JENNY
THE BORZOI-GYLDENDAL BOOKS
THE fires of Gyldendal (Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag) is the oldest and greatest publishing house in Scandinavia, and has been responsible, since its inception in 1770, for giving to the world some of the greatest Danish and Norwegian writers of three centuries. Among them are such names as Isbsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Pontoppidan, Brandes, Gjellerup, Hans Christian Andersen, and Knut Hamsun, the Nobel Prize winner for 1920, whose works I am publishing in America.
It is therefore with particular satisfaction that I announce the completion of arrangements whereby I shall bring out in this country certain of the publications of this famous house. The books listed below are the first of the Borzoi-Gyldendal books.
The Sworn Brothers
A Tale of the Early Days of Iceland. Translated from the Danish of Gunnar Gunnarsson [Icelandic] by C. Field and W. Emmé.Grim: the Story of a Pike
Translated from the Danish of Svend Fleuron by Jessie Muir and W. Emmé. Illustrated in black and white by Dorothy P. Lathrop.Jenny
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Publisher, NEW YORK
A NOVEL
TRANSLATED FROM
THE NORWEGIAN OF
BY W. EMMÉ
NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AS Helge Gram turned the corner into Via Condotti in the dusk a military band came down the street playing "The Merry Widow" in such a crazy, whirling time that it sounded like wild bugle calls. The small, dark soldiers rushed past in the cold afternoon, more like a Roman cohort intent on attacking barbarian hosts than peaceful men returning to their barracks for supper. That was perhaps the cause of their haste, Helge thought, smiling to himself, for as he stood there watching them, his coat-collar turned up for the cold, a peculiar atmosphere of history had pervaded him – but suddenly he found himself humming the same tune, and continued his way in the direction where he knew the Corso lay.
He stopped at the corner and looked. So that was the Corso – an endless stream of carriages in a crowded street, and a surging throng of people on a narrow pavement.
He stood still, watching the stream run past him, and smiled at the thought that he could drift along this street every evening in the dusk among the crowds, until it became as familiar to him as the best-known thoroughfare of his own city – Christiania. He was suddenly seized with the wish to walk and walk – now and all night maybe – through all the streets of Rome, for he thought of the town as it had appeared to him a while ago when he was looking down on it from Pincio, while the sun was setting.
Clouds all over the western sky, close together like small pale grey lambkins, and as the sun sank behind him it painted their linings a glorious amber. Beneath the pale skies lay the city, and Helge understood that this was the real Rome – not the Rome of his imagination and his dreams, but Rome as she actually was.
Everything else he had seen on his journey had disappointed him, for it was not what he had imagined at home when he had been longing to go abroad and see it all. One sight at last was far beyond his dreams, and that was Rome.
A plain of housetops lay beneath him in the valley, the roofs of houses new and old, of houses high and low – it looked as if they had been built anywhere and at any time, and of a size to suit the need of the moment. In a few places only a space could be seen between the mass of housetops, as of streets. All this world of reckless lines, crossing each other in a thousand hard angles, was lying inert and quiet under the pale skies, while the setting sun touched the borders of the clouds with a tinge of light. It was dreaming under a thin veil of white mist, which no busy pillar of smoke dared penetrate, for no factory chimney could be seen, and no smoke came from a single one of the funny little chimney pipes protruding from the houses. The round, old, rust-brown tiles were covered by greyish moss, grass and small plants with yellow blossoms grew in the gutters; along the border of the terraces the aloes stood immovably still in their tubs, and creepers hung in dead cascades from the cornices. Here and there the upper part of a high house rose above its neighbour, its dark, hollow windows staring at one out of a grey or reddish-yellow wall, or sleeping behind closed shutters. Loggias stood out of the mist, looking like parts of an old watchtower, and small summer-houses of wood or corrugated iron were erected on the roofs.
Above it all masses of church cupolas were floating – the huge, grey one, far on the other side of what Helge supposed to be the river, was that of St. Peter.
Beyond the valley, where the roofs covered the silent city – it well deserved the epithet "eternal" tonight – a low hill stretched its longish back toward the skies, carrying on the far-away ridge an avenue of pines, the foliage of which formed one large mass above the row of slender trunks. And behind the dome of St. Peter the eye was arrested by another hill with villas, built among pines and cypresses. Probably Monte Mario.
The dark leaves of the holly formed a roof over his head, and behind him a fountain made a curiously living sound as the water splashed against the stone border, before flowing into the basin beneath it.
Helge whispered to the city of his dreams, whose streets his feet had not yet touched, whose houses did not harbour one single soul he knew: "Rome – Rome – eternal Rome." He was suddenly struck by his own loneliness and startled at his emotion, though he knew that there was nobody to witness it, and, turning round, he hurried down the Spanish stairs,
And now when he stood at the corner of Condotti and Corso he experienced a quaint and yet pleasant anxiety at the thought of mixing with those hustling crowds and finding his way in the strange city – to wander through it as far as Piazza San Pietro.
As he was crossing the street two young girls passed him. They looked like Norwegians, he thought, with a slight thrill of pleasure. One of them was very fair and wore light-coloured furs.
It was a joy to him even to read the names of the streets carved in clear, Latin type on white marble slabs set in the corners of the houses.
The street he took ran into an open space near a bridge, on which two rows of lanterns burned with a sickly, greenish flame in the pale light pouring down from the restless sky. A low parapet of stone ran along the waterline, bordered by a row of trees with faded leaves and trunks, dropping their bark in big white flakes. On the opposite side of the river the street lamps were burning among the trees, and the houses stood out black against the sky, but on this side the twilight still flickered on the window-panes. The sky was almost clear now, and hung transparent and greenish blue over the hill with the pine avenue, with here and there a few reddish, threatening, slowly moving clouds.
He stopped on the bridge and looked down into the Tiber. How dull the water was! It flowed on rapidly, reflecting the colours of the evening skies, sweeping twigs and gravel and bits of wood on its way between the stone walls. A small staircase on the side of the bridge led down to the water's edge. Helge thought how easy it would be to walk down the steps one night, when one was tired of everything – had any ever done so? he wondered.
He asked a policeman the way to St. Peter's cathedral in German; the man answered him first in French and then Italian, and when Helge repeatedly shook his head, he spoke French again, pointing up the river. Helge turned in that direction.
A huge, dark stone erection stood out against the sky, a low, round tower with a jagged crest and the jet-black silhouette of an angel on top. He recognized the lines of the San Angelo fort, and went close up to it. It was still light enough for the statues by the bridge to show up yellow in the twilight, the red skies were still mirrored in the flowing waters of the Tiber, but the street lamps had gained power, and threw out paths of light across the river. Beyond the San Angelo bridge the electric tramcars with illuminated windows rolled over the new iron bridge, throwing white sparks from the connecting wires.
Helge took off his hat to a man:
"San Pietro, favorisca?"
The man pointed with his finger and said something Helge did not understand. He turned into a dark and narrow street which, with a sensation of joy, he almost thought he recognized, for it was exactly like the Italian street of his imagination: shop after shop full of curios. He gazed into the poorly lit windows. Most of the things were rubbish – those dirty strips of coarse white lace hanging on a string were surely not Italian handiwork. There were bits of pottery exhibited in dusty box-lids and small bronze figures of a poisonous green, old and new brass candlesticks and brooches with heaps of stones that looked far from genuine. Yet he was seized by a senseless wish to go in and buy something – to inquire, to bargain, and to purchase. Almost before he knew it, he had entered a small, stuffy shop filled with all sorts of things. There were church-lamps hanging from the ceiling, bits of silk with gold flowers on red and green and white ground, and broken pieces of furniture.
Behind the counter a youth with a dark complexion and a bluish, unshaven chin was reading. He talked and asked questions while Helge pointed at various articles, "Quanta?" The only thing he understood was that the prices were excessive, but one ought not to buy until one knew the language well enough to bargain with them.
Several pieces of china were standing on a shelf, rococo figures and vases with sprays of roses, which looked quite modern. Helge seized one at random and placed it on the counter: "Quanta?"
"Sette," said the youth, and spread out seven fingers.
"Quattro," said Helge, holding out four fingers in a new brown glove, and felt quite pleased with himself at this leap into the foreign language. He did not understand one word of the man's arguments, but each time he finished talking Helge raised his four fingers and repeated his quattro, adding with a superior air: "Non antica!"
But the shopkeeper protested, "Si, antica." "Quattro," said Helge again – the man had now only five fingers in the air – and turned towards the door. The man called him back, accepting, and Helge, feeling highly pleased with himself, went out with his purchase wrapped up in pink tissue paper.
He perceived the dark mass of the church at the bottom of the street outlined against the sky, and walked on. He hurried across the first part of the piazza with its lighted shop windows and passing trams towards the two semicircular arcades, which laid a pair of rounded arms, as it were, about one part of the place, drawing it into the quiet and darkness of the massive church, with its broad steps extending in a shell-like formation far out on the piazza.
The dome of the church and the row of saints along the roof of the arcades stood out black against the faint light of the sky; the trees and houses on the hill at the back seemed to be heaped one on top of the other in an irregular fashion. The street lamps were powerless here, the darkness streamed forth between the pillars, and spread over the steps from the open portico of the church. He went slowly up the steps close to the church and looked through the iron doors. Then he went back again to the obelisk in the middle of the piazza and stood there gazing at the dark building. He bent his head back, and followed with his eyes the slender needle of stone that pointed straight into the evening sky, where the last clouds had descended on the roofs of that part of the town whence he had come, and the first radiant sparks of the stars pierced the gathering darkness.
Again his ears caught the sound of water emptying into a stone cistern, and the soft ripple of the overflow from one receptacle into another into the basin. He approached one of the fountains and watched the thick, white jet, driven upwards as it were in angry defiance and looking black against the clear atmosphere, to break high in the air and sink back into the darkness, where the water gleamed white again. He kept staring at it until a gust of wind took hold of the jet and bent it towards him, raining icy drops on his face, but he remained where he was, listening and staring. Then he walked a few steps – stood still – and walked again, but very slowly, listening to an inner voice. It was true, then – really true – that he was here, far, far away from everything he had longed so intensely to leave. And he walked still more slowly, furtively, like one who has escaped from prison.
At the corner of the street there was a restaurant. He made for it, and on his way found a tobacco shop, where he bought some cigarettes, picture cards and stamps. Waiting for his steak, he drank big gulps of claret, while he wrote to his parents; to his father: "I have been thinking of you very often today" – it was true enough – and to his mother: "I have already got a small present for you, the first thing I bought here in Rome." Poor mother – how was she? He had often been impatient with her these last years. He unpacked the thing and had a look at it – it was probably meant for a scent-bottle. He added a few words to his mother's card that he managed the language all right, and that to bargain in the shops was an easy matter.
The food was good, but dear. Never mind, once he was more at home here he would soon learn how to live cheaply. Satisfied and exhilarated by the wine, he started to walk in a new direction, past long, low, dilapidated houses, through an archway on to a bridge. A man in a barrier hut stopped him and made him understand that he had to pay a soldo. On the other side of the bridge was a large, dark church with a dome.
He got into a labyrinth of dark, narrow bits of streets – in the mysterious gloom he surmised the existence of old palaces with projecting cornices and lattice windows side by side with miserable hovels, and small church-fronts in between the rows of houses. There were no pavements and he stepped into refuse that lay rotting in the gutter. Outside the narrow doors of the lighted taverns and under the few street lamps he had a vague glimpse of human forms.
He was half delighted, half afraid – boyishly excited, and wondering at the same time how he was to get out of this maze and find the way to his hotel at the ends of the earth – take a cab, he supposed.
He passed down another narrow, almost empty street. A small strip of clear, blue sky was visible between the high houses with their frameless windows, looking like black holes cut in the wall. On the uneven stone bridge dust and straw and bits of paper were tossed about by a light gust of wind.
Two women, walking behind him, passed him close under a lamp. He gave a start: they were the ones he had noticed that afternoon in the Corso and believed to be Norwegian. He recognized the light furs of the taller one.
