Part 3

"I slept on board, and early the next morning, it was Sunday, I stood on deck watching the coast as we glided through the water that danced in delicious September sunshine. I was happily expectant. At dinner hour we passed a fjord, a lovely deep-blue fjord, winding to our right as we passed, with the spire of a church just visible among the fir-trees round the bend. Boats of all kinds, from a smart cutter to a pram were coming out after the service. The white sails swelled as they caught the breeze, flapped as they tacked, hung listlessly a second, and then dashed with a swerve, like swift snowy-winged birds, through the water. I had not troubled with church-going of late years. Why? Oh, speculation, weariness of soul that found no drop of consolation in religious observance,--maybe that might be the reason. But all those honest, simple folk in their Sunday bravery, fair-haired girls with their psalm-books wrapped up in their only silk kerchief, the ring of laughter echoing across the water, the magic of sun and sky, mountain and fjord, made me feel that I too was church-going, and I felt strangely happy. It is the off moments that we do not count as playing any part in our lives that are, after all, the best we have. I am afraid it would be impossible to make you see things as I felt, them.

"I went up to the hotel when I landed. I had the reputation of riches; the hotel was at my service. I inquire for him, go down to my sitting-room, send him my card, and wait. I wait with an odd feeling that I am outside myself, watching myself as it were. I can see the very childishness of my figure, the too slight hips and bust, the flash of rings on my fingers,--they are pressed against my heart, for it is beating hatefully,--ay, the very expectant side-poise of head is visible to me some way. It flashes across me as I stand that so might a slave wait for the coming of a new master, and I laugh at myself for my want-wit agitation. A knock.

"'Come in!'

"The door opens, and I am satisfied. In the space of a second's gaze I meet what my soul has been waiting for, ah, how long! I think always. Have I lived before in some other life that no surprise touches me?--that it is just as if I am only meeting the embodiment of a disintegrated floating image that has often flashed before my consciousness, and flown before I could fix it? Has this man, or some psychical part of this man, been in touch with me before, or how is it? I stand still and stretch out my hand; I check an impulse to put out both, I feel so tremulously happy. I know before he speaks how his voice will sound, what his touch will be like before he clasps my hand. It is odd how the most important crisis of our lives often comes upon us in the most commonplace way. It is the fashion to decry love; yet the vehemence of the denials, the keenness of the weapons of satire and scepticism that are turned against it only prove its existence. As long as man is man and woman is woman, it will be to them at some time the sweetest and possibly the most fatal interest in life to them. Thrust it aside for ambition or gain, slight it as you will, sooner or later it will have its revenge. I had felt no breath of it as maid, wife, or widow; my heart had been a free, wild, shy thing, jessed by my will. Sometimes, by way of experiment, I let it fly to some one for an hour, but always to call it back again to my own safe keeping. Now it left me.

