meditated in retrospect on how very nicely he and I had once got on together. The one drawback was that we had no children. On that account I made the sacrifice and left him. I have been royally rewarded for it, through my Kelly.

Richard’s wife plays a good game of bridge, and we have already started a society for the winter. The report of your enormous pluck has reached the old Market Place, for Richard spoke of you in terms of the warmest admiration and esteem. At parting we both positively had tears in our eyes.

May I, without hurting you, give a hint? Please put on your silk dress, Magna. I shall have a new one made, I think, as quickly as possible. You see, this is to be a very important event in my life.

Embrace my boy for me, and remember what I said about his hands.

ELSIE.

DEAR JEANNE,

It is wrong of me to have been so lazy lately about writing. But I have had so much to do. I have, as a matter of fact, moved house. It happened in a twinkling. This habitation became to let through a death, and mine was taken by a young married couple.

Now I am living on the beach road so far out that I am hardly to be reckoned as belonging to Copenhagen. Can you guess why I have moved? Simply to be nearer the farm, so childish does one become with advancing age. Magna advised me strongly to come out altogether, but I am not inclined to do that. I am always and shall be a child of towns, though in the year that Kelly has been learning to be a farmer I have taken an almost incredible interest in cows, pigs, winter crops, and all the rest of it. My life is so full of richness and light, I have nearly more joy than I can bear, and no troubles at all.

Magna manages our “estate,” as she always calls it to please me, most admirably. And how well she understands the art of setting others to work!

My Kelly and her little Oluf are now, as they always have been, inseparable, and I believe that the blue-eyed little comrade exercises a most beneficent influence on Kelly. Magna told me one day that she had heard Oluf saying—the boy lay in a hay-cock and didn’t know that Magna was on the other side of it taking her after-dinner nap—“I have no father, for my father died ten years before I was born. But if you like to be my father, I shall be quite content to have no other.”

Magna visits me every time that she has anything to do in the town. When the window is open I can hear the crack of her whip above all the rest. And will you believe it, Jeanne, my heart begins to beat at the sound, for it means that the boys are with her, or that Magna is coming to tell me about them. You should just see her sitting rosy and upright in the dog-cart, her head hidden in a hood, with an old sealskin on, all rubbed the wrong way, the same that twenty years ago formed a topic of conversation the whole winter through, because it had cost her poor, struggling husband goodness knows how many thousands.

Magna is now getting on for sixty. But no one would think it. She beams as if the whole world were at her feet. I look at least ten years older, although, God knows, I take a lot of trouble over my hair, and touch up my cheeks a little, as I always did. She makes a fuss about getting out of the cart as if the coachman could not look after the butter and eggs.

Just think, she gets up at four in summer and at six in winter, and works for two. There is no work that she considers is too menial.

Lately she and Kelly painted all the four buildings for Whitsun. And they did it like the wind, so that one could hardly believe one’s own eyes. I sat out on the verandah and watched, and was nearly sick with delight.

Then we had roast ribs and oxeyes for dinner. How Kelly eats! You can have no conception of his appetite. It’s not elegant, but oh, so splendid! And after they have been slaughtering Kelly brings me lambs’ fry, black puddings, and liver sausages. What I once couldn’t tolerate now tastes to me better than the finest Astrakhan caviare.

How I chat on all about my own affairs. But I don’t forget my little fellow-traveller on that account, and her troubles are mine. Still, I am not going to make them such a serious matter as you do, for they are not worth it. You have arrived at a stage when everything looks to you black, and must look so. I should be deeply pained if I had not long ago seen what the cause of it is. You are now just about the age I was when we first met each other; that age which for women is so difficult and dangerous. And the inexplicable happiness is not granted to every woman to come through the time unscathed and triumphant as I did.

I have thought about it, and wondered what the reason could be why I, contrary to every one else, should remain during those years much the same as always; and I have come to the conclusion that it was because I lived so superficially at that time, and without any deep feeling for other people.

But you, little Jeanne, since you linked your fate so fortunately with Malthe’s, have been a sheer compost of love-worship and self-sacrifice. I could have foretold long ago that your transition age would be a hard time. But now try yourself to make it easier. Review the circumstances, sift, and explain them to yourself.

You have something to be thankful for that does not fall to the lot of one woman in ten thousand. Your husband continues to love you as much to-day as when you first became his. Does that not counter-balance everything? Are the little cosmopolitan godless angels of children really so hard to bring up as you think? They have, of course, the artistic temperament, and you attempt to model them into normal human beings. You will never succeed.