Suddenly he felt an impulse to try an adventure – to ask them the way, so as to hear if they were Norwegian – or Scandinavian at any rate, for they were certainly foreigners. With slightly beating heart he started to walk after them.
The two young girls stopped outside a shop, which was closed, and then walked on. Helge wondered if he should say "Please" or "Bitte" or "Scusi" – or if he should blurt out at once "Undskyld" – it would be funny if they were Norwegians.
The girls turned a corner; Helge was close upon them, screwing up courage to address them. The smaller one turned round angrily and said something in Italian in a low voice. He felt disappointed and was going to vanish after an apology, when the tall one said in Norwegian: "You should not speak to them, Cesca – it is much better to pretend not to notice."
"I cannot bear that cursed Italian rabble; they never will leave a woman alone," said the other.
"I beg your pardon," said Helge, and the two girls stopped, turning round quickly.
"I hope you will excuse me," he muttered, colouring, and, angrily conscious of it, blushed still deeper. "I only arrived from Florence today, and have lost my way in these winding streets. I thought you were Norwegian, or at any rate Scandinavian, and I cannot manage the Italian language. Would you be kind enough to tell me where to find a car? My name is Gram," he added, raising his hat again.
"Where do you live?" asked the taller girl.
"At a place called the Albergo Torino, close to the station," he explained.
"He should take the Trastevere tram at San Carlo ai Catenari," said the other.
"No; better take a No. 1 at the new Corso."
"But those cars don't go to the Termini," answered the little one.
"Yes, they do. Those that have San Pietro, stazione Termini, written on them," she explained to Helge.
"Oh, that one! It runs past Capo le Case and Ludovisi and an awful long way about first – it will take an hour at least to the station with that one."
"No, dear; it goes direct – straight along Via Nazionale."
"It does not," insisted the other; "it goes to the Lateran first."
The taller girl turned to Helge: "The first turning right will take you into a sort of market. From there you go along the Cancellaria on your left to the new Corso. If I remember rightly, the tram stops at the Cancellaria – somewhere near it anyway – you will see the sign. But be sure to take the tram marked San Pietro, stazione Termini, No. 1."
Helge stood somewhat crestfallen, listening to the foreign names which the girls used with such easy familiarity, and, shaking his head, said: "I am afraid I shall never be able to find it – perhaps I had better walk till I find a cab."
"We might go with you to the stop," said the tall one.
The little one whispered peevishly something in Italian, but the other answered her decisively. Helge felt still more confused at these asides, which he did not understand.
"Thank you, but please do not trouble. I am sure to find my way home somehow or other."
"It is no trouble," said the tall one, starting to walk; "it is on our way."
"It is very kind of you; I suppose it is rather difficult to find one's way about in Rome, is it not?" he said, by way of conversation – "especially when it is dark."
"Oh no, you will soon get into it."
"I only arrived here to-day. I came from Florence this morning by train." The smaller one said something in an undertone in Italian. The tall one asked: "Was it very cold in Florence?"
"Yes, bitterly cold. It is milder here, is it not? I wrote my mother anyway yesterday to send my winter coat."
"Well, it is cold enough here too sometimes. Did you like Florence? How long were you there?"
"A fortnight. I think I shall like Rome better than Florence."
The other young girl smiled – she had been muttering to herself in Italian all the time – but the tall one went on in her pleasant, quiet voice:
"I don't believe there is any town one could love as much as Rome."
"Is your friend Italian?" asked Helge.
"No; Miss Jahrman is Norwegian. We speak Italian because I want to learn, and she is very good at it. My name is Winge," she added. "That is the Cancellaria." She pointed towards a big, dark palace.
"Is the courtyard as fine as it is reported to be?"
"Yes; it is very fine. I will show you which car." While they stood waiting two men came across the street.
"Hullo, you here!" exclaimed one of them.
"Good evening," said the other. "What luck! We can go together. Have you been to look at the corals?"
"It was closed," said Miss Jahrman sulkily.
"We have met a fellow-countryman, and promised to show him the right tram," Miss Winge explained, introducing: "Mr. Gram – Mr. Heggen, artist, and Mr. Ahlin, sculptor."
"I don't know if you remember me, Mr. Heggen – my name is Gram; we met three years ago on the Mysusaeter."
"Oh yes – certainly. And so you are in Rome?"
Ahlin and Miss Jahrman had stood talking to one another in whispers. The girl came up to her friend and said: "I am going home, Jenny. I am not in the mood for Frascati tonight."
"But, my dear, you suggested it yourself."
"Well, not Frascati anyway – ugh! sit there and mope with thirty old Danish ladies of every possible age and sex."
"We can go somewhere else. But there is your tram coming, Mr. Gram."
"A thousand thanks for your help. Shall I see you again – at the Scandinavian club, perhaps?"
The tram stopped in front of them. Miss Winge said: "I don't know – perhaps you would like to come with us now; we were going to have a glass of wine somewhere, and hear some music."
"Thank you." Helge hesitated, looking round at the others a little embarrassed. "I should be very pleased, but" – and, turning with confidence to Miss Winge of the fair face and the kind voice, he said, with an awkward smile, "you all know one another – perhaps you would rather not have a stranger with you?"
"Indeed no," she said, smiling – "it would be very nice – and there – your tram's gone now. You know Heggen already, and now you know us. We'll see you get home all right, so if you are not tired, let us go."
"Tired, not a bit. I should love to come," said Helge eagerly.
The other three began to propose different cafés. Helge knew none of the names; his father had not mentioned them. Miss Jahrman rejected them all.
"Very well, then, let us go down to St. Agostino; you know the one, Gunnar, where they give you that first-rate claret," and Jenny began to walk on, accompanied by Heggen.
"There is no music," retorted Miss Jahrman.
"Oh yes, the man with a squint and the other fellow are there almost every night. Don't let us waste time."
Helge followed with Miss Jahrman and the Swedish sculptor.
"Have you been long in Rome, Mr. Gram?"
"No, I came this morning from Florence."
Miss Jahrman laughed. Helge felt rather snubbed. He ought perhaps to have said he was tired, and gone home. On their way down through dark, narrow streets Miss Jahrman talked all the time to the sculptor, and scarcely answered when he tried to speak to her. But before he had made up his mind he saw the other couple vanish through a narrow door down the street.
"WHAT'S wrong with Cesca again tonight? We are getting too much of her tempers lately. Take off your coat, Jenny, or you'll be cold when you go out." Heggen hung his coat and hat on a peg and sat down on a rush chair.
"She is not well, poor girl, and that man Gram, you see, followed us a while before he dared to speak to us; and anything of that kind always puts her out of temper; she has a weak heart, you know."
"Sorry for her. The cheek of the man."
"Poor thing, he was wandering listlessly about and could not find his way home. He doesn't seem used to travelling. Did you know him before?"
"Haven't the slightest recollection of it. I may have met him somewhere. Here they are."
Ahlin took Miss Jahrman's coat.
"By Jove!" said Heggen. "How smart you are tonight, Cesca. Pretty as paint."
She smiled, evidently pleased, and smoothed her hips; then, taking Heggen by the shoulders: "Move out, please, I want to sit by Jenny."
How pretty she is, thought Helge. Her dress was a brilliant green, the skirt so high-waisted that the rounded breasts rose as out of a cup. There was a golden sheen in the folds of the velvet, and the bodice was cut low round the pale, full throat. She was very dark; small, jet-black curls fell from under the brown bell-shaped hat about her soft, rosy cheeks. The face was that of a little girl, with full, round lids over deep, brown eyes, and charming dimples about the small, red mouth.
Miss Winge too was good-looking, but could not compete with her friend. She was as fair as the other was dark; her blonde hair brushed back from a high, white forehead had tints of flaming gold in it; her skin was a delicate pink and white. Even the brows and lashes round her steel-grey eyes were a fair, golden brown. The mouth was too big for her face, with its short, straight nose and blue-veined temples, and the lips were pale, but when she smiled, she showed even, pearly teeth. Her figure was slender: the long, slim neck, the arms covered with a fair, silken down, and the long, thin hands. She was tall, and so slim that she was almost like an overgrown boy. She seemed very young. She had a narrow, white turned-down collar round the V-shaped neck of her dress and revers of the same kind round her short sleeves. Her dress of soft, pale grey silk was gathered round the waist and on the shoulders – obviously to make her look less thin. She wore a row of pink beads round her neck, which were reflected in rosy spots on her skin.
Helge Gram sat down quietly at the end of the table and listened to the others talking about a friend of theirs who had been ill. An old Italian, with a dirty white apron covering his broad waistcoat, came up to ask what they required.
"Red or white, sweet or dry, what do you like, Gram?" said Heggen, turning to him.
"Mr. Gram must have half a litre of my claret," said Jenny Winge. "It is one of the best things you can have in Rome, and that is no small praise, you know."
The sculptor pushed his cigarette-case over to the ladies. Miss Jahrman took one and lighted it.
"No, Cesca – don't!" begged Miss Winge.
"Yes," said Miss Jahrman. "I shan't be any better if I don't smoke, and I am cross tonight."
"Why are you cross?" asked Ahlin.
"Because I did not get those corals."
"Were you going to wear them tonight?" asked Heggen.
"No, but I had made up my mind to have them."
"I see," said Heggen, laughing, "and tomorrow you will decide to have the malachite necklace."
"No, I won't, but it is awfully annoying. Jenny and I rushed down on purpose because of those wretched corals."
"But you had the good luck to meet us, otherwise you would have been obliged to go to Frascati, to which you seem to have taken a sudden dislike."
"I would not have gone to Frascati, you may be sure of that, Gunnar, and it would have been much better for me, because now that you have made me come I want to smoke and drink and be out the whole night."
"I was under the impression that you had suggested it yourself."
"I think the malachite necklace was very fine," said Ahlin, by way of interrupting – "and very cheap."
"Yes, but in Florence malachite is much cheaper still. This thing cost forty-seven lire. In Florence, where Jenny bought her cristallo rosso, I could have got one for thirty-five. Jenny gave only eighteen for hers. But I will make him give me the corals for ninety lire."
"I don't quite understand your economy," said Heggen.
"I don't want to talk about it any more," said Miss Jahrman. "I am sick of all this talk – and tomorrow I am going to buy the corals."
"But isn't ninety lire an awful price for corals?" Heggen risked the question.
"They are not ordinary corals, you know," Miss Jahrman deigned to answer. "They are contadina corals, a fat chain with a gold clasp and heavy drops – like that."
"Contadina – is that a special kind of coral?" asked Helge.
"No. It is what the contadinas wear."
"But I don't know what a contadina is, you see."
"A peasant girl. Have you not seen those big, dark red, polished corals they wear? Mine are exactly the colour of raw beef, and the bead in the middle is as big as that" – and she formed a ring with her thumb and forefinger the size of an egg.
"How beautiful they must be," said Helge, pleased to get hold of the thread of conversation. "I don't know what malachite is, or cristallo rossa, but I am sure that corals like those would suit you better than anything."
"Do you hear, Ahlin? And you wanted me to have the malachite necklace. Heggen's scarf-pin is malachite – take it off, Gunnar – and Jenny's beads are cristallo rosso, not rossa – red rock crystals, you know."
She handed him the scarf-pin and the necklace. The beads were warm from contact with the young girl's neck. He looked at them a while; in every bead there were small flaws, as it were, which absorbed the light.
"You ought really to wear corals, Miss Jahrman. You would look exactly like a Roman contadina yourself."
"You don't say so!" She smiled, pleased. "Do you hear, you others?"
"You have an Italian name, too," said Helge eagerly.
"No. I was named after my grandmother, but the Italian family I lived with last year could not pronounce my ugly name, and since then I have stuck to the Italian version of it."
"Francesca," said Ahlin, in a whisper.
"I shall always think of you as Francesca – signorina Francesca."
"Why not Miss Jahrman? Unfortunately we cannot speak Italian together, since you don't know the language." She turned to the others. "Jenny, Gunnar – I am going to buy the corals tomorrow."
"Yes; I think I heard you say so," said Heggen.
"And I will not pay more than ninety."