"We sat and talked,--rather I talked, I think, and he listened. He said my going to see him even on literary grounds was eccentric; but then it seemed I had a way of doing as I pleased without exciting much comment. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it! Was I really going away? How tiresome it was, really awfully tiresome! What was he like? Well, an American bison or a lion. You might put his head among the rarest and handsomest heads in the world. Prejudiced in his favor? No, not a bit. His hands, for instance, are great laborer's hands, freckled too; I don't like his gait either,--indeed, a dozen things. What we talked about? Well, as I said, he listened mostly; laughed with a great joyous boyish laugh, with a deep musical note in it. He has a deferential manner and a very caressing smile; a trick, too, of throwing back his head and tossing his crest of hair. Why he laughed? Well, I suppose I made him. I told him all about myself; turned myself inside out, good and bad alike, as one might the pocket of an old gown; laughed at my own expense, hid nothing. An extraordinary thing to do, was it? I suppose it was; but the whole thing was rather unusual. He got up and walked about, sometimes he thrust his hands in his pockets and exclaimed, 'The Deuce!' etc. I fancy he learned a good deal about me in a few hours. You see it was not as if one were talking to a stranger; it was as if one had met part of one's self one had lost for a long time, and was filling up the gaps made during the absence. You can't understand. I think we were both very happy. He admired--no, that is not the word; he was taken with me, that is better. He said my hands were 'as small as a child's;' the tablecloth was dark-red plush that made a good background. He pointed timidly, as a great shy boy might, to one of my rings; you see they don't as a rule wear many rings up there; I suppose they gave an impression of wealth. 'That one is very beautiful!' I laughed; I was so glad my hands were pretty,--pretty hands last so much longer than a pretty face. I laughed too at his finger, it had such a deferential expression about it; and I called him a great child. I think we were both like two great children; we had found a common interest to rejoice in,--we had found ourselves. Every moment was delightful; we were making discoveries, finding we had had like experiences,--had both hungered, both known want, were both of an age; we were both unconventional, and were shaking hands mentally all the time. I don't remember now what it was he said; but I remember I was obliged to drop my head, and I felt I was smiling from sheer, delicious pleasure. He cried laughingly: 'You say I am a great child, you are a child yourself when you smile!'

"He was to have supper with me, and he went away for an hour. After he left I walked over to a long mirror and looked at myself. Tried to fancy how _he_ saw me,--that might be different, you know. I had color, life, eyes like stars, trembling, smiling lips. There was something quivering, alert about me; I scarce knew myself. Of course the same hips, figure, features were reflected there,--it was something shining through that struck me as foreign. Do you know what I did? I danced all round the room. Shows what an idiot an old woman can be. By the way, he denied that I was old; I was like a little girl, but a remarkable little girl; no wonder people always noticed me, as if I were a somebody. How did he know that? Oh, he had heard it, for that matter seen it too, at the pier. He knew the moment I stepped off the boat that it was I. Yes, people always stared at me, but how could he know? Ah! presentiment perhaps. So he was on the pier? Why did he not come and meet me? No legible answer, but a slow reddening up to the roots of his fair hair. I do not know quite how he conveyed it, but I had the sensation, a charming one, of being treated as a queen.

"But to go back. I sat or rather lay in an arm-chair at the window, and watched the water and the ships. It was getting dusk, the luminous dusk of the north, as if a soft transparent purple veil is being dropped gently over the world. The fjord was full of lights from the different crafts at anchor, and the heaven full of stars; and the longer one looked up there, the more one saw myriads of flimmering eyes of light, until one's brain seemed full of their brightness, and one forgot one's body in gazing. Long silvery streaks glistened through the heaving water like the flash of feeding trout, and lads and lassies in boats rowed to and fro, and human vibration seemed to thrill from them, filling the atmosphere with man and woman. And the silken air caressed my face as the touch of cool, soft fingers. I had a feeling of perfect well-being; one does not get many such moments in one's life, does one? I think I just was happy, rehearsing the hours that flew too quickly, recalling every look, tone, gesture, and smile. The _jomfru_ came in to lay the table; she knew me from a previous visit and began to talk; but I wanted to be alone with my thoughts; so I went upstairs, washed my hands and puffed them with sweet smelling powder, and then when I went down again and sat and waited I clasped them up over my head to make them white. He came back, flung his hat on the sofa out of sheer boyish delight at being back, came over and stood and looked down at me, and I laughed up to him. If I were to talk until Doomsday, I could not make you understand what I cannot yet understand myself.

"After supper, at which I sipped my tea and watched him, we sat at the window and looked out at the purple world. I had told him he might smoke. Well? Well, we talked, and we talked when we were both silent; and he, I mean his thinking self, came to me; and I--well, I believe from the moment he came into the room, all the best of me went straight to him. The lights out in the harbor twinkled, a star fell, and I wished--well, wishes are foolish. I think he must have been watching my face, for when our eyes met, he smiled as if he understood. Sometimes he jumped up and stood rocking a chair backward and forward. He was sorry I was going away! Yes? Oh, we might meet again! That might be difficult! Indeed? I should have thought _he_ would be the last person in the world to say it was difficult to meet. He laughed at that, with a quick sidelong look he has, like a Finn dog, and said I was sharp, awfully sharp, as if he liked being caught. By the way, he occasionally used strong language; said I must forgive him, he wasn't very used to ladies' society.

