Chapter II

It was a Sunday afternoon in February. They were walking in one of the outer streets of the city towards the west, where they were sure to meet no acquaintances. Finally they entered a restaurant which lay off the road. She spoke of her approaching departure, and he said he would miss her society.

"Come along too," she said simply and openly.

"Yes," he answered, "it is really all the same to me where I stay."

That was an idea which seemed to drive away certain clouds. She now began to speak of Berlin, the theatrical prospects there, and so on.

"But," he objected, "it would be too far from my children."

"Your children! Yes, I have often thought of them. Have you their portraits with you? Do let me see them!"

He really had the portraits with him, and as she repeated her wish, he showed them. The two girls did not interest her much but she was delighted at the eight-year-old fair boy with the upturned look. "What a lovely child's face! Isn't it a happiness to have such a child!"

"To have it to-day, and lose to-morrow!" he replied.

She now examined the photograph more exactly and began to compare it with the father somewhat too closely. He began to feel some of that shyness which a man feels before a woman when she assumes this rôle.

"It is you," she said, "and not you also."

He asked for no explanation, and she requested that she might keep the portrait by her.

They resumed the discussion of the proposed journey, but she was absent-minded and often let her looks rest on the photograph.

He could not guess what was in her mind but he noticed that there was a struggle of some kind and that she was on the point of forming a resolution. He felt how a network of fine sucker-like tendrils spread from her being and wove itself into his. Something fateful was impending. He felt depressed, longed for the circle of male friends whom he had abandoned, and asked her to release him from his promise not to go any more to the café.

"Are you longing to go down _there_ again?" she said in a motherly voice. "Think of your little son!"

They went out silent in the dark but starlit evening. He had for the first time offered her his arm and the cape of his coat flapped loose in the wind and struck her face. "I have already dreamt this once," she said. But he gave no answer.

When they came to her door, she took him by both hands, looked him in the eyes and said: "Don't go to your friends." Then she let her veil drop, and before he divined her intention, printed a kiss through the veil on his mouth. As he stretched out his arms to embrace her, she was already behind the door, and closed it. He stood there completely crestfallen without being able to understand how it had happened. Then came the conclusion: "She loves me and has not been playing with me." But what audacity! It is true she let her veil fall, for she was modest, and fled, alarmed at what she had done. It was original, but not bold-faced; other countries, other manners!

But for a man it was somewhat humiliating to receive the first sign of love and not to bestow it. Yet he would never have dared to run the risk of a possible box on the ears and a scornful laugh. It was well that it had happened; now he had certainty, and that was enough.

She loved him! Since he was loved, he could say to himself: "I am not so bad after all if someone can look up to me and believe good of me." This awoke his self-respect, hope, and confidence. He felt himself young again, and was ready to begin a new spring. It was true that he had only shown her his good side, but his habit of suppressing his worse nature for the occasion had brought his better nature into prominence. This was the secret of the ennobling influence of real love. He played the part of the magnanimous till it became a second nature. The fact that he discovered her beauty, and was delighted with her as a woman later on was a further guarantee that the stages of their love affair had developed themselves in orderly progression, and that he had not been merely captivated by a beautiful exterior. He had indeed guessed her defects and overlooked them, for that is the duty of love, and the chief proof of its genuineness, for without forbearance with faults there is no love. He went home and wrote the inevitable letter. It ended with the words: "Now the man lays his head in your lap as a sign that the good in you overcomes the evil in him, but do not misuse your power, for then you must expect the usual fate of tyrants."

The next morning he sent off the letter by a messenger. Ilmarinen his Finnish friend stood by the head of his bed and looked mysterious. "Well!" he said. "Are you going to try once more?"

"Yes, so it appears."

"And you dare to?"

"If it comes to the worst, I only dare to be unhappy, and one is unhappy anyhow."

"Yes, yes."

"It is a change at any rate, and this lonely life is no life."

Instead of an answer to his letter he received a telegram with a request to meet her that evening at the office of an editor who might be useful to them.

In answer to this he sent a message by telegram: "I don't come till I have received an answer to my letter."

