Jenny: A Novel

VII

Jenny remained with Mrs. Schlessinger; it was cheap, and she did not know what to do with herself. Spring was in the air. She walked on the pier in the evenings. Heavy clouds, bordered by the sun, with red and burning gold, chased across the immense open dome of the sky, and were reflected in the restless sea. The dark and desolate plain turned light green and the poplars reddish brown with young shoots. Along the railway line violets and small white and yellow flowers were coming up in hundreds, and at last the whole plain was luxuriously green, and a world of colour sprang forth along the ditches; sulphur-tinted irises and big white lilies were reflected in the pools of the marsh. Then one day the air was permeated by a sweet scent of hay, mixing with the smell of tar from the shore.

The hotel opened, and the small houses by the pier were filled with summer visitors; children swarmed on the white beach, rolling in the sand and paddling in the water. Mothers and nurses in national costumes of the Spreewald sat on the grass with their sewing, looking after them. The bathing-huts had been transported into the sea, and young girls were shouting and laughing in the water. Sailing yachts anchored by the pier, tourists came from the town, in the evenings there was dancing in the hotel, and couples walked about in the small plantation where Jenny used to lie in the grass early in the spring listening to the wash of the waves and the rustling of the wind in the scraggy tree-tops.

One or two of the ladies looked at her with interest and compassion when she walked on the beach in her black and white dress. The summer visitors staying in the village had got to know that a young Norwegian girl had had a child and was disconsolately mourning its death, and some of them found it more touching than scandalous.

She much preferred walking out into the country, where the summer boarders never went. Once in a while she went as far as the cemetery, where her boy was buried. She sat staring at the grave, which she had not wished to have tended in any way, sometimes laying on it some wild flowers which she had picked on the way, but her mind refused to associate the little mound of grey earth with her beloved little boy.

In her room in the evenings she sat staring at the lamp—with needlework which she never touched. And her thoughts were always the same: she remembered the days when she had the boy—first the faint, peaceful joy while she was in bed, getting well, then when she was sitting up and Mrs. Schlessinger showed her how to bath and dress and handle him, and when they went to Warnemünde together to buy fine material, lace, and ribbon, and how on their return home she cut and sewed, designed and embroidered. Her boy was to have nice things, instead of the common, ready-made outfit she had ordered from Berlin. She had also bought a ridiculous garden syringe of green-painted tin, with pictures of a lion and a tiger, standing by a blue sea amid palms and looking with awe at the German dreadnoughts steaming away towards the African possessions of the Empire. She had found it so amusing that she bought it for baby-boy to play with when he should be big enough—after a very long time. He must first learn to find mother’s breast, which at present he only blindly sought for, and to discover his own little fingers, which he could not separate when he had clutched them together. By and by he would be able to recognize his mother, to look at the lamp and at mother’s watch when she was dangling it before his eyes. There were so many things baby-boy would have to learn.

All his things were in a drawer she never opened. She knew what every little piece looked like; she could feel them in the palms of her hands, the soft linen and the fluffy woollen things and the unfinished jacket of green flannel on which she had embroidered yellow buttercups—the jacket he was to wear when she took him out.

She had begun a picture of the beach with red and blue children on the white sands. Some of the compassionate ladies came to look at it, trying to make acquaintance with her: “How nice!” But she was not pleased with the sketch, and cared neither to finish it nor to make a new one.

Then one day the hotel closed up again, the sea was stormy, and summer had gone.

Gunnar wrote from Italy, advising her to go there. Cesca wanted her to go to Sweden, and her mother, who knew nothing, wrote she could not understand why she stayed so long in Germany. Jenny was thinking of going away, but she could not make up her mind, although a faint longing began to stir in her.

She became restless at going about like that without being able to do anything. She had to take a decision—even if it came only to throwing herself into the sea one night from the pier.

One evening she took out Heggen’s books from their case. Among them was one with poetry—Fiori della Poesia Italiana—in an edition for tourists, bound in leather. She turned the leaves to see if she had forgotten all her Italian.