"At ten I said I would say good-night for conventionality's sake. He begged, humbly it struck me, for a little longer. I was to leave by the steamer at eight in the morning, would be down at seven; he might come to me. Would I give him a portrait of myself? Yes, I would get one specially done. As much in profile as possible, he thought that would be happier. Yes. He came to the top of the stairs with me, and when we bade good-night he took my hand and held it curiously as if it were something fearfully fragile, and stood and watched me down the corridor. And will you credit it? I felt inclined to run like an awkward little school-girl. I said prayers that night; thanked God, I don't quite know what for,--I suppose I did then,--perhaps for being happy. I looked at my foreign self in the glass too, and when the light was out--Yes?--I did what you and every other woman might do, I cuddled my face to an imaginary face, rubbed my cheek to an imaginary cheek, whispered a God bless you! and fell asleep.

"I was down before seven, paid my bill, and sat waiting, with the little tray, with its thick white cups and lumpy yellow cream, before me. He came,--such a glad man, with glad eyes, glad smile, and outstretched hands. And I,--I was so glad, too, that I could have shouted out for very joy of living. I might have been drinking some magic elixir instead of coffee.

"'It is tiresome!' he said impatiently.

"'What is tiresome? You have said that so often.'

"'It is tiresome when a person one wants so badly to keep in the country is going out of it.'

"'Supposing I were to stay in it, you would probably be in one place and I in another. It is only a question of a little dearer postage!'

"We both laughed at that. It takes such a little thing to make one laugh when one is happy. Then the steamer came in sight, and we walked down through the bright morning to the pier, and went on board. He stood silently; we only looked at each other. It did not then strike me as odd--it does now. The first bell rang! I felt a chill steal over me. 'It is tiresome, it is hateful!' His smile had flown; and old deep lines and traces of past suffering I had not noticed before showed plainly.

"'I will come back,' I said, 'when the winter is over!'

"'Ay, but winter is long, or it used to be!'

"'No matter, I will come with the spring!'

"The second bell rang! Ah, why can't we do as our hearts bid us? We have one short life, and it is spoiled by chains of our own forging in deference to narrow custom. I shivered. There was after all an autumn chill in the air. I hate the sound of a steamer bell now.... The third bell! We turn, and I tighten my small fingers in his great hand, and I say good-by and God bless you! Not from a purely religious conception of God, unless it be that God (and I think it does) means all that is good and beautiful, tender and best. I might have said, 'The best I can think of befall you!' A second later, and the streamer rail separates us! I look into his soul through his eyes, and see it is sorry, regretful,--as sorry as I am glad it is so: he is sorry I am going from him, and in that short concentrated gaze his soul comes to me as I would have it come to me.

"'When spring comes' I whisper as I lean over to him, while the steamer glides out. He follows it to the end of the pier, and stands there as long as we are in sight. If he had held out his arms and said, 'Woman, stay with me!' I would, I fear, have jumped down and stayed. Didn't know anything about him? No, that is true, only that I had been waiting for something ever since I was old enough to have a want, and that he was that something; that I was nearly thirty when I found him, and--life is short!

"I was so glad, in spite of leaving him, that I believe I thought the sun shone differently. I almost asked some people on deck if they did not think that the day was quite the loveliest day ever dawned since the world was a world; if there was not something peculiarly and singularly delicious in the very air? I found a quiet sofa, and lay with closed eyes, and lived it over again.

