VII
One day during Christmas week Gram went into a trattoria. Heggen and Jenny were sitting at a table, but they did not see him. As he was taking off his overcoat, he heard Heggen say:
“I don’t like that man.”
“No; he is disgusting,” said Jenny, sighing.
“It is not good for her either—with this sirocco blowing. She will be a rag tomorrow. I suppose she does not work at all—only walks about with that fellow?”
“Work, no! But I can do nothing. She walks from here to Viterbo with him in those thin slippers of hers, in spite of the cold and the sirocco—only because the man can tell her about Hans Hermann.”
Gram greeted them as he passed. They made a movement as if inviting him to sit at their table, but he pretended not to see, and sat down farther up the room with his back to them. He understood that they were speaking about Francesca.
He was almost a daily visitor now at the Via Vantaggio; he could not help it. Miss Winge was always alone, reading or sewing, and seemed pleased to see him. He thought she had changed a little of late; she was not so determined or so ready with her opinions as she used to be; not so inclined to argue and to lay down the law. She seemed almost a little sad. He asked her once if she were not quite well.
“Yes, I am very well, thank you. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know—you seem so quiet nowadays.”
She had lighted the lamp meanwhile, and he noticed that she blushed.
“I may have to go home soon. My sister is ill with pneumonia, and my mother is so upset about it. I am very sorry to go,” she added after a pause. “I should have liked to stay for the spring at least.”
She sat down to her needlework. He wondered in his mind if it was Heggen—he had never been able to find out if there was an understanding between them. For the present, Heggen, who was said to be rather impressionable generally, was very much attached to a young Danish nurse staying in Rome with an elderly lady. It seemed so strange that she should blush; it was not like her.
Francesca came in that evening before he left. He had not seen her much since Christmas Eve, but enough to understand that he was quite indifferent to her. She was never in a temper, or childishly impetuous; she went about as if she did not see anybody, her mind completely absorbed by something or other. At times she seemed almost to walk in a trance.
He saw a great deal of Jenny; he went to the trattoria where she used to have her meals, and also to her rooms. He scarcely knew why, but he felt he wanted to see her.
One afternoon Jenny went into Francesca’s room to look for some turpentine. Francesca always took whatever she needed from Jenny’s belongings, but she never put the things back. Cesca was lying on the bed sobbing, with her head deep in the pillow. Jenny had not heard her come in.
“My dear, what is the matter? Are you ill?”
“No, but please go away, Jenny, do! I won’t tell you; you’ll only say it’s my own fault.”
Jenny understood it was no good talking to her when she was in that state, but at tea-time she knocked at her door. Cesca thanked her, but did not want any tea.
That night, when Jenny was reading in bed, Cesca suddenly came into the room in her nightdress. Her eyes were red and swollen with crying.
“May I sleep with you tonight? I don’t want to be alone.”
Jenny made room for her. She did not like the idea of sharing her bed, but Cesca used to come when she was very unhappy and ask to be allowed to sleep with her.
“Go on reading, Jenny; I won’t disturb you. I shall lie very still here by the wall.”
Jenny pretended to read for some time. Now and then a sigh like a sob was heard from Francesca.
“Shall I put out the lamp, or would you like it burning?” Jenny asked.
“No, put it out, please.”
In the dark she put her arm round Jenny and told her, sobbing, that she had been to the Campagna again with Hjerrild, and he had kissed her. At first she had just scolded him a little, thinking it was only fun, but he soon became so disgusting that she got angry. “And he wanted me to go and stay at an hotel with him tonight. He said it exactly as he would have asked me to go to a confectioner’s with him. I was furious, and he got very angry and said some nasty, horrid things.” She shivered as in a fever. “He spoke about Hans—he said that Hans, when he showed him my picture, had spoken to him about me in such a way as to make Hjerrild believe—you know what I mean?” She nestled close to Jenny. “Can you understand it—for I don’t—that I still care for that cad of a man? Hans had not mentioned my name, though, and he did not imagine, of course, that Hjerrild would meet me or know me from the photograph; it was taken when I was eighteen.”
Jenny’s birthday was on the seventeenth of January. She and Francesca were having a dinner-party in the Campagna, in a small osteria in the Via Appia Nuova. Ahlin, Heggen, Gram, and Miss Palm, the Danish nurse, made up the party.
From the tram terminus they walked two and two along the sunny, white road. Spring was in the air, the brown Campagna had a greyish-green tinge; the daisies, which had been blossoming more or less all the winter, began to spread all over in silvery spots, and the impatient clusters of tender green shoots on the elder bushes along the fences had grown.
The larks hung trembling high up in the blue-white sky, and there was a haze over the city and the ugly, red blocks of houses it had sprinkled over the plain. Beyond the massive arches of the canal, the Alban mountains, with small white villages, showed faintly through the mist.
Jenny walked in front with Gram, who carried her grey dust-coat. She was radiantly beautiful in a black silk dress; he had never seen her in anything but her grey dress or coat and skirt. It seemed to him almost as if he walked with a new and strange woman. Her waist was so small in the shiny black material that her form above it seemed round and supple; the bodice was cut open in a deep square in front, and her hair and skin were dazzlingly fair. She wore a big black hat, in which he had seen her before, but without specially noticing it. Even her pink beads looked quite different with the black dress.
They ate out of doors in the sunshine under the vine, which threw a shadow in the form of a fine bluish net over the tablecloth. Miss Palm and Heggen wanted to decorate the table with daisies; the macaroni was quite ready, but the others had to wait until they came back with the decorations. The food was good and the wine was excellent; Cesca had brought fruit, and coffee, which she was going to make herself, to make sure it should be good. After dinner Miss Palm and Heggen investigated marble reliefs and inscriptions that had been found on the site and fitted into the masonry of the house. After a while they disappeared round a corner. Ahlin remained sitting at the table smoking, his eyes half shut against the glare.
The osteria lay at the foot of a small hill. Gram and Jenny walked up the slope at random. She picked small wild flowers that grew in the yellow earth.
“There are masses of these at Monte Testaccio. Have you been there, Mr. Gram?”
“Yes, several times. I went there yesterday to have a look at the Protestant cemetery. The camelia trees are covered with blossoms, and in the old part I found anemones in the grass.”
“Yes, they are out now. Somewhere at Via Cassia, beyond Ponte Molle, there are lots of them. Gunnar gave me some almond blossoms this morning; they have them already at the Spanish stairs, but I daresay they are forced.”