The book fell open by itself at Lorenzo di Medici’s carnival song, where a folded piece of paper lay in Gunnar’s handwriting:

“Dear Mother,—I may tell you now that I have arrived safely in Italy and am quite comfortable, and that”—the rest of the sheet was covered with words to learn. Beside the verbs he had written down the conjugations, and the margin all along the melodramatic poetry was tightly covered with notes: Quant’è bella giovenezza, che se fugge tuttavia.

Even the commonest words were written down. Gunnar had probably tried to read the book directly he came to Italy, before he knew the language at all. On the first page was written “G. Heggen, Firenze, 1903”—that was before she knew him.

She began to read here and there. It was Leopardi’s “Ode to Italy,” which Gunnar was so enthusiastic about. She read it. The margin was full of notes and ink-spots.

It was as if he had sent her a message more intimate than any of his letters. Young, sound, firm, and active, he was calling her, asking her to come back to life—and work. Oh, if she could gather courage and begin work again! She wanted to try—to make her choice whether for life or death; she wanted to go out there where once she had felt herself free and strong—alone save for her work. She longed for her friends, the trusty comrades who never came too near to hurt one another, but lived side by side, each minding their own business and all sharing what they possessed in common: the belief in their ability and the joy of their work. She wanted to see again the country of mountains, with proud, severe lines and sunburnished colours.

A few days later she left for Berlin, where she stayed some time visiting the galleries, but, feeling tired and forlorn, she went on the Munich.

In the Alte Pinakothek she stopped before Rembrandt’s “Holy Family.” She did not look at it from a painter’s point of view; she only looked at the young peasant woman who, with her garment still drawn aside from her full bosom, sat looking at her child sleeping on her lap, and holding his foot caressingly in her hand. It was an ugly little peasant boy, but in splendid condition; he was sound asleep and such a darling all the same. Joseph was looking at him across the mother’s shoulder, but it was not an old Joseph, and Mary was no immaterial, heavenly bride; they were a strong, middle-aged working man and his young wife, and the child was the joy and pride of the two.

In the evening she wrote to Gert Gram a long, sad and tender letter bidding him farewell for ever.

On the following day she took a through ticket to Florence; after a sleepless night in the train she found herself sitting at the window at daybreak. Wild torrents spurted down the forest-clad mountain-sides. It grew lighter and lighter, and the towns became more and more Italian in character: rust-brown or golden-yellow tiles, loggias to the houses, green shutters against reddish stone walls, church fronts in baroque, stone bridges across the rivers, vineyards outside the towns, and grey castle ruins on the hilltops. At the stations all the signs were written in German and Italian.

She stood in the customs office looking at the first- and second-class passengers startled out of their sleep, and she felt quite happy without being able to account for it. She was back again in Italy. The customs officer smiled at her because she was so fair, and she smiled back; evidently he took her for the maid of one or other of the lady passengers.

The misty grey mountains ridges on either side had a bluish shade in the crevices, the ground looked rusty red, and the sun flamed white and hot.

But in Florence it was bitterly cold in the early days of November. Tired and frozen, she stayed in the city a fortnight—her heart cold to all the beauty around her, and melancholy and discouraged because it did not warm her as before.

One morning she went to Rome. The ground was white with frost all the way down through Toscana; in the middle of the day the frosty mist lifted and the sun shone—and she saw again a spot she had never forgotten: the lake of Trasimene lying pale blue, surrounded by the mountains. A point of land projected into the water, with towers and pinnacles of a small stone-grey town, with a cypress avenue leading from the station.

She arrived at Rome in pouring rain. Gunnar was on the platform to meet her, and he squeezed her hands as he wished her welcome. He went on talking and laughing all the time as they drove from the station to the quarters he had engaged for her, the rain splashing against the cab from the grey sky and from the street paving.

VIII

Heggen was sitting at the outer side of the marble table, taking no part in the conversation; now and then he cast a glance at Jenny, who sat pressed into the corner, with a whisky and soda before her. She was chatting very merrily with a young Swedish lady across the table, without taking the slightest notice of her neighbours, Dr. Broager and the little Danish artist Loulou Schulin, who both tried to draw her attention. Heggen saw that she had had too much to drink again. A company of Scandinavians and a couple of Germans had met in a wine shop, and were finishing the night in the inmost corner of a somewhat dingy café. They were all of them more or less affected by what they had drunk, and very much opposed to the request of the landlord that they should leave, as it was past time for locking up and he would be fined two hundred lire.