"You always have to bargain here," said Helge, as one who knows. "I went into a shop this afternoon near St. Pietro and bought this thing for my mother. They asked seven lire, but I got it for four. Don't you think it was cheap?" He put the thing on the table.
Francesca looked at it with contempt. "It costs two fifty in the market. I took a pair of them to each of the maids at home last year."
"The man said it was old," retorted Helge.
"They always do, when they see that people don't understand, and don't know the language."
"You don't think it is pretty?" said Helge, downcast, and wrapped the pink tissue paper round his treasure. "Don't you think I can give it to my mother?"
"I think it is hideous," said Francesca, "but, of course, I don't know your mother's taste."
"What on earth shall I do with it, then?" sighed Helge.
"Give it to your mother," said Jenny. "She will be pleased that you have remembered her. Besides, people at home like those things. We who live out here see so much that we become more critical."
Francesca reached her hand for Ahlin's cigarette-case, but he did not want to let her have it; they whispered together eagerly, then she flung it away, calling: "Giuseppe!"
Helge understood that she ordered the man to bring her some cigarettes. Ahlin got up suddenly: "My dear Miss Jahrman – I meant only to . . . you know it is not good for you to smoke so much."
Francesca rose. She had tears in her eyes.
"Never mind. I want to go home."
"Miss Jahrman – Cesca." Ahlin stood holding her cloak and begged her quietly not to go. She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Yes; I want to go home – you can see for yourself that I am quite impossible tonight. I want to go home alone. No, Jenny, you must not come with me."
Heggen rose too. Helge remained alone at the table.
"You don't imagine that we would let you go alone this time of night?" said Heggen.
"You mean to forbid me, perhaps?"
"I do absolutely."
"Don't, Gunnar," said Jenny Winge. She sent the men away and they sat down at the table in silence, while Jenny, with her arms round Francesca, drew her aside and talked to her soothingly. After a while they came back to the table.
But the company was somewhat out of sorts. Miss Jahrman sat close to Jenny; she had got her cigarettes and was smoking now, shaking her head at Ahlin, who insisted that his were better. Jenny, who had ordered some fruit, was eating tangerines, and now and again she put a slice in Francesca's mouth. How perfectly lovely she looked as she lay with her sad, childish face on Jenny's shoulder, letting herself be fed by her friend. Ahlin sat and stared at her and Heggen played absent-mindedly with the match-ends.
"Have you been in town long, Mr. Gram?" he asked.
"I have taken to saying that I came from Florence this morning by train."
Jenny gave a polite little laugh, and Francesca smiled faintly.
At this moment a bare-headed, dark-haired woman with a bold, yellow, greasy face entered the room with a mandolin. She was accompanied by a small man in the threadbare finery of a waiter, and carrying a guitar.
"I was right, you see, Cesca," said Jenny, speaking as to a child. "There is Emilia; now we are going to have some music."
"That's jolly," said Helge. "Do the ballad singers really still go about here in Rome singing in the taverns?"
The singers tuned up "The Merry Widow." The woman had a high, clear, metallic voice.
"Oh, how horrid," cried Francesca, awakening; "we don't want that, we want something Italian – la luna con palido canto, or what do you think?"
She went up to the singers and greeted them like old friends – laughed and gesticulated, seizing the guitar, and played, humming a few bars of one or two songs.
The Italian woman sang. The melody floated sweet and insinuating to the accompaniment of twanging metal strings, and Helge's four new friends joined in the refrain. It was about amore and bacciare.
"It is a love song, is it not?"
"A nice love song," laughed Miss Jahrman. "Don't ask me to translate it, but in Italian it sounds very pretty."
"This one is not so bad," said Jenny. She turned to Helge with her sweet smile: "What do you think of this place? Is it not a good wine?"
"Excellent, and a characteristic old place."
But all his interest was gone. Miss Winge and Heggen spoke to him now and again, but as he made no effort to keep up a conversation, they began to talk art together. The Sweedish sculptor sat gazing at Miss Jahrman. The strange melodies from the strings floated past him – he felt that others understood. The room was typical, with a red stone floor, the walls and the ceiling, which was arched and rested on a thick pillar in the middle of the room, being distempered. The tables were bare, the chairs had green rush bottoms, and the air was heavy with the sourish smell of the wine barrels behind the counter.
This was artist life in Rome. It was almost like looking at a picture or reading a description in a book, but he was not in it – on the contrary, he was hopelessly out of it. As long as it was a question only of books and pictures, he could dream that he was a part of it, but he was convinced that he would never get in with these people.
Confound it – well, never mind. He was no good at associating with people anyway, least of all with people like these. Look at Jenny Winge now, how unconcernedly she holds the smeared glass of dark red wine. It was a revelation to him. His father had drawn his attention to the glass, which the girl in Barstrand's picture from Rome in the Copenhagen museum holds in her hand. Miss Winge would probably think it a poor picture. These young girls had probably never read about Bramante's courtyard in the Cancellaria – "this pearl of renaissance architecture." They might have discovered it one day by chance, when they went out to buy beads and finery, and had perhaps taken their friends to see this new delight, of which they had not dreamt for years. They had not read in books about every stone and every place, until their eyes could not see the beauty in anything, unless it exactly corresponded to the picture already in mind. They could probably look at some white pillars standing against the dark blue sky and enjoy the sight without any pedantic curiosity as to what temple they were part of and for what unknown god it had been built.
He had read and he had dreamed, and he understood now that nothing in reality was what he had expected it to be. In the clear daylight everything seemed grey and hard, the dream had enveloped the pictures of his fancy in a soft chiaroscuro, had given them a harmonious finish, and covered the ruins with a delicate green. He would now only go round and make sure that everything he had read about was really there, and then he would be able to lecture on it to the young ladies at the Academy, and say that he had seen it. Not a single thing would he have to tell them that he had discovered for himself; he would learn nothing that he did not already know. And when he met living beings he conjured up in his mind the dead forms of poetry that he knew, to see if one of them were represented, for he knew nothing of the living, he who had never lived. Heggen with the full, red mouth would hardly – he supposed – dream of romantic adventure, like those one reads of in the popular novelettes, if he fell in with a girl one evening in the streets of Rome.
He began to feel conscious of having drunk wine.
"You will have a headache tomorrow if you go home now," said Miss Winge to him, when they stood outside in the street. The other three walked ahead; he followed with her.
"I am sure you think me an awful bore to take out of an evening."
"Not at all, but you do not know us well enough yet, and we don't know you."
"I am slow at making acquaintances – in fact, I never really get to know people. I ought not to have come tonight, when you were kind enough to ask me. Perhaps one needs training to enjoy oneself too," he said, with a short laugh.
"Of course one does." Ho could hear from her voice that she was smiling.
"I was twenty-five when I started and, you can take it from me, I had no easy time at first."
"You? I thought that you artists always. . . . For that matter, I did not think you were twenty-five or near it."
"I am, thank goodness, and considerably more."
"Do you thank Heaven for that? And I, a man, for every year that drops from me as it were into eternity, without having brought me anything but the humiliation of finding that nobody has any use for me – I – " He stopped suddenly, terrified. He heard that his voice trembled, and he concluded that the wine had gone to his head, since he could speak like that to a woman he did not even know. But in spite of his shyness he went on: "It seems quite hopeless. My father has told me about the young men of his time, about their eager discussions and their great illusions. I have never had a single illusion to talk about all these years, that now are gone, lost, never to return."
"You have no right to say that, Mr. Gram. Not one year of one's life is wasted, as long as you have not reached a point where suicide is the only way out. I don't believe that the old generation, those from the time of the great illusions, were better off than we. The dreams of their youth stripped life bare for them. We young people, most of the ones I know, have started life without illusions. We were thrown into the struggle for existence almost before we were grown up, and from the first we have looked at life with open eyes, expecting the worst. And then one day we understood that we could manage to get something good out of it ourselves. Something happens, perhaps, that makes you think: if you can stand this, you can stand anything. Once you have got self-reliance in that way, there are no illusions that any one or anything can rob you of."
"But circumstances and opportunities may be such that one's self-reliance is not much use when they are stronger than oneself."
"True," she said. "When a ship sets sail, circumstances may cause it to be wrecked – a collision or a mistake in the construction of a wheel – but it does not start with that presumption. Besides, one must try and conquer circumstances; there is nearly always a way out of them."
"You are very optimistic, Miss Winge."
"I am," she said, and after a while: "I have become an optimist since I have seen how much people really can stand without losing courage to struggle on, and without being degraded."
"That is exactly what I think they are – reduced in value, anyway."
"Not all. And even to find one who does not allow life to abase or reduce him is enough to make you optimistic. We are going in here."
"This looks more like a Montmartre café don't you think?" said Helge, looking around.
Along the walls of the small room were plush-covered forms; small iron tables with marble tops stood in front of them, and the steam rose from two nickel boilers on the counter.
"These places are the same everywhere. Do you know Paris?"
"No, but I thought. . . ." He felt suddenly irritated with this young girl artist who went about the world as she pleased – and God knows where she got the money from. It seemed to her quite as natural for him to have been in Paris as in a restaurant in Christiania. It was easy for people like her to speak of self-reliance. An unhappy love affair in Paris, which she forgot in Rome, was probably the greatest of her trials, and made her feel so confident and brave and able to solve the questions of life.
Her shape was almost scraggy, but the face was healthy and the colouring beautiful.
He wished he could speak to Miss Jahrman, who was wide awake now, but she was engaged by Ahlin and Heggen. Miss Winge was eating a poached egg and bread and drinking hot milk.
"The customers of this place look rather mysterious," he said, turning to her. "Perfect criminal types, it seems to me."
"Possibly – we have a little of everything here, but you must remember that Rome is a modern metropolis and that many people have night work. This is one of the few places open this time of night. But aren't you hungry? I am going to have some black coffee."
"Do you always stay out so late?" Helge looked at his watch; it was four o'clock.
"Oh no," she laughed. "Only now and then. We watch the sun rise and then go and have breakfast. Miss Jahrman does not want to go home tonight."
Helge scarcely knew why he stayed on. They had some green liqueur and he felt drowsy after it, but the others laughed and chatted, mentioning people and places unfamiliar to him.
"Don't talk to me about Douglas – with his preachings – I have done with him. One day last June, when he and the Finn – you remember him, Lindberg? – and I were alone in the life class, the Finn and I went out to have some coffee. When we came back Douglas was sitting with the girl on his knee. We pretended not to see, but he never asked me to tea after that."
"Dear me," said Jenny. "Was there any harm in that?"
"In spring-time and in Paris," said Heggen, with a smile. "Norman Douglas, I tell you, Cesca, was a splendid chap – you cannot deny that – and clever too. He showed me some beautiful things from the fortifications."
"Yes, and do you remember that one from Père Lachaise, with the purple rosaries to the left?" said Jenny.
"Rather! It was a gem; and the one with the little girl at the piano?"
"Yes, but think of the dreadful model," said Miss Jahrman – "that fat, middle-aged, fair one, you know. And he always pretended to be so virtuous."
"He was," said Heggen.
"Pugh! And I was on the verge of falling in love with him just because of that."
"Oh! That of course puts it in another light."
"He proposed to me lots of times," said Francesca pensively, "and I had decided to say yes, but fortunately I had not done it yet."
"If you had," said Heggen, "you would never have seen him with that model on his knee."
The expression on Francesca's face changed completely; for a second a shadow of melancholy passed over her soft features.
"Nonsense! You are all alike. I don't believe one of you. Per Bacco!"
"You must not think that, Francesca," said Ahlin, lifting his head for a moment from his hand.
She smiled again. "Give me some more liqueur."
Toward dawn Helge walked beside Jenny Winge through dark, deserted streets. The three in front of them stopped; two half-grown boys were sitting on the stone steps of a house. Francesca and Jenny talked to them and gave them money.
"Beggars?" asked Helge.
"I don't know – the big one said he was a paper-boy."
"I suppose the beggars in this country are merely humbugs?"
"Most of them, but many have to sleep in the street even in winter. And many are cripples."
"I noticed that in Florence. Don't you think it is a shame that people with nasty wounds or terribly deformed should be allowed to go about begging? The authorities ought to take care of those unfortunate people."