They reached the top and began strolling about. Jenny walked with her eyes on the ground; the short grass was springing up everywhere, and variegated thistle-leaves and some big, silver-grey ones were basking in the sun. They walked towards a solitary wall, which rose out of a mound of gravel; the Campagna extended around them in every direction, grey-green below the light spring skies and the warbling larks. Its boundaries were lost in the haze of the sun. The city beyond them seemed a mirage only, the mountains and the clouds melted together, and the yellow arches of the canal appeared, only to vanish again in the mist. The countless ruins were reduced to small, glistening pieces of walls, strewn about on the green, and pines and eucalyptus trees by the red or ochre houses stood solitary and dark on this fine day of early spring.
“Do you remember the first morning I was here, Miss Winge? I imagined I was disappointed, and I believed it to be because I had longed so much and dreamt so much that everything I was going to see would be colourless and poor, compared to my dreams. Have you noticed how on a summer day, when you lie in the sun with your eyes closed, all colours seem grey and faded when you first open them? It is because the eyes are weakened by not being used and cannot at once grasp the complexity of the colours as they really are; the first impression is incomplete and poor. Do you understand what I mean?”
Jenny nodded.
“It was my case in the beginning here. I was overwhelmed by Rome. Then I saw you passing by, tall and fair and a stranger. I did not pay any attention to Francesca then—not till we were in the tavern. When I sat there with you, who were all strange to me—it was really the first time such a thing happened to me. Up till then my association with strangers had been only an occasional meeting on my way between school and home. I was confused; it seemed impossible to speak to people. I almost longed for home and all it meant—and I longed for Rome as I knew it from hearsay and from pictures. I thought I could not settle down to anything but look at pictures made by others—read books other men had written—made the best use of the work of others and live in a world of fiction. I felt desperately lonely among you. You once said something about being lonely; I understand now what you meant.
“Do you see that tower over there? I went there yesterday. It is the remnant of a fortress from the Middle Ages, from feudal times. There are a good many of them in the city and round about. You see sometimes an almost windowless wall built in between the houses in a street. It is a bit of the Rome of the robber barons. We know comparatively little about that time, but I am very interested in it at present. I find in the records names of dead people, of whom sometimes nothing is known but their names, and I long to know more about them. I dream of Rome in the Middle Ages, when they fought in the street with fierce cries, and the town was full of robber-castles, where their womenfolk were shut up—daughters of those wild beasts and with their blood in their veins. Sometimes they broke away from their prison and mixed in the life, such as it was, inside the red-black walls. We know so little about those times, and the German professors do not take great interest in them, because they cannot be remade so as to convey abstract ideas; they are simply naked facts.
“What a mighty current of life has washed over this country!—breaking into billows round every spot with town and castle on it. And yet the mountains rise above it bare and desolate. Think of the endless number of ruins here in the Campagna only; of the stacks of books written on the history of Italy—and on the history of the whole world for that matter—and think of the hosts of dead people we know. Yet the result of all these waves of life, rolling one after the other, is very, very small. It is all so wonderful!
“I have talked to you so often and you have talked to me; yet I don’t really know you. You are just as much a mystery to me as that tower.—I wish you could see how your hair shines where you are standing now. It is glorious.
“Has it ever struck you that you have never seen your face? Only the reflection of it in the glass. We can never see what our face looks like when we sleep or shut our eyes—isn’t it odd? It was my birthday the day I met you; today it is yours. Are you glad to be twenty-eight, you who think that every year completed is a gain?”
“I did not say that. I said that you may have had so much to go through the first twenty-five years of your life that you are glad they are over.”
“And now?”
“Now....”
“Yes; do you know exactly what you want to attain during the next year—what use you are going to make of it? Life seems to me so overwhelmingly rich in possibilities that even you, with all your strength, cannot avail yourself of them. Does it ever occur to you, and does it make you sad, Jenny?”
She only smiled in answer, and looked down. She threw the end of her cigarette on the ground and put her foot on it; her white ankle showed through the thin black stocking. She followed with her eyes a pack of sheep running down the opposite slope.
“We are forgetting the coffee, Mr. Gram—I am sure they are waiting for us.”
They returned to the osteria in silence; on the slope, which stretched right down to where they had been lunching, they noticed that Ahlin was lying forward over the table, his head on his arms. Francesca in her bright green gown bent over him, her arms round his neck, trying to lift his head.
“Oh, don’t, Lennart! Don’t cry. I will love you. I will marry you—do you hear?—but you must not cry like that. I will marry you, and I think I can be fond of you, only don’t be so miserable.”
Ahlin sobbed: “No, no—not if you don’t love me, Cesca; I don’t want you to....”
Jenny turned and went back along the slope. Gram noticed that she flushed a deep red down to her neck. A path took them down by the other side of the house into the orchard. Heggen and Miss Palm were chasing each other round the little fountain, splashing each other with water. Miss Palm shrieked with laughter. Helge saw the colour again mount to Jenny’s face and neck as he walked behind her between the vegetable beds. Heggen and Miss Palm had made peace.
“The same old round,” said Helge; “take your partners.”
Jenny nodded, with the shadow of a smile.
The atmosphere at the coffee-table was somewhat strained. Miss Palm alone was in good spirits. Francesca tried to make conversation while they were sipping their liqueurs, and, as soon as she decently could, proposed that they should go for a walk.
The three couples made for the Campagna, the distance between them increasing, until they lost sight of one another altogether among the hills. Jenny walked with Gram.
“Where are we going really?” she said.
“We might go to the Egeria grotto, for instance.”
The grotto lay in quite an opposite direction to the one chosen by the others. They started to walk across the scorched slopes to the Bosco Sacro, where the ancient cork trees stretched their dark foliage to the burning sun.
“I ought to have put on my hat,” said Jenny, passing a hand over her hair. The ground of the sacred grove was covered with bits of paper and other litter; on the stump of a tree near the edge two ladies were seated, doing crochet work, and some little English boys played hide-and-seek behind the massive trunks. Jenny and Gram turned out of the grove and walked down the slope towards the ruin.
“Is it worth while going down?” said Jenny, and without waiting for an answer, sat down on the slope.
“No; let us stay here,” and Helge lay down at her feet on the short, dry grass, took off his hat, and, steadying himself on his elbow, looked up at her in silence.
“How old is she?” he asked suddenly. “I mean Cesca.”
“Twenty-six.” She sat looking at the view in front of her.
“I am not sorry,” he said quietly. “You have noticed it, I daresay. A month ago I might have.... She was so sweet to me once, so kind and confidential, and I was not used to that kind of thing. I took it as—well, as l’invitation à la valse, you see, but now ... I still think she is sweet, but I don’t mind in the least if she dances with somebody else.”