Gunnar Heggen was the only one who would have liked the symposium to come to an end; he was the only sober one, and in a bad temper.

Dr. Broager was constantly applying his black moustache to Jenny’s hand; when she pulled it away he tried to kiss her bare arm. He had succeeded in placing his arm behind her and they were squeezed so tight in the corner that it was useless to try and get away from him. Her resistance was, to tell the truth, somewhat lame, and she laughed without offence at his boldness.

“Ugh!” said Loulou, shrugging her shoulders. “How can you stand it? Don’t you think he is disgusting, Jenny?”

“Yes, I do, but don’t you see that he is exactly like a blue-bottle?—it is useless trying to drive him away. Ugh! stop it, doctor!”

“Ugh!” said Loulou again. “How can you stand that man?”

“Never mind. I can wash myself with soap when I get home.”

Loulou Schulin leaned against Jenny, stroking her arms. “Now I will take care of these poor, beautiful hands. Look!” She lifted one of them to be admired by the company round the table. “Isn’t it lovely?” and, loosening the green motor veil from her hat, she wrapped it round Jenny’s arms and hands. “In a mosquito net, you see,” she said, thrusting out a small tongue swiftly at Broager.

Jenny sat an instant with her arms and hands enveloped in the green veil before undoing it and putting on her coat and gloves.

Broager leaned back with eyes half closed, and Miss Schulin raised her glass: “Your health, Mr. Heggen.”

He pretended not to hear, but when she repeated her words he seized his glass: “Pardon—I did not see”—and, after taking a sip, looked away again.

One or two people in the company smiled. Heggen and Miss Winge lived next door to each other on the top floor of a house somewhere between Babuino and Corso; intimate relations between them seemed therefore to be a matter of course. As to Miss Schulin, she had been married to a Norwegian author, but after a year or so of married bliss had left him and the child, gone out into the world under her maiden name as “Miss,” and calling herself an artist.

The landlord came up once more to the company, urgently soliciting their departure; the two waiters put out the gas at the farther end of the room and stood waiting by the table, so there was nothing else to be done but pay and leave the place.

Heggen was one of the last as they came out into the square. By the light of the moon he saw Miss Schulin taking Jenny’s arm, both running towards a cab, which some of the others were storming. He ran in the same direction and heard Jenny calling out: “You know, the one in Via Paneperna,” just as she jumped into the already filled cab and fell into somebody’s lap.

But some ladies wanted to get out and others to get in—people kept on jumping out from one door and in at another, while the driver sat motionless on his seat waiting, and the horse slept with its head drooping against the stone bridge.

Jenny was in the street again now, but Miss Schulin reached out her hand—there was plenty of room.

“I’m sorry for the horse,” said Heggen curtly, and Jenny started to walk at his side behind the cab, the last among those who had not got room in the vehicle, which rolled on ahead.

“You don’t mean to say you want to be with these people any longer—to walk as far as Paneperna for that?” said Heggen.

“We might meet an empty cab on the way.”

“How can you be bothered with them?—they are all drunk,” he added.

Jenny laughed in a languid way.

“So am I, I suppose.”

Heggen did not answer. They had reached the Piazza di Spagna when she stopped:

“You are not coming with us, then, Gunnar?”

“Yes, if you absolutely insist on going on—otherwise not.”

“You need not come for my sake. I can get home all right, you know.”

“If you go, I go—I am not going to let you walk about alone with those people in that state.”

She laughed—the same limp, indifferent laugh.

“You will be too tired to sit to me tomorrow.”

“Oh, I shall be able to sit all right.”

“You won’t; and anyhow, I shan’t be able to work properly if I have to walk about all night.”

Jenny shrugged her shoulders, but started to walk in the direction of Babuina—the opposite way to the rest of the party.

Two policemen passed them; otherwise there was not a living soul to be seen. The fountain was playing in front of the Strada di Spagna, lying white with moonlight and bordered by black and silver glittering evergreen shrubs.