Again came a telegram, in which she asked to be allowed to postpone her answer till the next day.

He thought the whole affair nonsensical but went to keep the appointment. She seemed as though nothing had happened; they ate their supper and discussed business. The editor was a married man, and pleasant, nor did he seem to wish his visitors to worship him.

This evening, however, the Norwegian thought her ugly. She was carelessly dressed, had ink on her fingers, and she talked so exclusively of business that she lost all her ideal aspect. He had experienced much in his life, and seen many strange people, but anyone so eccentric as this woman he had never seen. He went home with a feeling of relief, firmly resolved not to follow her to Berlin, nor to link his destiny any closer with hers. The next morning he received her letter; this strengthened him still further in his resolve to withdraw. She wrote that she was one of those women who cannot love. ("What sort of a woman is that? A mere phrase!" he thought.) He believed that he loved her but he was only in love with her love. ("Alexandre Dumas I think!") She still desired, however, to remain his friend and asked him to meet her that day.

He answered this with a farewell letter of thanks.

Then there rained on him telegrams and express messengers.

Towards evening a hotel waiter entered his room and announced that a lady in a carriage was waiting below to see him. At first he thought of declining to go down, but she might come to his room, and then the bond would be made fast. Accordingly he went down, entered the carriage, and without reflection or saying anything they gave each other a kiss, which seemed perfectly natural. There ensued a stormy conversation which was extremely like a quarrel. She asked that he should accompany her that very night on her journey, but he gave a decided refusal. If they were seen together, to-morrow the "elopement" would be in all the newspapers. That he could not bring his conscience to agree to, both on account of her parents and his own children. He also told her that he was dependent on other people's help, and that as soon as he was known as an adventurer all these resources would dry up.

"Then you don't love me!"

"What nonsense you talk, child."

He had to laugh at her. They got out of the cab and continued their contest in a little green lane which led down to the shore.

Now and then he put his arm round her neck and silenced her mouth with a kiss.

"I have seen that you are cracked, but I myself am half-mad, you see, and you won't get the better of me."

"I will jump into the sea!" she shrieked.

"Very well! I will follow, and can swim."

At last he got her to laugh. Then they entered a café in order to arrive at a final decision. Now he had the upper hand and treated her like a naughty girl, and curiously enough, as soon as he had assigned this rôle to her, she took it up and maintained it.

Did these two love each other now? Yes, certainly, for he knew how tied he was, and she had already, as appeared later on, confessed her love in a letter to her mother, adding that he was to know nothing of it, for then she would immediately be brought under the yoke of subjection.

The final decision they arrived at was that she should travel alone, and they made no promises to each other. They were to correspond and see whether they would be able to meet in the summer; when his position was more secure they would think of betrothal and marriage.

They parted, and did not see each other again for a long time.

He went immediately afterwards to look up his old friends in the café. There in his own circle he wished to find himself again, for during this month's exclusive living with a woman, he had become loosed from his own environment, lost his foothold, and built up a common life on the shaky foundation of the temperament of a young girl, whom his passion had transformed into a mature woman. Her last outbreak of anger had revealed a fury who believed that she could compel him to blind obedience. During this her face had exhibited all possible changes from the broad grin of Punch to the hissing of the cat which shows its white claws. He breathed more lightly, experienced a sensation of relief, and entered the café feeling as though he had left something oppressive behind him, something happily over and done with!

The Swede sat there, and probably the gossip regarding the Norwegian's engagement had caused him to bring his lady friend with him. She was a tall fragile-looking Swede who seemed to be emaciated by illness; she had a mournful, despairing sort of voice, a drawling accent and drooping eyes. As an artist, although obscure she was "emancipated" as the phrase is, but not free from the feminine vanity of being able to appear with a number of male hangers-on, whom she boasted of having made conquests of. Her thoughts had long turned upon the Norwegian. When they met, she found him novel and full of surprises. At the same time he brought with him the fire of his newly kindled flame. Within half an hour she had neither eyes nor ears for her old friend. When at last she snapped at him, he stood up and asked her to come with him. "You can go," she answered. And he went.

