Chapter 7

Elinor cried, but Tage had risen from his seat, utterly bewildered. He then went close to her, kneeled down before her, and seized her hand. Sobbing, half-stifled with emotion, he pressed it against his cheek with infinite tenderness, with an expression of helplessness in every line of his face.

“Oh, but mother, dearest mother, what have we done to you, have we not always loved you, have we not always, both when we were with you and when we were away from from you, wanted you as the best thing we possessed in the world? We have never known father except through you; it was you who taught us to love him, and if Elinor and I are so close to each other, is it not because day after day you always pointed out to each of us what was best in the other? And has it not been thus with every other person to whom we became attached, do we not owe everything to you? We owe everything to you, and we worship you, mother, if you only knew.... Oh, you cannot imagine, how much we want your love, want you beyond all bounds and limits, but there again you have taught us to restrain our love, and we never dare to come as close to your heart as we should like. And now you say that you are going to leave us entirely, and put us to one side. But that is impossible. Only one who wanted to do us the greatest harm in the world could do anything as frightful as that, and you don’t want to do us the greatest harm, you want only what is best for us--how can it then be possible? Say quickly that it is not true; say it is not true, Tage, it is not true, Elinor.”

“Tage, Tage, don’t be so distressed, and don’t make it so hard, both for yourself and us others.”

Tage rose.

“Hard,” he said, “hard, hard, oh were it nothing but that, but it is horrible--unnatural; it is enough to drive one insane, merely to think of it. Have you any idea of the things you make me think of? My mother loved by a strange man, my mother desired, held in the arms of another and holding him in hers. Nice thoughts for a son, worse than the worst insult--but it is impossible, must be impossible, must be! Are the prayers of a son to be as powerless as that! Elinor, don’t sit there and cry, come and help me beg mother to have pity on us.”

Mrs. Fonss made a restraining gesture with her hand and said: “Let Elinor alone, she is probably tired enough, and besides I have told you that nothing can be changed.”

“I wish I were dead,” said Elinor, “but, mother, everything that Tage has said is true, and it never can be right that at our age you should give us a step-father.”

“Step-father,” cried Tage, “I hope that he does not for one moment dare.... You are mad. Where he enters, we go out. There isn’t any power on earth that can force me into the slightest intimacy with that person. Mother must choose--he or we! If they go to Denmark after their marriage, then we are exiles; if they stay here, we leave.”

“And those are your intentions, Tage?” asked Mrs. Fonss.

“I don’t think you need doubt that; imagine the life. Ida and I are sitting out there on the terrace on a moonlit evening, and behind the laurel-bushes some one is whispering. Ida asks who is whispering, and I reply that it is my mother and her new husband.--No, no, I shouldn’t have said that; but you see the effect of it already, the pain it causes me, and you may be sure that it won’t help Elinor’s health either.”

Mrs. Fonss let the children go while she remained sitting here.

No, Tage was right, it had not been good for them. How far from her they had already gone in that short hour! How they looked at her, not like her children, but like their father’s! How quick they were to desert her as soon as they saw that not every motion of her heart was theirs! But she was not only Tage’s and Elinor’s mother alone; she was also a human being on her own account, with a life of her own and hopes of her own, quite apart from them. But she was, perhaps, not quite as young as she had believed herself to be. This had come to her in the conversation with her children. Had she not sat there, timid, in spite of her words; had she not almost felt like one who was trespassing upon the rights of youth? Were not all the exorbitant demands of youth and all its naive tyranny in everything they had said?--It is for us to love, life belongs to us, and your life it is but to exist for us.

She began to understand that there might be a satisfaction in being quite old; not that she wished it, but yet old age smiled faintly at her like a far-distant peace, coming after all the agitation of recent times, and now when the prospect of so much discord was so near. For she did not believe that her children would ever change their mind, and yet she had to discuss it with them over and over again before she gave up hope. The best thing would be for Thorbrogger to leave immediately. With his presence no longer here the children might be less irritable, and she could try to show them how eager she was to be as considerate as possible to them. In time the first bitterness would disappear, and everything... no, she did not believe, that everything would turn out well.

They agreed that Thorbrogger should leave for Denmark to arrange their affairs. For the time being they would remain here. It seemed, however, that nothing was gained by this. The children avoided her. Tage spent all his time with Ida or her father, and Elinor stayed all the time with the invalid, Mrs. Kastager. And when they happened to be actually together, the old intimacy, the old feeling of comfort, was gone. Where were the thousand subjects for conversation, and, when finally they found one, where was the interest in it? They sat there keeping up a conversation like people who for a while have enjoyed each other’s company, and now must part. All the thoughts of those who are about to leave are fixed on the journey’s end, and those who remain think only of settling hack into the daily life and daily routine, as soon as the strangers have left.