Suddenly Jenny spoke in a hard and scornful voice:

“I know you mean it kindly, Gunnar. It is good of you to try and take care of me, but it is not worth while.”

He walked on in silence.

“No, not if you have no will of your own,” he said after a while.

“Will”—imitating him.

“Yes; I said will.”

Her breath came quick and sharp, as if she wanted to answer, but she checked herself. She was suddenly filled with disgust—she knew that she was half drunk, but she would not accentuate it by beginning to shout, moan, and explain—perhaps cry, before Gunnar. She set her teeth.

They reached their own entrance. Heggen opened the door and struck a match to light her up the endless flight of dark stone steps. Their two small rooms were on the half-landing at the end of the stairs; a small passage outside their doors ended in a marble staircase leading to the flat roof of the house.

At her door she shook hands with him, saying in a low voice:

“Good-night, Gunnar—thanks for tonight.”

“Thank you. Sleep well.”

“Same to you.”

Gunnar opened the window in his room. The moon shone on an ochre-yellow wall opposite, with closed shutters and black iron balconies. Behind it rose Pincio, with sharply outlined dark masses of foliage against the blue moonlit sky. Below him were old moss-covered roofs, and where the dark shadow of the house ended some washing was hung out to dry on a terrace farther down. He was leaning on the windowsill, disgusted and sad. He was not very particular in general, but to see Jenny in such a state. Ugh! And it was more or less his own fault; she had been so melancholy the first months of her return—like a wounded bird—and to cheer her up a little he had persuaded her to join the party, thinking of course that he and she would amuse themselves by watching the others only, never for a moment suspecting that it would have such an effect on her. He heard her come out from her room and go on to the roof. He hesitated a moment, then followed her.

She was sitting in the only chair, behind the little corrugated-iron summer-house. The pigeons cooed sleepily in the dovecot above.

“Why have you not gone to bed? You will be cold up here.” He fetched her shawl from the summer-house and handed it to her, sitting down between the flower-pots on the top of the wall. They sat quietly staring at the city and the church domes that seemed floating in the moonlit mist. The outlines of distant hills were completely obliterated.

Jenny was smoking. Gunnar lit a cigarette.

“I can hardly stand anything now, it seems—in the way of drink, I mean. It affects me at once,” she said apologetically.

He understood that she was quite herself again.

“I think you might leave it off altogether for a time, and not smoke—at least not so much. You know you have complained of your heart.”

She did not answer.

“I know that you agree with me about those people, and I cannot think how you could condescend to associate with them—in the way you did.”

“One is sometimes in need of—well, of a narcotic,” she said quietly. “And as to condescending....” He looked into her white face; her fair fluffy hair shone in the moonlight. “Sometimes I think it does not matter, though now—at this moment—I feel ashamed, but then I am extraordinarily sober just now, you see,” she said, smiling. “I am not always, although I have not taken anything, and in those moments I feel ready for any kind of revels.”

“It is dangerous, Jenny,” he said, and again after a pause: “I think it was disgusting tonight—I cannot call it anything else. I have seen something of life; I know what it leads to. I would not like to see you come down and end as something like Loulou.”

“You can be quite easy in your mind about me, Gunnar. I am not going to end that way. I don’t really like it, and I know where to stop.”

He sat looking at her.

“I know what you mean,” he said at last. “Other women have thought as you, but when one has been gliding downward for a time one ceases to care about where to stop, as you call it.” Stepping down from the wall, he went towards her and took her hand:

“Jenny, you will stop now, will you not?”

She rose, smiling:

“For the present, anyway. I think I am cured for a long time of that sort of thing.” She shook his hand firmly: “Good-night; I’ll sit for you in the morning,” she said, going down the stairs.

“All right, thanks.”

He remained on the roof for some time smoking, shivering a little, and thinking, before going down to his room.

IX

Next day she sat to him after lunch until it grew dark; in the rests, they exchanged some insignificant words while he went on painting the background or washed his brushes.

“There,” he said, putting down the palette and tidying up his paint-box. “That will do for today.”

She came to look at the picture.

“The black is good, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think it is very effective.”