In less than an hour she had broken with her friend of many years and formed a tie with the Norwegian who an hour and a half before had kissed his fiancée at parting. He asked himself how that was possible, but took no time to reflect on it. She possessed the advantage of being able to understand him completely; he was able to speak out his thoughts after a long imprisonment; he needed only to give a hint in order to be understood. She drank in the eloquence of his words, seemed to follow the sudden leaps of his thought, and probably received answers to many questions which had long occupied her mind. But she was ugly and ill-dressed, and he sometimes felt ashamed at the thought that he might be suspected of being her admirer. Then he felt an unspeakable sympathy with her which she interpreted to mean that she had made a conquest of him.

They went out into the town and wandered from café to café, continually talking. Sometimes his conscience pricked him, sometimes he felt a repulsion to her, because she had been faithless to her friend. Faithlessness indeed was the link which united them, and they felt as if Destiny had driven them to commit the same wrong on the same evening. She had at once inquired about his engagement and he had at first given an evasive answer; but as she had continued to ask with comrade-like sympathy he had told her the whole story. But in doing so he spoke of his love, he became enthusiastic; she warmed herself at the glow and seemed to be a reflection of "the other." So the two images coincided, and the absent maiden, who should have been a barrier between them, was the one who brought them near each other.

The next day they met again, and she never seemed tired of discussing his engagement. She was in a critical mood and began to express doubts whether he would be happy. But she went carefully to work, showed indulgence, and only attempted purely objective psychological analysis. She also understood how to withdraw a severe expression at the right time in order not to frighten him away.

Now as ill-luck would have it, he received at noon a letter from his fiancée which was the answer to the stormy one he had written when they parted. In her letter she only wrote of business matters, gave good advice in a superior tone, in a word was pedantic and narrow-minded. Not a trace of the pretty young girl was to be found in the letter. This put him out of humour and aroused his disgust to such a degree that when he met his new friend, with a ruthless joy in destruction he proceeded to analyse his fiancée under the microscope. The Swede was not backward with her feminine knowledge of feminine secrets to put the worst interpretation on all the details which he narrated. He had cast his lamb to the she-wolf, who tore the prey asunder while he looked on.

At the beginning of April, that is three weeks later, the Norwegian sat in the café one afternoon with Lais, as she was called, after she had become the friend of the company in general, not of anyone in particular. He sat there with a resigned air, "prepared for everything" as usual. It had been difficult to keep his engagement alive by means of the post, and it had become still more uncertain after the news had reached her father's ears and brought him to despair. He was a Minister of State, lived at Odense, went to Court when he was in the capital, and wore twelve orders. He would rather shoot himself than be the father-in-law of a notorious nihilist. In order to put an end to the affair the old man had dictated his conditions, which were of course impossible.

The Norwegian must pay all his debts and give a guarantee that he would have a regular and sufficient income. Since a writer of plays has nothing guaranteed, but is dependent on popular favour, the wooer considered his proposal withdrawn, and regarded himself as unfettered, and indeed he was so. Moreover, thus humiliating correspondence about pecuniary matters had cooled his devotion, for love letters which were full of figures and motherly advice, practical items of information about publishers and so on, were not inspiring to read for a literary free-lance. And as the correspondence slackened, and finally ceased, he considered himself entirely free.

With her usual vanity, Lais had ascribed to herself the honour of having dissolved his engagement, although there was no reason for her doing so. Moreover, in the last few days a circumstance had happened which was fortunate for his future. Another friend of Lais had arrived from the north, and as he was one of her admirers she had such assiduous court paid to her that she did not notice how the Norwegian was slackening in his attentions.

In order to celebrate the arrival of the newcomer, the last few days had been a continual feast, and now they were in that strange condition, when the soul is, so to speak, loosed from its bearings and utters its thoughts without distinction and without regard.

