Jenny had hired a studio and was arranging it to her taste. Kalfatrus came in the afternoons and helped her. “You have grown so tall that I almost thought I could not call you by the old name any longer.”
The boy laughed.
Jenny asked about all his doings while she had been away, and Nils told her of the extraordinary adventures he and two boy friends had had while they lived for some weeks in the log huts in Nordmarken. As she listened, it crossed her mind that her trips up there with him were now things of the past.
She went in the mornings to the outskirts of the city—to walk by herself in the sunshine. The fields lay yellow with dead grass, there was still snow under the pines, but tiny buds were coming out on the foliage trees and from underneath the dead leaves peeped downy shoots of the blue anemone. She read Helge’s letters again and again; she carried them about her wherever she went. She longed for him impatiently, madly—longed to see him and touch him and convince herself that he was hers.
She had been back twelve days and had not yet been to see his parents; when he asked her a third time if she had been, she made up her mind to go next day. The weather had changed in the night; a strong north wind was blowing, the sun shone with a sharp light, and clouds of dust were whirling in the streets. Then came a hail-storm so violent that she had to take refuge in a doorway. The hard white grains rebounded from the pavement on to her shoes and frivolous summer stockings. Next moment the sun came out again.
The Grams lived in Welhavensgate. At the corner Jenny stopped for a moment to look about; the two rows of grey houses[128] stood almost completely in the raw, icy shade; on the one side a narrow strip of sun fell on the top floor; she was pleased to think that Helge’s parents lived there.
Her way to school had been along this street for four years. She knew it well—the small shops, the black marks of snow on the plaster ornaments of the front entrances, the plants in majolica pots or coloured tissue paper in the windows, the fashion-plates against the panes at the dressmaker’s, and the narrow gateway leading to dark back-yards, where small heaps of dirty snow made the air still more raw. A tramcar rolled heavily up the hill.
Close to where she stood, in the other street, was a large house with a dark yard; they had lived there when her stepfather died.
Outside a door with a brass plate, with “G. Gram” engraved on it; she stood still for a moment, her heart beating. She tried to laugh at herself for this senseless feeling of oppression each time she had to face anything new, for which she had not prepared her mind in advance. Why should she consider her future parents-in-law of such importance? They could not hurt her.... She rang the bell.
She heard somebody coming through the hall; then the door opened. It was Helge’s mother; she knew her from a photograph.
“Are you Mrs. Gram? I am Miss Winge.”
“Oh yes—please come in.”
Jenny followed her through a long, narrow hall encumbered with cupboards, boxes, and outdoor clothes.
Mrs. Gram opened the door to the drawing-room. At this moment the sun came in, showing up the moss-green plush furniture, curtains and portiéres of the same material, and the vivid colours of the carpet. The room was small and very full—photographs and sundry fancy articles stood in every possible place.
[129]
“I am afraid it is very untidy here. I have not had time to dust for several days,” said Mrs. Gram. “We don’t use this room every day, and I have no servant just now. I had to dismiss the one I had—she was so dirty and always answering back, but it’s hard to get another at all, and just as well, for they’re all alike as far as that goes. Keeping house nowadays—it’s simply dreadful. Helge told us you would be coming, but we had almost given up hope of seeing you.”
When she talked and laughed she showed big, white front teeth and a black hole on either side, where two were missing.
Jenny sat looking at the woman who was Helge’s mother—how different it all was from what she had imagined.
She had formed a picture in her mind of Helge’s home and mother from his descriptions, and she had pitied the woman whom the husband did not love and who had loved the children so much that they had rebelled and longed to get away from this tyrannic mother-love that could not bear them ever to be anything but her children. In her heart she had taken the mother’s part. Men did not understand to what extent a woman could change who loved and got no love in return except the love of small children; they could not understand what a mother would feel at seeing her children grow up and glide away from her, or how she could rise in defiance and anger against the inexorable life that let little children grow up and cease to feel their mother everything to them, while they were everything to her as long as she lived.
Jenny had wanted to love Helge’s mother—and she could not do it; on the contrary, she felt an almost physical antipathy towards Mrs. Gram as she talked on and on.
The features were the same as Helge’s—the high, slightly narrow forehead, the beautifully carved nose, and the even, dark brows, the same small mouth with thin lips, and the pointed chin. But there was an expression about her mouth as if everything she said were spiteful, and a malicious and scornful[130] look about the fine wrinkles of the face. The remarkably well-shaped eyes, bluish in the white, were hard and piercing. They were large, dark brown eyes—much darker than Helge’s.
She had been uncommonly pretty; yet Jenny was convinced she was right in thinking that G............