Part 7

When they came to the river, he thought for a moment of pushing her into the water, but did not. He went along the bank where lime-ships unloaded, steam-cranes puffed out coal-smoke, and chains hindered their walking. He hoped that she would fall and hurt herself, or be pushed down by a workman, and wished that a coal-heaver would embrace and kiss her--so boundless was his hate and hers.

It was in vain that he mounted over barrels and wheel-barrows and threaded his way through heaps of lime. He thought of jumping into the river and swimming to the other side, but was withheld by the thought that she perhaps could swim also.

At last he made a wide circuit like an ox persecuted by a gadfly, and went down to Westminster. There the back streets swarmed with the strangest figures, like shapes seen in a nightmare. He entered the abbey, as if to shake off a pest, but she followed, silent and unweariable.

Finally he had to return home, and when he got there, he sat down on one chair, and she seated herself opposite him.

Then he understood how a man can become a murderer, and determined to fly, as soon as he had written for money.

The night came, and he hoped now to be able to collect his thoughts, and be master of himself.

She pretended to be asleep, but he could tell by her breathing that she did not really sleep.

"Are you awake?" she asked.

He was still unwise enough to answer "Yes." Now they lay there watching which should first go to sleep. At last he did so.

In the middle of the night he awoke, listened, and heard by her breathing that she was asleep.

Then his soul stretched itself, wrapped itself up in the darkness, and enjoyed being able to think without being watched by those cold, threatening eyes.

She had not, however, really gone to sleep, but in the darkness he heard her voice as before: "Are you asleep?"

He felt the vampire which had fastened on to his soul and kept watch even over his thoughts. Why did she spy on him except that she feared the silent workings of his mind? She felt perhaps how he lay there, and worked himself gradually out of the meshes of her net. He only needed a few hours' quiet, but that he was not to have. So she denied herself sleep in order to torment him. She would not allow herself the pleasure of going to the city, or of visiting the libraries and museums, because she did not wish to leave him alone. The next day he asked her whether she wished to continue to translate his worlds, or whether he should have recourse again to his old translators.'

"Shall I translate _you_?" she said contemptuously. "There are better writers to be done."

"Why will you not rather translate me than your rubbishy authors?"

"Take care!" she hissed. "You over-value yourself and a terrible awakening awaits you from the dream of your imagined greatness." She said that in a tone as if she were supported by the public opinion of all Europe. That made a certain impression on him, for an author, even when recognised, often seems nothing to himself but is entirely dependent on the opinion others cherish regarding his talents. Now he felt the bond between them snap. She hated and despised his work, which was his only means of support, and when she sought to rob him of courage and confidence, she was the enemy. And in dealing with an enemy there are only two methods--either to kill him, or not to fight him but to fly. He determined on the latter.

He had still to wait a few days till the money came, and these days were enough to develop his aversion. He had opportunities of witnessing more cold, calculating malice, mischievous joy at successful thrusts, all the feminine small-mindedness, meanness, and duplicity, but on a larger scale. Since she knew that he could not get away for want of money, she gave him to understand that he was her prisoner; but he was not, however.

The room looked like a pigsty, and the meals were so prepared as to be purposely repulsive. Dirt and disorder prevailed to such a degree that he felt himself in hell. With longing he thought of his lonely attic which had always been tidy, however careless he had been about expenses.

Two months had passed since their marriage. All smiles and even conversation had ceased; love was changed into unreasoning hate, and he began to find her ugly.

On the last day before his departure, he felt obliged to speak out in order not to explode. "You were beautiful as long as I loved you; perhaps my love made you so, not only in my opinion. Now I find you the ugliest and meanest character which I have met in my life."

She answered: "I know that I have never been so malicious towards anyone as towards you, without being able to give any reasons for it."

"I can, though," he said. "You hate me because I am a man, and your husband."

He had packed his portmanteau and she was prepared for his departure. When now the time of separation approached and she believed it would be for ever, her hatred vanished, and behold! love was there again!

Her tenderness and care for him knew no bounds. They spoke of the future as though they would soon meet again. She gave him good advice in a motherly way, but resignedly, as if in face of an unalterable destiny which demanded their temporary separation. As they drove to the station in an open carriage, she kissed him repeatedly in broad daylight in the main streets. The passers-by laughed, but when the police began to look attentively at the caressing pair, he felt the need of caution.

"Take care," he said, "in this country we might be imprisoned for making love openly."

"What do I care for that?" she answered. "I love you so much."

He thought her again sublime in her all-defying tenderness, and they planned to meet again in a week. His intention was to go to his colleague Ilmarinen in the Island of Rügen. The latter would help him to order his affairs; then he would rent a house and they would meet again in a fortnight at latest.