He was lying looking at her: “I believe it is you, Jenny, I am in love with,” he said suddenly.
She turned half-way towards him, with a faint smile, and shook her head.
“Yes,” said Helge firmly; “I think so. I don’t know for certain, for I have never been in love before—I know that now—although I have been engaged once.” He smiled to himself. “It was one of my blunders in the old foolish days.
“This, I am sure, is love. It was you, Jenny, I saw that evening—not her. I noticed you already in the afternoon when you crossed the Corso. I stood there thinking that life was new, full of adventure, and just then you passed me, fair and slender, and stranger. Later, when I had wandered about in this foreign town, I met you again. I also noticed Cesca, of course, and no wonder I was a little flustered for a moment, but it was you I saw first. And now we are sitting here together—we two.”
Her hand was close to him as she sat leaning on it; suddenly he stroked it—and she drew it away.
“You are not cross with me, are you? It is really nothing to be cross about. Why should I not tell you that I believe I am in love with you? I could not resist touching your hand—I wanted to feel that it was real, for it seems to me so wonderful that you are sitting here. I do not really know you, though we have talked about many things. I know that you are clever, level-headed, and energetic—and good and truthful, but I knew that the moment I saw you and heard your voice. I don’t know any more about you now, but there is of course a great deal more to learn—and perhaps I shall never learn it. But I can see for myself, for instance, that your silk skirt is glowing hot, and that if I laid my face in your lap I should burn myself.”
She made an involuntary movement with her hand across her lap.
“It attracts the sun; there are sparks in your hair, and the sunrays filter through your eyes. Your mouth is quite transparent; it looks like a raspberry in the sun.”
She smiled, looking a little embarrassed.
“Will you give me a kiss?” he said suddenly.
“‘L’invitation à la valse?’” She smiled lightly.
“I don’t know—but you cannot be cross with me because I ask you for one single little kiss—on a day like this. I am only telling you what I am longing for, and, after all, why could you not do it?”
She did not move.
“Is there any reason why not?—I shall not try to kiss you, but I cannot see why you should not bend down for a second and give me a tiny little kiss as you sit there with the sun right on your lips. It is no more to you than when you pat a bambino on the head and give him a soldo. It is nothing to you, Jenny, and to me it is all I wish for—just this moment I long for it so much,” he said, smiling.
She bent suddenly down and kissed him. Only for a second did he feel her hair and lips brush his cheek, and he saw the movement of her body under the black silk as she bent down and rose again. Her face, he noticed, which was smiling serenely as she kissed him, now looked embarrassed, almost frightened. He did not move, but lay still, musing contentedly in the sunshine. She became herself again.
“There, you see,” he said at last laughingly, “your mouth is exactly as before; the sun is shining on your lips, right into the blood. It was nothing to you—and I am so happy. You must not believe that I want you to think of me—I only want you to let me think of you, while you may sit and think of anything in the world. Others may dance—to me this is much better—if only I may look at you.”
They were both silent. Jenny sat with her face turned away, looking at the Campagna bathing in the sun.
As they walked back to the osteria, Helge chatted merrily about all sorts of things, telling her about the learned Germans he had met in the course of his work. Jenny stole a glance at him now and again; he used not to be like that, so free and easy. He was really handsome as he walked, looking straight ahead, and his light brown eyes were radiant like amber in the sun.
VIII
Jenny did not light the lamp when she got in, but, putting on an evening cloak in the dark, she went out to sit on the balcony. The night was cold, the skies stretched over the roofs like black velvet, covered with glittering stars. He had said when they parted: “I may come up tomorrow and ask you to go with me for a trip in the Campagna?”
Well, nothing had really happened—she had merely given him a kiss, but it was the first kiss she had ever given to a man, and it had not happened in the way she had expected. It was almost a joke—kissing him like that. She was not in love with him, yet she had kissed him. She had hesitated and thought: I have never kissed, and then a strange sensation of indifference and soft languor stole over her. Why be so ridiculously solemn about it?—and she did it—why not? It did not matter; he had asked for it quite candidly, because he thought he was in love with her and the sun was bright. He had not asked her to love him, and he had made no further advances; he had not claimed anything, only that one little kiss, and she had given it without a word. It was altogether beautiful; she had done nothing to be ashamed of.
She was twenty-eight, and she would not deny to herself that she longed to love and to be loved by a man, to nestle in his arms, young, healthy, and good to look upon as she was. Her blood was hot and she was yearning, but she had eyes that saw clearly, and she had never lied to herself. She had met men now and then and had asked herself: Is he the man?—one or two of them she might have loved if she had tried, if she could have closed her eyes to the one little thing that always was there, making her feel an opposition which she had to master. She had not met any one whom she felt compelled to love, so had not risked it. Cesca would let one man after another kiss and fondle her, and it made no difference; it merely grazed her lips and skin. Not even Hans Hermann, whom she loved, could warm her strangely thin, chilly blood.
She herself was different; her blood was red and hot, and the joy she coveted should be fiery, consuming, but spotlessly clean. She would be loyal and true to the man to whom she gave herself, but he must know how to take her wholly, to possess her body and soul, so that not a single possibility in her would be wasted or left neglected in some corner of her soul—to decay and fester. No, she dared not, would not be reckless—not she. Yet she could understand those who did not trouble their heads about such things; who did not subdue one instinct and call it bad, and give in to another, calling it good, or renounce all the cheap little joys of life, saving up all for the great joy that after all might never come. She was not so sure herself that her road led to the goal—not sure enough not to be impressed sometimes by people who quite cynically admitted that they had no road, no goal, and that to have ideals and morals was like trying to catch the moon on the water.
Once, many years ago, a man had asked her one night to go with him to his rooms, much in the same way as he would have offered to take her out to tea. It was no temptation to her—she knew, besides, that her mother was waiting up for her, which made it quite impossible. She knew the man very slightly, did not like him, and was cross because he was to see her home; and it was not because her senses were stirred, but from purely mental curiosity, that she turned the question for a moment over in her mind: what if she did?—what would be her feelings if she threw overboard will, self-control, and her old faith? A voluptuously exciting shiver ran through her at the thought. Was that kind of life more pleasant than her own? She was not pleased with hers that evening; she had again sat watching those who danced, she had tasted the wine and had listened to the music, and she had felt the dreadful loneliness of being young and not knowing how to dance or how to speak the language of the other young people and share their laughter, but she had tried to smile and look and talk as if she enjoyed it. And when she walked home in the icy-cold spring night she knew that at eight o’clock next morning she had to be at the school to act as substitute for one of the teachers. She was working that time at her big picture, but everything she did seemed dull and meaningless, and at six o’clock she had to go home and teach mathematics to her private pupils. She was very hard worked; she sometimes felt her nerves strained to the utmost, and did not know how she would be able to carry on till the long vacation.