He looked at his watch:

“It is almost time to go out and get something to eat—shall we dine together?”

“All right. Will you wait for me while I put on my things?”

A moment later when he knocked at her door she was ready, standing before the glass to fasten her hat.

How good looking she was, he thought, when she turned round. Slim and fair in her tight-fitting steel-grey dress, she looked very ladylike—discreet, cold, and stylish. What he had thought of her yesterday seemed quite impossible today.

“Did you not promise to go to Miss Schulin this afternoon to see her paintings?”

“Yes, but I am not going.” She blushed. “Honestly I don’t care to encourage an acquaintance with her, and I suppose there is not much in her paintings either.”

“I should not think so. I cannot understand your putting up with her advances last night. Personally, I would rather do anything—eat a plateful of live worms.”

Jenny smiled, and said seriously:

“Poor thing, I daresay she is not happy at all.”

“Pooh! not happy. I met her in Paris in 1905. I don’t think she is perverse by nature—only stupid and full of vanity. It was all put on. If it were the fashion now to be virtuous she would sit up darning children’s stockings, and would have been the best of housewives. Possibly painting roses with dewdrops on as a recreation. But once she got away from her moorings she wanted to see life—free as an artist, she thought she ought to get herself a lover for the sake of her self-respect. But unfortunately she got hold of a duffer who was old-fashioned enough to want her to marry him in the old non-modern way when things had gone wrong, and expected her to look after the child and the house.”

“It may be Paulsen’s fault that she ran away—you never know.”

“Of course it was his fault. He was of the old school, wanting happiness in his home, and he gave her probably too little love and still less cudgelling.”

Jenny smiled sadly:

“I know, Gunnar, that you believe life’s difficulties are easily solved.”

Heggen sat down astride on a chair with his arms on the back.

“There is so much of life that we don’t know anything about, that what we know is easy enough to manage. Have to make your aims and dreams accordingly, and tackle the unexpected as best you can.”

Jenny sat down in the sofa, resting her head in her hands:

“I can no longer feel that there is anything in life I am so sure about that I could make it a foundation for my judgment or the aim of my exertions,” she said placidly.

“I don’t think you mean it.”

She only smiled.

“Not always,” said Gunnar.

“I suppose there is nobody who means the same thing always.”

“Yes, always when one is sober. You were right last night in saying that sometimes one isn’t sober even if one hasn’t been drinking.”

“At present—when I am sober once in a while, I——” She broke off and remained silent.

“You know what I think about life, and I know you have always thought the same. What happens to you is, on the whole, the result of your own will. As a rule, you are the maker of your own fate. Now and then there are circumstances which you cannot master, but it is a colossal exaggeration to say it happens often.”

“God knows I did not will my fate, Gunnar. Yet I have willed for many years and lived accordingly, too.”

Both were quiet a moment.

“One day,” she said slowly, “I changed my course an instant. I found it so severe and hard to live the life I considered the most worthy—so lonely, you see. I left the road for a bit, wanting to be young and to play, and thus came into a current that carried me away, ending in something I never for a second had thought could possibly happen to me.”

After a moment’s silence Heggen said:

“Rossetti says—and you know he is a much better poet than painter:

Jenny said nothing—and Gunnar repeated: “That the same goal is still on the same track.”

“Do you think it is easy to find the track to the goal again?” asked Jenny.

“No, but ought one not to try?” he said, almost in a childish way.

“But what goal did I have at all?” she said, with sudden vehemence. “I wanted to live in such a way that I need never be ashamed of myself either as a woman or as an artist. Never to do a thing I did not think right myself. I wanted to be upright, firm, and good, and never to have any one else’s sorrow on my conscience. And what was the origin of the wrong—the cause of it all? It was that I yearned for love without there being any particular man whose love I wanted. Was there anything strange in it, or that I wanted to believe that Helge, when he came, was the one I had been longing for—wanting it so much that at last I really believed it? That was the beginning of what led to the rest. Gunnar, I did believe that I could make them happy—and yet I did only harm.”

She had risen and was pacing up and down the floor.