"I don't know. It is the way out here. Foreigners can hardly judge. I suppose they prefer to beg; they earn more that way."
"On the Piazza Michelangelo there was a beggar without arms; his hands came out straight from the shoulders. A German doctor I was living with said the man owned a villa at Fiesole."
"All the better for him!"
"With us the cripples are taught to work so that they can earn their living in a respectable way."
"Hardly enough anyhow to buy a villa," said Jenny, laughing.
"Can you imagine anything more demoralizing than to make one's living by exposing one's deformity?"
"It is always demoralizing to know that one is a cripple in one way or another."
"But to live by invoking people's compassion."
"A cripple knows that he will be pitied in any case, and has to accept help from men – or God."
Jenny mounted some steps and lifted the corner of a curtain that looked like a thin mattress. They entered a small church. Candles were burning on the altar. The light was reflected manifold on the halo of the tabernacle, fluttered on candlesticks and brass ornaments and made the paper roses in the altar vases look red and yellow. A priest stood with his back turned to them, reading silently from a book; a pair of acolytes moved to and fro, bowed, made the sign of the cross and various other movements which seemed meaningless to Helge.
The little church was dark; in the two side chapels tiny nightlight flames flickered, hanging from brass chains in front of images blacker than the darkness itself.
Jenny Winge knelt on a rush stood. Her folded hands rested on the prie-Dieu, and her head was raised, showing her profile clearly outlined against the soft candlelight, which trembled in the fair waves of her hair and stole down the delicate bend of her bare neck.
Heggen and Ahlin took two chairs quietly from the pile against one of the pillars.
This quiet service before dawn was quaint and impressive; Gram followed attentively every movement of the priest. The acolytes hung a white garment, with a golden cross on it, over his shoulders. He took the Host, turned round and held it up to the light. The boys swung the incense, and the sharp, sweet smell of it floated to where Helge stood, but he waited in vain for music or singing.
Miss Winge apparently made some pretence of being a Catholic, since she was kneeling like that. Heggen sat looking straight in front of him towards the altar. He had laid one arm about the shoulders of Francesca, who had fallen asleep leaning against him. Ahlin sat behind a pillar, probably asleep too – he could not see him.
It was extraordinary to sit here with utter strangers; he felt lonely, but no longer depressed. The happy feeling of freedom from the previous night returned. He looked at the others, at the two young girls, Jenny and Francesca. He knew their names now, but little more. And none of them knew what it meant to him to sit there, what he had left behind by coming, the painful struggles, the conquering of obstacles and the breaking of bonds that had held him. He felt strangely happy, almost proud of it, and he looked at the two women with a mild pity. Such a little thing as Cesca – and Jenny – young and high-spirited, with ready, confident opinions behind their white, small foreheads. Two young girls treading an even path of life, with here and there a small stone perhaps to move away, but who knew nothing about a road like his. What would they do, poor girls, if they had to try it? He started when Heggen touched his shoulder, and blushed, for he had been dozing.
"You have had a nap, too, I see," said Heggen.
Out in the street the high, quiet houses slept with closed shutters. A tram drove up in a side street, a cab rattled over the bridge, and one or two cold and sleepy stragglers walked on the pavement.
They turned into a street from where they could see the obelisk in front of Trinita-dei-Monti – it stood white against the dark hollies of Pincio. No living being was to be seen and no sound heard but their own steps on the iron bridge and the ripple of a fountain in a yard. Far away the murmur of the waters on Monte Pinco came through the stillness. Helge recognized it, and as he walked towards it, a growing feeling of joy filled him, as if his pleasure from the previous evening were waiting for him up there by the fountain under the hollies.
He turned to Jenny Winge, not realizing that his eyes and his voice betrayed his feeling.
"I stood here last night and saw the sun set; it seemed so strange to be here. I have been working for years to get here. I had to come because of my studies. I wanted to be an archaeologist, but I have been obliged to teach from the time I got my degree. I have been waiting for the day when I could come out here – sort of prepared myself for it. Yet, when I stood here yesterday so suddenly, I was almost taken unawares."
"I quite understand," said Jenny.
"The moment I stepped out of the train yesterday and saw the ruins of the Thermes opposite, surrounded by modern buildings with cafés and cinemas, with the sun shining on the mighty, yellow ruins, I loved it. The trains in the piazza, the plantations, the gorgeous fountains with such quantities of water. I thought the old walls looked so pretty in the midst of the modern quarters with the busy traffic."
She nodded pleasantly. "Yes," she said; "I love it too."
"Then I went down to the town; it was delightful. Modern buildings among the old ones, and fountains flowing and plashing everywhere. I walked right out to San Pietro; it was dark when I got there, but I stood a while and looked at the water. Do they play all night in this city?"
"Yes, all night. You see and hear fountains almost everywhere. The streets are very quiet at night. Where we live, Miss Jahrman and I, there is one in the courtyard, and when the weather is mild we sit on our balcony late at night and listen to it."
She had sat down on the stone parapet. Helge stood in the same spot as the evening before and gazed again at the town, with its background of hills under a sky as clear as the one over the mountain-tops at home. He filled his lungs with the pure, cold air.
"Nowhere in the world, are there such mornings as in Rome," said Jenny. "I mean when the whole town is sunk in a sleep that grows lighter and lighter, and then suddenly awakes rested and fit. Heggen says it is because of the shutters; no window-panes to catch the morning light and throw it on to your face."
They sat with their backs to the breaking dawn and the golden sky, where the pines in the Medici garden and the small church towers, with pavilions on top, appeared in hard and sharp outlines. The sun would not rise yet for some time, but the grey mass of houses began slowly to radiate colour. It looked as if the light came from within through transparent walls; some houses seemed red, others turned yellow or white. The villas in Monte Mario rose distinctly from a background of brown grassbanks and black cypresses.
All at once there was a sparkling as of a star somewhere on the hills behind the town – a window-pane had caught the first sunray after all – and the foliage turned a golden olive. A small bell began to peal down in the city.
Miss Jahrman came close to her friend and leaned sleepily against her:
"Il levar del sole."
Helge looked up against the limpid blue sky; a sunray brushed the top of the spray and made the waterdrops scintillate in gold and azure.
"Bless you all, I am desperately sleepy," said Francesca, yawning carelessly. "Ugh! it is freezing! I cannot understand how you can sit on that cold stone, Jenny. I want to go to bed at once – subito!"
"I am sleepy too." Heggen yawned. "We must go home, but I am going to have a cup of hot milk at my dairy first. Are you coming?"
They went down the Spanish stairs. Helge looked at all the little green leaves that peeped out between the stone steps.
"Fancy anything growing where so many people walk up and down."
"Everywhere, where there is some earth between the stones, something grows. You should have seen the roof below our house last spring. There is even a little fig-tree growing between the tiles, and Cesca is very concerned about it lest it should not stand the winter, and wonders where it will get nourishment when it grows bigger. She has made a sketch of it."
"Your friend is a painter, too, I understand?"
"Yes – she is very talented."
"I remember seeing a picture of yours at the autumn exhibition at home," said Helge. "Roses in a copper bowl."
"I painted it here last spring, but I am not altogether pleased with it now. I was in Paris for two months in the summer, and I think I learnt a lot in that time. But I sold it for three hundred kroner – the price I had marked it for. There are some things in it that are good."
"You are a modern painter – I suppose you all are?"
Jenny smiled slightly, but did not answer.
The others waited at the bottom of the stairs. Jenny shook hands with the men and said good morning.
"What do you mean by that?" said Heggen. "You are not really going off to work now?"
"Yes; that is what I mean."
"You are marvellous!"
"Oh, don't, Jenny, come home!" Francesca shivered.
"Why shouldn't I work? I am not a bit tired. Mr. Gram, hadn't you better take a cab home from here?"
"I suppose so. Is the post office open now? I know it is not far from the Piazza di Spagna."
"I am going past it – you can come with me." She nodded a last time to the others, who began to walk homeward. Francesca hung limp on Ahlin's arm, overcome with sleep.
"WELL, did you get a letter?" said Jenny Winge when he returned to the entrance hall of the post office, where she had been waiting for him. "Now I will show you which tram to take."
"Thank you, it is very kind of you."
The piazza lay white in the sunshine; the morning air was crisp and clear. Carts and people from the side streets were hurrying past.
"You know, Miss Winge, I don't think I will go home. I am as wide awake as I can be, and I should like to go for a walk. Would you think me intruding if I asked to be allowed to accompany you a little bit of the way?"
"Dear me, no. But will you be able to find the way to your hotel?"
"Oh, I think I can manage it in broad daylight."
"You will find cabs now everywhere."
They came out into the Corso, and she told him the names of the palaces. She was always a step or two ahead of him, for she moved with ease between the many people who had already come out on the pavements.
"Do you like vermouth?" she asked. "I am going in here to have one."
She drank it all in one gulp, standing at the marble counter of the bar. He did not like the bitter-sweet drink, which was new to him, but he thought it fun to look in at a bar on their way.
Jenny turned into narrow streets where the air was raw and damp, the sun reaching only the top part of the houses. Helge noticed everything with great interest: the blue carts behind mules with brass-studded harness and red tassels, the bareheaded women and dark-hued children, the small, cheap shops and the display of vegetables in the porches. In one place a man was making doughnuts on a stove. Jenny bought some and offered him, but he refused politely. What a queer girl, he thought. She ate and seemed to enjoy them, while he felt sick at the mere thought of those greasy balls between his teeth on top of the various drinks in the night, and the taste of vermouth still in his mouth. Besides, the old man was very dirty.
Side by side with poor, decrepit houses, where greyish wash hung out to dry between the broken ribs of the Venetian blinds, stood massive stone palaces with lattice windows and protruding cornices. Once Jenny had to take him by the arm – a scarlet automobile came hooting out of a gate in baroque style, turned with difficulty, and came speeding up the narrow street, where the gutters were full of cabbage leaves and other refuse.
He enjoyed it all – it was so strange and southern. Year after year his fantastic dreams had been destroyed by everyday petty reality, till at last he had tried to sneer at himself and correct his fancies in self-defence. And so now he tried to convince himself that in these romantic quarters lived the same kind of people as in every other big city – shopgirls and factory workers, typographers and telegraph operators, people who worked in offices and at machines, the same as in every part of the world. But it gave him pleasure to think that the houses and the streets, which were the image of his dreams, were obviously real as well.
After walking through small, damp and smelly streets they came into an open space in the sunlight. The ground was raked up at random; heaps of offal and rubbish lay between mounds of gravel; dilapidated old houses, some of them partly pulled down, with rooms showing, stood between classical ruins. Passing some detached houses, which looked as if they had been forgotten in the general destruction, they reached the piazza by the Vesta temple. Behind the big, new steam-mill and the lovely little church with the pillared portico and the slender tower, the Aventino rose distinct against the sunny sky, with the monasteries on the hill, and dust-grey, nameless ruins among the gardens on the slope.
The thing that always gave him a shock – in Germany and in Florence – was that the ruins he had read about and imagined standing in a romantic frame of green leaves with flowers in the crevices, as you see them in old etchings or on the scenery in a theatre, were in reality dirty and shabby, with bits of paper, dented, empty tins and rubbish lying about; and the vegetation of the south was represented by greyish black evergreen, naked, prickly shrubs, and yellow, faded rushes.
On this sunny morning he understood suddenly that even such a sight holds beauty for those who can see.
Jenny Winge took the road between garden walls at the back of the church. The walls were covered with ivy, and pines rose behind them. She stopped to light a cigarette.
"I am a pronounced smoker, you see," she said, "but I have to refrain when I am with Cesca, for her heart does not stand it; out here I smoke like a steam-engine. Here we are."
A small, yellow house stood inside a fence; in the garden were tables and forms under big, bare elms, and a summer-house made of rush stalks. Jenny greeted the old woman who came out on the doorstep.
"Well, Mr. Gram, what do you say to breakfast?"
"Not a bad idea. A cup of strong coffee and a roll and butter."
"Coffee! and butter! Listen to him! No, eggs and bread and wine, lettuce and perhaps some cheese. Yes, she says she has cheese. How many eggs do you want?"