For an instant she felt herself drawn by the man’s cynicism—or thought she was—but she smiled at him and said “no” in the same dry and direct way that he had asked her. He was a fool, after all, for he began preaching to her—first commonplace flattery, then sentimental nonsense about youth and spring, the right and freedom of passion, and the gospel of the flesh, until she simply laughed at him and hailed a passing cab.
And now—she was old enough now to understand those who brutally refused to deny themselves anything in life—who simply gave in and drifted, but the greenhorns, who boasted of having a mission to fill, when they enjoyed life after their fashion, the champions of the eternal rights of nature, who did not trouble to brush their teeth or clean their nails—they could not impose on her.
She would be true to her own old moral code, which aimed at truth and self-control, and originated from the time she was sent to school. She was not like the other children; even her clothes were unlike theirs, and her little soul was very, very different. She lived with her mother, who had been left a widow at the age of twenty, and had nothing in the world but her little daughter. Her father had died before she was old enough to remember him. He was in his grave and in heaven, but in reality he lived with them, for his picture hung above the piano and heard and saw everything they said and did. Her mother spoke of him constantly, telling her what he thought of everything and what Jenny might or must not do because of father. Jenny spoke of him as if she knew him, and at night, in bed, she spoke to him, and to God as one who was always with father and agreed with him about everything.
She remembered her first day at school, and smiled at the recollection. Her mother had taught her herself until she was eight years old. She used to explain things to Jenny by comparison; a cape, for instance, was likened to a small point near the town, which Jenny knew well, so when the teacher asked her in the geography lesson to name some Norwegian capes, she answered without hesitation: “Naesodden.” The teacher smiled and all the pupils laughed. “Signe,” said the teacher, and another girl stood up briskly to answer: “Nordkap, Lindesnaes, Stat.” Jenny smiled in a superior way, not heeding their laughter. She had never had child friends, and she never made any.
She had smiled indifferently at their sneering and teasing, but a quiet, implacable hatred grew in her towards the other children, who to her mind formed one compact mass, a many-headed savage beast. The consuming rage which filled her when they tormented her was always hidden behind a scornful, indifferent smile. Once she had nearly cried her eyes out with rage and misery, and when on one or two occasions she had lost control of herself, she had seen their triumph. Only by putting on an air of placid, irritating indifference could she hold her own against them.
In the upper form she made friends with one or two girls; she was then at an age when no child can bear to be unlike others, and she tried to copy them. These friendships, however, did not give her much joy. She remembered how they made fun of her when they discovered that she played with dolls. She disowned her beloved children and said they belonged to her little sisters.
There was a time when she wanted to go on the stage. She and her friends were stage-struck; they sold their school books and their confirmation brooches to buy tickets, and night after night they went to the gallery of the theatre. One day she told her friends how she would act a certain part that interested them. They burst out laughing; they had always known she was conceited, but not that she was a megalomaniac. Did she really believe that she could become an artist, she, who could not even dance? It would be a pretty sight indeed to see her walk up and down the stage with that tall, stiff skeleton of hers.
No, she could not dance. When she was quite a child her mother used to play to her, and she twisted and turned, tripped and curtseyed as she liked, and her mother called her a little linnet. She thought of her first party, how she had arrived full of anticipation, happy in a new white dress which her mother had made after an old English picture. She remembered how she stiffened all over when she began to dance. That stiffness never quite left her; when she tried to learn dancing by herself her soft, slim body became stiff as a poker. She was no good at it. She was very anxious to go to a dancing class, but it never came to anything.
She laughed at the recollection of her school friends. She had met two of them at the exhibition at home, the first time she had got one of her pictures hung and a few lines of praise in the papers. She was with some other artists—Heggen was one of them—when they came up to congratulate her: “Didn’t we always say you’d be an artist? We were all sure that some day we should hear more of you.”
She had smiled: “Yes, Ella; so was I.”
Lonely! She had been lonely ever since her mother met Mr. Berner, who worked with her in the same office. She was about ten at that time, but she understood at once that her dead father had departed from their home. His picture was still hanging there, but he was gone, and it dawned upon her what death really meant. The dead existed only in the memory of others, who had the power conditionally to end their poor shadow life—and they were gone for ever.
She understood why her mother became young and pretty and happy again; she noticed the expression on her face when Berner rang the bell. She was allowed to stay in the room and listen to their talk; it was never about things the child could not hear, and they did not send her out of the room when they were together in her home. In spite of the jealousy in her little heart, she understood that there were many things a grown-up mother could not speak about with a little girl, and a strong feeling of justice developed in her. She did not wish to be angry with her mother, but it hurt very much all the same.
She was too proud to show it, and when her mother in moments of self-reproach suddenly overwhelmed her child with tenderness and care, she remained cold and passive. She said not a word when her mother wanted her to call Berner father and said how fond he was of her. In the night she tried to speak to her own father, with a passionate longing to keep him alive, but she felt she could not do it alone; she knew him only through her mother. By and by Jens Winge became dead to her too, and since he had been the centre of her conception of God, and heaven, and eternal life, all these faded away with his picture. She remembered quite distinctly how, at thirteen, she had listened to the Scriptures at school without believing anything, and because the others in her form believed in God and were afraid of the devil, and yet were cowardly and cruel, and mean and common—in her opinion at least—religion became to her something despicable, cowardly, something associated with them.
She got to like Nils Berner against her will; she preferred him almost to her mother in the first period of their married life. He claimed no authority over his step-daughter, but by his wise and kind, frank ways he won her over. She was the child of the woman he loved—that was reason enough for him to be fond of Jenny.
She had much to thank her stepfather for; how much, she had not understood till now. He had fought and conquered much that was distorted and morbid in her. When she lived alone with her mother in the hothouse air of tenderness, care, and dreams, she had been a nervous child, afraid of dogs, of trams, of matches—afraid of everything—and she was sensitive to bodily pain. Her mother dared scarcely let her go alone to school.
The first thing Berner did was to take the girl with him to the woods; Sunday after Sunday they went to Nordmarken, in broiling sunshine or pouring rain, in the thaws of spring, and in winter on ski. Jenny, who was used to conceal her feelings, tried not to show how tired and nervous she was, and after a time she did not feel it.