"You see now, one cannot trust in the permanence of this hatred."

"No, one must trust love."

"It looks as if that had conquered."

Their parting at the station was heart-rending, and, as he sat alone in the railway carriage, he felt the pain of longing for her. He did not find the sense of freedom and happiness of which he had dreamt. All the recollections of her malice seemed to have been obliterated.

[Footnote 1: Heligoland.]

IV

He went from London to Hamburg in the hope of finding acquaintances on his arrival who would help him on to Rügen. But he found the place as though under a spell of enchantment; everyone had gone to the country or somewhere else. He had to take a room in an hotel and telegraph first to Ilmarinen in Rügen, but the latter answered that he had no money. Then he telegraphed to Copenhagen and Christiania and received similar answers.

He felt now as though he had been enticed into a trap and overpowered. Since there had been an outbreak of cholera the previous year in Hamburg, they expected another when the heat returned, and that was the case just now. Therefore, if he did not get away soon, he had to expect, not death, to which he felt indifferent, but the quarantine.

The days passed slowly with terrible monotony, for he had no one to talk to, and with the threatened cholera outbreak hanging over his head. Helpless and in a perpetual rage against some invisible foe who seemed to have a grudge against him, he felt paralysed. He dared not move a finger in order to alter his destiny, for he feared failure and renewed disappointment of his hopes.

In order to pass the time he studied historical tables and wrote dates from morning to evening. But the days were still terribly long, and after four days he conceived a fixed idea that he would never get away from this infernal town where nothing but buying and selling went on. This impression became so strong that he determined to end his life in his uncanny bedroom. He unpacked his things and put out the photographs of his children and other relatives on the writing-table.

Loneliness and torment made the time seem double its real length. He began to be under the illusion that he was a native of Hamburg; he forgot for a while his past and the fact that he was married or had lived anywhere else than here. He regarded himself as a prisoner with the weird feeling that he did not know what crime he had committed, who had condemned him, or who was his jailer. But the black spectre of cholera haunted invisibly the dirty water of the canals and watched for him. Three times a day he asked the waiter about the cholera and always received the same answer: "They are not sure yet."

Then at last came a letter from his wife. She cried aloud from longing, fear, and unrest, and wished to know where he was. He answered in the same tone and felt wild with rage at the destiny which separated them.

On the morning of the fifth day he discovered in a newspaper that his Danish friend lived only half an hour's journey by rail from Hamburg.

If he had known that before, he would not have been obliged to undergo all these sufferings. Now, since he could not pay the hotel bill, he resolved to depart at once and not to return. His friend would give him money which he would send to the hotel, and he would have his things sent after him. He took his seat in the railway carriage with the feelings of a liberated prisoner, cast a pitying look on Hamburg and forgave the injuries it had done him, but vowed never to honour it with another visit, unless compelled.

His half-hour's journey put him in a good humour, and his mouth watered at the prospect of being able to give expression to all his vexation and perhaps to make light of his martyrdom, and give it a comic aspect. His divine frivolity returned, and he thought that he must be after all a lucky fellow to find one of his friends so unexpectedly. He stopped before the comfortable little house; the landlord stood in the doorway; he greeted him and asked if Mr ---- were at home.

"No; he went off this morning."

"Where?"

"To Denmark."

During the three hours which he had to wait for the train he had time to get over the blow. When he took his seat again in the train, he thought: "There is something wrong here; it is not the natural logic of events. It is certainly something else."

Then the spires of Hamburg reappeared and his hatred to the place awoke again, and rose to an incredible height when he saw a coffin at the station. "Now the cholera is here," he thought, "and I shall be in quarantine for fourteen days!"

But it was not the cholera, which was something to be thankful for. He did not feel so, however, for he felt sure it would break out on the same day that he received the money. And he calculated that he would never get away from Hamburg in this way. The money would delay so long till the hotel bill, which grew in geometrical progression, swallowed up the whole amount, and nothing would be left for his travelling expenses. In this way there would be a sort of perpetual movement which might last till the end of the world.

That his calculations were about correct was proved two days later when the money really came. He paid the bill, left the hotel in a cab, and drove to the station; then a hotel servant who had followed him expected a tip, and had, besides, a little additional bill, probably falsified, as usual. When he came to the booking-office and inquired the price of the ticket, he was two marks short. Accordingly he returned to the hotel.

It is not necessary to linger over details in order to give the reader a lively idea of what he suffered. In short, his silence cure still lasted some days; then he got away, and the cholera had not yet broken out.