“Do you believe that the well you speak of will ever be pure and clear again to one who knows she has muddied it herself? Do you think it is easier for me to resign now? I longed for the same that all girls long for, and I long for it now, but I know that I have now a past which makes it impossible for me to accept the only happiness I care for. Pure, unspoilt, and sound it should be—but none of these conditions can I ever fulfil—not now. My experiences of these two last years are what I must be satisfied to call my life—and for the rest of it I shall just have to go on longing for the impossible.”

“Jenny,” said Gunnar, “I am sure I am right in saying again that it depends on yourself if these memories are going to spoil your life, or if you will consider them a lesson, however hard it may be, and still believe that the aim you once set for yourself is the only right one for you.”

“But can you not see it is impossible? It has sunk too deep; it has eaten into me like a corrosive acid, and I feel that what was once my inmost self is crumbling to pieces. Yet I don’t want it—I don’t want it. Sometimes I am inclined to—I don’t know really what—to stop all the thoughts at once. Either to die—or to live a mad, awful life—drown in a misery still greater than the present one. To go down in the mud so deep and so thoroughly that nothing but the end will come of it. Or”—she spoke low, with a wild, stifled voice—“to throw myself under a train—to know in the last second that now—just now—my whole body, nerves, heart, and brain will be made into one single shivering blood-stained heap.”

“Jenny,” he cried, white in the face, “I cannot bear to hear you speak like this!”

“I am hysterical,” she said soothingly, but she went to the corner where her canvases stood and almost flung them against the wall, with the painting turned out:

“Is it worth living to go about making things like those? Smearing oil paint on canvas? You can see for yourself that it is nothing now but a mess of paint. Yet you saw how I worked the first months—like a slave. Good God! I cannot even paint any more.”

Heggen looked at the pictures. He felt he had a firm ground to stand upon again.

“I should really like to have your frank opinion on—that piggish stuff,” she said provokingly.

“I must admit that they are not particularly good.” He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets looking at them. “But that happens to every one of us—I mean that there are certain times when you cannot produce anything, and you ought to know that it is only for a time. I don’t think one can lose one’s talent even if one has been ever so unhappy. You have left off painting for such a long time, besides; you will have to work it up again—to master the means of action, so to say. Take life study, for instance—I am sure it is three years since you drew a live model. One cannot neglect those things without being punished for it. I know from my own experience.”

He went to a shelf and searched among Jenny’s sketch-books:

“You ought to remember how much you improved in Paris—let me show you.”

“No, no, not that one,” said Jenny, reaching her hand for it.

Heggen stood with the book in his hand, looking amazed at her. She turned her face away:

“I don’t mind if you look at it—I tried to draw the boy one day.”

Heggen turned the leaves slowly. Jenny was sitting in the sofa again. He looked at the pencil sketches of the sleeping infant for a moment, then put the book carefully away.

“It was a great pity that you lost your little boy,” he said gently.

“Yes. If he had lived, all the rest would not have mattered. You speak about will, but when one’s will cannot keep one’s child alive, what is the good of it? I don’t care to try to make anything of my life now, because it seemed to me the only thing I was good for and cared about was to be a mother to my little boy. Oh, I could have loved him! I suppose I am an egoist at heart, for whenever I tried to love the others, my own self rose like a wall between us. But the boy was mine alone. I could have worked if he had been spared to me. I could have worked hard.

“I had made so many plans. On the way down here they all came back to my mind. I had decided to live in Bavaria with him in the summer, because I was afraid the sea air would be too strong for him. He was going to lie in his pram under the apple trees while I painted. There is not a place in the world I could go to where I have not been in my dreams with the boy. There is nothing good or beautiful in all the world that I did not think, while I had him, he should learn and see. I have not a thing that was not his too. I used to wrap him up in the red rug I have. The black dress you are painting me in was made in Warnemünde when I was out of bed again, and I had it cut so that it would be easy to nurse him.

“I cannot work because I am so full of him—the longing for him paralyses me. In the night I cuddle the pillow in my arms and sob for my baby-boy. I call him and talk to him when I am alone. I should have painted him, to have a picture of him at every age. He would have been a year old now, would have had teeth and been able to take hold of things, to stand up, and perhaps to walk a little. Every month, every day I think of him—how he would have grown and what he would be like. When I see a woman with a bambino on her arm, or the children in the street, I always think of him and how he would look at their age.”