Berner taught her to use map and compass, he talked to her as to a friend, and he taught her to observe the signs of wind and clouds, which brought about a change in the weather, and to reckon time and distance by the sun. He made her familiar with animals and plants—root and stalk, leaf and bud, blossom and fruit. Her sketch-book and his camera were always in their knapsack.
All the kindness and devotion her stepfather had put into this work of education she appreciated now for the first time—for he was a well-known ski-runner and mountaineer in the Jotunheim and Nordlandstinderne.
He had promised to take her there too. The summer when she was fifteen, she went with him grouse-shooting. Her mother could not go with them: she was expecting the little brother by that time.
They stayed in a solitary mountain saeter below Rondane. She had never been so happy in all her life as when she awoke in her tiny bunk. She hurried out to make coffee for her stepfather, and he took her to the Ronde peaks, into the Styg mountains, and on fishing tours; and they went down together to the valley for provisions. When he was out shooting, she bathed in the cold mountain brooks and went for endless walks on the moors; or sat in the porch knitting and dreaming, weaving romances about a fair saeter maiden and a huntsman, who was very like Berner, but young and handsome, and who could tell about hunting and mountaineering like Berner used to do in the evening by the fire. And he should promise to give her a gun and take her up to unknown mountain-tops.
She remembered how tormented, ashamed, and unhappy she was when she knew that her mother was going to have a baby. She tried to hide her thoughts from her mother, but she knew she only partly succeeded. Berner’s anxiety about his wife as the time drew near brought a change in her feelings. He spoke to her about it: “I am so afraid, Jenny, because I love your mother so dearly,” and he told her that when she herself was born her mother was very ill. The belief that her mother’s condition was unclean and unnatural left her when he spoke, but with it went also the feeling that the bond between her mother and herself was mysterious, supernatural. It became everyday, commonplace; she had been born and her mother had suffered; she had been small and needed her mother, and because of that her mother had loved her. Another little child was soon coming, who needed her mother more. Jenny felt she had grown up all at once; she sympathized with her mother as well as with Berner, and comforted him in a precocious way: “It will pass off quite well; it always does, you know. They scarcely ever die of it.”
When she saw her mother with the new child, who took all her time and care, Jenny felt very forlorn, and she cried, but by and by she became very fond of the baby, especially when little Ingeborg was over a year old and was the sweetest, darkest little gipsy doll you could imagine—and her mother had another tiny infant.
She had never considered the Berner children as her sisters; they were exactly like their father. Her relationship to them was more that of an aunt—she felt herself almost as an elderly, sensible aunt to her mother as well as to the children.
When the accident happened her mother was younger and weaker than she. Mrs. Winge had become young again in her second happy marriage, and she was a little tired and worn after her three confinements in the comparatively short time. Nils was only five months old when his father died.
Berner fell one summer when out mountaineering, and was killed on the spot. Jenny was then sixteen. Her mother’s grief was boundless; she had loved her husband and been worshipped by him. Jenny tried to help her as much as she could. How deeply she herself mourned her stepfather she never told anybody; she knew that she had lost the best friend she had ever had.
When she had finished school she began to take drawing lessons, and helped her mother in the house. Berner had always been interested in her drawings; he had been the first to teach her perspective and such things—all he knew about it himself. He had believed she had some talent.
They could not afford to keep his dog. The two little puppies were sold, and Mrs. Berner thought Leddy ought to be sold too—it cost so much to feed her. But Jenny objected; nobody should have the dog, which was mourning for its master, if they could not keep it, and she had her way. She took the dog herself one evening to Mr. Iversnaes, Berner’s friend, who shot and buried Leddy.
What Berner had been to her—a friend and a comrade—she tried to be to his children. As the two girls grew up, the relations between them and Jenny became less intimate, though still quite friendly, but the great difference in age made a breach between them which Jenny never tried to cross.
They were now quite nice little girls in their teens, with anæmia, small flirtations, friendships, parties, and all the rest of it—a merry pair, but somewhat indolent. The friendship between Nils and her had grown in strength as time went on. His father had called the tiny baby Kalfatrus; Jenny had adopted the name, and the boy called her Indiana.
During all those sad years now behind her, the rambles in Nordmarken with Kalfatrus were the only occasions when she could breathe freely. She enjoyed them specially in spring or autumn, when there were few people about, and she and the boy sat quietly gazing into the burning pile of wood they had made, or lay on the ground talking to one another in their particular slang, which they dared not use at home for fear of vexing their mother. Her portrait of Kalfatrus was the first of her paintings to please her; it was really good.
Gunnar scolded her for not exhibiting it; he thought it would have been bought for the picture gallery at home. She had never painted so good a picture since.
She was to have painted Berner—papa. She had begun to call him thus when his own children started to talk, and also to call her mother mamma. This marked to her mind the change that had taken place in the relations between her and the mother of her brief childhood.
The first part of the time out here, when at last she was freed from the constant strain, was not pleasant. She realized that her every nerve was quivering from the strain, and she thought it impossible ever to regain her youth. From her stay in Florence she remembered only that she had been cold, felt lonely, and been unable to assimilate all that was new around her. Little by little the endless treasure of beauty was revealed to her, and she was seized by a great longing to grasp it and live in it, to be young, to love and be loved. She thought of the first spring days when Cesca and Gunnar took her to Viterbo—of the sunshine on the bare trees and the masses of anemones, violets, and cowslips in the faded grass. Of the steppe-like plain outside the city, with fumes of boiling, strongly smelling sulphur springs wafted through the air, and the ground all round white with curdling lime. The thousands of swift emerald-green lizards in the stone walls, the olive trees in the green meadows, where white butterflies fluttered about. The old city with singing fountains and black mediaeval houses, and the towers in the surrounding wall with moonlight on them. And the yellow, slightly effervescent wine, with a fiery taste from the volcanic soil on which it was grown.
She called her new friends by their names. In the night Francesca made a confession of her young, eventful life, and crept into her bed at last to be comforted, repeating time after time: “Fancy, you being like this! I was always afraid of you at school. I never thought you could be so kind!”
Gunnar was in love with both of them. He was full of fire, like a young faun in spring-time, and Francesca let herself be kissed, and laughed and called him a silly boy.
But Jenny was afraid, though not of him. She dared not kiss his hot, red mouth, for the sake of something intangible, intoxicating, frivolous, which would last only while they were there amid sun and anemones—something irresponsible. She dared not put aside her old self; she felt that she could not take a flirtation light-heartedly, and neither could he. She had already seen enough of Gunnar Heggen to know that in his affairs with other women he was such as they were—and yet not quite—for in his inmost self he was a good man, much better than most women are. His infatuation had soon turned into friendship, and during the lovely, peaceful time in Paris, when they had worked hard, and afterwards out here, it had grown stronger and stronger.