And is Malthe’s depression of spirits of any great significance? There is cause for it. He has of late, with justice or injustice, been overlooked, and younger powers have been preferred before him; his name has no longer the _cachet_ it once had, and even his talent seems to have taken a back seat. But, dear Jeanne, you are greatly to blame for this. You have loved your husband so blindly and fondly that you have not set him on a pedestal, but you have built a castle of air far up in the highest clouds, and there you have placed him like a golden ball on the most inaccessible pinnacle, with no one above him and no one near him.... You have fed his ambition and stifled your own natural, critical faculty, instead of standing at his side and being helpful to him in deciding between good and mediocre, and now you complain that you cannot console, and that he spurns you. You are ashamed to say so, but I read between the lines that you are very, very unhappy.... And it is all because you are not well, dear Jeanne, and your despondency is likely to last some years.

But I could hit, I think, on ways and means of putting your cares to flight; if only you will at once make up your mind to bring your little flock northwards, so that I may take them with me to the Villa this summer, and teach the little goose-herds, the Parisian, the Sicilian, and the Smyrna child, indifferent Danish, while you and your Malthe close the house, store your furniture, and trot round the globe.

Don’t let the thought of money stand in your way. Tell Joergen from me that he may with an easy hand use the money which he would set aside as a dowry for his daughters.

He must be ashamed of himself if he has not that opinion about his own flesh and blood, that it will be a pure joy to any one to take over the girls, even if they come without a rag to their backs or clothed in flour sacks.

Besides, I have made my will, and, dear Jeanne, if I once played _la banque_ at Monte Carlo, I am not likely to do it again.

What a glorious summer it will be over there in the White Villa with your chicks. And we’ll borrow Magna’s Oluf and my Kelly for a week, too. What does my old travelling companion say to this?

Much love to you and to your husband, and the whole small flock, from

Yours always,

ELSIE LINDTNER.

* * * * *

Poor Jeanne and poor Joergen.... So it fares worse with you than I thought.

I have the greatest desire to travel over to them and mediate, but in these days my heart is too touchy and my neuralgia a consideration. I ought not by rights to sit out on the balcony in the cool evening air, but I never could be careful.

But it shall not happen; it would be too foolish and irresponsible a step—people don’t separate in a hurry like that without a ghost of a real reason. All very well if Malthe had another string to his bow, or if Jeanne was in love with another man, but, good Lord! one of them couldn’t live without the other, and yet she talks of having “weighed” the matter, and thoroughly thought it out. I am so angry my hands tremble.

Jeanne must really collect herself, and understand that all this is nothing but a transition. When I think of it, I can recall no case among the many I have known—except, of course, my own—of a single woman who has managed to get through these years without a slight rumpus of some kind. Afterwards they have taken endless trouble to patch up the wounds they have inflicted. Now, Jeanne has been more than unreasonable in this respect. There isn’t a man in the world who can stand such an everlasting adoration.

It was certainly brutal of him to say, “Mind yourself, your house, and your children, but don’t meddle with my work.”

But he meant nothing more by it than a child in a temper does when it vents its anger in trampling on a favourite toy. Yet the words rankled in Jeanne as a reproach—a reproach for what?

He has lost faith in his talent. Therefore he is irritable and dejected, and Jeanne, who all these years has had enough to do in bringing children into the world, and caring for them and him, now stands suddenly still, looks round and behind her, and feels disillusioned. Now is the time when she wants the tenderest words he has ever lavished on her, but he, with his head full of building plans, sees no sense or object in two people talking of love—two people who have proved their love with their whole life.

One of them ought to fall sick unto death ... so that the other should forget his small grievances.

Well, we shall see. If Jeanne listens to my advice, and lets the children come up here, all will be well.... A little air and freedom is what they need; otherwise I shall have to sacrifice myself and for the second time knock about the world with my little travelling companion.

* * * * *

So I have been in my old home once more! Weeks will have to go by before I get over the re-visiting of it. Every trace of me had been removed—with a scrupulous care and thoroughness as if every piece of furniture, every hanging and picture had been dangerously infected. Doors had been obliterated, and new ones cut in walls which used to be doorless. Not even the peaceful white fireplaces were there any longer, but instead gilded radiators. Had I never inhabited the rooms they could not have seemed more strange. I looked in vain for Richard’s oak bookcase, and the panels from his grandmother’s country place.

I had to see everything. My namesake—she who bears the name by right, not courtesy—led me from one room to another. It was as if she asked me incessantly, “Isn’t there anything that reminds you of your reign?” No, nothing, not the very least thing.

And then when we sat round the table at which Richard and I used to sit alone with the servants waiting behind our chairs, all the vacant places were filled with children whose appearance in the world was one of the conditions of my departure. Wonderful, wonderful! and a little sad.

I noticed how Richard exerted himself that I should feel at ease. But he, too, I think, was moved by the oddness of the situation.

She calls me Madame Elsie, and I call her Madame Beathe.