She stopped talking for a moment.

“I did not think you felt it like that, Jenny,” said Heggen gently. “It was sad for you, of course—I quite understood that—but I thought, on the whole, it was better he was taken. If I had known you were so distressed about it, I should have come to see you.”

She did not answer, but went on in the same strain: “And he died—such a tiny, tiny little thing. It is only selfishness on my part to grudge him death before he had begun to feel and to understand. He could only look at the light and cry when he was hungry or wanted to be changed; he did not know me even—not really, anyhow. Some vague glimpses of reason had possibly begun to awaken in his little head, but, think of it, he never knew that I was his mother.

“Never a name had he, poor darling, only mother’s baby-boy, and I have nothing to remember him by, except just material things.”

She lifted her hands as if holding the child to her heart, then let them fall empty and lifeless on the table.

“I remember so distinctly my impression when I first touched him, felt his skin against mine. It was so soft, a little damp—the air had scarcely touched it yet, you see. People think a newborn child is not nice to feel, and perhaps it is so when it is not your own flesh and blood. And his eyes—they were no special colour, only dark, but I think they would have been grey-blue. A baby’s eyes are so strange—almost mysterious. And his tiny head was so pretty, when he was feeding and pressing his little nose against me. I could see the pulse beating and the thin, downy hair; he had quite a lot of it—and dark—when he was born.

“Oh, that little body of his! I can never think of anything else—I can feel it lying in my hands. He was so round and fat, and every bit of him was so pretty—my own sweet little boy!

“But he died! I was looking forward so much to all that was going to happen that it seems to me now I did not pay enough attention to things when I had him, or kissed him or looked at him enough, though I did nothing else in those weeks.

“When he was gone there was nothing left but the yearning for him. You cannot understand what I felt. My whole body ached with it. I fell ill, and the fever and the pain seemed to be my longing materialized. I missed him from my arms, between my hands, and at my cheek. Once or twice in the last week of his life he clutched my finger when I put it in his hand. Once he had somehow got hold of a little of my hair—oh, the sweet, sweet little hands....”

She lay prostrate over the table, sobbing violently, her whole form shivering.

Gunnar had got up and stood hesitating, emotion rising in his throat. Then he went to her and, bending down over her head, he touched her hair lightly with a shy, gentle kiss.

She continued crying, in the same position, for a little while. At last she got up and went to the washstand to bathe her face.

“Oh, how I miss him,” she repeated, and he could not find anything to say but “Jenny, if I had known that you felt it so much.”

She came back to where he was and, putting her hands on his shoulders, said:

“Gunnar, you must not pay any attention to what I said a while ago. Sometimes I am not quite myself, but you will understand that, for the sake of the boy, if for no other reason, I am not going to throw myself entirely into a life of dissipation. At heart I really want to make the best I can of my life—you know that. I mean to try and work again, even if the result is poor in the beginning. I have always the comfort of knowing that one need not live longer than one cares to.”

She put on her hat again, finding a veil for her tear-stained face:

“Let us go and have something to eat—you must be starving by this time—it is very late.”

Gunnar Heggen blushed all over his face. Now she mentioned it, he felt awfully hungry, and was ashamed of himself for admitting it at such a moment as this. He dried the tears from his wet, hot cheeks and took his hat from the table.

X

By tacit agreement they passed the restaurant where they usually had their meals and where there were always a number of their countrymen, and, continuing their way in the twilight towards the Tiber, they crossed the bridge into the old Borgo quarters. In a corner by the Piazza San Pietro there was a small trattoria where they had dined after going to the Vatican, and they went there.

They ate in silence. When she had finished Jenny lit a cigarette, and sat sipping her claret and rubbing her fingers with the fragrant tangerine peel. Heggen smoked, staring in front of him. They were almost alone in the place.

“Would you like to read a letter I got from Cesca the other day?” asked Jenny suddenly.

“Yes. I saw there was a letter for you from her—from Stockholm, is it not?”

“Yes; they are back there and going to stay the winter.” Jenny took the letter out of her bag and handed it to him.