While the woman laid the table Miss Winge carried her easel and painting accessories into the garden, and changed her long, blue evening wrap for a short coat, which was soiled with paint.
"May I have a look at your picture?" asked Helge.
"Yes – I am going to tone down that green – it is rather hard. There is really no light in it yet, but the background is good, I think."
Helge looked at the painting; the trees looked like big grease splashes. He could see nothing in it.
"Here's breakfast coming. We'll throw the eggs at her if they are hard. Hurrah, they aren't!"
Helge was not hungry. The sour white wine gave him heartburn, and he could scarcely swallow the dry, unsalted bread, but Jenny bit off great chunks with her white teeth, put small pieces of Parmesan in her mouth, and drank wine. The three eggs were already done with.
"How can you eat that nasty bread without butter?" said Helge.
"I like it. I have not tasted butter since I left Christiania. Cesca and I buy it only when we are having a party. We have to live very economically, you see."
He laughed, saying: "What do you call economy – beads and corals?"
"No; it is luxury, but I think it is very essential – a little of it. We live cheaply and we eat cheaply, tea and dry bread and radishes twice or three times a week for supper – and we buy silk scarves."
She had finished eating, lit a cigarette, and sat looking in front of her, with her chin resting on her hand:
"To starve, you see, Mr. Gram – of course I have not tried it yet, but I may have to. Heggen has, and he thinks as I do – to starve or to have too little of the necessary is better than never to have any of the superfluous. The superfluous is the very thing we work and long for. At home, with my mother, we always had the strictly necessary, but everything beyond it was not to be thought of. It had to be – the children had to be fed before anything else."
"I cannot think of you as ever having been troubled about money."
"Why not?"
"Because you are so courageous and independent, and you have such decided opinions about everything. When you grow up in circumstances where it is a constant struggle to make ends meet, and you are always reminded of it, you sort of dare not form any opinions – in a general way – it is so tantalizing to know that the coins decide what you can afford to wish or to want."
Jenny nodded pensively. "Yes, but one must not feel like that when one has health and youth and knowledge."
"Well, take my case, for instance. I have always believed that I have some aptitude for scientific work, and it is the only thing I would like to do. I have written a few books – popular ones, you know – and I am now working at an essay on the Bronze Age in South Europe. But I am a teacher, and have a fairly good position – that of a superintendent of a private school."
"You have come out here to work, to study – I remember you said so this morning."
He did not answer, but continued: "It was the same thing with my father. He wanted to be an artist – wanted it more than anything else, and he came out here for a year. Then he married, and is now the owner of a lithographic press, which he has kept going for twenty-six years under great difficulties. I don't believe my father thinks he has got much out of life."
Jenny Winge sat as before, looking thoughtfully in front of her. In the orchard below grew rows of vegetables, small innocent tufts of green on the grey soil, and on the far side of the meadow one could see the yellow masses of ruins on the Palatine against the dark foliage. The day promised to be warm. The Alban mountains in the distance, beyond the pines of the villa gardens, looked misty against the soft blue of the sky.
Jenny drank some wine, still looking straight ahead. Helge followed with his eyes the smoke of her cigarette – a faint morning breeze carried it out in the sunshine. She sat with her legs crossed. She had small ankles, and her feet were clad in thin purple stockings and bead-embroidered evening shoes. The jacket was open over the gathered silver-grey dress with the white collar and the beads, which threw pink spots on her milky-white neck. The fur cap had slid back from her fair, fluffy hair.
"I suppose you have the support of your father, though, Mr. Gram – I mean, he understands you, doesn't he? Surely he sees that you can't get ahead so quickly at that school, when you have quite different work at heart?"
"I don't know. He was very pleased that I could go abroad, of course, but" – after some hesitation – "I have never been very intimate with my father. And then there is mother. She was anxious lest I should work too hard, or be short of money – or risk my future. Father and mother are so different – she has never quite understood him, and kept more to us children. She was a great deal to me when I was a boy, but she was jealous of father even – that he should have greater influence over me than she had. She was jealous of my work too, when I locked myself up in a room of an evening to read, and always anxious about my health and afraid I should give up my post."
Jenny nodded several times thoughtfully.
"The letter I fetched at the post office was from them." He took it out of his pocket and looked at it, but he did not open it. "It is my birthday today," he said, trying to smile. "I am twenty-six."
"Many happy returns." Miss Winge shook hands with him. She looked at him almost in the same way as she looked at Miss Jahrman when she nestled in her arms.
She had not noticed before what he looked like, though she was under the impression that he was tall and thin and dark. He had good, regular features on the whole, a high, somewhat narrow forehead, light brown eyes with a peculiar amber-like transparency, and a small, weak mouth with a tired and sad expression under the moustache.
"I understand you so well," she said suddenly. "I know all that. I was a teacher myself until Christmas last year. I started as a governess and went on till I was old enough to enter the seminary." She smiled a little shyly. "I gave up my post in the school when I was left a small amount of money by an aunt, and went abroad. It will last me about three years, I think – perhaps a little longer. Lately I have sent some articles to the papers, and I may sell some pictures. My mother did not approve of my using up all the money, and did not like my giving up my post when I had got it at last after all those years of private teaching and odd lessons here and there at schools. I suppose mothers always think a fixed salary. . . ."
"I don't think I would have risked it in your place – burning all your bridges like that. It is the influence of my home, I know, but I could not help being anxious about the time when the money would be spent."
"Never mind," said Jenny Winge. "I am well and strong and know a lot; I can sew and cook and wash and iron. And I know languages. I can always find something to do in England or America. Francesca," she said, laughing, "wants me to go to South Africa with her and be a dairy-maid, for that is a thing she is good at, she says. And we shall draw the Zulus; they are said to be such splendid models."
"That is no small job either – and the distance does not seem to trouble you."
"Not a bit – I am talking nonsense, of course. All those years I thought it impossible to get away, even as far as Copenhagen, to stay there some time to paint and learn. When at last I made up my mind to give up everything and go, I had many a bad moment, I can assure you. My people thought it madness, and I noticed that it made an impression on me, but that made me more determined still. To paint has always been my most ardent wish, and I knew I could never work at home as hard as I ought to; there were too many things to distract me. But mother could not see that I was so old that if I wanted to learn something I must start at once. She is only nineteen years older than I; when I was eleven she married again, and that made her younger still.
"The curious thing when you leave home is that the influence of the people with whom you accidentally have lived is broken. You learn to see with your own eyes and to think for yourself, and you understand that it rests with yourself to get something good out of your journey: what you mean to see and to learn, how you mean to arrange your life and what influence you choose to submit to. You learn to understand that what you will get out of life as a whole depends on yourself. Circumstances count for something, of course, as you said, but you learn how to avoid obstacles or surmount them in the way that comes easiest to your individuality, and most of the disagreeable things that happen to you are of your own doing. You are never alone in your home, don't you think? The greatest advantage of travelling seems to me that you are alone, without any one to help or advise you. You cannot appreciate all you owe to your home, or be grateful for it, until you are away from it, and you know that you will never be dependent on it any more, since you are your own master. You cannot really love it till then – for how could you love anything that you are dependent on?"
"I don't know. Are we not always dependent on what we love? – you and your work, for instance. And when once you get really fond of people," he said quietly, "you make yourself dependent on them for good and all."
"Ye – s" – she reflected a moment, then said suddenly, "but it is your own choice. You are not a slave; you serve willingly something or somebody that you prize higher than yourself. Are you not glad you can begin the new year alone, entirely free, and only do the work you like?"
Helge remembered the previous evening in the piazza San Pietro; he looked at the city, the soft veiled colourings of it in the sun, and he looked at the fair young girl beside him.
"Yes," he said.
"Well" – she rose, buttoned her jacket, and opened the paint-box – "I must work now."
"And I suppose you would like to get rid of me?"
Jenny smiled. "I daresay you are tired too."
"Not very – I must pay the bill."
She called the woman and helped him, squeezing out colours on to her palette meanwhile.
"Do you think you can find your way back to town?"
"Yes; I remember exactly how we came, and I shall soon find a cab, I suppose. Do you ever go to the club?"
"Yes, sometimes."
"I should like very much to meet you again."
"I daresay you will " – and after a moment's hesitation:
"Come and see us one day, if you care, and have tea. Via Vantaggio 111. Cesca and I are generally at home in the afternoon."
"Thanks, I should like to very much. Good-bye, then, and thanks so much."
She gave him her hand: "The same to you."
At the gate he looked back; she was scraping her canvas with a palette knife and humming the song they had heard in the café. He remembered the tune, and began to hum it himself as he walked away.
JENNY brought her arms out from under the blanket and put them behind her neck. It was icy cold in the room, and dark. No ray of light came through the shutters. She struck a match and looked at her watch – it was nearly seven. She could doze a little longer, and she crept down under the blankets again, with her head deep in the pillow.
"Jenny, are you asleep?" Francesca opened the door without knocking, and came close to the bed. She felt for her friend's face in the dark and stroked it. "Tired?"
"No. I am going to get up now."
"When did you come home?"
"About three o'clock. I went to Prati for a bath before lunch and ate at the Ripetta, you know, and when I came home I went to bed at once. I am thoroughly rested. I'll get up now."
"Wait a moment. It's very cold; let me light the fire." Francesca lighted the lamp on the table.
"Why not call the signora? Oh, Cesca, come here, let me look at you." Jenny sat up in bed.
Francesca placed the lamp on the table by the bed and turned slowly round in the light of it. She had put on a white blouse with her green skirt and thrown a striped scarf about her shoulders. Round her neck she wore a double row of deep red corals, and long, polished drops hung from her ears. She pulled her hair laughingly from her ears to show that the drops were tied to them by means of darning wool.
"Fancy, I got them for sixty-eight lire – a bargain, wasn't it? Do you think they suit me?"
"Capitally! With that costume, too. I should like to paint you as you are now."
"Yes, do. I can sit to you if you like – I'm too restless nowadays to work. Oh dear!" She sighed and sat down on the bed. "I had better go and bring the coal."
She came back carrying an earthenware pot of burning charcoal, and stooped down over the little stove. "Stay in bed, dear, till it gets a little warmer in here. I will make the tea and lay the table. I see you have brought your drawing home. Let me have a look at it." She placed the board against a chair and held the lamp to it.
"I say! I say!"
"It is not too bad – what do you think? I am going to make a few more sketches out there. I am planning a big picture, you see – don't you think it is a good subject, with all the working people and the mule-carts in the excavation field?"
"Very good. I am sure you can make something of it. I should like to show it to Gunnar and Ahlin. Oh, you are up! Let me do your hair. What a mass of it you have, child. May I do it in the new fashion? – with curls, you know." Francesca pulled her fingers through her friend's long, fair hair. "Sit quite still. There was a letter for you this morning. I brought it up. Did you find it? It was from your little brother, was it not?"
"Yes," said Jenny.
"Was it nice? – were you pleased?"
"Yes, very nice. You know, Cesca, sometimes – only on a Sunday morning once in a while – I wish I could fly home and go for a stroll in Nordmarken with Kalfatrus. He is such a brick, that boy."
Francesca looked at Jenny's smiling face in the glass. She took down her hair and began to brush it again.
"No, Cesca; there is no time for it."
"Oh yes. If they come too early they can go into my room. It is in a terrible state – a regular pigsty – but never mind. They won't come so early – not Gunnar, and I don't mind him if he does, and not Ahlin either for that matter. He has already been to see me this morning; I was in bed, and he sat and talked. I sent him out on to the balcony while I dressed, and then we went out and had a good meal at Tre Re. We have been together the whole afternoon."
Jenny said nothing.
"We saw Gram at Nazionale. Isn't he awful? Have you ever seen anything like it?"
"I don't think he is bad at all. He is awkward, poor boy, exactly as I was at first. He is one of those people who would like to enjoy themselves, but don't know how to."
"I came from Florence this morning," said Francesca, imitating him, and laughed. "Ugh! If he had come by aeroplane at least."
"You were exceedingly rude to him, my dear. It won't do. I should have liked to ask him here tonight, but I dared not because of you. I could not take the risk of your being discourteous to him when he was our guest."