Lais was possessed by the not unusual idea that she was irresistible, and liked to produce the impression that all her male friends, even those who had dropped her, were dismissed admirers. Now she wished to show her newly arrived friend how well she was provided with them and began to skirmish with the Norwegian. Since he had long cherished towards her the hate which is born of imprudently bestowed confidences, he seized the opportunity to bring about the breach without scandal, in a word to dispose of her without disgrace to either of them. Under some pretext, or perhaps with a foreboding that something was about to happen, he took his leave and left the other two together. But Lais pressed him to remain, probably to gain an opportunity of leaving him alone, when she went out with her friend. Here, however, she had made a miscalculation. Making a gesture of invitation to the new-comer, the Norwegian went out after saying the last word: "Now I leave you alone!"

When he came out on the street, he had a certain uneasy suspicion that he had left something unfinished behind him, and had something unexpected before him. He thought he heard the hissing voice of the woman he had left. She never opened her lips, which were sharply defined, like those of a snake, when she spoke, but brought the words straight out of her throat, which was always hoarse through her sitting up at night drinking and smoking. Such a voice in women he called a "porter voice" because it always reminded him of that black drink and its concomitants.

Such is friendship with women--either it ends in love or in hatred just like love!

When he came to his hotel, the waiter handed him a local telegram. "That is what brought me home," he said to himself. His experiences had made him believe in telepathy to such a degree that he was in the habit of saying when in company and there was talk of sending for some absent person: "Shall we telepath to him?"

Before he opened the telegram he believed he knew the contents, and when he had read, he felt as though he had done so before, and was not surprised. The telegram ran thus: "I am here; look me up at Doctor ----'s. Important news."

He stood still for two minutes in order to form a resolution. When the waiter came he asked him to telephone to the friendly doctor, who had a private hospital of his own and enjoyed a very good reputation. The doctor came at once and explained the situation: "Are you thinking of drawing back?" he asked.

"No, but I must collect myself, and sleep for twelve hours, for my nerves are out of control. I will send a telegram to say that I am not well. She will not believe that, but will come herself; I beg you therefore to wait for half an hour."

The telegram went off, and in half an hour steps were heard along the corridor. She entered, dressed in black and at first full of suspicion. But to be able to consult with the doctor gave her an advantage which pleased her. She said she would come next morning together, with the doctor, and then she went, after secretly imprinting a kiss on the patient's hand.

"You must not play with your feelings," said the doctor who remained behind. "This woman loves you and you love her. That is as plain as a pikestaff."

The Norwegian lay alone all the evening and sought to find some guiding thread through all this chaos, but in vain. What a tangled thicket was the human soul! How could one bring it into order? It passed from hate to contempt over esteem and reverence and then back again with one bound sideways and two forwards. Good and evil, sublime and mean, uniting treachery with deathless love, kisses and blows, insulting reproaches and boundless admiration. Since he knew the human soul he had adopted it as one of his fundamental principles never to balance accounts, never to go backwards, but always forwards. When in the beginning of their acquaintance she had wished to refer to something which he had said on a previous occasion he interrupted her: "Never look back! Only go forwards! One talks a lot of nonsense on the spur of the moment. I have no views but only speak impromptu, and life would be very monotonous if one thought and said the same things every day. It should be something new! Life is only a poem, and it is much jollier to float over the marsh than to stick one's feet in it and to feel for firm ground which is not there."

This must have suited her own ideas of life, for she was immediately ready to adopt this rôle. Therefore they found each other always novel, and always full of surprises. They could not take each other too seriously, and often when one of them attacked his or her own discarded views with the other's opinions of the day before, they were obliged to laugh at their own foolishness. Thus they were never clear about each other, and in really serious moments they would exclaim simultaneously: "Who are you? What are you really?" and neither of them could answer.

As he was on the point of falling asleep, he thought, "I shall make no resolve, for I have never seen a resolve lead to anything. The course of events may guide my destiny as it has done hitherto."

The next morning she came without waiting for the doctor. She had put on a wise air, as if she understood the illness thoroughly but did not wish to descend to trifles. She took a rod out of a basket she had brought with her.

"What is that?"

"That is 'the Easter rod'; to-day is Good Friday." She set up the rod at his feet, and adorned the edge of the bed with willow-branches in bloom. Like a little housewife she bustled about the room, surveying and putting it in order. Finally she sat down in an easy chair.

"Well! What is the great news?" he asked.