It was quite a different matter with Gram. He did not arouse any adventurous fancies or wild longings in her. He was not at all stupid, as she had thought at first; it was only that he seemed almost stunted, checked in mental growth, when he came out here, and she at least ought to have understood it. There was something gentle and young and sound about him, which she liked—he seemed more than two years her junior. His talk of being in love with her was nothing but a surplus of the joy he felt at the freedom of his new life. There was no danger in it, either for him or for her. They were fond of her at home, of course, and Gunnar and Francesca were fond of her too, but did any one of them think of her tonight? She was not altogether sorry to know that there was some one who did.
IX
When she awoke in the morning she told herself that he would very likely not come at all, and so much the better—but when he knocked at her door she was pleased all the same.
“I have had nothing to eat yet, Miss Winge. Could you give me a cup of tea and some bread?”
Jenny looked about her in the room.
“Yes, but the room isn’t done yet.”
“I’ll shut my eyes while you lead me on to the balcony,” said Gram from behind the door. “I am dying for a cup of tea.”
“Very well, half a minute.” Jenny covered her bed with the counterpane, tidied the dressing-table, and changed her dressing-jacket for a long kimono. “Come in, and please go and sit on the balcony while I get your tea.” She brought out a stool and placed some bread and cheese on it.
Gram looked at her bare, white arms in the long, fluttering sleeves of the dark blue kimono with a pattern of yellow and purple iris.
“What a pretty thing you have on. It looks like a real geisha dress.”
“It is real. Cesca and I bought these in Paris to wear at home in the morning.”
“It is a capital idea, I think, to go about like that and look pretty when you are alone. I like it.”
He lit a cigarette and gazed at the smoke as it rose in the air.
“Ugh! At home the maid and my mother and sister used to look like anything in the morning. Don’t you think women ought always to make themselves look as pretty as possible?”
“Yes, but it isn’t always possible when you have to do housework.”
“Perhaps not, but they might at least do their hair before breakfast and put on a thing like that, don’t you think?”
He was just in time to save a cup, which she was on the point of brushing down with her sleeve.
“You see how practical it is. Now, drink your tea; you said you were thirsty.”
She discovered suddenly that Cesca’s whole stock of coloured stockings were hanging to dry on the balcony, and she removed them a little nervously.
While he was having his tea he explained:
“I lay awake last night thinking, almost until dawn, and then, of course, I overslept, so had no time to stop at the latteria on my way. I think we should go to Via Cassia to that anemone place of yours.”
“Anemone place.” Jenny laughed. “When you were a boy did you, too, have special places for violets and bluebells, and kept them a secret from the others and went there all alone every year?”
“Of course I had. I know a beech grove by the old road to Holmenkollen, where there are real scented violets.”
“I know it too,” she interrupted triumphantly, “to the right, just before the road branches off to Sorkedal.”
“Exactly. I had some other places too, on Fredriksborg and——”
“I must go in and put on my dress,” said Jenny.
“Put on the one you had yesterday, please!” he called after her.
“It will get so dusty”—but she changed her mind in the same moment. Why should she not make herself look nice? The old black silk had been her best for a good many years; she need not treat it with such deference any more.
“I don’t care! but it fastens at the back, and Cesca’s not in.”
“Come out here and I’ll button it for you. I am an expert at it. It seems to me I have done nothing all my life but fasten mother’s and Sophy’s buttons at the back.”
She could manage all but two, and she allowed Gram to help her with them. As she stood by him in the sunshine while he fastened her dress, he became aware of the faint, mild fragrance of her hair and her body. He noticed one or two small rents in the silk, which were carefully darned, and the sight of it filled his heart with an infinite tenderness towards her.
“Do you think Helge a nice name?” he asked, when they were having lunch at an osteria far out on the Campagna.
“Yes; I like it.”
“Do you know that it is my Christian name?”
“Yes; I saw you had written it in the visitors’ book at the club.” She blushed slightly, thinking he might believe that she had looked it up on purpose.
“I suppose it is nice. On the whole, there are few names that are nice or ugly in themselves; it all depends if you like the people or not. When I was a boy we had a nurse called Jenny; I could not bear her, and ever since I thought the name was hideous and common. It seemed to me preposterous that you should be called Jenny, but now I think it so pretty; it gives one an idea of fairness. Can you not hear how delicately fair it sounds?—Jenny—a dark woman could not be called that, not Miss Jahrman, for instance. Francesca suits her capitally, don’t you think? It sounds so capricious, but Jenny is nice and bright.”
“It is a name we’ve always had in my father’s family,” she said, by way of an answer.
“What do you think of Rebecca, for instance?”
“I don’t know. Rather harsh and clattering, perhaps, but it is pretty, though.”
“My mother’s name is Rebecca,” said Helge. “I think it sounds hard, too. My sister’s name is Sophy. She married only to get away from home, I am sure, and have a place of her own. I wonder mother could be so delighted to get her married, considering the cat-and-dog life she herself has led with my father. But there was no end of a fuss about the Rev. Arnesen, when my sister got engaged to him. I can’t stand my brother-in-law, neither can father, I believe, but mother!...
“My fiancée—I was engaged once, you know—her name was Catherine, but she was always called Titti. I saw she had that name put into the papers, too, when her marriage was announced.
“It was a stupid thing altogether. It was three years ago. She was giving some lessons in the school where I was teaching. She was not a bit pretty, but she flirted with everybody, and no woman had ever taken any notice of me—which you can easily understand, when you think of me as I was here at first. She always laughed at everything—she was only nineteen. Heaven knows why she took to me.
“I was jealous, and it amused her. The more jealous she made me, the more in love was I. I suppose it was less love than male vanity, having a sweetheart very much in demand. I was very young then. I wanted her to be exclusively taken up with me—a very difficult proposition as I was then. I have often wondered what she wanted me for.
“My people wanted our engagement to be kept secret, because we were so young. Titti wanted it made public, and when I reproached her for being too much interested in other men, she said she could not spend all her time with me, as our engagement was a secret.
“I took her home, but she could not get on with my mother. They always quarrelled, and Titti simply hated her. I suppose it would have made no difference to mother if I had been engaged to somebody else; the fact that I was going to marry was enough to put her against any woman. Well—Titti broke it off.”
“Did it hurt you very much?” Jenny asked quietly.