"No fear of that. You know that quite well." Francesca was hurt.
"Do you remember that time when Douglas came home with me to tea?"
"Yes, after that model business, but that was quite a different matter."
"Nonsense. It was no concern of yours."
"Wasn't it? When he had proposed to me and I had very nearly accepted him."
"How could he know?" said Jenny.
"Anyway, I had not quite said no, and the day before I had been with him to Versailles. He kissed me there several times and lay with his head in my lap, and when I told him I didn't care for him he didn't believe me."
"It is not right, Cesca." Jenny caught her eye in the mirror. "You are the dearest little girl in the world when you use your brains, but sometimes it seems as if you had no idea you are dealing with living beings, with people who have feelings that you must respect. You would respect them if you were not so thoughtless, for I know you only want to be good and kind."
"Per Bacco. Don't be too sure of that. But I must show you some roses. Ahlin bought me quite a load this afternoon at a Spanish stairs." Cesca smiled defiantly.
"You ought to stop that kind of thing, I think – if only because you know he cannot afford it."
"I don't care. If he is in love with me, I suppose he likes it."
"I won't talk of reputation after all these doings of yours."
"No, better not speak about my reputation. You are quite right there. At home, in Christiania, I have spoilt my reputation past mending, once and for all." She laughed hysterically. "Damn it all! I don't care."
"I don't understand you, Cesca darling. You don't care for any of those men. Why do you want. . . . And as to Ahlin, can't you see he is in earnest? Norman Douglas, too, was in earnest. You don't know what you are doing. I really do believe, child, that you've no instincts at all."
Francesca put away brush and comb and looked at Jenny's hairdressing in the glass. She tried to retain her defiant little smile, but it faded away and her eyes filled with tears.
"I had a letter this morning, too." Her voice trembled. "From Berlin, from Borghild." Jenny rose from the dressing-table. "Yes, perhaps you had better get ready. Will you put the kettle on, or do you think we'd better cook the artichokes first?" She began to make the bed. "We might call Marietta – but don't you think we had better do it ourselves?"
"Borghild writes that Hans Hermann was married last week. His wife is already expecting a child."
Jenny put the matchbox on the table. She glanced at Francesca's miserable little face and then went quietly up to her.
"It is that singer, Berit Eck, you know, he was engaged to." Francesca spoke in a faint voice, leaning for an instant against her friend, and then began to arrange the sheets with trembling hands.
"But you knew they were engaged – more than a year ago."
"Yes – let me do that, Jenny; you lay the table. I know, of course, that you knew all about it."
Jenny laid the table for four. Francesca put the counterpane on the bed and brought the roses. She stood fumbling with her blouse, then pulled out a letter from inside it and twisted it between her fingers.
"She met them at the Thiergarten – she writes. She says – oh, she can be brutal sometimes, Borghild." Francesca went quickly across the room, pulled open the door of the stove, and threw the letter in. Then she sank down in an arm-chair and burst into tears.
Jenny went to her and put one arm round her neck.
"Cesca, dearest little Cesca!"
Francesca pressed her face against Jenny's arm:
"She looked so miserable, poor thing. She hung on his arm, and he seemed sullen and angry. I can quite imagine it. I am sorry for her – fancy allowing herself to become dependent on him in such a way. He has brought her to her knees, I am sure. How could she be such an idiot, when she knew him? Oh, but think of it, Jenny! He is going to have a child by somebody else – oh, my God! my God!"
Jenny sat on the arm of the chair. Cesca nestled close to her:
"I suppose you are right – I have no instincts. Perhaps I never loved him really, but I should have liked to have a child by him. And yet I could not make up my mind. Sometimes he wanted me to marry him straight off, go to the registry office, but I wouldn't. They would have been so angry with me at home, and people would have said we were obliged to marry, if we had done it that way. I did not want that either, although I knew they thought the worst of me all the same, but that did not worry me. I knew I was ruining my reputation for his sake, but I did not care, and I don't care now, I tell you.
"But he thought I refused because I was afraid he would not marry me afterwards. 'Let's go to the registry office first, then, you silly girl,' he said, but I would not go. He thought it was all sham. 'You cold!' he said; 'you are not cold any longer than you choose to be.' Sometimes I almost thought I wasn't. Perhaps it was only fright, for he was such a brute; he beat me sometimes – nearly tore the clothes off me. I had to scratch and bite to protect myself – and cry and scream."
"And yet you went back to him?" said Jenny.
"I did, that is true. The porter's wife did not want to do his rooms any longer, so I went and tidied up for him. I had a key. I scrubbed the floor and made his bed – Heaven only knows who had been in it."
Jenny shook her head.
"Borghild was furious about it. She proved to me that he had a mistress. I knew it, but I did not want proof. Borghild said he had given me the key, because he wanted me to take them by surprise, and make me jealous, so that I should give in, as I was compromised anyway. But she was not right, for it was me he loved – in his way – I know he loved me as much as he could love anybody.
"Borghild was angry with me because I pawned the diamond ring I had from our grandmother. I have never told you about it. Hans said he had to have money – a hundred kroner – and I promised to get it. Where I didn't know. I dared not write to father, for I'd spent more than my allowance already, so I went and pawned my watch and a chain bracelet and that ring – one of those old ones, you know, with a lot of little diamonds on a big shield. Borghild was angry because it had not been given to her, being the eldest, but grandmother had said I should have it, as I was named after her. I went down one morning as soon as they opened; it was hateful, but I got the money and I took it to Hans. He asked where I had got it from, and I told him. Then he kissed me and said: 'Give me the ticket and the money, puss' – that is what he used to call me – and I did. I thought he meant to redeem it, and said he need not. I was very much moved, you see. 'I will settle it in another way,' said Hans, and went out. I stayed in his rooms and waited. I was very excited, for I knew he wanted the money, and I decided to go and pawn the things again the next day. It would not be so horrid a second time – nothing more would be difficult. I would give him everything now. Then he came – and what do you think he had done?" She laughed amidst the tears. "He had redeemed the things from the loan-office and pawned them with his private banker, as he called him, who gave more for them. "We went about all day together – champagne and all the rest of it – and I went home with him at night. He played to me – my God, how he played! I lay on the floor and cried. Nothing mattered as long as he played like that, and to me alone. You have not heard him play; if you had, you would understand me. But afterwards it was awful. We fought like mad, but I got away at last. Borghild was awake when I came home. My dress was torn to tatters. 'You look like a street-girl,' she said. I laughed. It was five o'clock.
"I should have given in in the end, you know, if it hadn't been for one thing he had said. Sometimes he used to say: 'You are the only decent girl I have met. There is not a man who could get round you. I respect you, puss.' Fancy, he respected me for refusing to do what he begged and worried me about constantly. I wanted to give in, for I would have done anything to please him, but I could not get over my scare; he was so brutal, and I knew there were others. If only he had not frightened me so many times, I might have given up the struggle but then, of course, I should have lost his respect. That is why I broke with him at last – for wanting me to act in such a way that he would despise me."
She nestled close to Jenny, who caressed her. "Do you love me a little, Jenny?"
"You know I do, darling child."
"You are so kind. Kiss me once more! Gunnar is kind, too – and Ahlin. I shall be more careful. I don't wish him any harm. Besides, I may marry him, as he is so fond of me. Ahlin would never be brutal – I know that. Do you think he would worry me? Not much. And I might have children. Some day I will come into money, and he is so poor. We could live abroad and we could both work. There is something refined about all his work, don't you think? That relief of the boys playing, for instance, and the cast for the Almquist monument. Not very original, perhaps, in composition, but so beautiful, so noble and restful, and the figures so perfectly plastic."
Jenny smiled a little and stroked the hair from Francesca's forehead; it was wet with tears.
"I wish I could work like that – always – but I have those eternal pains in my heart and my head. My eyes hurt me too, and I am dead tired always."
"You know what your doctor says – only nerves – every bit of it. If you only would be sensible!"
"I know. That is what they all say, but I am afraid. You say that I have no instincts – not in the way you mean, but I have them all right in another way. I have been a devil all this week – I know it perfectly well – but I have been waiting all the time for something awful I knew was going to happen. You see, I was right."
Jenny kissed her again.
"I was down at S. Agostino tonight. You know that image of the Madonna that works miracles; I knelt before it and prayed to the Virgin. I think I should be happier if I turned Catholic. A woman like the Virgin Mary would understand. I ought really never to marry. I ought to go into a convent – Siena, for instance. I might paint copies in the gallery and earn some money for the convent. When I copied that angel for Melozzo da Forli in Florence there was a nun painting every day. It wasn't so bad." She laughed. "I mean, it was awful. I hated it. But they all said my copies were so good – and so they were. I believe I should be happy in that way. Oh, Jenny, if I only felt well and were at peace in my mind, but I am so bewildered and frightened. If I were well, I could work, work – always. And I'd be so good and nice – you don't know how good I could be. I know I am not always good. I give in to every mood when I feel as I do at present. I am going to stop it, if only you will love me, all of you, but you especially. Let us ask that Gram here. Next time I see him I'll be so nice and sweet to him, you see. We'll ask him here and take him out, and I will do anything to amuse him. Do you hear, Jenny? Are you pleased with me now?"
"Yes, Cesca dear."
"Gunnar does not think I can be serious," she said pensively.
"Oh yes, he does; he only thinks you are very childish. You know what he thinks of your work. Don't you remember what he said in Paris about your energy and your talent? Great and original, he said. He did not think lightly of you that time."
"Gunnar is a nice boy, but he was angry with me because of Douglas."
"Any man would have been angry with you. I was, too."
Francesca sighed and sat quiet an instant. "How did you get rid of Gram? I thought you would never be able to shake that fellow off. I thought that he would come home with you and sleep here on the sofa."
Jenny laughed. "Oh no! He went with me to the Aventine and had breakfast; then he went home. I rather like him, you know."
"Dio mio! Jenny, you are abnormally good. Have you not got enough to mother already, with us? Or have you fallen in love with him?"
Jenny laughed again. "I don't think there is much chance for me. I suppose he will fall in love with you, like the rest, if you are not careful."
"They all do, it seems – Heaven only knows why. But they soon get cured, and then they're angry with me afterwards." She sighed.
They heard steps on the stairs.
"That is Gunnar. I am going into my room a little. I must bathe my eyes."
She passed Heggen in the door with a short greeting as she hurried away. He shut the door and came into the room.
"You are all right, I see – but so you always are. You are an extraordinary girl, Jenny. I suppose you have been working all the morning – and she?" He pointed towards Cesca's room.
"In a bad state, poor little thing."
"I saw it in the papers when I looked in at the club. Have you finished the study? Show me. It is very good." Heggen held the picture to the light and looked at it for some time. "This part stands out beautifully. It is powerful work. Is she lying on her bed crying, do you think?"
"I don't know. She has been crying in here. She had a letter from her sister."
"If ever I meet that cad," said Heggen, "I shall find some pretext to give him a sound thrashing."
ONE afternoon Helge Gram sat in the club reading Norwegian newspapers. He was alone in the reading-room when Miss Jahrman entered. He stood up and bowed, but she came up to him with a smile and shook hands: "How are you getting on? Jenny and I have been wondering why we never see you; we were determined to come here on Saturday to see if we could find you and ask you to go out with us somewhere. Have you got rooms yet?"
"No, I am sorry to say. I am still at the hotel. All the rooms I have seen are so expensive."
"But it is not cheaper at the hotel, is it? I suppose you have to pay three lire a day at least? I thought so. It is not cheap in Rome, you know. You must have rooms to the south in winter. You don't speak Italian, of course, but why did you not ask us to help you? Jenny or I would willingly have gone with you to look for rooms."
"Thank you very much. I would not dream of troubling you about that."
"It is no trouble whatever. How are you getting on? Have you met any people?"
"No. I came here on Saturday, but I did not speak to anybody. I read the papers. The day before yesterday I saw Heggen in a cafe on the Corso and exchanged a few words with him. I have also met two German doctors I knew in Florence, and I went with them to Via Appi one day."
"Ugh! German doctors are not nice, are they?"