His object in going to Rügen was partly to seek masculine society in order to get rid of the feminine atmosphere which had enveloped him, and partly to settle matters with Ilmarinen; but his chief purpose was probably to talk himself out. That was precisely why, he thought, destiny or whatever it was had relegated him to absolute silence in Hamburg, for "destiny" always sought out his secret wishes in order to frustrate them.

When at last he reached Rügen, hoping to have a good talk for half a night, he found Ilmarinen altered, chilly in demeanour and embarrassed. The latter had heard that his friend had married a lady from a rich family, as indeed was the fact, and therefore could not understand this sudden come down. When the new-comer asked whether they could have supper together, the Finn excused himself by saying that he had been invited to a birthday feast.

"I live, you know," he said, "with Lais's oldest friend, the Swede, who was in love with her, and who came last."

"Is he here?"

"Yes, he lives here, since Lais engaged herself to the Russian who left his wife and children."

"He hates me then also?"

"Yes, to speak the truth, your presence will certainly annoy him."

So he remained alone the first evening. Alone after a long double loneliness with his wife and with himself!

He felt as though he were under some curse, to be so treated by this insignificant, uncultivated Ilmarinen whom he had lifted up from nothingness, introduced to his own circle, fed and lodged, because he executed business matters for him with the theatres and publishers. This employment was partly an honour for the young unknown author, and partly an advantage, for it helped him to find openings for his own work. Now the pupil abandoned the teacher, because he thought there was nothing more to be gained from him, and because he considered he could now help himself.

The days which followed were now so dreadful, that again the thought occurred to him that this could not be natural, but that a black hand was guiding his destiny.

Since there was only one restaurant in this third-class watering-place, he had to sit at the same table with his countryman, who attributed to him the loss of Lais, and with Ilmarinen, who assumed a superior tone, because he regarded him as lost. Then the food resembled hog's flesh from which all the goodness had been cooked out. One rose hungry from table, and was hungry the whole day. Everything was adulterated, even the beer. As regards the meat, the restaurant keeper's family first cooked all the goodness out of it for themselves; the customers only got the sinews and bones, and were fed, in fact, just like dogs. Bitter looks, which his unfortunate fellow-countryman could not quite suppress, did not increase the imaginary pleasures of the table.

He spent a week in Rügen without hearing anything from his wife in London. At first he had found life on the island tolerable in contrast to that in the Hamburg hotel; but when he woke one day and reflected on his situation, it seemed to him simply hellish. He had hired an attic room and the sun beat fiercely on the iron plates of the roof, which was only a foot above his head. Sixteen years previously he had, as a young bachelor, left his garret at the top of five flights of stairs, in order to enter a house as a married man. Since that time it had been one of his nightmares to find himself crawling up the five flights of stairs to his old garret, where all the wretchedness and untidiness of a bachelor's room awaited him. Now he was again in an attic and a bachelor, although married. That was like a punishment after receiving warnings. But what crime he had committed he could not say.

Moreover, the whole surrounding soil consisted of light, loose sand, which had been so heated by the suns of midsummer that it did not become cool at night. It made one think at first of the hot sand-girdles which peasants use to cure inflammation of the lungs. Later on, after searching in his memory, he thought of the scene in Dante's Inferno where the blasphemers lie stretched out on hot sand. But as he did not think he believed in any good God, it seemed to him that blasphemies might be left unpunished.

After walking about for a week in the deep sand, it seemed to him really a hellish torture to have to take half a step backward for every one forward, and to be obliged to lift the foot six inches high in walking. Worst of all was the feeling of sinking through the earth like the girl in the fairy story who trod on bread. Never to find a firm foothold, nor to be able to run a race with one's thoughts, but to drag oneself about like an old man--that was hell. Besides this, there was a heat in the air which never abated. His attic was burning hot by day, and when he lay in bed at night with nothing on, he was scorched by the iron plates of the roof. The nearness of the sea would naturally have helped to relieve the heat, but that possibility had been carefully guarded against, like everything else. From his boyhood he had been accustomed to cast himself head foremost into the water because he did not like creeping into it. In connection with this also, he was persecuted by a frequently recurring nightmare, i.e. he used to dream that he was overheated and must plunge into the sea. The sea was there but was so shallow that he could not plunge into it, and when he did crawl into it, it was still so shallow that he could not duck his head. That was precisely the case here. "Have I come here for the fulfilment of all my bad dreams?" he asked himself.