"The rest is more difficult to tell you. I was insanely happy, then I was intensely miserable. I sent him my portrait and a letter, and counted the days and the hours to a reply. It came. I stole away to read all the warm meaning ill concealed under the words of it; slept with it under my pillow, carried it in my bosom, and answered it straight from my heart. Why try and tell you of the aftertime? I would not go through that winter again for anything in the world. Hope, fear, suspense, joy, despondency,--all the strongest feelings that can torture or wear out a heart were mine. I longed to be up on a high mountain alone with my dream. I wonder does a man ever realize the beauty there is in a woman's thought of him! What kind were the letters? Warm, passionate, yet with a _reservatio mentalis_ that hurt me, but always with a 'When spring comes!' in them. It is amazing to what depths of folly a human being can descend! I had his photograph on my table; I greeted it as a Russian peasant his household saint. It would be hard to find my match in idiocy. I felt a letter coming, and waited with strained ears and fever-racked nerves for the postman's knock. Do you know there is something touchingly pitiful in the way one finds out all the tender bits in a letter and re-reads them? I have kissed a thumb-mark on the paper! Heavens, how the days dragged! I was ill with yearning thought; night brought no rest but the comfort of being alone; all the years of my life were not as long as that weary winter. Sleep fled, and nervous pain took its place. It was foolish, exceedingly foolish, because it was fatal to my looks. At the rare times I looked at myself I got a glimpse of a thin, waxen, yellow face with dark-ringed eyes, and I was certainly older looking. Thinking of it all dispassionately, I am inclined to think I was hysterical. How many of the follies and frailties of women are really due to hysterical rather than moral irresponsibility is a question. You see there is no time of sowing wild oats for women; we repress and repress, and then some day we stumble on the man who just satisfies our sexual and emotional nature, and then there is shipwreck of some sort. When we shall live larger and freer lives we shall be better balanced than we are now. If what I suffered is love, all I can say is I would not ask a better sample of conventional hell's pain. Hu-s-sh! Very well, I won't say those things!

"It is bad enough to be a fool and not to know it; but to be a fool and feel with every fibre of your being, every shred of your understanding, that you are one, and that there is no help for it; that all your philosophy won't aid you; that you are one great want, stilled a little by a letter, only to be haunted afresh by the personality of another creature, tortured with doubts and hurt by your loss of self-respect,--ah! it was a long winter! Then the New Year came and went, and time dragged slowly but surely, and at length the Almanacs said it was spring-time, and the girls at the street corners called, 'Vilets, sweet vilets!' and the milliners marked down guinea bonnets to 12_s._ 11_d._, and I watched each token of its coming with a fearsome, joyous expectation--Go on? Ah, yes, I'll go on,--where was I? Oh, spring was coming, wasn't it? I do not laugh as I used to, eh? How used I to laugh? I forget. Well, I won't laugh if it hurts you, dear, not even at myself.

"Well, once again, I was standing at a table in a hotel room, waiting. It is the simple things that are so hard to describe, and that are most complicated in their effects. I said again, 'Come in!' held fast to the table with my left hand and smiled,--to be accurate, began a smile. Spring is later up there; perhaps some of the winter's frost was still in the atmosphere, for something froze it on my lips. I felt a curious stiffening in my face, and the touch of his hand did not thaw me. Feel happy? No; I was numb in one way, and yet keenly alive to impressions. I felt as if my nerve net was outside my skin, not under it, and that the exposure to the air and surrounding influences made it intensely, acutely sensitive. I seemed to see with my sense of feeling as well as my sight. You know how in great cold you seem to burn your hand with an icy heat if you suddenly grasp a piece of iron? Well, I felt some way I was touched by glowing shivers: that sounds nonsense, but it expresses the feeling. Why? I don't know why: I was analyzing, being analyzed; criticising, being criticised. It was all so different, you see. Supposing you had just sipped a beaker of exhilarating, life-giving, rich wine with an exquisite bouquet, and a glow that steals through you and witches and warms you; and suddenly, without your knowing how it happens, the draught is transformed into luke-warm water, or 'Polly' without the 'dash' in it! What did he say? Let me think. Oh, yes: I was wretchedly thin. Odd how things strike one. I once saw a representation of Holberg's Stundeslöse in Copenhagen. One of the characters is an ancient housekeeper, with a long money-bag, who is, as they term it, 'marriage-sick.' A match is arranged between her and a young spark in the village. The scene is this: while the monetary part of the affair is being arranged by the notary, etc., he says to her,--'Permit me to pass my hand over your bosom, mistress?' She simpers; and I shall never forget the comical expression of dismay with which the suitor rolls his eyes and drops his jaw as he turns aside. I felt rather than saw the comprehensive look which accompanied his comment on my thinness, and that scene flashed across my inner vision. Odd, was it not? A sort of sympathetic after-comprehension. It was as if I, too, were having a hand passed across the flatness of my figure.