Helge smiled, embarrassed.
"Perhaps not, but we have some interests in common, and when one goes about without having anybody to talk to. . . ."
"Yes, but you must make up your mind to speak Italian; you know the language, don't you? Come for a walk with me and we will talk Italian all the way. I shall be a very strict maestra, you will see."
"Thank you very much, Miss Jahrman, but I am afraid you will not find me very entertaining – except unwittingly perhaps."
"Rubbish! Look here, I've got an idea! Two old Danish ladies left for Capri the day before yesterday. Their room may be vacant still. I am sure it is. A nice little room and cheap. I don't remember the name of the street, but I know where it is. Shall I go with you and have a look at it? Come along."
On the stairs she turned round and smiled awkwardly at him:
"I was awfully rude to you the other evening, Mr. Gram. Please accept my apologies."
"My dear Miss Jahrman!"
"I was out of sorts that day. You cannot imagine what a scolding I got from Jenny, but I deserved it."
"Not at all. I was to blame for forcing my company upon you, but it was so tempting to speak to you when I saw you and heard that you were Norwegians."
"Of course, an adventure like that could be great fun, but I spoilt it with my bad temper. I was ill, you see. My nerves worry me; I can't sleep and I can't work, and then I get horrid sometimes."
"Are you feeling better now?"
"Not really. Jenny and Gunnar are working – everybody works but myself. Is your work getting on all right? Aren't you pleased? Every afternoon I sit to Jenny for my picture. I am having a day off today. I think she does it only to prevent me from being alone with my thoughts. Sometimes she takes me for a ride outside the walls. She is like a mother to me – Mia cara mammina."
"You are very fond of your friend?"
"I should think so! She is so good to me. I am delicate and spoilt, and nobody but Jenny could stand me in the long run. She is so clever too, intelligent and energetic. And pretty – don't you think she is lovely? You should see her hair when it is let down! When I am good she lets me do it for her. Here we are," she said.
They mounted a pitch-dark staircase.
"You mustn't mind the stairs; ours are still worse: you will see for yourself when you pay us a visit. Come one evening. We'll get hold of the others and all go for a proper rag. I spoilt the last one for you."
She rang a bell on the top floor. The woman who opened the door looked nice and tidy. She showed them a room with two beds. It looked out over a grey backyard with washing hanging in the windows, but there were plants on the balconies; loggias and terraces with green shrubs rose above the grey roofs.
Francesca went on talking to the woman while she examined the beds and looked into the stove, and explained things to Helge:
"There's sun here all the morning. When one bed's moved out, the room will look bigger; and the stove is all right. The price is forty lire without light and fire, and two for servizio. It is cheap. Shall I say you take it? You can move in tomorrow, if you like."
"Don't thank me. I just loved to help you," she said, as they walked down the stairs. "I hope you will like it. Signora Papi is very clean, I know."
"It is not a common virtue here, I suppose?"
"No, indeed. But I don't think the people who let rooms in Christiania are much better. My sister and I lived once in rooms in Holbergsgate and I had a pair of patent leather shoes under the bed, but I never dared to take them out. Sometimes I peeped at them under the bed; they looked like two little white woolly lambs."
"I have no experience in that way. I have always lived at home."
Francesca burst out laughing all of a sudden. "The signora thought I was your moglie, do you know, and that we were going to live there together. I said I was your cousin, but she did not catch on. Cugina – it is not an accepted relationship anywhere in the world, it seems."
Both laughed.
"Would you care to go for a walk?" asked Miss Jahrman suddenly. "Shall we go to Ponte Molle? Have you been there? Is it too far? We can come back by tram."
"Is it not too far for you? You're not well."
"It does me good to walk. 'You must walk more,' says Gunnar always – Mr. Heggen, you know."
She chatted all the time, looking at him now and again to see if he was amused. They took the new road along by the Tiber; the yellow-grey river rolled between the green slopes. Small, pearl-tinted clouds sailed over the dark shrubbery of Monte Mario and the blocks of villas between the evergreen trees.
Francesca nodded to a policeman and said laughingly to Gram:
"Do you know, that man has proposed to me. I used to walk here very often alone, and sometimes I spoke to him, and one day he proposed. The son of our tobacconist has also proposed to me. Jenny says it was my own fault, and I suppose it was."
"Miss Winge seems to scold you very often. She is a strict mamma, I can see."
"No, she isn't. She only scolds me when I need scolding: I wish somebody had done it long before." She sighed. "But nobody ever did."
Helge Gram felt quite free and easy in her company. There was something very soft about her – her lissom gait, her voice, and her face under the big mushroom hat. He did not quite like Jenny Winge when he thought of her now; she had such determined grey eyes and such an enormous appetite. Cesca had just told him that she herself could hardly eat anything at present.
"Miss Winge is a very determined young lady, I should think," he said.
"No doubt about that! She has a very strong character; she has always been wanting to paint, but she had to go on teaching, teaching! She has had a hard time, poor Jenny. You would not believe it when you see her now. She is so strong, she never gives in. When I first met her at the art school I thought she was very reserved, almost hard – armour-plated, Gunnar called it. She was very retiring; I did not know her really till we came out here. Her mother is a widow for the second time – she is a Mrs. Berner – and there are three more children. They had only three small rooms, imagine, and Jenny had to live in a tiny servant's room, work and study to complete her education, besides helping her mother in the house and with money as well. They could not afford a servant. She knew nobody and had no friends. She shuts herself up, as it were, when things go badly, and does not want to complain, but when she is in luck she opens her arms to every one that needs comfort and support."
Francesca's cheeks were burning. She looked at him with her big eyes.
"All the bad luck I have had has been my own doing. I am a bit hysterical, and give way to all sorts of moods. Jenny gives me a talking-to; she says that if anything irreparable happens to you it is always your own fault, and if you cannot train your will to master your moods and impulses and so on, and have not complete control of yourself, you might as well commit suicide at once."
Helge smiled at her. "Jenny says," and "Gunnar says," and "I had a friend who used to say." How young and trusting she seemed!
"Don't you think it possible that Miss Winge's principles might not apply to you? You are so different, you two. No two people have the same views on life itself even."
"No," she said quietly. "But I am so fond of Jenny. I need her so."
They came to the bridge. Francesca bent over the railing. Farther up the river there was a factory; its tall chimney stood reflected in the swift yellow water. Behind the undulating plain, far away, lay the Sabine mountains, mud-grey and bare, and behind them, farther still, rose snowclad peaks.
"Jenny has painted this with strong evening light on it. The factory and the chimney are quite red. It was on a hot day, when you cannot see the mountains for mist, but only a few white snow-peaks in the heavy metallic blue of the sky, and the clouds above the snow. It is very pretty. I must ask her to show it to you."
"Shall we have some wine here?" he asked.
"It'll soon be getting cold, but we might sit down a little."
She led the way across the round piazza behind the bridge. She chose an osteria with a small garden. Behind a shed with chairs and tables stood a seat under some bare elms. At the back of the garden was a meadow, and on the opposite side of the river the slope appeared dark against the limpid sky. Francesca broke a twig from an elder that grew by the fence; it had small green shoots, with tops blackened by the cold.
"All the winter they stand like that, shivering with cold, but when spring comes they have not been harmed."
When she dropped the twig he picked it up and kept it. They had white wine. Francesca mixed hers with water, and hardly drank any of it. She smiled imploringly:
"Will you give me a cigarette?"
"With pleasure, if you think you can stand it."
"I scarcely ever smoke now. Jenny has almost given it up for my sake. I suppose she is making up for it tonight, though. She is with Gunnar." She laughed. "You must not tell Jenny that I smoked, promise me."
"I won't," he said, laughing too.
She smoked in silence for a while: "I wish she and Gunnar would marry, but I am afraid they won't. They have always been such friends. You don't easily fall in love with a friend, do you? One you knew so well before. They are very much alike in character, and it is just the contrast that attracts you, people say. It is stupid it should be so, I think, for it would be much better to fall in love with somebody akin to you, as it were; it would save all the misery and disappointment, don't you think?
"Gunnar's home is a small farm in the country. He came to Christiania, to an aunt, who took care of him, because they were so poor at home. He was only nine then, and had to carry the washing; his aunt kept a laundry. Later he got into a factory. He's taught himself all he knows by sheer hard work. He reads a lot; he takes an interest in everything, and wants to get to the bottom of it. Jenny says he even forgets to paint. He has learnt Italian thoroughly; he can read any book – poetry, too.
"Jenny is the same. She has learnt heaps because it interested her. I can never learn out of books; reading always give me a headache. But when Jenny or Gunnar tell me things, I remember them. You are very clever too; do tell me about the things you are studying. There is nothing I love more, and I store it in my memory.
"Gunnar has taught me to paint too. I always loved to draw; it came naturally. Three years ago I met him in the mountains at home. I had gone there to sketch. I made very nice pictures, quite correct, but not an ounce of art in them. I could see it myself, but I could not understand the reason why. I saw there was something missing in my pictures – something I wanted to put into them – but did not quite know what it was, and had not the least idea how to get it there.
"I spoke to him about it, showed him my things. He knew less than I about technique – he is only a year older than I – but he could make better use of what he had learnt. Then I made two pictures of a summer night in that wonderful chiaroscuro, where all the colours are so deep and yet with such a strong light. They were not good, of course, but they had something of what I had wanted. I could see they were done by me and not by any little girl who had just learnt something about drawing. You see what I mean?
"I've a subject out here – on the other way to the city. We'll go there another time. It is a road between two vineyards – quite a narrow one. In one place there are two baroque gates with iron gratings, each of them with a cypress beside it. I have made a couple of coloured drawings. There is a heavy dark blue sky above the cypresses and clearness of green air, and a star, and a faint outline of houses and cupolas in the distant city. I wanted the picture to be sort of stirring, you see."
Twilight began to fall upon them. Her face looked pale under the brim of her hat.
"Don't you think I ought to get well, and be allowed to work?"
"Yes," he said in a low voice; "dear. . . ."
He could hear that she was breathing heavily. They were both quiet for a moment, then he said:
"You are very fond of your friends, Miss Jahrman?"
"I want to like everybody, you see," she said quietly, taking a long breath.
Helge Gram bent suddenly forward and kissed her hand, which rested white and small on the table.
"Thank you," said Francesca in a low voice, and after a short pause:
"Let us go back now; it is getting cold."
The next day when he moved into his new room a majolica vase with small blue iris was standing in the sunlight on his table. The signora explained that his "cousin" had brought them. When Helge was alone he bent over the flowers and kissed them one by one.
HELGE GRAM liked his lodgings by the Ripetta. It seemed easy to do good work at the little table by the window that looked out on the yard with washing and flower-pots on the balconies. The people opposite had two children – a boy and a girl about six and seven. When they came out on their balcony they nodded and waved to him, and he waved back. Lately he had taken to greeting their mother too, and his nodding acquaintance with these people made him feel more at home in the place. Cesca's vase stood in front of him; he kept it always filled with fresh flowers. Signora Papi was quick at understanding his Italian. It was because she had had Danish lodgers, Cesca said – Danes can never learn foreign languages.
Whenever some errand brought the signora to his room she always stayed a long while chatting by the door. Mostly about his cousin, "che bella," said Signora Papi. Once Miss Jahrman had paid him a visit alone and once she came with Miss Winge, each time to invite him to tea. When Signora Papi at last discovered that she prevented him from working, she broke off the conversation and left. Helge leaned back in his chair, resting his neck on his folded hands. He thought of his room at home, beside the kitchen, where he could hear his mother and sister talking about him, being anxious about him or disapproving of him. He heard every word, as probably they meant him to do. Every day out here was a precious gift. He had peace at last and could work, work.
He spent the afternoons in libraries and museums. As often as he could do so without inflicting his company too much upon them, he went to late tea with the two girl artists at Via Vantaggio. As a rule they were both in; sometimes there were other visitors. Heggen and Ahlin were nearly always there.