“Yes, at the time. I did not quite get over it till I came here, but I think it was mostly my pride that suffered. Don’t you think that if I had loved her really, I should have wished her to be happy when she married another? But I didn’t.”
“It would have been almost too unselfish and noble,” said Jenny, smiling.
“Oh, I don’t know. That is how you ought to feel if you really love. Don’t you think it is strange that mothers never care for their sons’ sweethearts? They never do.”
“I suppose a mother thinks no woman is good enough for her boy.”
“When a daughter gets engaged it is quite different. I saw that in the case of my sister and the fat, red-haired clergyman. There was never much sympathy between my sister and myself, but when I saw that fellow making love to her, and thought that he.... Ugh!
“I sometimes think women who have been married some time become more cynical than we men ever are. They don’t give themselves away, but you notice it all the same. Marriage to them means merely business. When a daughter marries they are pleased to have her saddled on to some one who can feed and clothe her, and if she has to put up with the shady side of marriage in return, it’s not worth making a fuss about. But if a son takes upon himself the same kind of burden for a similar return, they are not so enthusiastic about it. Don’t you think there is something in it?”
“Sometimes,” said Jenny.
When she came home that evening she lit the lamp and sat down to write to her mother to thank her for the birthday greetings and tell her how she had spent the day.
She laughed at herself for having been so solemn the night before. Heaven knows, she had had difficulties and been lonely, but so had most of the young people she knew. Some of them had been worse off than she. She thought of all the young girls—and the old ones—who had taught at the school; nearly all of them had an old mother to support, or sisters and brothers to help. And Gunnar?—and Gram? Even Cesca, the spoilt child from a rich home, had fought her way, since she had left home at twenty-one and kept herself on the little money left her by her mother.
As to loneliness, she had chosen it herself. All said and done, she had perhaps not been quite sure about her own powers, and to deaden her doubts, had held by the idea that she was different from other people—and they had been repelled. She had made some headway since, had proved to herself that she could do something, and had grown more friendly, less reserved, than before. She was obliged to admit that she had never made any advances, either as a child or since; she had always been too proud to take the first step. All the friends she had—from her stepfather to Gunnar and Cesca—had first stretched out their hands to her. And why had she always imagined that she was passionate? Such nonsense! She who had reached twenty-eight without ever having been the least in love. She believed that she would not be a failure as a woman, if once she were fond of a man, for she was healthy, good looking, and had sound instincts, which her work and outdoor life had developed. And very naturally she longed to love and be loved—longed to live. But to imagine that she would be able, from sheer rebellion of her senses, to fall into the arms of any man who happened to be near at a critical moment was utter nonsense. It was only because she would not admit to herself that she was dull sometimes and wished to make a conquest and flirt a little just like other girls—a pastime which in reality she did not approve of—that she preferred to imagine she was consumed by a thirst for life and clamouring senses. Such high-flown words were only invented by men, poor things, not knowing that women generally are simple and vain, and so stupid that they are bored unless there is a man to entertain them. That is the origin of the legend of the sensual woman—they are as rare as black swans, or disciplined, educated women.
Jenny moved Francesca’s portrait on to the easel. The white blouse and the green skirt looked hard and ugly. It would have to be toned down. The face was well drawn, the position good.
This episode with Gram was really nothing to be serious about. It was time she became reasonable. She must do away with those silly notions that she was afraid of every man she met—as with Gunnar in the beginning—afraid of falling in love with him, and almost more of his falling in love with her: a thing she was so unused to that it bewildered her.
Why could one not be friends with a man? If not, the world would be all a muddle. She and Gunnar were friends—a solid, comfortable friendship.
There was much about Gram that would make a friendship between them quite natural. They had had much the same experiences. He was so young and so full of confidence in her; she liked his “Is it not?” and “Don’t you think?” He had talked yesterday about being in love with her—he thought at least he was, he said. She smiled to herself. A man would not speak to her as he had done if he had really fallen in love with a woman and wanted to win her.
“He is a dear boy; that’s what he is.”
Today he had not broached the subject. She liked him when he said that if he had been really fond of the girl he would have wished her happiness with the other man.
X
Jenny and Helge were running hand in hand down Via Magnanapoli. The street was merely a staircase, leading to the Trajan Forum. On the last step he drew her to him and kissed her.
“Are you mad? You mustn’t kiss people in the street here.”
And they both laughed. One evening they had been spoken to by two policemen on the Lateran piazza for walking up and down under the pines along the old wall kissing each other.
The last sunrays brushed the bronze figures on top of the pillar and burned on the walls and on the tree-tops in the gardens. The piazza lay in the shade, with its old, rickety houses round the excavated forum below the street level.
Jenny and Helge leaned over the railing and tried to count the fat, lazy cats which had taken their abode among the stumps of pillars on the grass-covered plot. They seemed to revive a little as the twilight began to fall. A big red one which had been lying on the pedestal of the Trajan pillar stretched himself, sharpened his claws on the masonry, jumped down on to the grass, and ran away.
“I make it twenty-three,” said Helge.
“I counted twenty-five.” She turned round and dismissed a post card seller, who was recommending his wares in fragments of every possible language.
She leaned again over the railing and stared vaguely at the grass, giving way to the pleasant languor of a long sunny day and countless kisses out in the green Campagna. Helge held one of her hands on his arm and patted it—she moved it along his sleeve until it rested between both of his. Helge smiled happily.
“What is it, dear?”
“I am thinking of those Germans.” She laughed too—quietly and indifferently, as happy people do at trifles that do not concern them. They had passed the Forum in the morning and sat down a moment on the high pedestal of the Focas pillar, talking in whispers. Beneath them lay the crumbled ruins, gilded by the sun, and small black tourists rambled among the stones. A newly married German couple were walking by themselves, seeking solitude in the midst of the crowd of travellers. He was fair and ruddy of face, wore knickerbockers and carried a kodak, and read to his wife out of Baedeker. She was very young, plump, and dark, with the inherited stamp of hausfrau on her smooth, floury face. She sat down on a tumbled pillar, posing to her husband, who took a snapshot of her. And the two who sat above, under the Focas pillar, whispering of their love, laughed, heedless of the fact that they were sitting above the Forum Romanum.
“Are you hungry?” asked Helge.
“No; are you?”
“No—but do you know what I should like to do?”
“Well?”
“I should like to go home with you and have supper. What do you say to that?”
“Yes, of course.”
They walked home arm in arm through small side streets. In her dark staircase he drew her suddenly to him, and kissed her with such force and passion that her heart began to beat violently. She was afraid, and at the same time angry with herself for being so, and whispered in the dark: “My darling,” to prove to herself that she was calm.