And with reason. Ilmarinen grew more inquisitive every day; he asked when the Norwegian's wife was coming, and when a fortnight had passed, believed that she had quite abandoned him. This, naturally, pleased Lais's friend, and nothing was wanting to complete the Norwegian's hell. For there was something very humiliating in his position as a discarded husband. His correspondence with England had assumed such an ominous character that he did not know himself whether he was still married or separated. In one of his wife's letters, she dwelt on her inextinguishable love, the pain of separation, and the martyrdom of longing. They were, she said, Hero and Leander on opposite sides of the sea, and if she could swim, she would fly to her Leander, even at the risk of being washed up on his island a corpse. In her next letter she announced that she intended opening a theatre in London, and was trying to raise sufficient capital. At the same time she could not find enough capital to buy a steamer-ticket. A third letter contained the news that she was ill, and was full of complaints that the husband had left his sick wife in a foreign land. A fourth letter said that she was in a convent kept by English ladies, where she had been educated, and where she found again her youth and innocence; in it she also denounced the wickedness of the world and the hell of marriage.

It was impossible to give reasonable answers to these letters, for they poured on him like hail and crossed his own. If he wrote a gentle reply he received a scolding letter in answer to a previous sharp one of his, and vice versa. Their misunderstandings arrived at such a pitch that they bordered on lunacy, and when he ceased to write, she began to send telegrams.

This imbroglio lasted for a month, and during that time he looked back with longing to the hours he had spent in Hamburg; they seemed to him like memories of an indescribably happy time when compared with this.

At last he was cut down from the gallows. A letter came from his sister-in-law inviting him to his father-in-law's villa at Odense. His wife had also been invited; and it was arranged that they should meet again there.

V

Prepared for everything, even the worst, he entered on this new stage of running the gauntlet. The most curious of all his changes awaited him. After having been a husband and father he was to become a child again, be incorporated into a family, and find another father and mother many years after losing his own. The situation was rendered more confused by the fact that his father and mother-in-law had lived separate for seven years, and now wished to come together again on the occasion of their daughter's marriage.

He had thus become a bond of union between them, and since the daughter had also been at variance with her father, the family meeting promised to take the shape of a manifold reconciliation.

But his own past was not exactly associated with family reconciliations, and since he himself had not a clean record the prospective idyll by the Areskov Lake began to loom before him like a cave of snakes. How was he to explain this strange parting from his bride after only eight weeks of marriage? To allege pecuniary embarrassment would be the worst of all excuses, because a son-in-law with money difficulties would be regarded as an impostor or a legacy-hunter.

As he approached the meeting-place, he became nervous, but at the last hour he saved his courage, as usual, by reverting to the stand-point of the author: "If I get no honour thereby, I will at any rate get material for a chapter in my novel."

He also regarded what happened to him from another point of view--that of the innocent martyr. "I will see how far Destiny can go in its meanness, and how much I can bear." When the train stopped at the pretty little branch-line station, he looked out, naturally enough, for faces which sought his own. A young lady leading a delicate-looking child by the hand approached, asked his name, and introduced herself as his father-in-law's French governess. She had been sent, she said, to meet him.

A pretty white village whose houses had high, tent-like roofs and green shutters lay in a valley surrounded by small hills, and enclosing a beautiful lake, on the bank of which, outside the village, stood his father-in-law's house. On the road under the lime-trees a bare-headed, white-haired lady met him, embraced him and bade him welcome. It was his wife's mother. He was immediately conscious what a strange transmission of feelings such a simple transaction as marriage had seemed to him, might bring about. She was his mother and he was her son.

"I have known you long before you saw my daughter," said the old lady, with the quavering voice of a religious fanatic. "And it is as though I had expected you. There is much evil in your writings, but your immorality is childish, your views of women are correct, and your godlessness is not your fault for He did not wish to make your acquaintance, but now you will soon see Him come. You have married a child of the world, but you will not long remain with her when you see how she pulls you down into the trivialities of life. When you find yourself alone, you will re-discover the first vocation of your youth."

This she said in the solemn and unembarrassed manner of a sibyl, as though someone else spoke through her and therefore she did not fear to have said too much.

When the conversation returned to mundane things, he asked after his father-in-law, whose absence surprised him. She answered that he was not here, but would come to-morrow. His sister-in-law now appeared but she was chilly, gloomy and conventional in demeanour. He had thought her his friend and had hoped to find a support in her presence, but perceived now that that hope was vain, especially as she was going to leave before her father came. Nothing more was said about his own wife, and no one knew whether she was coming or not.

Had he been enticed into a trap? he asked himself, and was a court martial about to be held here? Had his wife written complaints against him from England? How was he to interpret the situation? A mother-in-law who almost advised him to be divorced, and spoke ill of her child--that was something very original!