Twice he found Miss Winge alone, and once Francesca. They were always in Jenny's room, which was cosy and warm, although the windows stood wide open until the last rays of light had faded. The stove glowed and sparkled, and the kettle on the spirit-lamp was singing. He knew every article in the room now – the drawings and photographs on the walls, the flower vases, the blue tea-set, the bookshelf by the bed, and the easel with Francesca's portrait. The room was always a little untidy; the table by the window was littered with tubes and paint-boxes, sketch-books and sheets of drawing-paper; Jenny kicked brushes and painting rags under it as she was laying the tea. There was often a litter of needlework or half-darned stockings on the sofa to be put away before sitting down to butter the biscuits. A spirit-lamp and toilet trifles were frequently left lying about and had to be removed.
While these preparations were going on, Gram would sit by the stove and talk to Francesca, but sometimes Cesca would take it into her head to be domesticated and let Jenny be lazy. Jenny begged to be spared, but Cesca hustled about like a whirlwind, putting all the stray articles where Jenny could not find them afterwards, and ended up by putting drawing-pins into pictures that would not hang straight, or curled themselves on the wall, using her shoe as a hammer.
Gram could not understand Miss Jahrman at all. She was always nice and friendly to him, but never as intimate and confidential as on the day they had walked to Ponte Molle. Sometimes she was strangely absent; she seemed not to grasp what he said, although she answered kindly enough. Once or twice he thought he bored her. If he asked how she was, she hardly answered, and when he mentioned her picture with the cypresses she said sweetly: "You must not be offended, Mr. Gram, but I don't care to speak of my work before it is finished. Not now anyway."
He noticed that Ahlin did not like him, and this egged him on. The Swede, then, considered him a rival? He was under the impression that Francesca had of late been less friendly with Ahlin.
When he was by himself Helge turned over in his mind what he was going to say to Francesca – in his imagination he held long conversations with her. He longed for a talk like the one they had that day at Ponte Molle; he wanted to tell her all about himself, but when he saw her he felt nervous and awkward. He did not know how to lead the conversation on to what he wanted to say, and he was afraid of being pressing or tactless; afraid to do anything that made her like him less. She noticed his embarrassment, and came to the rescue with chatter and laughter, and made it easy for him to joke and laugh with her. He was grateful for the moment; she filled the pauses with small talk and helped him along when he made a start, but when he came home and thought it all over, he was disappointed. Their conversation had again been about all sorts of amusing trifles, nothing more.
When he was alone with Jenny Winge they always talked seriously – about solid things, so to speak. Sometimes he was slightly bored with these discussions on abstract matters, but more often he liked to talk to her, because the conversation frequently turned from general matters to things concerning himself. Gradually he got into the way of telling her a great deal about himself – about his work, the difficulties he encountered in life and those in himself. He noticed that Jenny avoided talking about Francesca Jahrman with him, but not that she scarcely ever talked about herself.
It did not occur to him that the reason why he could not talk to Francesca as he talked to Jenny was that he wanted to appear far more important, confident, and strong to her than he really believed himself to be.
On Christmas Eve they all went to the club, and afterwards to the midnight mass at S. Luigi de Franchesi. Helge found it very impressive. The church was in semi-darkness, in spite of the lighted chandeliers; they hung so high that their blaze of light was lost. The altar was one solitary wall of light from the flashing golden flames of hundreds of wax candles, and the subdued sound of the organ and the singing of the choir floated through the church. He sat beside a lovely young Italian woman, who took a rosary of lapis lazuli from a velvet case and prayed fervently. Gradually Francesca began to mutter more and more audibly. She was sitting beside Jenny in front of him.
"Let's go, Jenny. You don't think this gives you any sort of real Christmas feeling, do you? It's like an ordinary concert, and a bad one at that. Listen to that man singing now – absolutely no expression. His voice is absolutely done. Ugh!"
"Hush, Cesca! Remember you are in church."
"Church! It's a concert, I tell you – didn't we have to get tickets and a program? I can't stand it. I shall lose my temper soon."
"We'll go after this if you like, but do keep quiet while we are here."
"New Year's night last year was quite different," said Francesca. "I went to Gesu. They had the Te Deum; it was very beautiful. I knelt beside an old peasant from the Campagna and a young girl; she looked ill – but oh, so pretty! Everybody sang; the old man knew the whole Te Deum by heart. It was very solemn."
As they made their way slowly down the crowded aisle, the Ave Maria sounded through the church.
"Ave Maria." Francesca sniffed. "Can't you hear how indifferent she is to what she sings – exactly like a gramophone? I cannot bear to hear that kind of music ill-treated."
"Ave Maria," said a Dane walking beside her – "I remember how beautifully it was sung by a young Norwegian lady – a Miss Eck."
"Berit Eck. Do you know her, Mr. Hjerrild?"
"She was in Copenhagen two years ago studying under Ellen Beck. I knew her quite well. Do you know her?"
"My sister knew her," said Francesca. "I think you met my sister Borghild in Berlin. Do you like Miss Eck – or Mrs. Hermann as she is now?"
"She was a very nice girl – and good-looking. Extraordinarily gifted, too, I think."
Francesca and Hjerrild lagged behind.
Heggen, Ahlin, and Gram were to accompany the ladies home and have supper. Francesca had got a big parcel from home, and the table was laid with Norwegian Christmas fare, decorated with daisies from the Campagna and candles in seven-branched candlesticks.
Francesca came in last and brought the Dane with her.
"Wasn't it nice, Jenny, of Mr. Hjerrild to come too?"
There were butter and cheese, cold game and brawn and ham on the table, as well as drinks for the men. Francesca sat by Hjerrild, and when the conversation became more animated and general she turned to speak to him.
"Do you know the pianist, Mr. Hermann, who married Miss Eck?"
"Yes; I know him very well. I lived at the same boarding-house with him in Copenhagen, and I saw him in Berlin on my way here."
"What do you think of him?"
"He is a handsome fellow, tremendously talented. He gave me some of his latest compositions – very original, I call them. I like him very much."
"Have you got them here? May I have a look at them? I should like to try them on the piano at the club. I knew him years ago," said Francesca.
"Oh yes. I remember now, he has a photo of you. He would not say who it was."
Heggen's attention was drawn to their conversation.
"Yes," said Francesca inaudibly; "I think I gave him a photo once."
"All the same, he is too much of a bully for me," said Hjerrild, "unpardonably rude, but perhaps that is why he is irresistible to women. Rather too plebeian for my taste."
"That was exactly what . . ." – she searched for the right words – "what I admired in him was that he had made his way from the bottom of the ladder to where he now stands – such a struggle must necessarily make one brutal, it seems to me. Don't you think that a great deal – almost anything – can be excused from that point of view?"
"Nonsense, Cesca," said Heggen suddenly. "Hans Hermann was discovered when he was thirteen, and has been helped along ever since."
"Yes, but to have to accept help always, to have to thank other people for everything and always be afraid of being ignored, neglected, reminded of being – as Hjerrild just said – of plebeian origin."
"I might say the same about myself – the last, I mean."
"No, you cannot, Gunnar. I'm sure you have always been superior to your surroundings. When you came among people of higher social standing than the one you were born to, you were superior even there. You were cleverer; you had greater knowledge and a finer mind. You could always feel strong in the consciousness of having done it all yourself. You were never obliged to thank people that you knew looked down upon you because of your low birth, who snobbishly supported a talent which they did not understand, and who were inferior, though believing they stood above you. You did not have to thank people you could not feel grateful to. No, Gunnar, you cannot speak of the feelings of a man of the people, because you have never had them – you don't know what they are."
"A man who accepts the kind of help you speak of from people he cannot be grateful to is decidedly a plebeian, it seems to me."
"Oh, but can't you understand that one does such a thing when one knows one has talent – perhaps genius – that craves to be developed? It seems to me that you, who call yourself a democrat, should not speak like that about lower-class individuals."
"A man who respects his talent does not want to see it prostituted. As to being a democrat – social democracy is the craving for justice, and justice claims that men of his type should be subjugated, pressed down to the very bottom of the community, chained and forgotten. The real, legitimate lower class must be thoroughly subdued."
"A most peculiar socialism," laughed Hjerrild.
"There is no other for grown-up people. I don't take into account those blue-eyed, childish souls who believe that everybody is good and that all evil is the fault of the community. If every one were good, the community would be a paradise, but the vulgar souls spoil it. You find them in every grade of life. If they are masters, they are cruel and brutal; if they are servants, they are servile and cringing – and stupid. I have found them among the socialists too, for that matter – well, Hermann calls himself a socialist. If they find hands stretched out to lift them up, they grasp them – and stamp on them afterwards. If they see a troop marching past, they join it to get part of the booty, but loyalty and fellowship they have none. They laugh secretly at the aim, the ideal, and they hate justice, for they know that if it were to prevail they would come off badly.
"All those who are afraid of justice I call legitimately lower-class, and they should be fought without mercy. If they have any power with the poor and weak, they frighten and tyrannize them till they too become the same. If they are poor and weak themselves, they give up the struggle, and make their way by begging and flattering – or plundering if they have an opportunity.
"No, the ideal is a community governed by upper-class individuals, for they never fight for themselves; they know their own endless resources, and they give with open hands to those who are poorer. They endeavour to bring light and air to every possibility for good and beauty in the inferior souls – those who are neither this nor that; good when they can afford it, bad when the proletariat forces them to be so. The power should be in the hands of those who feel the responsibility for every good impulse that is killed."
"You are wrong about Hans Hermann," said Cesca quietly. "It was not for his own sake alone that he rebelled against social injustice. He, too, spoke of the good impulses that were wasted. When we walked about it the east end and saw the pale little children, he said he would like to set fire to the ugly, sad, crowded barracks where they lived."
"Mere talk. If the rent had been paid to him. . . ."
"For shame, Gunnar!" said Cesca impetuously.
"All the same he would not have been a socialist if he had been born rich – but still a true proletarian."
"Are you sure you would have been a socialist yourself," said Cesca, "if you had been born a count, for instance?"
"Mr. Heggen is a count," said Hjerrild, laughing, "of many airy castles."
Heggen sat silent for a minute. "I have never felt I was born poor," he said, speaking as if to himself.
"As to Hermann's love for children," said Hjerrild, "there was not much of it for his own child. And the way he treated his wife was disgraceful. He begged and pleaded till he got her, but when she was going to have the baby, she had to beg and implore him to marry her."
"Have they got a little boy?" whispered Francesca.
"Yes; he arrived after they had been married six weeks, just the day I left Berlin. When they had been married a month Hermann left her and went to Dresden. I don't see why they did not marry before, as they had agreed to divorce anyhow. She wanted it."
"How disgraceful," said Jenny, who had been listening to the conversation. "To marry with the intention to divorce!"
"Well," said Hjerrild, smiling. "When people know each other in and out, and know they cannot get on, what else is there to do?"
"Not marry at all, of course."
"Naturally. Free love is much better, but she had to marry. She is going to give concerts in Christiania in the autumn and try to get pupils. She could not do it, having the child, unless she had been married."
"Perhaps not, but it is hateful all the same. I have no sympathy with free love, if it means that people should take up with each other although they presume they will tire of one another. It seems to me that even to break an ordinary platonic engagement is a slight stain on the one who breaks it. But if one has been unfortunate enough to make a mistake, and then goes through the marriage ceremony for the sake of what people say, it is a blasphemy to stand there and make a promise that one has agreed beforehand not to keep."
By dawn the visitors left. Heggen stayed a second after the others had gone. Jenny opened the balcony doors to let out the smoke. The sky was grey, with a pale, reddish light appearing above the housetops. Heggen went up to her:
"Thanks so much. We've had a pleasant Christmas. What are you thinking of?"
"That it is Christmas morning. I wonder if they got my parcel at home in time."
"I daresay they did. You sent it on the eleventh, didn't you?"
"I did. It was always so nice on Christmas morning to go in and look at the tree and the presents in daylight – but I was young then," she added, smiling. "They say there's been lots of snow this winter. I suppose the children are tobagganing in the mountains today."
"Yes, probably," said Heggen. "You are getting cold. Good-night, and thanks again."
"Good-night, and a happy Christmas to you, Gunnar."
They shook hands. She stayed by the window a little while after he had gone.
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 t