“Wait a moment,” whispered Helge, when she was going to light the lamp, and he kissed her again. “Put on the geisha-dress; you look so sweet in it. I will sit on the balcony while you change.”
Jenny changed her dress in the dark; she put the kettle on and arranged the anemones and the almond sprigs before she called him in and lighted up.
He took her again in his arms and said:
“Oh, Jenny, you are so lovely. Everything about you is lovely; it is heavenly to be with you. I wish I could be with you always.”
She took his face between her two hands.
“Jenny—you wish it—that we could be always together?”
She looked into his beautiful brown eyes:
“Yes, Helge; I do.”
“Do you wish that this spring—our spring—never would end?”
“Yes—oh yes.” She threw herself suddenly into his arms and kissed him; her half-open lips and closed eyes begged for more kisses; his words about their spring, that should never cease, awoke a painful anxiety in her heart that the spring and their dream would come to an end. And yet behind it all was a dread, which she did not try to explain to herself, but it came into existence when he asked if she wished they could always be together.
“I wish I were not going home,” said Helge sadly.
“But I am going home soon too,” she said softly, “and we shall probably come back here together.”
“You are quite determined to go? Are you sorry that I have upset all your plans in this way?”
She gave him a hurried kiss and ran to the kettle, which was boiling over.
“No, you silly boy. I had almost made up my mind before, because mamma wants me badly.” She gave a short laugh. “I am ashamed of myself—she is so pleased that I am coming home to help her, and it is really only to be with my lover. But it is all right. I can live cheaper at home even if I help them a little, and I may be able to earn something. What I can save now, I shall want here later.”
Helge took the cup she gave him and seized her hand:
“But next time you come here you will come with me; for I suppose you will—you mean—that we should marry?”
His face was so young and so anxiously inquiring that she had to kiss him several times, forgetting that she had been afraid of that word, which had not been mentioned between them before.
“I suppose that will be the most practical plan, you dear boy, since we have agreed to be together always.”
Helge kissed her hand, asking quietly: “When?”
“When you like,” she answered as quietly—and firmly.
Again he kissed her hand.
“What a pity we can’t be married out here,” he said a moment after in a different voice.
She did not answer, but stroked his hair softly. Helge sighed:
“But I suppose we ought not to, as we are going home so soon in any case. Your mother would feel hurt, don’t you think, at such a hurried marriage?”
Jenny was silent. It had never occurred to her that she owed her mother any account of her doings—her mother had not consulted her when she had wanted to marry again.
“It would hurt my people, I know. I don’t like to admit it, but it is so, and I should much prefer to write and tell them that I am engaged. As you are going home before me, it would be nice of you to go and see them.”
Jenny bent her head as if to shake off a disagreeable sensation, and said:
“I will, dear, if you wish me to—of course.”
“I don’t like it at all. It has been so lovely here—only you and I, nobody else in all the world. But mother would be so vexed, you see, and I don’t want to make things worse for her than they are already. I don’t care for my mother any longer—she knows it, and is so grieved at it. It is only a formality, I know, but she would suffer if she thought I wanted to keep her out in the cold. She would think it was vengeance for the old story, you know. When we are through with all that, we will get married, and nobody will have anything more to say. I wish so much that it would be soon—don’t you?”
She kissed him in answer.
“I want you,” he whispered, and she made no resistance when he caressed her. But he let her go suddenly and, buttering his biscuit, began to eat.
Afterwards they sat by the stove smoking, she in the easy-chair and he on the floor with his head in her lap.
“Isn’t Cesca coming back tonight either?” he asked suddenly.
“No; she is staying in Tivoli till the end of the week,” Jenny answered a little nervously.
“You have such pretty, slender feet.”
“You are so lovely—oh, so lovely—and I am so fond of you. You don’t know how I love you, Jenny—I should like to lie down on the floor at your feet.”
“Helge! Helge!” His sudden violence frightened her, but then she said to herself: he is my own darling boy. Why should I be afraid of him.
“No, Helge—don’t. Not the shoes I stamp about with in those dirty streets.”
Helge rose—sobered and humble. She tried to laugh the whole matter away. “There may be many dangerous bacilli on those shoes, you know.”
“Ugh! What a pedant you are. And you pretend to be an artist.” He laughed too, and to hide his embarrassment, he went on boisterously: “A nice sweetheart you are. Let me smell: I thought so—you smell of turpentine and paint.”
“Nonsense, dear; I have not touched a brush for three weeks. But you will have to wash, sir.”
“Have you any carbolic, in case of infection?” While he was washing his hands he said: “My father used to say that women are utterly destitute of poetry.”
“Your father is quite right.”
“And they can cure people by ordering cold baths,” he said, with a laugh.
Jenny became suddenly serious. She went to him, put her hands on his shoulders, and kissed him: “I did not want you at my feet, Helge.”
When he had gone she was ashamed of herself. He was right. She did want to give him a cold bath, but she would not do it again, for she loved him. She had played a poor part tonight. She had thought of Signora Rosa. What would she have said if anything had happened? It was rather humiliating to realize that she had been afraid of a scene with an angry signora—and tried to get out of her promise to her lover. In accepting his love and responding to his kisses she had as good as bound herself over to give him all he asked. She, of all people, would not play a game where she took everything and gave but little—not more than she could easily withdraw, if she changed her mind.
It was only nerves—this dread of something she had never tried. But she was glad he had not asked for more than she could willingly give, for there would come a moment, she thought, when she herself would wish to give him all.
It had all come so slowly and unnoticeably—just like spring in the south—and as steadily and surely. No sudden transition, no cold and stormy days that made one long desperately for the sun, for wealth of light and consuming heat. There had been none of those tremendously clear, endless, maddening spring nights of her own country. When the sunny day was past, night came quietly, the cold and darkness bringing peaceful sleep between the bright, warm days—each new day a little warmer than the one before, each day with more flowers on the Campagna, which did not seem greener than yesterday, yet was much more green and mellow than the week before.
Her love for him had come in the same way. Every night she looked forward to the next sunny day with him on the Campagna, but gradually it was more himself and his young love that she longed for. She had let him kiss her because it gave her pleasure, and from day to day their kisses had grown more frequent, till at last words faded away and kisses took their place.
He had become more manly and mature from day to day; the uncertainty and the sudden despondency of the earlier days had quite left him. She herself was brighter, friendlier, more sure of herself, not the coldness of youth, always ready to fight, but more a calm confidence in herself. She was not disappointed with life now because it would not shape itself according to her dreams, but accepted each day, trusting that the unknown was right and could be turned to advantage.