"We must enter on an engagement, for the papers have announced it."

"Have they, indeed? What about the old man?"

"Father has resigned himself, because the matter cannot be altered; but he is not happy. Now won't you congratulate me?"

"You should congratulate me first, for I am the elder."

"And the less intelligent."

"I have the honour to congratulate you. And what a man you have got!"

So they chatted, and soon came to the subject of their prospects. He dictated and she wrote. Such and such plays of his accepted for the stage.... That would be a thousand pounds.

"Discount thirty per cent for disappointments," she said.

"Thirty! I also reckon ninety or a hundred per cent."

"Be sober! It is serious." And then they laughed.

Divine frivolity! To look down on the ugly earnestness of life as if all one had to do was to blow at it. The poet's light-hearted way of treating economy like poetry.

"How could one bear the miseries of life, if one did not treat them as unrealities? If I took it seriously, I should have to weep the whole day, and I don't want to do that."

Dinner-time came; she laid the sofa-table, fed him, and was especially sparing with the wine.

"You have drunk enough now, and you must promise never to go to the café again, especially with Thais."

"Lais," he corrected her, but coloured. "You know that then?"

"A woman of twenty-three knows everything."

Glad to avoid a troublesome confession, he promised never to visit the café again and kept his word, for that was the only penance he could offer for his sorry behaviour. Thus they were engaged. His only social intercourse consisted in her company, while she continued to go to families which she knew, to visit theatres, and so on, for this belonged to her work as a newspaper correspondent. In case of an eventual struggle for power, she had all the advantages on her side, as she moved in an environment from which she derived moral support and fresh impulses, while he was thrown back on himself and his previous observations. They lived really like playfellows, for he never read what she wrote in the newspapers, while she had read all his writings but never referred to them. There was no consciousness shown on either side that he was a mature and well-known author and she a young critic of books and plays. They met simply as man and woman, and as her future husband he had placed himself on the same level with her, not above her.

Sometimes while they were together, he felt a prisoner, isolated and in her power. If he were to break with her now he would stand alone in the world, for he had got quite out of touch with his old friends and come to dislike the life of the café. Moreover, he felt so grown together with this woman, that he thought he would pine away if parted from her. In spite of her love she could not hide the fact that she thought she had him absolutely in her power, and sometimes she let him feel it. But then he raged like a lion in a cage, went out and sought his old friends, though he noticed he did not thrive among them and his conscience pricked him for his faithlessness. She sulked for half a day, then crept up to him, fell on her knees and was pardoned.

"At bottom," he said once, "we hate each other because we love each other. We fear to lose our individualities through the assimilating force of love, and therefore we must sometimes have a breach in order to feel that I am not you, and you are not I."

She agreed, but it was no remedy against the spirit of revolt, the struggle of the ego for self-justification. She loved him as a woman loves a man, for she thought him handsome, although he was ugly. He, for his part, demanded neither respect nor admiration but only a measure of trust, and a friendly demeanour. She was generally sparkling and cheerful, playful, without being teasing, yielding and gracious.

Once when he reflected over the various types of woman he had observed in her during the beginning of their acquaintance, he could scarcely understand how she had been able to play so many different parts. The literary independent lady with Madame de Staël's open mouth and loquacious tongue had entirely disappeared; the grand, pretentious woman of the world and the _fin-de-siècle_ lady with morbid paradoxes were also both obliterated. She saw how unpretentious he was and she became like him.

April came and it was high spring-time. At the same time his prospects had brightened; some of his plays had been accepted; a novel sold for a considerable sum; and one of his dramas was acted in Paris. An untrue report was spread that the engaged pair had gone off together. Her parents in Odense were disturbed and urged on the marriage.

"Will you marry now?" she asked.

"Certainly I will," was his reply.

So the matter was settled! But then came difficulties. She was a Catholic and could not marry a divorced man as long as his first wife lived. In order to circumvent this difficulty he devised the plan of being married in England. And so it was settled. Her sister came as a witness to the ceremony. She was married to a famous artist, was herself an authoress, and therefore understood how to value talent, even when unaccompanied with earthly goods.

Thus they began their wedding journey.