“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[21] 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[22] 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.”
[23]
“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[24] 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?”
[25]
“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[26] 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?”
[27]
“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 Swedish 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[28] 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.”
[29]
“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.” He 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[30] 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[31] 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.[32] 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;[33] 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.[34] 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,[35] 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 arch?ologist, but I have been obliged to teach from the time I got my degree. I have been waiting for the day when I could[36] 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 trams 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[37] 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.”
[38]
“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.