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.