"'Yes, I have got thin.' Silence. Had I been very ill? Yes, very! Was that why I was so pale? It was fearful,--not a tinge of warm color in my face; one would be afraid to touch me. I felt as if I were being toted up: item, so much color; item, so much flesh. Had I been worried? I had lost that buoyant childishness that was so attractive. Ah, yes, I had dwelt too much on a trouble I had. Did I sleep? Not much. That was foolish. I ought to eat plenty, too. I looked as if I didn't eat enough; my eyes and cheeks were hollowed out. Ah, yes, no doubt I did look older than in autumn! I was not contradicted. I would have told a little lie to spare a man's feelings. Men are perhaps more conscientious.

"What else? I am rehearsing it all as best I can. Oh, my hands were altered; he thought they were not so small, eh? Might be my wrists were less round, that made a difference. Did it? They certainly were larger, and not so white. Did he kiss me? Oh, yes. You see I wanted to sift this thing thoroughly, to get clear into my head what ground I was standing on. So I let him. They were merely lip-kisses; his spirit did not come to mine, and I was simply analyzing them all the time. Did I not feel anything? Yes, I did,--deeply hurt; ah, I can't say how they hurt me! They lacked everything a kiss, as the expression of the strongest, best feeling of a man and woman, _can_ hold. How do I know? My dear woman, have you never dreamt, felt, had _intuitive experiences_? I have. I am not sure that I had not a keen sense of the ludicrous side of the whole affair; that one portion of my soul was not having a laugh at the other's expense. I do not quite know what I had been expecting. 'Tis true he had written me beautiful letters. You see he is too much of a word-artist to write anything else.

"Treated me badly? No, I am not prepared to say that he did. I am glad he was too honest to hide his startled realization of the fact that autumn and spring are different seasons, and that one's feelings may undergo a change in a winter. I do not see why I should resent that. Why, it would be punishing him for having cared for me. To put it in his words: 'I came as a strangely lovely dream into his life.' Probably the whole mistake lay in that. He thought of me as a dream lady, with dainty hands; idealized me, and wrote to the dream creature. When I came back in the flesh, he realized that I was a prosaic fact, with less charming hands, a tendency to leanness, and coming crow's feet. His look of dismayed awakening was simply delicious.

"I wish I could catch and fasten the fleeting images that flit across my memory; you would grasp my mental attitude better. In the midst of all my pain,--I was sitting next him, and he was stroking my hand mechanically,--I noticed a glass case on the wall containing an Italian landscape, with ball-blue sky and pink lakes; pasteboard figures of Dutch-peasant build, with Zouave jackets, Tyrolese hats, and bandaged legs, figured in the foreground; you wound it up, and the figures danced to a _varso-viana_. I was listening to him, and yet at the same time I caught myself imagining how he and I would look dressed like that, bobbing about to the old-fashioned tune. I could hardly keep from shrieking with laughter. He had a turn-down collar on: he ought always to wear unstarched linen,--it and his throat didn't fit. You cannot understand me? Dearest woman, I do not pretend to understand the thing myself.