Involuntarily I glanced round for the big portrait Kröyer in his day painted of me, the portrait which Richard simply idolised. He saw what I was looking for, and cast down his eyes. I felt inclined to say, “Dearest friend, don’t let us be sentimental. What was once is no longer. But the picture was a true work of art, and for that reason you should have let it hang where it was.”

One thinks such things, but doesn’t say them.

I was shown, too, the daughters’ bedroom upstairs, and there—there hung my picture among photographs of actresses and school friends. Finally it will land in the attic unless it occurs to some one to make money out of it.

Why is it I cannot get rid of a feeling of bitterness and humiliation? They were all very kind and considerate. But when Madame Beathe joking suggested a match between her Annelisa and my Kelly, I felt near to crying. Annelisa is a thoroughly nice girl, it is true. But I cannot endure the thought of Kelly being looked down on, because of his country manners. And she does look down on him.

The little mistress has one fault. She is too immaculately tidy. I noticed that all the carpets had dusting sheets over them, and naturally supposed their removal had been forgotten, till I saw that every single article on her dressing-table was covered in the middle of the day with gauze, and I heard her scolding one of the maids for not washing her hands before beginning to lay the cloth after touching some books. Richard, I am sure, finds it trying.

When he smokes a cigar she sits on pins and needles for fear he shall scatter the ash about. And God knows that for a man Richard is tidy enough. She discovered a mark on the white window-ledge, only a raindrop, I believe, but got up twenty times at least to scrub, brush, and breathe on the spot.

It gives me food for thought. It is not for me to judge what she does and how she acts. But I can’t get over it. I feel bound to criticise her. And somehow the idea will bother me that this is my home she is fussing about in, and not the other way about.

Annelisa kissed me at parting, and asked if she might soon come to see me. But she shall not come when Kelly is at home. That is certain.

And now they have invited me to a grand dinner-party.

* * * * *

Kelly must have a tail-coat, there is no question of that.

* * * * *

No, Kelly shall not have a dress suit. Kelly won’t come with me to the dinner-party at Richard’s. I am going alone.

* * * * *

Pah! I am positively excited! It was a grand occasion. And it did me good to hear pretty speeches made about my appearance. The orchids certainly did go well with my mauve silk. They couldn’t have come from anywhere but Paris, of course.

Annelisa and I became great friends. She took me up to her room and confided in me that she and her mother don’t get on.

You were afraid to move almost for fear of being told you were making things in a mess. And the child betrayed, by the way, the little domestic secret that her mother now had a bedroom to herself, because her father was so untidy in shaving. When no one was looking her mother went about with a duster and wiped away the marks left by the soles of your boots. Wasn’t it too awful? But it didn’t seem so dreadful to me, for all at once I saw plainly what it meant, and I consoled the child by telling her that in a year or two the scouring demon would be cleaned away.

Richard seems quite unconcerned. He doesn’t dream of complaining. But if he has any memory, it must occur to him in looking back, how in the years that I was passing through the phase, everything inwardly and outwardly went on the same as usual.

Richard plays a brilliant game of bridge. But I must say I was utterly unprepared for Professor Rothe making the third. He behaved as if nothing whatever had passed between us. And Lili’s name was not mentioned.

Richard said when I rose to go, “You have been the Queen of the Feast!” God knows I blushed.

Maybe that in his secret heart he recognises the great sacrifice I made for him. It was, undoubtedly, no easy matter to leave him and the beautiful house. But my exemplary conscience was sufficient reward, even if I had not afterwards received the guerdon of Kelly.

* * * * *

I believe I shall succeed in having a chat with Madame Beathe about her _tic doloreux_. If one broaches the subject tactfully, it’s possible to achieve a great deal; and it is only a matter of getting her to see herself that her malady is an appendage of her years.

* * * * *

What holes Kelly wears his stockings into, and how black he makes his pocket-handkerchiefs! I do believe the boy uses them to wash the cart-wheels.

* * * * *

Kelly said yesterday, “And if you hadn’t adopted me, I should have been in the gutter all my life.” How he looks at me!

* * * * *

I suppose I had better have left it alone. I was told that for others such a period of incapability might exist, but not for her. She knew the duties of a proper housewife, and did not attend to a fifth part of things and leave the rest in dirt and disorder.

It was a little too much that I should not only come and interfere in her housekeeping, but ascribe to her a fictitious illness that only existed in my imagination.... And then followed a long story which to listen to was enough to make one laugh and weep together. Goodness! she had actually been jealous of my former régime, and had no peace till she had turned the whole house topsy-turvy. She didn’t intend that I should know this. But the storm burst when she thought to-day I had been taking my revenge. Her one object in life was to live for her husband, her home, and her children, and she had no notions about posing as a beauty, and be painted by famous artists. And so on....