There was no longer any common interest in their life; all the feeling of belonging together had disappeared. They were able to talk about what they were going to do next week, next month, or even the month following, but it did not interest them as though it had to do with days out of their own lives. It was merely a time of waiting, which somehow or other had to be endured, for all three mentally asked themselves: And what then? They felt no solid foundation in their lives; there was no ground to build upon before this, which had separated them, was settled.

Every day that passed the children forgot more and more what their mother had meant to them, in the fashion in which children who believe themselves wronged will forget a thousand benefactions for the sake of one injustice.

Tage was the most sensitive of them, but also the one who was hurt most deeply, because he had loved most. He had wept through long nights because of his mother whom he could not retain in the way in which he wanted. There were times when the memory of her love almost deafened all other feelings in his heart. One day he even went to her and beseeched and implored her that she might belong to them, to them alone, and not to any other one, and the answer had been a “no.” And this “no” had made him hard and cold. At first he had been afraid of this coldness, because it was accompanied by a frightful emptiness.

The case with Elinor was different. In a strange way she had felt that it was an injustice toward her father, and she began to worship him like a fetish. Even though she but dimly remembered him, she recreated him for herself in most vivid fashion by becoming absorbed in everything she had ever heard about him. She asked Kastager about him and Tage, and every morning and night she kissed a medallion-portrait of his which belonged to her. She longed with a somewhat hysterical desire for some letters from him which she had left at home, and for things which had once belonged to him.

In proportion as the father in this way rose in her estimation, the mother sank. The fact that she had fallen in love with a man harmed her less in her daughter’s eyes; but she was no lenger the mother, the unfailing, the wisest, the supreme, most beautiful. She was a woman like other women; not quite, but just because not quite, it was possible to criticize and judge her and to find weaknesses and faults in her. Elinor was glad that she had not confided her unhappy love to her mother; but she did not know how much it was due to her mother that she had not done so.

One day passed like another, and their life became more and more unendurable. All three felt that it was useless; instead of bringing them together, it only drove them further apart.

Mrs. Kastager had now recovered. Though she had not played an active part in anything that had happened, she knew more about the situation than any one else, because everything had been told her. One day she had a long talk with Mrs. Fonss who was glad that there was some one who would quietly listen to her plans for the future. In this conversation Mrs. Kastager suggested that the children go with her to Nice, while they sent for Thorbrogger to come to Avignon, so that they might be married. Kastager could stay on as witness.

Mrs. Fonss wavered a little while longer, for she had been unable to discover what her children’s reaction would be. When they were told, they accepted it with proud silence, and when they were pressed for answer, they merely said that they would, of course, adjust themselves to whatever she decided to do.

So things turned out as Mrs. Kastager had proposed. She said good-by to the children, and they left; Thorbrogger came, and they were married.

Spain became their home; Thorbrogger chose it for the sake of sheep-farming.

Neither of them wished to return to Denmark.

And they lived happily in Spain.

She wrote several times to her children, but in their first violent anger that she had left them, they returned the letters. Later they regretted it; they were unable, however, to admit this to their mother and to write to her; for that reason all communication between them ceased. But now and then in round about ways they heard about each other’s lives.

For five years Thorbrogger and his wife lived happily, but then she suddenly fell ill. It was a disease whose course ran swiftly and whose end was necessarily fatal. Her strength dwindled hourly, and one day when the grave was no longer far away she wrote to her children.

“Dear children,” she wrote, “I know that you will read this letter, for it will not reach you until after my death. Do not be afraid, there are no reproaches in these lines; would that I might make them bear enough love.

“When people love, Tage and Elinor, little Elinor, the one who loves most must always humble himself, and therefore I come to you once more, as in my thoughts I shall come to you every hour as long as I am able. One who is about to die, dear children, is very poor; I am very poor, for all this beautiful world, which for so many years has been my abundant and kindly home, is to be taken from me. My chair will stand here empty, the door will close behind me, and never again will I set my foot here. Therefore I look at everything with the prayer in my eye that it shall hold me in kind memory. Therefore I come to you and beg that you will love me with all the love which once you had for me; for remember that not to be forgotten is the only part in the living world which from now on is to be mine; just to be remembered, nothing more.

“I have never doubted your love; I knew very well that it was your great love, that caused your great anger; had you loved me less, you would have let me go more easily. And therefore I want to say to you, that should some day it happen that a man bowed down with sorrow come to your door to speak with you concerning me, to talk about me to relieve his sorrow, then remember that no one has loved me as he has, and that all the happiness which can radiate from a human heart has come from him to me. And soon in the last great hour he will hold my hand in his when the darkness comes, and his words will be the last I shall hear....

“Farewell, I say it here, but it is not the farewell which will be the last to you; it I will say as late as I dare, and all my love will be in it, and all the longings for so many, many years, and the memories of the time when you were small, and a thousand wishes and a thousand thanks. Farewell Tage, farewell Elinor, farewell until the last farewell.

“YOUR MOTHER.”

End of Project Gutenberg’s Mogens and Other Stories, by Jens Peter Jacobsen