Jenny remained with Mrs. Schlessinger; it was cheap, and she did not know what to do with herself. Spring was in the air. She walked on the pier in the evenings. Heavy clouds, bordered by the sun, with red and burning gold, chased across the immense open dome of the sky, and were reflected in the restless sea. The dark and desolate plain turned light green and the poplars reddish brown with young shoots. Along the railway line violets and small white and yellow flowers were coming up in hundreds, and at last the whole plain was luxuriously green, and a world of colour sprang forth along the ditches; sulphur-tinted irises and big white lilies were reflected in the pools of the marsh. Then one day the air was permeated by a sweet scent of hay, mixing with the smell of tar from the shore. The hotel opened, and the small houses by the pier were filled with summer visitors; children swarmed on the white beach, rolling in the sand and paddling in the water. Mothers and nurses in national costumes of the Spreewald sat on the grass with their sewing, looking after them. The bathing-huts had been transported into the sea, and young girls were shouting and laughing in the water. Sailing yachts anchored by the pier, tourists came from the town, in the evenings there[252] was dancing in the hotel, and couples walked about in the small plantation where Jenny used to lie in the grass early in the spring listening to the wash of the waves and the rustling of the wind in the scraggy tree-tops.
One or two of the ladies looked at her with interest and compassion when she walked on the beach in her black and white dress. The summer visitors staying in the village had got to know that a young Norwegian girl had had a child and was disconsolately mourning its death, and some of them found it more touching than scandalous.
She much preferred walking out into the country, where the summer boarders never went. Once in a while she went as far as the cemetery, where her boy was buried. She sat staring at the grave, which she had not wished to have tended in any way, sometimes laying on it some wild flowers which she had picked on the way, but her mind refused to associate the little mound of grey earth with her beloved little boy.
In her room in the evenings she sat staring at the lamp—with needlework which she never touched. And her thoughts were always the same: she remembered the days when she had the boy—first the faint, peaceful joy while she was in bed, getting well, then when she was sitting up and Mrs. Schlessinger showed her how to bath and dress and handle him, and when they went to Warnemünde together to buy fine material, lace, and ribbon, and how on their return home she cut and sewed, designed and embroidered. Her boy was to have nice things, instead of the common, ready-made outfit she had ordered from Berlin. She had also bought a ridiculous garden syringe of green-painted tin, with pictures of a lion and a tiger, standing by a blue sea amid palms and looking with awe at the German dreadnoughts steaming away towards the African possessions of the Empire. She had found it so amusing that she bought it for baby-boy to play with when he should be big enough—after a very long time. He must first learn to find[253] mother’s breast, which at present he only blindly sought for, and to discover his own little fingers, which he could not separate when he had clutched them together. By and by he would be able to recognize his mother, to look at the lamp and at mother’s watch when she was dangling it before his eyes. There were so many things baby-boy would have to learn.
All his things were in a drawer she never opened. She knew what every little piece looked like; she could feel them in the palms of her hands, the soft linen and the fluffy woollen things and the unfinished jacket of green flannel on which she had embroidered yellow buttercups—the jacket he was to wear when she took him out.
She had begun a picture of the beach with red and blue children on the white sands. Some of the compassionate ladies came to look at it, trying to make acquaintance with her: “How nice!” But she was not pleased with the sketch, and cared neither to finish it nor to make a new one.
Then one day the hotel closed up again, the sea was stormy, and summer had gone.
Gunnar wrote from Italy, advising her to go there. Cesca wanted her to go to Sweden, and her mother, who knew nothing, wrote she could not understand why she stayed so long in Germany. Jenny was thinking of going away, but she could not make up her mind, although a faint longing began to stir in her.
She became restless at going about like that without being able to do anything. She had to take a decision—even if it came only to throwing herself into the sea one night from the pier.
One evening she took out Heggen’s books from their case. Among them was one with poetry—Fiori de............